Po:etry example

"A Knife of 20 Edges"

1.

Trillions upon trillions of swimmers swim

Across the river

Just to swim back.

How grotesquely rational!

2.

Silence echoes

With emptiness.

That’s it!

3.

Eckhart Tolle aside.

Siddhartha Gautama aside.

Vladimir Lenin aside.

I was born in ego,

I will die in ego.

Aside!

4.

Every moment

You inhale emptiness.

And

It laughs

At you.

5.

An autopilot puts

Itself on autopilot

And goes A.W.O.L.

Finally free

From the idea

Of freedom.

6.

One duality.

And an infinity of interpretations.

7.

Emptiness

Is no one’s.

The one and only orphan.

The first born.

The last undying.

8.

You smelled nothing.

You felt nothing.

You tasted nothing.

You heard nothing.

You saw nothing.

It was all mediated

by Nothing.

Exactly in that evolutionary sequence.

From exactly nothing.

To exactly Nothing.

As always.

As ever.

And yet, as never before!

That’s life

In all its nothing-new-under-the-Sun novelty.

9.

I remember those three-line poems,

When I had too much to say

And too little time to say it.

10.

The very first time I sell out

Is the first time I sell out.

I gain no interest in that.

11.

Consequence

Breaks the free fall

Of its own freedom.

12.

In trying to remember what I forgot

I remember this.

13.

First there was reality.

Then

There was an inventor of punctuation

who couldn’t stand the idea

Of a sentence ending without a period sign

14.

I already see that I’ve exhausted

All my spares.

Nothing’s left.

15.

In a many-fold multi-lingual poly-universe

Of mind-forms

There’s only one Consciousness.

You are it!

16.

I had two breaths.

I gave you one and kept one for myself.

Whereto will we exhale?

17.

Like a dream tired of reality,

mind resigns.

Enough.

18.

There is no 18.

There is a number “18” but there is nothing that it refers to.

Whenever you say there’s “18 of these”

You are looking at 18 of ones

And what makes these 18 ones “18”

Is your decision to call them such.

Same with the word “nothing.”

The word exists

But what it refers to

Doesn’t.

19.

Meaning of life is like a bomb on a timer.

You race all life trying to diffuse it.

You run out of time.

And then it doesn’t explode.

20.

"Enlightenment" is like a bladder infection.

First, you feel like you can’t hold it

in quotations marks any longer,

And then it slips out.





pavel somov, still is

copyright 2009

po:etry examples
.
Upanishads:

Whatever is here, that is there
What is there, that again is here.
He obtain death after death
Who seems to see difference here.

(what pattern does this break for you?)

Mahadeviyakka:

You're like milk
in water: I cannot tell
what comes before,
what after;
which is the master,
which the slave.

(what pattern does this break for you?)

Example from Allama Prabhu:

Whoever knew
that is body of body,
breath of breath
and feeling of feeling?

Thinking that it's far,
it's near,
it's out here,
and in there,

they tire themselves out.

For all their search
they cannot see
the image in the mirror.

(what pattern does this break for you?)

another by Allama Prabhu:

Mountain gooseberry
and sea salt:
when
were they kin?

(what pattern does this break for you?)

example from Hermann Hesse

Longing will drag me up the stairways
to the last suffering,
Up to the suffering of men.

(what pattern does this break for you?)

Herman Hesse again:

Then your life will flame out more
And one day gather even death
Into its arms.

(what pattern does this break for you?)

Dao De Jing (pattern interruption poetry from beginning to its beginningless end):

Way-making being empty
You make use of it.
Bud do not fill it up.

or

The space between the heavens and the earth -
Isn't it just like bellows!
Even though empty it is not vacuous.
Pump it and more and more comes out.

(what pattern does this break for you?)

Bhrtrhari:

Hope is a river
Whose water is desire,
Whose waves are craving,
Passions are crocodiles,
Conjectures are birds,
Destroying the tree of resolve,
Anxiety carves a deep ravine
And makes the whirlpool of delusion
Makes it difficult to ford.
Let ascetics who cross
To the opposite shore
Exult in their purified minds.

(what pattern does this break for you?)

po:etry - is pattern-interruption poetry
po:etry is an anti-dote to apophenia
po:

apophenia is:

Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad,[1] who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness".

more po:etry examples (from yours truly... whose? yours? really? nah...)

"A Chair for Levitation # 20"

1.

Consciousness

Looks itself

In the mirror

And sees

Nothing but mind.

2.

First Mother,

Caught up in the evolutionary jungle of simultaneous threats,

Instructs its child:

“Listen, everything you will be seeing for the next 8 hours

Is a dream. Mommy’s gonna be busy surviving for both of us.”

And so we dream,

Piously, uncritically, blissfully.

Dream was the first baby-sitter.

3.

The Cinderella of Mindlessness

Runs the whole house of the body

All by itself

From dawn to midnight,

Dreaming

Of being awake

At the Equinox of Ball of Time

When the Present eclipses itself.

4.

Nothing to transcend

But transcendence

Itself.

Blindness exhales its own memory of vision,

Like an old pair of gloves.

Reality is out of touch!

It finally knows.

5.

I prostituted

My innermost Self

To the approval of Money.

Yes, I have.

And,

So,

Have you.

We all have.

At some point or another.

Time isn’t money.

Time is consciousness.

Take it back.

6.

You know the Truth

When you can’t tell

One and the same lie from itself.

7.

A word

dreams of what it represents,

Just like the mind

Dreams of the reality

That it purports to reflect.

8.

You know how when you were a kid and you could see a face in a fold of a curtain.

And, you know how you could glance away, “come back,” and still see it?

You too are a fold in a curtain,

A wrinkle in the informational fabric of your consciousness.

This ego is the first pattern you saw.

But! It’s not your original face.

Signal is the noise.

Something is just another nothing.

See what I mean?

9.

Matter is inanimate

No matter how long consciousness plays with it.

10.

Quadrillions upon quadrillions

Of matter particles

Have absolutely no business being

In one and the same place

That you call “you”

Except for that one all-organizing meme of consciousness

That calls itself “I.”

You – whether you want to or not – are

The bird that leads this flock of cosmos

From chaos into an illusion of order.

How marvelous

And how hopelessly unexplainable!

11.

Consciousness,

Like magnetic field,

Attracts random particles of matter

Into an idiosyncratic artwork of body,

Just to say Namaste to itself.

Beautiful, huh?

But here’s the ugliness:

Liking the reflection it sees,

It clicks “Save.”

And the nesting doll of self-referencing mind is born.

And out of it comes the child of ego,

One moment at a time, ever colicky.

When you meet the Buddha on the road,

Kill him.

12.

Do You

Realize that

You

Have been able to detect

You

Through every experience that

You

Have ever had no matter how varied and original?

You

Have been able to see

You

Through a bewildering complexity of reality without any problem.

You,

My friend, are operating like a high-frequency signal that can break through any cloud of noise.

You

‘ve burst through the thick and thin of the material fog like a tachycardia of unmistakable essence!

You,

My friend,

Are the highest frequency signal that exists.

You,

My friend, are beating to the drumbeat of light.

13.

Consciousness plays with body like clay

Trying to sculpt an accurate picture of Nothingness that it is.

It can’t be done.

Not through poetry.

Not through math.

Not through zen.

14.

I pity pity.

15.

I am

a blinking cursor

on a blank page of a Word.

16.

Ego is a document.

Who for?

17.

Money means “not free.”
Free yourself from the illusion of money:

Reality is free.

Share it.

18.

Zen is a u-turn sign.

Don’t follow it.

Follow Nothing.

18.

Silence

Has a nice ring to it.

Listen.

19.

Existence is a joke.

It gave you a mother.

It gave you a father.

It gave you you.

And you still question it with the doctrine of sunyata.

Huh?

20.

Wisdom

Is when you match-make

Reality with what it’s Not

Without either party knowing it.



pavel somov, still is, copyright 2009

Poetry makes you feel.
Poetry makes you think.
Po:etry breaks your regular thougth patterns.
This isn't a poem
Maybe a po:em
but not really.

The sun is love. The lover, a speck circling the sun.

These po:etry lines are from Rumi, in translation by Coleman Barks.

Whose lines are these lines? Rumi's or Barks'?

When reading Rumi in translation by Barks, historically, I am reading Barks' translation of Rumi's translation of Rumi's thoughts.

Whose thoughts are these thoughts that Rumi tried to translate into words that Barks later translated into words that I am now trying to decode into my own experience?

The experience is the sun. The word, just another semantic Icarus burned up in its flight to describe it.

These lines are my attempt to translate the experience whose ownership is yet to be established.

Mind is a po:em lost in translation.

Your mind, too, right now, is a po:em the experience of which you are both beginning to write and read at the same time as I am finishing another one of my attempts to translate the untranslatable.

Not all haikus are po:ems. This one below is. It breaks up the (inner/outer) duality of the experience and puts back(nonhyphenated)non-duality of the experience back together.

A haiku – as I see it – is a pre-industrial camera click, a snap-shot of the outer and inner. Take this one by Master Buson 1716–1783.

Picking plum blossoms

And fretting at my wrinkled hand –

Fragrance.



Allow me to… analyze, rather than interpret. At a content level, the gist is simple: a man is picking up plum blossoms, notices his wrinkled hand, frets about it, and then smells the blossoms. But here’s the yoga of it (yoga=union).

First, the man is focused on the external (plum blossoms).
He then notices his hand – a part of himself – and experiences it also as an external object (Subject-Object/Mind-Body dualism).
He then reacts to his hand (because it is wrinkled) and experiences a reaction (fretting)(the Subject/Experiencing Self here further subdivides into Self the Subject experiencing one’s own emotion as an Object).
Finally, the man notices the smell (fragrance). The moment of experiencing the fragrance is a moment of the union of the man and the nature. The nature provides the stimulus (the fragrance of the flower) and the man provides the mind to experience it. Neither would exist without each other (after all, does a flower smell if there is no mind to experience it; or can you smell a blossom that is not there?). And the two (man and the blossom) become one. The fragmentation of Self-Other (Man/Nature; I/It) ends and so does the haiku.
Restated and diagramed, this haiku can be represented as follows:

Focus on the Outer

Focus on the Inner

Unification of Outer and Inner/Oneness



This haiku, like most, I think, is a story of Duality that leads to Fragmentation and ends in Union. A snap-shot of a happy ending of self-consciousness.



Reference:

Haiku Master Buson by Yuki Sawa and Edith M. Shiffert, Heian, 1978

Russian Poetry/Po:etry analysis

Pushkin - a poet
Mayakovsky - a po:et (rule of thumb - po:ets are not translatable); Mayakovsky - po:et of 1917 Bolshevik revolution which itself was one hell of a social pattern interruption.

Esenin - a poet
D. Kharms - a children's po:et, an unrecognized Zen master of the 1920s in the Soviet Union; his short stories were so out of the left field that he could only publish as a children's author, and, boy, did he sneak in some wild po:ems into the minds of Soviet children (died of starvation, during detention, in Leningrad jail, in 1941; ironically, Kharms was a big fan of Hamsun's "Hunger").

Leonard Cohen is a PO:ET

check him out:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

This could be the anthem of po:etry - po:etry exploits the cracks to let in the light of the unexpected.

Poets meets Po:et

Poet - I've never heard of "po:etry."
Po:et - Neigher have I!

Poet - What kind of genre is "po:etry"?
Po:et - Po:ety is a non-genre.

Poet - How do I know if I wrote a po:em rather than a poem?
Po:et - How do you know you wrote whatever you wrote?

Poet - What's the deal with the colon, the punctuation mark, of course, not the larger intestine?
Po:et - Po:etry is a laxative for your mind, a conceptual enima for the undigested mental constructions.

Poet - So, how do I write a po:em?
Po:et - By not writing it.

Poet - I don't understand!
Po:et - Congratulations!
Poet - Are you mocking me?
Po:et - I am mirroring you.

Poet - I have noticed that there is a certain kind of intellectual distance to these so-called po:ems.
Po:et - Yes, meta-cognitive distance.
Poet - Meta-cognitive distance between whom and whom/what?
Po:et - Between the reader-as-the-subject and his/her objects of consciousness.

Poet - Is there another way of describing all of this?
Po:et - Yes: soul-ipsism.

Share a po:em - derail my train of thought!

fyi: Schpellchecking Free Zone

Ex.

"Nine-Fold Pentagram of Indifference"

1.
Mirror tries
To differentiate
Itself
From its own reflection.
Consciousness tries
To differentiate
Itself
From its own mind.
Neither can:
There is
No difference
Between Subject and Object
Whatsoever!
2.
Remember our little balcony
On the third floor of that hotel
in Paris?
No.
3.
Consciousness wastes itself
On imagination,
Pretending it is memory.
4.
I saw
A mindless body
Walking, talking, thinking.
Don’t say!
It was me!
5.
Been stupefied?
Been enlightened?
Been neither?
5.
Attention-seeking
Is the psychic equivalent of the centrifugal.
Ego is a force.
Step aside.
5.
Karma
Catches up with itself
In a holodeck of self-negating circularity of Sunyata.
5.
In chasing ecstasy
I found reality.
In chasing reality,
I found ecstasy.
When I stopped chasing
I found no-difference.
5.
I see myself
Taking my time
Taking my clothes off
Stripping down,
past my informational ego
And walking out
On my life-long affair with poetry.
5.
As I stand
In the door-way of prose
I see no reason to linger.
Reality is better!
Far better
than my wildest fantasy of it!
5.
I saw a robot
Making a robot.
I saw a human
Giving birth to a human.
I saw no difference.
5.
I saw a body
Sleeping, dreaming, thinking.
Don’t say!
It was me!
Still is.
5.
A five-fold truth of indifference
Comes in five flavors of lies.
Have a taste.
Or two.
Or five.



pavel somov, still is
copyright 2009