Posts Tagged Meditation
On Tuesday, Meditation Did Big Things to Me
Some days, I’m
healed, craving deep,
frozen time,
holding this
now, wishing for old friends, but
they’re gone, so I sit.
.
The Unshakable Infantile Spirit, Part III
I’m good with being a baby
now, at the core.
I confess.
People don’t believe me.
They reject baby me with nervous
laughs.
They can’t see the core.
Today, meditation made me
okay.
Good baby, peaceful baby.
I could feel silky sands
of heaven fill my lungs.
I felt big life gifts from dogs
who settled in stillness
with me, who listened
to my silence, who
congratulated me on my
growth, who
loved me
with me.
.
Revolutions – This Isn’t a Poem, but I Don’t Write Fucking Essays
Posted by Carl in Essays, Finding Purpose, Poems on March 18, 2013
Here today, things started to change dramatically.
Do you know, when I just said that, I knew it was false,
but it’s hope, so fuck ’em. So for a few minutes, I thought,
I might be a writer. To me, that meant I might be a decent
human being. I have this blind sense that humans need to
have a central purpose, a reason for going on despite all
the facts that seem to recommend action to the contrary, but
it is blind because I don’t know other humans well enough
to know that they need a purpose. In fact, often, I wonder
how these integrated, bloated masses of people get along
without purpose because they simply trudge through, yes,
contented, but vacuous, contented with eating three meals,
with chips and snacks and pops, and weekend trips to the
lake ( THE fucking lake), and working on these schedules
that are preposterous, barely having time to hug the dog,
rarely awaking without an alarm designed to send humans
into blind destitute, where they don’t know how empty all of the
facades are, and I sit here, wanting to spit on my new pants,
wanting to throw the cafeteria tray across the room, blowing
out the perfectly-clean window which teases me with a Zen
garden that is never used for true purpose, not for lack of need,
but because the minds are entrapped in this buzzing hum
of doing what responsible adults and other gurus have told us
we are meant to do, despite our god-given sense that we waste
this gift of life every day, each day with these millions of
moments that spin down clockwise through snake-cleaned
drains made of the detritus of all of the gold we mined in the
good days when living in a tent and eating smoked rabbit
was a good thing. Here I am praying for a revolution that will
turn me into a writer and allow me to live out my days,
comfortable in some sense of purpose, praying that there
are people who might read and might be changed in the
slightest, because if I can touch a few people with writing and
eat a bit of rabbit, what would be wrong with me, but I’m scared
in the end, remembering those nightmares of walking out of
my tent and hanging myself with heavy rope on the sturdy,
horizontal limb of the old oak tree, ending what seems to be a
useless quest, a useless longing to rid myself of this vast,
empty purposelessness. And here I am wondering what kind
of stupid fuck would write about writing, and I stop. I’m due
back in my cubicle.
.
Right-Sizing Traps
I immerse a gray, nearly-dead mind
in a spiritual reading, searching for,
longing to create a space of goodness
in my soul, which itself seems to drip
a blue fungal trail, spitting like a baby’s
room which had been prepared too
carefully, and I learn that we inevitably
view ourselves as far bigger beings
than we are, more important, even
more critical, but mostly bigger. And
how could we step aside and see our
part in the universe? So this grows
badly as I think of the genius writing
from the science guy who writes beautiful
fiction – he tells me that he wants
to feel more important than that part
that is a millionth of man’s concept
of the tiddly building block, the atom.
I make three steps in my hallway,
feeling my flesh disappear, my bones
are the tooth picks of an empty,
meaningless being who is so tiny,
his brain and his vocal chords
should be eradicated forever.
.
Demanding Music
Demanding music
is my fuel.
Right now.
Look at the orange
bag, the dirty beard,
the cigarette disintegrating
the human,
the white shirt
with loud
wrinkles, blocked by the angry
truck. Listen
to that
beat.
Drive me to the end
of a scummy
day. Be mean, but hide me
from the mean, hide
me in the closets
of office death.
Crunch me.
Hammer me with that strange
beat,
“Back with another one of those
block rocking
beats.” Steal me
from my insanity and dump
me in the gutters
of leftover humanity swimming
for the meat,
for the currency.
Spear me
with the orange cones.
Tear out
my heart and liver.
Blow my brain into the guts
of the amplifier, seal me
for another era.
Demanding music
is saving me
again.
.
The Red Pants Tightened My Heart
There was a lady
with immaculate black
ponytail. I eagerly looked
but not one hair was
disarranged. And not
simply the ponytail. It was
this soft, slick, shiny, furry,
perfect, oval jewel on her
pate. Society would dub
me creepo if I had chased
her, but her red pants
fit too perfectly and her spicy
white blouse exploded
roars of light too good
for this rotten neighborhood,
so I wanted to tag after
and listen to her tell me
about all of the good things
that have happened to her,
listen with glowing eyes
to her indefatigable beauty,
but I am no creepo, so here
I sit, dead and dumb.
.
Willingness – Part VIII
The heavy, wet, navy blanket
was tilting my skull, left and right,
but not back, and sometimes
forward into a bowl, a chintzy
cereal, bluffed with crunched
sugar, smearing my eyes, my
coffee slathering all over my
shoes and my favorite paintings,
but the door was too close, my
hand working, my body flowing
like stale varnish in the basement,
my legs, two steps, and movement,
then the cement moving by, grinding
ankles and knees, these brain waves
crushing the pain and huge storms
of blood stirring my brain cells,
while the birds with perfect sixes
(torched pink by my favorite threes)
followed by eights in a blossoming
light telling me that air was
arriving slowly and today, yes
today I don’t want to leave
this world, as something has
taken my blanket and left it in the
ash can and the birds stretch
me into a terse example of reformed
ugliness, lightness of being.
.
On a Day When My Dismal Spirit Falls Behind
Even light and heat flow gently
when my bones are not finding resistance,
as the dogs clue me in on priorities,
showing me how to fight for a niceness
of spirit, and I want the thrill of this journey
to charge electrical circuits, to drive
my spitfire, to stifle the kind of darkness
which strives to suffocate me. As I
feel so clever for doing what the people
tell me to do, allowing the humid moss
to gather atop my skull, making me feel older
and exponentially worthless, but my steps
continue to follow one another, and the shit
gathers in between the fingers as the trees
continue to impress despite the counter-intuitive
movement of old and known trees making
a good world for me, the dogs knowing my fear
and trudging along without inclination of stopping
because they know we are close to home,
and they know that it is always possible that
something good could happen when we arrive home.
.
On A Day When People Blur By Without Me
I say ghosts, but the spectators parade by
in quick and evil flourishes and flashes with
primary colors and terse hearts, perhaps haters,
but the term rips at my soul because there
are not any haters. No, there are only those
who are not comfortable in their fur, in their slinky
waistcoats, but it says so much about me that
I worry later about what they think when I know not
who they are, and I’ve noticed that some days
I am in full command, a confidence dances around
on top of my head as if I have a beautiful hat with
feathers which bend with my heart as it heats
up with the tar on Main Street, and then there
are the other days, like today, when the ghosts
float by too quickly for me to be greeted or to
greet and my heart flutters with a mind that
cannot sit on anything but fills with tears and
terrible wounds that float with a liquidy aplomb
like tomato soup.
.
A Little Essay While Running Away From The Trashed Psyche
Posted by Carl in Essays, Finding Purpose, Poems on July 9, 2012
I don’t suffer from the brilliant people’s writer’s block.
I get these swarms of self-hatred that swamp me and create an inactive Tonka toy, ready to rust and to be kicked.
Kicked so there are dents that won’t be repaired ever and whose cracks will submit themselves to the onslaught of rust fueled by the beads of moisture tickling up from the Jersey Street sandbox that never had the privilege of sun.
The loneliness in the dirty sand.
Writing is my therapy, but fear dunks my horrible lungs – What a silly fool.
A toad who can’t stand water.
I’d laugh, but I’m sick of being sick.
Exercise is therapy also, but do I use it?
I know myself as a bucket of shit, pardon the phrase.
Meditation, yes, you have it – therapeutic, but the good people, the beautiful people, the loving people suggest 20 minutes, and my storms conquer me and my mind will not crawl in the cotton for longer than three and a half minutes, five when stretched to my maximum after a long, tortuous day, spent as a salmon in a brown pond with no outlets.
Today at lunch, I saw three people in a continuous slideshow of three side by side by side events.
For a flash, I think I can write, but it lasts only seconds.
At the end of my drinking career, I hated being drunk for almost every moment of the ten to twelve hours per night, Every Night, but there were still those few seconds of each night that crawled gently around my collar and that felt okay like a smooth hug from someone who can save you, that felt like a solution to all of my problems.
I perpetuated the myth of solution into dark ages because I hated being sober so very strongly.
Now, I like my sobriety, but the solution is spoiled milk and miles away on a dry highway below sea level, and I can’t write a silly, shitty little poem about three humans who arrived in three sudden scenes, like flashes from god.
A gift smashes my brain with light and I can’t speak.
For a moment, I knew I could scream the loudest beauty at the walls of the world, but my brain locks as a broken chain on a bicycle and it hates me.
Yes, writing is therapeutic, so I did this little essay. I share it with you because I must let it go.
Tomorrow, I will write a poem.
It will be brilliant
and I won’t
throw it away
because right
when it is complete,
I’ll shut off my brain,
and I’ll sit still,
trying not to worry about how
I seem to be a black hole
in this lifetime, hanging
on those thin threads
that won’t leave
the new pants
I had worn into
the battles
of the Monday workplace.
stillfugue 