Davey Dreamnation

I may have a thousand hands
but that doesn’t make me a Bodhisattva -
in fact, the only things my hands are good for
are mundane things, practical tasks,
not spiritual enlightenment.

I use my thousand hands to play
five hundred games of solitaire against myself
and whenever I win the cards cascade
like a waterfall of poker chips
built by a fake [...]

For the past twelve months I’ve been listening, looping and messing with my little pink Buddha Machine, with unexpected and mixed results. First off, this cute little boombox inspired me to write prose poems about various incarnations of Buddha, with walk-on cameos from a significant other, a series of kindlove poems intended more as tribute [...]

Past Buddha in a green waterfall making music from the falling drops. Spinning on a small rock, talking to a turtle. Red doves pecking at grains of sand on the little beach. That effortless river flowing backwards through stillness and fire. Gauze of the waterfall’s spray in the surrounding air, a song whose chorus fades [...]

And I saw a field of Buddhas and there you were, running fast up a hill, laughing. And I saw you laughing and my heart burst, like a small block of granite beneath a sculptor’s chisel, a million shards of myself flying through the air. And my heart burst and I saw us running down [...]

This one’s a secret, between us three. You, me and Buddha - our secret machine. A dim machine with four long limbs, two hearts and one desire. Explodes upon impact with water or fire. A new machine in time, its discernable hum. The clock that will not lock, an horizon’s tilt. A pink smoke machine, [...]

Send me your sunshine. Only you can make this buddha machine run. When there’s just one the drone creeps and the loops begin to skip. Buddha needs two machines to set up his feedback mantra, his fearful explosions. Buddha’s playing your melody. Buddha’s sweating underneath those robes. Your sunshine is Buddha and the sound of [...]

She’s pouring in from the future. Floating on a river of bees. An egg in each hand and pearls in her teeth. Eyes of honey, radiating the hive. Her happiness a stripe that no one else can see. Polka dots of secret laughter. Favourable explosion weather. That’s all there is too it. Their fallout projections [...]

A catalogue of tongues inside the Buddha’s room, that place it seemed impossible to leave, a space created by two dim machines under the tongue of a slippery moon. The tongue of a moon that licks the shore, that space where two melodies meet and form a zero, a name for the unwritten body floating [...]

When it rains non-stop for twenty four hours, that’s Buddha. Both the rain and the end of the rain, after which the freshness is Buddha, too. When two Chinese girls dressed in white stare at you for a while and then ask to have their photo taken with you, that’s Buddha. When you try to [...]