'NOW'
Through parted curtains,
as if by a magnet,
I am drawn to the window
by the pull of the full moon,
slowly filtering, distilling
from my brain, all sense of time;
her stark, barren presence
through aeons, endless ages
dissolved in endless space,
and the endless hours, turning
round my ticking, measured clock
chiming on the midnight hour,
as if it borrowed tomorrow
from her light and shade, -
time is the illusion,the Maya
as yesterday's rain-
gone forever to the drain,
by her lifeless, embodied dust
and hollow, hypnotic sway
the restless oceans move
and as the tide proves
when the sun sheets her most,
an apparition like a ghost
haunting with her steady glow
echoing nothing but ' now '.
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NOT OF ERGOT
(Vision)
Am I ready for the substance
of the bodhi tree
I will drink the cactus rain
awaiting glory
but will I ever be the same
where these sand dunes blow
if my time has come and gone
will I ever know
and is that water just the heat
tempting me to cross
are those desert blossoms my
infinite regress
will I be lost unto myself
if the vision stops
I will lay just where I am
'til the penny drops.....
Tarried with the unborn self and
through the unborn eye
made that green oasis our
caravanserai
and now as one to part with ease
set down the camel on it's knees.
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TOWARDS VEDANTA
How light is time when by the fire
the coal is emptied from the hold,
for in the embers of an hour
came moments glowing in the cold;
impervious to wind and rain
that lash at midnight on the pane
when life is never what it seems
and Pretzel nuzzles through her dreams
in closer contact with the game
around these residues of flame ;
through elongations of the kind
that see the clock stopped on the wall,
much closer to the twilight mind
the realisation of it all.... ...
As charcoal into ash transforms
fuliginous into the air -
am I the dreamer of a dream
embodied and reclining there?
Awakened by a ticking clock
the distance, crowing as a cock;
The bread of life comes with the dawn
it's ancient mill still treads
the way the world goes round.
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HAIKU - TRAIL
(Garden)
The wild strawberry
tastes like nothing else I know
shy behind the leaf
below my plimsole
I see a viper slither
to a timbered bole
while the children, lithe
surprising with hide and seek
echoing strange myth.
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ROCKING CHAIR
(To my beloved wife)
Hidden well behind the eyes
mystery in deepest black,
what I do not know I see
in the mirror looking back !
Feel your pulse and count you here,
catch the daydream on your face-
everyone is somewhere else,
somewhere in that inner space !
You move like the pendulum
gazing through as in between,
you, my disembodied love
all you are runs through my vein;
from the Hippocrene, you are
on the cusp of time and space,
you break through as muse, my love,
all I have is in your face !
Emptiness is what we are
omnipresent, like the air,
you resolve my universe
sitting in that rocking chair !
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CAUSAL
I walk a cliff - top wood -
a place to help me grow
as from the soil of my mind,
perhaps to change a troubled mood,
that 'path less travelled by' is good;
a spider's web, suspends the space
between two tall trees
that seem to transcend their roots,
in cycles to the light they climb
nourished by the stream of time;
and in the dew, drips something new
where fungi sprout their magic as poems do:
The wood responds to what I feel -
the hawk above, the vole below
would have the spider catch the fly !
Would have the earth catch the sun
which is a star, milking it's inside,
so too, it's inside is milking
the inside of the causal spirit.
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ANOTHER GOLGOTHA ?
I think of that old tree,
( still dear to me,)
like God’s fingers, clutching the earth -
feeding below the canopy above ;
but what have we made of it
with man’s inhumanity,
slicing the bole, felling as timber
to have lost a canopy of love ?
What have we made of it since then ?
What have we done ?
What shall we ever do -
in the same vein
when the whole forest has gone ?
Plant for a sapling and hope
for someone to kill and deify ?
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I KNOW
In the blink of an owl
I would miss it,
save for the eye - catching moon
to that shooting star, -
as the span of my life
to the age of the earth ;
from cradle to grave
I would miss it -
that soil disturbed for no one,
the bat to the belfry there
is more akin to me,
more than that clock-hand click
on the rotting flesh below;
the cause of all is hidden here
by virtue of what it has to show, -
what the eye - catching moon
has shown me, I know.
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STORM THOUGHT
(Willing to know by not knowing)
Weather-vane gone mad
spinning like a top
how still these graves
the lightning veins light up
and like a bowman there
who points with a spark
directing my eyes
in following the dark
to the void remote
mystically wrought
immanent, deep
and closer than my thought,
emptiness fulfils
faith in the obscure
from distant star-light
the comet weeps no more.
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SPIN
(Swept up in delusion)
I long to draw the inside out
dissolve that I might ever be
no other than the cause of me,
not this tornado of a self
that spins around it's inward eye
unmindful of the path it takes
to dissipate into a sky.
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OUT OF REACH
In a fog disabled
and blinded by degree
and dumb to say how I began
to drift away from me,
what mystery am I
that I should have no root ?
I watch the sea, the turning tide
as turns my inside out,
discarded and forlorn
washed up as on a beach
that feeling I am somewhere else
unborn and out of reach.
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ALAN WATTS (Vallejo)
(Gratitude)
The moment 'now ' was his and yet
the clock still gobbled up his time,
near three-score years and more like miles
that flickered past a speeding train
where he somehow applied the breaks
that passengers might see again,
but at the buffers end the sadness
each tipple tripped him down to zero,
I have my vision in the sun
under the brim of his sombrero.
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FACTORY
(Bondage)
The sad syndrome of nine to five
on bread alone I cannot thrive
work ethics perpetrate like sin
when I am out the clock reads in,
what rots the mind is its detention
men's souls are always in suspension
beyond the entrance to the gate
and always there and never late.
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All poetry and text copyright © Roy K. Austin
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