"Make of yourself a light"
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal-a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire-
clearly I'm not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

These students are walking
There headphones are blaring
Disattached from the world
Blankly they are staring

I glance at the clock
Not wanting to talk
My headphones are broken
So silent i walk

Forced to find
Something that will blind
A kind of distraction
To keep from the demons in the back of my mind

Away from the fears
The wandering ears
So evil are the demons
That bring me to tears

The looming of dept
The fear of regret
Without any distraction
I cannot forget

My headphones are broken
The demons have awoken
This silence it scares me
As do the fears i have spoken

This walk is taking forever
This heat a blistering fever
Forced to be grounded
With nothing to be a deceiver

My headphones are broken
My dark thoughts have risen
The evil I try to tuck away
Anger, pain, and fear I am stricken

Finally back in my room
Protection from the lurking doom
I blast the music as loud as i can
And the demons return to their tomb

no one really noticed
not until he stood
six thousand miles, disattached from the world
cold, grey separation

and they screamed for him,
but
he couldn't hear
over the taunting
the cold, uncaring
the anger
was just too loud

until he fell,
and met the welcoming ground

and of course
suddenly he was loved
but only in death

and by the time that oaken box of a broken man passed by
it was too late to care.

A crab leg, disattached and thrown on the beach
by tides and waves, its color still vibrant
as if its dismembering was a recent thing,
an escape perhaps, from the trap
that claimed the rest of the crab, destined
to become someone’s dinner.

But not this leg. It is a remainder, all that is left,
a splash of God’s art on the sand,
temporary as life, just as precious,
flaunting it’s broken beauty for just the briefest moment
between waves,

It was fate that I happened along.
Or perhaps more than fate. Perhaps
I was fated to see it, to capture its image,
fated to make certain its life and its death
were captured, recorded,
its beauty made less fleeting
than traps ever wished for.

Another wave and it is gone.

Bones Bones Bones
you've got bones
i've got bones
we've got bones
yet why do i feel...?
boneless?
Disattached from reality
depsite the microtubules and microfilaments holding me together
we grow stronger...
until we don't
and we crack
brittle pieces flying everywhere
getting stuck just to cause more pain
when we can no longer heal
and holes take taking the place of where greatness once lied
we are bones