Tag Archives: adventure

Abandon This Garbage: alcaics

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Oh wisdom seeking mendicant travelers,
your baggage and burdens are troubling handicaps;
they will not help you on your journey.
Abandon this garbage by the roadside.

If you would find some unforeseen adventure,
let drop your jaded world-weary illusions;
you have no need of those old crutches.
Use your own power to find the pathway.

Look inward, pilgrim: investigate carefully
what you have right now. Nothing is infinite
that has an ending, a start or finish;
if you see its edges, it’s not the source.

No dusty volume filling up shelving space
can provide answers; nor can just believing
in teachers, prophets, soldiers or saints.
The source of energy does not costume.

It is not waiting, patiently camouflaged
while you are wasting excuses and lifetimes.
It does its business, whether you are
singing in harmony or out of tune.

11 AUG 2006

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Against The Grain

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If knots formed in the wood
have turned the grain in a maze
that wanders no continued line
nor runs a cogent phrase,
then those who go against it
are not veering from a norm,
but rather seeking patterns
in the absence of pure form,
like turning in the skid
or tacking sails into the gale.

The true adventure starts
when more conventioned methods fail.

The salmon fights its way upstream
against the current’s flow;
a planet’s arc seems retrograde
to us, from down below;
our martyrs, saints and mystics
tap a source we do not know;
and we obsess on only what
the surface cares to show.

26 JUL 2005

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Box Haiku

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Inside the small box
that is our experience
there is nothing new:

the folded edges
let in small amounts of light
to read old news by.

But the lid is loose —
a gentle push opens it;
look, there is a sky!

If you throw your weight
against the side, you can tilt
the whole world open.

Just another box
that may look like open space
but has edges, too.

Some spend their lifetimes
thinking the box protects them;
they worship cardboard.

What lingers outside
is violent, wild and risky:
it is fully alive.

Without much warning
it may devour your small box;
why die that slowly?

Life is not easy;
anyone who denies this
is selling something.

Look! Your box and mine
share a common boundary.
Let’s leave together.

22 JUN 2004

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Our Children’s Lives: a villanelle

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Adventure here finds peril where great mystery still thrives;
it won’t respond to reason or attempts to understand
the me-o-centric universe that is our children’s lives.

A place where having grown ourselves, we’ve proved we can survive,
although what proof we have is often just in theory; and
adventure here finds peril where great mystery still thrives.

A mad morass of clique and class, peer pressure and sex drive,
that we have with experience found the strength to withstand:
the me-o-centric universe that is our children’s lives.

They simply want more everything, and each day are deprived;
and nothing is deemed good enough or goes the way it’s planned.
Adventure here finds peril where great mystery still thrives.

The constant webs they weave, and the perspectives they contrive
are foreign now, though once we were their age, and knew firsthand
the me-o-centric universe that is our children’s lives.

Successful navigation of this world is one in five;
and those who last intact are held in awe and great demand.
Adventure here finds peril where great mystery still thrives:
the me-o-centric universe that is our children’s lives.

15 APR 2004

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