Inexhaustible

"There must, whether the gods see it or not, be something great in the mortal soul"  Till we Have Faces - C.S. Lewis

In lucid dreaming the goal is to not awaken,

to not attain Buddhahood so to speak

So then the bodhisattva would be that most-esteemed one who started to wake,

then somehow fell back asleep,

and knowing full well that this is just a dream, plays it nonetheless to its fullest

This would be the princess who stole a glance at the purported prince,

and saw her illusory palace turn back to stone and bits of garbage,

Saw the man she had loved so deeply become (what all the villagers had seen from the start) just a tramp passing through, 

preying on her naive youth

And then she built the mental palace back up

Willed her rags back to a coronation gown

And looking upon her deceptive lover, noticed some distant lineage harking back to, if not a king, perhaps a recessive duke somewhere on his mother's side

And she felt in his rough, inebriated groping, a tenderness

And saw, through the red and watery film glazing his eyes,

a distinctly royal blue beneath clearly princely brows

I dont play the long game

I'll wait the time it takes

A cat to yawn

A game to load

A fry to French

here you go, dad

(Lyrics for an upcoming song)

If we changed the word from day to life

And we called it death instead of night

I could breathe easy then

And if you asked?

I'd say let's do it again

Life

Objectively prime,

Subjectively probably

Better than nothing

Some days my skin doesn't fit well

They were new shoes.  I think they were black and they slipped on which was great because I hadn't quite figured out where the second loop comes from when tying laces.  But they were too small.  I usually had shoes that were too small.  I honestly wonder if that is why my toes are all gnarly now.  And some kid stole them from me and played keep-away while I cried and asked him to give them back because my mom had bought them for me "with her own money".  I would have forgotten all about it, but a girl I'd been friends with had laughingly reminded me of my wording years later, which added a new layer to it all.  Cause then I was embarrassed for having been a naively-indignant 5-year-old who defended his caregiver in providing him with shoes which hurt his feet.  But which he was able to put on himself.

Vibrato

Should I wake up limitless,

I will, you can be sure,

Sample of the various heavens,

(Muslim, Norse, Pure Land Buddhism, Ancient Greek)

And will surely add my own flare and be

Decadently self-righteous for a time,

And then I will maybe crave my old

Blessed parameters,

The structure adolescents need so they can push against it,

So that when there is a moment,

(It was Arizona, I was 17)

It can be my moment,

My memory,

My achievement and my small-mind secret,

And when there is a poem about limits

(Here, now) 

it has mental context,

Can bump the needle off that Super-low B flat

For its brief space,

Right itself, reset, resurrect 

(About an hour after writing this, I was reading a letter from Alan Watts to Christmas Humphreys, wherein Alan writes of the divine sacrifice that something he alternately calls God and Sunyata makes in order to give us life. Something about God having the freedom to move in all directions at once, but giving up that freedom in order to pick a particular direction, move within certain parameters, give us/Himself this life to experience and to accept (because that acceptance itself is the very root of our lives). He said that if we live under the assumption that life is based on unmoving principles, there would be no need for gratitude, because principles have no choice but to be what they are. But as this is a voluntary sacrifice, an appropriate response is gratitude. And that non dualism and God have room for beings other than God within them. Whereas pantheism only allows for oneness, which is a term largely unused, because it excludes the many (and he made references to nazism and talked about how the earth does not orbit the sun in a neat 360 days). So it is not absurd for us to be grateful to Sunyata/God, for we can be within God and other than God at the same time. After reading that, I was (firstly, struck by how often I'll come across something in line with what I've been recently thinking, but also) humbled by how cavalierly I had compared myself to God. Giving a nod of understanding to the sacrifice, yes, but also speaking rather lightly of something which may be Infinitely holier and beyond me.  That said, in later talks Alan Watts also speaks pretty lightly of God being us and thinking as we think, so maybe his thinking changes, but I hadn't heard this particular take on it and the gratitude/God-Having-Room-For-Beings-Other-Than-God piece really resonates with me).

Slip...

... of a thing in Spring

... ping tween trees bare feet grass-greened

... clinging to sweat sheen