words and music by john litzenberg
How does this thing work,
living without much thinking
outside your own box?
What a little world
that makes the whole of your life,
with just your own mess.
How does that make sense,
with so much beauty outside,
just past your front door?
What a sad living
you make, trapped with just yourself
and no sense of loss.
02 Jul 2025
Leave a CommentYou can twist and turn them round
and then pretend they are profound,
but words are just like prison bars
constructing cages out of sound
we carry with us, though we are
fine specks of dust from the small stars
flung out and free in space and time.
We dare not travel quite that far.
We seek the edges, so we climb
until no longer in our prime,
and then, collapse back into sleep,
almost like death, but more sublime.
We use our words to laugh and weep,
and waste them, thinking they are cheap.
By this illusion we are bound,
just echoes in a boundless deep.
27 Jun 2025
Leave a CommentIf you take an inch
when offered only a mile,
how far have you gone
beyond the wide map’s edges,
where no length is yet measured?
What good is a ruler
past the end of the known world,
where one nothing looks
so much like the next something
that both have no start or end?
Would all your spare change
gathered and stacked together,
sorted by value,
be enough to help you evolve
or just buy a stale gumball?
If you take an inch
from one side of the wide world
and add it, carefully,
to the far end’s distant edge,
is your map any bigger?
10 Jun 2025
Leave a CommentYour first breath at dawn
is not the same as the next;
light and air seep in.
How does the eye gain focus?
All illusion is chaos.
The first thing you see
when you choose to close your eyes
is an exhaled breath.
How do you know it is there?
Each summer follows a spring.
A first impression
lasts longer than the last one;
time is relative.
How do you keep it captive?
Once snow melts, it is water.
10 Jun 2025
Leave a CommentThere is no practice, way, or path,
No future place, no lingering past,
Nothing is real, and nothing dream;
Everything that is, just seems,
and is connected but still free
to think with selfish vanity
That by itself it came to be.
What folly, to imagine this
and seek elsewhere for endless bliss
That is already here and now
Without your discipline or vow.
Each breath you take is sacred space
Transcending time, and self, and place.
You are already where it’s at,
And gone beyond. Imagine that!
24 AUG 2024
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Emptiness is form;
nothing has nothing in it,
like air in a jar.
Saying the jar owns that air
is a foolish way to think.
Form is emptiness;
nothing has something to it
that is not alone.
Thinking one jar’s empty space
stops at its rim is silly.
16 JUN 2024
When it comes,
the night don’t know no difference:
right and wrong
and that thin line in between.
In the dark,
you just watch for the lightning.
All the rest?
Doesn’t matter what you mean.
Simple truths
in the shadows become complicated:
black and white
both appear as shades of gray.
Choosing sides
beyond sight of the border,
where you find
it don’t matter anyway.
When it comes,
the night don’t know no difference:
You and me
and the darkness closing in.
In the end,
it becomes uncomplicated:
birth and death
and the sacred space within.
04 DEC 2015
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