Mission Statement of the Sacred Mundane

by Corey Jenkins

No one is here but me and the forgotten words of the dead and wise,
and the lost notes of doomed jazzmen.
I read their verse through blue-green eyes, shades of sea and grass and trees,
squinting through Evolution’s bad lenses.

I listened to the lost language of their notes with my third ear to the ground
and my third eye on their poppies.
Like them, I have learned that the mind has locks and molecules, like keys,
can open or close many different doors.

They told me, learn by listening to the hoarse voice of wind through leaves
or by watching the sights of light, endlessly bouncing reality into being
or by huffing the smells of rain on vines that rise above the Monday trash
and by observing your thoughts, then watching them swiftly slither away.

I tip my hat, raise my glass, and pour one for the dead, the lost, or the fun.
I’ll let my wishes for liberty sail along
on the last fibers of a listless and purposeless dandelion seed,
spreading life without volition.

Let me, like the cat, allow curiosity to drive me to the warm fire
of the hearth and the cold womb of the grave.
Some seek sentience in the form of a method or an exercise
or a pill or a plan or a regimen, a list, a lover, a win or loss.

Others seek answers in their work, their war, or their religion,
turning the gears of a global money-press.
But it comes in the transparency of a mind’s stillness
and the empty aroma of clarity.

The smell of diamonds in water that may cut through filters of memory
and the misleading mirages of foresight.
I am a man of life, long-lived in the passion of feeling
that all things and every happening simply Is.

Like a whirlpool in a river, I am but a fleeting form
Spinning out into the oneness of water
with the motions of melancholy cheer.