ofrenda

I’m reading a book that is disintegrating in my hands. Pieces of the pages break off because the book is an old Bantam paperback and I am trying to finish it before it crumbles into unreadable dust. I am not offering this as a metaphor. This is simply a slightly exaggerated description of something I did this morning before I made my oatmeal.

I read this old Chinese poem in the book:

“We eat, excrete, sleep and get up;

This is our world.

All we have to do after that —

is to die.”

A hungry ghost is shaped like a tear drop, they say.

Its neck is as slender as a needle, 

and its mouth as small as a needle’s eye,

and its stomach is as big as a mountain.

Damned this way by desire, greed, anger, and ignorance. Generating violence, and suffering, and unforgiven debt. 

Driven by the fierce winds of karma to searching for tiny pieces of food in sewage and garbage dumps on the outskirts of town.

Stop chasing phantoms, phantasms, and phantasy, and just sit down and be quiet and do nothing. Can you do that? Can you do nothing? Do you know how?

These demons and angels and ghosts and monsters are generated by your brain, so settle down and get sane.

It is 1221 palindromic time and I burned some medicinal herb, full disclosure, and I’m ascending with John Coltrane’s Sunship. I’m sitting at the window to the center of the world. I thought it was misty but I’m told it is raining and then I see the dust-like water particles blowing about. Watching the actions of the wind in rain and trees and inside air currents twist the smoke as it ascends to the ceiling and amid vibrations from long ago, ancient sounds in the sounds encoded in the CD, and carried by the air, carried from dead musicians, transmitted from the next world to me, carrying the Sunship to me.

It will rain tomorrow, they say, and it will be clear on Saturday and the moon will be full and it will be Halloween and Dia de los Muertos and we are building an ofrenda in front of the church and bringing offerings for those we lost this year, or somehow remembering them, honoring them, trying to pay our debts to them, but debts are only hungry ghosts generated by our brains, like an old horror movie. I look forward to the great spirit blowing the clouds away for Allhallowtide and the Moon giving her blessing, and we need to find a good mole connection.

Come live with me and share my pod and we can breathe together.

Conspire with me, go inside with me, come close, unmask, and kiss

We can perform alchemical rituals of bliss, 

blissed out, mixed up, entangled, interconnected —

and mutually infected?

We better get tested.

They say it’s only quarantine-age love,

but our love comes from God,

come live with me and share my pod.