Peace I Shudder

I’m already stepping back, wanting to throw out these pages for fear that the sentences, ideas, words aren’t clear enough, aren’t understandable, are too silly or fluffy or cliché. (The same fears haunt all my endeavors, really). But then I remember the Preface in Kerouac’s Book of Dreams, where he writes that as soon as he woke from his dreams,

“I wrote nonstop so that the subconscious could speak for itself in its own forms, that is, uninterruptedly flowing and rippling – Being half awake I hardly knew what I was doing let alone writing. But an hour later, over coffee, what shame I’d feel sometimes to see such naked revelations so insouciantly stated – But that is because the subconscious mind (the manas working through from alaya-vijnana) does not make any mental distinctions between good or bad, thisa or thata, it just deals with realities, What Is. It is only with our conscious mind (the mano-vijnana) that we judge and make arbitrary conceptions, that is, that we arbitrate and lay down laws about what should and shouldn’t be written or done. So I wrote these dreams with eerie sleeping cap head and now I’m glad I did it.”

This is the push enough to continue, so that with heart bent toward Autumn I can write what I see outside my window:

A nearby heirloom tomato so ripe, and red
A silver vine, a mud-stained mat
Woodgrain another language
Blackbirds flying overhead
And peace is so close now I shudder
In the sunlight