Reminder Poem by Suzanne Hayasaki

As I sat stewing in my misanthropy
The Buddha came to speak to me
Reminding me in his silent stillness
That if I wished to stand as witness
To deeper truths and higher planes
I must close my eyes and stop my brain.

These people, their voices, their thoughts, their claims
Are nothing but noise to bait and maim
The parts of you that are still left flesh
To remind you that there is no rest
In the eternal fight within the self
To shed this world as if a shell

Which binds and blinds the inner eye
To things which in the darkness lie
Beyond the senses which so distract
Our egos from the hidden path
By strewing riddles in our way
Which tempt our mind to stop and stay.

Instead, young one, within you search
For truths which in your soul do perch
On branches high and thin and green
Sustained by roots which draw from streams
Deeper still within reality
Where all has been and all will be.

There within that spaceless place
Where time within dimensions plays
Refracting back upon itself
Like mirrors sitting on a shelf
Resist the urge to chase the light
Which scatters like butterflies in flight.

Reject the pattern to find the math
That engineers this projected graph.
Look on the world like Pythagoras
Hear harmonics in the cosmic dust.
Follow the echoes in their golden mean
Until the ripples still and the eternal streams

Filling you with emptiness
Releasing you from your mistaken sense
Of individuality
Of destiny
Of responsibility
Of mortality.

Preparing you for the trials yet to come
In this world at once ended yet not begun.