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The
Little Zen Companion
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The Little Zen Companion
I AM THAT I AM says God who is also
known as Popeye, and who wouldn't be
popeyed once they got finished with everything
and saw that a puzzle they set off to piece together --
just as a lark -- ended up coughing and bursting
into a great big mess the fits and starts
of which lead to automobiles, bookmobiles,
Kentucky Fried Chicken, commercials,
lettuce ripped anonymously in a waterfall
and thrown out into what? why? Well, it's obvious,
it's so someone can make a book about it
and then someone else can read that book
and be completely consumed so that the way
groceries are chosen becomes according to
different guidelines and someone very different
can read it and set their clothes on fire
and throw away every ring and feel not even
the slightest rousing of conscience
because what is conscience when you've got
the Little Zen Companion at your feet like
a wisecracking puppet who doesn't know when
to shut up, who doesn't know how to utter
without hyperbole or quotation marks or
exclamation points and who finally one day
relents in utter exhaustion, out of work,
and whispers that God is just this little girl
who lives on Fourth and Vine and presses
every present she receives into the soft mud
of the ditch as soon as she gets a chance --
What a capitulation. Really? Are you really
going to believe that little book?
It's just a little book.
It's just everything it says evasively and less.
It's just that everything isn't ever going to be
tidy enough to suit us or untidy enough to suit
us and finally there will be no escape
but the one you can't quite imagine although
there will also be no blame and what
is licking your eyes will no longer be palm trees
and what rises on your tongue which will no longer
serve any purpose other than to not be a tongue
will not be budding taste but the creation you
still can't name and what you used to crave
eating will no longer cure, eating will no longer seem
anything but an abstraction and therefore inconsequential
to how you put one foot in front of the other
of course there will be no feet
and all will still be everything unnoticed, unnamed,
only neared by imagination which undergoes its own
radical transformation, transmutation, translation
but now you're riding in a trans-am with no hubcaps
and a desperate need to get somewhere so you throw out
the book which is what you were supposed to do
all along. You don't even notice the deer springing
across the road to temporary safety this night of
Jone 30th, you don't even notice.
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