John Pursch

052719

1:29 AM

A logbook can help me sort out thoughts. Textual openings of mind. How does it occur? What manifests? Where does context come from? A smile, a knowing acknowledgement, praiseworthy emblem of the heart, floating between faces.

Slow everything way down. Open the gates. Doors dissolve. Barriers bifurcate, becoming trees, becalming restless minds. Trees on a hillside in sunshine, beneath a clear moonlit sky, rooted in consciousness. Endless grass in possible space. A bird, verdant meadow, a solitary gnat. Printed flowers pervade quiet refrigerator hum. Discretion, advised consent, pinnacle of racehorse devotion, playing card nobility, lack of airline fossils pressed in strata. Fingertips. Careful conduct. Electrical fidelity, hovering in waves. More blue foam off the coast of naked aqua. Am I such a thing?

A hand in pajamas, misplaced dot, eyes released to wander, duty-free lounge between worlds. Relaxing for a moment before customary submission to valued humanity. Life in blank pages, silent omens, unresolved blur at night. Spectacular race to dawn at light speed. So many periods. A word echoes in a skinny shoulder.

Lettuce plays on, through pouring rain, a cello quavering in the distance. Somehow sunlight mingles with torn cardboard in silt, crowning the coastal flood. Under definitive absence, implications amplify to crystalline flowers. Seeing the flow of gravity in paintings. How time stands idly by, patiently continues. I wait for a mystery. Empty wallet, comb, earplugs, glasses, creaking wooden chair, scuff of foot on tile. Stubble.

Refrigerator starts again. I wonder what became of Proust. Did he cycle with the hum? His moments continue. My forehead simmers. A curved lantern hangs by lone electric wire from island nation. Nuts and lentils, growing beans in water; a padded cellular stream. Mixed substances dance. Isolated swallow. A dream. Quiet specular drop from running fountain. Standing-room planet. A smudge of air. Torrential almsgiving, instants overflow in endless creation. I am grateful. Certitude impending, waiting for missing identity. The Eiffel Tower sags, imperceptible iron weight, a world in torment.

An open eye, counting to twilight, elated loops in ordered pizza, fruitful interchange of dying carrier. Germinating nouns. Proverbial antidotes for parks. A chorus on a cold night, snowy sidewalk, scarf. Unrehearsed yawn.



060219

7:42 AM

Anger for sale
Emotion rationing
Crying parties
Sadness glut
Happiness shortage
Ersatz joy
Emotion machines
Pets in scarce supply
Emotional prostitution
Emotion theft
Hijacked compassion
Empathy almost extinct

Global time shortage
Time for sale
Fake time
Time machines
Time theft
Time prostitution

The end of time culminated in worldwide slaughter, continual war, over 200 million dead. WW’s I and II, Stalin’s purges, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and hundreds of proxy wars.

When time ended, it did not simply stop; it reversed. The flow of time flipped sign. Global war became relatively rare, but carnage increased radically. People began killing each other at an astonishing rate.

The reversal of time went unnoticed for decades; it is still unrecognized by most people. It is actively denied in the media; actually, it is a media taboo. What is denied is its major indicator: the ongoing murder of at least 25 million (some say billions) of people worldwide each year.

Clocks measure the flow of time, but not its direction. Abortion is a manifestation of the reversal of time. Death before birth can only occur if time is flowing backward.

Meditation and prayer slow down time. We are light beings, but tend to act as though we are we are material objects. As we lighten up, time slows down for us. Eventually, we attain enlightenment, and time stops, as it does for photons.



061719

6:15 PM

I am sitting.
We are sitting.
We are just this moment.
We are time.

I am eating = I am just (this action of) eating.

I am this eating event, this process of eating,
This instantiation of the eating process.

I am sitting = I am just (the action of) sitting.

My essential nature is just this moment,
What I am doing now, my action right now.

This instant is me.
This instant is eternity.



071219

4:30 AM

The sun will be rising soon, end of another long night, nocturnal journey into the boiling cauldron of desert summer day. Letting go… of what? Of any trace of what, wherefore, wherewithal, factual nuance, fictional identity, dipsomaniacal rage, dipsy-doodle logic, conundrums, encumbered cucumbers, tossed Hibernian salad, tundra plowed and seeded with rain, rain, rain.

The forecast calls for incipient sunshine, mesmerizing memorization drills, apple pie and star-spangled spaniels, slightly mangled marigolds, daffodils, daftly diffident rapture, the worship of warships, a sailor’s glorious sunset. Short respite of solitude, hermetical sanity, followed by frequent fractures along an ever-increasing fault line. Flippancy flits across an open pond, scans the lake shore, hovering. Releasing again, even more, always more to go…

But what is more, there is no more; the rope has not ended, it disappeared. Was it ever? And what became of all those knots? Were they untied, one by one? Rising stream, a thread, slips out the crown as ink dissolves. To finally sit here, pen in hand, if only for the moment.

O ceramic duck! O spectacle of human despair! O evaporated life! To cling would be to climb a candle’s smoke, extinguished.

A dance, a minuet; there is plenty of life left. Erasure of a moment, slipstream of thought, ellipsis a frozen bubble. Cold wind in morning memory, decades of toil, symptomatic soil unturned, receding into the hills. An ocean, articulated wonder, sky alive. Sentient clouds shift and merge, beauty in rhapsodic episode, thunder. Soon now, very soon. Periodic jolt, reset to recent; rescinding, resending resonant reliquaries. Soliloquies, salubrious sailboats on the bay, salvific soporifics. Time flickers on the wall. The air is filled with it.

Just sitting, with pockets of activity. This has always been the case. Even the activity is zazen. Just sitting. Eating, sleeping, breathing. It is all essential nature.

From a practical standpoint, life has flipped. Realizing that I’ve been sitting all along, from infancy. Just sitting. When off the cushion, I’m a living koan. My hand is a living rosary. On the cushion, too. Mary, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, all sentient beings, rocks, trees, grasses, clouds: all one, all me. Me means unity. The all-seeing eye of the I. We are one. Whenever I say “me”, I am referring to unity, albeit usually unconsciously. “I” refers to all. An exercise: read, hear, parse, interpret this way, beginning with your own thoughts. Listen to speech with this in mind: “I” means you too, all-inclusive pronouns. “Mine” means everyone’s. Separateness is an illusion.

This can be extended, of course, to space and time. All places are here; all moments are now. Here is everywhere; now is forever. Captivated, swallowed, and consumed by the infinite detail of the world, I am unity. To live in both, to realize them as one, to effortlessly glide between, is realization itself.

John Pursch lives in Tucson, Arizona. Twice nominated for Best of the Net, his work has appeared in many literary journals.
A collection of his poetry, Intunesia, is available at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/whiteskybooks.
Check out his pi video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l33aUs7obVc.
He’s @johnpursch on Twitter and john.pursch on Facebook.
 
 
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