LEAVE A LIGHT AT EACH CROSSROAD

THE END OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

Who’s going to

take you,

break you

and then remake you

into something you have passed through before

yet forged ahead with no notice?

Did you leave a light at every crossroads

and pray for the noise of your shuffling feet

not blow out the glow;

for finding a way to remade is harder

in the dark streets overblown in desert sands

awash in a flash of a forever moment flooded with intolerance.

Can you stand high and safe defining

the moment’s political correctness

and unharness the reality of

what is right yesterday,

wrong today,

and tomorrow;

well tomorrow is not defined yet for no study has been paid for.

Every definition of a part has an engineering cost,

especially high for them needing a loan

to be made into right yesterday,

wrong today,

and tomorrow soft enough to be told where to stand.

Did you leave that light

at every crossroad you

hopefully, slowly, thoughtfully passed

that you may find your  return,

re-turn and remake yourself

rather than have others tell you

who it is you are to become?

© M Durfee

7.21.2014

BODHI OF BUDDHA

THE LAST LOTUS

Unable to reach for the lotus throne any longer

I wake from my meditation to see I am ringed by fire.

I wonder how much life has been consumed

to bring this fire to me while I was

deeply touching the cool universe

A prefect circle of flame consumes more life still

as it draws nearer to my soul,

my body feels the heat without concern.

Slowly the flame circles me, touches me,

crawls up my skin.

I feel the pain within the licking fire of all it has squandered

before it chars my mortal flesh, burns my breath as I inhale.

Wick like I burn from the outside in; without smell

my skull bares itself and I rise in my karma to see

from where the fire has come.

I see the earth fully blistered,

a deeply scorched wasteland

I understand that the flame

brought its ring of death

to me last of all.

My punishment is fair and true.

I am left with my sight dying

to see the end of all that was adored by me

destroyed by me and my indifference

to all but my own growth.

Smoke am I now, looking down on ash.

No breeze to move me away from this sight

of my love gone away before me.

I have lived my life, eyes closed believing

that harmony ruled all as it once did my spirit.

I rose from

my past enlightenment.

I am now.

I see now.

Before my birth I began the fire that consumed my mortal world.

I am now nothing

but

the smoke of life

wasted.

© M Durfee

7.14.2014

PUT ON THE NEW YEARS HAT, WE MUST CHANGE

THE DAYS OF EXPLODING DAYS OFF

The smoke of a thousand times a thousand explosions drifts over a now silent field of nightmares. Places where people slept as war raged about them to a draw, no conclusion. All know the best wars are fought with stealth not frenetic firework explosions celebrating birth of freedoms long changed, corrupted, and lost. O nation of mine, flag of starry eyes and red, white, blue blood where have ye gone? Sailing on the mast snapping a martial salute over a battle ground where all explosives, imported from a land that freedom never grew. I light a fuse and throw the sparkling thing in the air to rattle the neighbors I’ve ignored all year.

This is now freedom: spending living money on a one night orgy of noise, explosions hoping to bring a binge of rights once owned not understood anymore. Allow the breeze, it will come by morning to clear off not only the target coordinates, smoke designated, but the lie that poverty provides only a military solution. Now to the war of holiday making, count the lost extremities and limbs blown off and made to shrapnel of skin and bone and let them laugh to tears who were kept awake. Irony is not found in the ones, every holiday that celebrate losing a palm, knuckle or knee for the rockets’ red glare, in that there is no glory. Simply waste. I will take my freedom, despite them who try to steal it, and I alone will count the day I won it; for my nation has abandoned freedom for profits sent to slave states and image makers who understand that I am not free because they tell me I am, but rather I have become so after fighting many a battle with—myself.

There is a herd to manage, to make the ewe feel good about the slaughter of her young, not for freedom but to protect the profits of the doomed who sit not in smoke designated target areas, or now silent fields of nightmares, but in gated housing tracts getting fat on lady fingers and tea once waste as it went over the side into the harbor. The cargo salvaged was fed dry to a peasant population but the wet orgy of profit came from assurance that all wars are good, for spreading the lies that freedom rings in slave made explosives lit by them who cannot read these words.


© M Durfee

7.5.2014