FEATURED: The Red Face of a Bāla

The Red Face of a Bāla

I was sitting in a chair beside a spring evening gray sky rain drops fire in the woodstove

I was thinking and reading and drinking and smoking a joint dreamily drifting through visions of the East… the far East, Nepalese temples incense-curls flower wreaths and snow-capped peaks swimming in cold crisp air and blue sky nirvana

The Buddha was a fat happy old bastard beneath older tree in older forest on older earth in the oldest universe of shining diamonds 

The sun slunk below the Green Mountains heading out to the west coast over vast waves of Midwest corn already knee high before it’s rays retreated from the Atlantic coast casting a red hue in its waning minutes, first from the top of Mt Washington then across the Adirondacks and the Appalachian uplift and dancing over high rising grain elevators before burning up the Rockies then the coastal ranges before disappearing like the Cheshire cat

My fire was casting a red hue across my room, and my face was growing hot

Tomorrow I’ll wake at 430 am, make coffee and a bagel and race off into the blonde light of the new day to work, Sunday or not, there is no rest for cash poor poets and thieves and students and bālas

I am a student of dead men, and a few who are still breathing fire and imagining the constant now

I am a piss-poor adult, I’ve been broke my whole life from the time I was kicked out in an early morning rage of wall pounding fists and a chorus of cursing and swearing from my father, a weak and fretful man tormented by the world and his own inner demons to a point of paralysis later in life, but I ran with the opportunity given and left at 17

Ran west, ran East, ran north, ran my mouth, ran around in circles, and I done run myself ragged

I wandered

Not lost

Not in fear

But in love with the earth

To touch soft green summer grass and smell its broken smell under the Milky Way with a concert of night bugs, I’ve always loved those night bugs, laying in my childhood bed listening to them in a frenzy outside my window or riding reckless midnight drunken bicycles through the swampy South Carolina Lowcountry barely hearing the breakers through the distortion of cicadas 

The Lowcountry at night is a rapture of the senses 

Those things make me rich, though I am as broke a mother mother as you can be,  just hanging on by a thread, a very worn and tattered thread at that

A thread tore from a battle flag laid on ashen ground

But I am dreaming of different flags, I dream of prayer flags quaking in the high peak daylight, and, I am already one with the universe, so I suffer not but keep dreaming of temples and flags and little yellow wrapped monks in distant land 

Where,  

as the sun trundles away across the mighty pacific, soon it’s peaks will wear a red hue as well

The earth dreams 

Like sleeping little bālas