Poems with a hint of Zen

Some unfinished

Poetry

Poetry, a bridge
from conceptual mind to
ocean beyond words

Verses written

Verses written here,
quasi-realisations
not yet the real thing

This is all there is

This is all there is,
steam rising over hot tea,
hands around warm cup

Each dived down

Each dived down
when they found a space
between words.
They swam togther
until they dissolved.

In two minds

I am in two minds.
Two minds are in me jostling
for my attention.

Breakfast

I want to be eaten by a lion.
I want to end this performance
on a high, all emotions blazing.

Only a short chase, surely,
lion at my heels. The supreme thrill
that undoes a toddler being chased.
Thud of paws on shoulders,
claws ripping down my back,
teeth sinking into neck – foreplay,
but this lover will not hold back.

I will lie pinioned in the present,
transfixed in a last rush of adrenalin,
held supine in boundless here! now!

This ‘me’, this oh-so-special self,
this strutting persona
misappropriated
from the dancing universe
will leave the stage unmasked,
recognised finally as
no more than a lion’s breakfast.

Maps

Our birth, was it like
parachuting down to unfamiliar terrain
and then being given maps to show us
shops, school, park, train station,
airport, rivers, mountains and oceans?

Or were we each entering a place
with no maps because no one had ever
been here before?

When we die, will we be able to
leave our maps behind so
other visitors can find the same shops,
school, park, train station, airport,
rivers, mountains and oceans?

Or will our world dissolve back
into the time and space from which
it crystallised at our birth?

Imperative

It was an imperative.
Not to leave the square.
The chalk marks were clear.

Who had drawn them? Had she?
Was she imagining these boundaries?

She could see on one side
all her old pains, joys and regrets
coming now to mind.

On the other, her hopes,
fears, ambitions and dreads.

She knew it was safe to look.
But leaving her square to cross over
to either side meant death.

She crouched down to stroke the cat
rubbing against her leg.

bury me at last

bury me at last
a compass in my coffin
and a map of time

Rising at dawn

Rising at dawn, through the kitchen window,
she saw Death sitting on her garden bench.
Being her usual gentle and gracious self,
she went out with an invitation to breakfast.
‘No, thank you very much’ came the reply,
‘food is more of your world than mine.’

‘Don’t you ever eat or drink?’ she asked
trying to show a polite interest.
‘No. After all, I do not have a body.’
‘But I can see it! Legs, hands, mouth and all!’
‘Ah, but what you see and what is really there
are two entirely different things.’

‘Are you Death, are you sitting on my bench?’
‘Yes, if that is what you are seeing.’
‘Are you saying you don’t exist, death’s not real?’
‘Yes, if that is what you are hearing.’
This was too much to think about so early.
She turned to go in – her cottage was gone.

Monk sitting lotus

Monk sitting lotus
flares up for a few minutes
then dies down.

News of the immolation
flares up for a few hours
then dies down.

In a gentle breeze
flags flutter over
government building.

There are countless harbours

There are countless harbours
around the sea of ideas.
Take refuge when you must.
Stay as long as you need.
But remember you are a sailor.

Cosmos

In primordial dark
thought becomes world.
With eyes and ears
come light, sound,
awareness.
Mind brings self, import,
other, anguish.
Now all sounds shatter,
light burns,
world falters, tips.
Thought melts back to dark.

We exist only

We exist only
in others’ thoughts. Our name
the only constant.

No eyes or ears

No eyes or ears –
so neither sound nor silence
nor light nor dark. Yet
in the first forests grasses
grew and tall trees toppled.

These eyes and ears

These eyes and ears of ours, seeming to
hold the means of true contact and even
the possibility of intimacy,
are instead struts and beams keeping us apart,
holding us deceptively in separate selves.
To truly know each other we must
go beyond these greedy senses to where
mind has no hooks on which to hang the self,
to where there is not a you and a me.

How long

How long is time?
What a tape measure
that would need!

Snow

Snow lying on branches.
Spring, sumer, autmun, winter
- mere speculation

There is

There is nothing that
is not here in front of me
- only this, here, now

Where does good

Where does good hang out
when no one is doing it?
What about evil?
Does it lurk round some corner
ready to be taken up?

If we want light

If we want light
there has to be dark
To arrive here
we must come from there.
Thinking of ourselves as us
means there has to be a them.
In the end, this language
of ins and outs, ups and downs,
is a scaffold of opposites,
pairs of mutuals
propping each other up,
each meaningless
without the other.
If one word goes
will they all go?
If the scaffold collapses,
will enough words be left
for thinking?

On seeing the female

On seeing the female form,
there is a Buddhist monk
in my head
and a Catholic priest
in my trousers

Kōshō Uchiyama

Monastery tenzo,
serving meals for monks. His way
of cooking his life.

Perception requires

Perception requires
something to be perceived and
someone perceiving
- subject and object, the trap
of dualistic thinking

creating borders,
categories, labels for
the ten thousand things
appearing deceptively
out of wholeness beyond words.

Seeds sprouting

Seeds sprouting in ground
consciousness emerge as our
seeing, hearing, thinking
- creating our own world for
each brief moment here and now.

But the ego mind
intercedes, everything
distorted by our
predilections, taking world
as real, self as its centre.

Good

Where does good hang out
when no one is doing it?
What about evil?
Does it lurk at some corner
ready to be taken up?

Wave

All phenomena
appear and disappear like
waves on the ocean.
I am a wave deluding
myself I have existence

quite separate from
the ocean, and so worry
about everything
- work, money, illness, dying and
what will happen after death.

A conceit of course,
this sense of my importance,
my mind playing tricks,
putting me at the centre
of this thought-made universe

where everything
I do is to benefit
my important self.
Me at the centre, other
people less significant.

Waves on the ocean
are born and die dependent
only on the wind,
coming from the ocean then
returning to it, self less.

Waves, a metaphor
for my birth and death
which I take as real,
blind to the ocean from which,
unknowingly, I have emerged.

The metaphor, a
reminder to consider
that my place in
the universe is very
different from what I thought

so freeing me from
worry about everything
- work, money, illness.
Aware now death's just a wave
returning to the ocean.

On my bench

On my bench reading.
Better to discard the book
and read the garden.

Foot

Knowing a bit about nerves,
I thought a stubbed toe hurt
in the brain, not the foot. Now
I know it is all in the mind.

Mountain

He felt sorry for
her on the mountain track in
such flimsy plimsolls.
She pitied him not hearing
the birds or seeing the flowers.

Escape

Escaping troubles
and strife in the world below,
though aware snow-capped
mountains existed only
in his mind, he came
fully qquipped with compass,
walking boots and stout stick.

Wake

What I wake up to is not
by choice. Celebration or
regret not appropriate
as this is just my life and,

whatever the circumstance
I find myself in today,
it is now, not another
time. Here, not another

place. Here, now and unique.
This is my life. Whatever
I do should be done with all
my body and mind leaving

nothing over to do in
some imagined place at some
future time. Tasks begun are
to be completed fully.

I should live in gratitude
for this life, valuing it
not as a stepping stone, but
as just what it is, my life,

life not understood as years
between my birth and my death,
but as all I am aware
of in this unique moment.

Write your text here...

thoughts are fish swimming

thoughts are fish swimming
in the fertile oceans of
the world’s memory

Tryin to catch them
we become ensnared in nets
of past anf future

A flash of memory

A flash of memory soon becomes
a library of history books.
An inkling of tomorrow comes
to hang bible-heavy as hope and fear.
Birth and death, only marks on a page
as though a spider had crawled through ink.

Flesh is our birthright

Flesh is our birthright
– also an obsession that
holds our minds hostage

Imagine

Was it a good flight?
I imagine so.
Why do you say imagine?
I don’t really believe you can fill a metal plane
with people and bags, lift it into the air, float it
over the ocean and drop it down in another
continent. So I always think I imagine it.
Canada must be a wonderful country. Will you go again?
I imagine so. But I’m not sure other countries
exist when I am not actually in them.
What about on this trip, were you real?
I imagine so.

Taking off

Taking off, I tell myself I am imagining
the aeroplane and the journey.
Then I relax, not needing to worry
about the engines, weather and so on.
All I have to think about is who
I imagine is doing the imagining.

She offers me

She offers me her
dark forebodings. I resist.
Who knows the future?
And will anticipation
merge into invitation?

I can understand

I can understand
no self, person, living being
or life span. But I
must still get off my cushion
to give the cat her dinner.

Life conjured

Life conjured out of
empty space by thought. Birth and
death just delusion.

Thoughts hitch rides on words

Thoughts hitch rides on words
that drift like leaves on the breeze.
Who will gather them?

sound

sound travels
silent with no
noise until it
strikes an ear

if your ears
give me a voice
do your eyes
give me a face

I’m tired of this quest

I’m tired of this quest
for enlightenment, this vain
attempt to peep
behind the veil of death to
see things as they really are.

I will dig a hole
in the turf for my head, pat
the soil down firmly
over my chin, make the earth
fit snugly around my neck,

then plant hands flat so
white roots can snake down to find
moisture for my legs
once they are hoisted upright,
soles exposed to the warm sun.

Green shoots will sprout from
nodes at ankle and knee and
grow to branch and leaf.
Proud herons will sit silent
and watchful high in my tops.

Mind a perfect sphere

Mind, a perfect sphere.
Why do we attach to it
the ten thousand things?

looking for a way

looking for way
to the gardens of our youth –
not a single path

just suchness

just suchness
only our attitude to it
causes suffering

no need

no need for a deathday suit
the one I came in is good enough
leaving in the same one I came in
has an air of rightness bringing
nothing taking nothing

I wonder

I wonder what my first thought was.
Did it have to wait until I had learned
a sentence-full of words?

And when could I think,
‘This is me’ and
‘I am thinking this thought’?
I wonder how many thoughts
I have had since then.

I wonder what my last thought will be.
Not, ‘This is my last thought.’
That would be too neat and another
thought would surely squeeze in
about thinking my last thought.

I will have to wait and see.

What if I am disappearing

What if I am disappearing?
I don’t mind if the world at large
cannot see me but what if
I cannot see myself?
The professional is fading
as is the poet and the parent.
And the partner?
Will I leave an empty space
behind? Will it be a hole
someone might fall into?
Me perhaps.

What if it is imagination

What if it is imagination?
All the things I see when I wake;
sunlight on the wall,
clock next to books propped on shelf.
What if I am seeing a scene
never been seen before?

I tell myself these things
were here yesterday
and the day before that so they
cannot be my imagination.
But what if these memories
are themselves my imagination?

They might come as a package,
the things I see on waking with
memory of seeing them before.
In which case, I only imagine
they are familiar; sunlight,
shelf, clock, books.

What if, as I get out of bed, this
body is just another aspect
of my imagination?
And the me
that inhabits this body?
Am I imagining myself?

Wooly hat

Wooly hat
Check.
Bottom firm on cushion?
Check.
Blanket over shoulders?
Check.
Down periscope.
Begin descent into mind!

Zen poetry of Dõgen

Zen poetry of Dõgen
twenty years
on the bookshelf
reading my mind
waiting its time
to catch my eye

Persisting thoughts

Persisting thoughts build
castles in the air with me
defending the walls

The world

The world in which we
exist is really a world
we have each made by
ourselves with our opinions
attitdes, likes and dislkes.

Not a world we share
together. Separate worlds
created by thoughts
perceptions, feelings, hopes,
anxiety and regretsi

Imaginary
selves each creatong a world
of our own making.
Nothing out there or in here,
just dreaming in empry space.

Aware of this, we
live in equanimity,
emptying our minds
of egocentric concerns
for supposed separate selves.

Scraps

Scraps of nothing come
together to make a being
with eyes and ears.
Scraps of what is perceived make
me - forgetful of no-thing

Bell

When you hear one bell
you hear all bells. When you see
one child broken
you see all of humanity
deluded, suffering, lost.

Moments

A circle of light perceived
from a dancing incense stick
has no reality, just points
of light joined up by the mind.

Looking at cat, my mind joins
a snapsot sequence into
a movie, making cat seem
a persisting entity

My ever-changing body,
rivers of feelings and thoughts
solidifying into self
by an egocentric mind.

Japanese garden

Japanese garden.
The haiku I bury here
will make good compost.

Undifferentiated

Undifferentiated
universe, no ten thousand
things and no separate selves
fretting between birth and death.

Thought

It took two of us getting
the thought out. One at the front
and one at the back lifting,
tipping, pushing and pulling.

We felt it growing stiffer,
heavier, 'til once outside
it was a sold thing with
its own colour, weight and shape.

Not wanting to just leave it,
we made a platform with a
cover to keep out the rain,
a lock for the garden gate.

Lying awake for the first
few nights, alert, listening
for unfamiliar sounds,
kept going out to see it.

Next time we have such a thought,
we decided, we will let
it drift quielty away,
save all the fuss and bother.

Cup

When we both look at a cup
I see the cup of my mind
you see the cup of your mind
so not at all the same cup.

When you look at me you see
what is in your mind, but when
I see me it is the me
of my mind, quite different.

Me, cup, two phenomena
both differently perceived.
Looking for either beyond
these perceptions is futile.

There can be no cup without
someone being aware of it,
no person not heard or seen
or thought of by another.

My sense of myself as a
person depends on the same
thinking and perception, so
'me' is an aspect of mind,

a mere product of small mind
busy with thought after thought
after thought taking me from
awareness of the present.

Once 'me' has come into mind
it gets busy taking each
thought as a call to action
in preservation of self

and all the things I value
as me or mine. Once self is
solidified as real and
fixed, then so is the whole world.

Everything in this world
now has to be named, counted,
catalogued as mine or yours,
thought of as real and out there.

This sense of self pulls me out
of the flowing universe
in which nothing is solid,
permanent or tangible

into a small personal
thought-made world of ownership,
borders, competition, a
deep sense of self and other

with all the thinking, planning,
worrying and struggling that
must be done every day
to maintain imagined self.

This is all the working of
small mind in delusion,
the worry of work, money,
illness, eventual death.

There is no solid cup, no
solid me looking at it,
just mental fabrications.
No permanence beyond this.

.