Plato's Cave Art

We who style ourselves
Composers of words,
Including these words,
Composers themselves,
However awful,

Practice a damned art
In a smoky light
In a labyrinth
That may be a maze,
A church or a cave,

But except perhaps
For calligraphy
And hand-chiseled glyphs
Has no art in it
Beyond how it sounds

And what it might mean
To someone well-versed
In the given tongue.
Language can't be left
In the dark alone

To signify life
Or death without lives
To interpret it:
Can't be left to be,
To mean, but be mute.

Just How Much

Should you care about your life?
It won't last; you can't keep it,
And the way that you'll lose it
Can't be promised in advance
(Nor matter to you once gone,
However dragged out the loss).
Is it what you do with it?

I suspect we only care
For what we do because
We think that what we do
Will fix or foul our universe,
While each of us has the hold
Of a whole world over which
No one holds the least control.

Relax a moment. Count breath.
Can you pause your beating heart?
Can you edit all your thoughts?
Can you order gods around,
Your own, anyone else's?
You will, must make a difference,
But you won't know what it was.

So just how much should you care,
Given you're in love with life,
Or in love with what's your own,
Or with a dream of changing 
Some other lives around yours?
Care as you can. Whatever
Can't be kept, can't be wasted.

The Body Inside

Therese, steeping tea, teases
Sequoia, who is cooing
In her stroller, practicing
Protolanguage prosody,
"Isn't it something, being
In a body? Isn't it?"
Sequoia laughs and stretches.

Or the reverse, it occurs
To me, could be true, if you
Construe yourself, less as more,
An empty vessel, and your
Body, your world, not as spheres
That your whole soul inhabits,
But things ringing within you.

Danse Libre (Theme and Variations)

"All poems trail behind them images that are part of them but can't be fitted in."

Unless of course we are what isn't,
In which case we've got nowhere to go,
Ourselves themselves comprising nowhere.

There can be only one empty set,
Only one null, one naught, one zero,
But my mind prefers to imagine

Bounded sets of various sizes,
Identifiable as our souls,
Vacuoles devoid of surprises

But presenting a certain presence,
To each its own unique emptiness
As if two nothings could be something

Other than the same preemptiveness
Subsuming boundaries and content
Alike, by definition, into

The space for everything that happens.
If we're nowhere, we've never been to
Anywhere and yet hold everywhere

And everywhen within us because
Only the empty set can contain
Room for all, with nothing to explain.

"Magicians Don't Exist"

The obsolescence of spoken presentations
Approaches that of the old-fashioned magic act.

There's nothing a speaker can offer to tell you
That you can't discover more quickly on your own.

(And the speaker is far more likely to be wrong.)
The famous and the infamous still go on tour,

But it's only the lure of flesh and blood nearness
To these embodiments of fame and infamy

That packs people in to hear what they have to say.
It's not as if the content can't be found elsewhere.

If both Mark Twain and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Were to barnstorm North America together,

People would refinance their houses to see them
"Live!" and hear what they had to say to each other,

And not so much in any anticipation
Of learning an unknown story or a new dream.

The anonymous speaker has nothing to say
That can't be found elsewhere, better illustrated,

No more than an illusionist makes deceptions
That can't be demonstrated somewhere on the Web.

No repercussions now when a fool like me talks
Through my hat. The rabbits have all left the building.

Giving a Talk about Enlightenment

Must be like giving a talk about sex.
You'd want people to assume you've done it,
And if indeed you've done it, done it well.

Well enough you'd not want them to want you.
You'd rather they worked it out for themselves.
And all the while you'd have to be thinking,

Is it possible there is no better
Prophylactic against the actual 
Experience than talking about it?

Advaita ad libitum

"the unreality of Birkin, Inspector of Schools, who sees the world as a book he isn't writing"

According to the latest avatar
Of universal knowledge, sanskrit sage
Adi Shankara was falsely accused

Of teaching a version of Buddhism
In the guise of Vedic Hinduism,
As his espousal of advaita

Could be confused with Buddhist emptiness,
When more truly his Atman was full up
With Brahman, never empty anywhere.

I chase advaita around the Web,
Unsure of whether I am the spider
Or the gracehoper or the struggling fly.

I find there's a guy, a guru sort of,
In, of course, Sedona, called Nirmala,
Who is fond of quoting himself, to wit:

"I often say, the truth is whatever
Opens your Heart and quiets your mind." Ah.
Somewhere the dour shade of Karl Marx chuckles.

Even he would not have gone quite so far
As to define, not only religion,
But truth itself in terms of opiates.

I cast my mind over hospital beds
In which I felt, singularly, not one
With everything else, but floating, detached,

My heart wide open, my mind so quiet
Every pin drop was a noisy insight,
And opiate memories remind me

Of that other, recent floating, the lake
In which I swim whenever the weather,
My child, my spouse, and circumstance allow:

Another, presumably healthier,
Form of floating awareness, a mind full
Of deep, cold water, green in northern light.

There swims my sometimes oneness, weirdly real,
Weirdly unreal, where awareness meets a
Kindly wall. I am that; advaita.