22 August 2019

Again – this poet is going into non-poetic mode (or am I). I’ll still post poetry – most is not on this site and being prepared under a separate manuscript – I’ll show some soon. Meanwhile – another day.

Intentions. You cannot turn a horse or a bike to the right if you are looking to the left. The simple attitude and azimuth of one’s attention will change the body’s response… even the horse is sensitive enough to this. So what is your intention… how specific, where is it stored within you, how often do you revisit and reaffirm? If you do not know, then where are you going? Do not take it too seriously… just hold it and go about your life and you’ll see where you go – or rather, you’ll go where you see.

A teacher galloped his horse back and forth across town exclaiming, “where is my horse!? where is my horse!?” The people would shout to him as he sped by, “Sidi! but you are on your horse! It is underneath you!” The teacher responded just as anxiously, “Yes, I know… but WHERE is my horse!?”

Just because you are doing as you wish, WHAT specifically is your wish? The teacher knew where the horse was relative to him, but he was asking where was the horse in the grander scheme of this universe. Your intention is your horse, you’re on your horse… so where is your intention?

While visiting my son’s guidance counselor, I noted a note stuck to her computer… a mantra of sorts… it read, “Wake, Pray, Slay.” And I got to thinkin’

Wake – become aware of yourself… “in” aware of “out” and “out” aware of “in.”

Pray – every word uttered, every thought, each step from the bedside to the mirror to the car to the office… EACH is a prayer. Speak only when you know God (and/or your highest self) is listening, and listen only when you know God is speaking (Abu al Hassan Kharaqani said this). Even the scuffling of your feet on the pavement makes a sound – a prayer. It is a sound you make AND a sound you hear… even you are listening and speaking to you.

Slay – seize the moment, win the ecstasy of presence… be the frolicking child of the now and own the world with each fraction of second. For to wake and and pray IS too slay.

First day of sophomore year for my son…at a new school. He is trying to be present in each step… I hear the blow dryer going and soon he’ll be dressed and we’ll be eating breakfast. Getting to your seat in the classroom is no more important than taking the first step out off of the bus… or the second, or the twentieth. If it is 500 paces to the front door, then you have 500 prayers and places to visit.

My daughter will be off to Norway soon – any day, provided she wakes up to catch the plane on 26 August. Sometimes it seems like she’s lifted her rudder out of the water and lowered the main sail of her ship… she is in the rolling ocean. And you know what, THAT’S O’KAY! I’m the dad in the crow’s nest, looking for high sea’s – preparing to shout down to her, “raise the main lassie, we’re coming about!”

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20 August 2019

A dear friend suggested I blog… so, I’m blogging under “Daily Scribblings.”

This is a page where I will simply compose thoughts in prose and see where it goes.

There are creatures in the trees… night crooners and sqealers, squeekers and screechers, crawlers and jumpers. I, on the other hand, am a scribbler, a scrawler, a tapper; here in a foam sack. Each of us is perched and proclaiming, waiting to pair up.

The cricket and I are poets – you are here reading my words, but who is melting to the impassioned pleas of the cricket outside my window. I am snapping my fingers in approval of its poem – all the night is a stage for bards.

If I told you a coyote ran through my dream last night… 300 meters away, along the crest of a snowy hill; would you stop reading this? I was playing chess with an absence I cannot name. When the coyote noticed us, me and my companion, “not her,” it stopped and turned toward us. As it approached, its grinning eyes filled mine with anticipation… my Knight and her Bishop lowered their swords. Make your next move coyote…

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A Heart is Contraband

O’ masked heart
steal this hidden houri
from the bold arms of dubiety.

O’ heart, my captain,
sail us swiftly through az-Zuqaq
to the Tibouda promontory
Let me hear her whisper
“Espana”
And save this ship from peril.

Sweetly place her silhouette
anywhere, be it
rippling Arizona dawn
Or Dusted Andalusian sunset

Hold her henna’d hands
A kiss for every fingertip
in a lighthouse
on Ras Uarc.
Shall we die here, my love and I,
or forever live
alive,
apart.

Allow me to be her thief,
her gentle highwayman
in whose embrace of certainty she’ll find
a heart that too,
is contraband.

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The Antiquity of Memory

Joy’s carousel of vision quivers,
stretching her arms of imagination,
my ears are tickled by the din and screech of children
Jumping rope, tossing lucky’s,
and buzzing dilly dally between playground sundries.

Where once, the soles of our soul’s shoes,
Pressed in red earth dust, stirred
In love’s fleet and gentle turns
the hems of their khirqas, gray and frayed
So sinuously rising, falling, in sighs sublime
Poems, we maundering bards wept
In Rose petal tears,
That taste of blood moonshine.

Sun rays still dress the clouds in blushing rose,
as the specter of Sakki serves the mey at dusk,
Oh, so elegant a pour,
His intoxicating touch.
And the trees beyond the golshan
stopped their sway to listen
and a ghost dancing on the ridge line
Stopped his sway to listen.

There is an radiant abode in the ruins
Where memories shrink in the shadows
And catch fire, like wolves’ eyes in a forest black,
crackled, scaling cinder skin
Oh, unplayed oud
thy hollow weeps quietly,
in rosewood, cut and hewn, and tears within.

Our hands raw from working the garden,
thorns and briars take their share of blood
Yet flower petals remain in our aprons
Gathered in the rain of wind and effort and love
Let’s reach for those silken lucky’s and toss them in
on the court of laylay,
Joy’s carousel of vision quivers, and listens.

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The Art of Love

The world is our palette and into it we dip the brush of imagination. The canvas is the veil between light of who we are and the perception of tangible life. I see my beloved as a multi-hued silhouette – as much of she can be seen through the fabric of her canvas – and my image of what she imagines is a function of how she engages the palette of the tangible world. And I see her through my owe veil, between the light of who I am and the mediums onto which I gaze. There are layers of fabric between each and all of us… translucent, but not transparent. This is where the magic between beloved and Beloved happens… how much of the fabric can be lowered; what lights get through?

Can we separate artist and beholder, art and the artist, imagination and its artifact? It is said that art is the path on which we travel toward our greatest works. Love is our greatest work of art. And do we even need the external world in which to dip the brush of creativity. Within the soul of the beloved reader is a patient universe waiting to be written. Perhaps, this is not so different for visual art… Like woman, we are not created, we are creator.

Art is all that is incapable of being contained by the soul; that and more… the spilling over of a secret story, whereby its conclusion is preserved in the deep wells of the artist’s heart. Beauty, passion, compassion, desire, whatever conveys the aesthetic of pure bliss is what draws deepest from that well. This is why beauty and love are so interchangeable… we sail the oceans looking for both, yet they are the wind and the water for our vessel.

God wished to be known, so He created humankind – the painter wishes to be known, so she paints. Yes, “beauty really does seek its mirror.” Emerson says, “beauty is God’s handwriting.” Rumi asks, “who says words with my mouth, who looks out with my eyes.”

This is the art of love and the love of art.

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The Shaikh in the Well

The compassion of the Shaikh
is the physician to our pain
He is a cool mist on desert sand
He is the rain upon on our skin
Below which seeds of hope give sprout
as his love seeps deep within.

He is the well of Gods water –
The dervish is the pail,
whose spirit turns the hand pulley
winding up the rope of the human veil.

We are drawn to look over the teacher’s edge
should her loving gaze ever be forgotten,
And behold down in the water well
Our own reflection at its bottom.

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Mevlana’s Kitchen

People cannot keep their eyes off of a fire,
they just have to gaze and reflect; because
there is something in the fire too bright to discern
and they simply must get closer.

Moths fiercely sacrifice themselves for this
wisdom of love.
Some friends are like this fire… and so,
there must bit of fire in the moth
for him/her to love the flame so much,
these same friends are also like the moth

Whatever provision comes to us
by way of condition, affect, abundance or shortcoming
surely must draw our eyes to the Provider,
the root of the root of the root,
the Shams too bright to discern.

Rumi reminds us not to separate sorrow and joy
lest it tear our heart apart – so…
pain is the doorway to the Ka’aba for lovers
and all shall leave “whole”
as it says over the very same doorway out.

Our tears add a pinch of salt
for the nourishment we all seek
in Mevlana’s kitchen!

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Zeliha Sings

Zeliha sang to us tonight,
I listened to what I heard,
“I’m not interested in your ears
But I’ll sing to your heart
with scented words…

…Your eyes are the sea
but your heart is my harbor.
This song is my ship,
its lyrics, my sails
Allah is the wind
Wherever there’s music.
listen
and I’ll meet you there.”

This benevolent singing bandit
has completely stolen me;
she drags me to edge of the Beloved’s fire
Blows the flames ’til my ears are seared,
Then dowses me in an ocean
of music and tears.

Love and longing,
dance away together
steal this unguarded poem
before the owner returns,
hurry,
snip this ode from its earthly tether.

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The Three Teachers

Sometimes I am drowning in answers

thirsting for questions – 

for it is the pain of not knowing

that I’ve befriended.

This one speaks of separation, 

that one of where union begins

another speaks of two fountains that converge
and shoot up toward the heavens.

I have loved and longed
for a bird locked in a gilded cage

thinking the bird on the perch was alive

oh, Jalal ad-Din may be dead,
but Mevlana lives –

even with the cage closed
,
away, that bird flies.

But when the door is open

it is the I of I who flies away

as if pain had wings

and love had weight.

study this poem carefully…

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Coming Home

My hands clasped in knotted prayer,
I slipped away, beyond aware
but you slipped a string around my finger
and tugged it toward your hidden turbe.
So I tugged back in this gentle play
of cat and mouse,
of Rumi and his parindey.

You were hiding in the sun of answers,
creeping toward my shadows
you sprung upon me Jelal-u’din
while my guard was down
sitting dreaming in your flowered meadow.

There in Mevlana’s turbesi this morning
in my fifth hour of stillness,
I lingered in the twilight of complete submission
and felt a vine craw into my heart
shortening my breath with erratic rhythms.

I was gently pulled from this precipice
by a dervish quietly exclaiming,
“the Shaikh and his khalifa arrived”
it was then I knew my bayat had begun
long before he’d seen my eyes.

I took hand with the teacher …
twice today.
Now – how can we ever be apart?
in the evening he placed his hand upon my head
but in the morning he’d already taken me by the heart.

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