Theravada or Zen?

It used be Theravada
Little did I know of Buddhist scrolls
Just a couple of commandments
obsessed with death
and a-clinging to enlightenment
Everything I did was with dharma and importance

Then it went to Zen, anything goes
absurdist, all for enlightenment
except overly polite ritual hymns
What’s up with that
when you don’t fear death?

Now I’m sort of back to Theravada
With a hint of roots Zen, Bodhidharma
But devotedly, I’ll take none of it all
Why believe in enlightenment?
Just appreciate the fall
changes

...**** It

Killed a moth on principle last night
I saw it outside standing on my air-conditioning
Then I found it inside after I turned my air-conditioning off
Climbed in through the silent vent
and orbited my light bulb l006 times
Before I killed it with a sock
and whipped it one more time into the lamp’s brass base
Almost saved a moth on principle last night
Rationality’s a sham and you know it
The moth said in the morning
I found it clung to my lampshade, dead
with white **** coming out from under a wing ripped in half
Life is a sham we all share

Cryptic cryptic
Use too many words with no imagery
to convey some personal philosophy
But, now I just want to say how lost sometimes I feel
Driving on gray dried oil roads through gold maize fields
surrounded by erosion saving forests
Look up, and see blue skies with mountain ranges of bulbous clouds
I am so small, even though we carved this land with the back of our thumbs
and changed the color of the sky with the smoke from our hair gel sleek planes
Alfalfa look from the wind blowing at my side
I’m a shark mechanically lifted as the fastest Earth creature
wantonly killing my ocean predator parody
Even eating the chunks of shark flesh I don’t throw out
A plunder king
atop a pile of just as much bones/cartilage
as jewels and fresh carcasses

“The trouble is, we think there’s time”
Buddha said it so urgent
Complete with Sanskrit contractions
The baby delivering doctor saying we all have a cancer, no matter how slow
so pick up your passions with a god’s effortlessness
Play a concerto that makes your hair stand on end
because the music was more important than a reflective surface
Looking like a you were born in a stormy garret
Writing, thinking, and plucking, as if the gods set you there
instead of the million hopeless mediocre ones
No, instead you are brethren to those gods
All competing for immortal kicks – like mortal tail
Until the game board perspective ceases
looking down on the plebeian pantheon
and it’s just you and what you lived for

Job searches getting me down
I wait a few days and build up expectations of a keyword,
only to be hit with my inexperience in strange computer programs
Secret knowledge, have the behind the curtain research consultants
No one wants to understand a fleeting past

It’s all about what’s profit present
an internet job board is a long look at the priorities of this nouveau world "culture"
The top jobs are in marketing,
turning spy loot into algorithms that explain to magistrates how
the top brands can stay above the clouds
It’s the only way they can look down

My college has a vapid radio commercial
advertising zesty summer programs
- and I thought my prestigious public college
was above that

Spy on this
not because I'm a deviant "ist"
of some dangerous ideology
No, I cannot hold on to anything so strong
What a scary time for those alive
whose key logs match that terribleness
just a little bit
"Oh, but she was so non-violent"
No, it's media martyr silence
Freedom of speech?
See how careful I am - just typing?

But for most the danger is in all our numbers
Algorithms for shopping patterns
voting and religion too
We give our attachments to them freely
so I say "hello there," maybe lone computer
or programmer
soulless, or believing Brother's benevolence
-Not here for the poetry

Humans are caught in a cultural duality at the moment. We - because I am human also - have a want in adventure in life as well as a want for egalitarian progress. Yet, both these options become limited while human population grows exponentially. As we take up more land and resources, and jobs increasingly become automated, many humans will find their lives unfulfilling compared to the possibilities offered by their media, as well as their past.

I truly believe now is the most exciting time to be alive; all the years of the neutral internet till its demise (c. January 2014), and nearly all the world’s likewise connected physically, by fast travel.

Yet, the excitement’s starting to wane. The internet’s becoming censored, and the world is turning monolithically mundane, with no promise of risk and new frontiers. Most people are fed up with growing inequality, including an uneven possibility of an adventurous life.

85 people control half the wealth of the world, but we are polarized toward smaller blame. So most the world doesn't live like I do, estadounidense. They don’t have the possibility of modest adventures. But only a devil’s pawful of people are living the grandest travels we watch in stories and film, and they have enough cash left over to live a life of those adventures a thousand times over.

Those living in real poverty are too concerned with the survival of themselves and their own families to gain progress against this prickly bat, who grows fatter from red blood since Babylon’s past. Now her global shadow casts a toxic plan, either too comforted, propagandized, or terrified - to shrug off some bullies.

The hope is – in this the waning time of the most exciting time to be alive – is that we unite, but keep local pride. Everywhere in the world wants a new comer over for some distinct thing.