none of it

it is all there
life, love, and interesting times

and i am looking past it
see only shadows and history

what is the time
the space
the atmosphere
that will let me sit quietly
and think of nothing

typically the lance would break after impact, though not before fulfilling their required purpose.

and so much for the Hussar
although the Cossack
is still more romantic

I would like you to play your Balalaika, now

I think I will shave my head
cross my legs
and think my hormones away

I am no longer a twenty three year old
and I've never had, dear Vladimir, a backbone flute,
such as yours

I am more like the little Octaroon, Pushkin,
getting shot by love
and taking two days to die

at least, he grazed his opponent

Making Krupnik on a Sunday Morning

good morning, Lev, Fyodor, Vladimir,
good morning poets of Poland, of Russian, of Ukraine,
good morning stary Dnierper, Vistual, Don,
good morning cossacks and bison,
good morning Polish horse,
I write to celebrate our love
of mountains,
lakes,
of forests deep and wide

I write to you,
good poets of another time,
another mind,
to let you know
I am alive

I drink a little vodka now,
to celebrate our ties
to times before
and after
women

The way we grow our beards
is not so different
than the way
we grow our minds

I live among the Nimjetzki now,
a people of great culture,
a love of art,
and a hatred of the French

I find them interesting
and warm
between
the rains and winds

I like their food
their beer
their women

They have the birch trees
that we love so well
because of the souls
which take refuge
in them
after love has died

and they have the dark, long winter
that drives us mad
with vodka
and sad music

they are not so different
although we name them strangers

their sausage lacks our pepper and garlic
but their humor makes up for it

but I have not come here to praise them,
I have come here to write about us,
about the Slavic poets and the snow
the Slavic soul
the lost days
or a winter's lonely drunk
a poet's need
for solitude
and the sad songs
or a morning
without
a woman's scent

On This Day in 1971, Shunryu Suzuki Left This World

my legs are crossed
and my back straight
the essence of my mind
is somewhere you have shown me
somewhere i am not

the transmission of knowledge
and the knowledge of transmission
no longer bother me

you are the Roshi
of the wind
the Buddha
in the bushes

Wednesday: Dateline Theesen

wednesday
German lessons
hiding the ADD
from the teacher
pretending to be there
when i'm not

old Heidigger stressed the being
and the being there
above the beingness
and i
can act them all

it's been forty years
in the making
this deficit of mine
and i can no longer
attend
to it
to you
to me
to anything

attention, attention,
the mind is in the room,
the garden,
the moon,
the last century,
the next,
i cannot find all the pieces
and if i did
i wouldn't sit still
long enough
to assemble them

i am a humble man
humbled by my inability
to display my proper ego
a terrible thing to see
if i could remember
where i left it

What was it then?

surely not love
I've known that
it is softer than this madness
we have shared

perhaps a passion shared
confused with love?

perhaps a need for something
nothing
anything?

I do not know you,
and I should not.

You are beautiful and wonderful
and obviously mad
and that I cannot live with
for I am growing old
and depend upon the memory
of honesty and trust
to get me through

what would i say if you sang out of tune?

i wouldn't stand up and walk out
but i'd put the tuning fork to your ear
until you could hum to it

hootenanny my mother annie
another thought that might make me
change my mind
change my shirt
and change my way of eating pasta

why do you think i cannot hear you
when you're standing right
between my ears

magnum sum
cogito ergo
sum ergo cogito
und so und so und sowieso
until the ducks and the chickens
and the me
are all elwedritchens
wading through a fountain
in the Pfalz

bringing color to the wine street
and sunshine to the wet cold north

jack and joe and john's poems (borrowed from another one of my blogs)

i was a Penn State poet in the late sixties and early seventies, hanging with Jack MacMannis and trying to get Joe Grucci to publish me. At least Jack was trying to get Joe to publish me. I was the last of the beatniks in a world moving into free love, free clothes, and free the Chicago Seven. It was the year before the Kent State Massacre. I had a bushy head and a scraggly beard and a scraggly head and a bushy beard and once went without a moustache for almost a month.There was Sartre and Beckett and Pynchon and yeah, there was Kerouac and Gary Snyder, and always, always, Hemingway and Pound. There was Zen and eventually, a Polish Pope, and my son was born and we had some very good dogs and I had some very good women in my life and some not and I was never the charm they thought I'd be. One loved Tolkien and Steeleye Span and another just liked to toke her way through her day. I smoked a briar pipe and Balkan Sobranie tobacco bought at Hall's Salvage for a dime.

schoenes wochenende

Yesterday, awedding
In an ancient barn
Today, Bad Salzuflen und zurueck, zu Fuss

The land and the people
Make me smile
Make me think
Make me happy

What more could I ask for
Save a wife, a child, a life

Alles Klar

A short visit
And I am once again lost
In this waking dream
Where time agrees
Only with consiousness
And the unconsious
Cannot understand it

I am aware of space
The folding kind
The author of the Black Hole
That is my mind
Assuming your gravity
As food for my own
Infintesmal smallness

The snallness of a Universe
Winding down

conversations on a country path (with apologies to Heidigger)

There are many ways of 'being there' , the German words Sein, Dasein, and Seiende are all used to express notions of existence and Heidigger in his "Being and Time" discussed them at length. I will talk about all three, neither in length, nor in depth, but as the artist, using Herford as his Dublin, and experiencing a day.

On this weekend, the sky was a brilliant blue, sometimes, for hours, before the clouds moved in. I had time to phrase some intelligent questions, and time to think about them. That is the differencee between philosophy and the other knowledge domains, in philosophy, the questions are always more interesting than the answers. Philosophy seeks to explain the universe.

an excerpt from Sundays in Herford

a rich cup of coffee
a brilliance of Sun
a chat with the neighbor
on the the balcony

leading into hiking round a lake
and chatting in the hut
a Sunday made for thinking
about eternities

not every Sunday
shines
not every one
is active
some are crippled by the rain
and the cold thoughts
it endues

but then the Sun will shine
in Bilefeld
and drift along the highway
to the little alley
where I live
and I will smile
and drink my coffee
knowing that I've much to learn

All Saints Day: 2004

Crisp, cool morning
In a German cemetery
No one I know living ther
But as dead as ny Father and Mother, my brother, and most of the aunts and uncles

A lot of life has passed in the few years since my manhood began and my childhood ended

I have lost loved to death
And stupidity
Have changed my life in body and in mind

Where did I leave that pride that Slavic pride which made me beam when women in bright kerchiefs said "Dobrij den' Profesor" and bowed there heads to the enormity of my thirty two years of wisdom?

on the benefits of breakfast

OK, i said, i'll eat some breakfast
bread and jam and butter and bacon and eggs and ham and salami and fruit and juice and coffee

did i forget anything?

ok, i ate my breakfast and walked 10 or so kilometers and now,
i'm hungry

Rain in the Rhineland

october day
grey
and cold
wet
the way a nightmare's wet
cutting into the bones
and drawing out the marrow

october day
grey and cold mind
dreaming the warmth
of a previous life
and waking to the reality of the coming winter's
rain
and darkness

not always so

How many times have I changed today? As Suzuki says, "not always so" and I am not always so. There is only one "me" but there is also only one suchness. To think otherwise would mean to think you are outside of the Bhudda's robe, perhaps a fly sitting on his arm. That can be so, but not always. Think about the idea of self and how silly it is when understand how many sentient beings there are and we are a part of each of them.

bei giovanni

it is a rich kneipe
full of dark wood
brass
and green plants
flowers
on the corner
roses
the last time i looked
and i am rich
spending my fortune
on dark beer and vodka
and my mind
on dark thoughts
i will go there tonight
to sit in a corner
away from the retired men
and the husbands and wives
to think away the present
with the past

an excerpt from the muse lives in bielefeld

i did not think to look at myself through her eyes
for me, the moment lasted forever
the minutes were days
the emotions were tornadoes
raging across the plain that was once my heart
i sit in a quiet room
listening to the hum of a compressor
looking toward the night
when i can sit
between retired men
and listen to meaningless words
which will free my thoughts
conversation
and a little bit of vodka
will help me sleep tonight
will quiet the echoes
in my empty apartment
in my empty soul
it will be good to hear them complain about taxes
about foreigners like myself
about the turns of history
it will be good
to drown my consciousness
and my conscience
in a shining pool
that is not her eyes

Herford, 10/18/2004

And Once Again, it Turns

There is neither clock
nor calendar
which tells the time
the way the mind
can see it

nothing from now 'til then
'tween then and now
they are inflexible
and undefined

changing in the blinking of an eye
a lasting forever

my thoughts are winter's now
cold and buried by the snow
that falls from my memory
to cover them
freeze them
to keep them in their place

there is no memory to call up
I have frozen it
then broken the ice
there will be no spring
to thaw my heart

Mouse

When you wake from a dream you may find yourself a mouse or
not find yourself at all. Be aware at all times that illusion is no more than this mouse, no less than the man dreaming it.

From Daily Zen

If you want to catch a rat
You don’t need a fancy cat
If you want to learn the principles
Don’t study fine bound books
The True Pearl’s in a hemp sack
The Buddha nature rests in huts
Many grasp the sack
But few open it.
- Shih-te

The Muse Awakens

I have always wondered what would happen if the poet who lives so deeply inside of me fought his way back to the surface. In the late sixties, I wrote poetry which was published, edited a university literary journal, and lived very close to the edge of sanity and propriety. Thirty years ago, I was young and wild, excited about all that I could find and assimilate. No experience was a bad experience. Love was free and accesible.

The eighties changed all of that. The economy was weak, films were being made about disco dancers and divorces, the social order was changed, again, and for the worse. There were no more digger stores, no more love-ins, not even the hootenannies survived. I traded my beard and my guitar for a tie and a typewriter and began a new life as a technical writer in a munitions plant, the same one I had picketed after the first moratorium against the war in Viet Nam. I kept the poet and his muse alive for awhile, even gave a reading at the Wine Cellar (a now defunct bar in Scranton, Pennsylvania) and had critical and public success. Life caught up with me, and work became a passion rather than a chore. I began thinking about process improvement and cultural breakthrough to the exclusion of all of my other interests. I gave up playing my guitar, my womanizing, and to an extent, public drunkeness.

There were short spurts of words meant only to amuse or impress, words surrounded by philosophy and mysticism, but they were only excercise, a tonic for the brain, to keep it functioning during overloads caused by bad business practices, obnoxious leadership, and the greed and cultural stupidity which was so often the practice in American business during the '70s and '80s.

The Muse is awake. She has slept inside of me for almost twenty years, knowing I would not die before she had her chance to shape me once again into a voice singing the praises of freedom and self-awareness. She is awake, and well, and urging me to write, for you.

Liebestraum

I had always thought this only a waltz
only a beautiful waltz
yet, today, it is a nocturne
a symphony
a memory I cannot explain

Tell me of time
Tell me of space
Explain them to me
for I do not understand them

How can I be here
and there
and then
and now
when I am nowhere and never?

How can this eternity be so short
when my memory of it is eternal?

The muse, fully awakened, pushes me
past the limits of my humanity
into a vast field
of dreams and fantasies
I realize but cannot rationalize

There was a yellow house
on the shore of a lake
or the bank of a river
which never was
nor ever will be
save in the eye of the poet
of the painter
or the sculptor
who lived within it

and a wall and a mountain
and a priest and a soldier
marching together
against a tide of madness
forcing it to ebb