29 July Year of our Zord 2010

Sitting on San Pablo outside Casa Latina
Reading "The Shape of Suffering" by Thanissaro Bhikkhu (Geoffrey DeGraff)
Slowing the mind down
With the music filling my ears
Inside my skull processor
Through little plastic ear phones
Everything is moving and everything is still
It's all happening and nothing is happening
Suddenly there is a bottle of wine and a little bag of weed at my house
Not in my body
But right there waiting
Cocaine in Chico
Time to move to another house
Thinking with ignorance
Craving arising

I mainly relate to crazy people
The true bums
These are my people
Like nameless man
But my pockets are bulging with money and possessions and they have nothing
This illusion looks a lot different for them
And it's all perspective
They are the Jesuses
They are the Buddhas
These people
The poor we have a war on
They are the Masters
Not the Dalai Llama flying around in first class

The clouds are parting
Pushed quickly East by the wind
And the sun is behind them
And the clouds are running East
Across blue sky
Above a dilapidated Svennson Volvo specialist shop
With a girl walking by toward Siva Devananda Yoga hidden on Delaware
And a little old black man riding by on his red scooter in front of scaffolding
In the midst of Pattica Samuppada, dependent co-arising
In the midst of Nothing
In the midst of Void
Somewhere in the midst of the Big Bang
Here we are
Riding the Ether

A Tea Party

Hey crazy heads! You see this picture? Tea party? What this picture proves is what a free ass country we live in, and how completely different the two men on the sides are from the man in the middle. Now I'm not saying Barack Obama is some kindof saint. He is not. He is at the helm of a dangerous government, engaged in two unjust wars in the middle east, where we are bombing human beings with unmanned drones and claiming some sort of legitimacy. Our own citizens are preyed upon by private corporations which enjoy the rights of individuals. These corporations have the protected right to brain wash the population in a rabid consumption driven ideology. No, Obama is no saint. But if we were living in a state half as psychotic and sick as either Soviet Russia under Lenin after the Red Terror began, or Germany under Hitler, that sign would not only be quickly taken down, but the people responsible for making it would be arrested and quickly put to death. Instead, in this waste of freedom called America, the sign will be put on the news, and probably a good half of the media will applaud the sentiment of the Tea Party movement. Live Free or Die! Hah. This is some weird ass freedom my friends. This is a fallacy of freedom. You are free to obey the laws of the State of America, you are free to do as you are told, you are free to be a competitive individualistic automaton. You are free to reap the benefits of the oppression and poverty that people in the third world endure so that we can walk into a coffee shop and pay three dollars for a coffee, where somebody only made three dollars working all day to grow it. We are damn lucky to be free to drink the American cool aid, and we are damn lucky to be free enough to talk about how free or not free we are. Obama is no Hitler or Stalin, if he was, you can bet that the sign would never have been put up. All those people carrying signs or wearing shirts with that Obama Joker face would just disappear, never to be seen again. Bye bye. If the tea party thinks Obama is a Hitler or Stalin, they should prepare themselves for the Gas Chamber, the Gulag, or the firing range, but instead Obama is trying to give them health care. What kind of tea are these people drinking?

Smells like it sounds

Are you insane Kemo Sabe? Does the pope eat chicken wings? How pure and true and lovely are the intentions of Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck? I can’t answer any of these questions. I’m still knee deep in sludge and we’re two years from the apocalypse, although I’m not convinced that the calendar isn’t off and 2012 actually happened in 1945, and the four horsemen actually rode into Hiroshima and Nagasaki snuggled up in twos on atomic bombs like bats swooping down from Hell. Well I’d like to think that was a bad enough horror show. Everyone needs an optimist once in awhile. Hi.

So what is the clawmeister up to? Well, I have ceased all ingestion of placebos, greens, blues, whites, liquids, etc. etc. The lamotrigine is all dried up in my shriveling brain stem and the nothing is crawling all over me like a thick damp blanket of sand. This haw. I could consume it with melancholy rage. When was the festival? Witnessing our foolishness head on and unmedicated is like sticking my face on a treadmill made of asphalt and napalm. Wee. This is so much fun. Reality. Eat a dead rat and suck a claw horn saith the swine herd.

Motivation? What’s the point? Why am I doing this? Why am I playing the fool? What am I doing trying to save the world and battling seminary? Why am I not just getting an MBA and trying to siphon the last bit of life off the planet and the rest of our souls like a normal person, a nice, well trained, little humanoid coddling the balls of the Master dollar and drinking my individualism cocktail through my me mouth thinking this is it? (as if my me mouth isn't individualistic enough, which it certainly is... as I worry about hair loss.) Why do I worship the nothing? There is no I; see? Just this felch experiencing this, trying to keep his mouth shut between the blinks of birth and death. Poof. I’m gone. I was never even here. I wouldn’t even know if I’d been here the whole time. Just like you, and you and you and you and you and the rest of us experiencing I AM. What? Nothing.

These are all just letters. Words on a page. Or a digital page now. These are all just ideas. None of this even exists. It’s all upside down and inside out and symbols for a thing that can’t be understood. It’s right here. In between the symbols. See the empty space, inside the empty space, between the spaces between the shapes. Ain’t no time like now. This is the end times as soon as we start the beginning.

Aug. 5 2002

I’ve seen these things before.
The war, the discothèques, the Jews and the Indians.
I’ve seen before me on the giant screen, the sickest prejudice of all.
So I put on my hat.
But I threw away the poems, forgot the dreams.
Awake.
Without cool moon pools twinkling along the earth plain.
I’ve forgotten them all, and in turn they’ve disappeared.
I put on my hat.
Innocence, pure paradise.
What prejudice could be the worst?
So much worse than human killing human in the middle east?
Worse than the murder, rape and kidnapping of Africa?
The worst prejudice is that which prevents the answer from landing on our doorstep.
What if there is no enemy?
I put on my hat.

Late summer or fall 2002

Teardrops
Soul crackers
Crumbling brick chimneys
The silence

I saw the inside of a microwave
Through a tinted windowpane
Folded bath towel on the kitchen counter
Huge rocks hurled through my windshield
Someone stole my skychair
And the world is ending

2012 right around the corner
Hold on to me
There is nowhere to go
Hold each other on this spaceship

I shimmied along the ground like a drugged lizard
Hidden behind a two foot wall of cement
I flat crawled along the ground
A speeding maniac
Pursued by an unknown monster
2012 coming round the corner
Comfortable in the shadows of the darkness in which we live
Behind the wall light is moving closer
I am the reptile running along the ground
Hiding from the light
Ever stronger behind the barrier
The hesitation
Murder, ceaseless slaughter, rape, sickness, storms, fire, conflict, anger, hatred, envy, Business

2012 coming round the corner
Better watch out
Slipping filler whiskers
Busy talk, busy time, world on the move
Problem time
The treadmill of busyness
Keep it moving on the track
Terrorism
You know
We better bomb Iraq

Evening drive to Oakland and the City

Some sunsets from Hawaii.