In the stories of the Self, the eyes of sunshine, it’s been Armageddon. A small voice out front says no, it’s been leading to something big. I’m a hope, and a skip, and a jump away from that. That’s what I’m pettin’. You hear the ups and downs, the soliloquies harbored on the snake. I swear these muse. I’m tellin’ the story of God. I’m not coughin’ up Skid Row, but I’m giving you pencils and integers of everything, and I don’t neglect nothin’ out. We’re on a roll now.
I feel something big. I can’t get my heart out to show you. I’m bein’ pushed from the inside. Still I can’t see my boy or anything else big, like a sudden public share. I still sit in someone else’s pain and cry, anyone on the planet I hear their story loud, and join that with my own. I still see the pain of the world and not its bright sunrise.
What is this bear I speak of now? A coming tidal wave, my head upon the stake? My faith in God hasn’t reached that far: he loves me at high noon, I mean like in front of everybody, and I’m not a bad man anymore. I’m a way with him. Would you count that, or do you even see him right out here open fields with everybody? I do have that smile.
Do performance art, and I’m from there. Stay in your room, that’s me. Catch me, you are my god I announce things at the seriousness of a child, and I am hurt by one. Look at me, a fattening calf, I have golden reins. I don’t know how to handle this: you don’t put my face on. That’s how it needs to be done to God knows what. You cannot contain this. You think aliens wrote it, or a moved lunatic. Some of you know I smile the meaning of the word. Play your blindfolded world.
Did the boy end up revealing anything to us? He’s happy and content on the outside I heard that your honor. On the inside he can’t handle himself, is boiling in pain. These are irreconcilable. He can’t hold this script down. Those around him only see the happy kid. He doesn’t reveal himself inside. I am not a name on his lips, like he doesn’t want to see me, but he cries for me inside and is continually scheming to see me or make contact.
These are all along the lines of Earth. He can’t make it right. He can’t get up out of his stool. He’s frozen there, and he and I are frozen there. You don’t know how this hits me. It’s like a betrayal that loves me so impossible to understand. He won’t even call my name, acts like I do not exist, and he is finished with me. This just does my head in, confuses me to no end. I swear the real boy’s right there, but he is so earnest when he shows me his inside, especially when he calls me and cries— so much pain, so much out of control, with a rage that wants to blow up the world, and I’m supposed to believe him? I get so worried about him. There is no end to this. There is no issue from this as he grows older.
I just want to walk away, but I’m pulled back every time by divine love and my unmanageable love for him. He is so big inside me. This is all in my reality. Can you lose a child, have him kidnapped, and he’s winin’ and dinin’ with his kidnappers just down the street, sending you secret notes of ransom that say daddy I love you so much and want to be with you? This is a crash course in reality. Fuck this I want off, and the Mother and Sri Aurobindo and other divine bid me stay with him, and I love that kid so much I do.
Here’s the trick. Get rid of the pain they say. Don’t even operate on that attachment. Count the divine only you see in everybody. Don’t be forlorn. He’s comin’ back. It’s all in my muse, there or in the background of every poem I write, his name, his name, Nithish, Nithish.
Stop the forlorn? The ache inside my breast all the time, the absence of my child and his dangerous psychological situation, how in the world do I stop that or believe the divine he’s here sometime soon? This plays with me and plays with me. Are the divine devils? I don’t know what’s goin’ on. I’ve lost my child.
You my divine reader swing with the Gods with your heart-breaths, your beliefs, your unaccountable sum. Have you seen the Great Beyond? Are you a born object of God, what others now discuss as an occasional moment in the Sun? It would change your way of life, radically transform society, because it’s there at our divinity’s base. We lit triumph with our children to bring this home to us.
Do you know the transformation of the outer life into the inborn divinity we wear? When do we put that on with our children, a radical new way of life that busts out of the husks of the old, where children can be themselves and not the uniforms they wear, not crammed down society’s schoolbook, not made to think your thoughts but open God up inside themselves? I’m a motion on that, a mover, and can I remind you here of our high aim in your classrooms with your kids, in your downtime? Nothing more to say except my time with children is that, who they are in time and their inborn sense to go beyond it a revolutionary.
How do the boatmen row? Gently and in springtime. I’m saying my worth, and I’m not a cherry picker. I’ve seen the city up high and the elephants the grass ate, the thieves that robbed bottom and the song they sang when they saw God they now with children row. I’ve counted the stars and their admonishments and protests, their gifted speech to the poets of the time. It’s all a crocodile beautifully put. It doesn’t change us. It only makes us mean towards our brother when we find them doing wrong.
Who can translate poetry the Gods themselves can’t bore? Do you know the living Ray? It comes form other shores, and we hand it in our pencils blockchains we wore. Can I pencil this in for you with the freedom of the Infinite involving children, involving Light?
It breaks on us a new path: you’re the leader finally acting, and I storybook my little boy from a full moon today where we draw redemption. Outstanding citizens no, we want radical revolutionaries with every child we write. Do I dare you? Radically I write time. I am life’s sacrament. It won’t pull me under. I am not dyin’ here. Somethin’ climbs in my room I don’t know. It’s got handles on it, but oh what they are? I’m a space nigger in time. Maybe that’s coming to an end? Maybe there’s a zombie apocalypse, and I get loved right out in the open by my boy? I think it will take that for him to act, despite this poem I wrote. Maybe I’m onto better days. Maybe I’m big stuff.
It’s Armageddon folks, is that how this is supposed to end? No we just pray there, and we get up and run the world again I lit in the face of certainty. The foreigners would wait outside folks, and the lady is a figure on trapped. Startled by his brightness, I see the Alone in every tree. It looks out at me with my dogs’ eyes. It’s in every figure of self, looking out at the world with timeless eyes. I am not alone here, even though you keep me at bay. I am a figure of Self, and I break bread with the Alone as a matter of happenstance. You can’t rob me of that deep. You can’t even see it.
Fine, I will wear your society, but I’m on revolution’s springs, and I stand there alone investing in time an uprising out of it. Now read me won’t you please? I see the Alone in every face, and you are nothing but he. Crowd me now with your figure of him. I dance on this delight on Earth’s shores just poetin’ the hell out of time, and that’s the start of it, prayfully yours.
The muse gave me a message to you, the muse rise and poetry. I’ll see it in the garbage can, won’t I? I don’t know how to negotiate this landmine in outer things. Every world has rejected me. I’m a nation to nobody, dear reader except you. This is across the board. It’s unhand me. It’s blue and it’s red and it’s gold. It’s unbelievably tight.
What do you say to no, we don’t want to have anything to do with you, and this is the entire of the yoga you follow, the city on earth that’s to realize the human dream and be alright with each other? I get kicked out of there too and in the hearts of every man and every woman who could make it possible to see my boy again right out in the open his daddy again, and that anomaly is solved: why the divine in-look on me carries his name, and it is a phantom make.
I stand here confused. Even the halls of poetrydom have spit me out. I have no place in society. I live in some little island of bright, and Douglas and our dogs hold the world together. Our visitors only want something, all they can get, and they only come here for that. We have no friends here. We have no one looking out for us. We are here alone and that’s it. This squeezes you, you know? You don’t understand when humanity and the world mean so much to you.
I’ve painted this isolation for myself. Douglas has friends and family who care for him and provide, else we wouldn’t make it. He lives in his room and I live in mine, but our best-friendship has reached the stars, but can I tell you about Paul? A friend for all the years, who is in the world at large giving me e-blasts I’m your friend. When the world rejects you, you get compensation, friends for all the world, if you’re holdin’ hands with the world, if the world means as much to you as yourself.
I can’t bear this, spit on by everyone, and I’m just diggin’ my hole deeper with these poems. They cost me so much. They tear me apart I am so real with you. I don’t know how to begin to really say it, the be there of the human being.
Oh my God I want to describe it to you, so we can join there. I want you to see my humanity. I don’t want to be an outcast no more. Oh I wish you could feel that. God does, and he’s here with me all day in bright thoughts and muse on the edge of time. Would that you could feel that.
A meaningful life, that’s established. Come to terms with myself and terms deeper. This is all in the sky. I’m a blockchain. I matter to mankind. I’m significant to your notions of self. I’m good to all you haven’t seen yet. I love people and feel their oneness. I am not about the snake. I touch you with deep meaning. I am really there.
The world blows up inside me it has eyes. I commune with the Unknown. I’m about your rocket ship. I ease on you these things: the starling oneness inside us, the jumprope to God, everything we have to do with each other in our ballpark with children and the animals in the room. You hear me there petting my dogs in wonder and taking children to the sky.
I cook meals for you and attend to your business all day. I am not just a selfish wound. I have lifted up the race everywhere I look. I am dawn on you the understanding of poet, and here I am, in my most serious mood, standing up and be counted, because you’ve shunned my face, a rocket-man that knows we share meaning together, that knows my part in the world, that knows I can’t live without you.
You’ve kicked me out of your homes, you’ve kicked me out of your hearts long enough. I’m not a beggar at your gates. I’m the poet at high noon. It’s time we fly. It’s time we fly.
photo by the author, a chalkboard at the entrance to an Auroville middle school
Boxed in the corner, I hear You call my name. I last. I play the game. I know how to handle time. There’s a secret to it. Open yourself to the Invisible. Hold yourself on the inside and see the outside. Don’t just stand there and swim. Mount time the stadium you wear. Don’t be bashful about it. Don’t overrate yourself. Stand up and spell time the way you wear it. Give the voice to the ages. You want to be so sincere you spelled time for everyone.
It can be in a broom closet, but you’ve made that closet sing. I’ve been in dens of iniquity, and I found the price of the world that way. I found out how much we cost hurtin’ people. They wore the boundaries me. They were the hope that carried the world, and I just cried my eyes out when I discovered that. Can you embarrass God? I think I did.
Then I opened inside myself time and discovered its secrets. I had damaged time, and it didn’t punish me with it. The way of redemption is forceful and slow, but you can ride upon its back if you find redemption’s base: I am trouble I am, and that is a whirlwind, and I turn that whirlwind upon myself, and I open time and fate upon myself, to rack the tools up in inner man to overcome evil with good I’ve paid for myself.
It happened, and I grab you by the hand and show you inner healing’s ways. We are not an accident, and we are bigger than the wrong we have done, and you are bigger than having it done to you. We get trapped in these ways, and we make reality existence either hurting or being hurt, the clash of right and wrong.
How this fools us into little lives that can’t see past their own noses, and we make everything a sin, or we are trying to get to sin. How many can let a child play with themselves and stay out of it? Why you want to stop them or join in. Fuck let’s cut that asunder and just stay out of it. Fuck, you can stay here, or you can allow language to get a little tight to come into these narrow straits of time. It’s difficult to go past your moral boundaries, and the world needs to be saved, and our existence depends up it.
Children need to play with themselves, and men and women need to heal from sin, not punished, not beaten, not be made outcast. You cannot stop evil you can only heal it, and that changes it into something else. We can heal together. We can find the weapons to do that. It’s much deeper than a doctor’s office, deeper than a psychiatry chair, deeper than a religious conversion and any form of prayer.
We have to turn inside out. We have to get to the bottom of things. We have to open our consciousness and get in there to the secret stuff. / We have to get clean, not from sin, from even the desire to hurt and harm. We have to look at each other and know we are more than any me. We have to find the secret Inhabitant that sees out both our eyes, and we both see together that we are one through that gaze.
Man this is reality, who we need to see to survive, and it’s how we heal from hurting people and being hurt, but you have to arrive there not just in belief. It’s to see that Look. We wear time. It doesn’t bury us. It’s not our keeper. It’s not who we are.
The phenomenon is just a wonderful in the All-Look’s gaze. Wonderful we see that, and wonderful we see each other, and a panda is to us the moon and a dog the starry sky. Can you get there? All life has Eyes, and oh the splash of healing there, phenomenal.
Do you want to understand? I can give you all I’ve got. That’s the music in me. You have to be wide enough to take it and not stand in its way. We need to heal time, and are you gonna block that?
Oh look at that swing behind the throw up. It’s how you reach enlightenment my dears. Believe it or not a swing shows up in dreams when you approach it. It’s a force that takes you like the spiral, and you literally swing. How about that habitat? Nothing can get in the way. You’ve got to swing all the way there. Your life will proportion this out to you. You get closer, and you move further away, swinging back and forth until you get high enough to arrive.
Do you see how tall you are? The symbol of dream has shown you up close your waking life approach, time’s secret here I’ve shown to you. If you do anything, habitat this truth when it comes out.
Am I allowed to continue? Why thank you I appreciate that. The little swing of enlightenment people, how we tell time what we are.
Everyone feels themselves the maker of things. Alone in our body’s cells, we do a branded work. We have the secret knowledge inside, and we know the meanings of things. We just can’t express itself to men. We live in our longings a perpetual keeper unable to handle stuff, but ours is the mooring to the base of life. We know no one above us in this, and even ones that we worship, they’ve just validated ourselves. We can keep them. No one else can.
I am the secret front of time. The world calls my name human. I am a draft everyone wears in their rise to fame. I can’t control fate, and the talent show, I can’t grate my time against it, but I am bigger than lost rooms, or, if I am famous, for your information, I’ve been put there by all eyes on me, and the knife I am to everyone I don’t have to please, it’s sought within, and I believe mine eyes hold all true. I’m good to everyone even if I’m not good to some. I am the eyes of life and time in my living room.
Surprise, surprise, surprise, you are not the march of the universe, or anything tall and big. You are a worm’s crawl to our Sublime, and you would spit on the Sublime now, if you saw it. You would not hold it right. You would not even know it’s there in your tangible real.
I fight this battle every day, sometimes on a horse, sometimes in the slime of morose doubt. I can count my sins all day long. I can sit and bash myself upon the head for being such an eager worm. Here’s the kitten: I sit in the arms of the divine all day. My doubt is not to its existence. I have knowledge firmly there. I see the Larger like I take breaths, but is this a whirlpool, a jolly roger’s madness ride, that has no issue for a starstruck human being?
I see the Larger like I count my face, and it’s suspicious to me. It doesn’t count humans. Oh my goodness the proxies’ wear. Everything’s for the larger good, the whole. Individuals get trampled in the stampede, and we have to stand this, because it’s all a dream, even our suffering, and we are nothing more than sinless souls putting on masks of flesh for lifetime wears. The flesh doesn’t count. The soul does.
Great Department Green, is my soul in my beating heart, the exclamation point of tears in my eyes I fight back left and right? How heavy is this pain a moral wear, how real, fresh, and alive, and yet it’s cut asunder by ideas, by momentary experiences I’ve won and lost, by a look there a breath there on God’s heights, like you throw bones to dogs?
Feel me I’m real, the character, the mask, You’ve donned. I cannot last like this, a plaything upon Your pittance. I need Your honest answer to my living pain, or crush me now and don’t look down at me again (uh-gayn). The pittance, the role and show, how do we handle it?
Time is larger than our showroom. More power to yah God. What’s man doing there with his head blown off? It inspired an amazing journey. It manufactured an attempt to find another rule than suffering, point out joy as my hunting rifle. It’s my must now. It’s where I lay my head, oh time machine, I go. It’s important that’s a carpet, not a bed of nails.
Do you hear me breathe? I’m countin’ the breaths of all of us, and I am sin, hold me down?
One of the photos I took of him in a secret meeting in April, the last time I saw him
Untitled
by S. Nithish
The Beatles needed each other. I need all of you together. Nithish can only take you to the door, but you have to open it.
* * * *
Soaked in pain, guilt. Let alone in the dark. Can’t find a ladder. I hit rock bottom and sink even deeper, laying for the lies that built the world. Where do I find a cure for this virus?
We stepped on a bubblegum. Will stick for life. Can I be forgived for being myself? Now I see how people turn evil and bad. Is it the society or the world or both?
I could almost call myself a homeless dog, but even the dog is happier than me. I saw a kid who can’t speak properly, but even he is happier than me.
The worst part about life for me is that I can’t go live with my daddy, [1] and I’m afraid that I can’t forgive myself till the end of time if I don’t go live with him.
Ever minute of my life spikes of sorrow and guilt. Poke me on the inside and the outside it’s been very long time since I’ve got wet in the rain of love and joy. [2]
Darkness on the corner and light on top of the mountain, it’s easy to run but can’t hide from the radiation of the bed I sleep in, the hole that I’m falling. The mud is soft but the hole is deep, and I’ve gone blind. I can’t see the world or feel the world of what it was.
I’ve never wanted to go to North Korea. [3] All I had to do was follow the damn train, [4] and I am warmed by his smile cause I’m the one who has his mouth stitched. Who am I? Why are we both chained to the pain of the world and suffer from this poison and keep drowning in the bottom?
Where is the divine? Is it a rock? Everybody thinks that I’m evil, bad, greedy, selfish. The one who really love me will really ever know me.
Where is my mother? [5] I don’t see her. Why aren’t you coming to the rescue? This is the story of the universe. Why aren’t you introducing the twist of my motive? My story is not filmed by IMAX. It is filmed by the divine, the universe.
What sin have I done and pay so much and put me in debt? Look into my eyes. See and feel the pain, guilt that is untouched by you.
[1] Me, what he calls me
[2] He lives under almost total control so that he will not make contact with me in any form and so that he will make passing marks in school, and that control entails being called names, being beaten and slapped. In his entire school career, and he’s now in 9th standard, he’s never been able to pass all of his exams. He has learning disabilities, mild dyslexia and severe dyscalculia, but his parents do not believe in learning disabilities nor will allow him to be tested for such. I was there from his birth and informed his mother of his dyslexia when I began trying to teach him the English alphabet when he was three, seeing him write letters backwards and not able to put sound to letters, and when he was not learning to read and write English in school, 2nd standard by this time, I taught him to how. His parents have been told it’s impossible for him to learn to read and write Tamil.
[3] A favorite activity of his growing up in my care was, when it rained, to take off all his clothes and go and play in it, I mean every time it rained and it wasn’t too late, on the roof when we lived in town, simply outside when we lived on the farm. I only made sure he didn’t harm himself or offend anyone.
[4] In our own personal speech between us, this phrase, which comes from a GTA gameplay video that he liked when he was six and watched more times than I liked, came to mean for us the simplicity of just going with the flow if it were taking us in a good direction, and we used it among ourselves to correct one another for going against that flow. The whole phrase is “all you had to do was follow the damn train CJ.”
[5] The Mother, Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual collaborator, who is for him is the divine mother and whom he adored and dreamed about often.
The poem was written by a 13-year-old Tamil boy. If you’ve read his previous poetry, it’s more organized than this and more poetic, but he’s suffered a lot since he was taken from my home a year and some months ago, and his poetry has suffered also. The first verse is classic muse, the inner voice of poetry, in its mode of giving advice and guidance, and so I set it apart from the rest of the poem. I suspect the rest of the poem is not pure muse, is him mostly just pouring his heart out, although still under the rush of inspiration and still in the voice of poetry. The trauma he’s suffered has almost turned off his muse, and, with the exception of a song he wrote upon being able to spend some time with me the first time since he was taken, “Heaven and Hell,” he gets very little muse now.
In the months before the was taken and his ordeal began, he wrote poem after poem, two raps, and a song from the muse, each spoken or sung to him on the inside, and each one a prevision of the future he’s now in, the raw hopelessness and desperation of this present poem so painful to read in the light of those past poems, which are full of confidence, faith, and resilience.
I am very familiar with his handwriting and form of spelling, and so I can make out what he wrote (you can see the dysgraphia) and organize it into lines and verses. I include the pieces of paper that he wrote this on at bottom. They were smuggled to me recently. He wrote this in school, in secret, on the back of exam papers. His muse told him to give it to me, and my muse told me to give it to you.
Months ago I gave his school a copy of all his poetry and asked that they provide for him a child mental health professional because he had mentioned suicide. I did this with a letter, as the parents have bribed the police near the school to take me to the station if I come there, what Nithish’s mother told him they had done, and what he warned me about. I might add that neither his school recognizes learning disabilities, and of him they have repeated what his mother told them, that he is acting and failing on purpose because he’s a smart boy.
I had complained to the Child Welfare Committee of Puducherry earlier, and they didn’t even know what dyslexia was, and a bribe was paid there also, his mother told him. The school has also complained that he thinks of me a lot, and that interferes with his studies, not able to recognize that he’s suffering the grief and heartbreak of the loss of a parent, a relationship with him they will also not recognize because I have no legals rights to the child.
It took months for the school to respond to the letter, and when they did it wasn’t to me or to provide him with care; they asked him to write a poem about his school, praising it, and they’d publish it in their weekly newsletter. The request that he write a poem came some weeks ago, and he wrote this poem instead, after much deliberation and anguish over the whole thing, but he’s afraid to give it to his school because his parents would see it and punish him for it, and so, I have to open the door, albeit without causing him further harm.
This poem began where Death went off his office, and it revealed. It’s beginning to baby us, political allies. About exit, what does it reveal today? We’re not safe in our own shoes. Death is the beginning of misery.
I kill myself from the beginning I bet. It’s a written, a written piece of paper. Now I left coins of me, shekels, splashes of time, in your jukebox. They’re horrible. It didn’t work. I could not write my name in the sky.
Just how do you do? I’m small pittens for small fare, smaller than that. I just do your head in, don’t I? Come talk to me I’m worth? And you don’t. [The sound of laughter here] You’re the wrong people. You’re not wearin’ soul shoes.
This is message for the times today. We did love. We’ve lost some trying to get it in there now. What in the hell’s a matter? It’s the go car looking for enlightenment brown. Make alright boy that’s it cut the track. Just need to think your love can speak. [sing line] Freedom caring, just need to think. Some of it has been miracles in the room. [sing line] One at a shot have a world education. [sing line] He’s called a creature of a dying world job, little until tea tomorrow. You’re getting good at it. Leadership is worship. Bake down, ask about your soul technology. Become immortal.
Before my life was over, I want to find what my life was in. I’m normally ask that, if I haven’t given up on life. Would you lay with me [sing line to tune of song of that name] all over this answer? It’s not a field of stone. It holds us all in tight keeping, but it’s not the angel in the room. This is pre-God ladies and gentlemen. Can you hacksaw that?
I’m getting deep into society’s ways. I’ve just found Spirit, the first covering of the Unknown. It’s how we have being. It’s where we come from. A great big Spirit wears everything. It fashions God. We’re getting into preexistence ladies and gentlemen, when only the Formless arise. Can you imagine nothing as its sailboat?
What’s the rule of this ship? Don’t fashion nothing. Expand into global waters. Make existence be to pronounce Itself. Spirit is the first form it wear, that makes for us souls. It’s aligned with God, but it’s not God. It’s the soul, the basic who we are.
You can touch that ship in intimate contact, feel it ride the wherewithal of your day. It can take over and rubs your belly with sweetness, and you are charged for awhile with everything’s honey. You see the soul in things.
How can you do this in a concentration camp, in the worst hell on earth? That’s the soul of the ages in bare bones reality giving you eyes to see. Overcoming physical pain is one thing. Watching cruelty mark the Earth, devour babies, and we’ve gotten down to the purpose of soul: don’t let it in, the despair.
The soul can get you out of this, even in the midst of it's bear. We are a sublime soul range, God gave us Savitri reads, and this is down on earth. We tarry there. The soul is completely out of this picture, the whole fortnight of evil takes our ship. The soul is not responsible for sin. It loads up our day with the honor we give one another for being the Itself to Itself, and we feel sweetness everywhere and principles of joy.
This can break in on us in the hell we have made of our lives, or what others have made us suffer. It can even break the dull routine of the days. It can be in ordinary and lift on you extraordinary in every mode you wear. There’s no end to the soul’s keeping. It’s the basic ground of everything. It’s goodness rides the high seas. It has so much feeling for everyone. A plant is to it existence and little dogs so lovingly looked upon. It can hold matter in its hand, and you don’t want to bruise that ship either. You’re careful with everything. You have respect for the Earth. You are never out of love, even when you see society’s nigger, the people we are allowed to hate.
I can’t fashion this for you. The soul is a mystery you know, but I can tell you how to do it, reach for soul, let it in. You grasp it all the time in bridges you wear. It’s the most common thing in life, coming upon your feelings, and you feel so alive with everything, and you want no harm done to the aliveness in front of you. You feel the pain of the Earth, the sorrow, disguised as your own or your close neighbor’s, and you grasp your loved ones to yourself and be good to them. You feel ranges of Spirit right there in your baked pie.
A moment of eternity has looked in on you, and you feel sublime with the Earth. You hold them with your children, these feelings, or your best friend’s face, and you love to pet your dog with them like you’re petting moon time. You want to protect everything don’t you? And you put down your enmity for a minute.
Can we range there, take those feelings to the sky? We can sure get along there, if we try. There’s more to soul science you know, but I’m trying to get you started on thin ice. We don’t know how to handle the world. It ruins our day, even when we’re drinkin’ with it, but we are not left out of soul. It envelopes everything, and when existence can be anything, the soul is there first a witness, then a power to bring the soul round to things, and you just have to grasp it in what I’m saying now.
Is everything okay? Is everything alright? I wear society like a sleeve, and they do not worth me in it, not even my own kin. I am left apart by everybody. Few call my name. I’m treated well by Douglas and a few others. My child cannot call my name, and though he is living I cannot see him. I live in isolation, bearing pain. I look at the specter of death. I’m in danger of society’s wrath. It sneezes on me.
Have you ever seen the sun and the mysteries of existence? I’ve pulled them out of my pocket. I’m a crash course in reality. I write this to you now in poetry that has never been seen before, and I’m a black bag. Society won’t read me. It spits my name out, never calls it. I want you to recognize this pavilion. I want my boy back and safe, and I want all of you to be safe.
How can one man’s love change the world? If it opens up the eyes of God it can. It can bring us to soul. I rabbit there and show you soul moments, a day or an hour, I can see because I wear. It’s close to enlightenment’s springs, and I refuse this honesty just as much, feeling my pain, my isolation and the loss of my boy, who tells me he’s walking in a void, in secret messages, and he’s lost on himself no light he can see.
I bear these days not as a guerrilla. I return again and again to the house of soul, what I’m lifting up for you to see in a certain light that give us release from pain, and I love you there, even though you give me the cold shoulder, again.
Rushing through a path of ambulance, I participate. I don’t promote my own story. I hand it to you because it’s how I found out things. I’d rather not tell it as honestly as I do. This does not do me good. It gets me ignored, not a poet in good standing, and no one will promote my work, except a fellow poet in Israel I can count on to call my name.
Just at the home of mankind, I’ll have the day at some point, and I’m in your picture of what everything means. For now I want to pass ships. I’m on a mission to get past my own boat. Come get me please. You’ll like what you see.
I wanna restrict access to ether department material. I wanna clarify the sense of know. What is the irony? They never seem to remember they’re not dealing with science they’re dealing with train yards. It only becomes science when consciousness becomes involved. That dog exists. He points all the cartoons and movies. I’ve seen ‘im.
This is not just an English submission. And the way you must maintain, [sing line] inhabit this as if your life depended upon it. Disturbed her hand. Nobody knows where this is comin’ from, and no reader sees this comin’. Soon you’ll get bit and ice cream. It has the attention, [sing line] and you hit a basketball court, and it may happen to be our key.
Dobie you came to stop me why? Christianity does not know it’s interred. It thinks it’s the sandman. It hurts people, and it does not match reality. Fine, I’ll keep singin’.
I put everybody in bed with me so they can see change. It’s a safety measure. Where do we come from? Do we come from the trees? What happens when our pants are off when we were children? How angry does momma spank us? Are we left in a corner to rot? Is daddy a guerilla? Do we get enough to eat? Are we the brunt of everyone’s joke? How much pressure do we spend childhood with?
What’s mental health, and how has it failed us? Every scientist knows you put the telescope on heavenly bodies, the microscope on nature’s small dance. What makes us tick? The observational posts are not there. We’ve neglected our very selves, who we need to see to survive it’s gotten so big our department store.
Why didn’t we do this from the beginning, put all those training devices on us so that we know where we came from when a child comes out of the womb? Have I hit the most territorial seize the day? You can’t look in there. It’s the most agreed upon privacy in the world, that little family intake, by the time we got to where science was. I’m not countin’ cucumbers. I want you to look at this. We put our eyes on the workings of nature not us, as if that would change the world and make us live with one another well.
What was early scientists thinking? They established a model, and to get right down to the business of us, the making of the human being, was that akin to heresy? Now folks, what do you want to look at to be safe, how many items dance on the head of a pin or study the universe to systematize it?
Let’s be crystal clear. Science deals with the environment too and the damage we’ve done to it and the danger that’s put us in, but human choices made these decisions that have put us at risk. How self-centered they are, how monetary gain. Change the human change the environment so we don’t run amok.
Did I just spell out change? Why has the focus been on objects of nature, I mean in the intention of science? Momma don’t make your babies grow up to be cowboys. [sing lineto tune of the country songwith similar title] Well I lost the rodeo. Can we talk about small minds and violent natures that live in boxes? / I grew up in this milieu. I could say policemen or rodeo clown, or even schoolteacher, but the exceptions would pile up, and I can’t show you what’s happenin’.
How can I tell you we are a tortured device? We do not produce good human beings. Just look at the world. Do you know how violated everybody is? Do you know how mean? We are still guerrillas, even your newspaperman and mother with her child. We are not a functional society for the good of us. We have animal hierarchy and just let people die or rot in misery. We are a selfish lot. We are not our brother’s keeper, and we do not love our neighbor like ourself. We make war with him.
No gentil people would agree with me. They’re soft and warm. They treat their brother kindly. They go to church and pay homage to society, or they have the right liberal opinions and treat everybody equally. Do you know how immature you are? Watch yourself in transactions you get shortchanged, or where your opinion is busted, or you find someone you don’t like, or you’re brought up against your unconscious, and you watch it take over. You react and show your immaturity.
This comes from upbringin’, from where your family put their hand, their voice, their feelings, and their directed-toned thoughts. Now science would not say this. It’s not there yet. It won’t do that, look that closely at us when we’re in momma’s lap, in bed with daddy, at the dinner table bein’ reamed for somethin’ we done, or just sittin’ on stools with the family in our little private milieu.
We can’t put lenses there, and we don’t know how to get at that space and nobody knows we’re lookin’. We could’ve solved this a long time ago, but science didn’t see that we are behaviorally made. Put genes in the shotgun they come from behavior too, however many diseases get in the way.
Audible, we saw a destiny. It wasn’t religion. It grew larger than mankind. We’re in the apple in the trees now. We can’t get out of our underwares. We still slap children, make them feel uncomfortable with themselves. We breed disease. We don’t know how to handle children, and our world’s a mess because of it.
How can I get you to see this newspaperman, scientist studying nature? Who else would we look to for change? A politician’s a ninny-gag. The clergyman reads from a book and doesn’t see change except to be more Christian. I bring a new thing upon the Earth that we haven’t seen in awhile, as the poet lands Earth.
I bring you essays on living through my personal share that can see through the walls of humanity and show things even cameras can’t capture. I can show you the inner workings of our species, and the dice is on the table. I can hunt you in corners and show how this makes us mad. I can show the pathology of mankind and the rule book of disease that puts rabids among us, and I can chip away at your armor and show you your snakeskin, the hidden fount of your wrath, and you are as policy as the rest of us.
I do this with a divine eye that looks in on things, and I have found the hidden fount of poetry, new for the times we wear, a new font of poetry that speaks to us living men and women to bring our heights to the sun.
I am not a caged animal. I have a freedom in my room that walks on mountaintops. I am a receptivity to God. I hear the angels sing. Healing lives in my top drawer, and I let it out and sing to you the heavenliness of its smile. I can do more than that. I can rise the sun in your eyes and reveal to you the secret of the universe, the real person you are beyond time. I can bring you to the Silence that empties our race of all its cares and brings enlightenment into the room. I can hold your hand to the well of soul and have you touch base with forever. These things I have seen and been, where moments meet me in the well of change.
Do you see me there? Every impossibility meets its gun. I’m taller than you in that I have met my own impossibility and let God handle it, but I did not neglect my duty to pay. So I’m aligned with the times to give us living Earth. This is not a handmaid’s tale that robs us of our own divinity. We have it on our tops, and we will wear this one day in clear and certain skies. Time’s the animal we wait on now, but time is not our keeper. The hidden divinity is all across our tops in every movement of time.
Right on. I have some stature to gain. I want Silence to enter my room, but the world keeps swellin’ up. I tarry there. It’s not an impossible situation, but it’s bigger than I am. I’ll just put on my hat and let grace still me. It’s an office I wear, concentrating with no thoughts in my head bound for the Silence. I can’t get past the thoughts of the day, but I can ride the quiet for minutes or hours. It’s a warfare you know. They know you’re close, and the world steps in and robs you of your peace. Dangnabbit, I chase the Silence away.
They carry your name in the wind, the lovers of sky, if you’ve seen past the boundaries thin Earth. You are a flame shot up there that kissed the night goodbye. I’m hope in your room. Don’t let me down. Can you see me now? [the last verse came watching the movie The Summer Book walk its way into my heart]
the new recruit, the author (18), basic training photo
As a member of Together We Served, the largest U.S. Military veteran’s site, I recently participated in a monthly writing competition, my entry below. Each month they ask a different question, and there is one winner and five runner ups, and they give prize money to all. I did not even get runner up. Click here to see the winners of June 2025. (If it’s been awhile, you’ll have to click on the back pages at the bottom of the page to see the winners)
The question for June 2025: “Lessons Learned Advice: What advice would you give a new recruit just starting out their military career? Please describe any specific lessons you learned the hard way from your own service!“
Godspeed
Wow, the question:
what would you say to a new recruit?
I'd light 'em on fire
with the spirit of the ages
guardin' humanity wore,
put them in a soldier’s uniform
to bring them round to themselves
the substance of that uniform,
the evidence they need to survive.
The secrets of the army:
let's go up the ladder;
Abraham Lincoln,
look it square on.
He was the underdog.
Even his boots laughed at him.
He needs to get its specification places.
How tall is that lamp
if it’s minus airborne freeze?
Get into the business of the army.
You’re not there pullin' teeth.
No matter how wide you have come,
how much this will do you in civilian life,
be unto the army the soldier it needs.
Any specialty can wear Airborne.
Educational benefits aside,
that Airborne's a gig.
You have an opportunity to face yourself,
learn how you grow.
Test yourself,
be that Ranger,
that Green Beret,
if you re done with paddy cake,
if you want to climb the world,
go the distance.
I can t hold you close.
Everybody's their own mood.
Alright you're an orderly,
or a vehicle repair specialist,
or get into computers.
We need those too.
See how you tick.
Be an army specialist.
Let that uniform wear you.
Volunteer for field duty,
sleep out in the cold.
Your entire life will talk about this moment,
and you're setting its patterns now.
Your time in service
is an aquifer
you'll draw from all your life.
Test yourself.
Know your limits.
Repeating that's good practice,
the best boat you could drive
over your troubled waters.
It s what you're here for,
the army your qualifier.
If you haven't done it before,
challenge that square one of yourself.
What does it mean out of the hand,
this frozen,
your stamina?
Can you get past that point?
Can you teach people to do that too
when all hell breaks loose,
when you engineer combat?
I'm a survival parade.
This is soft stuff.
Alright commando,
what has she seen with you,
the modern warfare?
You can sure run amok.
You’ve done it,
you’ve bloodied corpse,
pinched some ears off
tearin' apart civilian lives.
You would not want to kill civilians
or cause mayhem.
Would you ever,
would you ever brush your teeth in it?
Human rights law,
and let that be your guide.
I found someone needed to be intensity through now,
the cutting edge of that battlefield,
goin' on main street
doin' the duty
that lifts apart your life.
Habit something else.
About time is it.
Bring the money,
payin' for the part.
Can you advance as a human being?
I don't think this is rank put on,
but certainly a sergeant
has peaked encountered himself
at the role of that rank,
and a captain has gone beyond
the pettiness of himself,
and yes ma'am you wear rank too.
You certainly do.
Yes sir you certainly have,
gut in the garden,
you pull out pearls.
Mirroring enough NCOs,
we knows we have to count Brunos,
a dog that rides shoulders with the army.
This will happen
while we attack
we give everybody a hard time
as if it shouldn't be
some stupid protocol.
Well you've got it.
Learn how to be
I'm glad to be here,
and I'm getting good food anyway.
Perfect,
you're in the army now.
It’s costly.
Wide the terrain.
It will shape you for the rest of your life.
Write All the Paper
Full of self-importance, and there being no doubt in my mind that I should be chosen as a squad leader, I went to the platoon leader’s room at the back of the barracks to tell him, not worrying about anyone hearing, that a ruckus was happening he should attend to. I actually said it outside his door loud enough so that people could hear it. I thought I was showing my leadership skills by taking responsibility here.
It was a one-station-unit-training, basic and infantry school combined, at Harmony Church, Fort Benning, 1979, and it had just started. It was after lights out, and almost the whole platoon had gathered to watch a fight in our barracks. After I told the platoon leader what was happening, a new recruit also but one near 30-years-old, he put an end to it, and we all went back to bed, and nobody suffered any consequences, and I knew they wouldn’t, he being one of us. All stupidity aside, my action really did have a lot to do with not wanting us all to be outside in the push-up position for however long the infraction called for.
The next morning my whole world changed. The entire platoon was seething at me with one word, rat, and it took days to even get my best buddy back at my side, although some weren’t involved in this, but I couldn’t see those people for trees. The fight hadn’t been a fight but a mock fight involving the new recruit at the top of the pecking order, not in anything to do with the army but was some carry over from the popularity status of high school, the most of us being just fresh from that. He was play fighting with his best buddy, and the whole platoon wanted to watch, minus recruits I hadn’t noticed they were so, how can I say, mature for their age?
There then ensued two months of day and night harassment and bullying that took on TV proportions. Begs, the popular kid, made up this ongoing role play. I was Frank Burns of M.A.S.H., and Begs was Hawkeye, of course, and his best buddy was Trapper, and others had other roles. I can’t give you the awful enormity of this. It was played out to the tune of me just wanting to kill myself. My pride in myself, and my self-respect, I lost one day when I just broke down and cried in front of everybody, like an eight-year-old, after being lured away from my unlocked wall locker so that I’d get in trouble when they told the drill sergeant I’d left it unlocked. But my crying only made it worse. Soon after, one night while sleeping, I got my hair filled with shaving cream, and it was so strange to me how that made its way into my dream and became a part of it before I woke up, seeing that culprit shrinking off, and I can go on and on, but the worst would happen in the cattle car going back to the barracks at night after a long day of training.
One night, Begs had made up a song aimed at me, and the platoon was singing it, and with so much glee, some popular tune I don’t remember that he’d ill-adapted to fit his nefarious needs, but you had to hand it to the guy; he was creative. I looked on in disbelief, just silent now with all the abuse. Then out of the woodwork and out of nowhere two normally quiet recruits stood up and put a stop to it, one engaging the mob and the other bending down and making me feel better, they both befriending me and remaining near me watching my back until the end of the course. Heroes there were to me then and still are, gentle souls but with sharp teeth. They went to the drill sergeant when we got back that night and told him what had been happening, and he locked the platoon’s heels and made sure I wouldn’t be harassed anymore, and I wasn’t.
I might add that I graduated ranked third in the platoon, won an off-base pass, but no one said a word, and in subsequent Jump School, I didn’t get a gig the whole time but had somehow been overlooked and didn’t get a white helmet, and because I saw how harassed the white helmets where, I didn’t say a word. I was soldier of the year of lll Corps and Ft. Cavasos, 1981, had dinner with that general more than once, and I graduated on the Commandant’s List of the Special Forces Qualification Course, 1982. Hawkeye got an inability to adapt discharge while we were in Jump School.
The moral of the story is be very careful in telling on anyone, but sometimes it’s the right thing to do, and I’m talking about those two heroes in that cattle car, not what I did, which could remind you of Major Burns.
photo by Lydia, Dylan’s mom, a representative photo: the you in the poem is you, who ever you are, not the kid, or not until he reads poetry
Shooting rifles into the air, that’s my electric snow. It won’t move men. It can’t get at the oil in time that damages us, makes us mean, and I can’t even make you feel better.
Headlong into our joys and pains, into what makes us tick, into together you and me, I come up empty of the value of our ship where you whistle on board.
I don’t know how to reach the other side, where I’m not a page in oneness, but I’ve crawled under your bedcovers, and I’m up against your body safe. Tell me how to do that.
I spill myself. I just pour my guts out, and darlin’ you get enough of that. You aren’t gonna lie to me I know I reach your bed or not. I can hold innocence in my hand, but I can’t rub myself with you with it, but I can’t find that spot on you you take it.
Dang blast it stars, it’s not all about the body, but that’s where we meet each other in person. I’m tryin’ to say we can still do the value in verse of the sincerity meeting you.
It’s the secret of poetry. It’s my hand in yours as you dally with your own. I find you there my sweetness givin’ your kids a bath, takin’ your dog for a walk, liftin’ your mind to the skies in anticipation of more there be. Oh honey boogers, can we swing together?
I think you’ve found your verse, Eastern were able to read. There’s a piss on your blacklist. Guess what ladies and gentlemen, a rowboat, and there appears on your ears deeper meaning.
You think you’re too weird for our TV? You’ve touched hearts, you know? But the chorus rings out— how did it happen? How did you do anything at all? [sing this and above line] It’s about how to hold life at bay when we’re in a very physical intimacy. My official model is bliss. This will be call master.
photo by Lydia, Dylan’s mother, ban image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay
I tried to find people of substance to testify with me. I just heard my bottom line turn not which but for my soul. “Yeah I’ll be right there.” He was to make “me, I don’t care.” He is at this stage the little boy. He’ll bring him in in another place, and that boy cares about his room. It’s been set up for baby. Ohhhhhh, as in that’s an amazing fieldwork with the little in the house. God cares. He snuck in the lunch. Yes that was weird: a sudden host of angels lined the room.
Angels, when you are in a film, they see what you’re doin’. I’m happy about that. I’m not wrapped in golden chains. I love the highway. I love the freeway. I’m not mindin’ my own business. I do a lot of lookin’ in the inner chambers of people, all who’s connected with my room as they star in their own show— breakin’ bread together, and it’s just the outfield in my room. I put on my clothes.
Now I’m a witness of tomorrow, and I don’t think you’ve seen that yet. Look with Dylan. He’s about to turn two. I spend the day with him a time or two a week, really in soft with his mother how to do that. You walk on tippy toes around that kid. You let him lead. You follow, and you just see him all together soon. You focus, concentrate, on that kid, right where he’s developin’, and the voice come out “I am so glad you’re seeing me.”
You give him everything he wants that doesn’t hurt him or make him mean. You know you have to balance this with society’s rules. It’s what we make them for: we need a functioning society. Now what happens when he’s off base, a naked kid in a mud hole? Clean dirt don’t mind, well water, and there are no snakes and spiders around, biting insects. You let him enjoy himself, makin’ mud pies, smearin’ mud all over himself, splashin’ and a splashin’ and a splashin’.
The Rottweiler near him smiles. She understands mud. I am making sure he has the freedom to do it. Money from Heaven, I love to see him play. It’s a stadium room. We are bound by so many witnesses. I can feel them in my sleeves. I wanna get at the new creation, and I see with children we do that. I study them, hopin’ to find tomorrow. I am bound and limited in my time, and someone else owns that kid. I can only do so much.
I gave Nithish a brand new room, for a day, a kid now 13 I lost last year. It all crumbled. The new creation fell apart. He was reamed viciously by his parents, until he lost all his Heaven. They punished him for his spirituality, and he lost all sense of it. He’s told me he has no feelings now and would like to kill people if he could. That’s very far from grace, and I accuse God about it all the time, the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.
What we did cannot be repeated in a laboratory. It’s too much where we put spiritual influence. Laboratory conditions can’t copy that. Because I’m not there, on the ground, the kid is just in a black straight jacket, and I can’t get near ‘im. I can’t get this across to anyone. There is no need of me they see. I’m a foreigner in India, and that’s all they see. This is a racial country I just sit and bleed. Even if someone would turn him towards me, I’m a police major. Write it down hey I like kids, and I’ve stepped on their shoes in the past, and now I know what they need?
It’s a honey table, and the most skeptical person would find me right with kids if they followed me around with one. I know what I’m doin’. But I would not like the interference to tell you the truth, and we wouldn’t be focused on child development. It would be watching me. How do I show you this honey dog? You can’t blame me for tryin’. I want my boy back so he can grow up as tall as his destiny calls for, and I want Dylan to be assured I’m there, and no one will take me away. These are troubled times.
So we play eggs, these hot air balloons I sudden you with so’s you can see I’m not red in my room. It’s a feelin’ test. I’m givin’ you the means to look in there wide open feelin’. A seer would see a honey perch, laughter and commodity for the child. I arm there. It’s not a black bag.
Now what’s the commodity in my room? It’s soul change. I’m learnin’ the soul take over, and that’s the honey for the child I want them in contact with so with their souls they stay in touch; they don’t lose that sweet easiness that makes them joys at life, and that’s our leadership with children, the soul ever takes presence. Can you find that?
It’s too abstract to you, or most of you, or it’s some made-up notion we force in life’s cupboard. It’s the contact with life at its most basic. It’s what we deal with as children that never forgets childhood, and we love bein’ a child. It’s what we lose when we grow up that we call innocence and candor and silliness and so on. We lose that touch with our souls, the sweetness that can forgive everyone, even if they’ve just whipped your butt. You remember that?
I’m all about it, and I meet the souls of children with my own. Funny how you do that. You just be kind with them and ever present, as the big dog sittin’ there that just wants them safe. That’s what you do with children, open up their hearts with love and make them feel safe and special.
Dylan doesn’t respond yet to anyone to get out of his own mood, but he comes when I call, and that’s what we spent the day doin’. Self-Absorption do you see that dog sittin’ there? Luna baby loves you. And Self-Absorption looks up at me in play and gives me a smile full of eye contact, grinnin’ from ear to ear, and it lights up the sun and gives me the joy of the world. And he comes and takes my hand and leads me to what he wants to do, and he’s developin’ friendship and social contact. We have fun together.
Listen, you can’t fool an angel. What’s on with you when a child is under your care, when you play with kittens?
Harm's End 