Steve Abhaya (Brooks) - Poetry Prose & Art

Haiku Café

Steve Abhaya — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 18:17:33 +0000

Haiku Café was written entirely in the Charlotte Street Starbucks in Asheville, North Carolina, during the bitterly warm winter of 2011-12. Observations expressed in Haiku Café are taken from life, from the imagination of the author, or both.

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Haiku Cafe

Singing Down the Drain

Steve Abhaya — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 03:10:05 +0000

Singing Down the Drain is a musical with two players, an aging couple who may or may not know who the other is. They have just met or they have known each other for fifty years. The only thing they can remember with any consistency is the lyrics to the music of their lives, and that becomes an effective means of communication, and fun, between them.

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Singing Down the Drain

Walking in Asheville

Steve Abhaya — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 02:19:46 +0000

Walking in Asheville is poems and photographs, composed in Asheville, North Carolina, in the summer of 2011. It bears a resemblance to San Francisco Snapshots and Walking in Ellensburg, also availiable on this site.

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Walking in Asheville: with photos

Walking in Asheville: Text Only

Poet in America

Steve Abhaya — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 23:13:03 +0000

Poet in America is a compilation of three books of journalese, written over a ten year period, from ’75 to ’85, including Savage Amusement, Dear Nadja, and Invisible Lion. These books chronicle the life of a poet from age 33 to 43, before, during, and after booze played its role in his life. The story, moreover, is the chronicle of his consciousness of himself as a poet and as someone living a poet’s life, in one of the most beautiful and welcoming cities in the world.

There are two versions here. The unpunctuated version is harder to read. It was a experiment. I seem always to want to reinvent form, but the punctuated original is easier to read.

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Poet in America original

Poet in America

The Chair Outside the Door

Steve Abhaya — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 17:55:29 +0000

The Chair Outside the Door is a book of 26 poems, originally written as sonnets to Rilke, after his “Sonnets to Orpheus.”

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The Chair Outside the Door

I Write Poetry

Steve Abhaya — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 06:33:29 +0000

I Write Poetry is taken from four books written between ‘02 and ‘04, Victrola, The Essential Occupation, The Greening, and The Open Door that Oceans Are.

These poems were written after my first stents were put in, before and after my mother died, and after I had discovered the first truly bohemian coffeehouse in Seattle, after living there for fifteen years.

Victrola was a café where I finally felt at home, not in the sense of being welcome among decent people but being among other poet/artists. That was a common experience for me in San Francisco, but in Seattle, my life as a poet/artist felt somewhat isolated, even while finding sympathetic others in a sympathetic city, but not finding a gathering place of such people.

At the same time, I grappled with my romantic attachment to relationships and my practice of non-attachment in the awareness of spirit. In other words, was I going to continue to look for a lover or was I going to live in a monastery of my own making? The answer is neither. The answer is, “I write poetry”, but I was less clear about that at the time. These poems are more clear than I was, as is often the case.

I heard a man say, “Poets are lucky, because they have the opportunity, at the moment of creation, to turn and look and see the source. The problem is, they fall in love with the thing created, and they follow it into the world.” There is no problem here; both are true and both are worth doing, as a human being living in the consciousness of being itself.

It’s difficult, sometimes, to recognize the reality of both directions without losing sight of one or the other, but it’s not impossible, and it is a great challenge with great reward. These poems speak to the challenge and the reward of both ways the eyes are capable of seeing. There is a danger in the attachment to either way of seeing, and being a poet works for me as the way of no way.

Romanticism and Spirituality are both attachments of the mind, and poetry has been the path of freedom for me. Luckily for me, poetry works to dissolve thought and feeling, even as it forms awareness into consciousness. The more personal I become, the less personal I discover I am, and poetry is the expression of the highly personal and the least personal in the same language.

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Write Poetry Contents

I Write Poetry

Matisse in LA

Steve Abhaya — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 03:21:19 +0000

Matisse in LA is a small book of poems, written months after I had a real scare, from my first myocardial infarction. I was happy to be alive and suddenly conscious,in my body, of my morality. I said I was 18 until I was 60, when that happened. I was someone who embraced the presence of death, but my body hadn’t gotten the message, until then. It was a kind of awakening that produced these poems, which I had slighted until recently.

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Matisse in LA

Books & Art:

Steve Abhaya — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 23:04:26 +0000

For an overview of what’s here, click on 67 Covers or Contents by Title, on your right. Then enter the name of the post you want into the search box to your right. You can also go to Categories, and click on one of them for specific areas of interest. Once you enter a post in the search box, it will come up, but you will need to scroll down past other mentions of it until the post itself appears. If you want to respond to this site, scroll down to Leave a Comment on this page, or you can email me at: steve@steveabhaya.com.

For Nothing – A One Man Show, a full-length video, click on: http://mcooki.es/216521/

Nothing is a talk that evolved from doing my first two shows, Keep Talking: It’s Showtime, in ’75, and The Blood & Turnips Poetry Festival, first performed in ’82. Nothing was recorded in Seattle in ’03. My son, Jaxon Brooks, made this possible through his diligent effort and the facilities of his wonderful website, MilkandCookies.com, which I recommend for its insightful and often hilarious content.

All artwork on Steveabhaya.com is by the author, except for the cover of The Exquisite Poet and The Blood & Turnips Poetry Festival by Alexandra Benjamin, the cover to The Zen of Housepainting by Chris Blum, and the paintings that accompany The Lonely Lion are by Christine Schibly. The cover photo for Fearless in Lucknow was taken by Michael Schiesser. The artwork for Let’s Spend Some Time Together is by Gregory Vose.

Ordinary Ecstasy and Fearless in Lucknow have been removed from this site, since they have become part of another book, Fearless in India, and that book is being considered for publication.

On Board the Victoria Clipper

Steve Abhaya — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 22:32:11 +0000

On Board the Victoria Clipper is a collection of impressions written aboard the Victoria Clipper from Seattle to Victoria, BC.

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On Board the Victoria Clipper

Nothing

Steve Abhaya — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 05:54:27 +0000

Here is the text to the video: Nothing – A One Man Show.

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Nothing