Post-Modern Alterations on the Buddha's Teachings (The Four Ignoble Truths)

1.

Always failing always losing always weeping
always sleeping off
the always present, endless amazement
and disgust:

small alterations
on the Buddha’s teachings:
Ouroboros locked in perpetual motion, Samsara,
that unmoving vehicle of Mahayana and Theravada;
their lotus lungs are drowned in combustion.

Smoke that never clears the system
always taking always making
love to the idea of endings – that blatant lie
on the tips of tonight and tongues and
this blind blade against your throat.

Scimitar of wind pressed
against eyes bleeding tears – acid carving paths
down your cheeks into ether – ever-flowing –
that smashes white
on the never-blue shore.

2.

Always praising never shaking
always slaving away for never slaked thirst
for quiet epiphanies and clarity –

that crumbled neon in the veins of amphetamine Venus,
forever fishnetted with injection wounds, pregnant
with sadness and

fears that bleed out of paper:
the cobweb capillaries of an attic
that houses a Caliban devouring lightbulbs,
its maw enveloping skies
of perfume.

That insulate of disconnected cables
that once joined jaw and skull,
synapse and electricity – the circuit
that’s been closed.

3.

Always wooden always named
always ashen, but never contained within
the words on the page – never breathing,
always aging behind the fleshy petals

of eyelids always darkened
but never closed – dyings caught
on the edges of lashes,

that passes through the small
of a needles eye – your eye – and punctures
unnamed stranger’s ears.

4.

Never trade end-stopped echoes
for bayonets and gunpowder –
re-verb-erations are more effective
in times of roses.

Always scamper and scuttle
along the bottoms of gutters
filled with blood, but never ask why,
why the manhole cover has been welded shut.

Nothing pro-found is anti-found in the navel
of a woman or child, but do not covet their bodies –
covet their capacity for ripping open the seams
of your desires.

Continue dreaming of eyeballs
wrapped in burlap and red paper,
lumpy packages bound with twine,
of love and of nights
when it goes un-found.

And if you are consistent,
if you never falter in your conviction
that we are all convicts conscripted
to walk all night to gallows the next morning,
then you will be able to peel back your third eyelid,
disassemble eight-lane highways,
and sup from pools of beauty,
of horror.