Justin Hott was a retail analyst for Bear Stearns I met at LaGuardia airport one night
heading back to Detroit in December 2007, shortly before his company imploded.
What is the basis of greed / wanting to be free of money worries / There are 2 ways to do it: either you chase down money all your life / or you let go of the desire to be free of money worries / If you chase down money that springs the trap I’m pretty sure / Justin Hott at the airport hating life just wanting to be home with his wife and kid / but in too good a gig at that big building midtown Manhattan, woe, yeah / and as he said of Detroit: there’s nothing for me there / meaning i cannot replace my golden salary in those dead boulevards, no way / Seven Mile Nine Mile Woodward whatever, you fuckin kidding me? / doesn’t exist / So he was in the buddhist hell of the airport. How do religious people live? By charity / how do artists live? by charity / we are lucky / when someone comes to power who cares about religion or art / otherwise we struggle and die / altria, supporter of saints / bill and melinda the gateless gate / I would meditate more on this / but I should go look at the want ads
Sculpture by Henner Schröder
what am I missing? Persistence / fearlessness / which virtue on the self-empowerment list am I deficient in? check check check back, check back
I have a book of Zen stories / just one or two of these trust me are enough for enlightenment, and I have a whole book / and I would like another, bigger book, w/ more Zen stories / I study the Bhagavad Gita, a few lines of which will suffice for enlightenment / but I think of buying another translation, when I own 4 or 5 already / Any one page of Sri Nisargadatta, which I have been reading for years, would open the eyes of most people once and for all / but I consider buying all his books / I have a tape of Rudram sung by learned swamis carnatic perfection year in and year out I listen to these mantras but they bounce like arrows off a stone wall, and I think: I should get to the gym, I should get the new CD of Krishna Das / I have a whole roomful of keys, identical keys to the same door / but instead of opening the door, which any one would do / I buy the key again and again, and keep adding to the pile / so the question is / am I going to die in the cold and darkness outside the house / with a thousand copies of the key, unused, at my wanna-be lotus feet?
10 december 2007
–Emily XYZ
Sensitive Skin 12 available here in PDF format here for just $4.95, or get the full-color print version via Amazon and select bookstores.
Poetry Sculpture