High Performance

photo by Donny

A Donny Lee Duke poem

I'll Show You
The sweet graze of the stars,
children enhance this;
children block this.
We don’t know what to do with children.
We crush children,
make school their only occupation,
even if it’s tribes.
They’re not supposed to do that,
hitch school to their star.
It’s mean:
so much force is used to get them to do it.
They’re whipped and beaten,
and you just think them frauds.

You don’t know how they are with you,
look up to you for so much sustenance.
They trust you.
Is that the only way to solve this,
with violence?
You don’t know what that kid’s thinkin’—
“You’re a bad woman Miss.”
Can you see yourself?
Do you even care?

What would you do if I told you
Nitish is a star in his own right?
He has the Mother’s calling.
He’s been initiated by God.
He will grow up to be a poet,
and I’m not kidding you.

Dyslexia has him by the throat.
You can’t seem to believe that.
You don’t even know what it means.
Is that so funny?
Dyslexia’s a large size.
It’s where kids go to school.
They don’t know how to behave themselves.
It’s all a mystery to them:
why can’t they do better in school?
They’re just dyslexic children.
Is that imagination to you?

Why do you hit him?
Is that your way with children?
You can’t do any better?
Why the hostility towards him?
He really tries, you know?
And he really cries.
Can you hear it?

Nitish is ugly now,
like he’s some derelict child.
He can’t do the simplest things
when it comes to letters and time,
numbers and what they do on the page,
school facts and memory power.
This is dyslexia.
It’s not a mean child.
Can you grasp this?

Now let’s look at Nitish
as who he will be when he grows up.
What makes you see failure?
You see his soul?
I’m a grandfather that does.
How do you know he’s going to fail?
He’s bigger than you.
He’s captured a star already.

Just take a mousetrap together and don’t worry about it.
Just take here your punishment.
You’ve got no right to hit him.
You have no right at all.
Now be a proper teacher
and be good to that boy.
You know I love that boy.
Believe me,
you hurt him,
and please stop.

Hand it down,
wean it down,
hand it to yah.
Ask that boy
to come closer.
You see a captain there don’t yah?
Never mind the school.
Please be good to him.
His burden is the world, you know?
A poem walk off with him.
You can history sing it.
You’re gonna see him be the very person children believe they can be.


I too had the world on my knee
and turned it wrong.
I was like you
and thought I did no wrong.
I couldn’t grasp its significance.
I’ve learned my lessons early and late.
I have to power you if I’m going to power me.
It’s something we all do together,
be reality human beings.

I pet my dog and say why.
We need a better world, don’t we?
That’s the story today.
Are you listenin’?
I am here with the Eyes.
See them?
Are you hearin’ me?
It’s the star point of Heaven’s gaze,
if you want to know the truth of the matter.
Now buckle up.
We got a long ride
to see the Sun.

Humbly and without reservation the teacher in question apologized to Nitish after reading this poem, and his teachers are learning about Dyslexia, but we still have a ways to go, and so I am not naming the teacher or the school and don’t want, don’t need, any outrage from you. I think this is the very first result I’ve gotten in an art action, that I know of at least, and it is so very close to home and so very personal, the most appropriate and needed kind of result. Thank you Mother.

I Understand It

an illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a 1913 addition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass

A poem by Donny Lee Duke

He did.
He figured it out.
You haven’t seen it.
Oh my God no one has even read it.
What is your name?
A holistic reader.
There’s a lot of censorship
of the ideas that make the world.

The world ran out of culture.
It couldn’t see itself.
It didn’t care.
It couldn’t come up with itself.
It just stayed where it was.
It didn’t know where it was.
It had no means for improvement.
It was small and intimate.
It was huge and dim.
It didn’t know where to begin.
It’s stomped on itself.
It raced ahead.
It lagged behind.
It wore horns no one could grasp.
We sit here and stare at it today,
just confused by what we see.

This was self-taught,
how we reach out and touch the world.
It didn’t come in the papers.
It wasn’t on the Internet.
No course in university taught it.
No book could grasp the whole.
It wasn’t in speech.
You couldn’t find it anywhere.

Everybody was afraid of it.
They thought it would bite them.
How to reach out and touch the whole
came from inner experience.
It was deeper than the world.
It really tested your boundaries,
and you had no choice but to surrender to its process.
It had your very being at heart.
It schooled you,
showed the inside of everything.
You never saw it completely.
You just handled it with care.
It would eat you alive
if you affronted its mission.

You understood it was a Larger you.
You saw it dream
a nation of particulars.
It gave you vision,
spoke to you with the inner voice.
You held it close to you
and processed its thought
into the unknown.
Great the days lay
the seat-point of vision.
You just studied reality
absolved in yourself.

You had no way to communicate this to men,
wherever you came from.
No poem would read it,
no prose spell it out.
The visual arts could not express it,
no drama act it out,
no dance routine show it,
even in its living room.
It was beyond itself.

If you got life that need a poet,
I’m your subject right here.
Now go floss
with the rest of that form.
You’ve left something incomplete.
If I just listen,
I’d find it out numbers me.
I’ve encountered a different verse.

Its form is amplified by common speech.
There is the line.
Give me back my lunch;
I can do nothing with the way it works.
See there
you’ve been taken in.
Now tell me I’m a Great Lake I’m ready to play.
Now tell me I was murdered.
You know I just heard the news and wrote it down.
I’m a five star hotel,
and I’ve got the muse
in poetry form.
I mean inner voices speak.
It’s the divine muse of poetry.

How raw and off the cuff.
It has every name involved.
It won’t leave you alone.
Now say I’m silly
understanding prose.
All is said
to top off the mountain,
to be a governor unto itself,
to let you fly in the word.
How could that be?
I don’t think I got all freaked out about it
as grey mountain.
The poetry of redemption lands here,
the upper money.

I will just let you fuck me,
give in.
I’m about to be homeless.
That death I was telling you about,
they take my sky away from me.
The ground of silence eats me up.
I become a Silent Mind.
Realization proves my calling.
There’s nothing else
to realize:
we’re in love
with the whole thing,
each business and everybody.
We grok this.

It’s standin’ on your shoe.
Great the papers play
in the immediate seat of your room.
Welcome to the lost word.
That’s the sound of silence,
a preface to Enlightenment.

A shortcut,
I can write it down.
What else
can we do?
Headphones surround—
you’re hearin’ the interior music.
You’ve opened up that wide.
Wrap up some milk
left you some poetry.
This is your ticket.

For you it would be nice
right here:
the grinding of the dog.
I’m a farmer.
This is my business.
I keep business spoken.
Pinecones have left to a civilization.
What are you guys?
TikTok
describin’ the universe,
time of missed a keyframe
and causality.
Whether you want to or not,
the movie echo system.
You said what?
Reality in this page.
I’m gonna listen to yah.
Good mornin’.

I’ll loosen poetry I’ll listen.
Find that way offshore.
But Enlightenment seeks.
Ask her about the whole thing.
Did you tell ‘im you’ll take the horses,
make that your team?
Not that saying but keep
outside science,
and never cry wolf.
Read my full exposed.
My hands are tied.
Make me feel better.
Make me feel so much better.
We’re in this cut;
at least our voices aren’t.
He actually science.
Cosmopolitan
I understood it,
no doubt.
He’s right in front of me.
I could sing up here for hours.

I have everything I need to start the revolution.
I’m a purpose.
I want a bigger world.
You can keep me out as long as you can.
I’m not gonna die.
I’m gonna change consciousness.
Look me over.
I’m real.
I am so very real.
You can’t get around me.
It’s reality I’m showin’ you,
all holistically laid out.
You can dance all you want.
Reality’s not goin’ anywhere.
It’s on the way to you,
even if you don’t want it.

Reality’s comin’ for you.
Hold your head up high and embrace it.
A poem with your name on it Marginalian.
Poetry works
I can’t ignore.
She’s busy,
clean up what happened:
showed herself a calloused human being,
with no feelings at all
for the man everybody hates.

There is no Whole behind the whole—
she shows you what that does to you
when you believe that.
You don’t have to love everybody,
and you can pick and choose.
You don’t even have to treat them human.
Your ethics just come from ground zero,
and you make ‘em up on the spot.

Okay Riviera,
let’s see you explore your consciousness.
Can you do that?
Wow, have you blocked things.
You will not be happy with yourself
on the other side.
Maria Popova,
live up to your ideals,
and that intelligence of yours,
taking it
to some encounter on the inside
you see the whole,
you see it all means somethin’.
Put your finger on it,
and let us hear your own source material.

Has the jacket,
a lonely packet,
of quoting the right material.
That’s starfish.
It says more than what you want it to say.
Okay I’m outta here.
I have to let you everything,
be a work in progress
understand human.
I’m reminding myself
of what I’ve been taught.
You can have this.
It’s a seer’s wisdom.
Handle it with care.

They were talking about
y’all are choosing the apartment
you’re gonna let this seer in.
I’ve reached out to so many people
over the years.
A big no they wouldn’t even tell me,
usually.
They just read me and tossed me aside.
Put up his banner,
that’s where we go.
Who stole the cones?
You know it’s not coming.
You’re here for the Rachel Carson.
Write someone back.
You never had more powerful that was the end of the game.

Can I Apprentice You With Love?

a typical image found on channeling sites, source unknown

A poem by Donny Lee Duke

But in your routine,
what is the foundation of the whole thing?
It’s that the technology?
Can you point to God?
What’s happenin’
in your soul’s process with God?

Can you get your soul to speak?
Why always this:
you channel beings
of a particular order?
Can you grasp the inner voice,
hear that on the inside that your record?
Definitely more personal,
it’s got you at heart,
a wide variety of vision.
You’re hearin’ it now.

Now let me speak some
about capital.
You are not Nathaniel Hawthorne.
I hear no substance in your words.
Do you know the power of divine revelation?
It knocks you off your feet,
shakes you up,
makes you confront yourself,
and is really, really, poetic, you know?
No convulsions needed.

We can actually open a gateway
in people’s lives
to hope and possibility.
Wounded by something.
Now let’s go to the doctor,
and the young body
can open now.
Closed it,
closed it earlier,
channeling the soda pop.
I’m sorry,
that is not your next of kin.
I wouldn’t even call it divine.

I’m not gonna be used
by things that destroy
you just tell yourself.
Go get the basics
a little deep man:
we’ve whooped it up on stage.

The eve of creation—
you’ve hit the run around
with a big referral
to some starfish.
It’s got ears,
your soul buddy.
You have to ask it for help
fervently,
ardently.
Your soul rises to the surface
over many lifetimes.
I think you are where it speaks.
I offer you solace
in the form of understanding.
Come with me.

Stupid me,
I am not a perfected master,
not in Realization yet.
I’m sorry I sound so heavy,
so blow your tops off,
so glory in the hole.
I get in trouble
tryin’ to help.
People spit on me
the big bad outcast.
Oh have I sinned,
and so no one lets me speak.
Will you?

The stage the poem speaks of Tonight on Television.

I wrote this poem, or my muse did rather, which also serves to introduce the poem I’m currently disseminating, “Tonight on Television”, to a person who channels, Asil Toksal, after watching a video on YouTube where he channels, or says he’s channeling, the archangel Ariel. The video here. I watched the whole video and left this poem both as a comment after it and in an email sent to his site.

A Belief in a Miracle

photo by the author

One of the ones that let me in,
that touched my soul,
profound mailbox.
I came homeless
year after year after year.

We’re good.
We don’t understand your concept,
the jolt in the room.
Let’s keep busy
so we don’t have to reply.
Is this license
to just take the trouble to ignore someone?
Seldom I got a reply.

The root task
and how profound it is.
It’s indeed the world.
It’s indeed larger than the universe.
I can’t carve this out for you.
I can only sing.

I don’t know the Rumpelstiltskin of your life’s work.
Your struggles are a Banyan tree to me.
See the consciousness there?
It has handles on it.
Study books and thought process,
I don’t think you’ll arrive at the explanation of the universe.

Can we hold a tree?
What do we do with time?
How do we say the world to ourselves?
Do you hear the inner speech?
It’s spoken softly in so many inner ears.
You’re readin’ it.

It’s what you hold in your hands
in an ancient text of wisdom.
Not everyone has the fire.
Not everyone can read the text right.

And we’ve come back to your story:
not everyone has the inner fire,
though they long to see the universe as it is,
though they long to be more than what they are.
Can you grasp this?

You light it that way:
the object of your romance with time
the inner fire
to see the Invisible.

I think you’ve accredited universities with this task.
I think you’ve stopped at representations.
I think you’ve stopped at outer process.
Hidden meaning.
Self-doubt see
in your own blue pen.

Who am I cooking?
Jessica Frazier
the academic.
Have a little
finger pointing in your own direction.
The TVS fixed.
It was incredibly difficult.

Why do you believe in miracles?
I’m standing one.
You hear my measurements?
The boy in the yard.
Bigger then reality
I have not made them.

For years I’ve been sending emails to scientists and academics, or I’ve commented on a tweet of theirs, usually with links to something I’ve written involving inner exploration. Less than a handful of times have I gotten a reply, and when I have it’s just to express thanks for reading them, not to engage me over the importance of such experience. This is the latest example of such an email. If you’ve been reading my latest poems, I’m trying to show where we fail as a world. Here, it was not from reasons of moral outrage, but it was one of the titanic: the best minds aren’t. It was from an ‘expert’, i.e., a person influencing world opinion on an official level, in this case a person assigning meaning to the world, not listening to someone trying to get their attention, someone who just might have something valuable to add to the conversation. Click on the link at the end of the email, read the article, and tell me that’s just not possible.

[Subject of email] “Communicating with someone, and learning what they have to teach us…

learning to adapt our view to the information they give.” From your YouTube video Gadamer. Hello, I’ve just read your article in Psyche “Ancient Indian texts reveal the liberating power of metaphysics”. I’d like to get to the heart of the matter as quickly as possible please. “We can do something extraordinary: our mental parts can climb out of the window of the body, and up into the higher levels of reality.” What a wonderful statement worded so well, but are you speaking literally of actual hands on spiritual experience, or are you talking about using your imagination and having high thoughts? I think it’s the latter, and it’s precisely here your article doesn’t capture truth, that being what’s actually going on or has. “I might live in 2022 in Oxford, but I can share the experiences of persons in Thailand or the US, and imagine different lives I might have lived. With the help of scientists and philosophers, I understand levels of the cosmos that lie beyond the senses, and can access realities, values or ideas that cannot be destroyed with any mere physical body.” What it seems not only you are missing, but also the scientific establishment and the humanities, as university teaches them, is that it’s possible to have the experiences that the mystics (or metaphysicians describe). They are not only basing their ideas on the use of their imagination or on their thoughts. Many if not most are basing them on firsthand experience. Furthermore, though beyond this email, the authors of the Upanishads and the Vedas did not compose their writings but heard them via the inner voice. Do you know the meaning of Agni in this context? In other words, the texts came whole and ready made from their inner vision, one or a few lines at a time, and they wrote them down, something not possible unless you’ve had the experiences the texts they wrote describe, what would open a Rishi or seer to such inner vision.

Although I can give ample examples of the latter, the inner voice writing one’s seer-poetry (you can look that up if you want), I will only give an example of the heart of the matter of the email. It would be quite something if you even read it. There’s just so much vying for our attention, and something from out of the blue and from someone unknown, well, that’s usually what automatically gets sacrificed to the expediency of time:

The Spoiler
What’s bigger than the universe? Hang on, What’s bigger than everything?

I Can Touch His Own Feeling

photo by Donny

A poem by Donny Lee Duke

Yes of course you can go beyond man.
I felt the house alone.
I stood there on a bridge of time,
not expecting outcomes.
I just saw reality.
It was frozen bare,
and it challenged me to think
surpassing thought.
I was alone in the room,
and even Nitish was there
and my beloved dogs.
I heaved,
approaching the Silence.
It was an illusive prey.
Infinity stole my mind.
It grabbed me by the Silence.

I was a good day.
I cooked lunch,
did my duties
and took care of the people around me.
They were fighting their own battles
and needed my help.
I stood there and be a friend.
I listened to myself
giving them what they need.
I was withdrawing from time.
I stared at the gates of forever.
It orange glowed.

I gathered myself.
I didn’t have any pockets.
Things were to me on the shelf.
I craved no vital indulgence.
I was tired of the play.
Relaxing it was just to stop my thoughts.
It stood upon a verge of time
unaccompanied by time.
I was in that place where God was
the spectator in the room.
Sri Aurobindo held my hand.
The Mother surrounded me.

I loved myself,
faults and all,
but I was in transit from the center of the room.
I was beginning to smile.
I was beginning to hold water,
reacting less to things around me,
but still a reaction bore.
It was a principled state
that divined the reality of others to themselves.
I felt them Self with me.
I felt them safe with me
reacting less and less.
The world was a communiqué and a sound.

Still I was hated
in Auroville
and by the yoga.
No one looked at me
with kind eyes.
I understood and did not hate in return.
I continued to send them postcards:
help me
undo being this outcast among you.
It fell on deaf ears.
I was pariah.
Hello?

Great big bold thoughts,
when they looked at me,
gave them pause to think
for one second.
That’s it.
No one would talk to me,
except to brush me off.
I realized the condition of man.
We are animals in nearness to each other,
even when we have our high ideals
and so many rhymes to sing.
When you’re an outcast you see that.

We are stuck in our ways,
and change is a four-letter word
when you hit that most basic stuff,
someone’s morality,
their motherland,
their lens with which they view the world.
Can you tell me what changes minds,
open hearts
to what they are closed to?
What a position I’m in to learn that.

Our race is doomed,
and the divine has chosen the wrong race to foster.
Change is incremental and slow,
if it happens at all.
But then I look in my own eyes
and see what’s happening with me.
Oh my God we have a chance.
Oh my God we have a chance.
How do you fill in light?
How do you bring change into the room?
You bring change into the room.
It won’t come any other way.
Okay children?

Reality

photo by Donny

A poem by Donny Lee Duke

In a large distribution gap saw man,
a wide, territorial spree.
A trouble on islands,
they could not chapter this.
They saw each one to blame
but themselves,
or if they saw their faults
they didn’t recognize them in the field of play.
This screamed solution.
No power on earth could stop it.
Everyone saw themselves the leader of the play,
even when no leadership bore.

Listen to me I’m human—
social media post after social media post.
And they all cried:
I’m the development of man;
listen to me.
Nobody was a warehouse
of the exact thing in ourselves we needed to see.
This was how we play ball.
The game itself had no meaning.
We were Earth flat.
Nobody spoke our language
or could write up their own,
but they kept speaking.

Well the only thing I could do was cause trouble
with the abundance of you and I
in such a routine I told you so,
in such an abundance of I told you so.
I don’t think you understand this.
I think we are all spokesperson for humanity,
but what we are speaking we can’t say.
It’s all void of meaning,
not big enough to show the problem.
We nosedive into it
and break apart upon the seas.
It’s terrible inane,
and we can’t get past chapter 1.

Take it upon yourself to show this to us,
and no one sees it.
Everyone is a brick wall
when they need to see something
they don’t want to see.
Can we see nationalism in India?
Can we see Sri Aurobindo?
And we see Sri Aurobindo?
You read the Torah?
If God Himself told you to change it,
would you?
Muhammad’s infallibility,
tell me he’s not
something human.
Kill people because he is,
and that just puts us down.
Everybody see the Son of God?
Everybody see the fatherless God
born from sin?
And that’s how I believe in miracles,
excluding reality.
Are we alright with atheists?
I don’t want God to exist;
therefore He doesn’t.

Now let’s just start with standard room.
I hate bad people,
and they should be punished.
Oh great we saw man,
and wanted us to rub our nose in it.
A holistic reality isn’t a thing among us,
and here we are at where we’re at,
and no one could care less about reality,
and that’s my thought for the day,
where this poem sits in your lap.
Can you grasp inside it?
Can you get behind it?

The Well of Human Unity

photo by Donny

A poem by Donny Lee Duke

Goin’ through the tunnel of a poem,
I sit here and write to you.
I puppy every morning.
That’s a little boy I get off to school
or get ready for the day.
Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed no,
he’s a bear.
He’s difficult to deal with
in the morning times.
I just do my job.
Stand around and baby me!
Hold that thought while I iron your uniform.
J.A.R.V.I.S., mach 4!
And on goes the uniform.
It’s a rush to get him off to school.
And there we go.

I really like my job.
I don’t get annoyed too easily.
I’m giving the world its fresh morning start.
I’m giving God his clothes for the day.
That boy gets my full attention.
He’s my special project.
What does he think about it?
You’d have to see it believe it:
he just wants to be with me all the time.
What do I give him that other people don’t?
I give him the bell role,
and he sure makes use of that bell.
I am so delighted to be in his presence.
I cherish him
a devoted man,
hang on his every word,
well almost,
and just shower him with attention.
We’re not always there.
So much time we spend alone
doing our own thing
in close proximity.
Even now he’s on the computer
a few feet away.

Why do I give him this attention?
I can’t give you a label that fits.
Nothing I can call myself works.
Pederast, pedophile, boy lover,
I think you’d think of sex.
You don’t understand.
I love him
in that special way you love boys
when they embody to you your other half.
Let me explain.

I think we all desire union
with a person to fulfill ourselves.
It’s not always the opposite sex.
I think you’ve accepted gay and lesbian unions,
although some people still have problems with the sex.
Well here we are with a boy
representing my opposite half to me.

Okay put God there
you tell me offended by the relationship,
and that’s what I have done.
The boy’s not God for me.
God’s lookin’ at me through that boy.
Now imagine if you really saw this.
I’m not there to harm him, am I?

Granted,
it’s not easy to sacrifice sex and the romantic squeeze.
You do it because you have to.
You love that boy.
You love humanity,
and God you love,
and you don’t forget you love yourself.
Now tell me love can’t do it.

It is stronger than your hate,
what I’ve had to overcome to sacrifice sex,
your hatred.
You’re the biggest obstacle a pedophile faces
in making it right with children.
You can’t even see this.
Sitting in your buffered self,
you can’t see your hate reach the world.
Consciousness is to you a byproduct of brain,
and the hidden consciousness we all share,
you just deny.
A bubble’s worth,
it means no more.
Are you following me?
Now what do we do with pedophiles?

Now tell me love isn’t strong enough
to get them to love kids right.
You are so mistaken with your animal impulses.
You give hate the day.
A pedophile has a purpose if he could be made right.
Let’s grasp a little boy by the horns.
He needs a lot of focused attention,
and no not every pedophile would have one,
and I don’t know how many little boys need a pederast at their side.
Soul manages things,
and we’ve got so much to learn to let it do that.

I’ve made a beginning
to give you this example,
the making of a poet.
Will you hear me?
Anyway here we go.
Let's book ends meet.
He's in patterned straights.
He has the divine attention.
I just look after him.
The divine attention melts
into that he is a poet.
I keep him open to that line.
That's my job with him.

The logic of a poem,
it’s clear on certain things.
Let’s play with boy love, shall we?
Every boy has potential
to be something worthwhile in this world,
I mean in human stakes,
raise our integer.
I’m sorry girls too,
but that’s not my discussion today.
You think I’m talking fame.
I’m talking make us a better people,
and many are unknown who do that.
Now where do we bring the boys along,
the ones who have that mark
of adding meaning to our lives?
Why not a pedophile brings them,
not barring other people can?
I don’t think you know the meaning of pederasty
as an ideal mentoring us along one boy at a time.
You imagine only sex.

And where do we take this vehicle from,
in its proper form,
what brings humanity closer to itself?
Have you ever heard of human unity?
No believe me you have not.
Every area of human life
has to charge itself to human unity.
Every perversion has to find the divine purpose behind it.
This is not a communist manifesto.
God is the unity of all,
the God that brings oneness
as the guiding principle of our lives.
It’s a process of soul.

All our ships will have to be recommissioned.
Every institution,
marriage, family, law and order,
and all our means of employment,
has to produce human unity to survive.
It’s a lofty idea.
Put in practical terms it means fundamental change.
The very engines of society have to change.
Anybody who they are by nature
will have to be dealt with
in the light of human unity,
the most perverted,
and it’s there we reach harm’s end.

Nothing is done we prepare in school.
What would it be anyway different?
Look who we are
and match with that who.
Perfection comes from both of them,
the creature of the world
and the creature of God.
Bruno!
Ideology
can’t put up with this,
someone dangerous.
I don’t think an annual wait would work.
You would have to show them
the way of life to change.
Oh my God experimentation,
how you have to do that.
That means it can’t be a national field,
set about by its laws.
It means overturnin’ bein’ human.
I’m there with a camera
right in your argue belt.
We’re almost there,
where you see my contribution.

Individual's place power,
look at this.
I’m talking to you today
the very thing I’m talking about.
How do you propose this?
Well can you think of better circumstances
for human unity to come waltzing into the room,
when the lights of human unity Auroville are almost out?
The city will still be there
even when human unity is not
where it is taking itself.

You want Auroville the city of the status quo,
government-run Auroville.
You’re not going to produce the new human being.
No radical shift in consciousness there.
Rules cannot arrive at human unity.
How we’ll have to overcome consciousness,
all these formations of ill will floating around.
Tell me the outer process sees this.
It takes an inner revolution
overturning society’s ways.
We need circumstances for that.
We need Auroville.

And there you are in Auroville
arguing for land this and that,
ecological green, the keys to the office, what have you.
Something more fundamental’s at stake.
Can you see where we’re at?
We’re at the very crossroads of the city itself.
Who’s taking over,
the ordinary way of life or human unity,
and who will Auroville produce,
just more people or the superman?
It’s time for you to decide.

The Indian government can’t do it.
It will just produce the Indian government.
It has no means to outgrow itself.
You’d need a charter that says what it needs,
and we go from there.
You have the charter in your hands
the Mother wrote.
To listen to superman,
he's always on time.
Where are you gonna get a map?
Look right here.
Can you see the way?
If you're like me,
it'll take you awhile to see it.
And another little baby child is born in the ghetto. [heard sung, by Elvis]
There's just so much at stake,
and we need to hurry.
So race to human unity on itself.
Alright news, listen.
Cause man help.

The Waking of Pontius Pilate

photo by Donny, gimped by him, middle painting “Plato’s Cave” by Lalita Hamill, others source unknown

A poem by Donny Lee Duke

Read the stories around the area.
Read Mcdowell Christian’s story where he says he’s gay.
He’s been made a knight of honor
by the press.
Even Anglican bishops compromise over him.
No way
you’re gonna laugh his book to death.
You’ll make him the star of the show.
Oh my God his struggle brings you to tears—
the narrow-minded people along his way.

Woke agenda,
this is the story today
in our Liverpool.
Good God almighty great balls of fire, [heard sung]
everybody’s mean, you know it?
I think you’re too woke to see this:
how you have to have some disadvantaged marginalized people to kick around.

It’s not sufferin’ you’re lookin’ at.
You’re lookin’ at what’s easy to look at.
You won’t even look at the pedophile
except to hate his name in public.
It’s socially acceptable to kick him around,
enjoy watching him killed.
Can you say the word spaz?
How sensitive to people’s pain you think you’ve become,
those of you writing words out of our lexicon.

Wait a second,
will you throw me a line?
I’m writing the poetry of the world and nobody reads me,
and I am more outcast than Noah.
I sit in my house and write these poems to the world,
and all you read is the scarlet letter P,
and my poems do not get passed around.
I’m just a dirty creature with fangs.

Come out, come out, wherever you are
the woke person truly there.
Feel my pain.
My whole family’s disowned me,
those blood ties you celebrate so much.
It’s not a real joint.
I’m not even allowed to be alive
if you study the fine print in the news.

Now let’s talk about miracles.
I’m not a monster you know.
I’m so bright and shiny it’s not even funny,
and here I am talking to you.
Where is the thought police?
Why hasn’t cancel culture canceled me?
Years I’ve been on the road
a social media page.
Come on let’s get real.
I show you what woke really means, don’t I?

And I’m not talkin’ about racial politics,
sexual identities,
and all that jazz.
Do you see reality or the agenda you wear?
Do you even remember your dreams?
I’m a laughing stock.
I’ve seen reality outside of the cave,
and I know more than shadows
along the wall.

I’ll tell yah about a story
about yourself.
Football yourself,
Mr. Davis,
all in love with divinity. [heard sung]
Television ran out.
A hillbilly question:
is God really the nature of the universe?
Taste the Sugar.
You want it now.
You are the Sugar you see.

Mode of vehicle does not determine birth.
Identity politics,
where is this vision free?
What’s your contribution?
Is it for the whole race?
You have marginalized me to the nth degree,
and I sing your song.
I am all about your meaning.

I have a question.
What do they call
a bit more
than the alphabet among us?
Poetry it’s been explained to you changes the world
or at least has impact.
When they’re not supposed to be there,
we’ve become so blind,
poems come to open our inner sense,
and now you’re reading mine.
Will you allow me in my meditative friend?

Sri Aurobindo Birth Cemetery

from Twitter

A poem by Donny Lee Duke

Tear the whole thing apart.
I’ve been writing all of my life,
over a lifetime’s hole,
the orange and white.
I shake my hips and sing.
Some call me indecent.

Do penises shame?
Do they dance and sing?
It's so down to earth your control program:
nice and cool
leave the boy alone.
We can get over matter.
The most gorgeous boy in the world’s layin’ beside me,
and I’m writing a poem.

Now where do we do business?
That goes there. [vision of a TV screen in snow static]
Walkin’ to Sri Aurobindo’s birth anniversary.
I live it down.
All this interest he’s generated is not sincere.
I don’t know how to tell you this:
he’s clickbait.

Grab his pants will yah?
I’m awfully strong.
I feature in lit fests,
in everybody’s alter ego.
I liberated India
and will the superman bring.
I am bigger than the world,
but I’m only in Indian subcultures:
tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet.
We put the energy abounds,
the mesmerizing of a name.

Okay take him apart.
Where would we put him?
I don’t think we can find him
in his early quotations.
Do you know the fullness of his thought?
He wasn’t a barnstormer.
He wasn’t even a nationalist in the end,
where so many put him.
He got bigger than stars.
Would we say Supermind is an Indian thing?
He’s callin’ the shots
for the whole damn race to change.

So pigeonhole him
the nationalistic spirit.
Be a lie unto yourself
because you vote for Trump.
I’m sorry, I’m crossin’ lines.
Can we say Trump’s Modi?
They’re not identical twins.
It’s a time spirit phenomenon
all wrapped up nice and pretty.
Nations are heaving with nationalism.
Hear India?

I don’t know which one there is victory or defeat.
I’m not a time spirit reckoning.
I just came to say Sri Aurobindo
is not a nationalistic voice.
He saw Supermind on earth,
and that was his evolutionary aim,
and that’s what he showed us
much better than we think we saw.
You’re all wrapped up in particulars.
Let’s look at the Sun, shall we?

I think he built a bridge
from here to there,
there beyond this field of stars.
It’s bigger than the universe,
even if you don’t understand it.
I’ve studied there
in one great big moment of my life,
the only way you can see there:
be there.
I’ve offended everybody I know.
It’s not that you believe me;
read me
and tell me I only know here.

Now can we get past a name?
They trip us up every time.
Okay put a pedophile in Supermind1
for one sudden moment in life,
and we’ve found a way out of name.
You got it.

________________________________________________________________

  1. For a description of the experience click here.

Love Is

photo by Nitish

A poem by Donny Lee Duke

A spread of humanity
in Indian business,
that’s the way.
Everbody’s calling cards,
their race card,
caste or religion.
I’m tellin’ yah the direction is up.
We’ve been clannish too long.
Hear what I’m sayin’?

What would govern us?
Some say love it is a fountain. [heard sung]
I can only quote love,
give it divine wings.
It’s the psychic fire in us
recognizing the unity all is,
and with this soul lamp
we will argue in favor of God.

It’s not the God of Hindus,
however many you may count.
It’s the Supreme in each of us
bearin’ out Its world.
I can light the fire
in my own soul’s keeping,
in the middle of my own life,
to bring God closer to me
when I see your face,
in any face I see.

This is not popular.
It’s not the rule of the crowd.
It’s God on earth my friend
manifesting His reality among us.
We need to get over the divisions among us
in our heart’s call to the world.

Can you see this in India
and still love India,
and still be a Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh?
Does God count rainbows?
Each one is His smile upon the world.
Tell everyone
God’s on earth you see.
That’s the epiphany.

I was born yesterday,
and I’m pushin’ the envelope now,
a foreigner
just blinding speaking his piece,
a foreigner causin’ trouble;
would you handcuff me this way?

Let me make myself clear:
God I love you,
I’ll put it on the freeway
and drive that idea across country—
and keep your eyes on the roadway at all times.