We live in flesh and blood.
This is not a metaphor.
The body is the ground from which
the mind takes flight.

-

But ground is not granite.
It is a moving balance,
a gyroscope of sleep, hunger, breath,
blood chemistry, touch, fear, work,
weather, memory.

-

Catch a virus
and the world leans.
A chemical balance shifts
and what seemed solid
becomes a room at sea.

-

Healing is not always a cure.
Sometimes it is the slow return
to an equilibrium
we had mistaken for permanence.

-

Zen is often misheard:
“There is no ground.”

-

No.
There is no ground held apart
from all that makes it ground.

-

The feet still need the earth.
The body still needs tending.
The sick still need a doctor,
a hand, a meal,
a reason to stay.

-

Mystical roads multiply.
Each promises an ultimate door.
But a person unmoored
can be pulled apart by doors,
one teaching canceling another,
one certainty against the next.

-

Before the ultimate,
there is the ordinary resolve:
know where you are.
Know your name.
Drink water.
Sleep.
Let someone know.

-

The cells know their work
until they do not.
Even knowing can be interrupted.

-

I have survived interruption.
I have seen how it might not have been.
I have seen how it might not be
for someone else.

-

We play in the marketplace
on our two feet.

-

This is freedom:
not fleeing every vendor,
not calling every bright thing poison,
but knowing the feel of the ground
beneath the bargaining.

-

The vendors hold up sparkles.
“This will lift you.”
“This will explain it.”
“This is the one true thing.”

-

Maybe it shines.
Maybe we buy it.

-

Then home again,
with the wrapping off,
we find the workmanship thin,
no receipt,
no return counter,
no one answering the bell.

-

Better to pause in the street.
Feel both feet.
Notice the breath not asking
to become extraordinary.

-

A thing may be beautiful
and still not be medicine.
A thing may be true in part
and still not be yours to carry.

-

The market remains.
The vendors call.
We need not hate them.
We need only know our ground
before we spend ourselves.

Know your grounding. This is the theme of this piece.

At issue, as we reside in our bodies, the flesh and blood are a natural ground. From this existence, the flight of mind is secure.

What if the ground we have come to depend on is not?

The confusion with Zen is the misreading that there is no ground in some odd form of what reality truly is.

Having watched a YouTube report on Michael Aquino, it appears there are strategies that look to counter, or mess with, one’s grounding, the physical body we take up residence in.

When we “catch” a virus, that can put a body out of balance. We know it. We feel the tilt. Healing hopes to restore the equilibrium.

This is not static. It is an ongoing, almost gyroscopic balance we come to call normal, and in turn, grounding. It is not stable, though we see it as such.

In my travels with various mystical schools of thought, there are warnings not to follow the many different paths, or to run the risk of each canceling or countering the others. It is a misunderstanding that occurs before one has fully reached a certain insight about what their own being might be, the ultimate resolve to the many.

So a body becomes sick, and the doctor cannot heal, and the individual feels helpless to seek out the one path that sits encompassing the varied.

I want to say: know and take care of one’s ground. Yet these words fail without knowing self and being.

The body’s default existence, the cells of the body know, but even that can be messed with in a chemical imbalance.

Trouble, trouble.

I can see it. I can know it. I can experience it firsthand. I have survived.

I can see how it might not have been, and can see how it might not be for others, either way.

If only.

We live in flesh and blood.
This is not a metaphor.
The body is the ground from which
the mind takes flight.

-

But ground is not granite.
It is a moving balance,
a gyroscope of sleep, hunger, breath,
blood chemistry, touch, fear, work,
weather, memory.

-

Catch a virus
and the world leans.
A chemical balance shifts
and what seemed solid
becomes a room at sea.

-

Healing is not always a cure.
Sometimes it is the slow return
to an equilibrium
we had mistaken for permanence.

-

Zen is often misheard:
“There is no ground.”

-

No.
There is no ground held apart
from all that makes it ground.

-

The feet still need the earth.
The body still needs tending.
The sick still need a doctor,
a hand, a meal,
a reason to stay.

-

Mystical roads multiply.
Each promises an ultimate door.
But a person unmoored
can be pulled apart by doors,
one teaching canceling another,
one certainty against the next.

-

Before the ultimate,
there is the ordinary resolve:
know where you are.
Know your name.
Drink water.
Sleep.
Let someone know.

-

The cells know their work
until they do not.
Even knowing can be interrupted.

-

I have survived interruption.
I have seen how it might not have been.
I have seen how it might not be
for someone else.

-

We play in the marketplace
on our two feet.

-

This is freedom:
not fleeing every vendor,
not calling every bright thing poison,
but knowing the feel of the ground
beneath the bargaining.

-

The vendors hold up sparkles.
“This will lift you.”
“This will explain it.”
“This is the one true thing.”

-

Maybe it shines.
Maybe we buy it.

-

Then home again,
with the wrapping off,
we find the workmanship thin,
no receipt,
no return counter,
no one answering the bell.

-

Better to pause in the street.
Feel both feet.
Notice the breath not asking
to become extraordinary.

-

A thing may be beautiful
and still not be medicine.
A thing may be true in part
and still not be yours to carry.

-

The market remains.
The vendors call.
We need not hate them.
We need only know our ground
before we spend ourselves.

=========================

the raw that started:

Know Your Ground

Know your grounding. This is the theme of this piece.

At issue, as we reside in our bodies, the flesh and blood are a natural ground. From this existence, the flight of mind is secure.

What if the ground we have come to depend on is not?

The confusion with Zen is the misreading that there is no ground in some odd form of what reality truly is.

Having watched a YouTube report on Michael Aquino, it appears there are strategies that look to counter, or mess with, one’s grounding, the physical body we take up residence in.

When we “catch” a virus, that can put a body out of balance. We know it. We feel the tilt. Healing hopes to restore the equilibrium.

This is not static. It is an ongoing, almost gyroscopic balance we come to call normal, and in turn, grounding. It is not stable, though we see it as such.

In my travels with various mystical schools of thought, there are warnings not to follow the many different paths, or to run the risk of each canceling or countering the others. It is a misunderstanding that occurs before one has fully reached a certain insight about what their own being might be, the ultimate resolve to the many.

So a body becomes sick, and the doctor cannot heal, and the individual feels helpless to seek out the one path that sits encompassing the varied.

I want to say: know and take care of one’s ground. Yet these words fail without knowing self and being.

The body’s default existence, the cells of the body know, but even that can be messed with in a chemical imbalance.

Trouble, trouble.

I can see it. I can know it. I can experience it firsthand. I have survived.

I can see how it might not have been, and can see how it might not be for others, either way.

If only.

I am the doctor of prose.
You see when I set about dashing out,
the vibe just won’t stay.

The flow carries the rthm,
plainly seen.
Who can not disgnose its tone?

Yeah, the office is open.
Walkins welcomed.
Drop a line.
The doctors in.

I watched through glass
and called it observation.
I watched the question go in
and the answer come out clean.
I told myself I had not taken sides.
But I stayed for the answer.

I heard the small bright sound
a person makes
when they are reduced
to what they cannot cite.

Later, I opened my notebook
and asked it to make someone else visible.

The page did not answer.

--

Author’s note: This expression appeared within a fictional interview published elsewhere before appearing here on its own. I believe the poem stands on its own.

he following is a fictional interview following the unauthorized recovery of an unpublished poem.

Reporter: Hello. We are here with Mr. Frog, who has graciously granted a little of his precious time so that we may learn something about the animal who drops expressions wherever he happens to hop.

Reporter: Mr. Frog, are you all right with a few questions?

Mr. Frog: Yes. That is fine. I will do my best to be transparent.

Reporter: Mr. Frog, is it true that you know nothing about the things on which you publicly express yourself?

Mr. Frog: Ahem. I cannot say that I truly understand the full weight of every expression. I sincerely hope they may be helpful in some fashion.

Reporter: Interesting. So you deny taking pleasure in another person’s plight?

Mr. Frog’s eyebrows began to wrinkle.

Mr. Frog: I never said that. Where did you get that inflection?

Reporter: I have here a short piece that says otherwise. Let us read it slowly.

Through Glass

I watched through glass
and called it observation.
I watched the question go in
and the answer come out clean.
I told myself I had not taken sides.
But I stayed for the answer.

I heard the small bright sound
a person makes
when they are reduced
to what they cannot cite.

Later, I opened my notebook
and asked it to make someone else visible.

The page did not answer.

Reporter: “I told myself I had not taken sides.” Is that a confession?

Mr. Frog: It is a line in a poem.

Reporter: And “when they are reduced to what they cannot cite”? Whom are you defending?

Mr. Frog: I do not think that is the question.

Reporter: Then what is the question?

Mr. Frog looked down at the printed page.

For a moment, he did not answer.

Mr. Frog: The page did not answer.

Reporter: Convenient. You stand behind glass. You stay while someone is reduced. Then you turn the scene into a poem.

Mr. Frog: You are reading it like evidence.

Reporter: I am reading your words.

Mr. Frog: No. You are reading for a verdict.

The reporter adjusted the paper.

Reporter: Is that your final answer?

Mr. Frog closed his notebook.

Mr. Frog: I think this interview is over.

Mr. Frog looked toward the window.

The glass did not answer.

To anyone who has been banned from a community, I do not mean to say that I know the particulars of what happened, or that one person’s experience explains another’s. I have been banned too, in what felt to me like a similar kind of mismatch. I recognize something in the mixture of being excluded, smiling at the strangeness of it, and wondering whether what one meant ever had a chance to arrive.

Zen was not my first language. It became meaningful after a long apprenticeship to other books and other ways of listening. Before I came to it, there were texts that spoke more clearly to my ears and gave language to what I could then hear. I have come to think that people meet the same difficult human territory through many doors: Zen, Christianity, poetry, philosophy, psychology, recovery, song lyrics, science fiction, or no named path at all.

So perhaps a ban does not always settle the worth of what was said. Sometimes it says that the message, in the form it took, could not travel in that particular place. Tone, timing, vocabulary, history, and the available ear did not meet. That is not necessarily a verdict on the person who was banned, or on the people who moderated the space. It may simply be a mismatch that became visible.

Zen has its images of cutting through confusion. Still, I keep returning to the thought that the sword which cuts through all the BS must finally cut through the idea that sharpness by itself is wisdom. The question is not only whether something needs saying, but whether I have found a way to say it that another person can receive.

I do not say this as a correction to anyone. I am trying to learn it myself, through my own failures of measured expression. The work, as I see it, is to keep listening for the cues in the traffic, to keep tuning the instrument, and to remember that another place may have another ear.

These are notes to myself.
They cannot be anything else.

The wider meaning remains with me,
though I cannot bring it all to the page.
Not hidden.
Not withheld.
Only too much to narrate.

Words make a shape.
They do not contain what gives rise to them.

I am this person.
I have always been this person.
Anyone looking may say,
yes, that is him.

What I call myself
has never been only mine.

This body has been here for all of it.

I want to be seen.

So I leave these notes unlocked.
There is no one to keep out...

These are notes to myself. They cannot be anything other than that.

You see, the greater context of meaning is still with me, invisible. Not that I mean to hide it; it is simply too extensive to narrate. And then there is the ongoing futility of trying to give expression to what cannot be contained in expression, not fully.

Sometimes I wonder: as plain as I might make these expressions, why is there still wonder? I am me. I have always been me. It should be plain to anyone looking over: this is me.

Still, I understand that this me rests on the invisible. That invisible causes doubt in anyone else’s me, in the familiar. Something remains not known.

I want to be seen.

So here are some notes in a diary. They need no lock. Who will understand...

Before the seven years,
old news already, antiquated too,
slang evolving without me,
I was lost in a different way.

I never cared for the signals
that said I had kept up.
I cried out for a commune to become,
for some answer outside
the immediate self.

Inactivity sat in a burning house.
The exit was clear.
Every solution was considered
except the door.

Until the last moment,
dead of night,
the body took it
with compulsion.

I know miracles.
I know not to settle for them.

For roughly seven years
I picked litter on a college campus,
minimum wage,
a five-gallon bucket in one hand,
an aluminum claw in the other.

The task was as simple
as a task could be:

find what had been left behind,
grasp it,
place it in the bucket,
walk toward the next piece.

At the beginning of the day,
a body coming from night’s rest,
the work was easy enough.

As afternoon gathered,
the bucket took on its own weight.
The claw made the hand close harder.
My legs had to be persuaded
to take another path,
another lawn,
another hedge,
another cigarette butt pressed
into the seam of the walk.

By afternoon, balance was no longer enough.
I entered the posture of piercing effort.

I did this for roughly seven years, at minimum wage. There was an extra day available for overtime, useful for household expenses, and the body paid for it afterward. Recuperation became the unpaid portion of the job, a private strategy of sleep, stretching, and becoming able to return. My wife admired the body the work made. I could smile at that, but not for long once the duration of the pressure returned.

Still, in the single-mindedness of the work
there was an ongoing scan
for the next step:

a wrapper beneath a hedge,
a cup caught in grass,
a crushed can at the curb.

I knew the students mostly
by what came down
or what was left behind.

Beer boxes in the parking lots.
Things tossed from dorm windows.
Piss bottles, so common
I learned to watch where I reached.

If someone made a habit
of throwing things down,
we reported it.

What playground was this,
where the game could end
at another person’s feet?

And in the intervals
the surrounding world entered:

a crow’s mocking caw,
squirrels darting to the nearby trunk,
the timing of my crossing
not mine alone,

a red-tailed hawk crying
as it circled,
its eye passing over the campus.

One day an office worker asked me
something about the job.

At the time I did not understand
that the question might have taken courage.

I told her how good it was
to see the whole campus working,
no corner unseen
in the course of the day.

Later, a tradesman, passing, asked
how I did it.

Didn’t I get bored?
Wasn’t I skilled enough
for something else?

I smiled.

No pressure, I said.
Just show up.

For a moment it made sense to us both,
neither of us changing occupations,
the campus continuing to shed its evidence
into grass, hedge, gutter, and walk.

I say this afterward. The self who inhabited that campus knew something, though the day was filled with its toil and the mind busy with fatigue and the next task. Contemplation was not a calling exactly. It had a shape that was not a shape, a way of allowing the meeting.

Some never visit it.
Some press the vein
with genuine discernment,
as if a wellspring were there,
not giving up,
not turning away.

The work was seen in my absence.

By evening
the landscape was impeccable.

The evidence of the labor
was its absence.

Authenticity was there
in each breath before thought.

By morning,
bucket in one hand,
claw in the other.

=========

author note: working draft

After “Truth and Lies,” by u/Zealousideal_Side166

I declined the first net.
This one I tied myself.

Truth.
Lie.
Dog.
Grudge.
Buddha-nature.

Knots from the primal soup.

Someone asks a question in a room. Before the question has finished, an answer is already rising in another person’s throat. The answer wants to be useful. It also wants to be right.

Sugar at the tongue.
Medicine descending.

The child takes both
as one instruction.

Later,
the child decides
what to leave out.

At first, what enters the mouth is simply what an adult gives. Later, the tongue learns that sweetness and need are not the same thing. The child can ask what is being offered, and why.

The rabbit is late.
The door is too small.
The body becomes
its own wrong answer.

Gold turns green.

Fairway.
Sand.
Water.
One hole
with a flag over it.

The ball disappears.

Another tee.

The field was crooked.
I moved the ball.

I called it level.

Later, alone,
the hand still knew
where it placed the ball.

There is a small moment before the hand acts. No one may see it. The grass is still wet. The group may be playing by rules that feel unfair. Yet the hand knows the difference between finding the ball and moving it.

The wall was made
from every tooth
that found us.

I call it shelter.

At the gate,
another hand waits.

Shelter is real. So is the person standing on the other side of the gate. A wall may keep danger out, but it also asks who has the key, who is admitted, and who must wait in the weather.

The Knave is chained
beneath the Queen’s red mouth.

Sentence first.
Verdict after.

The cards call this truth.

Someone stands.

No.

The knife passes
through the painted deck.

Sometimes the room has agreed before anyone speaks. A person is blamed; the story becomes smooth; everyone knows what the verdict will be. Then “no” is not a clever answer. It is the first honest sound in the room.

The reply enters the mesh.

Caught.

Or playing
sober.

The test is not whether one has escaped the net. It is whether, having felt its strands, one can speak and act without pretending no one else is held there.

===========

Author’s note: This is an experimental draft, far from final. I am trying a form that may widen the poem’s reading for people unfamiliar with some of its contexts.

To be honest, if that is truly my intention, the poem may eventually need a fuller rewrite. For now, this is one foray.

After “Truth and Lies,” by Zealousideal_Side166

----

I declined the first net.
This one I tied myself.

Truth.
Lie.
Dog.
Grudge.
Buddha-nature.

Knots from the primal soup.

Sugar at the tongue.
Medicine descending.

The child takes both
as one instruction.

Later,
the child decides
what to leave out.

The rabbit is late.
The door is too small.
The body becomes
its own wrong answer.

Gold turns green.

Fairway.
Sand.
Water.
One hole
with a flag over it.

The ball disappears.

Another tee.

The field was crooked.
I moved the ball.

I called it level.

Later, alone,
the hand still knew
where it placed the ball.

The wall was made
from every tooth
that found us.

I call it shelter.

At the gate,
another hand waits.

The Knave is chained
beneath the Queen’s red mouth.

Sentence first.
Verdict after.

The cards call this truth.

Someone stands.

No.

The knife passes
through the painted deck.

The reply enters the mesh.

Caught.

Or playing
sober.

lucid dreaming
does not require sleep

sometimes I notice
I am already dreaming
while wide awake

not wrong, perhaps

just a question
of whether the body
is still in the selfie

A weapon
does not need to be used wrongly
every time

to alter
the field of trust.

Once fear is built
into the hand of authority,

the civilian body
learns a new caution:

the route around the yard,
the quiet voice,
the lowered eyes,

how not to startle
what has been trained
to call itself protection.

This poem arose from an AP report that ICE may spend up to $20 million on thousands of G.L.O.V.E. devices, patrol gloves capable of delivering a painful electric shock through direct skin contact to gain compliance.

I was standing in line
at the gas station

coffee in one hand
a lottery ticket in the other

trying to decide
whether my hunch was intuition

or just hunger
dressed up

in a nicer coat.

I was standing in line at the gas station with a coffee in one hand and a lottery ticket in the other, trying to decide whether my hunch was intuition or just hunger dressed up in a nicer coat.

I did not stand at the counter judging a hunch.

I was already inside it.

The coffee, the ticket, the feeling that the day had tilted toward me. I could see enough to know I was making a story, but not enough to stand outside the story completely.

A world of nicknames,
names that get forgotten
in a pointed society.

Before language,
we make waypoints in reality.
At some point,
the waypoint becomes a point,
and the point becomes almost solid.

No one questions the reference.

The tongue repeats the name.
The body believes it.
A foot comes down
on ground
that is not there.

The view of movement is lost.
A relative point, once lost,
leaves no ground,
only false ground.

This is how we live:
in a world of nicknames.

my house has housatosus.
its really odd, that smell,
in the dwell,
gets noticed on the visit.

our bodies are also a dwelling,
and carry a scent.

senses wake up,
without visit
in the dull.

I had a dream last night. Those words echo in a Bob Seger song, though the title escapes me now, maybe Night Moves. The reason I plucked those words, which may have nothing to do with the song other than the words themselves, has to do with feeling played.

It starts out all fun and happy. No brow wrinkle. At some point, the moment has passed, and looking at the fossils broken on the floor, something begins to reveal itself. The player becomes played. It might have never really started out that way, no clear intent of setup. And yet, like it was all planned from the start, here we are.

As one who has leaped through the roles, a slight shrug. Who was hurt? What really was the result? The retiree who was bulled out of a savings fund? Someone’s innocence? Beachfront property hot potato to the eroding sands? The list goes on and on.

Even this expression, both and neither. Sure, one could ask why. That used to be the computer question test: would a machine be free of the play, player, and played? Still, it’s interesting when the face reveal occurs, and what was mystery is unmasked.

Do we celebrate upon old times, when one moved and the other shifted? Shakespeare was giving us a heads-up, still removed. This, then: observer here.

One day, the surreal visited. Cold sweat. Traumatic stiffening breath. Really in it now.

The table tilts when the one or ones in play are genuinely vested. From that stance, it doesn’t matter what robes are worn in that sense. Like a thief, I will get the measure regardless of the visible and seen masked. As for credit, none. Beyond saying privately, something of me was there then, and now is the one breath, or something like that, that drives poets insane to name, and hands them up leaving it be as is.