Happy Halloween

For more bad ass pumpkins & how
to make them click here.

"I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before,
Or else I am awake for the first time,
and all before has been a mean sleep."
Walt Whitman.

Beautiful village in Pakistan.
Click here to see more pics.
I never knew how beautiful it was there!
It reminds me of the Alps.

LOOKING FOR YOUR FACE

click to e-largenerate
i shot myself. com

From the beginning of my life
I have been looking for your face
but today I have seen it

Today I have seen
the charm, the beauty,
the unfathomable grace
of the face
that I was looking for

Today I have found you
and those who laughed
and scorned me yesterday
are sorry that they were not looking
as I did

I am bewildered by the magnificence
of your beauty
and wish to see you
with a hundred eyes

My heart has burned with passion
and has searched forever
for this wondrous beauty
that I now behold

I am ashamed
to call this love human
and afraid of God
to call it divine

Your fragrant breath
like the morning breeze
has come to the stillness of the garden
You have breathed new life into me
I have become your sunshine
and also your shadow

My soul is screaming in ecstacy
Every fiber of my being
is in love with you

Your efflugence
has lit a fire in my heart
for me
the earth and sky

My arrow of love
has arrived at the target
I am in the house of mercy
and my heart
is a place of prayer

The Love Poems of RUMI
Edited by Deepak Chopra
Translations by Farsi scholar Fereydoun Kia

click to e-largenerate

Red meat

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!

Abraham Lincoln

Coyotes

Forlorn barking laugh

Flying through the trees to break

As a bone with all the marrow

Licked out.

Dry as a late summer,

Cracked and splintered

Falling

On these old drums, the steady

Beat of fear echoing through

The pine, as darkness rises from

Its bed of rusty needles, wiping

The last of the twilight from

Its eyes.

In time's desert I feel your presence.
In the rock's silence I hear your footstep.
Emotion overcomes me.
Then, like a sudden downpour
Fear of death startles me.

(`Abd Al-Sabour 1992, 64).

Supermarket

Four years old, a beautiful prize displayed

proudly in the center of a bubble-wrapped display of

a gumball vending machine, a lone tooth with a golden

cap and chain, a crescent moon dagger of a tooth from

a : wolf, saber tooth tiger, or lion. A hunters prize that

could dangle above your heart in the victory of man-child

against beast unknown. Tarzan’s treasure for one shining

bicentennial quarter, and the turn of the key, click and drop

of a plastic acorn, falling to tap the silver door, and a black

plastic spider proudly clung to my finger all day.

Last year we fought by the head-stream of the Sang-kan,

This year we are fighting on the Tsung-ho road.

We have washed our armor in the waves of Chiao-chi lake,

We have pastured our horses on Tien-shan's snowy slopes.

The long, long war goes on ten thousand miles from home,

Our three armies are worn and grown old.

The barbarian does man-slaughter, not plowing;

On this yellow sand-plains nothing has been seen but

blanched skulls and bones.

Where the Chin emperor built the walls against the Tartars,

There the defenders of Han are burning beacon fires.

The beacon fires burn and never go out,

There is no end to war!—

In the battlefield men grapple each other and die;

The horses of the vanquished utter lamentable cries to heaven,

While ravens and kites peck at human entrails,

Carry them up in their flight, and hang them on the branches of dead trees.

So, men are scattered and smeared over the desert grass,

And the generals have accomplished nothing.

Oh, nefarious war! I see why arms

Were so seldom used by the benign sovereigns.

Li Po

Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

John Lennon

Rilke's wine

bitter German wine

grows sweet with the

savoring, digesting slowly to become

drunk with images

dreaming my life into hidden memory,

unfurling and folding to rise as a prayer

to the vaulted constellations of

a domed cathedral,

incense drifting to rise above

the smoldering evanescence.

It's kind of warm and fuzzy for a message of doom.

click the rearview mirror
to see objects larger
then they appear!

Shadow Dancer

Yellowed

vellum pages turn

as a moths dancing soliloquy

makes drunken shadows on the ancient pages

the wine-stained ink of blood

in the false light of history.

Victorious monuments rising

from the bone piles of the living

mystery, as the waves break

upon this fertile earth,

draining to bleach bones and shells.

This dawns leaden weight of clouds

resting silently on the beach

amidst the crying gulls

and salty tears of ocean mist.

The Art of Poetry

To gaze at a river made of time and water
and remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.

Jorge Luis Borges

In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

• Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Like the jelly beans in this jar, the Universe is mostly dark: 96 percent consists of dark energy (about 70%) and dark matter (about 26%). Only about four percent (the same proportion as the lightly colored jelly beans) of the Universe— including the stars, planets and us—is made of familiar atomic matter.

Chandra chronicles

When you feel yourself starting to become whole, it's alright to accept positions of
power, but not before then. The overriding problem with our country, and our
world in general, is that we are in large part, managed by incompetents. Most
of these are men who have spent their lives seeking power rather then themselves.

Consequently, we are confronted with the grotesque spectacle of working for
childish figures half-baked little generals with overblown egos and no more understanding
of the search for meaning than some primitive, base organism spending it's time feeding
on the lives and feelings of others, guzzling them up like strained peaches, cackling
to themselves as they play shell games with other people's destinies.

Robert James Waller

The tao is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind. When the deep meaning of things is not understood the mind's essential peace is disturbed to no avail.

The tao is perfect like vast space where nothing is lacking and nothing is in excess. Indeed, it is due to our choosing to accept or reject that we do not see the true nature of things. Live neither in the entanglements of outer things, nor in inner feelings of emptiness. Be serene in the oneness of things and such erroneous views will disappear by themselves. When you try to stop activity to achieve passivity your very effort fills you with activity. As long as you remain in one extreme or the other you will never know oneness.

Those who do not live in the single tao fail in both activity and passivity, assertion and denial. To deny the reality of things is to miss their reality, to assert the emptiness of things is to miss their reality. The more you talk and think about it, the further astray you wander from the truth. Stop talking and thinking, and there is nothing you will not be able to know. To return to the root is to find the meaning, but to pursue appearances is to miss the source. At the moment of inner enlightenment there is a going beyond appearance and emptiness. The changes that appear to occur in the empty world, we call real only because of our ignorance. Do not search for the truth; only cease to cherish opinions.

Jianzhi Sengcan

Just understand that birth-and-death is itself
nirvana. There is nothing such as birth and death
to be avoided; there is nothing such as nirvana to
be sought. Only when you realize this are you free
from birth and death.
~Dogen

Eighty one chapters
and no division
between Te and Tao.
Wisdom came
and bit me on the ass,
thorns sunk deep
pumping Novocaine and
my sinister leg went to sleep.
For days dragging as a wounded
animal , the Gods sympathy
a black dragon moon
its fangs sunk in darkened symmetry.
The stars brilliant cold numbing light.

U2 October

October
And the trees are stripped bare
Of all they wear
What do I care
October
And kingdoms rise
And kingdoms fall
But you go on

My computer crashed. Waited Two weeks for the computer
guy to fix it, but he couldn't. I looked for my copy of windows
Xp and couldn't find it. Had to buy windows Vista ($240.00)
and a flash drive to load my pictures so I could format the hard
drive. Now the sound card won't work, Looked it up online, to
discover That I'm not the only one this has happened to.

On the 18th of September my left leg went completely numb;
very disconcerting. Any way, I can walk on it now, and it seems to be
getting better. I am going to physical therapy twice a week. Fingers
crossed.

Now that my computer mostly works I will once again be
Tracking through the blogosphere.

In the last month and a half I have written a lot more poetry.