Zen and Heart.

There's a shortcut anyone can take to the
heart.
It's about knowing feeling, although senses'
snake doesn't know numbers nor more beyond a
flicking tongue's sensitivity.

So they told me to learn about
testing air, and recognising
messages that arrive and merge with
me.

Each message has a heart,
believe it, and
soon is good to help it
home into my hands.

When my tongue tries to arrive
home, yet no language unlocks the
mighty door,
I've a way to get
there,
no matter what.

To walk that one,
we should stand in the same light
even though it knows nothing more than
arrival, and that waiting for what's
already there.

Birthday homily

God is love.

When I was young they taught me
God is love.
These were important words, the biggest in
English language, standing for the
highest truths of all.
I was amazed and frightened by their
sound, and sought their meaning out.
So I dropped both into the sea of
truth,
and they swiftly sank,
and I never saw them again.
I threw them up into the sky of freedom,
and they fell back to me, unchanged.
I took one in each hand, and they were
a perfect fit.
I put them into the heart of me,
and found them already there.
I asked, in my mind,
what they are,
and language became very silent.

So what is left then?
Two intensities, keenly wanting to
walk and act
in a world that is witless without them.
And I, poor preacher,
need to mind the difference
that isn't there
between the importance of words
and how they act
in a world we have
dimly discovered,
thus far.

Poem to myself

I've arrived at a door I'd thought was locked, and the key
gone.
Not any more,
words are said not owned,
and mine are beginning to stand and stretch.

I don't think wind recognises airtight
places. Somehow,
messages get through the smallest cracks,
whispering so many memories that no-one can
bear to remember them.

In the past few days I've been walking
everywhere,
and I seem to recall what was said
before I was born.

The experts make a secret of it all,
and try to sell it,
but I was told told something better.
A bold soul doesn't sell,
although they've made money the measure of
far too much on this rich and rare planet,
turning themselves poor in purpose.

I've come to a living door that will
never die.
It was never locked, it swings almost too
easily
when voices utter a real reverence.

Don't worship a book, or a story of your own
making, or set phrases designed to flush out
fear.

If you see something just once in a
friend's face,
or lover's eyes,
that's how the door works,
and your way opens.

I know you have a thing with locked
doors and clocked deadlines, and that
life isn't forever is frightening.

Yet you know better, don't you,
but you don't know how to say it.

Come, I'll help you.
Look about and notice how things fit,
in the shortest moments.
Hear and hold for as long as you can
that music with which you were born.
You know you can't deny that,
and each cell in your body doesn't have to believe
what is known.

This door is open, and the hinges have been stolen by
truth.

They can't say what that is, exactly,
but why should you care?
That's another word,
and the wind blows warm today,
and all your seasons of self are
slipping by.

Really, I don't ask anything of you
but this short walk of accompaniment.
If it's good enough for me,
look for your happiness in
our common steps.

Alive

Somewhere a hadeda is alive because it was nurtured and nourished,
from falling over, next door, on the bowling green.

It stayed and ate cat-food, announced hunger regularly at the front door,
even walking in, impatient for
that which gives life.

I am alive, too, and also impatient for
so much.

I have to say it with this body,
words are wind.

So when I dip into the
electric river, which is where I
live, bear with me.

Like a hadeda,
my voice can be unaccomplished,
so far as sophistication can be made to swell.

It's not the words, nor the larynx, pharynx or
any itemized spelling or sense of silly
speciality.

When you take off the socks and shoes of
pretence and walk,  just alive,
maybe humming something you remember,
you could know how
nothing is better than
now.

Dissecting God.

You have to deal with what's in front of you,
and the action you take is what
happens.

Yet God happens deep in these
human emotions,
urging the things we don't
know.

When you approach holiness,
it's wise to take of more than shoes.

Come naked, and
dance.

It's been done before.

But when you do that,
what are you saying?

I've been trying to tell myself something
about which I now
give up.

It can't be done.

What a music the body is.
I can hear it, and it's something in the
cosmos who knows.

Now, I'm not sure about where this wild
wind will take me.

I don't think it matters in ways we
understand.

When you take care with language do you
dissect God?

It's a double edged sword,
this knowing from which there's
no return.

Touch

I'm surprised by what touch does.
Reaching out, or just
happening,
or something big, on purpose,
somehow it says more than language ever will,
and knows something more than a rush of
rationality.

They say
"this touches me".

It goes further, like fingers hunting a
hunger of knowing.

My body has never discovered itself,
it's a demanding and selfish island
that refuses to exist for
any one and especially any
order.

When you touch on purpose,
that's special.
And the meaning behind it carries on so
far, you won't guess.

I know about beauty that you see, hear, and smell
in the mornings of rain reaching deep into our earth:
but when drops touch, and tell secrets into
places that wait for  purpose,

that's where we arise.
Let's walk out onto this
loch.
It's about longing, isn't it?
How far do you think it
stretches out?

Stopping time

Sometimes it happens, probably more often than we
think.
When we feel, that's more to the point.
I've watched it, compassion, companionship,
care and more,
coursing out, because the want of it
wells out, and there's no stopping it.

I'm not sure about time. We invented it
some cycles ago. It's a sure measure, yes,
but bodies say something else.

It's odd that a lightning touch
torches everything it strikes,
firing every surface it feels,
in it's fierce finding of
ourselves.

Some time ago we knew what might have been,
and in those moments we thought of
love.

That word turns into
windswept ways, seething in the
Cape southwester,
curling into growing waves that
crash against a daring walk along
the breaking water.

When you stop time,
you know more,
and the ocean agrees,
arguing aimlessly as it moves
incessantly.