Beatnik Disembarks from Bardo Plane

Ginsberg Burning

Once I hoped to write like Ginsberg—
but Allen Ginsberg went to hell.
His bolder Buddhist poetry glitters,
then opens like an empty shell.

In vain one searches for the pearl
within the lyric art he showed us.
Open wide his rotten oyster –
seek the center of the lotus.

Perverted lost Semitic soul,
lyrical ranter, mind unhinged…
He celebrated sin and shame
while crew-cut culture cringed.

His beatnik aircraft took off fast,
flew into bardos of the damned
promising enlightenment—
but the cockpit was unmanned.

Reply to a Bumpersticker

Apr9

Multitudes will be liberated by that recognition;
and although multitudes obtain liberation in that manner,
the number of sentient beings being great, evil karma powerful,
obscurations dense, propensities o too long standing,
the Wheel of Ignorance and Illusion becometh neither exhausted nor accelerated.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead
translation: Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup

“Free Tibet” your sticker tells me…
Yes, I think, perhaps I should—
and the noble thought compels me,
uninformed, half-understood.

Will their freedom help my Karma?
Upgrade my reincarnation?
(Soul who could not dare to harm a
fly… much less a Buddhist nation.)

Not to justify aggression
by the ever-brutal Commies,
let us grant no glib concession
to the Maoists or their mommies.

Slogans echo in the void, Dakini1
shining in bardos of the dead;
stopped by the light, I am annoyed
impatient for the change from red.

A bumper crop of human woe
beams forth a mandate to my brain
while red Dakinis circle slow
in Buddhist hells of karmic pain.

The eastern concepts here diverge
and bow before brutality.
They make this driver long to merge
with incorporeality.

Then I glimpse a monkish fellow
swathed in saffron, calmly seated.
His, the cloud-borne sage’s pillow;
mine the traffic; stalled, defeated.

In his gaze of stern displeasure
I perceive the orient stars
calculating man’s mismeasure
trapped, exhausted, among the cars.

Flanked by Spirits wreathed in fire
he extends an accusing hand:
Western slave of base desire:
come and liberate my land !”

I meditate before the stop light:
am I ready for the task ?
Should I just refuse it outright
Can’t it be someone else ? I ask…

Must I free this mountain nation
from the Buddha, demons and Reds?
Shall your sticker’s declaration
shatter the yoke and raise their heads ?

Somebody ought to free Tibet,
and heed this Himalayan cry.
Maybe we should get upset…
The red light changes. Cars pass by,

predestined for benign events
and unconcerned for persecution;
oblivious to dissidents
awaiting execution.

IMAGES: templeilluminatus.com
tintin.wikia.com

Spending Down Ideals

Apr8

Education as universal solvent:
philosopher’s stone of beneficent thought.
(A perennial excuse for state involvement
and dangerous myth: that goodwill can be taught.)

Well-meaning intentions… more theory to burn.
A faulty assumption; debt for the debtor:
humanity’s limitless hunger to learn
while taxpayer dollars pass through the shredder.

Let’s smoke up a page from the liberal libretto
while strolling the grounds in our brief intermission;
Philanthropy’s dead in the streets of the ghetto
(another unfortunate juxtaposition).

When such benign fables are dropped in the ‘hood,
applied to armed thugs with their trousers sagging
little progress is made toward collective good
amidst feral aggression and narco-bragging.

Thus raised without love, no family, no father
devoid of compassion, unformed and unmanned,
they’re numb to your efforts, which barely bother
such thugs with a rock or a gun in their hand.