Ode to the Star-Nosed Mole

Monday, August 27, 2012

Lullaby for a Baby Sea Monster

It’s been a long day, little sweet thing

Your jaws are all tired and sore

From playfully nipping at mermaids

And gobbling up crabs near the shore

You capsized a fisherman’s sailboat

And laughed when he called out for help

But then you looked silly yourself, kid

When you got your tail tangled in kelp

You stuck out your tongue at the dolphins

They don’t like you much, to be frank

And I’m sure you annoyed that young diver

When you punctured his oxygen tank

I saw you dismember that lifeguard

You’ve developed a taste for fresh blood

You like to jump out and scare lungfish

After hiding yourself in the mud

I love you, you naughty sea monster

You’re a prankster from birth, so it seems

But hush and sleep well, little sweet thing

Even monsters deserve pleasant dreams.

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

A Long Poem that is Not a Poem

I am about to move to Hanoi, Vietnam, and the first thing I will do when I get there is take a shot of cobra blood. They have live cobras in cages and then they chop off the cobra's head and pour its blood into a glass and top it off with the cobra heart and then you drink it. And then after a little while I will learn to ride a motorcycle and motorcycle around everywhere, and maybe even motorcycle the whole length of the country just so I could smell the rice paddies. I will also speak Vietnamese really well, because I will work hard at learning it. Of course, I will also make friends and find everything amusing and feel things deeply and be lonely and miss things and take Vietnamese cooking classes and do something entirely unpredictable, like turn into a hippopotamus.

So why am I moving to Vietnam? Question mark, indeed! I really don't know what I'm doing, but no one ever really does. Our cells are constantly being replaced--how are we supposed to keep track of ourselves? Everything is in flux, down to quanta. That is why Buddhists talk about karma, and why we see complex repercussions across time, space and matter. There is no layer in the fabric of universal energy that is static, dead or irrelevant. Even a corpse undergoes changes, and there is no real such thing as death. All fears are useless. And yet...

How weird are dreams? Why don’t we talk about them more? A person goes to bed, spends the night wearing fairy wings and battling giant technicolor robot cabbages and licking their grandma's eyelids, and wakes up to an alarm clock and thinks, "Time to go to work!" How does that happen?

We know that dreams happen as much as real life does, we just don't give them as much credit because they take place in a different state of consciousness. We take for granted and/or deny that we exist in different planes of consciousness, because it's scary to think of our brain as duplicitous. We are only aware of an itty-bitty fraction of what is going around inside and outside of us. We really are moving within this incredibly bizarre, almost science-fictiony kind of stretchy cloth; an all-encompassing, sea monsterish blob of energy fabric that includes literally everything in existence. There are ridiculously complex interactions occurring all the time on infinite levels. Matter cannot be created or destroyed; everything both is a consequence and creates a consequence. This is why we attract what we focus on and why our predictions are self-fulfilling prophecies and why Henry Ford said, "Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right."

Really, what a measly chunk of reality we get--our perception filters out most of it, and it still seems immense! Think what would happen if we were non-filtering and received all of reality at once. Without the happy filter of our perception, infinity would unleash itself upon us like Noah's flood, and the walls of our House of Identity would be blown to smithereens. Maybe we should invent a Normalcy Defibrillator now just in case someone in the future somehow gains access to unfiltered reality and suffers an enlightenment heart attack. But really, who knows what kind of berserk neuron dances would happen if the concept of infinity ever truly dawned on us. I’m guessing we would see that all action is simultaneous, that all beings are limbs of the same being, that we are connected to everything infinitely outward and infinitely inward, that our bodies are far bigger and more encompassing than we think they are (sorry, dieters), and that we are just as much a part of nature as a squid blink or a lemur sneeze. Why do children run around proclaiming, "I'm a tiger!" "I'm a vampire bat!" "I'm a mutant ninja wombat!" Maybe our brains have access to these imaginary modes because humans, tigers, vampire bats, and mutant ninja wombats are all made of the same energy fabric, and we are able to access bizarre, primeval sources of empathy that manifest as games of pretend.

So, House of Identity. We construct identities as we would dwellings. We all understand that sometimes our identities can be "shaken," just like the foundation of a house, and we all trust deeply in our house's ability to protect us. Some of us have identity walls that are flimsy and easily penetrable---we are little piggies who built our houses out of straw. Some of us have standard wooden siding and shingled roofs and picket fences. Some of us have identities made of brick, and the Big Bad Wolf of Infinite Truth will never be able to blow them down, no matter how much it huffs and puffs. So, have you fashioned your Identity House so that it's immune to the Big Bad Wolf of Infinite Truth? Are you a person who “puts up walls”? Be the little pig that built the house out of straw! Identities ("egos" in Zen parlance) are not real existing things, but only protective shields. If I had no identity, I could be easily destroyed. But if I am tightly bound to my identity, I am limited in my vision of the universe. So I must be somewhere in between: strong enough to live in a world of identities, and penetrable enough to let some unfiltered reality seep in.

So what do we do knowing that all things are connected? We bask in the sunshine of nonsense. Surrender to nonsense and you will have surrendered to the universe and to God (and to lobster claws, and to bunny slippers). Surrender involves a delight in absurdity and willingness to enjoy this incomprehensible sea monsterish energy fabric. We are comforted by the universe because we are stupid children surrounded by forces unfathomably wise, and we are frightened by the universe for the same reason. You cannot possibly learn very much in your short lifetime, but, of course, you ought to try to learn as much as you can, because well, I don't know, do what you want. Remember, though, that real money is monopoly money and girls have pink skin and boys have blue skin just like in the game of Life and Obama is King Kandy of Candyland. The most unfortunate psychological malady is taking oneself too seriously.

Now let’s think about brains that are different from our own. Would you like to be severely schizophrenic for just one day? What are the dreams of someone who is blind from birth? Wouldn't you like to experience someone else's dream--just crawl into their head at night with a bag of buttered popcorn and watch it like you're in the 1930s going to a talkie? What are dreams, anyway? Dreams are weird because they are conglomerations of millions of different memory bits—a reminder that there are infinite possible imaginative scenarios. Every second of life is incredibly rich in information, and scraps of this information is manifested in a powerful way while we sleep.

Back to karma: there is no moment that does not change us in some small way, and perceivable change is only a result of uncountable, imperceptible repercussions. This is why even twins are radically unique. And yet our ability to empathize, and our commonality of imaginary experiences (who hasn't had a dream where they're flying?) reveal the ridiculously heart-warming fact that we are all one, and, its corollary: “all you need is love.” Because any harm we inflict on other people or the earth is actually self-inflicted harm, and the happiest people are the ones who just love, love, love all over the place and never stop loving. "Hey!" say the lovers, "we all share the same bathwater! Let’s make it a bubble bath!" Universally shared bathwater--how's that for intimacy? Maybe bathwater isn't the right word, but neither is turkey vulture or meniscus. And speaking of memory, are we storehouses of chronological experiences? I doubt it, even though it might seem intuitively correct. I can't get over the idea that chronology is sort of a myth that we adopted because it's convenient for survival (just like mental categorization in general: more useful than it is true, although of course it's not entirely false either). I guess I subscribe to the idea that we should not accept even our most intuitive convictions. We are much too accepting of myths. Some myths are the result of evolution and others are the result of societal training—we are contextual beings, in either case. Nothing is self-evident, and our modes of thought have been handed to us by non-authoritative sources--there is no conscious omniscience, anyway. We receive philosophical frameworks with which to operate, and if we're dumb, we never question them. Am I rambling?

The point is, I'm going to Vietnam, where I will drink cobra blood.

Sunday, August 19, 2012

Pills

I went to a psychiatrist

He told me I was nutty

He said thanks to genetics

I had brain cells made of putty

So he gave me lots of pills

And said that they would help me function:

Twenty pills to take with breakfast

Fifty more to take with luncheon

I take pills to help me concentrate

And keep my mind from swimmin’

I take pills that calm my jitters

When I speak to pretty women

I take pills that wake me up

And make my eyes a bit less bleary

I take pills that make me happy

Even when the world is dreary

I need my pills to fall asleep

And though it may seem silly

I need pills to help me harden up

Or soften down my willy

I take pills that help me do my work

And pills that calm my mood

And pills that help me curb

My appetite for certain food

Certain pills help me remember

To take all the pills I take

And if I lost those pills

I'd live a pill-less life by mistake.

Monday, July 23, 2012

A Lawyer's Wonky Ticker

I talked to a woman at work.

She said her dad was a lawyer

so stressed out all the time

that he developed a heart condition.

His metronome, an overworked mule,

driven to exhaustion and madness,

went on a rampage.

He was walking down the boardwalk

No time to notice the seagulls—

his heart sped up, up, up

to 400 beats a minute

and he, a grown-up, a hummingbird,

said, with a gasp:

“It’s doing a funny thing.”

And then collapsed.

The paramedics had to rescue him with a defibrillator—

pressing those powerful toasters to his chest,

zapping his wonky ticker.

He would say later, with a smile, that those toasters felt like being punched

by Muhammad Ali

in the heart.

His hummingbirditis worsened, but he dared not leave the courtroom

For the suit was his identity

And his knowledge of red tape

Earned him a pretty penny.

With his money, he bought a sailboat…a second one…

And of course he feasted on caviar,

though everything he ate tasted like pebbles.

Then his “heart did that funny thing” again

While he was at work.

He decided he didn’t want to be that guy—

That guy at the firm

Who always had to have the paramedics called in.

He asked the doc what his options were

The doc said he could be the proud new owner

of surgically implanted defibrillator.

He looked this up online:

The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute states

that an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD)

is a device the size of a pager

that is implanted underneath your skin

near the clavicle.

Wires from the device

are attached to your heart.

The device, which runs on batteries,

contains a small computer

and a pulse generator.

The size of a pager, he mused

The size of a cigarette pack

“Okey dokey,” he said casually, “Sew the damn thing in!”

And now, if he hasn’t got a shirt on,

You can see the clear outline of the cigarette pack-sized metal box

Implanted just under his skin.

A high-tech, geometric tumor of the lower collarbone.

A fairly pricey item

in the Oriental Trading Company of cyborg implants.

“That’s what he wanted,” said the man’s daughter.

“And he didn’t quit his job.

He says the only crazy thing about it

Is that they have a remote control for the ICD

Somewhere at the hospital.

Imagine feeling a fist of lightning punch your heart

Remote-controlled by sadist interns.”

Saturday, June 30, 2012

First Day Teaching First Grade

Why, no, I do not belong to myself!

I am merely a vessel!

Deep in the quicksand of my double helices, there is the kinesthesia of the ancients.

Do you understand, children?

Good. Now repeat after me:

When I howl, it is spontaneous combustion of breath and wolf.

When I travel, it is thanks to the testicles of the Wright brothers.

When I cry, my eyes are the underground railroad for saltwater slaves.

When I run, I have the knees of a centaur and grim reaper speed.

When I am in first grade, I will be quiet and pay attention to my teacher.

If I do not pay attention, I will be sent to time out.

Very good!

Now remember, children, I am an hourglass of blood

but you'll need a stopwatch for anything more precise.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Circus Trick

for my next circus trick, this cracked egg will make itself whole!
this shaved Schnauzer will instantly have its hair back!
this popped balloon will become unpopped!
this hangnail will become unhung!
this chalk drawing will undraw itself!
this monkey with its teeth pulled out will once again have teeth!
this squashed berry will become plump!
this fried sausage will become uncooked!
this decapitated bunny will have back its head!
this will all occur before your very eyes, ladies and gentlemen, quicker than you can say bob's your uncle!
and what's more, ladies and gentlemen....
it will all happen in reverse!