Heart Sutra (abridged version)

Heart Sutra (abridged version)

Gate, gate, paragate …
Gone, gone, gone beyond gone …
There was I thinking that
there were things.
There was I not, knowing
that there were none.
Nothing at all, it seems, is here?
No sex, no drugs, no curry or pizza,
no champagne, no beefsteak or beer!
And no lovely dangerous stuff
like diving from rocks and running
down hills and playing footie, sometimes
without, even taking, whizz or pills.
But that was bollocks!
That was delusion!
That was all a dream?
Even that stuff I did with
the French girls, the pineapple
rings and ice cream?

Para-samgate …
Completely utterly gone …
Never completed; never was started,
no undoing, what was never done.
Rejoicing in hatred most
justly and juicy, was a mental
state made by me?
Sucked in again by
cause and effect, into the
Samsara sea.
Loving to hate and hating to love
and getting them all confused.
Discernment dualistics; for the
easily amused.
The big show, is a no show,
it’s a silhouette most faint;
tarted up to look like something,
till it starts to lose it’s paint.

Bodhi Svaha …
Enlightenment Hail!…
It’s all silly old thought
and it cannot prevail.
So Nirvana is nothing?
Not attractive, at all, if
sweet bugger all is the deal?
Can’t really be anything else I
suppose, as reality’s really, unreal!
No pain. No gain. But the
pain that you gain is as
real as reality gets.
You really can’t miss if
you give it the kiss off, no
game. So don’t place any bets.
Enlightenment’s bliss
is as easy as this…
you are somewhere
within the ball park,
if you look on all life,
and say, 'This isn’t much!
So frankly, fuck this for a lark.'…
OM… (that’s another nothing)

Conditionless Compassion.

Conditionless Compassion.

The Bodhisattva with a thousand eyes
has limited perspective.
Despite his panoramic sight
his view is still selective.
Attachment is a specification,
binding a mind to position.
And the view from any designation
is clouded by condition.
The more we see the more we feel,
wisdom and compassion grow.
Yet still emotive hooks can steal
momentum from the Dharma flow.
Enlightenment is a viewless estate,
unhindered by sense temptations.
Unperturbed by feckless fate;
idyllic absence of sensations.
All imagery seeks synergy
and feeds contamination,
facilitating the energy
of familiarist damnation.
Dharma compassion is vision free;
unpolluted by concepts photonic.
Light is a metaphor. There is nothing to see,
that is not, delusion synchronic.

Religion.

I believe that I deceive
myself with fond illusion.
To which I cling like a crazy thing
to dodge real world confusion.
I limit my indulgences,
in challenging abundances
of complex consternations of the mind.
A mentality non martial,
means perceptions must be partial
and I choose to be,
to many things, just blind.
Although I kick and squeal,
at each spiritual package deal
that markets myth as true and holy writ.
I envision with discernment,
a god of my own preferment,
and like the rest,
it’s just a load of shit.
In truth though I'm in doubt.
The jury is still out.
A god of my design?
An energy benign?
Well some things are so ... maybe?
O.K. Where do I sign?

Flat.

Flat.

I hate flat country.
Moundless miles, of
nothing outstanding just
hedges and stiles.

The horror of level horizons
makes me feel squashed in gravity,
crawling ant like
on a painted paving stone.
Purposeless and aimless.
Norfolk is a level non entity.
A morbid map of monotony.
Irish bogland is a banality
of boring bogger all.
Plains are too plain
I need features.

I want drifting downs,
massive muscular moors,
towering rocks ripping ice from the stars.
Furious tree covered fells,
valleys and chasms,
gorges and gouges;
Eiger walls,
Niagara falls,
hills like buttocks
and sawteeth.

I want to see where I’m going.
I want to know where I am.

Poppies.

Dismembering, remembering.
The Poppy powder ploughs the mind.
As morphine muddled visions draw
reality’s cold blind.

A Remembrance book
in the Town Hall tells
that one whose name I bear
saw Hells.
At a place called Ypres,
So pleasant and green,
to be bloodied and ripped
to a charnel house scene.

Red as the Poppies
yet black as their hearts.
Dead tossed on
to the War plague carts.

But Death is my hero.
Death is my friend.
Death is the bringer
of suffering’s end.
Death is the portal
to where we refresh,
the rot. The decay:
The corruption of flesh.

Ashes to ashes; fill the ash bins.
Poppies to powder, poured through pins,
clouding the cares. Cleansing the sins.

Countries of clouds
and oceans of bliss.
Forgetting all that.
Forgetting all this.