Midnight mass
On TV.
Pope Benedict preaching.
I hear the metaphor
Translated from Italian
And quickly try to write what he said
And it comes out in verse,
Like this:

‘God made himself small
So that we may love him.
He made himself a child
So that we could perceive loving him.
Our small intellects
Can hardly see God,
So distant,
It’s hard to love him with all our heart.
And with all that is confused in this world
With war
And poverty
And illness,
God made himself small for us,
He made himself a child
So that we could love him completely;
A new born baby,
A symbol of something everyone can love.
Today we celebrate
His gift to us,
Our Lord,
Jesus Christ.’

When I close my eyes,
I feel how mysterious
Existence is
The conundrum of anything existing at all.

I read the bible when I was a child.
I re-read the stories of
Creation and
The Savior
And Revelations.

Even as a child I needed to know why I was here,
And how it would end.

Life
Redemption
Death.

II.

I skipped all the stories after Jesus died
And saw vividly in my child’s mind
The Apocalypse of John,
A dawn of death,
A picture of a God
I could not love
Who would send me
Here
To be judged.

I will judge myself
And live free
And join my God
As his son
When I’ve mastered this place
Like a Buddha
Free of longing
And yearning
When the storm inside
Subsides
And compassion overwhelms me.

In this life
I will follow my heart over the cliff,
Into the sun,
Wherever it leads me,
I
Will
Follow
My heart
To my death.

And at the end of my consciousness
Like the end of the universe
I find it ever expanding
Reaching further beyond itself
In a futile attempt
To touch what’s on the other side
Of what we cannot see
Only feel.
This is all emptiness anyway,
Existence,
You know?
Consciousness too.

Once this place became empty to me
I saw I was the same as everything
Manifested to experience
What it is to
Be.

Creation is love.
Love is created,
Given,
Found;
In loving
The creator.

III.

The baby Jesus
Is our greatest metaphor.
All of us born with Jesus potential
To open our hearts completely
And live with passion.

If only this weak
Self conscious
Species
Could grow strong enough
To open its heart.

Suffering will end.
Peace will find a place…

When the evil that rules the world
Is overthrown by love,
The world will evolve.
We will experience
Collective evolution.

We are the tiny buds on a bush
That has yet to bloom
In the garden of God.

I am an astronaut
I am what you are not
I will fly in space
And take my place in this place
And surface
On the other side
When I die
Into the place I birthed from
Like a flower blooming on the cherry blossom tree
As temporary as the seasons change
Of ever blooming and dying beauty
I will die
And my life,
If it never mattered,
Will return to lifeless matter,
And then the tree,
And then the sun
And then the Earth
And universe
Will die
And on the other side of nothing
Lies everything
We are made of.

I dreamt
I had a broken heart.
As my soul raged
I ravaged through an ancient Japanese battlefield
Regardless for life
Trying to extinguish my anger and hatred for creation,
Killing samurai with hate—
A Shinto demon
Possessing my soul.

Oh soul set on fire
And left to burn alone
This life isn’t worth living without love
So I want to destroy
I want to die.
The ecstasy of heaven
Now the burning of hell.

When we take the battlefield
I will lead.
I will lay steel through the first and last enemy
And you will all follow me,
The lover
The artist
The warrior
Turned by rejection
Into a destroyer.
I am lost in myself.
The world around me
Illusory.

I close my eyes.
Buddha sitting on a giant lotus;
He looks at me and laughs.
I open my eyes
And look at what I’ve done:
A field full of slaughtered men
The wheat stained red,
And the wind blowing the smell of blood.

A tear drops from my eye
As I realize
It cannot be extinguished until
I am dead.
I drop to my knees
As my soul burns
And I,
Scream a war cry
And seppuku.