(“Citadel of Light Merit Badge”, 2016, original pen and ink)
The Great Debate
The great debate in buddhism
Specifically in ancient Tibet,
Was between the sudden and gradualist schools.
Even though the event is apocryphal
And never actually happened,
It’s a good and relevant story
Because it is the debate that happens to this day
Between students and teachers,
Dharma brothers and sisters
And within our own heart,
Because it concerns the nature of actual enlightenment.
You see,
The two schools view and conceive
The nature of reality,
And thus nature of ourselves,
Fundamentally differently.
The gradual school says life is like a dream
While the sudden school says it is a dream.
Disregard for a moment
The popular row row row your boat song
Which somehow inexplicably
Gave us all in the West
The sudden school lesson,
The vast majority of spiritual aspirants
Are of the gradual path
While only the very few are sudden types.
But the bottom line
Is that everyone is a gradual path type
Until they are a sudden enlightenment type.
(8/11/25)
Valentine is what they say to their valentines to describe,
The enchanting heart's whisper, how much they are special to them.
Nevertheless, I fell sick, to be exact, not in the ocean of my lover's love.
Astonishingly, the lover is what I mentioned is not real just an apocryphal to be enough.
Dwelling in my mind from the dawn to the sweet kisses of night,
He is nothing just fictional, a creature of my imagination, only to ignite.
The day of fourteenth February, in which people celebrate the cherish of love,
Where I prefer to live in my room, with my lover in my head, no any reason found to shrug.
Hoping him to convert into reality, to create the world with me, I imagined,
But the reality is a curse to us, I'd rather enter the world, I create, nothing to be tangled.
I had the worst terrors last night
My mind was in a gruesome sight
The ‘ol apocryphal scene
Insighted by the new regime
Migration bill stirs fear among
Farmworkers chant that It’s Wrong!
Phone app saves Honduran journalist
Can’t go back she’s on their death list
Can’t walk ‘n get food without stress
ICE is cold, enforcing arrests
Or anywhere, nonetheless
For a green card is meaningless
Now a tourist destination
Gaza's newest sensation
Take over plans for a Riviera
Palestine people’s tierra*
Taken; territory sovereign
New rich owner YOU ONLY gain
Who be the beneficiaries
Billionaire contemporaries
For undoence he’s called a hero
Those sacrificed their life for, zero
Those fought for everyone’s freedom
In vain forgotten in this new kingdom
Unbeknownst me how it plays out
Living in the USA, peace-out
Is the wind alive? That’s what the Choctaw believed.
The Apache called it, apocryphally, “the breath of the world.”
To them, the wind is the trickster you never see,
a joker on the plain of life.
What’s always arriving and always leaving?
What’s as old as the world, yet forever current?
Ever present and tireless, it seldom sleeps,
holding up jets, herding clouds like sheep,
filling sails, stirring leaves, causing rough seas.
What’s always passing, but already everywhere?
The Cherokee named ‘air’ the ‘keeper of spirits,”
because it sighs, cries, whispers and moans.
They credited it with great power and influence.
Today, we watch the skies with doppler witchery,
we forecast its path, with the gambler's odds - see,
the wind has turned on us, many times - like a tornado.
.
.
Songs for this;
Colors Of the Wind - End Title by Vanessa Williams
They Call the Wind Maria by Harve Presnell
Windy by The Association
How does the soul enter Heaven?
Through ways, I believe, that are dark and effervescent,
For the soul, a thing of light and solemnity,
must cross through its opposites in anonymity
Controversial though my ideas are, according to the apocryphal biblical texts which some take too far, I believe this must be true
Life is a sojourn of symmetry,
A cyclical process of repetitious histories
We rise and begin as do we fall and end.
These are my beliefs on how the soul enters heaven.
"The Clementine"
for the plucking,
the Clementine
leaves were fresher back then
the light glistened stronger
each segment a morsel
a revision slow and deliberate
transcribed by Jerome
gates to be opened
and consumed
in latin passages
verdi vulgate ancient fruit
before the modern world
the meaning lost
for those lost
between orchards
of words, opened
before
the greater great war,
a harvest, the Q source
strange language
strange stories
some found
apocryphal,
the hidden
didymos Thomas,
buried by strict canons
revealed untrue
in that strange winter
the orchards
were all burned
(LadyLabyrinth / 2022)
apocryphal. Adjective
apocrypha. Noun
didymos/Greek, meaning.
Q Source
Thomas
Jerome
When at last we go silent
deep within this internet hive,
will the delayed surprise
travel more or less than a minute or an hour?
Did she or he die, or were they always
apocryphal names written on dead air?
If we ‘pass’ known only to a few
who knew our covert compulsion to speak
to the invisible, to write to strangers,
(a secret we may take to the grave)
shall we miss being so mislaid?
Will a minor fame, a little flame,
die with only an ethernet epithet
knowing it left a mark so digital
it could be deleted by a fingertip?
When we go silent will they suspect,
assume that we are just gone away,
or imagine they hear once more
a phantom voice on distant lips
some other day?
Poetry is like opera to me.
It brings some, to your very soul’s gate!
Some poets only pen for a witty, rude
fast laugh.
I don’t think life is a bowl of chuckling human
guffaws and gaffes!
Some will never comment to you.
So what?
Make this not a popularity zoo, poetry is not akin to showing off
brand new shoes!
True friends are not like a bag of apocryphal popcorn!
Spitting philosophical gems like a dunce, all over a college dorm,
All kinds of varied, creative poets here!
Some write way too long, some too short.
Then, there are also, humble deep philosophers.
Find a few who make you purr.
Those that make your heart, stir!
**Read well known poets each day.
This is a must, a learning foray.**
These are just things I learned
since being here.
Beautiful poetry brings me to tears.
Cliches as comments should be
banned.
Empty and cold in this poet’s heart and
hands.
03-8-2022
Written 11/2021
UC Davis Hospital
She had many sad stories,
they were filed away, labeled,
color coded;
tales presented as apocryphal bibles.
He would listen as she pulled them out
of her droning breast,
intoned then as if reciting
poetry to an acolyte sponge.
Her stories festered the air
with pitiful sorrows,
scratched yet more stigmata
upon hide-bound woes.
White paper moths would fly up to his eyes
as if to illustrate her narratives;
tissue thin, he would see within them
the many skeletons of her living ghosts,
bones free now of all minerality,
fish-wet and wriggling
in the gel of a long preserved plasma.
He often closed his ears
to make his lips numb. The nasal gnarl
of her broken voice
coated his tongue with sticky commiserations,
a jejune sympathy
that had the texture of mildewed goatskin.
Her words mechanically ticked off
every injustice and persecution
ever heaped upon a martyred mind.
Eventually though, her deep well of mopes
dried to a blubber of sighs.
Then all those emaciated moths
would flutter around her
anointing her echoing skull
with a seeping urine-like substance
she called love.
All children of a lesser god,
Someone somewhere has spared the rod.
Disobedience led astray
Where iconoclast await to prey.
Apocryphal the unaware,
Their secrets juveniles don't share.
Subversive action that relies,
On innocence through child like eyes.
A fountain of all knowledge, yet
Corruption roams the internet.
Projecting images and sound,
Leaves immaturity spellbound.
And adolescents with stupidity,
Lured into vile iniquity.
Recriminations, who is to blame?
Those children taught to kill and maim,
Or radicals, wherever from,
Who leave misfits to plant the bomb.
4 / 9 / 2020.
ALL ALONE
Acerbic analysis awaits Annie.
Allies augment angrily against
Alicia’s apocryphal antithesis.
Authentication arrests all arguments.
11/26/2017
Alliteration Contest
Entitled
If You Listen
All Will Be Silent
The Apocryphal Dance
begins at Midnight
and becomes a Night Song
But/If You Go There
take Money
Time Eats Your Words
and you’ll Leave Something Unfinished
Finitude ends by The Mill
at the End of The Road
and the Descent
ends as a Shadow
Between Us
in the Still Moment
Adrift In a Dream
Take This
instead of a Bottle of Wine
to the Tag Sale
at the foot
of the Taconic Hills
overlooking the Promontory
by Long Pond
Where I’d Rather Be
Teasing the Line
while a Red Umbrella
makes an Impression
on the Lambent Sheen
suspended on Breath
Time Makes No Difference
and If You Go There
in Aura of First Light
Take the Long Way Back
where a Bloom Buds
On Edge
Before Time Becomes Light
Maybe you shouldn't send the letter
Argued counsel in my head
But the moral compass pointed
Toward transparency instead
I have always walked the straight path
From the time I was a boy
To the noble and the righteous
Revelation brings but joy
There's no gangster or homemaker
President or CEO
That is going to subvert justice
Not while I am on patrol
Now the careless and the reckless
Not necessarily a crime
To you I'll give a warning
Do not cross me one more time
Like apocryphal Washington
If it's a lie I cannot tell
Inclusive of the truth withholding
It is I who sounds the bell
There is too much information
Some is fresh and some is not
I'll call an investigation
And we'll find out what is what
Maybe I overreacted
Turns out there's nothing to see
Let us have it all redacted
This revolution's not on me
January 13, 2017
Apocryphal embellishments of
a non-canonical secret society,
teeming amidst a dubious
enterprising authenticity,
exposure's excessed stormy decay of
tormented poet's crushing blows,
ego's wild oats fruitlessly sown
rampaged rush to save their own flesh,
poesy's wildflower blooms wilted
under acid rein's torridity of seduction,
hence poetry's infertile demise unto
dusty shelves' apathetic surrender
Here I am
Opening a new finesse
Creating a rapport of mercurial genre
From nadir to zenith
I never thought the labyrinthine of searching would never end
The demise of one long ago
Propinquity would never come close
Yet amidst a facade
A reprieve
In the quintessence silence I can breathe
Savior faire becomes poignant
As the genesis holds out its hand
Showing a viable paradigm of which I can now stand
A liaison from utopian will always emanate with levity
That's incongruous
It is esoteric and simultaneously profound
The eyes are opaque
Plausible to deduce by an epitome using extraneous cliches
There is a diaphanous window of not mundane deference
Containing altruism
Adopting protean as a force
Ignoring platitude on a plate of empathy
Fires of cajole
Follow the paragon
They bring inimical hubris and footsteps in nuance
Flames of apocryphal are flamboyant to a naive soul
By Christy Teas
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