Sixty Minutes

Sixty Minutes
Saved the Mt Athos ossuary
For the end of their segment
Behind the monastery
A mound of whitewashed skulls
Still chanting

zen reversal

Zen represents a reversal of common wisdom:

Instead of the moment serving one's agenda,
One's agenda is made to serve The Moment

Nature or Not?

Are we mistaken
To hold up in our minds
A paradigm of non-human Nature,
As pure, undefiled, whole?
Is this something true, useful, compelling,
Or some kind of aesthetic mythology?
I mean,
As many have asked,
So many species inhabit this planet,
And is not the human race one more?
Because whatever you can say about cultivation,
Manipulation,
Opposing thumb,
Domesticity may well fall
Into a larger category of FERAL

sky

If imagery is everything
what compares
to that loose wedge of snowgeese
moving north over Grass Valley
giving the cloud-dappled April sky
enormous dimensions

what time is it?

Look closely-
Has this moment
Any extension in it?
Then it's the same moment
It's always been-
The eternal Now

First Light

Seldom enters the eye
  into the dream-pavilions
    of Aurora,    sweet dawn
      deftly shedding her satin
        night-robes

downtown

hands full of zinnias
she pushes the CrossWalk button
with her elbow

-grass valley

POV

He gets on his high horse
He tilts at windmills of every stripe
Minus sceptre & robe
He pontificates to anyone who'll listen,
He takes no prisoners-
Who is this rathskallion
Clubbing you with his position?
Some self-righteous fool
On his street soapbox?
No- that someone is me

GroupThink explored

Q. People share many positions, at any time many may be thinking the same thought, having the same POV... so what's wrong with "groupthink?"

A.  Well I'm glad you raise that point because what I'm referring to is what you might call "marching orders" to advance, invoke, or preserve a given position... What I call "groupthink" is not about sharing a certain point of view, it's about promoting it in a self-rigteous way- the flip side, the dark side, is make anyone who does NOT share that view "lost," "fallen," misguided or in some way wrong. The dark side of this is that others, just because they don't march to the same music, are rendered second-class citizens or marginalized in some way. "Orthodoxy" comes into play, and people are measured according to how they line up- or don't.
Human beings are social animals, and our queus are many- all you have to do is go downtown and see all the pants hanging around the knees of teenagers to realize what lengths people go to be "cool." I'm not angry or bitter, I'm amused actually, but when you look back over human history and see the vast mayhem that's been visited on "outgroups"- that's when this aspect of human psychology gets to be downright frightening .

Chester Street Roof Repairs

Little did I know!    when yesterday
I stacked the two-by-eights & corrugated sheetmetal
that my errand to repair her leaking roof
would carry me up shaky ladders
into a windy blue domain
where hour by hour      things changed,
close clouds caught the light
a hundred ways
rowdy ravens gave me their greeting
morning air pulsed
& squirrels scolded from blustery cedars,
Little did I know!
what fortune would I find
spending an entire day rubbing elbows
with eaves gables chimneys & gutters
low-slung cumuli entered my eye
and at dusk    full moons!
waxing huge over the purple sage Sierra

quoting Shakespeare

The other day an erudite friend of mine was asked, in the course of conversation, to give us his favorite Shakespeare quote-
"OK," he responded, "“To thine own self be true,  and as it follows, as the night does the day, that thou canst not then be false to any man..."
We thought that was too well-known, so, annoyed, he offered us this:  "Exit, Stage Right, pursued by a bear..." 

-michael moerman

DH Lawrence

"...in everything, the shimmer of creation, and never the finality of the created."

field trip

in a circle
around the Park Ranger
kids pass a bear skull

-Alleghany

zen

...it is mystical in the sense that the sun shines, that the flower blooms, that I hear at this moment somebody beating a drum in the street.  If these are mystical facts, Zen is brim full of them.

-DT Suzuki

Lake Vera

in the saucepan
   catching rainleaks
      a cricket has drowned

impressed

Of the many fine appointments
In their lakeside getaway-

The Bavarian crystal,
The brass scrimshaw chandalay-

Most precious to me's
Left in the rain:

The white humpback vertebrae

burroughs, anyone?

William Burroughs got a Pulitzer Prize for literature when he took newpaper clippings and cut them into strips and rearranged the words. who knew genius.

river walk

between sets
the trumpet mariachi
talks on his cell

-san antonio

late

missed my one o'clock--
somehow got my tick
confused with tock

newspapers

Why subsist
On the bottomless basket of rotten fruit

When it can only lead
To disillusion & dismay?

This is NOT a rhetorical question.

The poet offers this:
Identify the sources of exaltation & Joy,

Make your life
The edification of them--

And from there let the world know
What's p-o-s-s-i-b-l-e

Shangri-La

is toweling down
after a brisk swim
in Bally's blue cove

-coupla shots of Bushmill's in you-

sun dazzling off the rim
spokes of cirrus
radiate overhead

and in the lemon trees
a warm Texas breeze