Hot coffee on lips and tongue,
steams the glasses, too.
I draw another sip.
A garbage truck roars
down the rutted street,
its wake swirling spring dust.
Strolling down the sidewalk,
an oblivious youth passes a landscaper
intently mowing a strip of lawn.
In my patio, typing away,
a lone dove quietly feeds on seed
scattered maybe an hour ago.
Ninos said I should give him something.
A dilemma, until I finally found something
he didn’t already have.
John Williams in my ears.
A soundtrack to the universe
dancing and prancing all about.
On good and moderate days, I agape all things.
On an ill-tempered day, well,
let us not go there.
You want my love?
Then you must share it
with the rest of the mystery.
When was it I stopped crying?
When I saw the universe
for the dream it is.
This moment
is all I could ever imagine
letting go.
Three joggers pass by,
minding the social distancing
marking this modern time.
Drifting down the river of time,
I wonder at its mystery
and the falls ahead.
Can any cloud be more dark
than the stoical cynicism I bear
towards the dream dancing in my mind?
Sometimes I laugh hard and long.
Whether with or at,
I’m not telling.
The mailman cometh.
Netflix, bills, and all sorts of throwaways.
Santa Claus in blue.
The universe is an ever-mutating show of quantum design.
How it came to this, how it continues on,
only fools imagine knowing.
What is there to transcend,
when the moment from which awareness peers,
is every figment you could yearn to be.
A long life.
So many agonies, so many ecstasies.
A new day of the same underway.
At the sink, eyes closed,
I brush well-worn teeth.
What an immensity, that chasm.
Water, transcendent source of life …
… vapor … liquid … solid … back and forth with such ease.
Too boggling for words.
A lifetime wandering the stage.
A lifetime full of adventures.
Not much longer now.
Love and friendship.
Hate and animosity.
Such tenuous intrigues.
Hands barely working, always painful.
Most everything else in a more gradual decline.
So far.
Adrift in the ether of awareness;
consciousness swirling around and about.
No destination known.
Had I known what I know today,
would have only made for another trail of discovery
in the helter-skelter of dreamtime.
Needs no longer an issue,
I delved into wants, and found them wanting.
And so was born a philosopher.
Walking the sandy beaches,
waves lapping and crashing upon the shoals,
toes feel the sea beckoning me home.
Left alone, I am my own device.
What need for any other?
I am rock, I am island, unto Self.
The flies … the flies … the flies …
whiz about … anywhere, everywhere …
the swatter can’t keep up.
A world filled with stuff
of every conceivable make and model,
and more to come.
Polarization at every turn.
Imagination … the combustion of consciousness …
locked in ceaseless struggle for survival.
Sugar … sugar … sugar … in every form and fancy.
A daily routine for addicts who waddle,
from binge to binge.
I imagine,
therefore, I imagine I am.
And the recording plays on and on and on …
Mother Nature, in all her combustion.
Has not yet hit upon a way to eradicate the human cancer.
She will take another stab at it tomorrow.
When it comes to this Grand Mystery,
why would anybody believe, trust, imagine, accept,
anyone else truly knows any more than they?
All this stuff, piles in every nook and cranny.
Who else would even free want it,
when they already have so much of their own.
An agnostic mind, knowing it knows nothing,
freely wanders, anonymously wanders, serenely wanders,
though the madness of a delusional illusion.
How clouds do wander the sky.
Here and there, so oblivious, so unaware, so unmindful,
of that moment in which all genesis abides.
I putter, therefore I think I am.
But what am I, but awareness locked in a vat of flesh and bones,
witnessing a figment of imagination wandering an illusory matrix
of space and time.
Alone again, naturally.
The world, the cosmos, naught but a mind-body dream.
Just the way I likes it.
An illusory matrix, chock-full of vain dreams of becoming.
But what more can any truly be,
but the way it is, right here, right now.
How tiring, how wearing, some people become.
Some more quickly than others.
Curious how often they show up.
Some daze just grate unmercifully on the nerves.
Nothing goes right, the mind-body is askew.
What a curious thing to be born.
Lying in the darkness between sheets
I patiently await the oblivion,
the little death of this night’s slumber.
Older than the stars, younger than the moment,
unborn, undying, I am, I Am,
in the once upon a time.