poetry

Anne poem : the emptiness project #12

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Anne Frank

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” Anne Frank

Anne

The warm ovens that say crematoria
are someone you once loved–
in the lines, in the worn-out ovens

The concrete floor of the room
becomes you, a mirror
staring back at the memory
of windows and dead leaves

Falling outside your window
are dead leaves, so many colors
and you once knew all of them

Before the time of your time,
which is to say: your time.

(“The Holocaust was the World War II genocide of the European Jews. Between 1941 and 1945, across German-occupied Europe, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews, around two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population.” Wikipedia) 

AWOL poem : the emptiness project # 11

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Lidice massacre memorial

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?”― Mahatma Gandhi

AWOL

Afterwards, you weren’t home
The war was over
We stood on your front porch
Knocking

The windows
were broken
and in my heart
a small boy
broke all the windows
but you didn’t care

It was only
the start
of somebody’s
picnic

We waited for an hour
Then we turned around
& started killing

On the hill
On the hill

On the beautiful hill

We ran
and when somebody said
“I love you”
we all of us
laughed
like hyenas
& started killing

Laughing
like hyenas.

“The Lidice massacre was the complete destruction of the village of Lidice in June, 1942 on orders from Adolf Hitler and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.” Wikipedia

Photo: Ashley Pomeroy, Sculpture by Marie Uchytilova

Awake & Sing

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Picasso- The Tragedy

“The only crime equaling inhumanity is the crime of indifference, silence, and forgetting.” James Orbinski

Minamata

In a tiny room,
in the Hiroshima dance hall,
an old man
sings Kaddish

A universal dream machine
tells you not to go home:
There are too many scars
on her body

The number you have forgotten
is inside your black book

Holes in the sky
The brown earth
Digging a hole in the sky
Welts on your skin

My hands are burning
as I dip them
into the river of you

Take my hand,
little one
Bathe in the river

Are you digging?
We are digging a hole
for our god you
We lay the bodies there
one at a time

We had a memory
You were there
You held my hand
I carried you to the river

The smell of you
on my body

Please help me to understand
I have come from a far place
My eyes are cold
There are lesions on my body

There are lesions on your body

You are being forgiven
for being far away

I sing you in the river

(“Minamata, Japan is known worldwide due to Minamata disease, a neurological disorder caused by mercury poisoning. The disease was discovered in 1956. A local chemical plant was blamed for causing the disease by emitting untreated wastewater to the Minamata Bay.” — Wikipedia)

Visiting Day

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PicassoChild

Child with a Dove

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When  we walk inside the broken place
Your hair, your eyes, the broken way you smile

The broken door that hurt your hand
Your fingers broken, one memory at a time

When we walk inside the broken place
A ghost of skin and broken strands of hair

Your mouth a broken O
Your dreams bereft of skin

We call your name
It echoes

Our mouth forms O
Our mouth says U

Your hair, your eyes, the broken way you smile
All come into view

Seeing

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“There is an abiding beauty  
which may be appreciated by those
who will see things as they are
and who will ask for no reward
except to see.”
Vera Brittain

 

 

 

 

 

 

The heart doesn’t break,
it wakes up to what it always was:
the earth’s wound,
unencumbered by illusion

Formlessness, emptiness, the Self,
awakens to the earth’s wound,
unencumbered by illusion

Experience stripped of language,
experience stripped of identity,
experience stripped of hope,
= the Self experiencing the world
of unarmored sensation

By embodying impermanence,
by integrating hopelessness,
the Self eliminates the need for hope,
eliminates the need for identity
as a flight from impermanence

Hope is a symptom of identity

As identity falls away,
as hope falls away,
as hopelessness falls away,
an empty vessel remains:

A conduit
for experiencing the world,
for seeing the world,
as it is

vincent-van-gogh-mulberry-tree-c-1889_u-l-o4qkl0
Mulberry Tree

Labor Pains

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“Mama take this badge off of me
I can’t use it anymore
It’s getting dark, too dark for me to see
I feel like I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door…”
Bob Dylan

Kali Birth

Meditation Koan

The emergent self
releases the sacrum-sphincter,
releases the heart-mouth,
releases the eyes,
empties the mind of I-thoughts,
experiences sounds,
tolerates the arising
of the original infant self’s
unbearable sensations
released into consciousness
as identity becomes unnecessary
at which point the Self
is born

Butoh heart

“A broken heart is an awakened heart.”

Emptiness 101

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EmptinessWoods

  • “reality” = emptiness (experience stripped of language, conceptualization, ideation, identity)
  • living from, writing from, acting from, “reality” = using language-as-“music” (sound) after unarmored experience (sensation)
  • emptiness = language stripped of dissociation
  • emptiness = experience stripped of preconceptions (dissociation)
  • if dissociation (flight from reality) is “built” from originally (infant) unbearable sensation (“pain”, “suffering”), emptiness (reality) is “built” from consciously experienced (integrated) original (infant) “pain,” “suffering” “impermanence” “terror of annihilation”
  • emptiness is the absence of dissociation
  • emptiness is language stripped of dissociative metaphor
  • emptiness is the language of the original (infant) experiencing self after having undergone neurological & psychological maturation (that is, having developed the capacity to experience all sensation without the need for dissociation as defense against the terror of annihilation)
  • emptiness replaces dissociation with impermanence (formlessness)
  • in which the ground of being prior to form is impermanence
  • in which impermanence is the death of the self-as-identity
  • and the birth of the Self-as-emptiness
  • emptiness reveals the Self (unarmored consciousness, awareness) to its dissociative configuration, identity

Knowledge

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SufiMystic

Reality

In love, nothing exists between heart and heart.
Speech is born out of longing,
True description from the real taste.
The one who tastes, knows;
the one who explains, lies.
How can you describe the true form of Something
In whose presence you are blotted out?
And in whose being you still exist?
And who lives as a sign for your journey?

—Rabia Al Basri

SunMyth

Reality

In the Self, nothing exists between heart & heart

Language is born out of unbearable suffering,

True description from the real taste of suffering.

The one who integrates pre-language suffering, knows;

The one who dissociates, lies.

How can you describe the true experience of Something

In whose presence identity is blotted out?

And in whose being the Self arises?

And who lives as a sign that the Self is born?

–RM

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In The Beginning Was The Word

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“War can kill victims but it cannot kill memory of survivors.”
Hak Kim: “Alive”

Guernica Child
The worms of death
pickled with incongruous silence
founded a nation of drones
dropping their bombs
in the middle of cities

The children who sing
with the language of concrete
bodies draped across enemies

Withered stalks of skin
adhere to lost continents,
limbs cry out for lonely trains
on platforms
where we used to live
singing love songs
of inscrutable hindsight

The sound of grandma
in her 1 bedroom apartment
on Kossuth Avenue,
three windows looking down
on pavements of children
limping across apocalyptic memory

A hospital memory before time,
its thumping heart sounds,
its broken windows,
its eyes of dogs shining
with incandescent radiation

An extremity of thought
along a hallway corridor
in a hospital wing
with glazed windows
filtering the late morning light
as it yellows across the plastic floor

Prior to the loss of time,
prior to the frozen-faced
armor that cloaks memory,
prior to sensation as hopeless rage

Beneath a frozen shell called “armor”
devising its own inhibitions,
dictating strategies for evading reality,
is the birth

Awake

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 Time Suite

By Robert Margolis

1. Cadenza

I have seen the incipient membrane of cities
The weltered contagion
The wending of shadows
The black night of stars
Shimmying indelicately
Memory lisping its sorry song

Have seen cadavers
Marching through cities
Blind figurines
Fingers of children
Whose cripples are empty

Have seen the skin of children
Limping through the old house
Saying “mother”

Have seen men in black dresses
Confabulate indecorously within the catacomb of song
The contiguous melancholy of buildings
Faces pressed against glass

Singing OOOOO
Singing OOOOO

Have seen bereft in Beirut
The transmogrified silence of statues
Women cloaked in diaphanous crusts
Mouths sewn shut

The sorry spectacle of Jack & Jill
Clambering up the hill

I was once encumbered by silence
Messianic whispers
Whimpering inconsolably
Among children
Digging welts in the frozen earth
Sifting through waist-high debris
Configuring remnants
Of black time
The ticking solstice
Of your eyes
Catacombs bereft of time
Where we walked
Our hands knotted
Fists against face
Mother’s grey hair
Flailing against time

We are emergent in time
The perpendicular axis
Weaving its insomnia
Meticulously, rending
Its hole face of scars
Its bereft soup kitchens
Its men gimping feverishly
Its women writhing on forks
Its cats & dogs mewling teeth
Its quiescent bacterium
Its stinking impermanence

Everyone loses in time
Everyone says time is a virus
Your mama says so
R u dying?

We are rudderless time

I remember that trip
A summer in August
The roar of the river
As we groped with our oars
You in the bow, your black hair
Streaming against the white sun
The river flecked with stones
Our shadows flickering
Impaled by the moon

And then it was autumn
Smashed by stink breath
I altered the tone of my hatred
To suit your black sun
Awake in neon nighties

In the middle of despair
Is the vernacular

2. Coronation: Summer, 1968

Morning time, a window
Opens nonchalantly exuberant
The hospital seems far away
Altered by time’s déjà vu
Ringed by time
The bells chanting time

Grass breaks through concrete
The wires meld with unfurnished rooms
Whose documented silence
Sings with the echo of ponged balls
Bounding on wooden tables,
Sorcerers chant
“The wicked thimble of Thumbelina”
Plastic slipcovers
Mound the dead furniture

Unbounded by them, the I sings
And leaps to its death
Liberating the singed Self
To soar, awake
Among the ruins of time

Time is ticking
And yet as a tick
It flies and bites
Through tongues
Wept throngs of mass indifference
Murmuring their murderous songs

Under the breath of god
We sing our own song
Catapulting the divine scent
Of tree and flower and field
A child’s white legs
Flash in the sun

Eclipsing silence
Eclipsing madness
Eclipsing the overmuch torn remnants
Where childhood lurks
Stinking its paws against
The furtive smiles
And tiny trains
Of a boy
Who would be king

JasondeCairesTaylorHands

Art: Jason de Caires “Hands”