Tools on D Street.

by Gino Sky

How many tools are required
to keep us going on D Street?

Plumbing, electrical, carpentry, painting, gardening,
medical, mechanical, computers, grooming, cooking,
washing, scrubbing, spiritual.

And that’s for amateurs.

At what point do we become professional?
At what point do we become professional human beings?

With a Ph.D. at being human,
that’s the rub.

What about the bums living on the street?
The Nobel Prize winners?
The Dalai Lama?

How many tools do we need to get it right?
What about getting right down to the basics?
Simplify. Pare the redundant.
Reduce all things to their simplest forms,
as someone once said.

Will that make us more spiritual,
or more financially efficient?

What about happy?
The golden mean?
Being the fool?
(The fool’s card in the Tarot deck is the god card).
Now that’s a mind bender.

Being rich, i.e. money?
That one left town along with the railroad a long time ago.
What we have is a house, garage and shop full of loving stuff.
Oh yes, a six foot garden gate shaped like a butterfly.
Like one of those bar doors in Hollywood westerns.
Splits in the middle.
The butterfly has red marbles for eyes
and two antenna made from 24 gauge copper wire.

A garden path that goes around the house
so we can circumnavigate our home when necessary.

It’s like circumnavigating our stuff as spiritual ceremony.
Lots of flowers to talk to and nut hatches and butterflies,
and snails who believe escargot is not their future.

Inside stuff, outside stuff.
I think the important thing is to keep}
the outside and inside as one. How’s that for
spiritual insight. The epiphany of epiphanies.

Keep the doors and windows working,
the glass polished, and forget about
all the rest on the list. That’s about it,
except put out cheap beer for the snails
once in a while
and forget about our next reincarnation.

Doesn’t add up.
It’s one of the paradoxes — like being a vegetarian
and refusing
to offer mouth–to–mouth resuscitation to a carnivore.

Like all the prophets tell us . . . just kiss the fool
and get it over with.