It’s amazing what doesn’t exist in the
real world. There are no events. No things.
A marvelous system of describing. Picked
out stars in the skies. Constellations in the mind’s eye.
My self and the universe. There is no real difference.
A basic inseparability. Silent. The interminable chatter.
Thinking compulsively. Talking to ourselves. The first
sign of madness. Thinking about thoughts. Living entirely
in the world of symbols. The only reason. Meditation has none.
There is no purpose. There is no arrival. There is no journey that
has a point. There is only playing. That is the only point.
The discovery of an immediate moment. The future, my friend,
never comes. There is only now. Stop talking to yourself.
Stop looking for tomorrow.
Meditation is no grim duty. Religion is no grim duty. We
do it because it is good, not because it is good for us.
Just grooving with the eternal now. A peace with understanding.
A simply here. A simply now. A beginning by listening. Close
your eyes. Hear the sounds. Listen to the hum of the world
as if you were listening to music. Just play with your eardrums.
Let them go. Let your ears hear whatever they want to. Without judgment,
it’s all just sound. I want you to listen to me. To this poem. To what the
brain understands automatically. The sound. The experiment. What you cannot help naming.
Thinking inside is automatic, but repression is not. As you hear, simply listen
to them as the general noise. Cars going by and birds chattering outside the window.
Your own thoughts.
The outside and inside coming together as a happening. A happening.
We are watching the happening.
The breath runs. If we will it to and if it wills on its own, the breath breaths
the way it wants to. I breathe because I am doing it, just as I am walking
and talking, just the same. I am doing it and it is happening to me. Awareness,
and the hard and fast division. All one happening.
I’m not in charge and I am not a slave. I am responsible for my own reality.
My eardrums turn the world into sound. But when we are not talking about it,
there is just a nameless. A happening. What is it that we feel when we feel I?
What’s the difference between waiting and enduring? Frowning, Pulling ourselves
together. Holding our breath. Trying to control the nervous system.
Grunts and groans as if we are lifting weights.
It has nothing to do with the thoughts that bring results we want. Pulling at our seatbelts. A chronic feeling that sees. If you feel your ears, you have an organ that is sick. You are not in your own way. Optic nerves in the back of our skulls, like the awareness that sees the futility of seeing. I am impotent. I am a real problem. I should be different. I am a heart. I am everybody. I am awake. I am in the world. I am selfish. I am in love. I pretend to love. I love the Lord and my neighbor. But I don’t. I am in love against. I am trying. This religion. Changing. Satori. Mystical. Moksha. What you don’t get in church.
George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, NY. His work has been included in such publications as the Hazmat Review, Moria Poetry Journal, Chronogram Journal, Ampersand Literary Review, the Angle at St. John Fisher College, and 3:16 Journal. George’s blogs, essays and letters have appeared in the USA Today, Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the Havana Times, the South China Morning Post, the Buffalo News, and more.