Mind: the Bollocks

Punk Poem

Rage like what the fuck
it’s rage like madness everywhere
like rage tequila rage
the rage of fucking madness rage
an exclamation fucking rage!

OK. Historically
this rage begins at THE beginning:
World War One, the war
to end all wars. Yeah, right. Just fucking
blow me! Dresden. My Lai. Baghdad.

Rage against the ego!
Rage against the fucking mind!
And rage against the poor
indoctrination that our rage
endows upon the raging child.

~Gregoire Feugill Poirier 2007

My Maya Poem

Maya Choir One

The mind creates
a world of thoughts
like leaves, but black
and white instead
of green, and filled
with fear instead
of chlorophyll,
and emptiness
within its center
rather than
the light of eons
rising from
its root.

~Greg Perry 2007

Birthday Poem

Re-Birthday Poem

Snow is turning everything
in sight completely white except
the river running through it all.
Profoundly gray, for all intents
and purposes let’s call it black,
it lends a certain point of reference
to the day. For otherwise
the world is being covered with
an unremitting thought that’s not
that different from the constant noise
I hear within my head. It’s like
I should have done the opposite
of what I did and now the question
is irrelevant, although
I wish I could—just do it all
again—and if I could, I’d make
the perfectly appropriate
response, I think. But underneath
that chatter is the river, void
of anything but emptiness
itself, alive with energy
from mountains upstream, and the sea
downriver, storm surge currently
impelling all the world to me.

~Greg Perry 12/13/2007

Soup's Up

Yes Soup for You

I thought the story, soup to nuts, was me.

The comedy and drama of relationships.
The interest or tedium of work.
Even the witnessing of beauty in some natural setting.
I thought the ups and downs, my thoughts, emotions, all were me.

They're mine, but they're not me.
They're in my mind, but they're not me.

Possessions only.
Dreams.
And dust to dust.

They're made by me.
I made them crazy out of ignorance.
I made them sorrowful because I knew not I was making them.
I made them bitter knowing not I was the cook.
I used ingredients I didn't know that I was using.
I made an awful soup of things not knowing.

Not knowing I'm in a greater soup.
Not knowing I'll never know that either.
Not knowing I had to give up knowing.

And float.
Float within the greater soup.
Float within the greater soup of consciousness.
Float within the greater soup of universal consciousness without the knowing.

Knowing I will make my soup of things taste any way I want to.
Knowing I will let the universe prepare my soup's ingredients.
Knowing that this soup is never me.
Knowing that this soup is just a bubble that I blow while floating in the greater soup which is unknowable.

Which is the soup I am.

~Son Rivers 2007

Kind of Like a Toltec Zen-like Kind of Sonnet Poem

Determinating What I Saw

This morning in the early light of day,
a neighbor’s jet black cat descended from
low branches of an evergreen (that stands
besides my just-filled backyard birdfeeder) with
a snow bird in its mouth. At first I felt
responsible, but then I cursed the cat,
and only after getting past the blackness
of the wild and bleak existence of
each living thing, I saw the sunlight melting
last night’s frost—and knew that as the cat
determined bird, the sun determines cat,
and space itself determines in the end
the sunlight, I determine how that space
and everything within will get determined.

~Son Rivers 2007

Poem for November

Affluence of Later Autumn

Even in November—
leaves aren’t really falling
as much as trees are giving
fertility to earth

—everywhere is full
in possibility.
I’m overwhelmed by air
just recently released

in space once occupied
by greenery—the sky
revealed! Returning south,
abundant snowbirds fly.

~Son Rivers 2007

Atoms 'R Us

Beauty Is In the Eyes

These walls, these four specific walls,
created by a crew of carpenters
encircle everything they swing
their hammer to: joint universe

no worse than highest mountaintop
or island ocean endless view.
Don’t let the mundane limit you.
There’s more to wonder than just 'the seven'—

even the manmade reeks of heaven.

~Son Rivers 2007

Drinking Wine Poems 3 - Francis Ford Fall

Scoping out the Tidal Merrimack 9/28

In just one week the leaves have greatly changed.
Along the river—colors in the water.
The last two years I’ve seen ten thousand herons.
Along the river—tides are ever increasing.

Apocalyptic leaves begin to fall.
What if high tide continues on forever?
I see a single heron standing still.
What if this sea change begets still greater change?



~Son Rivers 2007

Kimball Farm Corn Maze a la Tao Chien

Drinking Wine 2—After Tao Chien

The Maze

The thing is this: keep moving
fast as you can navigate
through ways of repetition
and that one interpretation
of the corn. Don’t lose
your ear for vision. Let your eyes
go silent. Taste the ground
and feel the crosswords written in
an alphabet not spoken.

~Son Rivers 2007

The Return of Son Rivers

Drinking Wine 1—After Tao Chien

Aware of the Waves

Sometimes I conveniently forget
I’m nothing more than energies—
not blood and guts or mind,
but quantum strings and waves
as infinite as all the seas.

Don’t get me wrong—it’s not at all
materialistic, as if I know
a centillionth of the facts,
but one of mystery
and feeling this experience.

The random reach of willow trees;
the tug of body hugging body;
the birth of river girls;
the dream of constellations;
coincidence and trains and stations.

~Son Rivers 2007

Concord Haiku

Emerson to Me

Deep-rooted trees span
the rude bridge that arched the flood—
from paradise lost.

~Son Rivers 2007

Haiku with Title (Peepers Poem)

An Inside Job

Out back, the peepers
resound their nonstop signal—
spring is in the house!

~Son Rivers 2007

Wave Poem Waves Poem Wave

From Monument Cove April 16, 2007

This world is waves today.
The world is always waves
but here today the world
is visibly a world of waves.

The waves come crashing on
this long and sloping granite
coastline, making sprays
of sea and surf this world of waves.

As if the world of waves
beneath this solid world
we see escaped its sub-
atomic world of quantum waves

becoming visibly
a world today of always
waves becoming worlds
becoming always waves and always.

~Son Rivers 2007

Earthlight Poem Moon Poem Night Poem

After the New Moon

Earthlight on
the moon is almost
bright enough
to mirror back

to earth its own
enlightenment—
before the newborn
night turns black.

~Son Rivers 2007

Not a Science or Religious Poem: A Love Poem

A Tetrameter Road to the Interior

This world is very serious
about its staple product: self-
importance and the worth of knowledge.

Wisdom isn’t something sold,
so no one needs to entertain
its rare necessity to life.

Instead we worship science prove
another theory wrong before
it’s proven wrong itself in time.

We play the game of living well
through power plays and playing one
against the other one although…

there is no other one; there’s life
and life alone. The rest is null
and void of mass reality.

It might be trite and quite cliché
to say that all you need is love—
but true; there’s nothing else above.

~Son Rivers 2007

Bar Harbor Poem Nor'easter Poem and Postcard

Postcards from Bar Harbor in a Spring Nor’easter

A black and white
striated storm flag streaks
across its tethered space.

High tide is windswept
over stone impediments
forging the harbor pier.

Pick-up trucks are battered
by strong waves that crash
the anchorage wall head-on.

A single lobster boat is tugging
at its mooring in a roiling
bay of sea-sized waves.

An island in the background
fades behind a driving rain
in mists from endless surf.

We watch in silence while
the sound of wind is drowning
everything in view.

~Son Rivers 2007 rev-1

Acadia Poem Sea Poem Apologies to Basho Poem

On A Narrow Road to Acadia National Park

In Acadia, in April,
before the storm,
the roads are closed.

But we navigate a passage
underneath a bridge
emerging on a bay.

Absolutely no one there--
the seagulls cry
above the empty harbor.

The coastline is a granite rung
the color of a peach
and pine trees waiting skywards.

Far past the mouth, some islands
lift the near horizon
like mirages in a desert.

The sea is mercury
beneath an overcast,
close by and mottled sky.

All seems motionless
despite the rippled waves
and wings of birds above them.

I know that Church once painted
mountains in the background
from this point in 1850.

And still, 2007
doesn’t look dissimilar
seeing in this stark and other way.


~Son Rivers 2007 (rev-1)