All Hail Zenshin

All Hail Zenshin!

February 20, 2012

Dear Zenshin:

How pleasant to sit in Vimalakirti’s room. Patch robed monks, burley belly dancers, pimps and poinsettias not to mention horned frogs, turtles, lampreys and all those first year bodhisattvas trying to jump onto those humongous golden thrones reserved for those who have attained at least the eighth bhumi (I won’t go on about the deer, lions, upasakas and all else who were present.) It all barely allowed for the huge flat screen TV on which we could watch, in living color and three D no less, all projection, not just mine or yours.

I’ll be sure to note all the joy, splendor and love that bathed the entirety in golden light, sort of like Michael Renney as he walked out from that space ship on the appropriately entitled “Mall” at Washington D.C., our capitol city, in the movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, in my report to Akshobhya although I am sure he already knows.

I assure you all stand ready for a repeat performance.   

With love and devotion, I will always appear for you, if needs be, as dark blue, with three eyes and fangs, trampling on human corpses, wearing a tiger skin skirt, hair streaming upwards with a crown of five skulls and a necklace of human heads, surrounded by flames of wisdom and wrathful compassion.

Mr. Kotatsu

Songs and Stories of the Ghouls, Alice Notley

Songs and Stories of the Ghouls: Yet another great book of poetry from Alice Notley: this one, Epic Poetry. I can feel the crush of anonymous destroyed ruptured and ripped fleeting and tremendous disappearing and asserted orthodoxies that at one moment in one time seem so absolute so forever eternal and are not are pulverized. And always we are recreating out of mouth building weaving is culture of life of what it takes effervescent survival always fragments of stories telling spewing as some unknown unknowable law of universe we still make up and remove ourselves from or functionalize lever with to get what appears to be ahead to make as sure as possible which ain’t very sure we survive and pass on this moment standing in nowhere and in nothing but that for what we make up and flows out of this mouth our mouth this lion’s roar of blood crushed bone heart.

“See to this crime they said: the object I am drew the child even further into itself, for justice would never help her. As everything seems to be a made thing, when I make this for you, out of the same mouth anything comes from. I’m holding you as close as I can. I cover you.”[1]

…

“…Towards changes hands of configuration each small mask is a word to cover your lack that is where language stands on no foundation but the wars it has always upheld for if your ways were destroyed and your poems broken and ploughed into the slated earth what would you be? The ghoulishness of this project is affirmed by any style and there is no ‘way forward’ but your empire’s way.”[2]

---

[1] Alice Notley, Song of the Ghouls, p.12.

[2] Ibid. p. 13.

Michelia Champaca

Michelia Champaca

We look for insights in your words,

your words, sometimes ripe plums

falling from before the Empty Aeon

feeding entire universes.

Is this primordial

                                or is that

                                                primordial?

It’s not like there is going to be an answer

& it is not as though there isn’t going to be

an answer.

Who is this answer?

Walking à

                                just        

                                                |WALKING|

All my pants are dying

lost right here with holes in my thighs

dreams falling through cool breezes

lifting dust motes right here

where this Buddha from before

the Aeon of Emptiness alights

telephones salt & pepper coffee cup

napkin stainless steel cream pitcher.

All of them they are arriving

this is where I find myself standing

all of them arriving from

going to…

Extinction rises and vanishes

each moment calling

the cool breeze  your voice

echoing across calling to be

gone all gone all ways

rising nothing

returns.

Emerging whale eyes barnacles brains

distraught chemicals appear as

this world of colorful emotions

nothing ever removed nothing

ever returns only turning

in this stillness the silence

of loons across lakes of dreams

complete utter darkness of

intimacy.

This is my work and no one else’s.

John Bailes, Kotatsu Roko           

Prospect Hill                 

Thursday, 2 February 2012

Words...

Your words…

We look for insights in your words,

your words, sometimes ripe plums

falling from before the Empty Aeon,

feeding entire universes.

John Bailes,

Kotatsu Roko

San Francisco Airport

Monday, 30 January 2012

From Alice Notley's, Culture of One

Excerpt from: Mercy's Teeth Defaced

“…But, Mercy is fucking wicked I tell you.

What are you going to do when you are let off the hook?

I like that: I paint a hook, one of her hands is a hook you

Fall from into a vat of creamy sudsy compassion. There

You are swimming in it, with your happy curled mouth

And little X-eyes. Is it like that? ...”

Alice Notley

Great River Zendo Zazenkai Too

Great River Zendo Zazenkai Tooà

Twitching – seek ’em hold ‘em

inward torrent burnt turn

ramble rout.

A light snowing cold day clear and crisp birds, squirrels and chipmunks ate at the bird feeding platform some atop some below receiving the rain of blessings and burrowing in the snow.

Amaryllis, unknown to most of us, reached up all the way from Boston. Lofty thoughts, aspirations heart felt, rose and crumbled and took off again midst mind’s eddies. 

Manjusri’s sword invisible swiftly dispatching attachments leaving us alone with our grasping longing selves until we tired and allowed that leap, really almost a fall, into Mercy’s arms, those arms which none of us can deny we know and are but which sometimes get lost until Manjusri helps us touch our heart.

Kotatsu Roko

Great River Zendo

West Bath, Maine

21 January, 2012

Great River Zazenkai

Great River Zendo Zazenkai à

Twitching – seek ’em hold ‘em

inward torrent burnt turn

ramble rout.

Kotatsu Roko

Great River Zendo

West Bath, Maine

21 January, 2012