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Nissim Apr 2020
I had unsuccessfully danced with the paradoxes of Reality,
Its feet were not in lockstep with mine.
And yet I sensed they were a lesser peak in the shadow of the mountain peak above all.
I went into the forest in a state of Chaotic confusion.
It was a cold day, my wispy breath wafted in front of me.
It was a sunny day, the sun's explosive light,
Through the trees bare and bright,
Exposed my body, my soul was nigh.
I walked into the forest as far as possible,
And then completed the journey on the half-way out.
I emerged at the precipice above a sea,
Its shoreline on the other side of a narrow and meandering road.
Across the waters were the North Shore mountains.
They were snowy and rugged and hoary.
The sea was a blue-green marble sparkling by the sun's strong light.
I sat at the precipice.
In front of me my feet dangled above a void,
And behind me the Autumn leaves were dying.
I reflected on Reality's paradoxes,
On what they are truly telling me.
I stripped them of all prejudices and banalities.
I pealed away their artifices and artifacts.
I aimed to see them with a Zen state of mind,
deconstructed and bare.
How to describe a state of Zen consciousness?
Imagine looking at a painting depicting a beautiful sunset.
This painting evokes powerful emotions in you.
Emotions of serenity and your soul's longing for communion with divinity.
You ARE Zen consciousness when,
upon pondering this evocative painting,
All you can see is a coat of paint.
Zen deconstructs reality and returns you to the white-eyed womb of Creation.
Imagine descending the branches of a tall and sprawling tree,
From child to parent branch,
And then repeated like nested mirrors,
Until you reach the trunk.
You are now communing with the Source.
When you descend the Tree of Existence it is for the void,
The nothingness, the ineffable truth at the core of Existence,
That you are yearning.
And when I fell into the Zen within me I saw a grand tree.
But the world of space and time,
The implicate order imprinted by the paradoxical,
Was only one branch and not its totality.
On each branch I saw a myriad of wrestling angels - the denizens of its dream.
They perceived only the completeness of their own branch,
But not of the totality.
And then a denizen of a branch's dream soared high above the tree,
And saw its entirety.
How naive he was to think its home branch was the whole tree.
How myopic to only aspire to wrestle its home branch,
Instead of yearning to dance with the entire tree.
To this wrestler it slowly dawned, freed from prejudices and tethers,
First a release of tension due to paradox resolution and then,
like a shadow illuminated by the light,
The paradox lost its fight.
And then I snapped out of my reverie.
I witnessed a sunset with a beauty transcending sight's domain,
And which can only be parsed as the soul dancing with divinity,
Reverberating within its innermost grasp - Creation's womb.
The sky splintered into crimson shards that pierced the wispy clouds,
And then the sun's turgid red ball hung low for an Eternity,
Above the sea's furthest edge,
And then sank into the void beyond horizon's ledge.
Nissim Apr 2020
I reminisced of a time long ago when I was only twenty years old.
I was studying English 101 at the University Of British Columbia in the summer of Eighty-Four.
It was at a summer session because I had failed English 101 two years before.
A failure due more to my citizenship in a different realm than to the failings of my intellect, aptitude or the magnanimity of my core.
“You have such a poignant and evocative writing style,” wrote my teacher on the short-story I had submitted the week before.
I had written about a lonely sojourn on a desolate beach in the pregnant moment,
When sunset injures day's abandon and grants night the freedom to roam.
I had written about the mighty North Shore mountains,
Hoary with age and reverberating with an energy ineffable to the mind,
But savored by the soul.
I remembered how exhausting of mind, but above all of the soul, writing that short-story had been.
I tried to reveal my spirit bare and exposed.
I tried to destroy the ramparts and blow open the heavy gates shielding my secretive core.
But through my exhausting efforts I had only succeeded in weakening the facade between me and the world,
Usually held at arm's length,
But through my story then, only slightly nearer yet still remote.
There is an essence within everyone hidden in a chamber far beneath the veneer that encrusts our core.
We seldom allow it expression beyond just its fractured shadows dancing on an external wall.
But if we all dig deep and reach into this secretive chamber,
We will, to our astonishment, discover we are all reaching into the same chamber,
Not a separate one for each within the all.
And then we will grasp each other's same-hand.
We all share the same soul.
I knew that in the novel of my compulsion I would have to expose this chamber,
Ramparts and heavy gates destroyed once and for all.
And my novel would then cry out from this collective chamber,
And speak for my left and for my right with one voice for all.
It would be the ineffable ground of being reaching out to humanity from the navel of Creation,
Proclaiming the dawn of a Third Age.
It would announce the sunset of the Second Age before this coming dawn.
A moment pregnant with change that will forever be remembered in the annals of the Civilization of Man.
It would herald a paradigm shift far greater than the Renaissance,
Not just an age of reason, but of reason and divinity intertwined as an inseparable whole.
I envision the Third Age to be promoting the two primordial dancers,
The abstract magical and the other its complementary whole.
To engage in the Dance and thence unshard into the Eternal Garden from whence we all came forth.
They are in Eternity entwined, but sharded into the realms of space and time.
They are shards of the divine.
Would composing such a novel be an arduous journey,
Exhausting my body and above all my core?
Would I be as a drowning man,
Gasping for breath,
Kicking and screaming while with futility grasping for shore?
But would every paragraph and page exhaust me,
Yet also leave me yearning for more?
It would I am sure.
This arduous compulsion will also uplift and invigorate me with waves of catharsis and frisson.
And I pray dearly for the same in my reader,
of soul-piercing joy.
If I fail to evoke the same in my audience then I would have failed to breach the ramparts and the gates shielding my innermost chamber,
Our collective soul.
Only within this innermost shared sanctum can I truly touch someone's soul.
And by touching one, I will be touching them all.
JDL Mar 2020
Do you ever wonder why music transcends sound?

Or why a painting transcends the landscape that it represents?

Or why your home transcends it’s geographical location?

Or how a story book transcends the pages and words by taking you on an adventure to another planet that you wish to never leave?

Do you ever wonder why no matter what you do or where you are, something profound feels to be missing that these transcendent moments merely beckon?

What makes them so tantalizing?

Why do so many of us live for these transcendent moments that always fail to deliver what they always promise?

Is it because what they promise is actually the thing to which they point rather than what they promise?

Is that why these transcendent moments deliver with diminishing returns?

Are we just getting a titillating taste of true reality or is it just a scratch and sniff of a single ingredient?

If these transcendent moments are created through material objects but move beyond the object, mustn’t there be something beyond material reality?
Yitkbel Nov 2019
Chorus:

In Spring, from my poems, flowers spring
In Summer, a sum of everything green
In Autumn, foliage melancholically falls
In Winter,  my wintry mind gradually thaws

I. Spring:

Always one with nature
The Truth, my mind follows
A wave of pastel colors, returning swallows
Peck the hedges with petals of my soul
Blue and shattered, into the poetry it goes
What is without, escapes, imprints on the folds
Of time and space, as the stream of consciousness flows
Till, without me purposefully noticing
It captures within my thoughts an eternal Spring
And remains
Subtly felt but
Unseen

!

In Spring, from my poems, flowers spring
In Summer, a sum of everything green
In Autumn, foliage melancholically falls
In Winter,  my wintry mind gradually thaws

The Poet's Dream Follows the Season's Calls:

When the world exterior is abundant with
Life and the breathing, palpitating all
I capture in my mind, thoughts and words
With wonders and troubles
Of the nature
Without

When the world exterior crumbles and falls
Hidden and blanketed, asleep by the winter's call
The opening beyond Plato's cave gradually thaws
I am suddenly privy and drawn
To the nature
Within

II. Summer:

Always one with nature
The Truth, my mind follows
Between the boulders of lichens
Upon the emerald streams
Floats the vessel of my soul
Gathering seagrass and pollocks, it goes
What is within, the nature time briefly holds
Is now words of mine, to be told
Before the grass fields are eclipsed by the gold
It captures my thoughts evergreen
And remains
Brilliant with eternal warmth
Read and felt yet
Unseen

!

In Spring, from my poems, flowers spring
In Summer, a sum of everything green
In Autumn, foliage melancholically falls
In Winter,  my wintry mind gradually thaws

III. Autumn:

Always one with nature
The Truth, my mind follows
A twilight dance of leaves and boughs
First it blushes, ruddy, timid but bold
Then, it undresses, melancholy, bare in its fallen maple soul
A chilling gale gloats, pallid night wallows
In the anticipation of the impending revelation
What is without, dreaming its withering dreams,
Is now traversing through the wilting wintry plain
Soon to reach the delusive emptiness above
The hidden valley of invisible plenty
And be captured by my thoughts, reason and faith in harmony
With its dazzling orange and red, cerulean velvet behind emerald fringes
Forever vivid
In my poetry, to remain
Deeply felt, though
Unseen

!

In Spring, from my poems, flowers spring
In Summer, a sum of everything green
In Autumn, foliage melancholically falls
In Winter,  my wintry mind gradually thaws

IV. Winter:

Always one with nature
The Truth, my mind follows
The snow covered barren streets
A tattered overcoat suddenly greets
In a moment, by it I was brought to a place
BLOOMING with intrigue, I navigated this maze
And found the GREEN hedge of will and fate
Rich with HARVEST fruits of reason and faith
Like the SNOWFALL, that steals all
I became a glutton of light, in spite of the shadow wall
What is within, bursts from my mind's seams
And overflows
Not into the nature beyond, without
But nature of my mind and dreams within
And is captured by my words
Mirrored from my thoughts
In my poetry, it remains
Enlightened by and enlightening
All who seek and think, every being
With truth evidently felt
However
Unseen

Conclusion:

The poet of autumn, summer, and spring
To the exterior objective nature sings
The poet of winter, withered and plain
From the interior subjective nature, essence springs

The seasoned poet blossoms regardless
Whenever, wherever, timeless
Among
Fleeting fields of earthly gold
Or eternal pastures of souls
The Seasoned Poet Reaps Truth with His Soul
By: Yitkbel Yue Xing ****
Date of completion: Friday, November 15, 2019 1:38 AM
Started sometime after/around 10:00 PM Thursday, November 14, 2019
Yitkbel Nov 2019
Introduction:

If I, with my childlike mind, thus
Interpret Hawking’s analogy here
Of the Universum Infinitus
Not as a fringeless sphere
But as he described, like the surface
Of our beloved planet Earth

Then, the only place
That is beyond time and space
That is with-out time and space
Must be hidden within
Forever, within
Eternity’s grace

What would we see,
If we left Plato’s cave
Into the Perfect Circle
As if through the looking glass
See all of life and existence
For what it was
Without our restricting frame of
Reference:
Our Consciousness
Fear and awareness of change
And loss
Without fear of the light,
Because we were shielded
By the shadows on the walls
For too long?

I

Through the perfectly lucid concave
I saw every String and every way
I saw the river of time, the ring of time
Unified
I saw it ebbs and flows, without death
And seemingly, forever alive

Humanity, consciousness, swim freely
But each soul stay in place, yet as
The river itself moves, and changes,
No one ever ceases to move

As St.Augustine deducted:
Time is the awareness of change
Something must come from
The Future
And
It will unstoppably pass into
The Past

The Present
Is almost nonexistent
Ever within one indivisible
Moment
Thus,
Time is meaningless to God
Time only exists for us
For it is what is gained
And what is immediately lost
TIME doesn’t exist for the eternal

II

Over time, I noticed something This River Time on the other sideSeems to be changing over nightIts flow becoming slower and slowerYetIts waves becoming wider and widerTill less steps is necessary To be able to cross over time     

We measure time by change
But even change is quickly
Changing
Becoming more and more often
More and more senile and forgetful

Is TIME ageing? Dying?
Is the river of time becoming
More and more viscous
As the sentiments build-up
Becoming more and more
Like milk or even honey?

III

Century is the new millennium!
If we measure the river of time
By section or meters of changes
Then, surely we can see that
As the flow of the denser and denser
Bodies of water slow down
Quicker and quicker
What used to be a thousand waves,
Or a thousand years
Is now a hundred waves
Or a hundred years:

If each fixed section or meter
Is marked by a great shift
Paradigm shift or
Great Change
Then
It is clear that the younger time
Used to take shorter, quicker,
Steps
And as it grows and ages
His steps become steady and slowerBut each stride becoming longer 
Thus travels faster
Till only in about a hundred paces
Would he encounter another
Lamppost,
As opposed to Olden Day’s
Every thousand paces

Conclusion:

Time is Consciousness
Or Awareness of change
For if nothing dies, arrives,
Then the constant present
Is forever a place without time

What if the speed of change changes
What happens when change
Seems to be coming quicker
And quicker?

Is change coming towards us
Or are we flowing towards change

Is time ageing?
Is our conscious awareness of
Change
Moving in greater and greater
Strides?
Moving from thousands of years
To hundreds
To decades
To months, weeks,
Days?

Would such a frequency
Exhaust time itself to death?

And grants us our search
For eternity
Not for us to live unbelievably
To age beyond Adam’s 930
But for us, within a hundred years,
A decade, year, month, day,
Hours, seconds
Experience all possible changes
Till we lose it all,
Till no more changes could occur
And
Forever stills the Status Quo.

We are experiencing it now,
Quicker and quicker
From a thousand years old
To a hundred years old
From centuries of greatness
To fifteen minutes of fame
To weeks of love
And endless separation
Till we exhaust it all
Ran all the way
To end up in the
Land of Waste

Or find a way
Beyond the cave
Into the unfathomable
Perfect Circle
Beyond loss, beyond change

Either way,
We will end up in a place
Beyond Time and Space
https://hellopoetry.com/poem/3387038/a-platos-perfect-circle/
A very muddied but curious stream of consciousness formed from different strands of what I recently read (Science for the Layman books), and my naive thought experiments sparked by whatever it is that I encounter.
---
Century is the New Millennium
By: Yue Xing Yitkbel ****
November 4, 2019 18:47
Sara Brummer Sep 2019
The world is made of mystery
as wild as the dunes
where secret spirits gather
and grasses whisper psalms.
My guesses cannot run as fast
nor can ideas fly
to catch all that amazement
floating upwards toward the sky.

This universe enormous,
its distances unknown.
Its stars and moons and planets
live in their spacious home,
but all that can belong to us
is life and death alone.
Same meter as Emily Dickinson used, that is tetrameter followed by trimeter
Justin Aptaker Aug 2019
Everyone's been talking about how
the universe will either expand
indefinite cold star death
or collapse and then repeat itself

meanwhile i'm a slave proper
in every sense of the word physical
bound to the elements hunger
a criminal for speaking my thoughts aloud

a loud or a soft noise unheard
unseen and unknown and unthinkable
still I would try to define it
humanity, always effing the ineffable

i'm one and apart and the same all the same
the universe cloaked in name after name
every man and woman a star
in their own drama melodrama how dramatic

i am in a word addict
again you might say i'm back at it
rhyming with rhythm but static
sense or nonsense and i've had it
Justin Aptaker Aug 2019
i was born
to a mother who always is
trying to destroy me

my father
left
long before
i was born
i can never seem to find
where he's at

i'm so dry
such a dry, dry drunk
white knuckle sober
Written ca. 2012
Justin Aptaker Aug 2019
even now has come to an end
the world that once was then
when
the nights were young
full of natural electricity

you may find yourself
standing in a place so unfamiliar
yet so full of such bewildering
similarity
to something you knew before

then,
you may just be watching
the wind as it plays
in ripples on the surface of the water
which passes under your feet
standing on a bridge
Written ca. 2012
Justin Aptaker Aug 2019
couple on a motor
cycle with a death wish
drum drops
still pond
early morning
coolness broken

pull that poison, pull it deeply
deeply, deeply
pull it deeply
keep that breath, like memory bitter
sweetly taste that lungs can know

a good will, strong, and a one hundred
these are made alone
for breaking
benjamin Wishing, Well behind
our time,
our pennies
are made
for throwing
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