A War Muse

Brzezinski’s grand chess:
Where kings and queens are puppets;
Army, clergy, pawns.

It doesn’t pay to
check the other king too soon.
Better ask: whose strings?

Though spring dawns, the game of thrones marches on with the eternal refrain: Winter is coming.

The evil plan is unleashed on the world, with good people powerless to stop it. The ones pushing it feed on the power to control, assuming freedom from personal impact or consequences. But karma is waiting.

I skip the political meeting, citing a poor fit for my engagement. Tribal survival is tenuous, when the cave holds good-hearted souls mired in ego concerns and liabilities. The oracle mumbles more questions than answers.

Terse haiku or in-depth polemic?
Outbreath or inbreath?

Leaving space, taking time.
Small efforts, kind mercies.

Shorter lines, smiling.
Down to the bone.

What is left?
Space for space’s sake?

I inquire again, at the risk of impertinence. Calling forth mentors of influence, seeking to fine-tune relevant topics and approaches. Sharpening focus on the inside of craft and vision.

What, for example, is my relationship with language? Can I cinch the deal with pithy prose, laced with concrete and reinforced with rusty rebar?

The oracle whispers, do not outsource everything to AI. Find a groove in the walls of this cave and mine it, while it provides. Learn the lessons others have learned and passed on, and pass them on.

Is it cheating, I muse, to use up more space, filling the page with fewer lines, less words?
Maybe that’s a good thing, says poetry. Room for the spirit to maneuver.

I return to the one.
Marking time, in a rhythm most basic of all.
Return to the one.

sitting in forest
the worldly trees welcome me
fully, eyes open

facing the ocean
warm aqua womb of the world,
I breathe in the waves

this is the heart space
the place for core vibrations
love and everything

Outside the cave, where white cars sit parked on the driveway, St. Patrick’s Day marks the genocide of the indigenous Irish pagans, legitimized by fairy tales for young and old alike, that the conqueror was a hero and the vanquished were snakes. Some myths never die.

My partner is distracted, anxious from reading news about the war, and fresh threats of nukes. I find myself strangely unaffected. I seem to have exhausted all my fears about nuclear war back in the height of the arms race, the 1980s.

The news rushes by like water over stones, burbling downhill, relentless yet too shallow to overwhelm. Like these words as they pass, another form of meditation.

With a slower breath, will more insight follow? Let us see…

Blank space intercedes.

A few more words appear.

By making this process self-referential, will it bring forth any more satisfactory fruition?

Yet there is more to the plant than the fruit.

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