Dark rock

Lightning flashes
Limestone hills bright
Exploding into
Being
Leaves no trace
A dark rock
Unmoved

Laughing life

I prepared myself for
A life of service
So I began to laugh
Leaving no
Trace in
Heaven

Love is here

Poor moon
Poor victim of poets
Let's come off it
Who wants a woman
With a cloud between
Her thighs?
Love walks the earth
The moon up high
Is here

Human confusion

The world is vast
Incredibly vast
But there is nothing strange
In being human
Eyes wide open
It's a gentle confusion

Dog burps

A dog stalks moths in
Florescent light
Walking away
Burps with her
Whole body

Speechless

Bodhidharma has no beard
And I am without words
The moon is neither rising
Nor sinking
All this space
And no room for self

Petals guffaw

Bending over in
The garden
I nearly fell over
The flowers laugh
Very
Very slowly

Water Dissolves Water: Baso Döitsu

All of you here! Believe that your own mind is Buddha. This very mind is buddha-mind.

Water Dissolves Water: Baso Döitsu

What is the Pure Land?

A monk asked Zen Master Joshu, “What is the Pure Land?”
Joshu said, “A puddle of piss.”
The monk asked, “Can you show it to me?”
Joshu said, “Don’t tempt me.”

You Zen Like a Sailor

that stone Buddha deserves all the birdshit it gets
I wave my skinny arms like a tall flower in the wind

-Ikkyu Sojun

That's Watts Up

"...but it doesn't matter a bit if you don't understand, because each one of you is quite perfect as you are, even if you don't know it. Life is basically a gesture, but no one, no thing, is making it. There is no necessity for it to happen, and none for it to go on happening. For it isn't being driven by anything; it just happens freely of itself. It's a gesture of motion, of sound, of color, and just as no one is making it, it isn't happening to anyone. There is simply no problem of life; it is completely purposeless play—exuberance which is its own end. Basically there is the gesture. Time, space, and multiplicity are complications of it. There is no reason whatever to explain it, for explanations are just another form of complexity, a new manifestation of life on top of life, of gestures gesturing. Pain and suffering are simply extreme forms of play, and there isn't anything in the whole universe to be afraid of because it doesn't happen to anyone! There isn't any substantial ego at all. The ego is a kind of flip, a knowing of knowing, a fearing of fearing. It's a curlicue, an extra jazz to experience, a sort of double-take or reverberation, a dithering of consciousness which is the same as anxiety.
Of course, to say that life is just a gesture, an action without agent, recipient, or purpose, sounds much more empty and futile than joyous. But to me it seems that an ego, a substantial entity to which experience happens, is more of a minus than a plus. It is an estrangement from experience, a lack of participation. And in this moment I feel absolutely with the world, free of that chronic resistance to experience which blocks the free flowing of life and makes us move like muscle-bound dancers. But I don't have to overcome resistance. I see that resistance, ego, is just an extra vortex in the stream--part of it—and that in fact there is no actual resistance at all. There is no point from which to confront life, or stand against it."

 -Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology

did i eat

to those who would
feed on me
I ask only
that you feast on
living flesh
there is no taste
among the dead and
dreaming
there before a moonless night
I close my eyes
and walk
burning my
hut to the ground
where is reflection?
where are the ripples that
become children
on a moonless
deathless
dreamless
night?

furry furnace

you were young
a thin black cat
feeling fire between
his eyes
a giddy mutant
smelling of smoke
and orchids
a mangy dancer in
moon dust
they threw bottles
at your head
threw spears of light
at the dark side of
man you never see
the face of man
on forest's floor
leaves of grass
bought by the ounce

then
through the sand
castles in their mouths
from the angelic
whispers of jesters
you heard the king's demands
you owed them guts
and fur
the fur your ancestors
wrapped around silent machines
in the night
and you gave up a thousand dream
bodies to gentle laughing lions
shaped your unbridled
entropy and
sniffed out alien mischief
in scorched fields
read horoscopes to particles
read sutras to lizards
but you couldn't shape
the world of squares

it busted up
the stars in your eyes
reeling in moebius ten strips
in a rollercoaster blooming
strange flowers all
the way down
no one really saw it
the distant planet
all it had was motion
and time
beauty blew through you
and swirled crackling
around the others
but you couldn't shape
the world of squares
the corpse of the Illuminati
still dancing on
strings held by
scared children

woe is the freakyheaded
child who loveslovesloves
even the boot heel pressed
into his heart
wild is the burst of light
the inflation
of smooth starry blowoffs
the byzantine puppets
of stardust grokking
how stars died for their
sinlessness
long gone lights of
true benevolence
asking for no penance
for they gave what
they came to give
and yet they called
to you
to pledge fealty
to beauty

you couldn't shape
what has no shape
you know it now
why you couldn't change
what is only change with
a face
you couldn't see it
until the faces all changed
giving generations
to the earth
life to the tomb
the mask dissolved in
its own energy
and you saw the true face
the face of nobody
the cool water that
a long year's desert
concealed in transparency
it was zen
and the bald-faced
love of a woman
of nobody
you are nobody's fool

now
you are young
a thin black cat
feeling fire between
his shoulders
nowhere to go today
but something's always
happening

Pontypool

Pontypool...
Pontypool...
Pontypool...

Just kidding.

How can a film recapitulate so viciously every desire I ever had for a spontaneous language driven by pure novelty? Does anyone get it? Do I? I hope so. I dope so. I rope slow. I pope slow.

It seems like a very, very large chunk of human communication could be mindless repetition. Rush Limbaugh, or insert any other proud moth-filled mouth here, drops a phrase, the appropriate aural mirrors reflect it in an endless circle, and everyone in the middle of that ideological boundary just repeats a few words without any explanation behind it. Lately I see "socialism" as the buzz. Obama is a Socialist! Obama is a Socialist! Osama is a SoCal Fish!

But what does that mean? Try to explain it without depending on synonymous replacement chants, please. How would you like it if all dictionaries were thesauruses? How would you stay connected to the original spark of innovation? By infusing the words with emotional fury, the only thing that breaks through the numbness of mechanical action, of course!

People mistrust any politician who explains things in logical terms, for he becomes an intellectual elitist, while preferring those who explain nothing and seek to spread blind passion. But fuck, that's just something I read on the internet.

Screaming saves the dying word, right? But a tolerance builds and it becomes harder and harder to pretend that a direct experience of meaning is contained within the words, so you scream louder and louder, and eventually you're in a rage and the savageness of desperation is the only thing that exists, having outlived any conscious acknowledgment of a word's dynamic implications.

At that point, you're a zombie, or the word is a zombie, and you are reduced to a singular desire, to consume and spread, to be replicated through destruction and thus justified in all of your rage. You are now the religious zealot of a meme, who can only find validation in knowing that someone else can be infected with the same strain of virus. Good job, parrot. Your blog is a hit now!

Burroughs and Joyce suddenly stand before us like Buddha and Christ. Every poet who ever swung around the alleys of the mind with a jazz-like unsteadiness seems to have actualized a natural philosophy which aims to avoid the ever-increasing tangles of our mental wire. Association increases in complexity within even loosely defined borders and the only thing that brings a sense of clarity sometimes is a burning sword slicing through established relationships in language.

But how do you talk of this, as you surely want to do, without committing the crime yourself? Do you become the holy man in the temple who expresses himself necessarily through a chalkboard? Do you keep speaking but allow a fever dream to drive the content of your speech as you invent an entirely new universe?

The trick might be outside of language entirely. It might not be relevant how, or if, you speak at all. Because expression follows perception, perception must be the source. Shock the system, shock the monkey, sledgehammer tongues falling to the ground. See. You are a fucking infant. You are in it to zen it.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Lather with the quantum foam, where the buffalo roam. Can you hear me now? Beneath anything mechanical in our world, no matter how much strength it gains, no matter how much its agents seem to bear good tidings, there is the upset conveyed by spirit, or chaos, Hermes, Thoth, Trickster, Bugs Bunny, Eris, that clump of dirt, that star, that scratch on your cornea, your farting god. It's time to be paranoid. If you inspire paranoia, you better also feel it yourself.

"The soft overcomes the hadron collider." -Tao Teh Kinky

Things are moving in all directions. Try to contain it and an energy becomes more volatile and you feel more and more like a schmuck even though you're getting better and better at pretending that you're not. Maybe it doesn't matter what we say. Maybe verbal communication is a form of social grooming. I read that on the internet once!

It's not like we're actual zombies, that words become murderous at every level of stale interaction, right? I don't expect the spirit of liberation to ever have any continuing cult - that devotion belongs to the word. But a mad laugh blasts at what is innately disruptive and it won't feel any need to justify itself. There is no need for redemption when your goal is to exhaust every possibility of this existential singularity. So I am saying nothing, I hope. With any luck, these words will fall on deaf ears.

If you put the sound of one hand clapping on a loudspeaker, you hope that people don't start humming the tune. They'll pin you down in your isolated booth where you broadcast everything you found relevant from the wire, they'll dig for your voice so they can also surf out of the void on radio waves, and they'll eat you, eat away all illusion until you realize that you are one of them, as you always have been.

Now... the upset.

I really had you going, didn't I?

This was all a joke. A yolk. A soak.

The thing is, viral interpretations of memetics would frequently hope for expression as an alienated harmony of disparate cells. Conversely, there's flowing resonance, ripples in continuity to which we are all subject. We wouldn't call a wave in water a consequential villian spawned by the evil ocean, would we? It's okay to be a zombie, folks. Here, have my brains and I'll have some of yours. Lather, rinse, repeat.

All we ever wanted is to let the energy flow through us, to animate us in its passing. I couldn't blame anyone for that. We are all fools stepping off of that cliff and that requires no justification. Purpose would be contrived, and so it shall be. Contrive, motherfucker, contrive and thrive. You're alive.

History repeats itself to the extent that you recognize cycles. If the reference points seem a bit arbitrary and begin to dissolve, then it is not repetition so much as awareness reaching out for anything, which, amusingly, occurs at the beginning of a cycle. Truth may be best expressed in any old instance of paradox. Shock the system. I read that in the sky once. Why must you return? No, really, ask yourself that.


Repeat it until the bomb drops.
The Bomb Drops.
The Bomb drops.
The bomb drops.
the bomb drops
bomb


FIN
{translated as: I hope this doesn't feel conclusive}

The Universe is a T00b

 

Ah, Zen. 

*HACK HACK COUGH COUGH VOMIT BLOOD*

Whatever you got.

Every Fool Thing

every hang-nail holy
every butt pimple holy
every wolf in the tea house
scratching at back door mind
scratching at black hole velvet intelligence within
every fool thing holy
every rainbow-hued ghost in blue moon trance
every black-nosed buddha of translucent breath
everything falling through cosmic gutters of night
behind pastoral screens beaming
droning freak enchantments
yep it's holy
every stoned reflection
every heart lulled
every sweet graceful shadow rhythm
everything in a ragged old universe holy
everything an open eye
everything harvesting zen from seeds of fire
every star banging bright tonight
holy holy holy
until the chao comes home
until the tao comes home
until ET phones home
until a monkey AUMs
like I said
it's all holy
every serpent string
in the ever-holy musick of the spheres
every clear mist of this fur-spotted body
every blossomed jewel on death's wilderness mask
every liquid invocation anchoring time
every beatific grind in blood and bone holy
every fool thing holy
because it is also wise
everyone I love you
because you are holy

monk sees monkeys

we can not live with the monks
for our harps keep them up at night
our gift is fire from a dying ember
a flash between broken lines
feathering the trance
of 1,000 suns
we bemoan Saturn as it approaches
no shame whatsoever!
we are that planet spinning in ecstasy
we are furry hedonic priests
dancing in lush bulbous attention
in primordial soup kitchens nightly
we are so many ancestral visions
pressed to the lips of emptiness
we also fade away
no shame at all!
we are sincere as animals
even in the robes of monks
but we are not monks
for our harps keep us up at night
and our gift is a dying ember
given lovingly by fire