Ghazal for The Dharma Bum Temple 05/01/24

From "Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana" (City Works Press, 2025)

The Dharma Bum Temple. Photo credit: Tamara Johnson

by Tamara Johnson

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Sweet Sylvester singing work songs in his bunk/
On a land contested (named after a Franciscan monk)…/

He has/we have TREKKED, unlike the wild parrots, step-by-step/
And all will switchback—unlost as a monk/

In Pilgrimage to bury the unburied Saints./
(A poet after all is a kind of a monk,/

Priest, mendicant, a beggar of SILENCE/
In indirect lineage—a stray, a play-monk/

Circling, spiraling, turning back into [in two]/
Kintsugi, yab-yum, Lay-Lady-Lay monk…)/

Encampments Springing Up as They always Have—/
Monk turning warrior, Warrior turning monk/

Proclivities of scale trailing into the Flash-Bang/ 
Pacific Alma-mater Monk:/

Harmonic converging & turn-table Tabling,/
Spinning into the Go-Man-Go Thelonius Monk,/

Pauline Oliveros & [DOGS], The Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing,/
“I always wanted to be a monk;/

But, I never believed in anything enough.”/
Not Spirits. Not karma, Not even the Freudian Uncanny. Among/

Skeptics & The Angel, Sylvester, in stitches/
Having stitched the living monk-/

Skin Bag of His Beloved, so tenderly,/
Beneath a pinyon/piñon, lone pine serving shelter to the monks-

hoods & winter fat, a Battle Wild with Oxen & a doctor—/
who, despite his Latin, is no monk—/

Man, the mantra of Battlefield-Medicine is work work work…./
                Bhikkus: Business dealings are not for monks.

Then there’s the story about the poet trying to teach/
Efficiency to his zendo work-crew, when a head-monk/

Takes him aside to say:  Efficiency is not Our Purpose./
                 “We are not teachers, nuns or monks.”/

And the new myths aren’t any truer. Men Camped above The Presidio, at the site of The Church of The     
                New Jerusalem—which, built in 1927, doesn’t exist yet./
A woman, who will steal my shoes as We Are [IN MEDITATION], has already returned them. I am          
                [AWAY] at a Thanksgiving dinner in Oregon—still penniless as a monk./

Sylvester Hulet & Amos Cox turn back, not brokeback, not barefoot—but back, over The Sierras, to bury 
                the remains of a daughter & The Donner Party./
There are love poems still in existence: they do not undo the document BY EXPLAINING TOO MUCH./

But, finally, it is May Day—The students have all walked out of class/
We are sprawled on the lawn & stuffing mulberries into our chipmunk/

Cheeks. “Professor Johnson, Did you really write a book?” A canon perpetuous!/
Giggles burst into a war ronde, a sailor song—you know, the one which ends:
                 “The monk,      the monk,      the monk,      the monk…!”/

Tamara Johnson has lived in five different apartments on the same three blocks, but not consecutively. She is the author of Not Far from Normal, a hybrid work (2014, San Diego City Works Press).

To buy Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana or Not Far From Normal, go here or go to The Book Catapult.