By Ash Good

Sometimes, or probably all the time and with the same outcome, 
I try something new, or old for that matter,
like playing the shakuhachi, and can’t get the damn thing 
to make a single solitary sound, not even a noise that would annoy my wife,
and cause her to give me that look. That would at the least, be somethin worth complaining about,
and even in terms of complaining, I fail to create much commotion,
but after years of puckering my lips as if going in for a kiss
and blowing over the simplest of angled cuts
on the most ordinary of all bamboo sticks, the shakuhachi is silent. 
I thought it would make me wise, and it is silent. 
I thought it would calm my inner demons, and yet—silent anger.
I thought it could help me find inner peace, but inner turmoil rises
with breath after breath until I’m out of breath and must catch it
and maybe this was the point, maybe the final answer is to be more silent.
But then, I know that shakuhachis do, in practice, make sounds,
and making sounds with the shakuhachi is what I wanted to do,
regardless of some Buddhist lesson in futility. 
I imagined myself playing the shakuhachi at parties and office retreats,
under waterfalls in Hawaii, at a Japanese appreciation festival,
while sitting as peaceful and grounded as a boulder,
rooted by a healthy and robust butt chakra, 
or outside a Buddhist temple with a basket on my head—
I even have a proper basket— 
on spiritual trips to Bhutan, or at local yoga classes,
at least local yoga, but still and always, along with all Gods
and the vast Universe, there is effort and intention
only to be followed by more silence. 
Sometimes I hum through it and pretend. 
Sometimes I think, definitely, without a doubt, this is a faulty shakuhachi. 
There is something deeply wrong with this shakuhachi, 
something dark and disturbing and beyond my grasp. 
But then—I do hear something. 
There is a voice calling to me from inside the shakuhachi.
It is wise and it is smug, and it represents all things
as they pertain to the essence of the embodiment of me,
and it says, “Well, there’s one thing we know for sure,
the problem isn’t the shakuhachi.”

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Ash Good attended Ohio University’s MA Program where he studied poetry and attended Hollins University’s MFA program. He resides in Chillicothe, Ohio.