A Poem of Awakening by Ben Riggs
Descending through a dark cloud,
Into a region of the mind that speaks in a strange tongue,
The five gates are over run by legions of provocative beasts.
Day in and day out,
I am cast down,
Again and again,
Into a violent world of my own design.
The shadows that populate the scene,
Both putrid and seductive in manner,
Are but bags of skin dangling from the distant past.
The tone self-conscious,
The rhythm anxious and barbaric,
Dancing with these hallucinations has become claustrophobic.
Trembling with fear,
Cutting through the womb of appearances
-Both the gorgeous and grotesque-
There is but one embryonic thought to be found.
Forgetting it was the answer,
This question became afraid of birth.
Incubated by self-deception,
It lost touch with the ground of being.
Like settling the surface of water with the palm of my hand,
My words scream back at me,
Reasoning sews only cloaks of sophistication,
And try as I might,
Its face cannot be seen.
Utterly defeated by this simple fear,
I surrender and cease to be.
Merging with the space between this and that,
At once the fear dissolves,
As it was but a reflection of me.
The void is filled with my original face,
In a realm beyond time and space.
Not many nor one,
It does not end as it never begun,
A perfect Truth which cannot be undone.
