So the days went. Morning’s wake to the street auto’s din and clamor, sweat sleep, tropic transversus perinaei, the early morning flip side-to-side wake/slumber until finally the calling is great enough to ramble into the private bath for pre-meditation shower, usually up before my mother who would sleep late whenever she could, pushing the somnambulant escape envelope cocoon...sometimes I would think of the Duke of Aquitaine, the first Troubadour poet of 12th century Europe, who kept his mistress “La Dangereuse” in the tower out of gangster sensibility, to fuel his emerging sense of a mature romantic love that is full blown madness, the “unknown lady” and think about how this was the dawn of my heritage, when longing was put on history’s map, albeit in relief but nonetheless there like lines of topography—a poet’s lines showing how the underlying world achieves movement, energy movement, LOVE, love from Cather and Sufi Currents, a Greek inherited gnosis built from the hearts of men and women and recorded in those dawning days as song, the plaintive and tender song of the rising world of poet into the red opening of the future...so in the shower, after now 24 days of inspired visions, as lead into gold, I stood under the trickle and thought about my place in line, giving Ramona a love like the love of God, the center, source, depth, and end of romantic love, but I had yet to know where God stood in a hard poetic new reality of my coming of age late, as I always had and would, where was God in Ramona? I only knew my stream thoughts of what she meant to me, of how her presence sparkled in water and sun, and was reminded again that distance is another form of presence as I stood alone and let the sweat of yester night wash away...then into my room where in the corner I had set up my temporary shrine...on the old Mennonite chair covered in bad whimsy purple and geometric shapes I placed the photo of my guru, a Chinese character metal candle, a small drinking glass filled with beach sand for burning of scented sticks, honor sticks glow orange for the smoke of room mystic charge, a photo of my mom and dad from the mid sixties, a tiny photo in color about the size of a matchbook, with a white border, my handsome early parents, there for me in any way always ever and responsible for my chance, and a bottle of beer to remember to keep it moderate when it came to poisons and intoxicants...oh all this looked remarkable and strange but it allowed me to return day after day to pay my homage, blow apart my selves, and bring some calm to the trace elements around me...that forty-five minutes of first stretching like the hurdler to sitting in half-lotus spine straight hands in each other in the triangle of my crotch, head cocked crown up chin down eyes half open half closed fixed on a spot, tongue pressed to the top of the mouth just behind the front cutters, breath histrionic and smooth...
Then something to remind me when trying to understand the real mysteries, the brain stops short, the brain can contain neither the questions themselves, nor the answers...and this a monstrous insight for me, for all of us only thinking that it’s the answers that are so elusive but turn and look fools, we don’t even know the questions!! For sure we ask all kinds of inane and tepid sometimes fervent questions, enough to sully the air but think none of them is anywhere near to an opening, a seam, for which to peel back the fake, like covered-over master paintings in garage sale frames...your I is the veil...
To get straight I would take refuge in the triple jewel three times with a half bow, recite my mantra taught from a tome found in a Las Vegas used bookstore, days after becoming a cuckold, then read one secret page from a sacred text tipped me by Vinnie Bend tipped him by a famous and learned translator of secret texts...then it was nothing but BOREDOM. Count the breath to 21 in-and-outs, then focus, Vipassana, and watch, witness, try to remain calm, indifferent but warm, pure...usually I would begin talking to myself in verse, then the mind would take over, the inferiors would each weigh in, first bored, then worried, then hungry, sore, tired...and on like this it goes through the half hour...but this is on a clear day when I didn’t have a half-hatch knot of lust and duramater, a separation in love, which, with Ramona, could not be avoided, for only in separateness is a relationship possible but on the perennial rhizome plane where I sat, none of this is known, that lovers don’t find each other but were inside each other all along...this then, made the mind race with predatory investigative madness, trying to find every angle every way that the bliss could go away and then make strategy to prevent it...the odd miserable mistake of earthly life...trying to prolong pleasure and avoid the pain of pennies and loose change...when you find yourself in the grip of obsession this takes over so that you spend hours of sugar energy beating up intangible details into separate scenarios where you win, you love, but never do you come out neutral, never do you come out pure...it’s always returning to flack hope and wishful work out whether it’s true and it never is...you have to know the secret to Vishnu’s Maya, and if you’re ever so slippery as to get to where the space reifies into destroyed words hope and trust, to where faith is rule, then into your heart may ply the mantra I received on a run in Philadelphia through cold driving rain: “Water has the will to be wet”...
-Micahel Price
