Joy and suffering the same , just different sides of the same coin..

The rooming house was hidden from Carlise Street

by a large green fence and one great brooding tree

reminding you of that Dickens novel , Bleak House,

I lived out back in a small flat separated from the main

house. The kitchen was built for a dwarf. I had a bar

heater that worked only three hours a day because

the owner was a stingy arsehole. In another flat nearby

was Jack who was ageing fast , his flat smaller than mine,

in fact his place looked like the boiler room. He’d sit

like a King of old and smoke cigarettes surrounded

by a sea of newspapers stroking his goatee beard

made black by shoe polish to deny his age. He wore

his pants so tight you could hear his testicles screaming death letter , a slow dying blues.

In another flat out the back was a Chinaman always wearing

a white singlet sitting on a bench smoking his pipe. I kept

thinking of the opium dens every time I saw him. In the big

house, it was dark, and had the smell of death caused

by too much disinfectant. I couldn’t bring myself to stay

there too long, it felt dangerous, sad, and just a touch

mad. Inside the house was a man who wore pink Garfield slippers

who told me of squealers beach where the boys would

go at night in the sand dunes between St. Kilda & Port

Melbourne beaches. Lastly there was the tattooed man

who looked like a story from Ray Bradbury, mean and cruel

only because everybody else was mean and cruel to him.

Causes and conditions as the Buddhists say.

Shiva

Is everything spiritual I asked. Yes , everything. Even the darkness, even the death, even the madness, even the loneliness. Yes , everything , every goddamn thing from Auschwitz to the Sound of Music. You’ve got to say yes to everything , death, life, hatred, joy , war and peace because to deny is to deny the very essence of life that creates and destroys .