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 Feb 2016 Kari
Sonya Ki Tomlinson
The doctor rubbed my sore shoulder
spraying copious amounts of analgesic compound
to freeze the area
from the side of my eye I caught the
silver glint of a 6 inch needle poised
to penetrate my quivering shoulder
with cortisone
intense pain exploded through my consciousness
as the syringe fracked into the deeper regions of
my shoulder

Afterwards, while reflecting on this incident
I thought about polarities and Newton’s Law:
“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”
The pain I had just experienced did not occur in a vacuum
Somewhere along the time continuum I’d set up that opposite
swing of the pendulum

I recollected all the intense moments of extreme and dizzying
sense enjoyment, lust and gratification
my mind has sought and indulged in with rabid satisfaction
always wanting more, restless, never content or at peace

When we examine this world, and its quintessential duality
we are confronted with extremes at every angle
Hot, cold, up, down, win, lose
We can’t have birth without death and so on
hmm…. I thought as the enlightenment bulb
went off in my head
This is why many great sages and saints
fostered a way of life that
transcended duality

Lord Buddha extolled the “Middle Path”
He described the middle way as moderation
between the excesses of carnal indulgence
and self mortification

Aristotle gave us the “Golden Mean”
“every virtue is a mean between two extremes, each of which is a vice.”

Sathya Sai Baba states:
“The object of meditation is equanimity,
the object of equanimity is samadhi (enlightenment or self realization)"

This beautiful quote by Bhagavan Baba is redolent with wisdom
and sublime beauty:

“Surrender to God and to life means the absence of duality
and being of the same nature as God.
But such a state is beyond man’s will.
Surrender is when doer, deed and object are all God.
It comes naturally to a heart filled with love for God.
God is as a spring of fresh and sweet water in the heart.
The best tool to dig a well to that inexhaustible source and
savor its sweetness, is Japa (Chanting God’s Name)
 Jan 2016 Kari
Wordforged Fool
Thief
 Jan 2016 Kari
Wordforged Fool
She was everything
All I needed was to ask
Then she took it *all
The mother will not turn, who thinks she hears
Her nursling’s speech first grow articulate;
But breathless with averted eyes elate
She sits, with open lips and open ears,
That it may call her twice. ’Mid doubts and fears
Thus oft my soul has hearkened; till the song,
A central moan for days, at length found tongue,
And the sweet music welled and the sweet tears.

But now, whatever while the soul is fain
To list that wonted murmur, as it were
The speech-bound sea-shell’s low importunate strain,—
No breath of song, thy voice alone is there,
O bitterly beloved! and all her gain
Is but the pang of unpermitted prayer.
 Jan 2016 Kari
Julian
Gruesome blister on a denatured mind
Chimes rumble the anchored soul foggy with Elysian wine
Flippant ruse ignites a battered fuse rusty with malevolent impotence
Blustery portents beyond expired extent throngs the chapels and pickets along the electrified fence
That separates the grave from the gravity of a physics enslaved
A physics where disillusioned mathematics and decay are as sure as taxes and the last earthen day
Nescient of giant leaps our stepwise ascension is helical and cheap
It snails along with unctuous repetition of pendulous rhythm and sails biologically with evolved and animated meat
The advent of acid and bass is a keepsake for the epicurean chase
Of a fulgurant galvanization of phases that remain unfazed
Trends punctuate vain diversions and lionized conversions both raise and raze
The velocity of money ensures a melliferous alchemy of a well-oiled plutocracy buffered by praise and pay
Ivory-tower elegance is immune to demotic ignorance
When the shot-callers devise the rules to the game with impenetrable clandestine eloquence
Hebetude and lassitude sink abundant platitude and offer trite prescriptions for useless attitudes
But the vogue of disembogued vanity entraps individualism and trains martial raillery
Trends tantalized by preening epigamic tens makes the roosters become owls that neglect nest egg hens
Fatuous ambush of the Kardashian putsch is as clockwork as Big Ben
Murky lies appear in flimsy disguise suitable for mice “say cheese” demise
Privacy cries and answers only lurk accessibly when spurred by wise “why’s” never asked when garish time flies
Tweets and beats make us obese with threadbare wheat cultivated by nescient bleats
Beatific ambition obscured by the wail of sheepish sheep
Outnumbered by obtuse angels and a cute horde of meretricious dissolution that ever wrangles
The shelter turns to rubble and the cloister turns to bustle: useful convolution thus entangles
Agorophilia defiles a voiceless lechery on speed dial
Disembodied violence sprints a green mile bankrolled by the peaceful throngs slowed through the paid but dilatory turnstile
Thus we loiter in queue as the slew of vibrant militarized celerity taxes our pews
Pews which enthuse jingoism eager to apportion sentient deaths through religious abuse
We can surf beams of light chasing verisimilitudes of diversion bright
Of unwagered immersion gambling a pittance for vicarious thrills and riskless fright
To discover the vestige of war, a useless artifact of sore egos we now deplore
An enormity of unmoored evil percolating apace of the paradoxical rush hour from shore to shore
But more decisively than an implacable brush fire on pristine ground abetted by sleek star-crossed winds that soar
Irenic ignorance placates, because a vagrant vacant mind is more a felicity than a bellicose grimy crease
Because excess corrodes squinty detests, and partial enslavement is both a rest and arrest to earth’s untenanted lease
Decries the devolution of pop culture that transmogrifies people into sheep and then makes them sheepish over their peccadillos. It also bashes war as a callous mechanism of useless death. It concludes by asserting the paradox that the throngs in real life slow our movement but we can move at light speed through technological implements. It concludes that useful idiots are irenic if also disheartening. In the earlier sections it laments that materialistic monism is taking over because science has made us deterministic and thus blind to the numinous beyond that staggers beyond our comprehension. It addresses how we are silently monopolized by artful esoteric chess masters immune to trifling quibbles, and how distracted society has become with respect to digital plasticity and consumerist disfiguration spurred on by fatuous and meretricious values. It further satirizes the effigy of modern culture deliberately disfigured with grandiloquence to deploy resourceful linguistic invention. I hope you enjoy this piece!

Here is a response I posted on another poetry site with respect to this poem. It explains the emblems, themes, philosophical agenda and metaphors of this poem so that more people can appreciate the level of meticulous care I preen with my craft
“I understand the charge of hyperbole, that was unintentional. It is an epiphenomenon of protean grandiloquence ( multi-pronged connotations suffering entropy through translation) crafted to emblazon lurid imagery and to conceal arcane mystery with an emphasis on cadence. When you use big words it is inevitable that some words chosen connote more strongly than you originally hoped for when writing it initially. Also, it was not designed to be solely a scathing harangue bemoaning the decadence and anomie endemic to this zeitgeist. You should read the final four or five lines (after I lambasted how war makes human life unnecessarily disposable for expedient aims). In those lines I marvel at miracle of technology wizardry and insinuate that in modern times we can wager much less to gain the same thrills we would have risked life and limb for before. Instead of a bottlenecked turnstile of industry that admits one person at a time like when entering an amusement park (the sluggish pace of premodern industry) to fund the clunky and internecine annihilation operated through rapid-fire death ( “Disembodied violence sprinting ‘the green mile’ A.K.A. a prisoner’s last walk before execution). The pace of society is a central theme of the poem throughout. The gravity of a physics enslaved implies the dilatory and dismal apprehension of a universe moving at an infinitesimally slow rate. A helical and cheap evolution mediated by animal meat snails along throughout history only to precipitate the exponential acceleration of human progress witnessed more recently after the advent of language. The rate of speed (the velocity of money line) is the lifeblood of all culture and all entertainment but it has become such a blur that it obscures the inveterate values of a leisurely stroll rather than a hedonistic galloping gallivant. Ironically, the plutocracy depends on gradate—(thus slow enough to lull people into the “say cheese” mousetrap (privacy eradication)—cultural devolution (clockwork like Big Ben to me evokes the imagery of a slowly ticking clock, a fixture and emblem of the proctor of the old world domineering over newfangled world prospects). Pop culture centered in the Anglophonic world depends on a rapid velocity of vagary blustery with money inuring people to fast-paced changes that abide by slow-moving subterfuge( the Kardashian putsch). The word ambush in that sentence implies that the encroachment of hegemons depends on a furtive approach solidified by an alacritous leap at the heartstrings of mankind in a moment of brinkmanship. The mousetrap is the slow roll but steady bet “say cheese demise”. The irony is that the only way this plan could work is because “wise why’s are never asked when garish time flies. This bewilderingly rapid pace is also the mechanism whereby sheltered obtuse angels are desensitized by breakneck cultural celerity that disabuses their naivety thus leading to useful convolution (paradigm shift). But there is also a lament that “meretricious wranglers” could lead to unmoored decadence bewildered by a smug agnostic relativism tethered to nothing more than the culmination of momentary fads reverberating in a plangent delay chamber like a finely crafted sound effect in a musical production program. The poem ends optimistically by concluding war is a vestige and concedes that partial enslavement (PC culture) is irenic precisely because it shepherds pedestrian considerations predictably in order to secure a stalemate. The Earth’s Untenanted Lease is thus arrested by counterbalanced nuclear specters. This leads to a rest and also an arrest of territorial claims. There is so much deliberate and emblematic imagery deployed here, drenched with subconscious enrichment that is unintended. A perfunctory interpretation of this piece misses so many astute cultural commentaries. The poem ends on a relatively positive note. The final several lines announce war as a vestige but concede that peace is built upon a latticework of acquiescent sheep indoctrinated to despise the past rather than learn from it (this goes slightly beyond what is directly stated). This poem in essence is about the ironic dynamics of history at the intersection of our modern cultural identity.
 Jan 2016 Kari
Allyson Walsh
Choking on words
Attempting to shove them down

Reliving the vision of you
Brings mixed emotions

We do not speak
For reasons continually multiplying

Yet I wish to tell you
Hurts unspoken

I dream of stopping you
In your tracks

Merely to tell you
Secrets left unsaid

"Your teammate's hands
Skipped consent

I cannot forget
The look in his eyes

His touch left my skin
Purple in places

He made me feel
Like I was the cause."

But dreams are
Only hazy

They're wishes meant
For the mind only

We do not speak
And I will not tell you

You will never know
Of bruises on thighs
For WY

Somehow I think telling you will make me feel better. I know it won't. He was reported and he doesn't talk to me... but you were supposed to protect me. You were too busy cheating on me at the time to do so.
 Jan 2016 Kari
Edward Lear
There was an Old Man of the West,
Who never could get any rest;
So they set him to spin
On his nose and chin,
Which cured that Old Man of the West.
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