Beacon

remembering Michael Jackson

For years
Your antics embarrassed us
But now you've left
And the world has woken in response

Never gone, we now re-affirm
Was your singular, unique talent
Your real influence in shaping song
And by this, you re-shaped the world

Man in the mirror
You've played your stage role
in the drama of healing the world

Boy forever lost
We forgive and embrace you
As we must, despite our species' countless transgressions

Working the giant within

this took so much of June, just to put down as words

I've become increasingly aware of the huge role carried on, by the large part of the mind we are not conscious of.
I think it's exceedingly arrogant to think we can greatly manipulate the so-called subconscious giant, with the merest tools of our conscious desires.
Even a deep intrapersonal intelligence should tell us to sincerely respect, not brazenly try to exploit, and fall to, such a giant who actually controls so much of what each of us is.
And the giant's not often telling what is doing, or being done to our lives.

I learnt this the hard and very long way.
I was educated to believe in the adamantine invincibility of knowledge, logic, rules, procedures, institutions and other creations of the human mind.
Nothing was supposed to be unconquerable, through the application of plans & reasoning.
Especially when stamped with approval on high from educated experts and competent politicians.

But I kept noticing what a failure I continued to be.
While my peers seemed to effectively administer iron-cast mental discipline in studies, national service and careers, I repeatedly washed out, feebly attempting to use the same excellent methods.
All my life, I've always felt a boy just wanting his own time & space to play in and be alive, so it became unbelievable that I could be such a rotten reject in society.

Years of youth passed by, as my limbs finally got forcefully twisted time and again, by an inner certainty that started questioning one by one, one after another, one moment after another, all the social and cultural engineering I was pledged to defend with my life.
The simpler, purer voice of childhood with its powerful innocence never stopped speaking quietly, calmly to me, even when I was too enraged, fearful or indifferent to listen.

The giant was summoned against me, and how tormented I felt to endlessly meet his acquaintance.
Deadlines I could not meet, performance I could not sustain; norms I actually, really did not subscribe to; thanks to all the wrestle-downs by this giant with its strong arms.

Eventually I have snail-slowly begun to understand: the giant is my lost much-more-than-half.
We needed to re-unify to become the greater whole of which we were, originally.

It's painful to witness-experience how so much of what parents, teachers, seniors, authorities taught us, must be allowed to fall away, fade away, be ignored, and forgotten.
But persist with them and risk losing that child of boundless potential & resource which each of us once was.

Fight the giant within, or work with it.
I chose.

Baby

As I gaze fondly at it
I ask:
Why, how did you choose
To be born where, when, as who?

What is it about us
as your parents
that made you choose
to leave the endless stretch of infinite cosmic sleep
and once again play
an active role in this existence?

How did you know
What ancestral, racial memories possess you
that you so uncannily resemble us, remind us
of what we are, we were
so that we cannot but be charmed by
and give our all to you?

more than we ever imagined we had
compassion blooming from selfish hearts
unsuspected reserves of energy from our limited physical selves

the smell
the warmth of skin
the alive-ness of being
the unbelievable strength & resilience
concealed in cuddly helplessness

Snake into straight tube

Since early on
Words have been few
Could still write stuff
Had won prizes

But --
"There must be rewrites!"
She vehemently declared
Towards proper grammar
and respectable norms
we had to go

Fortunately none would do so then
But ivory towers remain
While the merry brooks of poets
sing past in their flow

Way of kings

It is your brutal way:
Put to death without a care
so many whom you claim as subjects
Yet bend knees
for a child in your path
Your curious concern
mingling with
savage violence
which is your consistent nature

Boundlessly proud
as you of course are
You couldn't care
that you would vanish
more than fade away
in but a historic moment

For such is the way
for those who would be gods
You think your name
more eternal than
countless nameless unknowns, forgottens
Who have forever quietly loved, sacrificed --
How can you merely supreme entities compare?

You walk in an age
where mortals run
paramount

Keep moving

Your lives change
as does mine
Going on in directions often felt unwanted
But you will be made to go along
Like a passenger on a caravan
trudging through vast expanse
A journey's end defining all your travelling's purpose

You get older with every passing season
But as you acquire lessons of experience
in this uni-directional voyage
you can choose to free your earth-bound, grounded constraints
And take wing on the updrafts of dreams
While cocoon-wrapped in the assurance of your positive memories

In your visions, the dreams ever glorious
In living the years, more memories getting better

So step out and really see, my friends
Your histories are each little epics
Remembered, carried within us
You will not voyage alone
This ocean that keeps moving

Provocateur

What creature are you,
What power do you possess?
That you can turn
a calm & composed person
into a furious raving maniac
While all the time unheeding
of the tempest you have wrought
All because you are driven
by selfish urges
which have already overpowered, consumed you

You can be forgiven
For you are still a child

You cannot help yourself
Trapped in that tower of your growing mind
Those raging hormones, their blood-song drowning out
Your still so fragile edifice of reason & maturity
The acceptance and greater harmony you've yet to master

But we cannot use you as excuse --
To bring forth the young
one must transcend the birthing pools.
From all of our hearts we need to hold you
Onto a greater growing self
And so we restart
in necessary suffering
To not suffer your provocation

In time you will learn
The wistful peace of the gentle breeze
caressing heads of grasses
The brave assurance of not succumbing
to your terrific inner storms

Facing back, facing forth

Community of boys
Approaching the elite
Little giants of potential
Slow-cooking in a scenic backburner
Juicing in rivalry & competition
Intensely training every moment
To emerge the superior gravy of society's pot-roast

This is the pie within which, I remember

Network of men
Now successfully ensconced into what they were engineered for
Older, no longer the youthful energies bursting forth
That has now passed on to their cute, lovable children
As they sit around
Time having taken toll, as it must
Do I envy their numerous achievements, to date
Or feel much more acutely, the passing of lives with time?

This is what I can finally honestly see, these days.

Pulling apart many ways

The old man was a fading ghost
Laden down with unfinishing work
Forever a tortured slave
of course in body
but ever so in mind
Never finding peace & satisfaction
Being not himself

A young boy is hope springing eternal
Always free of bonds, happily preoccupied
Doing the things he naturally does, timelessly
The eternal now
Was only born, never the painful start
Does not die, nary a bitter end
Being himself

The man is ageing
Like raw grape juice that must
improve into mellower wine
He keeps hearing the boy's voice a-calling
And as more these days looks through old man's dwindling eyes
Courage & sense grow
Death not the suffering, but the lifelong stalwart companion
This is life fully lived every moment

Evil lurks within good

fiction

"So the lead monk turned out to be evil after all?" Walker checked with the others present, her voice in hushed surprise.
She had just returned from her run about town, getting the latest news from everyone & anything, mostly by observing than probing.

"No," Smith corrected her, bringing out a tricky pair of small, delicate metal clasps for some final bending adjustments, "evil was never the conscious intent, just that almost all his monkhood, in their research into the divine, lost touch with mortal compassion.
It took the deaths of babies & children, within this town & without, to awaken many to something very wrong going around."

Grower came in to sit, his tray piled with cool, damp, just-picked mushrooms.
Overhearing Walker & Smith at the start, he added, "The monks deeply believed their good intentions, hoping to extract the pureness in the very young and understand it better, so that all may emulate their innocence.
But they used harsh methods gotten used to from their daily rituals, and that only caused the little ones so much damage.

"Evil lurks within seemingly good motives."

During this while, Artist had been quietly leaning at a side wall, listening to the exchange, and he said, "I just heard more about that Kingdom diplomat denounced by our mayor.
Folks here & there are finding it hard to believe any ill-will concealed within a kindly gesture of friendship."

"Yes, it gets more troubling when little imps appeared too soon in the next week past, to assault trading folk for no common sense," Smith agreed, holding the jacket he had just welded the clasps on, and flinging it straight with both hands.

"And now the mayor's practically vanished, after the townspeople almost killed that poor representative with their lynching."

"You think that whatever diabolic forces couldn't get our leader here, finished him off privately?" Grower questioned.
The powerful smell of still-fresh fungi was beginning to fill the room.

Walker let out a quick, amused laugh, stretching her standing legs, as was her habit before going on one of her countless little jaunts again.
"Stop teasing Smith and us, Grower!
Your tone hints so strongly that you think it's all a deception.
The person we've trusted for several years, might actually be the seed of chaos trying to fester in this nice place!"

"You suggest right," Artist returned instantly, and Smith was nodding slowly in their general direction, taciturn as usual again, "Forester and Marsher are already starting to track twisted creatures walking their grounds, few in number but... that's why it's troubling.
They seem too well-hidden, to leave such few signs.
In the direction of where our likely ex-mayor was last headed."

"Oh, that supposed trip to visit kin at our neighbour town, when we now know no such thing was expected coming."
Walker sank into uncommon brooding, but not for long, as expected.
She actually propped up on a bench, for a moment.
The shed wrapped briefly in quiet.

Then she spoke up, "Our old friend Sage, whom, admit it, we see as our goodly senior, you think too that...?"

Artist finished the final outlining touches to her coal sketch, looking up sharply, "Anything is possible."
But what he wouldn't say, kept within, was he really felt the opposite.
That brainiac was too untouchable in his natural & true rightness.

That would be a problem.

(for brief backgrounds into their character cousins from River Town, they're in this growing post from another blog of mine, World & Space)