Lao Tzu’s Admonishment

Lao Tzu admonishes

Tsk tsk tsk

Buddha wags

A finger at me

Yet I am delirious

In my trishna

Avidya! a damned fool

Samsara the relentless

Loop is inevitable

An incessant carousel

From my first breath

Delicious! I devoured

The myriad creatures

Spellbound by maya

Suffering is our nature

To cling to reign over

Our humdrum days

To make sense of

Our futile obsessions

The persistent chaos

Swirling about us

Regrettably a few

Noble Truths will

Remain (blissfully)

Beyond my grasp

You see there is love

Quite a conundrum

And I want I desire

My beloved her

Lips hips breasts

Her easy laughter

Though the embrace

Is tragically temporary

Therefore screw you

Lao Tzu and then

I eventually apprehend

As Buddha smiles.

Lazy Sage

A lazy sage

Chuang Tzu simply

Acquiesced what’s obvious

All is chaos – broken

Then Siddhartha tossed

Suffering into the mix

(Gee thanks a bunch!)

Despite this wisdom

The sagacious formula

I learned helplessness

I was an inevitability

The nervous little dog

In the shock box

Will Dad bring home

Milk eggs hamburger

This time – next time

Auto health life

(Drive carefully!)

Will Mom be hauled

Home by the cops

Or locked up – how crazy

This time – next time

Will she disappear

With my little sister

Will she launch jelly

Jars at our heads

After seeking predictability

Reasonable assumptions

I now recognize mayhem

Now much too wary

Too vigilant to love

Suspicious of optimism

Heart races stomach churns

In obsessions and compulsions

And now the old augur

I also surmise

There’s only futility in

Solving our predicament.

Silence

I will happily remain silent, lips sutured, sealing ancient,

festered wounds (though hapless impulses tug at stitches),

my tongue a giddy atrophy, old car in its garage. I’ll not

wag or lash it anytime soon.

I know this silence, a wide horizon, an ocean, a silence

nearly as deep as magma sputtering beneath

the Laurentian Abyss. Awed by sublime, I only teeter

at its precipice, a wanderer in a Romantic’s painting.

I search my shelves for adequate locutions, attic, cellar,

spare room, to fit rather than buy a new articulation.

But my attempts remain clumsy, lumbering obstacles

so long as obsession hinders my intent (My mind

a fence row, nettles, burs and briar strangled in barbed wire.

There. There now.)

Does silence abide the absurd or pass unencumbered,

whistling through my ribs, wind through an abandoned

house? As the Buddha, a monk, I shall loosen my grip

on petty clamor, what’s futile, samatha, tranquility,

my singular desire.

This silence is (and I shall listen without interruption)

a breeze whispering through pines just outside

my window; the lulling murmur of phoebes hopping

and pecking across the yard;

the trillium pushing noisily though mayapples and loam;

with the morning sun, apple blossoms opening one by one.

I shall regard each arrival, each pink bud,

each white explosion.

This silence is (Though much too sentimental, I’ll try again.)

that warm afternoon, lolling in bed, when there’s nothing else,

when I apprehend, galvanic skin to skin, lip to breast,

I love my lover, when words are ludicrous.

David Sapp, writer and artist, lives along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. A Pushcart nominee, he was awarded Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants for poetry and the visual arts. His poetry and prose appear widely in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. His publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior, chapbooks Close to Home and Two Buddha, a novel Flying Over Erie, and a book of poems and drawingstitled Drawing Nirvana.