• CRADLING NIGHT

    Last night the moon hid daring the stars to give chase across the void but they preferred their slow procession. I looked long, hard for her but she was master of this game. I looked for her behind the neon signs blazing from countless buildings electric grave stones marking the resting place of peace on…


  • TENT CITY

    From my window on the twenty-sixth floor they appear as so many blue roofs, arranged in small villages in Shinjuku-Chuo Park below. At 6:30 in the morning many older Japanese gather in sweater vests and hats despite the humidity to perform the tai chi ritual. Nearby hands and feet emerge from blue tarp tents crammed…


  • IMPERMANENCE

    In this moment there is, and can be, no other. And when the moment is gone it never existed, much as the next will never exist. So it is with us, a reflection of the ripple of the long sunk stone now nestling the bottom of the pond.


  • MORNING

    Morning would find him sitting calmly, cross-legged, under the apple tree that sat on the edge of the park. He would stare up at a small branch and carefully watch the bud begin to open, ignoring all who passed. Morning would find him sitting calmly, cross-legged, under the apple tree watching the fragile blossom open,…


  • TRANSFORMATION

    There was a time, once, when the most everything was metaphorical. That was before the great metamorphosis when everything was suddenly malleable. No one was quite certain just what happened. Most thought it was in the dead of night when they, and most everyone else was firmly in the grip of Morpheus, who was, all…


  • DROP IT

    It is a burden he does not want to bear any longer, one he would shed in a moment, but there is no place to put it and you cannot just leave it anywhere. And so he continues to bear it dragging it here, carrying it there, always attached to it, and it to him.…


  • KENSHO

    She curls in my arm, head on my chest, offers a gentle smile which melts me and I stroke her small shoulder, as Sid the Sloth and Manny the Mammoth, two bodhisattvas, smile back at us from the TV screen. Enlightenment isn’t something you seek, it’s a five-year old who sits next to you on the…


  • ERGO SUM

    She says she was certain she exists much as she is certain he exists as well. He says she thinks she exists, and thinks he does as well. Descartes, he says was right, at least on that point. She says no, it is obvious, thoughts requires existence, sum ergo cogito, she says, is how it…


  • ZAZEN

    Soon I will sit and stare into the wall, into my heart,, into the universe, and will find everything and nothing. But the center of nothing, is everything.


  • LOVER

    There is a moment just after the prior moment, when the ticking of the clock on the nightstand is amplified, reverberating off the skylights, when the heat of your body is a blanket from which I never wish to emerge.