John F. Rhodes
 |
|
My poetry utilizes common fantasies and riddles about our customary habits giving them depth and value where there was none, making you wonder about the real hidden implications to regular life. I try to wake the reader from the monotonous one-dimensional rituals and conventions that we perform half asleep, to see that we are really at all times on a fantastic stage. I believe that there is a true meaning to Zen riddles whose style of questioning I try to use in my poems. For example I think there is a subtle Western meaning and message in the Zen Koan “One Hand Clapping” that one should consider without giving up the reasonless Eastern interpretation. It is simply that one always needs two of everything to create an experience, so subject and object are one. Thusly, when there are two hands instead of one, there is fused awareness: two in one. One by itself is a very lonely experience and two together is unity as in God and the disciple, or the disciple and the teacher. One is division and two is unity. It is this mystical rationale that I utilize in writing my “American Zen Riddles” shedding a western light on the almost indescribable Eastern truths.
My poetry also speaks of ghosts and specters of material bondage, which bind us to irrational pseudo-truths, and of eventual and inherent transcendence, as the title of my book indicates. When I was young I practiced and preached ascetic detachment from the world, but only found transcendence when I discovered that I was trying to spiritually escape from something, which is a form of desire in itself. Now I have lost the “desire” to escape from material bondage, and in that way have escaped from that spiritual escapist viewpoint which I didn’t know was controlling me too.
Note: As of Febuary of 2006, I have been podcasting 3 poems at a time from my book, along with poems from other poets on my podcast at: http://mysticbabylon.podomatic.com every two weeks. You can subscribe to it on iTunes or other podcast directories.
Also visit http://www.rhodespoetry.com
I was born and brought up in 1952 in Southern Illinois. I grew up living a rather normal traditional life in Springfield, Illinois where Abraham Lincoln had lived. I then lived internationally in different places, living for a time an Avant-garde lifestyle on the beach out-side of Puerto Vallarta, where I searched to find my soul and inner spirit. I went to College in Arizona studying comparative religion, and eventually moved to San Francisco, where I have now been for 30 years or so where I live near the Haight. As my life has been both radical and conservative I have preserved both traits within myself.
I have studied Eastern religion all my life and have learned through spiritual maturity that there is purpose to the material world as a material message bearer of the spirit to others, through word of mouth in bits and pieces. My studies have included Zen, psychology, and Mind Games formally, and I have worked as a mental health counselor. I have written for about ten years since 1995. Some of my mentors have been Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, and, Robert Masters and Jean Houston to name only a few. Above all I recommend caution when looking for God. One must be at all times rational. A phrase used by numerous writers such as Meher Baba is that one must keep, “One Foot in The World”. I didn’t learn this until I got a lot older. One must respect all levels and views of reality, nor should one allow oneself to become spiritually snobbish.
Venetian Blinds
For me there are no Venetian blinds hiding things in my life. My life has been hard and I’ve even had strife.
Jokes have been easy, though, with a magic twist, but sometimes disillusionment comes over me like a low-level mist.
There is only one existence in my life who will pay for my pain… that is the Godhead who knows that all that has happened to me is inane.
The Godhead also reminds me not to feel bad when I see light falling through the glass window pane.
After all this happens I am able to get back on life’s train.
The message I have fused in my brain is quite normal and sane, even in the old days in Egypt, things were just the same; The pharaoh some days felt odd, too, like a Jew or a half-breed on a chain.
Mummy Rap
The dummy mummy was shocked by the stupidity of the discoverer’s mock-up of being a mastermind.
He asked himself, “How could they still be so ineffectual and behind?”
The curse that he put on this youthful archeologist was to cause him to be mystified with undeducible facts, that led him to think, while walking the passages of this tailor’s dummy tomb, that he must come to the obvious assumption that this pharaoh had defended his civilization with computations based only on self-righteous acts, and that he, the student of these artifacts, was sentenced to a similar doom.
Because of his performance of invented reason in these dark hallways, where the doubt of didactic thoughts of persons before him loomed, he felt this chronologically analogous scientific pact was complicity to ignorance, in the sense that he, like this zombie, made up for error with presumptuous theories for what he, in actual real integrity, lacked.
The prejudice of this zombie pharaoh proved to be constricted, just as this pharaoh choked any hope out of this discoverer, as he walked these pathways that were as limited as the mind was narrow.
The harassing judgments of this past clan killed the inquisitive believer’s faith in humanity…Those believers who stalked these mummies, as they were struck with pompous arrows.
These backwards kings were really like one-dimensional automatons who computed their curses with grudges they doled from their purses.
They created judgments that produced new chips on mankind’s shoulders, proving that a mummy truly is wrapped up in itself.
Cognition of currying favor serves to tighten the mummy’s wraps on itself, as these Kings seem to live on unfathomable wealth.
Infirm
Man seems a mere nothing when weakened and infirmed, as when he is colorless and pallid, like the worm, and is called by some a demeaning term.
It seems though if man can crawl, he ought to be able to stand up to his fate, instead of stall, and, rather than swagger and speak contemptuously with a drawl, that all he knows is the calamity of bankruptcy and the fall, ought to be able to heed some righte
