Some Notes on Contentment and its Opposite

                                             1

Happiness is contentment when nothing’s happening,

Is not the bliss of not missing out on some moment

Gone almost before we are or were aware it was one.

I said no less when I felt a mess, left home alone at a loss

In bed, bored out of my head, bogged down and logged-on,

Scrolling on phone, tossing and rolling as fog or log under

And above sheet and cover, head unsettled and restless

Upon a wet, wept-on pillow, till slow, sweet sleep swept me  

Sheer over shelf of Self… (down I fell from my Empire height,

Eiffel-steep- straight to sight while made in 8’s, so like night’s   

Strange-shaped phases, stages & states of sleep, some as deep

As wishing’s own well; still, I’ll dwell under no wand-waved spell

So strong I won’t wake up from down well before the gates of dawn.

Well, such is my wont in summer months when my mind’s ever on,

Some three or four in a dozen I don’t doze long beyond five or so,

Head-to-toe drowning in thought unsought, caught in an undertow).

                                               2

Wide awake we wait for serene Selene to seek us, see us soon  

Wade into fading, like a moon, at the theta-delta intersection

Where wave weaves with wave and leaves us no trace of us,

Effaces us as darkness does crater or cone once so luminous…  

Fatigue eases till sleep erases us, seizes us as sea’s waves  

Rolling in (and so on…), soon the shallows followed by swells  

And walls swallowing us all-hollow as scrolls, shells, conches

(We less numb when in those half-conscious spikes and peaks

That speak than when in slumber’s undertow none remembers,

No seeing of dream’s seascape but in peeks that soon escape us)

Till we wake from Nature’s salty caves and sandy waves of oblivion…

                                               3

I wake from some soon-forgotten form, then only to live on

In some shell-sized, hand-held cell (of Man’s make), with Self

Turning nameless, faceless serf, a sort of board that seldom 

Surfaces from (a sort of) surfing, caught in aughts and ones,

In nets of tens, zones of one and none, as web and tentacles

Catch at and on neurons’ ends, and acts on synapse and axon

As another anoxia (the first one, at my birth, made me as I am,

The second made me grateful both to live and not to have died

In a riptide I labored in, delivered from its grave by grace of God:

He Who saves from waves not only David and Peter as in ages

Past, but all Daves and Petes repeating His saving name in faith,

Or call Him via His mom, Star of our Seas, with ceaseless Aves…

But all this drifting away may show how easily I did so that day).     

Tied to a doom-mood-scroll, away rolls all current and time,

Both it and me, I lost in the tide I’d ride for mind desires to rise

No higher than its own sinking-lower-down-to-drowning-now…

                                                  4

Contentment can be nothing more than that happiness we have

At the contents of half-a-glass, an otherwise-sadness we’re wise

Enough to not bother noticing- not icing on a cake, nor both having

And eating, is not the not-halving of what we have; we don’t notice   

Until or unless by a lessening that feels fully like loss, the lesson

Then no other than experience- past presence proved by absence-

The end of what we had in hand and hid like a gem from ourselves,

Hadn’t sense enough to tend to though well we knew such a having

Is less loving than losing: a loss worse for its worth we throw away,

Gloss over then toss but at a cost we can’t count until it’s been lost.  

(Happy till sad at the last sad apple eaten in an inner Eden,

We then knew that each taste we’d wasted was no knee-,

No waist-deep need, but it was to us as both neck and head,

Nexus and connection, union of next-last as east-west, not

That knot of now we know as a looking-past-forward-toward).

                                                5

Waking late next day, every hour we’re weary as the dreary

Years ahead we dread, dead from our headless necks up,

Happy nor content from the rush of pleasure and leisure

We were sure, so varied they were, would last us forever,

Endure until Time’s end, or till tide, shore and all else cease…

Lost as last (as every slut or whore-born lust must be) flavors

Are savored but never saved beyond the tasting, heaven-sent

Testings- blessings if less surrendered to sense- then empty

Temptings if indulged to the full, and all fair fruits fall to foul;

Like sinners we ever lose our inner level (never again so level

As level is itself) as devil-deceived Adams or Eves who’ll believe 

Appeal of every apple will appear wholly as great as the first we ate:

As if our appetite late at night ought to be as great as when we wake  

After even eight or ten-hour sleep, and with a cup of tea take a cake.

No fool is half as bad as who each bite eats as if a feast after a fast,

Loses food’s good in gorging, finds too late one may sate the taste

Yet plate not be empty, that palate is not mouth’s palace-palatine

(Mind is), and what’s in measure sweet is ours by pleasure to sour.

We mourn in not accepting the norm or ordinary, by ever expecting

Our rule to be exceptions and so lure ourselves each new morning

From our moorings, hoping every road we roam will lead to more.

                                                    6

What was desired like life yesterday derides us as death today, 

Is hated just as much as was loved (a universal law, that what

Empty joy’s won now is borrowed as sorrow from tomorrow,

Our seeking-for-more-comfort a form of preferring our former

To our future selves), and all the todays we drink to the lees

In glee will be drank to the dregs before our glasses are empty

(Know, also, joys are our choice, though too often we confuse

Mere choice with more joy and can fuse the two to our sorrow).

                                                    7

Lust forgets the love coveted before it’s over, can’t sit, is on or off

To its next fix and fixation the instant the instant’s diminished,

Sheds the moment the moment it exists, exits lest it set

The precedent that who takes one makes a monument of it,

Too busied buried in doing to begin living until being is done.

Not having the feline’s nine lives, only one more than none,

Begin by being content and ten-to-one we’ll end there, turn

Some tent into a house (used to live in but not in lieu of a home),

Habit making it a habitat, though it’s no shell a snail or tortoise

Lugs on its back along a sluggish, tortuous path, not a nautilus

Shell divided into cells, but is a wholly within us, nowhere else.

                                                           8

We throw away as old and of no worth with one hand and hold fast  

With the other to reject objects we only half, if even that, object to

(Too broken to rid ourselves of some same fix that’s our brokenness,

We add to addiction or subtract by some substitute of one substance

For another, so know numbness by a new name that’s in sum the same).

Apple-in-hand and yet unhappy as any man can be who can’t not eat

What rich feast he’s set on one dish, while with his wish for the east

(For rest in a forest, say, with each treat-bearing tree far from his reach)  

Still he will (or will if with more than a half-self left he can still) stay set

In his wayward ways, dwelling well west of well, in thrall to all small thrills,

Fresh-yet-empty but filling a gut to the gills not with flesh or fish but frills.

(This dopamine of mine is in me as my-feeling-fine as it’s out of me like a line

Of dope that, once done or done once, binds to and blinds mind in its binges;

Our inspiration may be mostly chemical, not divine as was Bingen’s Mystic’s

Who saw not with rod and cone but in Vision more than we in mixes of pixels;

Play’s creative, but who prays praises a Creator Who raises us high as Heaven).  

                                                                   9

With first itsy-bitsy bites of any happy-as-sad Apple we’re in fits for far more

(Bites of both types enticing us, those we eat as those of a weightless eight),

Can’t wait to use our eight (or the other two that take us up to ten) tentacles

To be more one-with-the-iPhone than otherwise, more than with the other I’s

We send to at other ends who to talk to feels like pulling teeth with our fingers.

We, in using two ones, thumb the nose at those who know us the longest best,

Our mothers, fathers, brothers, and all others we love but can’t be bothered with,

Who we have these forms from whose own we’ve been all but wed to for as long

As we’d mouths to sing or shout out to for more; or, as now (in our later Me-ages),

Message in text since cortex is in anguish now that language languishes with sense

And absence of connection, when half what we say wants correction, and that half

The best as the rest isn’t right but just better left (so we sigh) in silence than in sign-

Letters better than sounds (in any case) but a sort of high-tech hieroglyphics at best.

                                                                    10   

Too much attention is spent on notes sent in tens, on a ton of non-sentence-

Messages made messes of for we’re all-thumbs, not sage enough to massage

Any meaning, and even if tense with intending tend only to many meanderings

To no one end; and what you mean by a word or a name may not be the same

As me, and zero is received by one that hasn’t at once deceived both, be we ten

Times as wise, or twice as aware as we are, or any of many things in between…

So we make more contact yet connect less than ever, elect the electronic text

Instead of breath, a type that connects us just as necks do bodies, minus heads

(And beware any manmade master smarter by far than we, the mere makers, are).

                                                                    11

Bed is for little more, anymore, than for when we’re bored with what’s on-offer

In an online life (as men starving staring at the meat and bread they’re bred to eat

Yet lips and tongues too eager for sweets, trading talk for tweets, books for clips,

Depth for drift), the only real feeling of relief in falling-off from being constantly on

Morn to noon to moon, midnight down on to dawn, with no one we know, though…    

Being sober bores us as we cry in our dryness, gather up rust and dust, thus this  

Being-bored is abhorred like the notion of not-being at all, of not being in motion

After a light-speed-beginning, any and all slight slowing of feeling as a flight, quite

An ever-and-even-faster-as-we-go-fleeing of a flowing yet always fleeting delight.

                                                                     12

So the onus is on us now to do most with only a residue, the merest moistness,

Just a mist or dew to a sky-high drip that no more lifts our dipping spirits as it did

(We who love only what’s novel and tantalizes, no poets whose poems aren’t posts,

Ten stanzas- even lines- too much tension for an attention that stops, by odd design,

At nine, plus or minus the fuss one deigns to take but makes us even a touch number.

Yet, as a rule of thumb, going-by-feel and my members may lead me to remember

As when my memory was no more than a forgetting of both memory and attention,

When intention and trying again went against the grain of what I’d wanted to regain

From a finders-keepers region in the brain that’s same as at tips of fingers or tongue).

No more able to abstain than can an unaided sinner remove his stain to be a saint,   

No lowering of dose does us the trick, only following up some no-more-filling-us

Last bliss, missed as if forever lost, ever-after the lust just before: but now I suspect

Our future or fortune is to be up no more unless down content being blessed with less.

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