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HOW CAN I TELL

The drops from the shower are real
 They cleanse my outside
The sounds of the mantra are real
 They cleanse my inside
So clean, in and out
 Yet is the soul roasting in my chest real too?

The doctor said
 After over a year, I don’t need those little pills
  Happy pills, I called them
Manufactured in state of the art, sterile, white, clean rooms,
by Saran wrapped people
white hair nets and powder blue booties,
resembling machines more than human
programmed normality, inhuman,
dictated by sales margins.
 
Stuffed with a few decades
of research and
millions of tax dollars
funneled thru NIH grants
Refined, white, smooth,
stamped FL (For Love?) 
Pop a pill a day
kept depression away
  That was months ago

I have these other pills.
Given not by a doctor
[with an alphabet after his name,]
but by a simple Asian man,
fat and jovial with inner peace.

Rough, burnished brown buttons
tiny compared to the doctor’s
He placed in my hands.
They were born from makers wearing cloth shields
of maroon/saffron patchwork
like rags stitched together by dignity,
bald with Lex Luthor cunning but right motivation
rolled spices in trancelike single minded concentration
adding all the compassion of the universe
distilled into 6 tiny syllables
chanted over 100 million times
[even a few thousand from the Dalai Lama.]

OM MANI PADME HUM

These other pills, the guru laughingly calls magic
tho I’m not laughing.

Packed with wisdom of the ages
they purify,
rectify
majestify

But I don’t take them too often
  They are too rare for me.

These two twins of different mothers
East and West
White and Brown
smooth and rough
Manufactured and crafted,
act on brain and mind.
 
Must choose with mind
 muddled by brain chemical imbalance
 or Karmic purification
Like grasping at branches hanging over a bog
Some hold my weight,
others snap at the lightest touch,
and others
are tricks of moonglow,
playing on swamp gas.

Which, the fulfillment of my warmest wish?
Which, the weapon to wipe out the weeping?
Which?

Steve Goldberg

OUT AND IN AUDIBLE

Every act of creation
is an erasure
an abrasion
an anaphylactic
shock and awe
hack job
a pleasure
wrought of leisure
and an irrepressible
need to blather on
both with and without
words.

Every devastation is
an act of creation
is an act
of transfusion
and a letting of blood
rich jewel confusion
a measure
of destruction
in the symphony
of what is becoming
a disillusion
of what is not
a twat shot full of love
a love of splatter
a shortage
and abundance
of what we call sanctity
and insanity
in and out
of fertile matter.

Every creation is
an act of destruction
and reproduction
a deconstruction
of yesterday
but a recreation
of tomorrow
an ablation
sullied only by illusion
a transmission
in search of substantiation
contracted
into transubstantiation
expanding like
an outstanding ovation
both with and without
reason
a scene
both with and without
cohesion
both in and out
of season
both over
and under heard.

Jesus Crisis

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