Poetry

Western Meditation

In the West, we think that if you're walking down the street talking to yourself too much, you're crazy. But if you talk to yourself all day long, silently—from the moment you get out of bed to the moment you fall asleep—that's perfectly normal.

—Sam Harris

Observe the people watching the people watching
the spontaneous line-dancers in the street:
A storied structure of psychologists studying
divergent behavior. Observe

the radio-walk, the one frequency of mind-speech
where the knob breaks off. A transcription
would echo in walls of asylums:
Eyes whispering, I see... a loud voice tampering,
NO, ME. It is not a dream-like quality,

the one-direction laser-walk, the concrete paths
beneath electric sky-wires. A toothache
flaring—ROOT CANAL NEXT WEEK—
faceward flies the wind, or there is none.

It's easy to ignore the sky's wide lobe,
and not just in streets of forty-story distraction.
Also in Kansas, eyes develop internal dialogues,
and roll earthward, and glaze
the teeming intentions of insects. Incidentally,

A dung beetle just rolled a ball of feces in a circle,
until the wind blew the ball away.

There must be a motive on the macro level,
in the beetle's egoless brain. Call it
a rolling amnesic shit-ball-a-thon,
or evolution, but the behavior's existence

speaks for it. To push the ball without thinking;
to self-diagnose a slow-growing tumor,
& hold it under segmented feelers,
& weigh it—& release. O dung beetle,
I suspect we have pushed an equal weight.

The trans-Kansas highway cuts to populous partitions
where the sidewalks are straight, the baseball caps—
on, the sun-roofs—closed, the sky's jets—bees.
No, not bees. Buzzing. The kind

with a Doppler effect;
the glassy fuel for daylight dreaming;
the hum of static hemispheres,
up there, unaware.