CHÖD
There is no artifice to the morning,
No allegory, no metaphor.
It is a clear road, known,
Never before travelled:
A cold wind streams from the North,
A dissolving moon sliding slowly down.
My purpose for existing,
Maybe only to be a friend
Of this little cat (future Buddha)
And to offer comfort where I can,
Watching the light grow and spread.
A flood of fast despair boiling tragically,
The collapse of possibilities, the revealing of wounds.
A world that is not enough, cast away.
The wonderful gods we have chosen,
Radiant with omnipotence, turn out to be
Exaggerated parodies of our own neuroses,
Given all power and now driving sanctioned insanities,
Mitigating circumstances for all atrocities,
All excuses sinless and shining.
In a high field the ice winds
Flow around a young girl dancing,
Naked, spinning a drum.
She has no possession, nothing of value
That she has not given away.
Her breath, her flesh, her voice, given away,
Her dance, to feed the ever hungry,
To clothe the ever despairing,
The hungry ghosts and tragic gods,
The parasitic demons, the lost children,
The bright feathered ones.
Within a vessel of silence,
With words of silence,
With melodies of silence,
She gives it all away
Until she has everything and nothing.
Drum like a heart at the heart of reasons,
At the heart of reasons not to,
At the heart of simply no other options,
At the heart of no choice.
Giving it all away.
All the language, all the fabulations.
Here,
This is yours, this is yours,
Feed and be satisfied.
There are no paths here to this field,
Nor are there any roads that lead away.
A road is an excuse not to stay where you are.
No future has ever been laid down by a road:
They simply return us
To where we have already trodden –
Debris of an old campfire, burnt cans,
Strewn plastic, shredded in tatters on black branches,
Whiff of ordure and wet ashes.
Do not follow the ones that say follow,
The bright parasites, shining destroyers of choice.
Pioneers of novel disaster, slaves to habit,
Recycled, irrefutible logics.
Step off the road, just step off the road.
If it is a new destination you seek,
Step off the road.
Return to the silent grasses, wordless whispers,
Mycelial clusters of small symbiosis
That feed the hungry ghosts
The roots and white fingers of dirt and dark.
Step off the bright road
That heads for war,
The bright road to a bright future.
Step off, sink down, be silent.
Refuse to be moved by impatient passions,
Goaded by entrepreneurs of stolen honesty.
Give away all the excuses that tell the reason why not,
Feed them to the subtle beasts.
Open to the cold north air, itself of itself.
A hollow, ringing emptiness:
Words that are of less value
Than last autumn’s torn, sliding, burnt brown leaves.
Heard only by those already listening,
Maps to those already on that path,
Validation of shared insanities.
Chanted the chanted spells,
To wake the world with word and song.
I shall sink to silence,
Sink to silence
Where the spinning drum
Calls the hungry demons,
Who, satisfied will turn flakes of laughter,
Sink to earth and dissolve.
A word to silence,
A thought to breath,
A soul to the winds,
The cold north winds.
Chöd is the Tibetan Buddhist/Bon practice of offering oneself as sustenance to all beings, a stripping away of owned existence, owned energy, owned thoughts, owned beliefs. This piece emerged from a pre-dawn slushing of phrases and ideas. It started as one thing but changed in the focusing upon it to something else. Machig Labdron is a popular figure, portrayed as a naked young woman with long, flowing hair, chöd drum in hand, dancing. She was an influential yogini.
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