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Tag: knowledge

Out of Plumb: a caudate sonnet

Published on December 4, 2010

When will these foolish notions dissipate
and take their place with dreams, safe in the grave?
How long must I be some grand idea’s slave,
locked in an endless struggle with my fate?
How much of life will pass me by, too late,
while I watch on the shore for bigger waves,
and in the name of revolution, save
myself for just the hope of something great?

How many think it better to abstain,
and by some grand denial, grasp the truth;
their conscience scrubbed so clean it glows,
a life spent in denial, lack and pain?
How much they waste of energy and youth;
and was it worth it? None will ever know.

Ideas come and go;
the truths that seem so evident right now,
next spring, too, will be turned beneath the plow.
Come back in from the bough;
the universe requires no martyrdom,
no sacrifice. It is not out of plumb.

04 DEC 2010

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For Starlight: cancione

Published on November 24, 2010

I cannot claim to know her;
at best, I’ve mapped the surface:
those little nooks and crannies
that she feels like revealing.
More knowledge would not help me;
to understand more deeply,
would take a lifetime’s effort
and skills beyond my grasping.

But what she deigns to show me,
that small part I can handle,
in just over a decade
has become sun- and moon-rise:
my alpha and omega.
There is no life without her,
no breath, no flowing current;
she is my one and only.

They say that men are simple;
we eat and sleep and venture
so few steps from our comfort,
content in our small fiefdoms,
but crave the complication
of woman’s advanced nature
to give our lives their meaning,
some sense of awe and beauty.

I can’t refute that logic;
and for myself, I wonder
where I would go for solace
if she were not here with me.
I know I cannot claim her;
more truthfully, she owns me:
and I live in her service,
my payment is her love.

24 NOV 2010

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This is the oyster

Published on April 24, 2006

This is the oyster; why seek for the pearl?
There’s no escape plan for leaving this world
in my religion: no hereafter gold,
no burning embers, no cold of Sheol.

This is the medicine; why seek a pill
to flee reality, thinking you will
by any action change the universe,
except, perhaps, to make it a bit worse
with senseless struggle against so-called fate,
hedging your bets hoping it’s not too late.

This is the path you’re on; why second guess?
No point in leaving this life in a mess,
hoping salvation will come undeserved,
praying the universe doesn’t throw curves.

There is just oyster; that one grain of sand
turned to a pearl in the palm of your hand
is just some excrement to soothe the pain
of the endless ocean. Time and again
it waits at the shoreline to carry us out,
waits while we ponder, apostize and doubt.

This is the world that is; why seek one more?
Who knows what waits beyond the tide’s great roar?
This is your heaven, or this is your hell.
It too will pass away, after a spell.

24 APR 2006

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Confucious

Published on March 21, 2006

The words that rend my soul’s speech are my own;
they are not borrowed from another’s lines.
From someone else’s field, of their seeds sown,
come not the fruits due me at harvest time.

To posit otherwise is to admit
my life only an actor’s walk-on role,
with no responsibility or wit
of my own — no true joy, love or control.

So, each new moment becomes mine to make,
immersed in self-wrought ecstacy or hell.
How then, to keep from making more mistakes,
or at least, to recover from them well?

The secret: admit what you do not know.
From that small bit of knowledge, all things flow.

21 MAR 2006

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Socrates

Published on June 2, 2005

Each grain of sand that populates
the endless span of shore
seems to be some small answer,
yet implies that there is more
to knowing than to learn by rote
some formulas or rules;
and when compared to the wide ocean
leaves wise men as fools
who would describe their world without
first knowing who describes,
gathering in wild opinions
like a thief collecting bribes.

To grasp the edge of the unknown,
and feel its sharp lip’s rasp
leaves only scars on seeking hands
that would some great truth grasp.
And truth? What sage would dare to dream
their vision broad enough
to take in what has breadth and depth
beyond man’s feeble bluff?
What theories we may formulate,
imagining the range
of life to be within our limits
seems exceeding strange.

If time is our sole instrument
for judging deeds and such,
how sad that it be squandered
limping along on the crutch
of preconceived ideas, formed
in sterile beds of thought
assuming constancy the norm
that drives how we are taught.
What good a single grain of sand
if man is on the beach
and for the want of one small speck
thinks the sea out of reach?

2 JUN 2005

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Rabelais

Published on May 6, 2005

I would un-Crowley Rabelais
to taste, unplagiarized
the simple, yet sarcastic truths
that Aleister disguised:

that man, if left the sole device
of acting with free will
would, after some adjustment,
neither harm, debase or kill

but would instead seek Beauty, Truth,
and other worthy aims
eschewing constant upmanship
and endless win-lose games,

learning to laugh, first, at one’s self,
to recognize, and know,
that wisdom’s parent is compassion
freed from the ego.

I wonder, sometimes, why so few
who hunger after power
spend all their time out of control
and memorize for hours

arcane instructions, complex spells,
and pompous, trumped up rites,
the rule of mankind, not themselves,
the target in their sights.

Oh, Rabelais, your rapier wit
so sadly has been turned
into a comedy for fools,
and nothing has been learned.

06 MAY 2005

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The Food (for Thought) of the Gods

Published on January 10, 2005

Who decides what lives, what dies,
based on more than the needs of some,
but on what is best for the entire world
so balance can be maintained?

Who thinks they have the right to choose
that some should flourish while others fail,
that their kind is much more essential
and so deserves more space, more food?

The gods of course.

For only the gods act out of concern
for the whole; their own interests are not part
in any way of the actions made.

The point is this:

if you benefit in any way from a decision
to kill or not to kill today;
if you gain more ground, or food, or power
by taking others’ things away,
you’re not a god.

This is not your dominion.
You are not the most auspiciously born.
You are only a small part of the whole.

And if you act as if you’re a god,
without that knowledge,
you will only result in destroying everything.

You will fail.

And you will find excuses for your failure,
like “man is a fallen creature,
bound by sin to make mistakes”
because you don’t really think so —
you think man is a god,
and that the world just doesn’t work right.

Well, it just doesn’t work the way you think it does.

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