WITHOUT ZEN

While I have little quarrel
with the field of counseling
and hesitate to even bring it up

(other than the pursuit of its profession
removing from the last couple years of my life
one of my favorite drinking buddies)

and while I do not wish to discount
the great gift of virtuous value
good counseling has been for me personally

it might serve in this moment
as an effective preamble
to recall that

I have on occasion wondered whether
it isn't a bit of a crime to professionalize
the natural empathy humans are capable of

place it behind closed doors
and demand four years of tuition
paid to world-manipulating banks

as well as approval
from a state bureaucracy
and then an hourly fee

all in order to establish
a clock-determined space
of formalized friendship

yet this is nothing

it is the crime of containment
of access to non-ordinary states
I call spiritual communion--

within the walls of buddhist temples
demanding endless chants
or allegience to the rigors of sitting still

or projected into
an unfathomable experience
only a distant saviour could attain

or demonized by criminal codes
against public celebration
or private intoxication

or torqued into destructive addictions
by government-funded Mena-airport deliveries
of crack cocaine to American streetpeople

or funneled into pornographic perversion
of the inherently transforming nature
of loving sexuality

or boxed up into a new age song and dance
costing $1000 for a weekend of professional empathy
shamanic journeying or tarot-reading

or manipulated into the capitalist nightmare
of commercialized entertainment
and moneyed stuff--

it is this alone which has been the single most pointed source
of the brutalization of both mankind
and the Earth

for as it turns out

life itself is the most magnificent koan
in which every challenge we face
holds the key to our arrival

and bliss is nothing other than
our natural empathic sensitivities
developed and magnified

by the complimentary courage
to fight and build and change
into that which we are not

in order that we may become fully human
loving soul in body
without separation

neither discipline
nor indulgence
alone will suffice

neither empathic commitment
to attend to the overwhelming despair
of the human condition

nor relaxing
into the precious comforts
of one's spiritual practice

but in merging our own bliss and despair
vulnerability and power
shadow and light

within the natural dialectic
inherent in the erotic Tao
of this Goddess-gendered life

have I become
so passionately chained
to the task of freedom in reality

and so free
to serve
God