The Hippie Experience And The Zen Experience

When I was young,
I was a hippie
who believed
in love, peace and happiness,
and I had
a little altar
with candles
and incense
and I would meditate
and contemplate
and chant
made-up things,
so later
I got into Zen
and now
I have
a bunch of altars
with candles
and incense
and I meditate
and contemplate
and chant
learned chants
and made-up things,
and I believe
in love, peace and happiness,
but the difference is
that I was stoned
in the old days
and I'm wholesome,
sort of,
now.

This Old Room

I'm sitting in
my old bedroom
which is now
my office
for poetry
and I remember
breaking in
through the window
a long time ago,
and I remember
my friend
burning his hair
accidently
on a candle
and I remember
drinking wine
here
and I remember
smoking dope here,
like the first time
that I got high on it
and I remember
sitting here
with a friend
and a girl friend
and the friend said
"Let's make a movie".

Blimpy And The Hermit

Blimpy and the hermit
lived in houses
that were next to each other,
and Blimpy was a right wing guy
who had lots of guns
and his walls were filled
with the heads of animals
which he had killed,
and the hermit was a left wing guy
who didn't have any guns,
because he practiced
non-violence
and didn't want to harm
anything, even cancer,
if he could help it,
so both Blimpy and the hermit
believed in kindness
and being good neighbors,
but it was Blimpy
who first came over
to the hermit's house
and introduced himself,
and so they became
good friends,
so the moral
of this story
is that you never know
who people really are.

Mental Illness And Spirituality

The mental patient
gets put on drugs
which he or she
doesn't like,
but must be on them
or risk
suicide, hospitalization,
jail, or being
one of those people
who go out
and shoot a bunch
of people,
so you see
how dangerous
it is
to get off of
those drugs,
but the spiritual path
usually teaches
to get off of them
because they say
with their way
you don't need them,
but the spiritual people
don't know
how dangerous
it is for us mental patients,
because
for most of us
these drugs
are a matter
of life and death.

The Dirtyish Way

The way
is the path
of clean living,
but I am in the way
of the dirtyish artist,
and the way
can get dirty,
or gonzo,
or filthy,
or disgusting,
or even evil,
but those ways
are too wrong
for me,
although
I was pretty gonzo
for awhile,
so I am
about ten percentage points
off of
the clean living way,
but I tried
to live
the spiritual way,
and the holy way,
and the monkish way,
and even the saintly way,
but those ways
were all wrong for me,
because I wasn't really good enough,
so I have settled for
the dirtyish way
of the artist,
and that's fine
with me.

The Highest Truth

I arrived
at the Highest Truth
today,
after a difficult lifetime
of searching,
where death
followed me everywhere,
torturing me,
and life was
an bad ocean
of bad beer,
and so this truth
is known
by all the greatest sages
who knew,
because they too
tread this lonely,
treacherous path,
and I followed
the Buddha
because I thought
that he was the One Who Knew,
and so today
I was sitting on the patio
and realized
this Greatest Of Truths
and it was
that I should be
a nice guy.

Torture - A Memorial Day Tale

In Buddhism, there are four stages of mind-development, called jhanas. The first jhana is thinking. The second jhana is not thinking. The third jhana is remembering past lives. The fourth jhana is emptiness.
I have been to all four stages, as, I think, all people have, but we don't know it. The third jhana interested me, from the beginning of my Buddhism, because I thought, "How can I know myself, if I don't know where I came from?".
Memory reveals itself to me, with little video kind of pictures in the mind. If you want to remember what happened a few minutes ago, you look inside and see a little kind of film about what happened. But it is distorted, like a dream, or imagining things, but if it was an occurrence that happened just a few minutes before, it can be pretty clear. However, memories of past lives are not easy as that to believe.
I seem to remember my last life and something about what happened. This is a tale about that.
I was a young man who wanted adventure. I joined the army. It was the Korean War. I was a Christian, but met a Korean woman who I fell in love with. She introduced me to Buddhism. I liked it.
Us soldiers parachuted into the front lines. We came upon a Buddhist temple, and for some reason, the order came down that we couldn't take the monks as prisoners. We had to kill them. So I was facing court martial or killing my fellow Buddhists. I didn't want to face treason, because I refused an order, so we shot the monks.
Later, I was captured by the enemy, and beaten severely in the armpits with the butt of a rifle. I was put in a dark cell. They deprived me of sleep. I was drowned until I almost died, and then they brought me up, and then drowned again, and up again, over and over. I had bamboo shoots shoved up under my fingernails. They gave me ice cream one day, that was filled with maggots which I was forced to eat. They heated up a metal rod to red heat, and burned my genitals. I was completely wrecked.
I think the genital mutilation was more than I could take so I broke and told them what they wanted to know.
Later, I got out, but my own government brought up charges of sedition. While waiting for my court martial and the possible death sentence, I blew my brains out with a pistol, after a last cigarette, and screaming the words, "Help me, Jesus!"
Much of my current life is explainable, knowing or not knowing that this happened.