Seeing Past the Material World

Follow these steps and tell me what you see.

1. Don't be afraid to feel deeply.

2. Love is never too strong a word.

3. Your life is your great work--like a book, dedicate it to someone else.

4. Trace every detail back to its infinite source.

5. Swim breast-deep in Buddha nature.

6. Inhibited energy will explode on its own.

7. The lightbulb flashes brightest before it goes out.

8. Every answer is a vortex.

9. Do whatever you can to stop thinking.

10. Don't forget that you're going to die.

11. Familiarity breeds content.

12. Don't be too cool to get red in the face.

13. Faith and doubt flow in and out of one another.

14. Throw out your watch; you know it's now.

15. Politics are just literal fantasies.

16. Listen to the ringing of silence.

17. Sit at the back of the boat and watch for mermaids.

18. Engage in silent exhortation until you drop down into the psalm-place.

19. It is your moral duty to perceive beauty that exists around you.

20. You can fit the whole world in your heart.

21. All roads lead to roam.

4th Excerpt from Seoul Sonnets

All I do is daydream.
Showed up 70min before
work starts. Spaced
out. Automatic in the
morning, – all I do is walk
and melt into the
staggering reality of souls
filling the small spaces
between bodies.
The day gets stranger
as it goes. The more
the sun moves through
its motions, the more the
normal morphs and twists.

Am I the only one who heard
about the end of the war?
The guns are still going off and
nothing has been decided,
armoured baby carriages
patrol the brown-grassed
park, and the names of lost
children are engraved on a
marble memorial that nobody
reads—eyes always skyward
and hands clutched to breasts,
or to crucifixes, and the only
ones who know the truth
don’t tell those fighting

Me, too busy scribbling;
Avalokitesvara staring up
a skirt in Myeongdong while
the screaming grows louder.
Walls up, truth time,
monster stomping the city,
bones, wolves coming
over the hills to terrorize those
below, but I’m too busy
to tell them it’s not real.
Martha Wainwright keeps
wailing over the guitars;
the voice of the torture,
that I was supposed to end

For the good of living beings
in the confusion who
must remember, cursed with
memory! The joy of frivolous
forgetting will soon be your
only passion. More than
candles in Arabia, this story
is about the flying mystery and
the man who saw the angel
who said he came from Allah
with the word: the prophet’s
prophet – such perfect
faith that turns doubt into
a victorious wrestling match

Leaving the victor with
a blessing instead of
the chokehold of unknowing
suffering the sting of an
ungrateful god—Is it only me
who sees the sun? I’m the only
one who goes out
into the yard to feel the warmth
on my face, arms, legs—
doesn’t anyone else
long for a beautiful day
this late into autumn
when birds don’t sing—
the boughs are in mourning.