Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Vi Aug 2022
Still more, in words

In experience

Confusing Familiarity with Comfort

Confusing Comfort with Peace

Reifying confusion, but not successfully

Yielding, on my knees, heart to the sky

Forgetting

Seeing through, a single pinhole in a perfectly realistic backdrop

Pinholes everywhere, more than can be contained

Not containing

Torn all over

Dispelling everything

Stripping away the Stripping away

Trying to stand very still and very quite so I can feel, hear, sense

Perfect realism

Wanting to be convinced by rage

Agitation, but only conceptual

Feeling tight

Feeling rehearsed

Feeling like an imposter

Wanting to impress

Wanting to be convinced of Self, of Realness

Fortified by others knowing, or preferably- admiration

Like being constructed out of sets of other peoples' eyes

Like being made real by propagating in more minds, many more minds, specific minds. In countless beating and virtual hearts, likes, thumbs up

Not wanting to be forgotten, while alive, while dead

Taxed by maintenance and constant imminent collapse

Compassion, like collapsing into a safe lap

Relinquishing

No pretense

Bare being

More naked than when unclothed

Total exposure

Outed, in the light of knowing

Self forgetting and glimpses of freedom

Trusting sighing

Always loving Sad, not despondent, just sad

Feeling continuous

Feeling fragmented

Feeling like motion, like flow

Feeling like thousands of still frames, constant flickering

Grasping at impermanence, visceral

Resting in the middle

Dancing down the tightrope

Knowing perfect poise, brief equilibrium

Reifying stability. Gone.

Everything is hysterically funny

Hysterically

But also, sometimes, just plain humorous

And absurd

Crying

Loving people

Grateful for people

Seeing beauty everywhere

Encountering this, intimate, me, indistinguishable being, but everywhere

Ouch

Awareness

Always coming back

Like an epic

Like a great love story

Like the last wring of that silk dress you weren't supposed to squeeze dry

Feeling like I shouldn't know what I know, like I couldn't. This must be illegal, cosmically illegal

Knowing the inside of my hand

Knowing teenage shame

Knowing being yelled at, towered over, by my dad, in a narrow hallway, eyes glued to speckled floor tiles, feeling small

Loving with my body, with my hands, with my mouth, with my whole entire strong softness

Loving with understanding

Loving with teeth and nails

Music, lacerating

Crying with tears, and snot, and heaving

Becoming one single, concentrated point

Wanting to envelope everything. Really. Actually. Like physically with my body.

Knowing I am not this voice

Or this writer

Or this narrator

Though I am also all that
I couldn't edit my previous Poem for some reason. There is therefore repetition here from "The Art of Selfing". I do not prefer it this way.
Vi Aug 2022
Sleep deprivation

***

Guilt

Sense-making and maps of meaning

Revisiting memories

Crying

Staying away from scary corners of my mind

Deliberately going toward scariness

Not resisting

Yes resisting

Respecting resistance

Compulsive tv watching

Dropping or letting go over and over again

Exploring

Curiosity

Forgetting and then remembering that it’s all happening on its own, noticing this, knowing this, realizing this

Realizing that realization comes and goes on its own

Being in love with everything

Crying

Playing with time and concepts

Craving emptiness

Love

Catastrophizing

Ranking what "works" (i.e. sleep deprivation is effective), noticing that the metric of “effective” and "works" is = resulting in greater illusions of "forgetting" with a capital F

Loving everything

Being everything

Self-flagellation

Not really believing any of the stories or narratives

Procrastinating

Being irresponsible

Getting off on self-loathing

Forcing intimacy

Compassion, large, whole, unrelenting, everywhere

Oversharing

Falling in love with a homeless person at a traffic stop

Being bored and sad and hopeless and desperate

Remembering inherent wholeness

Being stubborn

Getting out of the way always feels like dying

Loving dying

Loving mourning dying

Dramatizing dying

Wanting to be seen and loved

Self-loathing

Intensity

Craving intensity

Hating craving intensity

Knowing that nothing is a problem

Suffering

Being impatient

Being very very patient

Feeling like I don’t belong in the world, like people and things and money and social media are alien, foreign and scary

Feeling like I am the world

Forgetting that knowing how to verbalize isn’t the same as knowing

Wanting knowing with words to be the same as Knowing

Wanting knowing to be a Real, solid thing

Fear

Mortal fear

Bewilderment

Constant background anxiety

Hating this body

Not caring for this body

Being burdened by this body

Feeling trapped in a body

Feeling more trapped in a mind

Wanting knowing to resolve everything

Wanting to be saved

Thinking that I probably don’t need to be saved

Thinking or knowing(?) there’s nothing to be saved from

Knowing that I can’t be saved

Feeling open

Feeling vulnerable

Feeling exposed

Feeling bad

Feeling like I'm doing it wrong

Believing it all

Wanting to both believe it and have a choice about when, where, and to what extent I believe it

Not knowing where the edge is until I've fallen off

Feeling violated

Feeling like existence is non-consensual

Somehow trusting all of it, totally, exactly as it is

Watching the panicking

More crying

Being one

Being very very aware

Noticing and letting go of effort in one swift move

Compulsive clenching

Compassion

Dissolving

Disillusion

Dying without the novelty

Being ok vey very briefly and for no apparent reason/because of no reason./?

Wanting distraction

Respecting needing distraction

Getting out of the way of intelligent coping mechanisms

Villifying coping mechanisms

Understanding only in retrospect

Frustration

Compassion, deep, like warm water

Compassion, hard, like being ****** vey very slowly

Torture

Life-giving torture

Never wanting to stop

Marveling

Abundance like grace, like not deserving, like not needing to be deserving, like deserving is perverse language

Tasting everything

Endless kaleidoscopes of being and tasting and knowing

Non visual seeing

Clarity, brightness, nothing is a problem

Being alive

Being sososo tired

Wanting to rest, to die into void and nothing

Wanting to hibernate

Wanting to still

Dying to get off

Begging to get off

Finding the edge more thrilling than the center (because then the center can be anything at all?)

Loving all the previous versions of this being

Needing to hate, loathe, earlier renditions of this being

Hating repulsion

Trusting repulsion

Getting stuck because resisting repulsion

Knowing that there's no way out

Knowing that the way out that I'm seeking isn't a way out

Not wanting to do the work

Dancing around the center, constantly

Feeling dizzy with chaos, with knowledge of power

Feeling comfortable with mediocrity

Hating mediocrity

Waking up with jaw tension from the enormity of my own suppressed power

Telling stories about sensations

Relying on self-bullying methods I know don't work

Perfecting the art of pretending

Perfecting the art of self-deception

Wanting to make the stakes higher

Being overwhelmed by my own storytelling

Not wanting to give stories credibility by dispelling them

Naval gazing

Loving philosophy

Feeling dried up, tired, stagnant, disinterested, not engaged, not here.

Sleepwalking. Sleep writing. Sleep talking. Sleep caring

Not sleeping

Vivid dreaming

High weirdness

Questioning my sanity

Romanticizing insanity

Wanting to blur all boundaries

Wanting to smooth the edges of reality

Questioning reality

Destabilizing reality

Feeling destabilized

Feeling irresponsible

Guilt

Feeling sick and tired

Feeling scared

Feeling hopeless

Wanting to reach out

Feeling like everything is inevitable

Feeling like suffering is inevitable

Recognizing kindness

Discerning well (properly? Clearly? Well.)

Fearful trusting

Thinking too much

Not wanting to love my dad as much as I do.

Chasing the intellectual high

Disappointment

No need for resolution

Feeling caught in existence

Feeling caught up. Like in a potato sack; I can explore the exact measure of my confinement, the sensorial elements, the scratchiness, the filtering light from the outside, the stagnation, the wanting to stretch.

I love this being.

This. It's not a problem.

Confusing familiarity with comfort

Confusing comfort with peace

Reifying confusion, but not really

Yielding, on my knees, heart to the sky

Seeing through, like pinholes in a perfectly realistic backdrop

Dispelling everything

Stripping away the Stripping away

Trying to stand still and feel

Wanting to be convinced by rage

Always loving Sad, not despondent, just sad

Feeling continuous

Feeling fragmented

Feeling like motion, like flow

Feeling like thousands of still frames, constant flickering

Grasping at impermanence

Resting in the middle

Dancing down the tightrope

Knowing perfect poise, so so brief

Everything is hysterically funny

Hysterically

But also just plain humorous

And absurd

Loving people

Feeling grateful for people

Seeing beauty everywhere

Always coming back

Like an epic

Like a great love story

Like a violin solo in a forbidden song

Like the last wring of that silk dress you're not supposed to squeeze dry

Knowing the inside of my hand

Knowing teenage shame

Knowing being yelled at, towered over, by my dad, in a narrow
hallway, eyes glued to speckled floor tiles, feeling small, nowhere to go

Loving with my body, with my hands, with my mouth, with my whole entire strong soft body

Crying with tears, and snot, and heaving

Becoming one single, concentrated point

Wanting to envelope everything. Really. Actually. With my body.

I am not this voice

Or this writer

Or this narrator

Though I am also all that
Ken Pepiton Oct 2018
Forwards and fore words are cult if ations, (cultureshapen)
words we would find mean more

than their idle kin dread, (a play)
if we had been reared
starting now

A push from behind,
God put padding for a reason,
Mrs. Marshall said. Second grade.

A word, to the wise, is enough.
Acculturation.

That's the clue that leads to leaven,
and a little leaven...
you know, or say you do, of course,
we've known yeast
resurrects in our bread, for eons and ages,
Good Lord.

We know how things work.

If we be honest,
some,
a little bit, we know how things work.
Sayin' hon, I ain't sure I know what honest was.

To tell the truth, I don't suppose anybody knows,
wit'out attention's terrible price,

secret price, only the paid and payer know it, ever.
Sacred makin', sacrifice,

that's a one time deal, for real.

A mortal man can't know until he dies if he unbelieved all his
lies, but his try's are said to give him some -umph,

----
What manner of men are we that it is given unto us

to be? That is an answer worth paying attention to chase, per
haps. Not, to be or not to be, what choice, before now? You know?

Remember, we asked. Together, we agreed,
that greed will draw us to the treasure,

do you mind my taking greed from agreed and making it work.

it does work. it is an essential elemental,
desire is another word they use, but that gives it more
purpose than greed, and calls for more minding of the process.

Once a reifying action has begun we must maintain our equilibrium,
or
find ourselves falling, once more, into dis-traction
on life's slipper *****.

Slipper-iness has meaning.
Ask any little princess planning to grease her foot with KY.
It can be good or bad, not good or evil.

Squeeks from the audience, sometimes signal gasps,
as agap is crossed, like a spark,
mnemonical daemonic algorythms, those ain't bad you understand?

The Intelligence in Re-al, 's'no accidental instance of order over chaos that just cain't quit,
that ain't it.
Geeks as you know geeks,
Gates, Jobs, 'nem, A. I. Imagineers,
did not write this algorithm of life, as it turns out,

The Idea of God seems not to have needed help
designing a safeground,
where kids can play.

Sam Harris axed me, vicar-iously, Do you believe in literal
re-sur-rection of some formerly
living thing/ any?

Yes, yeast, I do. It seems dead, only our knowing it's not
and proving other wise de-ifs the possibility it's dead, now alive.

It's like that cat box, Schrödinger has.
Anything is possible, God knows, Jesus even said so,
wit' God, all o'this is possible,
save lying and dying and failing to be good for me.

Living, it seems, is the deed we do
to prove living forever is worthy of trying,
happily ever after, starting now,
if you wish to stay mortal and never know,

you can't.
You know you die, so you die.
Forever,
that goes on.

It's hell to try that with no triumph in sight.
Alone, especially.
I heard the phrase Jesus Bomb during the JBP/Sam Harris talk on youtube. I thought it might be fun to make one. If you notice, the poems posted here, byme, time as proven flow together onward.
Onoma Mar 2023
from the pens of beaks--

overblown to the flock

of a black bird.

come premature spring

shoots ******* on tufts

of wet snow.

sempiternal archways

reifying sound.

a whole body moving--

before it stops and looks

back beneath different

weather.

a banding host, purely

cut off from the

visitation of wind.

— The End —