Love at a Reasonable Price

sweet potato, vegetables, turmeric, garlic, cumin, olive oil, salt and pepper
Dance, yoga, meditate, pull-ups and dips, various push-ups
Energy glow from center-line out / alternate with think/feel glow
Health how?
Self, relationships, communities, nation, world
Healthy how?
Inside out, accept the mystery, each moment a prayer for wisdom and to feel our way towards the better away the worse.
Healthy how?
I need you
but how can I be any good for you?
the gathering blobby evil must be off-ramped
but how to combine elan compassion competence here and now enough to make decent lemonade out of rotten lemons and hydrogenated high fructose corn syrup soaked in three hundred artificial flavors and a thousand artificial colors?
Healthy how?
And aren’t we supposed to be selling Pure Love?
Pure Love, Something Deeperism, wisdom meme — isn’t there anything in all that to lift this operation out of this doldrum that threatens to snap the hull stave the ship founder her upon a sea calm blue and sunny for mile upon motionless mile?

Intimate
Specific
This portal’s for you
And you alone
It is your path
Out of this shared illusion
Into the One Light
That Eden saw play

Death is always ready
To step in
When your body
Loses its balance
You think it’s far away
But it’s always all over you
Coating you, waiting
For one little misstep

If Death is stalking you
You can’t ask for love
You have to be readying yourself
For a solo trip

If Death has marked you
You can’t start a revolution
You must say goodbye to
The world and its projects

Death’s a sleepy headed
Companion
But you still can’t
Sneak past

A few talismans arranged at random
on a small redbrown table with a thick gloppy finish

a paper plane made of shiny silvery paper
a yellow table tennis ball settled into a knot
a single jack, once red, but with the paint chipping to reveal silver steel
a mixed tape a friend made back when we were still friends
a bit of shriveled orange peel
a black crow feather
a large swath of the Milky Way Galaxy
a clipping of God’s toenail even though that’s doubly impossible
an empty brown beer bottle without any paper left that I still sometimes think of returning for that long overdue dime
an audiophile of something outrageous Jesus once said to the Buddha when they were still pretty young and given to gloating
a

Never mind.

Rewind.

Start from

fuzzy caterpillar scrunch fore to aft
up the pussy willow branch
next to the river
where we lost

Not so fast so far.

Restart.

Start from

dollar bill kissed goodbye
by his thin wan lips
then handed over
by his long mottled veiny hands
to her with pink fingernails manning the mechanical cash register
ca Ching

nope

Alive or dead
he’s already failed
The bounty and the poison
The thug and his lackeys
The hamburger and its special sauce
The lie and its symphony
Never mind
Alive or dead
it was over before he started
it was over before Vesuvius rained down that awful powder
it was over before the asteroid dust blackened the sky, froze the earth, tipped over the thunder lizards
it was over before Jesus stepped through the eye of the needle to thread every destiny contained within this spacetime, which he did while wearing a Christmas shirt figuring a wreath of thorns, which he wore with irony, which was not a metaphysical irony, but merely a teenage coming of age claiming humor for him and his friends and their generation and the stars to come
it was over when I thought I was Elvis Presley bending the big steel microphone towards my long white teeth and the crowd went crazy, feeling the moment eternal, glowing with the passion of well-fed youth.

Why should the Lord of me a nation build?
And why should I care about descendants?
I seek no promise, nor need one fulfilled
here on this world of make-believe events.

And now He tests me by naming my child
His blessing upon me?! A child lives,
A child breathes; he feels to think; and, mild,
should grow into his own estate. Who gives
permission to kill an innocent?
What God would foist mere history
upon humankind, that we might live by hints,
and put our faith in what pretend we to be?

Now binding Isaac on the altar, I’m
slow-moing every moment; and thus
I stretch this act out to the edge of time,
to wait out the Lord himself, if I must.

And Isaac lies so very still. He knows
this knife now aimed and sinking at his throat
will never slice the neck through which I flow
from dust to more and grander dust. We float
together forever. We will wait out space
and time, man, woman, God. We’ll take our place
among stones and sand, where winds dissolve each
wild, reckless claim to solid certain reach.

Man’s nothing compared to God the Wise
And God’s more constant than the sun
But God’s face changes in our eyes
And though His will must always be done,
that will is not always as it seems
to us flinchy squawky foolish little things.

In crystal shard or sky-clear orb
By upward falling waterfall
or blackhole flower absorbing
all the shit we ever fought for,

The Knight of Faith will clean his blade
in waters pure as snow that melt
where mountaintops through clouds do wade
and everything we ever thought or felt
evaporates to bright blue sky,
recalling only Purest Love:
forgetting all the surrounding lies —
every pull, every shove.

In mystic lands where ogres pant and wheeze
and Yetis hide their heavy tracks,
where pilgrims march upon their knees,
with crosses strapped upon their bowing backs,

The Knight of Faith may slay his hopes
and fears with violence thieved like fire
from the gods, with indifference, shadow and smoke
he borrowed from the Fates — too eternal to conspire,
too blessed to nit-pick, to infinite to care
what people believe do say, how they wear their hair.

The Knight of Faith his shield he polishes
A mirror round and perfect to espy
Medusa’s fanged and wriggling locks — which is
not needed now. She’s changed I don’t know why
but anymore she keeps the dark magic under a hat
and you can just ask her help and she’s cool like that.

All around every town rubble lays
fallen cities with dragon carcasses
their broken necks splintered this way
and that in the dusty clutter
homes churches fields: a bloody circus
dead peasants clergy nobles and others
who strayed by chance into swift blade
of our Knight his Faith a battle for to wage.

By virtue of the Absurd more heroic
than the hero who live in the open
in morality in values universal

By virtue of the Absurd more wise
than the wise who pray that God reveal the way
to a gentle kind resolve that ties,
interlines heart and mind into the soul that shines
through everything everyone the bells that ring across and through the sun

By virtue of the Absurd more faithful
than the humble churchgoer who prays for everything
who puts God first and lives only to ever sing
the praises due a God of perfect holy Love.

Knight of Faith:
Will God tomorrow slaughter me
like fatted cattle roasting sweetly
on altar stone? My faith I see
a blazing start of art discreetly yet metely
reorienting us all
to health wisdom orders that don’t fall
to meanness, folly, vanity, dishonesty
whathaveyou bullshit commodities

Discarded:

I couldn’t find that heart with space
for worries mine, who might face
with challenges local near
or communal far.

Abe: I’m lonely, tired; don’t want to die alone.

God: You’re crazy. You can’t tell what’s real.

Abe: Every wife was a daydream. Every success
just some kind of dress-up playtime afternoon.

God: You can’t talk in the mystic. There’s no words
here.

Abe: Too soon old; too late wise.
Too far afield; a horse collapses
into tall meadow grasses as short-lived
hoppers thwack triumphantly on all sides,
not guessing the impending dissolution
of their flimsy segmented
hard-skinned, sloshy-gutted bodies.

God: You can’t feel in the mystery.
The mystic’s before ideals and feels.
You cannot mope around inside Pure Love.

Abe: I thought I could feel my way
from inside out. To wisdom, health
and even as wide as a nation, as commonwealth.
But I can only watch as the Fates
absentmindedly turn me off,
one switch-flip at a time.

God: You don’t know what’s going on
And the mystic’s no place to discover
details
like
if so and so likes you,
if your planet survives,
if the weather improves.

Abe: I need someone to talk to, someone
who believes the things I say, someone
who forgives the lines I draw without pretending they never happened.
The mystic’s too lonely when you’ve so little faith.

God: Oh ye of little faith!
Why don’t you melt yourself
down into the formless explosion at the core of everything,
a-shining bright out every moment.
Right there in your own consciousness
is the nothing that’s everything, is
the Love
that swamps all like a Light so bright it burns through every edge, every boundary, ever particular —
the Love
that’s All.

Abe: I don’t find It. I grow sleepy.
I don’t want It. I just want a wife
and a safe place to hide with her —
to shelter with her out of the hurly-burly,
away from the crime, apart the lie.

God: You’ll have to shift your expectations.
You’ll have to prefer heaven to earth.
You’ll have to choose Love over touch.

Abe: A wooden sailing ship drifting farther and farther
from course; her crew less and less
interested in their journey, more and more
resigned to fading drying out settling down
as parched white bones
on a deck of fallen planks
on a ship who glides
forever to the edge of the sea
and then forever totters
over those falls
from which no knowledge returns.

In the spaceship my mouth feels weird.
A window dome’s for gazing at the stars
We go tumbling through worm holes that veer
from galaxy to galaxy. We go really far.

In the spaceship my throat is catching crumbs.
We steer by melding our minds to machinery.
Onboard we’ve restaurants, rivers, parks for fun.
And we visit planets. To change the scenery.

In the spaceship my fingers fumble around.
None dare attack us — our weapons levels suns.
We’re peaceful. It’s easy when you’re safe and sound.
We write poetry, books, symphonies; program worlds for fun.
It’s easy when your mind can stretch as wide as thought.
We don’t brag; we’re grateful for, and careful with, what we’ve got.

In the spaceship I cannot regain my balance or stop
the floor from spinning.
I think we might be crashing
actually

Abe: Forever floating for a moment ‘fore
that final step when I fall like Satan down
while tattered wings shrill rustling whistling sing
athwart my bursting ears

Sara: You seem the same as you always have seemed

Abe: A ghost is dead but stuck on earth to haunt
expired premonitions of some soon
arriving destinies. I’ve walked beyond
my life to living haunt myself, outrunning death

Sara: Sounds like an existential stand to me
or some other gimmick of desperate thoughts
in times of great leisure and little soul

Abe: I (inside-out) walk the edge between alive
and dead — where God with mortal most overlaps.
No fear nor hope of future separates
my mind-in-motion from the God who makes
all
through the shakes
of Holy thought

Sara: Then ask your buddy Lord and God
restore the bounce your steps once kept
and carry our venture past our lonely schemes

Abe: Here held always on the precipice
we dance with Holy Spirit in mystic time
beyond all times and spaces. Form of Good
where wisdom past all notions dwells
A perfect Formless Form of Purest Love
Ascend we there by forgetting every known,
remembering only the joyful giggling Light
beyond feelings and ideas

Sara: You’re spirit soars on angel wings
but body heart and mind all like stones sink
And what of
Our shared purpose to sail this ship
away breakers smashing jagged stones,
towards open seas where once again
the many choose what’s best
by witnessing one another
as drops of perfect Love?
Our goal’s
a delirious
a fever dream.
Why can’t we please start again?

Abe: We must go into the mystic
as sacrificial virgins leap
with open arms into the fire
their tribe dresses up as God

Sara: Your leap of faith’s a pathetic
collapse. If God is Love, God’s mystery
is found in fearless relentless Love
for everyone. Not gimmicks that scheme
salvation meets success meets animal satiety

Abe: What do you want from me anymore?

Sara: Some navigable path to the man
I married for his smile that shone
for all but loved his wife enough
to lodge a million shards of Light
into his body pressing hers
into his smile hearing hers
into his strength cuddling hers

Abe: I have to get well or else we’ll never win
the game for everyone the game the way we’ve pledge to play

Sara: It has to be Okay either way
I need that much faith from you
We don’t have to anything
except each other love
so gently complete
as to dissolve ourselves
and, a Love without bournes,
become All and Nothing,
love everyone and no one,
forget our perfect strategy

Abe: I don’t see how that’s different from what I’m saying

Sara: It’s different from what you’re doing

Abe: Well how? What? I just …

Sara: Come with me to see the sparkling sea
Come take a walk and be just you and me
two no ones in a nowhere that no one recalls
but that was nice that was cozy that was home
enough for two intertwining lifetimes

A bright December sun to overrun
the sky and burn a yellow fang across
the wide’ning river, shimmying beyond
the rounded bournes — still lightly a-slosh
on outer cusp of sleepy sound.
In a retired whaling town.

Hedge trimmed way back, exposing branches raw
with edges beveled sharp to fit straight sides.
A bluejay tilted under and along
a slanted bone. Then he dropped back and flied
away, his coat of blues and smock
a fluffy white with grayish shocks

But thirty-five has never felt so warm!
A lonely walk a Christmas at noon
it opens onto universes born
as flame on flame will leap to fire’s crackling tune.
Is eternity available is energy infinite
can we catch and through the God’s very Light
to heal these overlapping spots
my place yours too the nation’s tattered thoughts

Aglow with spirit energy I heal
slack jagged lines within this froggy throat —
old boring gullet now I always feel,
suggesting vaguely darkly I go float
on flowery barges, ‘less I remember
how Light to light to healthy motion flows.
When Socrates proves a theorem in embers
or sand or tablet clay and soft, we know:
We’ve lived before, approved this math before.
When Jesus heals the cripple we recall some door
through body heart and mind.
Must open now in time?

Aglow with spirit energy I spread
as wide as every universe and fix
what ails our body politic’s smashed head.
I do this gently — nothing forced; no tricks.

But all I ever want’s to share my glow
with yours — for us for real now us to know.

Can we, snug-joined, find enough Light to light
our way out this mistake here catching sharp —
in stumbling throat, through sliding land, at right
tight angles to the happy home where cross our hearts.

They cross each other and twist around each other and grow together into a vine that can most surely make everything all better I just know it

Would you please pull it together and go
deep into the magic mystic fire
that’s sure to carry, rather than merely show
what works and what is anyway higher
and wiser, where we can all win by all
together heeding and answering the call.

Come on!
You need to glow
from the inside out
and coat your body
with
as you radiate
out
the Love
that

What does it do?