Totem & Snafu

Click here to see Totem & SNAFU, the NFT collection on OpenSea!

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Each poem of the collection is an image of liminality between sacred and profane; vessel and contents. These "love" poems are sometimes peaceful, and sometimes fierce; ironic and uncanny. Compositional styles include the classical ode, blues, rock, free-form, pithy, and prosaic.

"In art alone it still happens that man, consumed by his wishes, produces something similar to the gratification of these wishes and his playing, thanks to artistic illusion, calls forth affects as if it were something real. We rightly speak of the magic of art and compare the artist with a magician."
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo

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“SNAFU”: One of a progression of military situational indicators:

• SNAFU: Situation Normal, All Fucked Up
• TARFUN: Things Are Really Fucked Up Now
• FUBAR: Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition

My Guru Drinks Bourbon

My Guru drinks bourbon
108 the barrel-proof
Three places he empowers
Blissful heat’s ablaze

If I burn, let me burn
Surely he’s a Buddha
Gnaws his meat well-done

My Guru drinks bourbon
Uncut the barrel-proof
Tossing shots onto the fire
Vapor to the void

If I freeze, let me freeze
Surely he’s a Buddha
Breakthrough icy hell

My Guru drinks bourbon
Living simply as a bum
No trappings, robes
Just scraps of clothes
No fancy hats
But wrinkled tats

My Guru drinks bourbon
Mingles with the mad
My Guru drinks bourbon
Devouring dinner like it’s last

Drunk on the bus
“I’ll send you to the morgue!”
Drunk at the library
Unlimited WiFi never bored

Another shot of bourbon
Blissful heat’s ablaze

The ultimate in dropping out
His wandering retreat
Social Security and Medicare
His ordinary yogic deeds

Others whisper gossip, loved ones plea
My Guru sips bourbon and liberates extremes
He’s not your typical OK boomer elite

My Guru drinks bourbon
He’s a secret monk indeed
If you meet him on the road
He laughs the more hysterically

My Guru the Jew-Bu
Me, my Testament’s New
My Guru drinks bourbon
Blissful heat’s ablaze

His failure, my blessing
Thinking of the opposite
His mishap, my delight
Fundamentalism’s opposite
Again and again
Fail better again

Of course it’s mind-only
And one can be two
My Guru drinks bourbon
His blissful heat’s for you

Another bourbon again
Blissful heats for me and you

After Dzongsar Khyentse’s contemporary shastra of a similar title. 
An image of my own strange Guru biding across the continent, living like a disciple of Buddha of yore, a homeless refugee. In blues form. 
By Steven RAJ

Nine Moods

Your supple charm, wrists & ankles, hook & angle me
My champion! What courageous, virile stance you’re in
Your rutting musk, just-arisen hair, accessories appalling, skins you wear
Your victor’s body crushes me, starstruck, smitten at your feet!

Adamant words like “screw it,” “who cares,” & “burn it all”
“HA HA” & “HI HI” hilarity makes me the more hysterical
When you say, “I’ll bind and f*** your demon ‘til its sun dawns in the west”
Your speech my vajra hardens, my passion for enlightenment is whet!

Great compassion aims your weapons at my self-inflicted miseries
I bask to see you strut your stuff just like a haughty king
You rage, you strike, you kill, and yet never lose your centered peace & cool
My one & only, god & intimate, I praise your mind & moods!

Some slight accomplishment of the wrathful mantra during a month-long silent group retreat resulted in the scrawling of this devotional praise to the deity. Modern kāvya. 
By Steven RAJ

Friday

Her diamond shines
High on the throne
Nine point perfections
One with the lone

Orchids are blooming
Rhizomes, schooling
Chanting congregation
Refugees’ oblation

There’s my diamond sister
Friday is her name
Rainbows all around her
Venus is her fame

Syllables as fine as hairs
Stand up, stream into abyss
Her dance of timeless harmony
All that is holy, holy matrimony

Clouds across the continent
Worlds between us
Her lotus in dreams
Quickens to free us

Kindness to our mothers, Liberatrix bless
Only father Guru, see us through this mess
      All souls blaze in bliss & emptiness 

Written facing the salty breeze of Choya Bay, under traveling summer clouds. Rock.
By Steven RAJ

Coyote Bodhi

In Nor-Cal mythtime
Some sequoias are older than
Siddharta, immortal
who mastered
Generosity, patience, discipline
Before there were words

as such

Symbols to Coyote-mind
Bulbous effigies of dough
Impaled with poles
Painted with butter, banners fly

Geodes of one thousand eyes
Crack open at the howl arching to the light

In Mahamudra-land
A moment’s devotion
Never dies

but

Ululates in families

Awoo....
         au, au... 
                   awoo....

Downridge from retreat
Across barbwire fence
One domestic ranchdog
Barks at the moon each watch of the night

Coyote camping out at an intensive meditation retreat in Northern Arizona.
By Steven RAJ

Three Smears

We dip our right index and middle fingers into the coal-fly-ash military-industrial sludge of a hungry ghost technocracy, smear it atop and below our third eye, bulging and bloodshot; the apocalyptic view of no escape. No planet. No cave. The extinction event that is the slaying of Rudra’s ego is coming for us all!

Hip, hip, hoo-RA!

We dip our ring fingers into the bloody ocean of Red #40 million billion helpless lives of insectually pointless sufferings, smear it like war paint under our eyes and across our cheeks. Stomping onto the red-tide sea: it’s risen knee-high! Roil the depths! Our singular destiny!

Hip, hip, hoo-RA!

We dip our thumbs into a pail of a fine fetus serum, aborted thought itself, rub the designer grade collagen peptides quick and smear the good grease down to the tippy-tip-tip of our goatee. In the heat it drips down savage razor wire and spontaneously combusts in fatty wisdom flames. When the rich natural flavors hit our nose and brain: we curl our tongue, roar and cheer!

Hip, hip, hoo-RA!

Pure recollection of Vajra Youth, King of Wrath’s charnel ground makeup.
By Steven RAJ

Retreat Mode

Surveil this sacred and primitive frontier
Red wolf’s Sangre de Christo range
From this grandparent child of ancestral peaks
Two hundred miles of turquoise, seashell, aquamarine
Wine soaked rock of oblations, speak

Eye to eye our liquid sun traverses sky
Blank White’s point of emergence opens wide
An oceanic valley of sand in the wake

A pair of raven sentinels
Make their b-lines to and fro
Double they down in vortexes
A congress croaking secret code

Wide-eyed through the window of the soul at night
The moon and each the wanderers
Gods in the course of cosmic time
Predictable in their coursework
Leave no trace in the void behind

Juniper leaves moistened, berries bluish gray
Billowing clouds of smoke in the purple morning blaze

Geoengineering hex-lined skies
Mara’s poison-tipped arrows fly
Invoking “flower power,” cancel-and-clear
Clouds of silver lining and rainbows in time 

Prayer flags flutter in the mind, the pines
The jeweled ground shimmers in its nature, mirage

The view from a primitive retreat hut, high on a mountain in San Luis Valley. 
By Steven RAJ

Kachina Wilderness

Perched on prehistory 
Lava outflows outcrop atop
Scarred hillsides of the gods
Emergent ponderosa
Clearcut & completely 
Charred

A vision of dotted lights stream skies
Space itself animates the all
Living beings too
Orb like rainbows
Disguise in respective
Forms

Raven, lizard, bear
Cougar, coyote, badger
Starbeings’ extraterrestrial interventions

Couple of dudes in four-wheel drive 
Rambling down Forest Road 553

“Shoulda been a cowboy
 Shoulda learned to rope and ride”

Tiny dotted traffic on the abyss of 89
And yet beyond the horizons of optical illusion
The first and foremost impending of frontiers
Brave civilization, Hopi, Diné Nations

Crazy cloud Dragon
Phoenix his wife
Their flames lap high in the roiling strong wind
Their kettle comes to boil and water’s poured for tea

Essence, peace
Nature, beauty
Our purpose is to offer
Drum and rattle old spirits alive — 
they whistle and fly in the gales of night!

A harrowingly romantic getaway in the name of a “honeymoon,” and “camping.”
By Steven RAJ

Rise in Love

Hooked into infinity
The zero point of tiger’s eyes
The windows to the soul say, “I’m available”

Two golden eagles court and circle silent round
Drift apart and check each other’s orbit out
The moon and planets magnetism too
Revolve around a zero-point of truth

From the depths of four chambers 
Free to flow in ectasy
Shaman’s drum and jinglebells beat
Heartcore’s singularity

This daytime star so Sirius
Bright and rogue, Betelgeuse

Two destined human beings
Inseparable as south to north 
and north to south
Circumambulate Buddha’s monument
The stupa crowned with sun and moon

White with limitless love and gilded with auspiciousness

Celestial ancestors
Cool samadhi eyes
Garudas, dragons, phoenices
Five great elements

Witness and rejoice 
Two spirits who choose and pray
To honor each other, and “rise in love”
Enjoying and yet again transcending earthly planes

The ritual courtship of lifetimes on display at the “Traga Stupa,” Garchen Buddhist Institute.
By Steven RAJ

Long Life

Yonkers! OṂ! Who cares you weren’t abducted as a tulku as a child
You were picked up by the Mishaps on Forty-Second Street
You went on to attend the inimitable Crazy Wise
And are blessed by now to the summit of Buddha’s Nine

EMA! What could be better than that?
Upon this ground of fine and solid gold
On the crystal peak of clarity, pride of the turquoise-maned
Buddha All-Good, naked as space, caresses your lovely, bearded Jewish face

Who cares if you’re homeless, beat on the street
Longchenpa was homeless, Shabkar and Paltrul, too
Who cares about lavish temples, tending gilded shrines
A secret yogi in your likeness, Highness, has got a graver pledge to keep

With bone to stone stand strong on lotus feet!
Persevere for the benefit of yourself and living beings!
By the power of awareness, the truth behind the mind
Pierce the darkness of wrong views, let your rainbow love light shine!

This prayer for the long life of a secret yogi was written on the 25th day of the 1st lunar month in the exceptionally lucky year of Earth Dog by the coyote-like disciple, A Great Complete Mess. 
SARVA MANGALAM!

Click here to see Totem & SNAFU, the NFT collection on OpenSea!