Spinal Cinquains

[Guest guest]

There was a time when lines

persimmoned in on me, rhymed fat,

with scarlet-skinned, fruited words,

but never quite made it to their full,

peak ripeness of life as art.

Hardly a simile shaft away from harvest

and always only 7 degrees away

from florid refrains painfully executed,

the spinal cinquains sell the story short

when icing over in meticulous metaphor.

Adelaide Crapsey, shhheeeet,

she would probably show me to the proverbial door!

 

Ugh. Editate! Deletate the drivel-drabble

of 108 stone-written drafts driven home,

droned to the bone-white bare essentials of awe

articulated into poem-palmed passion

perfectly ejaculated from the unknown.

 

Evocative of the Ahhh of Wa,

I cannot paw at the black mala

of mechanics and muse,

or karma card tricks

of slick semantics

anymore.

 

I dittoed 22 years of chakral carnage clearing

in the kilnage of Kriya Yoga.

A taut string of beaded years,

beating down the doors of darkness,

worn dull in meditation,

strung with the repetively severed heads

of my Gurudeva,

thats the garland of jewels I wore

when Love roared like Rumi’s lion

and tore this heart open,

when I gave ‘one long, unobstructed cry,’

like Lalleshwari lifting Light to Light to Light.

Allayed fears, witness this, Earth-Mara…

Someone slayed the Buddha

playing me, (this part slays me!)

playing me

slaying the Buddha, in bhava,

in this metaphor: I Am.

 

~image from Joseph Eagle

 

Note: for nearly a decade, for 10,000 1000 years,

(or so it would appear the fear would have me feel it)

in meditation, the image of my Guru would appear before me, Radiant,

Inconceivable Love, All-Embracing Belovedness, and then, in an

instant he would appear with his throat cut open. I cannot tell you

how distressing this was and how it took the greatest determination

and commitment to meditation and inquiry to continue year after year

with this odd and frightening phenomenon. Surrender and grace

replaced fear with Love, and the experience ended where it had first

begun.

 

“When you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

 

 

Love,

 

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