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Poetry

We are presenting a small selection of Andrew’s poetry here for the first time.
(2012)

LOVE’S PARADOXICAL INCLUSIVENESS

Love dissolves conundrums; keeping them intact.
Love resolves unresolvable paradox; keeping it intact.
Love unifies opposites; keeping them intact.

Love, as The Impersonal, exposes its own self-hypnosis as the personal.
And by taking that sentence personally,
Keeps it intact.

Love says, “Everything is included.
Nothing is excluded.
Including exclusion.”
Keeping it intact.

Love, as Oneness, says “Oneness is All.”
Love, as Zero,
Says “Even one is one too many!”
Both are included, keeping them intact.

Love, as Silence, says “I am all sound.”
Love, as sound, says “I am all Silence.”
Being one and the same,
Both are included, keeping them intact.

Love, Unconditioned, births the conditional.
Both are included, keeping them intact.

Love, Unconditioned, says “I am everything.”
Everything says “I am No-Thing.”
Being one and the same,
Both are included, keeping them intact.

Love, as isness,
Says “I am, and I am not.
Simultaneously.”
Both are included, keeping them intact.

SELF REFLECTING

The Impersonal sees the personal reflecting back to Itself in The Dreaming Pool.
The personal cannot see the Impersonal Looking back at itself in the Dream-Mirror.

Shattered glass.
These exquisite ripples.

EMPTY BELL

Trying and failing to define this
Is like eating sand.
Any attempt is a movement towards that which can’t be approached.
How elegantly futile.
Beloved insists on entrancing Herself so cleverly,
She’s found sadly wanting in attempting Her self-descriptions!
So She’s seduced Herself into Silence.
Finally.

CRUCIFIXION

The crux of the matter is,
That vertical timelessness
Is the end of the
I-fiction!

HER MAKE BELIEVE

Under a cloudless sky
Beloved’s pretending to be lost in the desert,
The midday sun,
Relentless.
Madly, desperately, She’s still clutching last night’s near-spent candle.
Guarding this precious, sputtering flame from what exactly, Beloved?
It’s windless, after all.
Her eccentricities are baffling.
Who can guess, Her hidden agendas?
Maybe there’s no secret motive.
Maybe even She has no idea.
Probably.
Who knows?
But that’s beside the point.

Half-starved,
Beloved eats Her self-created mirage.
Parched,
Beloved drinks Her holographic hallucination.

With fine tooth-comb,
She searches the sands…
No trace of melted wax to be seen.

Hunger satisfied.
Thirst quenched.
Over the dunes,
Mad laughter…
Coming from the oasis.

LOVE SILENTLY WATCHES ITSELF

Love silently watches Itself,
As She looks everywhere for the missing piece.
She learns the art of mindful negotiation,
Whist protecting Her center from what She perceives is a threatening outside world.
She quickly learns how to avoid pain,
How to attract pleasure.
Not always successfully.
Sound familiar?

All the while,  Love silently watches Itself.

Her deeper sensitivities send her on The Quest.
To find meaning.
To find The Answer.
She explores religion, spirituality, psychology, therapy, altered states.
Whatever it takes.
The Grail of Enlightenment remains Her sole focus.
One-pointedness is all.
She’s gone beyond the guru-disciple loop.
Massive, timeless awakenings follow.
But She returns, identified, again contracted,
Looking to repeat the experience.
One taste and She’s hooked.
The drug of blissful absence.
Sound familiar?

All the while, Love silently watches Itself.

She’s identified Her search is for Home.
Looking for death, She’s magnetically drawn to advaita.
Acquiring absolute clarity, She’s hungry for the ever-elusive no-me.

All the while, Love silently watches Itself.

Just when She isn’t looking,
Death comes stalking
And destroys the dream temple,
Forever.

All the while, Love silently loves Itself.

THE ENCHANTMENT

First I dreamed You pulled me out of Your void.
Then I dreamed You pulled me back into Your void.
The dream of I and Thou, intact.
So too, the dream of before and after.

But all that’s gone now.
Beloved says,
“I dream I pull Myself out of MY void.
I dream I pull Myself back into MY void.
All along forgetting to remember.
Well, pretending to, anyhow.
It’s a clever spellbinding that never happened.
No?”

NON ENTITY

This madman has pockets full of holes.
The needle’s eye swallowed all concepts and other extraneous possessions,
Leaving only this raw, sensual immediacy.
He’s The King of Fools.
An utter non-entity.
Nobody important pays him any mind.

Enigmatic to the worldly,
Small children love him.
Babies smile back, unselfconsciously, at mirrored infinity.

Traveling any which-way the wind blows, he’s seen
Building sandcastles,
And appears delighted by the sculpting, devouring incoming tide.

Inscrutable to the ambitious and powerful.
Opaque to the learned and pious.
Obscure to the vain and proud.
Transparent, unthreatening and approachable, he’s equally comfortable
Alone, and in company.

Owning nothing, yet the most gracious host.
Speaking No-Thing, his words resonate with Silence.
Being absent, there’s no agenda to please.

Leaving no legacy of extraordinary achievement,
Abandoned to Eternity,
This camouflaged jewel remains overlooked in the marketplace,
Mercifully hidden from fickle-fame and fortune.

Being no one,
Going nowhere,
Unhurried,
He wanders freely.
Unnoticed.
Unknowable, enigmatic,
This King of Fools
Has no siddhis to impress the impressionable.
His calling card
Is absence.

WHEN THOUGHT RULES

Thought wears a crown of thorns.
The wise fool never covets a king’s throne.

THE PARADOX NECKLACE

Who will wear the paradox necklace?
There’s no one to adorn.
Who will see the invisible paradox necklace?
There’s no one to observe.
Who will appreciate the paradox necklace?
There’s no one to exalt.

Its worthless, invisible jewels, fret, boast
And lie about their very existence.
Constantly vigilant…
Am I losing my sheen?
Am I safe from thieves in the night?
Am I unfashionable?
Such gorgeously pitiful vanities!
Such exquisite self-deception!
Such painfully grandiose claims!
Conspicuous overconfidence…
Compensation for clandestine under-confidence.

No thread.
No clasp.
No beginning.
No end.
No relationship-between.
No apart-from.
Invisible!

An infinity loop of Timelessness.

This priceless absence.

Who wears the paradox necklace?

THE BETRAYAL

In the brain’s labyrinth,
A glitch sabotages the ‘me-matrix’,
Betraying its secret mission to divide and rule.

Memory fails to locate that point of reference.
It’s erased from the program.
Period.

Preference no longer defers to desired outcome.

All practices of negotiation,
Now redundant.

Here?
There?
There’s no location.

INVISIBLE INK

The Last Trail disappears in the sand.
Like a desert river.
Like a thief in the night.

Beloved dissolves the mirage
With Her silent koan,
And all paths-to become the pathless no-path.

Now it’s like trying to write on water.
With invisible ink.

ME

In dream-time,
No-Thing births its own contraction
And
Knots a phantom center
In the Void.

TREASURE MAP

Oneness pretends to forget itself,
And draws a treasure map for pretend-twoness to decipher.

Filled with contours of relationship
And symbols of negotiation,
Twoness seeks the hidden gold.

Constant unease comes with the territory.

ONENESS DREAMS OTHERNESS

Oneness looks in the two-way mirror of time,
And catches itself dreaming otherness
Looking back.

DUST

A quadrillion
Exquisitely futile,
Beautifully courageous
Attempts
At describing THIS
Are gathering dust, lost to antiquity.

Now I’m catching water in a fishing net.

THE ABSENT KOAN

Describing personal absence
Is like
Digging holes in space.

HALL OF MIRRORS

Your true identity
Is the origin of all reflections.

The Mirror of Infinity
Gathers no dust.
Your face is missing, altogether.

The weaver that made this fabric out of Void,
Looks back, startled by its own absence.

A chamber without dimension.
It’s empty fullness fills the eternal vacuum.
And exposes No-Thing kissing Everything in the dark-light.

KINGDOM COME

The Needle’s Eye
Is exposed as a broken cobweb in the breeze.
Very small children are playing everywhere.

There’s not a camel in sight.

REDUNDANT

When the owner’s left the house,
With no one to take delivery,
Incoming stories
Dissolve in their own redundancy.

DEATH OF DEATH

Death; the last delusion.
The final veil-renting.

Love…Her great compassion,
To dissolve the dream-knot She cruelly birthed ages ago in dream-time.
To dissolve the dream-centre and dream-circumference that negotiate dream-time and dream-space.
To dissolve all dream-ownership, dream-purpose and dream-meaning…the dream-glue of dream-separation.
To dissolve all dream-belief, dream-becoming, and dream-attainment…the dream-iron bars of the dream-prison.

The first dream-death,
Her Fire,
Coursing through every atom, burning out all burden of dream-guilt and dream-shame.

The second dream-death,
Her Flood,
Carrying every last vestige of the personal with it,
Back to The Void from whence it came.

Love reveals to Herself
The great inversion,
The irony-tinged butterfly farce;
The death of death.

SEAMLESS

The Grand Conjurer’s shadow puppets
Dance in choreographed synchronized perfection.

Choice-less responses.
Automatic neurological impulses.
Unfathomable origins.
Love keeps Her actors busy.
There’s little or no respite for these stringless manikins.
Always new, unplanned dream-words, spontaneously spoken.
Always new, uncreated dream-scenery, spontaneously appearing.

This, a beginning-less and endless dream-theater;
A hermetically-sealed work of beyond-genius.

BURN BURN BURN

Time after time,
Beloved savagely strips bare expectation and disappointment
To the bone.
Again and again.
Bare bones of disenchantment.
Bare bones of disillusionment.

This ache of longing, longing, longing.
Burning it down.
Burning to ash every last dream.
Ashes on the stone-cold floor.
Ashes in the wind.
Scattered every-which-way.

Every breath revealing newness,
Newness,
Newness,
Always this unknowable newness.
This eternal unfathomable mystery.
This.

All poems by Andrew Forrest.
Copyright 2012.