A Broken Stone of Ozymandius is a book of 27 poems, that began in expressing the ways one might fall in love with unknown and unmet strangers, that evolved into an expression of the way love moves out from the recognition of love within oneself to an expression of love toward others and back again to the recognition of love’s truest source.
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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 and the imagination of the author.
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The Window Seat 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.
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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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Essential Occupation is drawn from four books written between ‘02 and ‘04, Victrola, 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. Lucky 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.
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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“Sun is shining in its place as Sun, and here, now, Sun is shining in this place I am. Sun fills me with its heat and light, and I am made the same as Sun. Never thinking I am the Sun, I am Sun.”
“The Wind blows,” we say, but Wind is Wind. Standing in Wind, like a fish swimming in the ocean, I swallow Wind, it swallows me, and I am Wind.
Earth, this land, this soil, this ground beneath our feet is lifted from itself by wind. Earth becomes scattered across the surface of itself, as I am scattered from my origin, across the surface of my life. I am Earth, I live apart from myself, I settle down to myself again.
Rain falls, as rainfall does, down upon the land and sea it rises above. My eyes rain from themselves, in brokenhearted memory of what’s been held close as my own self. I am the rain of a tear that falls to sorrow from sorrowing. I am this Rain that evaporates in the air, to fall again, when sorrow calls again. I am the rain of my raining. I am Rain.
I breathe in and out the Air that breathes me. I am the Air that fills and empties me. I am its vessel, its container, the shape of its strength. Air opens and drains my lungs. I taste its nectar. I am the shape of shapeless Air. Without Air, I am the shape of its destruction. I am the Air of my demise. I am empty Air, from which I breathe myself alive. I am no difference between in and out.
I am Water, as I seek the shape of my container. I seek my shape in myself, as flow seeks itself across the flat bed of a stream. As I level myself with any like me in my range. I am Water, in being round in round things, narrow in narrow things, spiral in spirals, wide in deltas.
I am true to myself in many forms. I am Water. I am Air. I am Rain. I am Wind. I am Sun.
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Everyone is Naked and Dancing All the Time, 35 pages, poetry about what remains when one finally moves beyond a life of romanticism.
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Prepare to Dance is a small book of poems, written in 1993, a year after I got back from India, during which time I had seen myself surrender to myself, to Being Itself, and to the love of another. All of these surrenders mirror the same emptiness of intention.
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This is the anthology for the one-man show, The Blood & Turnips Poetry Festival, which was first performed by the author in San Francisco in 1975 at Intersection Theater, and later at other venues.
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Steve Brooks (Abhaya) - Poetry, Prose & Art 