The Cock Poems by Georgio Vesta were written in the mid-Seventies and published in City Lights Magazine. They were performed at Opal Nations’ place in San Francisco, by Wendy Miller, in male drag, appearing as Georgio.”
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TheCockPoemsbyGeorgioVestaastoldtoSteveBrooks
Ordinary Ecstasy was written from November, 1991, to January, 1992, in the Osho International Commune in Pune, India. I was there with Suryo Gardner, a longtime sannyasin of the beloved and notorious guru, Rajneesh, finally called Osho. The ashram became a crucible in our relationship with each other, with the guru, and in our relationship with awareness itself. Osho was her master but not mine. The experience of ordinary ecstasy became the tenor of our life in that remarkable place and time.
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Ordinary Ecstasy has been removed from this site, since it has become part of another book, Fearless in India, and that book is being considered for publication.
The Lost Poems of Jesus is an apocryphal discovery of divine imagination. I wrote these poems, originally, as expressions of my own, and they were published under the title Outbursts of Love. Recently, I re-imagined them as if they were poems Jesus might have written when he was in his twenties and an unknown carpenter, falling deeper and deeper into his own awareness of the spirit. There is a kind of expression in these poems that resembles the way Rumi spoke of what he called The Beloved. I am not a practicing Christian, but I don’t believe I am saying anything here that could be called untoward or inappropriate for such a man, as Jesus might have been, before he began his ministry.
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The poems in The Eternal Ruse were written in 1985, when the freedom from alcohol in my life opened the floodgates. These love poems were the first I had written, and many more followed. The muse of my poems at the time became Joni McConnell, who died in 2002, after a bright and brave life. She was one who brought happiness into the lives of the people around her, because of the light she encouraged to shine within herself and others. She was coming to terms with being an incest survivor, and I was recovering from 22 years of drinking. We were called Holocaust and Apocalypse when we were together, but we never stopped loving each other and loving this life that we were a part of, together.
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Millie the Mermaid is a fictional story, written in the 90s, of sexual abuse, alcoholism, friendship, abandonment, love and fear. “I don’t know who these people are, and I can remember nothing in my life that parallels this story, but both of these characters came to life for me, and I cared for them as long as they were with me.”
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Fearless in Lucknow is now available on Kindle, @ http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BXK1OVU/
Fearless in Lucknow is the story of an intimate meeting with an esteemed guru, in the least personal reality one can imagine. It is also the story of a poet among seekers.
The first day I spent with Papaji, listening, I saw something I’d never seen before. I saw a man, not only speaking to others about the truth of their inherent nature, I saw being speaking to being, not merely someone speaking about being to others. I saw a man speaking to others in the big, open room of a suburban house, in a large urban city, on the other side of the world, sometimes speaking as one person to another, and I saw a new thing I hadn’t seen before, I saw love pouring out toward itself, and I heard the clearest, most direct expression of what is beyond the familiar forms of religion and philosophy – awareness of being itself, and speaking, in and from, that awareness.
“In reading Fearless in Lucknow, I realized that Steve Abhaya is one of the few people I have ever met who truly understands and tries to live the spiritual concepts which he talks about in this profound personal memoir. In fact, I don’t know anyone who has gone as far as he has (consciously) in this direction. He walks the walk. Maybe I just don’t get out enough, but the concepts and ideas/ideals in this memoir are important for people to read – if for no other reason than to at least get a glimpse of ‘the journey.’ Abhaya writes about his particular journey in an unthreatening and unpretentious way – which is also rare for such subject matter and spiritual books in my experience. I think that this little book could go a long way to becoming an American version of “An Autobiography of a Yogi” for this day and age. If nothing else, it will certainly add to the existing literature of the whole East/West canon.
-Thomas Rain Crowe
author/translator of Drunk on the Wine of the Beloved: 100 Poems of Hafiz (Shambhala)
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My Mother’s Chair was written in ’03-’04, when I was taking care of my mother, during the last year of her life. She was an imposing figure in my life and the lives of my two brothers. I was her other, as a small boy, and she was my first other. The story explores her effect on my life as an poet, artist and writer.
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My Mother’s Chair Introduction
Zenwords is a Zendex of Zenguistic Zenfinitions. “Years ago, I wrote 16 definitions that seemed to be true from within the awareness that is called Zen, and a friend said, ‘If you wrote 365, you could make a calendar.’ As someone susceptible to suggestion, after a moment of despairing apprehension, I did, and published the Zencalendar in 2001. Three more batches followed and became the Zenictionary. These koanclusions, or Zenwords, evolved from those earlier works.”
The Zencabulary below contains the words that these zenwords were taken from, perhaps making the understanding a bit more clear.
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Zencabulary
Dear Nadja is autobiographical writing, from 1982, a kind of journalese, that became Borderwalker, seven years later.
“Dear Nadja was written as letters to my sister, Nadja, who doesn’t exist and never did, but when I thought of killing her off, several demanded I not do that. She’s as real as the narrator, who lived another kind of life, a long time ago.”
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SWIMMING is a coming of age novelization of autobiographical stories.
“These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies – captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose from among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
“Since my past is a familiar life story, like a novel, it seems more true to tell my story as a novelistic autobiography rather than an autobiographical novel. Steve Brooks and I share identical histories, but we are not the same. His life is in this book. Mine is in this moment. You could say that this is a personal true story, or you could say it’s fiction, and both are true. By telling my life story as if it’s about someone else, I can tell both kinds of truth, the literal and the literary, the true story of Steve Brooks.”
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Steve Brooks (Abhaya) - Poetry, Prose & Art 