I will be what I am

sometimes love wakes, sometimes it slips                                                                                                                               away
to where love likes to wait
 
at the dark world’s core, by the firegate
then to erupt in flame
 
then to consume in warmth a little while
then to retreat and freeze and shatter
 
i will not play hostage to this little game
i will be the flame within all matter
 
when the fire fades and the cold rains come
i will be the lasting ember
 
i will be the coals that carry from fire to fire
i will remember
 
i will sing out into the winter night
i will glow hotly in the stinging rain
 
i will brighten in your hand
i will light the dark terrain
 
i will touch you with the original love
i will show you the original plan
 
i will send forth the warmth that will                                              consume this world
I will be what I am

To the Great Turtle

I do not forget you this morning as sweet and innocent snow
blankets the winter earth that rests upon your back. I am not unmindful of your selfless task. I think of you, bodhisattva turtle, standing needless on metaphysical thin air, gazing with sober reliability in your office of Ultimate Ground for our fleeting seasons, our crystalline displays of landscape and weather, the delicate wide transparency of falling snow that lights my heart. I want to know what lights your heart as well. Are you really as dutiful and faceless as all that? There must be for you something as beautiful as this snow; something as promising as the pond's edge and the dream of flies. Some way you plunge, even with our sorrows on your back, into a wetter, deeper darkness of cool mud;
into the wide serenity of the morning lake.

The Comedian

Dear friend, I would like to exchange my consciousness
with yours -- only to find our sand paintings smoothed and erased by the same sea. Take my hand as we are drawn again
into the same undertow, cast out again onto the same moment, same gray sky. This body is a wish-fulfilling gem.
I would wish for you to know it just a little. I would like
to hear your laughter in the surf.

It's never new, never old, this gray morning of melting snow, spring in the tundra, noisy back streets of Istanbul,
paddling home on the Orinoco, picking the dump outside
of Bangalore. This heartache of empty space.

This body temple has no walls. Consciousness burns
through the fat on the frying pan, till all is cast iron, ring
of pure ore. This belly and this brain are warmth rising from another star. The way the mind arranges things is just an exercise in creating a world. There's no real truth in it. Imagine:
one thing separate from another, distributed in space -- the illusion of a master set designer! This morning's glimpse behind
the set, how sweet -- there's the producer eating a sandwich --
but no need to blow the whistle. The cops shrewdly
mailed out free name tags to all the bank robbers,
who shrewdly decided not to wear them.

Do you find something friendly in all this? So many lives,
one diarist leaving no one out. Go ahead, take an hour. It's Saturday. You reach for a book of poetry: poems from everywhere --
with the same careful notation, same itch of perception, same commedia del'arte in every heart. I love to read my poetry out loud. I want to exchange my consciousness with yours.
I want to tell a joke in every language.
"Poetry," says Jerry Seinfeld, "is bad stand-up comedy."

But we don't need those laugh lines anymore. The wide open door of the senses is purity itself.