Poem Written While Walking East on 28th Street

Stop talking just do it
Beauty lies within
In my current state
Of mental health
Such as it is
(stuck looking without)
All the t-shirts
I notice on my way
Across 28th street
Walking to Kalustyan's
Speak directly to me
Suggesting another chapter
In the Chuang Tzu perhaps
About randomness and truth
And the richness of the present

*  *  *  *  *  *  *

By way of explaining a few of the references in this poem, I am very pleased to announce (albeit by such indirect means) that I have recently begun work on a new translation project - helping a Chinese friend and colleague prepare for publication a new translation of the Chuang Tzu, a Daoist wisdom book comparable in importance and beauty to the Dao De Jing.  (For those of you not familiar with it, you can read about the great original Chinese text here.)  The chapter I am currently working on is Chapter 26, which is entitled External Things (or 外物 if you prefer in Chinese).

Ode to the Joy of Living in the Multiverse

History sometimes

Neither rhymes

Nor repeats itself;

It simply skips a beat

Or jumps from one frame
To the next

And it’s up to us

To master the timing
So we're prepared for
A series of acrobatic leaps    

Back and forth
Along the drala

Agile and quick enough

We navigate merrily

Among the adjacencies -- 

Of what karma begets

And forgets amidst

This plenitude

Of suchness --

Each offering up

Its own rendition

Of a present tense

Every moment 

We journey upstream or 

Sideways like a crustacean

Moving by fractal advance

Across multiple fronts

Still comforting ourselves

With the conventional

Wisdom that our destiny
Is singular and not diverse

Ode to Gus the Mouser

You’re either growing your list

Or entropy takes its toll

Every day

What little comes in

Over the transom

Is barely enough

To keep the kitty

Nice and pretty

In the windowsill

But God bless Gus

The one-eyed Cat

Who just today

Caught a mouse

All on his own

And there he sits

In Buddha-like splendor

Contemplating

His next move

Flower From a Stranger

A rose destined to continue opening

No matter what you do or say

A Buddha Flower of the first degree

A power that keeps on giving

It’s hard to express this better

Either in petals or the flesh

Perfection in a vase before your eyes

For all the world to plainly see
There's nothing more curative
Than the flower's pure gratuity

The backstory to this poem is interesting.  My wife was walking down 28th street the other day and approached a man (who looked kind of scruffy) standing on the corner and he handed her a perfect rose and explained that something lucky had just happened to him.  So this rose represents the most gratuitous of generous acts and that's why it looks like perfection itself fit snugly into a vase.

Post script:  And then a few days later Marissa sent me another photo.

Opening further 

Until Time holds sway 

Perfect or not 

Flowers all end 

The same way

On the vine

Or in the vase

Brittle in decay  

Poem for an August Evening in Saco Maine

Let the frogs and crickets

Talking back and forth

On an August evening

In Saco Maine

Along with the hens

Calling to each other

Across the street

About the eggs that

Still need to be laid

Tonight serve  

As reminder

Of all that remains

Undone and unfelt

Now that summer's life

Is more than half spent

The wine stands

All but overdrawn and

The dying leaf is soon

To be revenant

A Trembling Blue Flower

The Blue Flower trembles
It knows not what to do
The moment you look at it
It begins to change
Flushed with vermillion

A trembling blue flower
Each petal tells a different story
Much like a lightning strike
It denotes a singular destiny

Die Blaue Blume zittert
Sie weiß nicht, was zu tu
In dem Moment, Sie es betrachten
Es beginnt sich zu verändern
Mit Zinnoberrot Flushed

The Party of the First Part

There’s the party of the first part

And there’s the party of the second

No matter what sort of loco weed

Shakespeare happened to be smoking

While composing his verse

I’ve decided once again

To partake of more of the same

Ecstatic freedom of speech

However easy or hard

It may be to come by

There’s the party of the first

And there’s the party

Of the last resort too

It makes no difference

What else you

Happen to be doing

When Yama comes calling

In the end it’s your choice

Not that it matters much
To indulge or abstain
At best it's a semi-vegetative
State we all end up in
Any way you
Look at it

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

By way of explaining at least the first verse of this poem, I read a news story online this morning (you can read the full story here) about how an academic researcher in Australia (government funded no doubt) has just published a paper which strongly suggests the Bard of Avon may have been smoking some fine Virginia bud when he penned his very best plays.  The bud, so the researchers claim, had been brought back to Merry Old England by Sir Walter Raleigh.  To toke or not to toke, that is the question.  The evidence supporting the claim that Shakespeare was a pot smoker consists of molecular analysis of clay pipe stems that were recently excavated from the great Bard's back yard, which show trace evidence of cannibus sativa residue.  The paper also cites Shakespeare's Sonnet 76 for additional textual support of their claim:

Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name

Sonnet 76 (in pertinent part)

An Excerpt from a Work in Progress

I wrote the following poem in the course of working on my new book - another work of non-fiction, but this time the book as a whole will not be in poetic form.  In any case, the book's first section is devoted to a discussion of Daoism and that's how I came to write the following poem. 

Ode to the Dao

Striving to be secure

Only exposes you further

So the latest tech in turn
Attracts the latest hacks

All of which by the Dao  

Can be fully foreseen

Everything brings
Its opposite to fruition

Contrasts propel and 

Propagate the entire

Realm of 10,000 things

Teaching us that

All such distinctions

Lovely as they may be

Are trivial in the grand scheme 

Like a peacock’s plumage

Words Written in Early August (while remembering a certain snowy evening)

Nor is the quality of suffering

Strained in the least when

Humidity grips the city streets

And sweat beads on 

Our collective brow

I hear it too in

The sluggish cries

Outside the casement window

And the random honks

Of taxis passing by

Dulled by the effort

Of getting wherever

It is the passengers

Need to go

*  *  *  *  *  *  *

Here's a link to a prior poem that I was reminded of earlier this morning: 

Poem for a Snowy Evening