The bullshit story stops here.

Leaving 2012, I've just realized a major lesson from the year and it came to me from an unlikely source. Remember Felix Baumgartner; he jumped out of space and became the first person to break the sound barrier without an "enclosure". He said, "The only thing standing between you and your goal is the bullshit story you keep telling yourself as to why you can't achieve it." At first I was resistant to this macho sentiment. It sounds a little egotistic and hoorah, go-get-em. But like the best lessons, as I've thought about it, this has become more true and impactful in my life.

First, you have to have a goal, but most importantly, you have to stop coming up with the reasons why you can't achieve it. This directly confronts our insecure nature and makes us stop and listen to the whiny "cant's" and hear them for the bullshit that they are.
So, no more "no's", no more "what if this or that did or didn't...", no more "well then how am i going to pay for...". No. No more bullshit story. Just steps in the direction of my dreams which I've had enough time formulating while I was also busy formulating their impossibility.
This year I will move toward what I want to achieve and I will not let anyone, least of all me, tell me why I can't.

I wish anyone reading this the same good fortune of discovering the heart of confident and authentic intention and manifestation, even in the most unlikely places.

go inside the bluest blood, come back kid.

say to me that newness exists
that you forget the formula
for haiku, and your stories remind
you of me. say that somewhere
it still matters which color
underwear i might choose for
today, which i am still awake in
blushing before bed...time to
remember how to land again...
damn.

set a setting and recombine, sometimes it's just what arises, and then what you miss and what continues to vex you, perplex you, after all you've analyzed; what lasts to put you solidly in your place. which place is where? well certainly limned in the minds of this degenerative generation, location is now "cloud"ed, where rain comes from to ruin barns and fuel corn and soy extravaganzas. upside is tonight down shown...

daywash

around every corner
this blasphemous day
disappears before forever
comes to dismantle
its secret hollows

we lay down on the concrete
stare at the darkening sky
and whisper the symptoms
of remembering flight from
our flightless station

love, in fact, imbues time
with its due dimension
saturates summer days
and distends them without
discretion

we go around in this light
like living on a ship
where something loved
has been thrown overboard
and see its absence as
clearly as itself

bring me a long rope
to haul in the shadows
of all that i've shed on
these seas and a shovel
to erase the decks

R. Sonnet

we are
the whole mess
of us
dizzied spinning
vertical goes the
horizon in our blood
a song

we whirl
and up come alliances
pointed eyes
memorized bedrooms
put forth pleas
you capsize
me

inside crescendos
recur – our skin
tingles to forget
this planet

antitextspeak

1.15.2012

write a wrinkle
out a finished
word a finch that
ends a sentence

entertainment takes
a swift stroll through
scholarship makes
for wobbly minds

where winter rewinds
us into an open or
otherwise openable
compendium

an afterego aura
a landslide toward
midnight come back
doesn’t cut it

upside is or isn’t
tautology is histrionic

fireflies

life is a mess
or so it seems
a jangle and jumble
and we go insistently,
resiliently through

but we go haltingly
and abitoff pace,
go and sometimes
synchronize: fireflies
in a giant jar

happiness is learning how to fly without an airplane

looks like there's absolutely no way to ask for and receive happiness from any part of the world. as much as i "am" and exist in the formations of my mind is as much as i can create my own happiness. i might bounce the very notion of it off other people and objects and mind-objects and then claim them to be the cause, but it was me all along.
the end of suffering is not happiness. the word is all wrong. if existence as we know it, as we've created it and continue to create it every moment, is not actual or accurate, then it is suffering and it is the cause of suffering. if suffering were to end it would require that existence (as we know it entirely) would also have to cease. so what am i left with then? another (no)thing to not ask for or receive happiness from.

in this reality i've created, i know that when happiness arises (or bounces back from something i threw it at) it must at some point end. as with my conceptions that create suffering. they cannot be maintained...because they are assembled of things that also cannot last. (ideas, delusions, cravings...) but say, i want something and then i get it. i'm happy with that. but is it really absent of suffering? musn't suffering exist in order to provide the other side of non-sufferings coin.

the risk of going on breathing is that everything must come to pass and go on and end. even me. even my loved ones. and it seems that the only way to "end the suffering" of this pervasive impermanence is by ending "reality". hahaha, so reality isn't real.

the eightfold path is a path written on the ground of the earth. it is words and ideas. but to follow it one must take up perfections which cannot exist on the ground of this earth through words. so, "right"-perfect mindfulness, perfect speech, perfect view, and attention...perfect action, perfect work. what i'm saying here is that the real request is for transcendence. luckily we have the only "yana", the only tool capable of breaking out, of creating the levity required for this flight: the human mind. (also, coincidentally the cause of our problems in the first place.)

bummer paradox: language and perception cause suffering by separating our own phenomenal bodies from the world, but if you didn't have them you'd be totally screwed...and you'd be ignorant because you wouldn't be able to learn...and ignorance prevents perfect knowledge.
really transcendence must be the way out. by wings or ropes or elevators, the way is surely up.

on the wonderful flip-side: gosh, it looks like all you gotta do is love. love until it lifts you up. love until you don't just love a him or a her. love your way out of anything you could ever say about it. love until you don't even know the difference between yourself and all that you love. i'm not really a fan of the Beatles, but it looks like they got one thing right.