Thursday

Buddha Theory

Asked what he was,
Buddha replied "I am awake."

I sleep, I don't sleep.
This morning, I search for a headache
because that pain would be an equalizer.
I watch weed, I smoke the weather;
Sidharta watches from his shelf,
a cold ceramic face that never moves.
He oversees the pull of necessity,
then the slow push of nirvana.
I know that all night, he has watched
the water trouble and turn.

Once, in a physics class,
I explained to a professor, in his language,
that G times EM into I was theoretically nothing
to a theoretic me; that I was just a microbe
whose outcome was probable- a vibration
through fluid, a string of membrane stretched
across the light of everything.
The professor had tapped his meerschaum
against his heel and told me that the space
for my grade was to small for him to identify.

This afternoon, I lay
on a plush red divan in the back room
of a store-front posed as a fish market
and let a vietnamese man massage my thighs;
he pressed his palms against my theoretical knees
with each fluid stroke of his hands.
I watched in a mirror hung above our spot,
tried to convince myself of its reflective nature.
I turned my head to avoid myself,
but Buddha was there, perched on the sill,
his gold face painted with a smile.

I just settled back into red,
a constant relative in my fixed background,
and wondered if he smirks like that
while the water rushes its angry banks.

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