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This book, published in February 2009, deals, at first, with the end of the spiritual search, especially the need for freedom from gurus, except the one, who is your Self, from whom all others come.

It looks at this moment of freedom and examines its nature, but then, as the poet gets back to “chopping wood and carrying water”, the poems reflect, with some passion and wit, on many aspects of life. Many of them speak of India, while others stop a while in england, on their way to the Yukon Territory and Alaska.

Buy this book here for £7 including registered post.

Love

Love is never absent from the air.
I find it there, each time
the me that blocks the view
has wandered off, somewhere;

Like many tricky friends
I knew in school,
love reaches round my back
and taps me on the shoulder
so I turn and look
away from where she stands.
But I am not so stupid
that I do not know her hands.

And when she uses them
to hide my eyes
and whispers in my ears,
“guess who?”
my smile grows so wide
that there is only smile
and nothing else, inside.

When I Feel Small

This need to wear
a definition or to measure
where I am
against some mark
that I believe
is written on the wall
can only be …
when I have painted
all around me
giant frescos,
up at which I stare
in all my tiny-ness,
as if it were not me
who put them there.

When Mind Is 1/3 Awake

Waiting for today.
It tiptoes in behind me,
then turns round
and goes away.

“They also serve who only stand and wait”: Milton

I guess that God must be
the kind of customer
who never leaves a tip.

What Flesh Of The Heart Cannot Contain
(to Alaska)

I have not known such love
since I was twenty-one.
My heart is crying out
for land as big as skies;
where every range of hills reveals
another, then another,
as the green of trees
grows softer in the distance,
till they meet the feet
of craggy mountains,
black and bare,
with snow hurled here and there
as though some painter
threw his whitewash
in their face.

My heart cries out for company
of men and women brought to life
by facing all the darkness and the storms
an Arctic sky can give;
who aren’t afraid
to open up their doors
and take a stranger for a ride
because this is a place
where every being must be
a neighbour, so that all survive,
and there is no escaping
from the prevalence of life.

My heart is clamouring
to get up from this chair
to grab my pack
and use my thumb
to carry on that journey
down the road
where anything might come,
and this damn heart of me
remains struck dumb
without the slightest need
of looking back.

Rising From The Earth

Bursting from my heart, the sun,
now, unsupported in the sky
half-blinded by itself
is feeling with the rays
that set ablaze
a thousand hues
revealing forms
that all night long had merged themselves
in tragic shades of black and grey.

The light and warmth
that’s streaming from the hands
that you lay on,
now strip away the clothes
and open up the folded arms
that shield the trembling forms,
and trumpet out their healing
with the din of cocks and bells and buses
as the blinds are opened up
to let you in.

Now minds become un-numbed
and poke their spiky elbows
in the ribs of somnolence and calm
to wrest them from their peace
and force them to put on
their running shoes to simply
hold their place that seems to slip
away beneath them as the world goes round.

They chase that end, each moment
of their wakefulness is reaching
out to find: that place so sweet
that they can put aside their mind
and rest their feet:
that place in which they lay
before the sun came bursting
from the heart to start the day.

And yet that peace still lies
within each face; and neither sun, nor night,
nor surgeon’s knife
can find a place to slice
a sample of this emptiness
to place before a microscope and see
just what the hell it is
that makes a me.

The Morning Is

The birdsongs pierce my body
and sing from my own inside.
The fan of my computer hums in my heart.
This new born line catches
a corner of my sight.
Words arrive and depart.

The Compleat Scene

The words of each house speak,
ramshackle and unique
with colours stolen
from some paint-box
full of ancient grains
that can be scattered
on this creek, so still,
no wavelet speaks.

And this creates
a space so deep
that mind itself is drowned
inside its I
while images, like birds
who need no wings,
are singing such a song,
that nothing else intrudes
between this water and its sky.

Back From the Shopping

I do not bring you answers,
for no man can give
the answers that another man
must find to live.

The questions that would
drag me to the floor
have slipped out through the holes
to leave my bag so light
that nothing’s in it any more.

So if you search for light,
just flip the switch,
or stick your head
outside the door.

`

Tasting The Spring Where Pictures Sing

A short book of poems all written between June and October 2006, during a motor-bike trip across India, and immediately after my return home, as I worked to improve them and added a few more. Often humorous or wistful, they reflect on the passing scene, and the impossibility of ever describing what is truly seen or the one who is seeing it.

Buy this book here for £5, including registered post.

final cover

Compassion
Grunting upwards, lazy legs,
unused to mountain paths,
weighed double by my bag,
and short of gasping breath,
I step aside, to let the faster feet
of this Tibetan girl go past.

But she, instead, stops by my side
and smiling takes in hand
one handle from my bag
and slows her stride to match my pace.

And so we walk up hand by hand,
with me, inadequate to speak
the thanks I feel, but most of all,
the joy that there can be
in this humility
that puts me in my place,
confronted by this sister
from the human race.

Going Walkies

Now that I must leave
this much-loved place,
my mind is dragging on its lead,
and fighting for each lamp-post
that I leave behind.

And thus I bark and whine
along this path,
where I create my time,
as though I were a guide-dog
who has chosen
to act blind.
Sartorial Discomfort
Whether humidity comes from the skies,
or from my skin,
my t-shirt's damn uncomfortable
to keep my body in.

Paradoxes Transcend Time

It's strange, that now I am sixty,
I see these serious, younger men,
still with an eye,
that wonders if I
will one day grow up
to be like them.

Helping Me On “The Way”

“Where have you been?
Just look at your self!
Who do you think you are?”
my mother asked.

And thus she was the Guru
who first set me on this path.

The Gourmet’s Treat

There are many grades of tea
and I would like to try each one:
to feel the different grades of me
with each taste on my tongue.

Tossing The Coin With No Sides

The voice that says that this is me
has rarely ceased to speak
while I have been awake;
but this that is not me, yet is,
has never had a voice
but always is,
and which I am this moment
seems beyond my choice.

The Point Of The Book

I guess I love to rave about
my spiritual affairs,
but still I have to ask myself,
“Who cares?”

Without A Second

In 2004, the German book of the teachings of Karl Renz, called Das Buch Karl, was translated into a fairly German kind of English and Karl agreed to my suggestion that I try to put it into a natural and flowing style that truly reflected the dialogue situation in which they took place. On their request, I gave this text to his American publishers, who then distorted it in a semi-literate manner with superfluous words and dishonoured the poetic and simple lay-out, which I had given them. I therefore offer you the full text, free from the ugliness that was later imposed upon it, and hope you will feel free to download any bits you like.

Here are a few samples from the book:

Karl: If I regarded myself as wise and enlightened,
there would only be stupid, unenlightened beings in front of me.
This would be separation. It would be the old illusion
that here is someone who knows something
and there someone sits who doesn’t know.
But I talk about knowledge which is absolute: absolute here,
and equally absolute, there. It is nothing new for you.
That’s why it is nothing you can attain.
There is nothing you can discover; nowhere you can arrive.
It is already completely present. I talk about that which was never concealed;
which doesn’t require attainment.
Any endeavour can only lead to relative knowledge.

K: … that, which you are, has never been asleep.
It knows neither sleeping nor waking.
Waking and sleeping appear within it.
Moreover, there is no one awake or asleep.
There is no enlightened one or someone who needs enlightenment.
These are merely ideas which are meaningless.
They appear and disappear again in that which you are.

K: I’m not here to dissolve knots. I create knots.
I tie so many knots in your brain that you may suddenly realise
it’s impossible to ever undo them.
So you can give up trying and simply be still.
Once you are completely still, who cares whether there ever were worlds,
or rebirths, or webs, or knots and dissolvings?

Remembering Matthew Greenblatt (Publisher)

I cast my pearls before the swine
who laps them up,
saying, "Mine … mine …mine!"

If you want to order a book, or there's anything else you would like to communicate, Kevan would like to hear from you.
Email Kevan

About Kevan Myers

Born in London; but soon found the way out, using his thumb to visit many lands, and now that planes are cheap, he always bags a window seat to peer through clouds at places where he’d love to wander, underneath.

In 1967, he set out to round the World, but got waylaid, in Punjab, sitting backwards on a horse-cart, faced by setting sun which spread across the skies between the trees, accompanied by clopping hooves and birds with wild cries.

He found that India had got him by the hand and even when he turned away she never would let go.

He tried twice more to round the globe, but every time she lay in waiting by the road, to throw his watch away, and spin his head around, until one day he found the place to plant some trees and build the house where he would stay, from 1995 until today.

Between these trips, for money and for joy, he worked in schools, endeavouring to teach the words and tools that make it possible for everyone to speak, in English words, the feelings and the thoughts which make each being unique.

He still can feel the presence that each name will bring, but when the school bells ring, inside his dreams, he finds himself stark naked in a race with time he cannot win.

And this may be one reason why he left the West.

Another is the place he now resides: beside a holy mountain, in a climate where his windows never close and sleeping can take place, near to the breathing trees and stars, which peer through the mosquito net to light his face.

is

Tasting The Spring Where Pictures Sing

Karl Renz Book: Without A Second