Effortlessly realizing that nothing good comes for free

Peeling back the silky mandala one gauzy layer at a time

Gazing back out through its crystalline structure from a central void

Then suddenly and necessarily, without any conscious effort

It is that first real time up, riding on that old bicycle

Always in that process of learning something new

not merely chattering to simply hide good silence

Taking pride and pleasure in the basics of life

Feeling the native wisdom of hot sweat and hard breathing

Studying deeply as well as reading widely

getting up before the sun

Knowing how to do things with the use of your own hands

Cooking food yourselves and sharing it at home

Watching the cycles of the moon, the sun and the seasons of the earth

Remaining simply aware of the subtle sounds of nature

Finding use for anger but not living driven blindly by rage

Sharing as much love in any way as often as you can

Traveling far but not forsaking the good home that you have made

Always being sure that you can still read and write

Respecting the old, repairing the broken, knowing the history

relaxing your entire body one part at a time

Understanding that you can’t be any happier than the saddest you have ever been

Making every single day a good day to die

Being honest and avoiding salesmanship

Knowing yourself and listening to others

Not letting their noise and confusion mask the vast emptiness

Seeking out the quiet places and letting them fill you up

Adjusting constantly and unconsciously to the eye of the storm

Effortlessly realizing that nothing good comes for free

Once I Could Make Sense

As I lay before you here - gray, thin, bedraggled, sick and weak - Hang on for just a moment!

Just as now I am pausing in my vigorous, full-color life, equally as vibrant as yours is to you

Just as the long-dead doctor who spanked me into life so far in my past was, way back then

Do you try to imagine as he did then, and I did later, that you are me and I am you?

I was a boy who was glad not to have been created as an adult and especially not an old man

This useless and wornout husk you see now, did once actually quiver and overflow with life

Slowly, so slowly, despite all my best efforts and intentions, it must have all come to this

I lay gurgling, learned to crawl, walked, ran, walked again, sat down and now lay here, still

I apologize in advance and thank you so much from the real part of a life to your busy future

I likely don’t have a lot to say right now, but know that once even I could make a little sense

This shrunken and dried chrysalis, from which I am about to emerge, actually served me well

These bent and twisted fingers that can now barely even feed me, could make a daily music

I know not if memories of any of this will remain across the years, to my shrunken perspective

But once a light burned so furious and bright it often brought joyful tears to my eyes

I sat with my elders and later, my loved ones closer than you sit to me now and pondered

Are my eyes empty and blank, drugged or filled with pain, with no trace of this life now?

Once my faculties were sharp and my reflexes quick and I took the measure of this world

Its hard now to believe that I will strive merely not to soil my sheets and can barely sit up to eat

Yes, I knew the impossibility of imagining the weak and withered as the young and strong

But, I swear to you that my own life was no faded photograph, incomparable to your present

The meaning of my time may well be invisible to you and forgotten by me…but here it is real

I may have forgotten running miles, skiing steep slopes and swimming those huge blue swells

So, go ahead and make your pronouncements but simply remember that I made them, too

For all that remains to me is all that will remain to you, far sooner than you can prepare for

Just one snowflake swirling

Just one snowflake swirling during the height of the mighty storm

A single quark in an atom of a protein molecule on one cell in my brain

A single note in the chorus of the marsh as the sun grows warm again

Just one voice among the billions either dead, alive or as yet unborn

Just one moment, quite important, except light years away in any direction

The only tree in miles of forest where lightning chose to strike

Just one small planet of an average yellow star midway out in a common spiral galaxy

One billion years of geological change witnessed by absolutely nothing

Colorful patterns emitting subconscious messages from the wing of a butterfly

Just one boy notices for the briefest moment as she alights just one time

Just a ripple of the many on a single lake when the breeze comes up one day

One mossy, glacially-striated granite boulder in that vast northern woods

An eye falls upon a single pebble among hundreds of thousands strewn about

Just one neuron fires in the hiker and no conscious thought emerges

Just one photon emitted long ago speeds past a blue-green cloud-rippled paradise

A billion cries for food and shelter turn into white background noise

Water dripping from the glacier has not yet become the river we will experience

Just one small flame from the roaring bonfire rends a single word of my book

Just one dream may fuel a people’s imagination for entire generations

A single skeleton encased in stone gives rise to a moment’s pause

Just one instant in the implacable present, so quickly gone despite my many efforts

Narrow beam of reason disappears in a fog of ignorance and superstition

The pallid sun of December briefly lights the room and then the long night falls

Just one more acre cleared will help to feed us and cannot do much harm

Just one life condemned to ignorance, hunger and filth cannot sway our faith

Just one salty teardrop falls drying in that hot, red desert sand

A single prayer cast outward into the twinkling black of the celestial firmament

Just one more futile gesture in a city fueled by desperate need

Just one more forgotten moment in a string of days from many years, now all long gone by

A single-celled creature living large in one drop of greenish pond water

The very first fat raindrop lost in the dust raised by its approaching storm

Just one life form based on carbon given over to a moment’s passion

Just one light ray refracted through one water molecule in a rainbow

The last waking thought in a meditation that morphs slowly into restful sleep

A single simple stone among all the rest in a long and winding gravel road

Just one shortest riff of the sound of a creek roaring in the Spring

Just one more filthy refugee trudging amid the sighing, shuffling pilgrims

The anonymous steer in the slaughter house with brown eyes so very full of soul

Simple problem that unravels systems far beyond its own importance

Just one second before the explosion and things remain quite ordinary

Just one more drink should solve the problems plaguing me like biting flies

A single golden leaf spins ground-ward on a still and sunny autumn day

A child alone whimpering in a cold building with shining antiseptic floors

Just one more winter comber slams itself upon the ancient rocky shore

Just one more bitter pill to swallow in a lifetime of mental self-medication

One and only one inattention brings on death in a quick, but casual, fashion

Just one happy smile can lift the gloom that settled in like some densest fog

The faintest chance of one small victory vies evenly with the certainty of death

A single light after miles of driving may seem either lonely or inviting

Just one brief thought spreading out from but a single soul among the billions

Just one day in an era of an epoch on a short-lived, but fortunate, planet

Just one more Monday arrives too quickly as yet another weekend fades away

Just one song in the misty pre-dawn stillness begins the entire avian chorus

In a single flash of insight an old problem is finally solved, for once and for all

Relative To One Another

I am slowing down as you are speeding up and we pass at an angle to time

They go up and we move down with the vast oceanic swells between us

Rotating slowly I see the beauty of the stars and galaxies all around us

Spinning too fast in my time I became disoriented and confused

I am folding up my ragged tent as you stake your newest claim

Her mother can no longer stand but your child has just learned to crawl

I am passing you as he is passing me and we cannot yet get out of their way

There is a new well in your village and we celebrate by our swimming pool

I read my book as you send one-fingered messages off somewhere into the ether

The snow that sent you off the road was welcomed by the farmers

We carved different ellipses around an invisible center of gravity

They waste more than they can ever use as we eke by on castoff remnants

I traveled quite slowly but was struck head-on by a speeding semi

When at last I returned it seemed nothing had changed but no one recognized me, either

The loss of the microscopic diatoms spelled disaster for the whales

Parts of seconds were to seconds as seconds were to the age of the universe

Her long lifetime could not be seen on the smallest of geologic time scales

All their simpering adulation could not push his boat across to heaven

We pass closely heading in different directions in all four known dimensions

Their silly propaganda changes timbre, Doppler shifting with the passing election

We observe a planet perturbing its sun as we are swarmed by microscopic mites

We attack our enemies while trillions of our cells hungrily struggle for their blood supply

Gentle winter sunlight shows the soft side of nuclear fusion on a truly massive scale

We destroy expensive, sophisticated satellites with simple high-speed brute force collisions

I am spinning slowly around in circles but you - You are really making a mark

A sun-glassed business woman phoning in a leased car distractedly strikes a fawn

I am sliding down the hill smiling, never to ascend again

He still climbs upward, his fatigue masked by the anticipation of the run

We both stand quite still as my train leaves you behind at the station

I briefly continue moving in small arcs after stepping off the merry-go-round

This seemingly small increase in temperature rippled through the biosphere

The insects hatched early, the chicks starved and the trees were decimated

My bobber went down just as you roared by shouting hoarsely from your speedboat

I sat down to be served as she struggled with the wood for their cooking fire

Our music and fireworks filled the air but not a sound went into space

I paused behind my muddy ox as your silvery jet gleamed far, far overhead

The difference in our ages would make a full lifetime for someone else

Our fossil bones would mix and date to plus or minus a thousand generations

The look in the eyes of the mutely destitute mother spoke too much to me

He thought disdainfully of all the little words he could ever hope to write

The poverty, filth, sickness, slave labor and lack of hope were as nothing -

Given the wondrous future paradise he learned of in the magnificence of the mosque

The clockwork universe was underpinned by the chaos of quantum uncertainty

Our most basic assumptions proved devastating to our ecological niche

I lay on my back with arms outspread in a field bright with spring flowers

20000 miles above, a geo-synchronous satellite moved right along with me

I breathed deeply as my beautiful vehicle turned oxygen into gases, poisonous to me

You survived by cutting firewood as your goats denuded the drying hillsides

He had his two sons and their daughter-in-laws, so he did not work any more

He strove hard to attain a corporate jet and to earn a 7 figure bonus every year

She remembered as a child that it snowed very heavily and it was always cold

Now, her obese youngsters went about smirkingly in baggy shorts and tees all year round

Each small change was imperceptible but the first and last photos were truly of different men

The runners showed amazing speed, but you casually drove by them so much faster

Dinosaurs dominated the earth for 160 million years but left here 65 million years ago

Our written history began about 5000 years ago with simple bookkeeping records

The sunlight that sustains me takes 8 minutes from its surface to my forehead

Four and a half years later, at 186k mps, it reaches the very nearest star

He looked at me with those soft brown eyes and I just had to stroke his ear

A long line of crowded stinking semis brought more cattle to the slaughterhouse

I am slowing down as you are speeding up, but for a while we have communications

I stand still on this rotating earth, orbiting the sun which revolves about the Milky Way as it moves towards constellation Hydra at a mere 600 kilometers per second

Morning Rain In A Dry Land

In a dry land, a morning rain brings on an early smile

as the wet birds are calling between the drops

peace need not stir to leave, from this house

the sounds of falling drops and dripping runoff mingle

and the old ones are speaking even as she calls to me now

- the great emptiness softened briefly by the gentle rain

the earth is washing like a healthy, purring cat

and I count the blessing in every single drop,

storms that come with first light define a special day

I hear as drops plop up among the leaves in a nearby tree

A part of the rain chant known by a thousand generations

She comes in fits and starts with a fog, then perhaps a bit of hail

Raindrops ripple across the puddles and it is all, just as simple as it seems

Slowly it grows lighter but there remains a calm and easygoing dimness

The moss soaks up the moisture growing spongy, soft and green

What falls stimulates the earth to exude a misty cloud of peace

I remain in silence, engrossed within this quiet symphony

This rain knows neither here nor how in its wet and simple certainty

The mist off of the lake arises, to greet the lowering clouds

The wind stays resting, somewhere far away

And here once again comes the hope that we might yet, find our way

These are the days I often spoke of back then

These are the days, I used to say, when we would only remember back then like a dream

These days, I now recall saying, we would wonder about what happened before

Now is when back prior to then joins easily with only a confused haze in between

I always felt then that now we would retain but little from that dizzying spiral

At last, these are the days I often spoke of as our emergence from that rapid blur

Details would disappear even as we finally try to consider them during our awakening

Now is when I meant that then would seem to have been too many years, gone by too fast

These are the times I said we would look back from, only to remember so very little

I always knew we could not possibly be digesting all that we were seeing every day

I always thought now we would look back on then as if through rapidly shifting mists

I always told you that it all would pass way before we would even know that it could end

These times, I said back then, we would regard like some old movie, stuck on fast forward

These days I see I was right to say we moved too fast then to have any appreciation

Those days are the ones I always said we would now remember like their old pictures

These are the times to which we left but little to be summed up, in too a short time

Now we have no choice but to try and grope meaning from our own ambivalent contrails

Those days recede back beyond our buckled event horizon into a jumbled darkness

Now memory has compressed the tight wavetrain of bygone days into indistinguishability

Those were the days from which so few events even remain still jutting up enough to be seen

The rest lie blanketed by heavy clouds viewed from far above here in this blindingly blue sky

Sounds I Should Have Heard

I heard that temple gong, amid their padding footfalls upon polished stone and old wood

I listened as the peaceful church bells tolled out once more with the coming of the evening

The mystic loon calls carried from far out across the lake, honoring that long June twilight

Their meditative chanting briefly revealed a place where I had always hoped to remain

An eagle cried out from impossibly far above my thoughts in that deep blue mountain sky

The wind spoke through the pines and then went off, sighing to itself among the aspen

For hours I listened as the entire world made music there, upon that one tiny creek

I felt so safe as the warm evening rain tinkled softly down upon that old metal roof

I spaced my thoughts between the bird calls, and so they came and went

The distant thunder rolled across and away in echoes, one peal cascading upon another

All during the night, the peaceful sea took a restful breath with each single wave

Their music carried me to a place where I just wished that I might someday abide

Wolves howled in cold and lonely wonder at the mystery that stood their coats on edge

Fingers scraped the strings between the beautiful chords they strung together like pearls

I heard nothing but my own footfalls for such a long time, so far out on that empty trail

Their roosters began calling just before the dawn, helping to set me on my way once more

Huge branches creaked above me as those giant sequoias stretched up for the coming rain

Familiar elder voices carried gently up the wooden stairs and I fell securely into a child’s sleep

That wind chime bore a message about something that I felt I should have always known

The simple croaking of those wet green frogs briefly made everything seem alright again

I found the white noise of the waterfall once more, carried along within that giant crowd

The roar of my own heavy breathing filled my ears where the way was long and steep

In that Apache sandstone, the wind drifted and eddied, as ancient shadows came and went

The rich timbre of her voice lingered in my memory and often came to me in dreams

Our crackling fire brought a deep sense of well being despite the vast surrounding darkness

I passed long hours to the purring of that calico cat who rolled on the wool blanket in my lap

After my escape I noticed the internal deafness caused by always having to shout out my thoughts

The soft sound of snowflakes upon my cap, many at once, began, at last to set me straight

The mysterious music sometimes emerging from my flute both delighted and surprised me

I took a sideways satisfaction in that here, the jets were too high for their sound to reach me

The quiet repetition of that empty phrase helped settle my breathing and clear my head

I noted drowsily that the shouts and laughter of the playing children did not disturb me at all

I saw that, from a great enough distance, the ugly roar of heavy traffic faded to a soothing hum

I nodded saying nothing until, at last, even they had finally heard themselves for quite long enough

I turned ever so slowly to the surrounding silence, so very pregnant with everything, all at once

Atmlast things maybe even begin to sound like the rest of my life really should have always been

Rain Of Blessings

Rain of blessings falling so very softly everywhere at once, all the time, almost indiscernible

Very quiet and so gentle as to be easily ignored, so light as to go on by, normally unnoticed

Yet flowing away in every dimension, easily outpacing even the expansion of this universe

As faint as the cosmic background radiation, but just as all-pervasive, when tuned in at last

Layer dancing across layer from the pico to the tera scales, from the quantum to the multiverse

Rain of mercy, shower of grace, redemption soaks the lines of each and every smiling face

In the sky shimmers a rainbow of joy from the soft light filtering through these falling blessings

My fevered forehead cooled by the mist off the infinite sea of peace these showers fill

Spinning slowly round and round, I briefly take a place, as I turn like a blossom falling down

Rain of blessings fleetingly opens our eyes wide to that eternal harmony unfolding all around

Perfectly interweaving springs, all from the same source, balance me with calm energy

Radiating mercy from the center of grace, interweaving with cosmic phenomena, out in space

Cooling when it is too hot or warming us like a bath, our faces upturned like little flowers

Their vast and eternal flow carries off our tiny sins just as surely as it erodes all our tiny actions

Rain of blessings, falling in all directions, through every dimension, without an in-between

As always, just as soon as I really sense it, I am instantly overflowing, into those gentle tears

Reflections of rippling waters, echoes of fading footsteps, fossil starlight from so far away

Dirty, smiling, tiny children, gap-toothed old men nodding off in wisdom, gentle yak upon the trail

Cymbals sounding off the vast blue ice fall, uncountable simplicities, all so inextricably bound

Hail of joy briefly awakens sleepers, flood of compassion carries away their joyful images

In my mind, running mostly naked, a brown child glistening in this warm monsoon of cosmic blessings

We watched their futures become our past

As our days we slowly passed

we watched their futures become our past

In all those instants nothing changes

Then all at once it’s rearranged

Born as children, not like those with that white hair

Yet slowly we assume their shady chairs

As three generations pass while we grow tall

At last we become the next to fall

The minutes pass at first so slowly: Summer never seems to come

then the years fly by so quickly, as life flees before it's done

Through all our moments we string together

a tiny blurred fraction, we think of as forever

So slowly do our days we gather

it takes quite a while til nothing matters

Cast with fossil bones or glimpsed as insects trapped in amber

Brief, sideways glances we now scarcely remember

Our lives and history seemed to be so everlasting

in brief insights revealed by merest instants flashing

Long awaited events stored in half-remembered jumbles

Lives so short, but memories only incoherent mumbles

Time spent always looking forward to myriad trivia

Then off into the insensate void, delivered to an empty oblivion

In the end and looking back, it seemed as if it were quite long

yet I know I could not finish my confused little song

Both far away and long ago take on different aspects

On that day we stare back so blankly from empty caskets

Still we bend to pray for guidance with our knees to the earth

round our sun inside the galaxy, within a cluster, in just one universe

Having written in the beach sand, the hand of man, it shortly pauses

and just as quickly all life ends of insensate causes

Just as all things we thought important so surely disappeared

Their monuments and their memories shall no longer be revered

In the eternal mountains we lay our dead to rest in peace forever

though science tells us the peaks will not resist the weather

We work away the many years with vague promises to ponder later

then comes the day that quickly ends our short stay here

Our breaths will have a finite number, our heartbeats too, a small round figure

But time in the void cannot be grasped by any mathematical rigor

Long the sunset, fine the twilight, in that wondrous, warm June summer

but at last full darkness must induce, a perpetual and dreamless slumber