bent to this task

Their eyes are like blank sheets of paper.

These stanzas are like having to wear a weird shirt. The buttons 

don't line up right. There are no pockets. 

The lines of this poem are a factory that employs 

the dead. Ghosts of people that walk 

on concrete floors, their eyes 

like blank sheets of paper. Do you 

have a pen? Me neither. 

What is a day? Rows and lines 

of broken things - dreams, hopes, love. 

No, that's too hard and I reject it. 

A day is you with your shoes off. 

You are running toward me 

laughing. You are telling me 

about some poet from The Gaza Strip 

or Kentucky.

Where are the jars that hold those things 

we saved? Paper clips and erasers. Odd 

screws and bolts. Jars that didn't have lids 

anymore. That no one wanted, 

like these poems. 

I am bent to this task that I have given myself. 

For fifty years I have kept busy, and now 

I don't think I know how to stop.

james lee jobe

If you attain unsurpassable, complete enlightenment, all sentient beings also attain it. The reason is that all sentient beings are aspects of enlightenment.

Eihei Dogen Zenji

children of delight and sorrow

the hawks scream, playing together on the ceiling of heaven. 

-kenneth rexroth

son, 

we are children of delight and sorrow, we are the sound 

of massive waves against a boulder-strewn beach, we are moonbeams, 

we are a thought of something greater. 

and my dear boy, we are riding on the wings of hawks, we are slipping 

through the walls of heaven like the wind, like feathers, we are infinite, 

souls without end, like dreams. 

and it is almost time to go.

james lee jobe

LINK: Assume the Role of Cassandra, Wearing a Mask, Speaking into the Camera, a poem by Carolina Ebeid

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jlj