*
*
*
I have often meditated, thought/felt about unnecessary
suffering, all the tragic, miserable suffering based on
misunderstandings, or on situations which further down
the timeline no longer exist.
Diseases for which cures have been found, injuries in
wars that never needed to be fought, mistaken enmity,
all the gays and witches stoned and burned, all the
mentally ill subjected to horrendous “treatments,”
all the twisted secrets that never needed to be kept
keeping people entrapped in violent abuse.
In the way of meditation, I am drawn to thought about
Christian mystics.
Many were highly intelligent women who would never
have been taken seriously as everyday wives, but
cloistered from early ages, encouraged to give their minds
and souls and bodies to Christ, their writings preserved
show their grappling as mystic philosopher seekers, trying
to make sense of the suffering and brutality all around
and within them. Christ is love.  God is good and merciful.
If we suffer, it must be to bring us closer to our blessed
saviour.
Suffering (Piscean empathy) not so much about healing
as opening up to the holy well of pain we as mortals must
experience to learn true compassion, to take our share of
that pain from the shoulders of Christ, and by the grace
of our ecstatic burdens enter the realm of the holy,
the loving spirit.
*
But there is another way along this route, where the
suffering is about healing, is about transcendence and
transformation, alchemical catalyzation.
If I can enter the pain and find my way within it, learn its
language, learn to speak with it, understand it to the point
of being of it, work with it artistically and in a comradely spirit,
learn its secrets and its fears and its beauty, I can learn to
transform the pain within me, and find avenues to send that
transforming out into the world of suffering, into the pervasive
pain and misery of those who are caught up in traumas and
dramas and debilitation.
Though gospel says Christ died for our sins and transubstantiates
to lead us into the kingdom of heaven, perhaps the mystical way
can lead us to live through the pain and into that untimebound plane
where the pain has evolved into awestruck beauty that doesn’t hurt
at all, a way of ecstatic celebration in mutual love, support, opening
into pleasure and health, release into another kind of consciousness.
Or maybe we should just shut up and take our prescribed medications.
*
*
*
 
Healing
*
*
Pedestals in intricate geometric arrangement
Empty
since the sculptured gods have run off
seeking glories and adventures
in less structured realms.
Petitioners never notice,
leaving putrid mewling remains,
sacred sacrifice,
rotting stench to keep the altars
holy.
Out on the playfields,
breathing in hearty exercise,
laughter expanding lung strength,
crying leaving damp rich soil,
incremental mineral deposits
essential to health.
 
*
*
 
*
Close to the Edge
*
*
Close to the edge, so close.
The music’s playing old familiar memories.
It’s a grey day, fog of Pisces,
a year of fear and hopeful reawakening —
is there hope of resurrection?
in these grim, grim times?
But so grim?
A time to newly discover
strength within;
to again see life as a discovery 
    — can it be done?
On a day so grey, in a year so fraught with peril
    and misadventure?
Slowly, one at a time:  take things one at a time,
and they seem so small and easy.
Why hold expectations that lead to dismay,
hiding from fantasy?
Breathe, meditate.
Build dream towers to climb to,
not nightmares.
But it seems so safe and easy to hide
in the darkness,
to never utter another “I”
to cease.
Why not?
Close to the edge, so close.
The fool looks over his shoulder.
The wise goat climbs with care.
The lonely may jump in despair.
How to be alone and strong?
Ask the high priestess —
All is within/without you.
But to find that smile of understanding?
It is a search worth taking.
Slow, easy, breathe.
*
*
 
*
February snows through conflated years.
Fear was my ally, hailing me on, hugging
with glorious laughter, carrying unsure steps through
onerous trails. And those ebullient ecstasies of survival.
Drunk on the gold that surpasseth science or light.
Touch the cold sting, letting the song sing through me.
Do you?
Feel the music?  Abandon your amygdala to dance free
awhirl in a swirl of laughing snow?
In dreams, inchoate, unremembered, do we play in those
moments of bliss to keep us balanced, to give courage in a life
less lived, less honored?
*
Old, glazed-over eyes seek momentary solace, look long,
longingly, into a silly mist of snow beyond windows closed
securely against the cold.   Dream world revealed,
in the interplay of eyes and mind.
*
February snowflakes
Flitter Flutter
Feathery powder
Melt into my mind.
 
*
*
*
 
zoom back into throng
the very pain of life a Holiday song
metaliminal passion play in several actions
foggy notions, robes of myst
limbic video bliss
let loose into this foggy dawn:
colours, still subtle, arranging,
catch cold liquid, dissolve in
undulating air —
tell a story.
*
*
 
A new day dawns cloudy and forbidding.
We are entering San Francisco in the morning fog,
early, early, the world still dreaming.
Or maybe it was Cambridge, Mass.,
lost in the fog, unsure of time or space.
Sometimes there is singing:
something about a “Yellow Submarine” or “Strawberry Fields”
or sometimes haunting melodies without words.
But it’s all about the words, even those implied by the music.
Wine can help.
By the gods, wine is sometimes all that can help
(tho sometimes even wine betrays me).
The stinking debris of mornings after the night before,
or just morning by the coast with the stink of rotting fish,
the cries of gulls or sirens, the emptiness without tears, the cold of morning
— I remember that too.
That no more mornings could touch me,
that I could hide contented in the night dreaming
flying dreams so none could touch me.
Fragments. Taking life in fragments. Folding each shiny fragment
into tender velvet pockets sequined to reflect the light,
let them be all right, feel cared for.
Let the nights protect us from the days.
Like a wandering hermit with a self-igniting lantern . . . .
 
*
*
 
*
 
 
Here, in a world of fog and fury,
blurred in twilight vengeance,
crows, ravens, portents of
dark flight circle above.
A crown of shrieks, feathers
cascade, rain like pestilence.
No blame in blindness.
“I could not see through feathered fog;
could not save you.”
 
*
 
Collar up against the wind and dark.
Rising smoke creates warmth illusion.
Wrapped in sanity’s delusion,
fog’s memory of mist, imagined tide.
Seated here, salt-etched wall
alone between vast sand and
murmuring waves.
No one sings.
The notes, the voices
appear
*
 
Singers in the fog.
Outlying voices thin, yet growing;
accruing sound, like liquid, flowing.
Emoting tales of woe, resistance.
Shouted sighs of denied existence.
Insightful chants insist persistence.
We never died.  We’re knitting strong.
Born into a world-wide village.
Only from ourselves to pillage.
Hear our song.
Some bright good morning of
fish and loaves, cake and wine,
capacious tribes adjoin in movement.
Shining line of peace.
*
*
*
 
Cloud imagery morphs, calls forth
enchantment effused through morning firmament.
Pulls memories, wishes, muses’
wordless cinema
enhanced by rhythmic score.
Loosed within foggy aurora,
birdsong. Voices conflate
sums of experience.
Mauves, shades of color still subtle
coalesce;
mist rainbow
undulates.  Moist air
shares, surrenders whispered tales.
*
Prismatic atmosphere,
diffracted light.
Layered clouds, sustain
perfect
inspiration.
Ecstasy dissolves the lock
dividing everyday from magic.
*
*
 
*
World-eating fog encroaches.
No capacity to breathe in this miasma.
Rotting from lung to core,
gasping for something clean
to inhale, to cure.
*
Release.
Ooze gently
into nothingness.
No trace of panic
around which to coalesce
fear, malice.
Let turmoil bleed off,
dissipate as airless mist.
 
*
*
Creature, being, created from singular experience
cocooned in dreaming.
Sitting, silent, still, watching artfilm of revealed
truth waft, oracular smoke. Mesmerized by beauty,
this deep-blue pond contained
in floating ice offset in fog-faded mountain promise.
Those dreams, those dreams, to live only there,
where it all makes nonsense that feels so inevitable.
Stories unencumbered by beginnings, logical progression,
by boundaries, yet pure and strong as sacred text.
 
*
*