Karma

I me mine, I me mine, I me mine

No one’s frightened of playing it

Everyone’s saying it

Flowing more freely than wine

—The Beatles, 1970

I’ve come to loathe our brown-

robed, Buddhist friend. The way

he bows in the market

when he sees us, to the Buddha

residing within, then smiling

Namaste. 

Oh fuck off, I mutter

under my breath.

Inside us are faulty guts,

decaying every

second while we stand.

He says the only thing

that’s real is the present

moment. By the time he’s

finished telling us

it’s the past—

so we’re always playing

catch-up.

He tries to make a funny:

think of it as ketchup,

once a thousand tomatoes,

its bottle in the future

to sail the ocean current,

with a message from your

older-to-younger self.

And if that bullshit’s

not enough, he giggles there IS

no separate self,

nothing I/Me/Mine;

we’re a circle of inter-

connections: no dawn &

no finale, our bronchi

like the furcates

of the woods. Everything is air,

grinning like a gibbon

when he says it.

He spends 21 hours a

day on his stinky

pillow, fished from a

Zellers bin, eyes latched

like a double garage,

kōaning his years away:

Don’t just do something,

sit there!

I’m sick of his joyful smirk,

his shaved & shiny head,

his 30 cans of Foamy—

aligned like some mandala

in his cart; the incense

that reeks of seaweed

when he visits, sticking

it under our noses

till we cough, calling it

the breath of our existence.

He says in his

previous shitty life

he was a cockroach,

learned a lot from

his experience

under the fridge.

I clench my fists

and warmly envision

an earlier farce of my own—

the terminator, slayer

of annoying bugs, spraying

the kitchen floor with DDT,

like the deodorant that he

spritzes on his Mahayana

skull,

laughing take that,

motherfucker, 

failing to realize

vengeance finds its way

into any faith, that he’ll wait

a billion lifetimes

to pay me back,

beaming every minute

as he does it.

Andreas Gripp

May 4, 2025

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