Exquisite: Hilarity

I said to myself,
Why be so rigid?
Why not say,
‘what if,’ once in a while, instead?

‘But that’s not very scholarly,’
I opined,
Which is what I thought I was
Or wanted to be.

But I’m not thinking like a scholar
At the moment,
So, let’s see where that leads,
Can I do as I please and think for myself?

But then,
Wait just a moment,
Do I think for myself?

‘NO! I think not,’
Came the startling conclusion,
Nobody does.
How funny!

And if I ask
Who the thinker is,
I find none
And at this,
I laugh even harder.

‘What a crazy world,’
Hardly an original observation
But possibly just as true
As ever;

Sometimes I think I’ll never
Get to the bottom of this,
Perhaps, because,
What if, there isn’t one?
Hilarious!

Expressly: Ignorance

What if,
Everything we think we know
Is really ignorance:
Everything we see,
Hear, taste, touch, smell,
Think, experience,
It’s all ignorance and delusion.

There are so many ignorances:
The ignorance of a young child,
That we mistakenly call innocence,
The ignorance of a teenager
That we mistakenly refer to as rebellion,

The ignorance of young adults
That we mistakenly call maturation,
The ignorance of middle age
And of old age
That we sometimes confuse with wisdom,

Even though we know that
There’s no fool like an old fool
And no fool as foolish as we ourselves.

And where’s the Buddha in this?
What did he know?
I would guess just this:
That all of us, even he
Lived in delusion,

The difference being that he knew this,
Although he was assuredly not alone
And yet, just as ignorant and deluded
As everybody else is,

And, upon seeing this,
Was moved
To compassion,
Towards all our folly.

Expressively: Miscellaneous Fragments

Felt like
Doing nothing,
Chose to look towards,
‘I don’t want to do anything,’

Saw forever in it
And then quite rapidly,
Sprang up
And began to do,

How curious!

***

What if,
It does not matter
Whether
There ever was
A Buddha or a Buddhism,
Or whether there is or is not.

What if it’s irrelevant
And that
Whatever I say,
That’s irrelevant too?

Is it all
Just words,
All delusion?

If so,
How precarious!
What a shaky ladder
Upon which to stand!

And yet, we are still standing!
How so?
I do not even know!
Do you?