Zen Clown

DOG as a Metaphor for The Soul

2009-05-31T11:52:00.000-07:00

A collection of video billboards

The soul loves the world more than you know

The soul is not especially smart

To the soul every day is the sabbath

When the soul seeks release

God must love crazy people

2008-11-24T06:58:00.000-08:00

He made so many of us
When we talk to ourselves
on a busy street and we are not
talking into a cellphone
he smiles

When we start arguments out of nothing
and imagine persecution
so person we bleed, literally we bleed
he wants to cry

When we miss the rent because
we had to spent the only money we had
on a Krazy Kat clock with ping pong eyes
it is fulfilling as if this
was what the universe was for

When we weep ourselvbes to sleep
because we can't seem to change
and we drive everyone we love
out into the night cursing
it matters, it matters a great deal to him

Must must love crazy people or why
would he make them the way that they are
impossible to put with
and unhealable as disease

Hhe loves us because
we remind him of him
Incomprehensible
to the heart

New Found Land

2008-09-07T05:38:00.001-07:00

Beheaded

2008-09-07T05:34:00.000-07:00

The word has been undermined
so you think of mattocks
and stained chopping blocks

but it should be a term of approval
as in, that that is one well-beheaded young man,
and he will go places

or her beauty was beheaded with
a diadem of roses that pulsed
with fragrance in the dying light

or for use in a vow
when it must be especially clear
what we intend, as I'll
beheaded home to you

The Great Chain of Being

2008-09-07T05:32:00.001-07:00

File upon file, every species standing on the shoulder of another species,
every individual within each species standing atop the one almost as worthy as him,
but not quite, like the rings of saturn that go on forever,
and somewhere in there is the least worthy person, standing on the shoulders
of a perspicacious ape, or maybe the ape has eclipsed him already

Unmitigated gall

2008-07-02T05:44:00.000-07:00

The oak tree has a gall around its trunk,
the only exception to its perfect upright lines
but it makes the tree look pregnant
and suggests a shortened life.

But what does a tree think.
The water rises, the sugar is distributed,
the leaves splay out in the sun
like stewardesses on layoff.

Photosynthesis wants no more than this
and the effect of hideousness
at the waistline, a tumor of wood
that throws everything off kilter

is minimal, or less.
Life goes on despite deformity
despite circuitousness
despite all obstacles to our flow.

Dig this, dog

2008-04-14T13:51:00.001-07:00

http://picasaweb.google.com/mfinley98/DOGAsAMetaphorForTheSoul/photo#s5189205339007673330

"THE MINNEAPOLIS"

2008-04-12T09:49:00.001-07:00

The sand at Hidden Falls was still frozen
but it softens when you sit
because here pumps the first barge of spring
coming round the bend.
At least as far as you know
no, it's no Mark Twain Delta Queen
cascading up the waterway
the night Old Dixie laid it down
but it is pleasant to sit and watch
the barges shudder and smack the next ripple
pushed on by an engine a fiftieth their size
and out of sight around the willow sandbar
But as the barges come into view I see
they are not coming up empty for gravel or grain
but are laden down with construction gear,
steel black I-bars, the span of the new bridge
they are building by the falls, the one that came down
and killed those people last August.
It's a smart idea as these bars are huge,
they can't be shuttled about on city streets,
no helicopter can hold them,
and on the next cold barge I see compressors
and a crewhouse and gigantic black tires
maybe to buffer the boats from the pylons
and I see an entire steel staircase in one welded piece
you could just drop into place and start climbing
but it is on its side now, so the stairs
go neither up nor down
and would be very awkward to navigate.
And it all chugs by, the most remarkable thing,
a bridge coming upriver to take its place,

until it falls too, all bridges fall,

and that tiny little tug behind now coming into view,
a fiftieth the size of the barges it's pushing
is a riverboat, a tug, with whistles whooshing,
pushing against current for all it's worth,
and on its prow its name, The Minneapolis.