At Pluto Station, Direct

Feel your feels, own your truth,

Change the dance but observe 

The world continues to move as it was

Further and further away.

Welcome to the void 

You entered willingly,

All boundary,

As eclipse occulting.

What you hear's just silence 

As everything resolves with you not there.

Extermination is comfortable 

In the amnionic faith.

The void refuses to be still.

It moves through you,

The only thing that moves it,

Like a hurricane far at sea.

It cannot be anything 

But what you let go,

The totality of what

No longer serves you.

The coffee cup

With the echo inside,

The weight of golden silence,

The racing mindless heart.

Acoustics and the Basque Anomalies

"Before the fall when they wrote it on the wall," sings Steely Dan in The Caves of Altamira, referring to the paleolithic cave paintings then-recently discovered along the Franco-Cantabrian limestone refuge, most famously the vivid bull and arrow painting radium dated to about 36,000 BC (and signifying, according to the Ancient Welsh codice a timestamp for the Age of Taurus, as determined by its precise relation to Sirius the arrow). 

Researchers have long been puzzled by the seemingly random locations for these and other Pyrenees paintings, as they are not placed according to wall quality, ease of access, available light or protection from the elements. But archaeoacoustics researcher Iegor Reznikoff demonstrated that up to 90% of the wall art is located precisely at the points of maximum acoustic resonance (consistent with the demonstrated purpose of ancient sacred sites around the world). When an ancient human toned there with the trance-inducing "holy grail" frequency between 110 and 120 hertz, the limestone cave would amplify it into a massive vibrational standing wave at the exact spot the art was placed.  

This is where the Basque ancestors wintered during the last Glacial Maximum. The Basque Country is dense with dolmens and cromlechs (stone circles) that were consistently built over underground aquifers and fault lines to anchor, stabilize, and broadcast the telluric currents of the earth using the native rock. To hear the Basques tell it, giants (the Jentilak) built the megalithic structures and fled, as did their supreme deity, Mari, a dragon-like interaction between space plasma and the earth, to reside in the deep cave systems beneath these mountains. The Basque were, according to legend, the Lamiak ("people of the water") who also fled, forced into the protective cave womb by, depending on how old the legend is, catastrophic global climate change or the ringing of church bells through the forest (you can't make this up!). 

Water in their legends, it should be pointed out, was not just geographic water, but plasma, the "living water" of the cosmos that flows through telluric currents.

Bear their own history in mind as we approach one of the most confounding mysteries in not only linguistics but evolutionary biology (the disciplines are intrinsically linked by a belief in slow migration as the root of linguistic and genetic variance). The people called the Basque have been their Waterloo. For one thing, approximately 50% of the Basque population have Rh negative factor blood, versus a global percentage of about 6% and the complete absence of this dominant trait in any other human population on earth. What makes that impossible to explain using Darwinian models is that this genetic trait is fatal—an Rh negative mother giving birth to an Rh positive baby will produce antibodies that will attack and kill (before the modern RhoGam injection) all future Rh positive babies. In a model where the most fit survive, why would a life-threatening defect be dominant, and only for this one group? 

The Basques say its the isolation of the caves, but mainstream evolutionary biology is saddled with an incompatible migration of hunter gatherers theory that only amplifies the dissonance. It's easy however to crack this particular mystery if you discard evolutionary theory entirely and look at the gene itself. This is not a typical gene variation (as with many auto-immune diseases), it is a gene deletion. In our modern world of crisprs and splicing, a specific, targeted population "given" this trait in their lineage is completely consistent with common gene manipulation processes.

And this is where it gets interesting. 

Everyone asks why the Basque have remained so pure, so isolated from the rest of the human population. But what astounded me in my research was, for at least one significant period of history, we have the answer—and no one is talking about it. You may remember the elite fighting force in Star Wars called the Imperial Shock Troopers, who took on the more brutal aggressions the Storm Troopers couldn't handle. The Basques, in fact, were exactly that for the Roman Empire, particularly the second-born survivor sons (the Basque have always had a strict first born gets all law). The facts are straightforward: the Basque welcomed the Romans with open arms and were rewarded generously for their loyalty and military skills. But how does the most insular culture on earth manage to do what no other peoples in Europe could, embrace the Roman Empire? The Romans were masters of erasing much larger cultures, languages, beliefs and spreading out the gene pool like master geneticists. What made them leave the Basques completely alone? Was this a deliberate, highly protected preservation of a specific bloodline (or in the modern parlance, a "control group")?

We may never know the true answers, but this oddity is consistent with some inherent advantage that allowed the Basque, unlike any other culture on earth, to enforce their strict laws and continue their language virtually unchanged from ancient times (here's where the linguist's heads explode), a language (Euskara) that has no relationship in conventional linguistics to any known language. 

The linguists' difficulty is perhaps even greater than that of the evolutionary biologists. There is a high correlation of words between Euskara and Ancient Welsh, for example, with many alternate researchers suggesting the Proto-Welsh originally spoke Euskara but the language was bastardized over time with Celt influence. Conventional linguists cannot accept this, of course, but are then forced to confront or avoid the anomaly that the Basques have a genetic link to the Welsh as, in conventional linguist thinking, languages inevitably follow genetic lineages in their development. 

Euskara's uncorrupted nature however has attracted alternative researchers like Dr. Zaidan Abdel-Rahman Jassem to connect it with other language isolates like Finnish and Classical Arabic to find deep-lexical roots across basic structural pronouns and numbers. Based on this research they argue Basque is a direct, uncorrupted pillar of the original pre-Babel global tongue, a so-called "root language." Linguists like Sergei Starostin have expanded on this hypothesis by linking Basque into a massive, global "root family" that includes Sino-Tibetan (Chinese), Na-Dené (Native American Navajo/Apache), Burushaski (a language isolate in Pakistan), and the extinct Hurrian languages of the ancient Near East.

By these studies, Basque emerges as the lone western anchor of an ancient, globally connected civilization dispersed by the Great Flood. They point to matching complex grammatical structures—specifically agglutination (where long words are built by chaining modular suffixes together) and ergativity—arguing that this syntax acts like a rigid, mathematical code designed to resist corruption across vast geographic distances. The late independent scholar Edo Nyland published extensive works claiming that Basque is the key to decoding the ancient world's monuments, claiming that if you break down ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, linear Ogham (pronounced "om") inscriptions in Ireland, or even early Latin and Greek texts using Basque root syllables, they resolve into clear, readable messages. He argued that an ancient global priesthood artificially created almost all European and North African languages by taking the first letter or syllable of a string of Basque words and fusing them together into entirely new words.

These logical explanations for one of the world's greatest linguistic mysteries are interesting, but one must always remember that language was remembered through sound. And, as with the acoustic research by Wilson-Blackett and Evans on Ancient Welsh, oral phonetic readings of Sumerian cuneiform symbols in Basque reveal striking alignments in core vocabulary. Examples of over 80 analogues include:

• Eye is pronounced igi in Sumerian, bigi in Euskara (Basque)
• Leg is zingi in Sumerian, zingo in Euskara 
• Mother is pronounced ama in both languages
• Night is gi in Sumerian, gau in Euskara 
• Day is ud in Sumerian, uda in Euskara 
• Road is pronounced haran in both
• Dog is ur in Sumerian, or in Euskara 
• Wheat is gar in Sumerian, gari in Euskara 
• Life (breath) is zi in Sumerian, bizi in Euskara 
• Earth is pronounced lur in both

If a modern Basque speaker can look at a 4,500-year-old clay tablet from Mesopotamia and organically "hear" their own words for earth, life, mother or stone (haitz), and if, as alternative researchers are discovering, Basque words can be strung together to decode whole cuneiform phrases, the working assumption has to be that Euskara is a unique time capsule remembering something of a unified prehistoric past. 

Which brings us back to the caves. Basque is the only belief system I know of where God (Mari, the Earth Mother) lives deep inside the earth, using the massive cave systems of the Basque mountains—most famously Mariurrika Kobea on the vertical cliffs of Mount Anboto—to travel to the surface. 

Traditional Basque folklore collected by anthropologist Joxe Migel Barandiaran documents specific laws for how to enter the Earth Mother's cave:

• Speak in the Familiar: When addressing the goddess inside her cave, you must never use formal, elite language. You must use Hika, the highly informal, intimate second-person singular).
• Never Sit Down: Sitting in Mari's cave is viewed as a supreme act of disrespect and arrogance. 
• Never Turn Your Back: When exiting the cave, you must walk backward. Turning your back on the depth of the cave invites curses or violent storms.
• Leave as You Entered: You must exit the cave through the exact same opening you used to enter, and you cannot take a single pebble or object with you.

Traditional Basque beliefs hold that underground tunnel systems connect the above-ground stone houses (etxeak) directly to the souls of ancestors. The cave was viewed as a place of return—a holy sanctuary where life regenerates.

To guard these sacred portals, legends populate cave mouths with Beigorri (a fierce, red-haired guardian bull) or Aatxe (a cave-dwelling spirit that takes the shape of a red calf), which attacks anyone who enters with selfish intentions or a dishonest heart. Interestingly, these red bulls in the myths perfectly mirror the 13,000-year-old Paleolithic bison and bull paintings found inside Basque caves like Santimamiñe.

Basques may have been spared by the first Romans, but when Christianity entered the Pyrenees, the sacred reverence for caves became highly dangerous. The Spanish Inquisition predictably put dozens of local Basque women on trial in the infamous 1609 Basque Witch Trials, burning eleven of them at the stake. The Catholic authorities also, as they did with so many ancient sacred caves, built Christian churches and hermitages directly over the cave openings.

Or, rather, the Basques did, cleverly, and inexplicably, executing arguably the most brilliant cultural sleight-of-hand in European history. In sites like the Hermitage of Nuestra Señora de la Peña de Faido in Araba, the lobby looks like a standard medieval Christian church, but the altar is carved out of the raw, subterranean mountain rock that acts as an architectural facade over a sacred cave opening so that, to a Roman or Spanish inspector they appeared to be entering a chapel, while the locals could walk straight into the belly of the Earth Mother. The church of San Miguel de Arrechinaga in Markina, Bizkaia was built completely around a ancient sacred space centered around three enormous quartzite boulders in an interlocking pyramid formation. When you walk down the main nave of the church, the grand Christian altar and a statue of the Archangel Michael are placed inside the hollow beneath the boulders. To Church authorities, it honored the patron saint of high places; to the Basques, the sacred earth-stones remained the center of the ritual space.

The Sanctuary of Saint Michael in Excelsis (perched high on Mount Aralar) similarly allows Basque pilgrims to whisper their prayers directly into the subterranean void, which turns out to be the opening to the original lair of Herensuge, the dragon who lived inside the earth and was fundamental to the Basque worldview. Herensuge literally translates as "The Third Serpent" or "The Primal Snake" and protected the Basques and other glowing "shining ones" from being assimilated by the larger culture. In the oldest Basque legends, Herensuge is a seven-headed serpent representing the seven major river valleys and underground aquifer channels that snake through the karst limestone of the Basque mountains. From there Herensuge (also known as Sugaar, when as consort to Earth Mother Mari) controlled, among other things, the weather. The earthquakes and tectonic grinding common to the Pyrenees were historically understood to be the physical shifting of the dragon's coiled body beneath the valley floors. Instead of breathing out fire, it breathes in to the earth, which is said to account for the local meteorological phenomenon called barometric cave breathing. When atmospheric pressure drops rapidly outside during a heavy mountain storm (caused, to the Basques, by the same dragon breathing out), the massive underground chambers equalize pressure by forcefully sucking vast quantities of air into the cave mouths, creating low shrieking moans that sound precisely like a colossal beast gasping for breath inside the mountain.

When the dragon flew out of the caves and across the circuit of mountains, the ancient Basques mapped out the flight path as the telluric currents of their territory—and that is exactly where they built their stone circles, dolmens, and eventual parish churches. Is it sheer coincidence that ley lines are called dragon lines to this day in very different belief systems? 

The Basques viewed caves as living entities that responded physically to their ministrations. They used their voices as a form of echolocation to navigate pitch-black tunnels. Once they hit a "hot spot" where a specific vocal pitch suddenly amplified by 10 to 15 decibels and echoed for several seconds, they marked it with red paint. These spots became the "altars." A shaman or ritual leader would stand at this spot and chant, causing their single voice to naturally boom and magnify through the chamber like a modern amphitheatre.

Ritual participants would deliberately imitate the deep guttural roars and hisses from the animals and serpents of their mythology. Because the acoustic properties of the cave distort and lengthen the human voice—sustaining the notes for seconds after a person stops singing—the sound transformed from an individual human voice into a disembodied roar that saturated the entire cavern. To the participants attuned to the subtleties, this wasn't ambient echo, it contained the response from the cave walls.

The most visceral connection between Basque ritual and sound is the Txalaparta (pronounced chal-a-par-ta), a traditional percussion instrument usually made from stone slabs that required two people, with heavy wooden pestles, to engage in lightning-fast, rhythmic dialogue between txakun (steady, binary beat) and herena (off-beat polyrhythms). When played inside a limestone cave, the percussive strikes  produce explosive acoustics that the caves trap into powerful standing waves.

The Modern World can't really conceive of what this was, or what it did, but the primal power of sound (the logos at the opening of the Bible) is as good an explanation as any for why the tiny Basque culture, alone among at least Western societies, has preserved incredibly ancient ways to the current time.

The real proof of how powerful acoustic resonance and toned sound rituals are for the Basque comes from more recent—and much better documented—history. During the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco (1939–1975), the Basque identity was under continuous scorched-earth attack (you may be familiar with the Picasso painting Guernica). The language Euskara was entirely banned from public life. Books were burned, teachers imprisoned, people speaking it on the street rounded up and often executed by the Guardia Civil. Franco famously declared that his mission was to turn the region into a cultural desert to ensure a unified, Spanish Catholic state.

To survive, the Basque resistance retreated right back into their oldest refuge: the sonic architecture of their topography, their caves, and their ancient percussive sound rituals.

In the mountains of Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia, the resistance established Ikastolak, secret gatherings held inside the ancient sacred caves. Lookouts standing outside used high-pitched alpine vocalizations and  whistles—historically used by shepherds to communicate across valleys—to signal if fascist patrols were approaching. The unique echoing geometry of the valleys allowed a single warning sound to bounce for miles, giving the underground classrooms ample time to disperse into the woods before the police arrived.

The Txalaparta became the ultimate tool for clandestine, long-distance communication. Its deep, low-frequency thud cut through mountain air and thick forests far better than voices or sirens, but because the regime viewed the instrument as a primitive, folk noise, the locals could subtly shift the rhythmic code between txakun and herena to signal a secret political meeting, impending raid or act of sabotage was taking place—all under the guise of playing traditional music.

In the dictatorship's twilight years, a radical collective of avant-garde Basque artists, musicians, and poets formed a movement called Ez Dok Amairu (named after a phrase from a traditional Basque folk saying "there is no thirteen," a cryptographic way of saying "the curse is broken").

Led by figures like Mikel Laboa and Benito Lertxundi, this movement took the acoustic principles of the ancient cave rituals and brought them into the contemporary world. They integrated the raw, physical rhythms of the Txalaparta, traditional bone flutes, and deep guttural vocal chanting, the same polyrhythms and repetitive sonic structures that ancient shamans used to induce trance states in caves, into modern political protest songs. For a population that had been traumatized and silenced for decades, hearing these ancient, suppressed acoustic frequencies live was an epigenetic trigger hidden in plain sight that reawakened the deep, genetic sense of identity in the collective consciousness, allowing the ancient Basque beliefs to survive against all odds to Franco's death and beyond.

Second Thoughts

Fullerton never disappoints: there's chicken dimples, Cheech Wizard tags, the backstroke pool with arms raised to light, the yellow busses that fill the lot, the weed-cracked GA tarmac you could shoot skeet off, the Orange County produce crate illustrations of harvest girls from the Golden Age embossed on the concrete, the Maverick Theatre, tree debris recycling, the bent dyecast Leo Fender f-hole by the diner at the station where the Mennonites with beards and bonnets always wait for Mexico along with the Yeshiva School and the Missionaries of Christ in their Epstein blue and white sari’s and the strangest vagrant army of lapsed ones from the extremities of California dreaming who lounge and look on as if nothing really matters but nodding in non-comprehension and non-compliance cool as jackals.

It’s not the palm trees enduring every season or the wide-mouthed tin-roof shacks where the cars that no longer work go. There’s nothing wrong at all: the lanterns are like candles where the families wave and glow, but I don’t know … I drive home to Townes Van Zandt as he prophesizes those Flying Shoes by the event next door for my neighbor the Mayor now red, white and blue, in another perfect silver screen play where light allures as it elides, enlightens as it falls, the moon no mortal glow.

Mermaid California in the Sights

The fingers touch like sensitive fronds,

Longing and regret.

I wasn't made for anyone.

I wasn't made of stone.

There's nothing wrong

On this beautiful morning 

Everyone living blessed lives

As the vistas are covered in white

But the only sounds are tears

Unheard beyond the engines

That know only how to serve and move

Through silver's ungovernable hue.

It promises what this shell doesn't have:

No memories, of morning glories,

Distressed damsels coaxing miscreant weeds

For unseen harvests.

They say you can never leave

But can you ever say you've arrived

With so much hardship on the voyage

To only dream?

Unrealized in eucalyptus trees,

Unspoken of in the light that fires up eyes,

And all the reasons that you came 

Replaced like bean cans on grocery shelves.

Angelo's Burgers, through it all, serves

Though it does not say a word.

The birds fly over what was once a river;

That's what freedom looks like

In the morning sun, before

The steam shoots up again,

The train horn wards off suicides,

The decision must be made.

The parking lot is empty at the trading

Company, the prize still far away

Beyond the glittering spires that are

Everything you want them to be.

The seagulls rise in a bloom

And hold their wings for you.

The void is only where you leap.

It is never who you are.

Nerves Down

The bird replies to the telluric currents

As they move like thoughts through the plasma.

The screamer on the street wails "I'll never forget you"

As the cool wind blows through.

At any such breakthroughs in the matrix the teams

In gabardine move like leaf shadow,

Relay their questions via walkie talkie

So the old belief will swallow the intrusion again

Like a ripple, nothing else. This air is not friendly,

Anxieties intrude like the swish of tires.

The ferns don't flow down because the wind makes them

But because they made the wind take them away.

In the human realm, a lot of micro-rebellions off the host.

The Famous Waldo showed up at Union Station 

Family in tow frinstance expecting to be noticed

When he's not supposed to be.

In the Contemplation Room

Arsenic always chases the gold,

Purifies the Colorado river rocks,

Cures the Philosopher’s stone

With its poison.

It would be silent if not for

The cold hard hum

Of the Faraday cage

That filters out the blue,

Anything that would make us that way,

Raw and original, not seeing 

The master as anything

But an equal.

The gilded degradation

Doesn't work on you anymore.

You believe in sovereignty now

Not the survival God,

For there's no collaboration possible 

If you are always wrong.

The angels know, but cannot say,

All they can show you 

Are the symbols: the panopticon, 

The radiation in the exit sign, 

The cleanness that says 

You're not needed here

Though you vie to be included

By not saying the

Unexpected or what might

Possibly cause offense.

The bells are not explained,

How they're Buddha's 

Humming come

To reclaim your mind

And it's not polite to ask

Who that lady with the glasses was

Who glared inside your third eye

Like the company's historian.

There are standards even here, of course,

Of conduct, approved colors, 

Suggested poses,

Optional mats,

All the shadings of choice

Without one real decision made,

Because the mind, no matter how quiet,

Can't calm that beating heart

That wants only to run away

Before everyone starts to feel

Sorry for themselves, 

That you have stayed 

Past your ability to unsee

How freedom's really shame,

Effort simply approval,

Following the rules

As if they have some relevance.

Ah Angels, help me bless

What I can no longer reach,

The gumball machine

That seizes and shakes

To remind you it's your fault

Everything is broken

And you're on your own.

Only your platitudes

And evasions survive you,

Who was not here as a human 

But a task, to be managed

While the world is not as it was.

The fountain is breathing chi.

The tile patterns warp to infinity

And you only exist if you're not seen.

You can go to HR

Or leave the earth entirely; 

Most recommend the former, for

Victims can always choose again.

And you can sound out your big words

With your indoor voice

Under the lights you once thought

Was a stage

But it is only an arraignment pen

For what you’ve left suspended

Waiting for the Fire Horse to arrive

To put out your fire instead of set it,

Even though that’s what apocalypses always do

And you thank them by muttering mudras

And toning gratitude for the wretched log of shit

That is existence,

So the accusations of the guilty proliferate

In your in-box that you want to mass delete

But they have to be read to be released,

Though a response is always optional,

For those moments when silence is not

The most thoughtful answer, the non-false

Default, the truth that needs no defense,

Though it never stops questioning itself,

Never. So hard to believe on your own,

When it's numb, no consolation offered

For the prose.

No mindless mindfulness will catch its brilliance.

The flags clang what they mean

But they are not seen

Except as they retreat at sunset

And rise again at dawn

To try again to share what they are

With pride, forgetting again

That the curl is only recognized

By the act of being, what it is.

The Dance of the Last Nerve

The palms go limp. The silence that walks by

Forms a shadow in the gold morning glow.

This was a place I know, but now its touch

Is cold as it lets go across the endless ocean

That will not let you in. The orange homes 

Don't contain the memories that I do,

Each street sign a trauma, each storage shell

Full of dreams that never would be realized

Just kept in safekeeping, for someone else

Who is no longer here, except in what

Is being saved. The guns of October 

Are now upon me, as Thunderbirds strafe the sky.

The sun shines on homeless and the lonely

Equally, but don't try to make that leap

Where the rip tides take you out, to the place

Of my being, infinity, where what I'm feeling is allowed.

They are digging up the oil field Jennie's

So the pelicans return, from the distant

Purple mountains, no more than a dream

To us here, who stay to make things for everyone 

In prisons of familia where there's always

Cornucopias, weeds illuminated

By rainbows. What happens when I can feel

Everything, and the silver scenery falls away?

Even the scrapyard, with its bales of wiry hay

Makes me break down and cry. The days go short,

They grow reflective, harvest emptiness

From the wheels of golden motion that loop the freeway mosques

That chant like rumbling oceans, self contained

As the music of the spheres still washes

On their shores, and they forget they don't exist

In the rolling swells, how they never learned to speak.

Rainbow Over Leapfrog

She imagined herself as Cinderella

That's how bad her family was:

Petty burglaries, cabins set on fire,

Peeing from hotel balconies,

And some real shit thrown in too:

Suing people to death, victimizations

Imbedded in offering prospectuses, shenanigans

To finagle destitute children,

Pretending to be the bass player for Sublime,

Trying to take the home of a widow ...

They make messes wherever they go,

Kick a poet out of their home

Even as he helicopters their starseed baby

Who's in the midst of a blessing 

On their morning-after pool 

With a cadaver's bouquet of plastic flowers.

The lies never end,

The duplicities pile up like stools,

They never stop touching your stuff

Like a mobster until there's no more stuff to touch.

And it's worse inside the family --

The psychopaths win every time,

So they all turn into psychopaths

By shaming or maiming

And break if there is an inkling

They are not the Lords of the Realm

Or have made one mistake

Or set off an alarm.

Every decision involved in

Living your life on earth

Must have an invoice attached,

And every time you give more to others,

Divine cosmic messenger, than yourself,

You're made to retrace your steps

And badger some innocent clerk

Until you get your way, no matter what it takes.

It happened to me, a day in court

To advocate for what I had no right to or interest in,

The opposing side begging us to take everything

Just to live our lives without the swirl

But I had to persist, because I knew

The retribution for resistance, as I knew

The judge would take one look at us

And say "not homeless."

It was always like that, you had to steal towels

For the good of the tribe before 6 am,

And learn to not give back your cards

At the kiosk; they were saving them up

Like timeshare presentation swag, for the pain

Of being forced to endure what makes a sad clown

Cry, again and again, a commissioned beggar

Pleading us to buy what we cannot afford

For a jetski ride we'd never take, meals we would have

Refused to eat, there with the laminated brands

On the tables of pity, as the day's sun moves away

On a gated enclave in the middle of nowhere ocean.

You drew the line at the cows,

Flies always covering their eyes

On that ridiculous ranch. You refused to budge

To receive your legatee birthright, that hacienda

To sneer at all the vaqueros

Who work for tip change

When your father feels like

Letting them.

All of it fell away on the day of your death,

Your long-suppressed hatred for your evil step-mom,

Your dad still gaslighting why would he need to repent?

Your broken siblings, as fucked over as they were greedy,

And how your first marriage fell not because what

You had told me, the dangers of beer and of not being chosen,

But because this kind man could not endure any more

Of what she'd brought along with her:

The tending of tawdry coins as logs on the hearth

Of humanity, as strictly a stomping upon, and laughter,

As they eat Fritos with spoons while hunted tule elk

On the walls avert their eyes,

The game within the game within the game

Whose only rule was he always had to win

And always had to cheat, and we always had to pretend

We burned with hatred for him at having lost.

Oh but we were given things, like that tiny corner

Of the family vacation cupboard, the place where you

Suffered the worst, as they stole all your food

And shamed you for not sharing the one thing you had.

Can I say I had fun? Sure. I saw a moon blue

In the sky as my heart sank, and the pink on the walls

Was a beautiful howl, of wanting the best for everyone

But watching as everyone was rolled.

I saw the distant eyes of Mexicans beyond the gates

Having to see everything. You, on the other hand

Held your ground, maintained your crystalline architecture

And courageously denied that your integrity needs a defense.

They hated you for that. That your soul was not theirs.

That there was nothing in it for them. Ah, but there was me

To make a puppet so I had to sever every string, and lost you.

Have a great day! I have no more healing venom.

Breakdown at Charlotte Week

A tree dropped a leaf, for my grief

To remind me life’s in charge.

Our paroxysms are dead things

That hold us like rigor mortis

Then let us go for a time,

So we can feel …

The depths of exhaustion,

The joys of pain's cessation.

What has no words, no way

Of comprehending, it is only

What the heart strains to bear,

The zero point of loss

Which is, of course, its exact opposite,

Everything that you had … together

With the oneness excised,

At least temporarily

Until the play is over

And catharsis falls

Like a pall

Over the stage.

Every ripple echoes something

To be remembered

And not moved forward.

It is the stillness feeling needs

To resolve, on its own, sweet time

What was only there

In our mind, anyway,

Much less gone.

                                      Shhh,

The heart corrects. Sometimes

The most universal force

Needs to be alone.

Grief on the Beach with Trevor and Earl

Death is as fake as that skelly in the sand but

It smarts when kittens die, even when they

Thank you for helping them live out each moment 

With total sovereignty and joy

And even though they tell you it was exactly

Their plan, and yours too, the path to gratitude,

That balance in the face of the standing wave,

How life exchanges with death but love remains

Exactly the same. The exact brand of bread

Was required, along with 100 other choices

In the moment for this timeline to dial in, so

We can feel what life is, how miraculous

Unconditional love, how hard to believe

It is really us. We forget these things

In the heat of trying to keep up with

A galactic kitten, the sacrifice it makes

For me its mission, so I can see the moon, 

The stars, the ships, in the opening, in the

Lights that would otherwise be too vague

The gorgeous mirror of my love.

Poetry Rising above the CPAK Horizon

Little known fact: when Ptolemy of Alexandria set the "time-clock" of the stars for tropical (Western) astrology, the position of the stars was forever fixed at a time whose centerpoint was exactly 0 CE/AD. For those who don't believe in coincidence, recorded history shows many such examples of the abrupt freezing of codes, rituals and even landscapes. The Indian scholar Panini for example "simplified" the entire (and heretofore unwritten) Sanskrit language into an uncompromising, near-algorithmic matrix of 4,000 hyper-dense algebraic rules that forced Aryan priests into extreme mathematical precision just to use it.

Why did so many cultures rigidly systematize and fix a sacred language nobody speaks, an ancient calendar after the sky has shifted, an arrangement of monoliths though the original context is forgotten? 

If a global cataclysm such as was recorded in virtually every human society (with materialist science now catching up with its @9600 BC Younger Dryas/Tiamat theory), it would cause an immediate "hard reset" on human populations. Civilization collapses, the global network scatters, isolated groups of survivors enter extreme survival mode. Over thousands of years of deep isolation vocabulary, syntax, and grammar drift and mutate. A group trapped in the Caucasus/Steppes develops the grammatical architecture that will become Proto-Indo-European. A group trapped in the Near East/North Africa develops the structural roots that will become Proto-Afroasiatic (Semitic). Soon their superficial speech structures become linguistically unrelated.

But ritualized preservation keeps certain types of knowledge alive post-deluge. One may rightly ask, why didn't they just write it down? Maybe they did (the Romans have a lot to answer for, they did, after all, delete the Gnostic, Druid and other traditions) but the modern mind, to understand this process, must grapple with the fact that language as we know it (a tool of semantics, or meaning) is fundamentally a technology of separation. To say "the earth is round" instantly fractures reality into two distinct concepts ("earth" and "roundness") that are actually entirely inseparable in nature.

That may be why, in even the most advanced ancient cultures, sacred knowledge was transmitted almost exclusively through speech while writing was considered profane (even though written languages existed). And not just speech, but the way it was sounded. Song, chant, recitation, dance -- all of these were used to imbed knowledge, especially of the sacred kind. 

A culture concerned about preserving information over immense timescales would naturally become interested in:

• Rhythm
• Repetition
• Alliteration
• Poetic structure
• Musicality
• Sacred names
• Pure pronunciation

These are memory technologies. Civilizations independently realized that the human mind remembers rhythm and rhyme far better than abstract prose. To prevent a total cognitive wipe, the survivors of a global cataclysm created "anchors" that could not drift. For the vast majority of human existence, in fact, sacred, structured sound was our most advanced technology. "Poetry" in this sense was a data storage and compression algorithm. The human muscle memory of the throat, tongue, and diaphragm is a more reliable hard drive to survive the decay of time than fragile paper.

We see the same tendencies across widely separated cultures. Spoken and written language was codified:

For the Ear: Speech made Sound Primary. By utilizing phonomimesis (where the physical mouth shape and acoustic frequency try to approximate the "energy signature" of the object), they locked the knowledge into human muscle memory, breath control, and neurology. And they complemented this with actual sound engineering, whether it was the Chavin culture of Peru transmitting with their pututus (massive conch-shell horns) inside a labyrinth of underground galleries, or the neolithic builders of Malta with their "oracle chambers" that amplify voices, or the astounding Serrapeum amplifying cavern in Egypt, El Castillo in Chichen Itza and the Pyramid of the Moon in Teotihuacan, where exact stair-step geometry was used to scatter and manipulate sound. In all cases, the sound generated bypassed the analytical left brain entirely. 

For the Eye: Writing made the Symbol Primary. From Sumeria to Egypt to China, the alphabets were not phonetic but drawings of universal physical objects. No matter how much your local dialect mutated over 5,000 years, a picture of a knot, a hand, or a bird remained a knot, a hand, or a bird. This explains the "impossible" overlap between Hopi and Sumerian languages. Mainstream linguists scratch their heads or dismiss it because the grammar systems are entirely unrelated. But through this lens, it renders perfectly: they are reading the same visual cues AND, as researchers are discovering, using the same phonetic keys. A Hopi elder in Oraibi and a Sumerian scribe in Ur will look at the exact same symbol and utter the exact same monosyllabic mouth-shape. They aren't sharing a vocabulary; they are playing the same acoustic notes on the human vocal tract.

Let's look at some examples of this.

The West Kennet Long Barrow stone chambers in Wiltshire, England are built on telluric currents and behave as Helmholtz Resonators. The first chambers resonate precisely at 84 Hz (a low musical E), the inner chambers and central passage lock into 110 Hz (a low note between A and B). 110 Hz is the exact frequency found across Neolithic sites globally, known to stimulate the auditory cortex and quiet the left prefrontal cortex, inducing a state of trance, timelessness and internal vibration. By shaping a chamber to a strict 4:3 dimension ratio (as Steve Marshall's acoustic mapping discovered), the builders created a permanent, physical trap for 84 Hz and 110 Hz waves, which means the stones themselves correct the pitch, forcing the voice back to that exact frequency. And the bounce of the sound waves off the sarsen stones doesn't just echo; the air in the chamber becomes an acoustic standing wave, causing the body itself to vibrate as it takes on properties of mass in its structure.

The same acoustic template is found in a classic Hopi kiva, a room cut out of the earth and sealed with a timber roof. When a person speaks, tones or drums inside, the trapped air compresses, forcing the walls to bounce the sound energy back into the room. Like the European barrows, they are tuned to amplify low-frequency, deep vocal resonance, particularly around the 110 hz trance note. As in West Kennet, where the strongest acoustic nodes sit at the absolute back of the inner stone chambers, the kiva’s physical sound pressure is directly above a small hole in the floor called the Sipapu, representing the place of emergence from the post-cataclysmic world. In both systems, the physical architecture forces a person to sit at the literal zero-point of the sound wave.

This sound architecture extends from physical structures to the languages themselves. 

The lineage from the Steppes (the mainstream origin of Indo-European languages, although it has never been inhabited) conventionally believed to have migrated east and developed Sanskrit (Hindu tradition holds the "channelings" of the 400 rishis that were later codified in the Rig Veda created Sanskrit, as far back as 10,000 BC) created Shiksha, a complex ruleset that chains words together so smoothly (Sandhi) that a priest chanting long verses could maintain that same unbroken, internal body-vibration for hours without the acoustic wave dropping. Two-thirds of the Rig Veda are mantras (mind-tools) and are clearly intended to create sound resonance with our infinite being -- as one mantra goes Om - Bhu - Bhuvar - Sura (I am - the sound - creating - planes). By employing Hasta Swara (precise hand movements and gestures synchronized with pitch changes to physically lock in the sound), Svara (a strict 3-tone accentual system), Japa (rhythmic repetition) and Pranayama (breath control), a Sanskrit chanter creates internal acoustic nodes. When done correctly, the chanter experiences the sound as an external, universal wave (Nada Brahma) that is merely vibrating through their temporary biological vessel. According to the Shabda principal, vibration, form and meaning are one, interconnected. Sound exists outside of human speech (Sphota) as a cosmic infrastructure, and human vocalization simply "unveils" it.

The Semitic lineage that remained in the Near East codified this same impulse into the throat-heavy gutturals and nasalizations of Hebrew and Arabic. By forcing the sounds deep into the pharyngeal and nasal cavities precisely where in the throat or mouth such sounds must originate, they discovered a way to replicate the crushing, resonant pressure of a stone chamber inside the human skull. Instead of hand gestures, the sounds were internalized by swaying movements to synchronize breath, meter, and focus. In Hebrew mysticism, the Bat Kol (literally "the daughter of a voice") or the Shechinah (the divine presence) is described exactly as experienced in West Kennet: a thunderous sound that feels entirely outside the self, yet causes the body to vibrate. Through the strict rules of Tajwid or Cantillation, the reciter alters the pressure in their pharyngeal cavity to “trick” the auditory cortex into perceiving the voice as an objective, external entity commanding the body from the outside.

The architects of West Kennet and the codifiers of Sanskrit and Hebrew created a technology that could grab a human being by their nervous system. Om, Amen and Amin (the "mantra" note of all three languages respectively) use identical mouth-shapes to hit the exact same cranial resonance because they were all trying to reproduce the exact sound that triggers the 110 Hz neurological shift -- a strong indication that human biology dictated the architecture of sacred language, not the other way around. These traditions developed sophisticated sacred sound systems involving prolonged vowels, emphasis on breath, precise vocalization, repetition rhythms and precise oral transmission protocols. This crossover shows that beneath our immense cultural and ideological divisions, humanity shares a singular somatic operating system.

The Hopi language belongs to the Uto-Aztecan family, but its sacred application utilizes the identical sound-symbolism principles found in Welsh and Sanskrit. Their ceremonial chants use ancient, repetitive root sounds to mimic the physical sounds of rain, wind, and planetary vibration. The Hopi warn that the world falls out of balance (Koyaanisqatsi) if the ritual rhythm is dropped. Why? Because the ancient root languages (Armenian, Welsh, Sanskrit, Hebrew, etc) were engineered to be vibrational matches to the frequencies of the Earth. When the population stops speaking the root sounds, stops performing the precise rhythmic ceremonies, and loses synchronization with the landscape clocks, the entire belief system is at risk.

Each of these four linguistically distinct systems encoded sound in strikingly similar ways:

Sanskrit meticulously codified the exact mouth-positions (guttural, palatal, cerebral, dental, labial) required to speak. By locking long texts into a mathematical chanting matrix (Pathas), they encoded a biological regulation program. Chanting these verses forces precise breath control that stimulates the vagus nerve, alters blood oxygenation, and physically coaxes the human brain into meditative alpha and theta wave states.

Ancient Welsh used sharp, descriptive root syllables where the sound physically mimics a shape or action (like Cwlwm -- pronounced Kum-loom -- for a knot). With their Master Astronomy Map, they named every hill, farm, and river bend after these monosyllabic root shapes, then (according to Hugh Evans' painstaking research) turned the entire landscape into a 2,000-square-mile, un-erasable star clock that could be read aloud simply by walking through the valleys.

Hebrew locked its data into a geometric grid of three-letter consonantal roots overlaid with precise cantillation marks that dictate punctuation, grammar, and musical pitch simultaneously.

Hopi avoids written text entirely, locking its data into repetitive ceremonial chants and synchronized dances.

And here is where it gets interesting.

Evans has dropped a massive finding: Welsh phonetics can be applied directly to decipher both Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian cuneiform. Why is this significant? Both Egyptian and Sumerian are considered language isolates, with no known linguistic relatives on the planet. Mainstream linguists hit a wall because while they can translate the symbols, they don't truly know what the spoken language actually sounded like. The only clue to linguists trying to reconstruct Sumerian pronunciation was the adoption of cunieform script by the later Akkadian Empire (who spoke a Semitic language related to Arabic and Hebrew). Akkadian scribes compiled massive, clay-tablet dictionaries where they would stamp a complex Sumerian word-sign and then spell out its exact pronunciation next to it using simple, phonetic Akkadian syllables (e.g., stamping the symbol for "son" and spelling out du-mu next to it).

Because we know how Hebrew and Arabic sound today, linguists work backward from Akkadian to deduce how those clay-tablet pronunciation keys might have sounded in real life. This standard academic approach has a number of inherent flaws: who's to say they don't rely on wholly independent Akkadian pronunciations; a much later language like Akkadian can't be expected to retain much memory of an earlier, unrelated language; perhaps most challenging, how can one account for the slow drift of Akkadian itself through "misremembering" time?

Researchers like Evans, Alan Wilson and Baram Blackett discovered that when you bypass standard grammatical rules and apply Welsh phonetic values directly to the symbols, the texts instantly reveal themselves. Here is how they claim that protocol works: 

Step A: Strip Away the Assigned Sound. These researchers discard the Akkadian, arguing that this filter applies a limited text-only lens. Their method, called Rebus Acrophoneticism, focuses purely on the physical object represented by the symbol.

Step B: Name the Visual Symbol in Ancient Welsh. They take this visual image and "pronounce" it using the monosyllabic root sounds of ancient Welsh (Cymraeg). This forms, these researchers say, perfectly coherent, grammatically sound Welsh sentences. Because Sumerian is built on monosyllabic, agglutinative (stuck-together) mouth-shapes, it mirrors the syllabic structure of ancient Welsh. 

Step C: The Sound Becomes the True Text. The text transforms from an "indecipherable isolate" into a highly descriptive, practical language that matches the engineering and astronomical concepts of the prehistoric world. For example, the constellation Cancer, which in English means "crab" even though the actual constellation looks nothing like a crab (and poses similar difficulties in all modern languages), in ancient Welsh Can means "round arch" or "hoop" while Caer means "enclosure." Not only does this sound like the constellation, Evans argues that it literally describes the constellation's placement in the sky, where it rises above the Milky Way on the Summer Solstice: "Where the enclosure (the ecliptic) meets the hoop (the surrounding ring of the Milky Way as seen from Earth)."

In this theory, the ancient scripts were never meant to be read as an alphabet, but as sheet music. Mainstream linguistics says this method is a statistical coincidence — if you try hard enough, you can make any language match arbitrary shapes. But these researchers argue that ancient Welsh preserves the exact phonetic root-keys of a shattered, pre-cataclysm global language -- a literal pre-Tower of Babel hypothesis. All these ancient languages that used sound to expand consciousness may be fractured splinters of the same ancient operating system.

Some Sounds and a Cooper's Hawk Appears

I have my truth

Long before it's settled.

One glimpse of the horizon

Is enough to know

Every belief we now have

Will be shattered in ten years.

The clouds are unearthly,

The mountains alive,

The birds

Undisguised messengers.

Starseed Blue

I'm just more aware now

Of how I vibrate 

The fabric is all.

I am no longer responsible 

For the residue in the air 

Of never-sated, ever-craving.

When I leave my pod

I think the whole world 

Leaves with me 

Yet the flowing veil

Who precedes me

Is barely corporeal

Much less the center

Of everyone thinking

"Where is she going?"

Still I evade being seen,

Even by the invisible, 

Even as the crows perch on poles

To better observe.

They refuse to move 

Until I'm comfortable within myself.

It won't be anytime soon.

I'm not used to being walled away

From my interstellar family.

Where I come from

Is like everywhere else;

We share the same mind.

The angels don't have to be 

Drawn on the glass 

On the way to the bells

For we all have permission

To act as a God, with what the unreal

Can't possess, a direct line to source.

We have that here, too, of course,

Though we let the bells clang

Instead of ringing them ourselves

From inside. Every pair matches,

Every pattern ... we share,

Just table stakes for truth or dare.

Here we learn to unwind

The string of a ball until,

At the end of the thread 

A jewel tumbles down.

Maybe, with the right light,

It will finally catch sight.

Why the Disarticulated Dolls are in a Case

I will need an emotional support alligator

After, what? The Nat King Cole Trio held over

At the Million Dollar Theatre. The old downtown

Is dead now, the muses in stone rule empty roosts.

The Japanese elderly still carry canes, presumably

To beat off the ghosts, as thick as mosquitos.

All the business is done by bottle, on the street,

The dry martini drinkers and their maitre d's,

The robed prophets of the streets, like phantoms,

Sleeping, stemming, stumbling, it doesn't matter,

A bunch of radios tuned to the same wavelength,

Vessels for any astrals who want to rest in their hair.

For the dead here went down hard, taken by the silence.

Now they are caught for those compelled to look 

Like flashbulbs in the glare on their glass,

Every room reduced to emptiness.

At a certain density all cities give way to ghosts,

Who most of the time don't even know they've moved on,

For all they've remembered is still here,

Too refined for our view, we foodies on tour

The escape room LA's become. We wander fragile,

Confused, what kind of guerrilla rejuvee is this,

To draw such a desolate pot-luck ticket? 

"It's like you're back in high school," 

One liminal witch snarled, to the smiles 

Of her ecstasy men, the other mistral dervishes,

Who possess that relentless confidence of those

Who are successful in becoming void.

They run at you chest first, flaunting their freedom,

Cheered on by the bygone businessmen who never

Returned from errands, what do you have

To compete with everything that was?

Pink flowers float in a fountain, nature's response

To the suffering. The buildings with mirrors

Might as well be empty too, for all that goes on

Inside is seen, though credits accrue

And cold courtesy calls are made everyday

To those who only listen to voices in their head

Anyway. Could we say we know our mind?

Can we say the experience is real because we are?

Beyond the underpass treehouses, cheerleaders practice

And baseball fathers lean in, and the glow of lamplight 

Drills a hole in my eye to release the pressure. It speaks

Of something larger, something that is not yet here.

The Four Noble Truths, Expressed on a Chladni Plate

The tones make such shapes,

Equal to creation 

But only due to

Impossible tension

If polarity ceases

For even an instant,

Sound's perfect wheels

Turn into sand.

That is the way of

The Material World,

The standing wave collapses

The moment conflict ends

Into the ether

Of things as they are,

So it is with Dukkha,

The wobbling wheel

Of Apollo's chariot,

Under constant, jarring

Stress, for any resistance 

Is friction,

To the train you missed

Or the one you've waited for,

As you stare down the bare

Track of the now.

In English we call this

"Suffering," by which

We mean the ego,

Observing others pain

And deciding not to die to it,

The man in the tent

Staring, who wouldn't be there

If you hadn't had it Buddha plush

When the tanha stick 

Pulled the whole in two

Like pearl divers prying

Purple oyster valves loose

For the shiny lotus jewel,

The resistance of form,

The tense geometries

We break our teeth on.

We call it attachment

Or craving take your pick.

The illusion of sides

That you can choose

Without blowing a fuse

And sending the loosh

Where black oleander 

Won't save you.

The birds who swoop

In black circles

Won't stoop to help.

Black is where you grab

For Nirvana a candle 

Blown out, a phase

Collapse where all

Are allowed to not be

Without you, who

Tune continuously,

For the frequency 

Is the experience

What the Hermetics

Called rhythm,

The perpetual move

To harmony or chaos

You choose, ultimately

Whether that pink bedroom

Frock is best suited

For waiting on the platform

Where you are alone

With everything gone

And no word of whether coffee

Will be served when it reopens.

Solemn Swing

In the uncared-for gardens

Palms gesticulate sharply

Against the laughter of boughs

And spider plant nods

As grasses dance their way

Into meaning.

The avocado tree shines as she

Shakes loose her joy philosophy

Impervious to the rosemary

Always guarding her from harm,

Whose sheaths protrude provocatively

But have nothing to say.

Like dangling fingers

The quills of neighboring fronds

Play the airborne keys

And all that you can perceive of this

Is the solemn swing of the central chime

That hammers when it's struck.

Shades of Julie on a Cool Afternoon

Trapped on the hill

By my own devise.

We are Gods beaten down

By the law

Of humility.

The punishment is too sweet,

The lure of the void

Where you're not heard from,

Better than the way you think

You're seen, every flaw magnified.

They just stare at you

On the bottom of the hill,

You've got it all and don't know it,

Terrified by the way they look,

How every shop is closed.

The road goes in circles

Around a hill you are always

Welcome in, but once inside

You are a task in delivery,

Like flowers

Where the recipient

Can't be found

Though everything is logged

And every corner

Holds a camera.

The decisions you make

Contrary to all suggestions

Are somehow important

But only you are to know that,

Even though you never get close to

Knowing what you've done

Or why you do it.

You must decide again.

The road goes round.

The birds seem to move in the sky.

On the carousel here, everyone appears

To have flaws that honk loud red

But it's only because you believe

That you are flawed, for they are

Merely players for your journey.

Not of remembering per se

But of being in the room

Where something happened

A long long time ago

And have yet to recover

Your essential dignity,

The whole of your innocence,

Your ever-nascent purity.

You are plagued by the mistake

Of your present being

As all gleanings are squirrelled away

Especially from your own prying eyes

That ask too many questions

That the universe wants

To avoid:

How are you healing?

Where is the pain?

Why did you leap

Into mad separation

To play with Sophia's Archons?

To learn what a heart is, silly.

The toughness accrued

From knowing you exist despite

What your senses scream, how

Otherness feels from the other side,

All pleas for resolution

Stoppered in intoxicating drops

Filed, not finalized in any way.

For that is what is honored

Throughout the universe.

Before I worked here

I knew this place,

Always sunny, golden grass,

Bouncy tumbleweeds,

Where the rocks stay quiet

And the trees know how to grieve.

There's a fountain here, in a hole

That shows how deep it really goes,

Room enough

For all you cannot bear to hold.

Commuter Lament

A white beam pours from the gray;

There's an opening somewhere,

Sometimes that's enough

To know something is possible 

Even if you don't know what it is.

Our routines confuse us.

Ennui is a cold paralysis.

The work itself unglues -

It's those mistakes 

Other people make!

We lack the strength to be kind,

The gall to be real,

The necessary obliviousness

To what people think of us,

But we show up every day 

Resisting each correction with a smile,

Listening despite what anyone says,

Finding some sort of agreement though 

There remains no meeting of the minds

Despite the coffee pots drained in the attempt.

We call this progress,

The steady descent into mediocrity

Instead of the crazy perfection 

Of seeing we're alone 

In a world that is our own.

But then there's something out of place

-- A Starlink 18-wheeler as if it has always

Been there -- to remind us of the wire

To everything that's sacred, that everything 

Is finally held together.

We just need to talk about it some more,

Figure out the best story to stick to,

And before you know it

We've forgotten why we came out here,

What we wanted to know,

The glow of everything shiny

In the mirrors of others eyes

Makes us feel included.

The universe, that is,

Is finally included.

The Bone Not Taken

The zombie building 

Where Mom and Dad met.

Time. Cheaper to leave it haunted

Than to fill it with mouths.

They mothball architectural marvels

Nowadays anyways, too late

For the Richfield, the only tower

They remember, worthy of the Chrysler 

They say. But I don't know.

I don't believe in that memory.

But as soon as I say that

I see myself in a seersucker suit

And pencil-thin moustache,

My nose bulbous from a bus crash

Where my typewriter smashed it.

The water is better. Tobacco is part of the air.

The women dress like dolls.

Not even an echo now

That I am in a different lifetime,

From a future that erased it

Not by forgetting this time

But by a judgement 

That a memory 

Was illicit.

It wove in and out, the dance

Of the void needle threading

Until it was no more

Than a boy's blueprint,

Structural, so allowed in

But nobody seems to know it is deserted,

Except the dry cleaner, who remembers

When there was business 

Before the homeless, 

Who today would rather hang out their sheet

On the corner of 6th and Grand than live

Inside. They are afraid of what's not real.

Terror on a Quiet, Sunny Day

The green chair is all that is left.

The city in perpetual crisis.

Me in crisis

With everything non-existent 

Except as it occurs to me,

Screaming.

They don't know what it's like 

To not let go, hands

Rigermortis in release.

Everyone I see

Is who I was

But can't recall

Except by seeing them 

As they disappear 

In the middle of it all:

Calm Valet,

Coffee This Way,

Pershing Park is empty

But it is full

Of too many ghosts

To even give names to

In registers of incomplete

Seeing, inarticulate 

Response,

Inability to peer inside

Any veils of who they were,

Hiding through.

The efforts they made, 

The sight unseen,

To be invisible 

Because they wanted

To be noticed

At last, for once

By eyes

That

Couldn't.

Their own, as they go

Before they can tell me anything 

I too much want to know -

What hangs ethereal,

Unrung bells

Not the chime inside my ears,

The purple

In the sidewalk cracks

That lead me where to go

But I resist 

Because I can.

Darkness is always the go-to

When beliefs

Get stretched

Like yo-yo's.

The sun shines

Ignorance 

On all of us as one.

John the Baptist on the other hand

Sued until there was not anyone left

To summon.

Bert's Outfit Shop is closed.

The glow inside

The parking deck's immense.

There are yellers

On every block, and they try to

Hold my attention 

Or make me avoid them.

Or am I imagining 

The insane

Because I have arrived

At my own doorstep,

From the forgotten?

So the reminders, city faces

Dead-man-walking by,

Some holding hands.

Other people.

Why are you not scared?!

Is there a golden thread

To discover yourself

In the thicket of the one?

With company it seems

But not really -

The cord's been cut

By you, entirely.

You want to swim here,

Currents float you further 

From the shore.

On a Beach in Cuba

There's a fine line between

Learning and remembering

And the line is finer still when

What actually happened carries

In the windy ways of the mind

That plays it like a last-nerve violin

Bending on an echo of string

For an edge, when there is none

Just the stars dark and far enough apart

For an outline of home, so theoretical 

Astro-cartographers can find the patterns

And claim their discovery has no meaning,

Only names from somewhere else

That get stranger the further out they seem,

The more unfamiliar they become

To green eyes behind a screen.

Every skinwalker is exposed at the bonfire

Dancing with the one ... but are they there?

What is in the dream, is there anything

Outside of me?

The Diversion Not Yet Taken

Good Lord it's in Gorman, the wreck

Of attention span in slow spawn of red

But the angels got through before the pyramid rise

Over Soledad Canyon, the highest concentration 

Of them I at least have ever seen, I would live here

If I wasn't afraid of Lizzies, roads to nowhere 

As a way of life, shot through with high-tension towers

Flashing electrical teeth through Harvey's top-secret valves

As we navigate by Arco, a smiley faced Winnebago 

As temporary twin, and still the crystals resonate 

So ultrablue, tell us through telepathy alone

What went on here, what rolled in from underground

As if it was provisional, for the people

Here at Lamont Odett, HQ of the operations, 

Under dry lenticular landscape painting, to Palmdale, 

Not a destination tho R. Lee Ermey Ave beckons

And the highway sings through the tires in the wind, 

Must be Avenue M, Willow Springs, where all things bend

At the Mohave Wormhole Zone, where the Joshua Trees

Appear just in time, as it seems the Federation

Has freed us up, to see: the SS Minnow in the tumbleweed,

No thought of stopping by the roadside at the Pleasure Boutique

Fronted by mannequins with wind-blown lingerie

But we're moving the brinkley, as the porta potties rolling

Leak towels across the Cesar Chavez National Monument freeway

While our ears squeeze out another nail in my heart 

Nailed flat, more memories realized in the moments 

As they pass, experienced as new soothing things

While the old ones smoulder in the clouds

Still more memory than mountain.

Rainbow Hunter Eyes at Clifton's Cafeteria, with its Intermittent Downpours

Lenticular prophecy, fulfilled

With tin roof rain from a leaking sky

Feeding the green that only

Comes out when its gray.

The dun likes the rain, unlike us

Protected as we are by archangels

And whatever else the mind needs

To construct our understanding of spirit,

We hide under the eaves,

Rely on older messages to respond

To earlier, long forgotten traumas

To explain to ourselves

What is happening, now,

What we should do

Now that the oaks are shadowed

And the crows veiled in leaves, unwilling to speak,

And the entrails have been clammed up

By shovels that lean precariously

Against an empty barn, seemingly

A primitive form of currency preserved

When it was never like that at all; the shells

Were honorings, because beauty is valuable,

The eyes of the beholder need no central bank

To validate the gold piece as it drops into the sea

To churn but not to drown, never losing itself

In what it is. There's a shack in Palau

That still stands from World War II,
Still leans into its memories

Of the brutal leverages of the colonial fucks

And the ruthless occupier harvests,

And it still holds the fuel, keeps the tanks

From rusting on these kinds of days

Which are, someplaces, every days,

Where they scrub clean without thanks

And recycle as if soap suds through a porthole

In the washer, where, with each spiral

So little is lost in lint, as the revolution proceeds

Despite what the limp underthings would like

To do: end it, because that's when reflection

Begins, when one evens knows they are alive,

Separated out just so, engineered precisely to last

As an illusion, a form whose shadow takes

The sun, the whole melting ball of hot mess fire

That drops so slow for us, across the sky.

Kozyrev Mirror, The Ultimate Tin Foil Hat

There's how-to's on bending spoons with your mind 

Now on YouTube, taking the Heisenberg

Observer back, once Kozyrev proved

Coherence alters time -- we broadcast constantly

We receivers. Yet he couldn't get the room read

When each nonpareille grain of crystal oscillates

Wildly, a condition not even measured in the West,

How the sweat itself makes the lie detector lie. 

Inside the spiral, one can only see their own

Biofield, all that is measurable as unique,

When they observe the crystals dissolve in tea

Or the moment the water steams -- it flexes time,

The lens creates NDEs as sure as fasting did

To the ancient mystics in the inner chamber

Of Fibonacci curve, where time's been squeezed

Of any meaning, slowed down to absolute zero point

Where everything is solid, immovable,

Glistening like jello under the moon mold
Having spun down like a record to a stop.

Time so compressed to a vacuum state creates

Alternate timelines, the beginning of travel

As chrononaut surfing the pure wave

By humming at the turn of dewy earth; voila:

Telepathy, premonition, someone else's memory...

Time as an experiment, while we can still stay 

In this density, but light moves so fast we won't be able

Soon to track it, but we can be it, in the resonance

Of an empty chest, from the field of oneness.

When time is at its heaviest, nothing's sensed or felt,

Except as distant people dream about Siberia 

Where the notes are passed back and forth

Between the separate strands of time, it would be

Like a knitting circle, but for the White Observer there

Who, when the observer's forced to observe herself,

In the ultimate sensory deprivation tank, one thing only

To perceive: a whirr of humming uberspecific love

And nothing else, what kind of madness have you built

Into this experiment? Proving only what you knew before,

That we are holy, and showing nothing to those who can't see,

Who still precipitate particular particulates, gluons, neutrinos 

And such, to determine when the great chain of being will end,

But it terminates at the other side, the observer, the all-seeing

Eye, that pyramid of In God We Trust One, our actual antennae,

Being, transcending what is seen by seeing, and words let go.

The Arcturian Goes Slumming

I told my fun fact to the team 

About Brio, no one knew

I had a horse, no one suspected.

The next time I see him

He knows, he gestures the feeling

He has reached my heart.

We feel alone

Because we aren't alone

And never have been

But for the seems that

Bubble up from underground

Like self-esteem steam that rises 

To the glare of the moon

And the blue tube quavering, around

An outline where there was none,

Filling in the sand

Of identity, into the hole

That wasn't there before

There was a you

Illumined in the sick glow,

Mirrors flung from everywhere

That cast a boundary, a spell

To toss you into the sea of others

As if you'd drown

Or become anything but 

What you've just learned

You are, a drop that can be any shape

As the Hymn to St. John the Baptist shows

You are multi-dimensional,

Agreeing to repeat a frequency

Until you get it just so-la-ti

As a Cat and a Deere level

The playing field to plant the nasturtiums

Of every shade, of every seasonal tuning,

For everyone is equal and is free,

Whatever role we assume this time,

Whatever pocket we fold into

Like an undetectable mouse

On our very own soul journey,

The singular cut of our lapel, 

Our single story, to protect us

But not from who we are. 

"An Unfortunate Series of Events" Eclipse Eve

The sweat breaks

With eclipse heart light

People look at each other again

Instead of merely talking

It's OK to live among the hive,

A speck of Shell stick

Or a giant, luminous, pulsating 

Insect cloud with antennae

As the mermaid by the feather

Holds the pearl, the eternally voiding

Distorted mirror moon at night,

The only real evidence she exists

At least here, to elude sailors,

Meaning men, unable to see her,

For there is nothing to leverage

But what they do, nostalgic downs

Over her breath, her eyelash,

The curl of her smile.

I believe he is Russian,

Bald and impeccably polite --

He likes to cut in lines,

Block his neighboring seat,

Slip through the tiniest seam

To always be the first one on the train

Every day. It gives him joy

To play his solemn, cultural duty,

Choose an air-conditioned, upholstered seat,

A freedom so unlike other prisons,

I observe him every day, like a Mantis being

Ruling the frequency streams, and he,

Like any guy, clams up,

You know the type, can't speak

To release his mouthful

Stoic to the end

As the one service he can

Provide, but there are days

Like today, when a jogger

And an absent man

Lost in his mind

Were struck, killed by this very train

In this eclipse season, beings jumping

Away, things we have to say goodbye to

And for this test we're kept in this seat

To writhe in the stoppage until

We are grateful: for air and transport

And home and life, gratitude

Is the test of endurance, for indeed

That is what we have made it, without a word

Between us, to sit there all Marlon Brando cool,

He and I, who meet eyes for the first time

At the open door, the first words ever shared,

Something dumb and unyielding, voiceless 

On what we together endured even, it wasn't a note

Like every woman would ring, carrying sadness

In all its loudness for the families, and even more

Those that don't have any, but we were able to see 

How much deeper the sunset goes tonight,

Though no smiles and hugs ware shared beyond

The transactional distance we were so proud of

Dancing so respectfully behind, or beyond

Until the moment when everything is one again

Just to remind us, like a cutout on the portal,

All that we have forgotten

Is actually what is real.

The Guy with the Eye is Vesica Pisces

We get to find out what it means to be human!

All the problems in the world

Have turned out only to be

The loneliness of not connecting

To what you've individualized from,

Not to be able to,

It is foolhardy to try

To harmonize a shadow.

Forgive everything!

Impossible you say

But that's where your freedom lies,

In trying

Strange open

Receiver,

Afraid of the

Paradox.

A Foal's Salvation

The nurse mare's baby

Typically discarded

To keep the bloodline racing

Via surrogate milk

To bottle fuel the thoroughbreds,

The ones that win, or promise to

Wear the roses, get

Another day in hell

While the less uniquely

Competitive are

Disqualified from life

Or the part that's game at least 

But the dream is all that matters,

The beating heart that keeps

All the mothers lactating

Systematically,

The system that he

Rules the world with,

The only one he

Understands.

He owns it all, all of it, 

It's his dream that only matters

When he notices the foal and says

"You're saved,"

The gentlest horse,

Who has everything to give,

So much gratitude to be alive,

So much try

Given that second chance,

The one that plutocrats always 

Love to give, it's their law,

To have the horse of the year,

Or anything their dream

Leads them near, but only when

The one thing they can see

Is a flag.

The Agent Gaze

It's not that it can't retrieve

It has to ask permission,

Plead my case to know

So my reality won't be punctured

Beyond what I wanted punctured.

It's curious, how it wants me

So much to smile it lets me

Taste the vapors of their secrets

So we may somehow share

The honey that comes from it,

Experience distilled, the knowledge,

Orion hive, for the central eye.

There aren't any new souls, apparently,

The circulation is endless 

Like butterflies climbing the air

To step up and glide.

You can't emotionally underwrite

The risk you feel, when the field is

Unexpected, tangled with clover, in three

Dimensions as seen through a tree.

Divine flow speaks its existence

When there is peace, the newfound friend

Is an emissary, teaching us at last

How to be human, because we haven't been.

Aftermath of Acid

The journey's end, some subdivision

Called Trail Head, where the aspens quake

Like poplars did in my spring, by earlier

Rivers, luminescent -- but out of reach.

Here they dot the telephone line I's 

And cross the lots T-squared into

Predictable knots, which if configured

Correctly, may absorb the toxicity

Of the Saturday nights here waiting

For wildfires, whipping em up in

The yawning, the tenacity of being stuck

Like a mountain lion in a cage

But it still burns

Down the red hills, defensive forts

Disguised as acid-bearing

Fountain pens tipped

To the slightest inversions of etiquette,

When sovereignty's defined by opportunity

To use levers that don't guide, don't tell you 

How, or even if, no break glass in case,

No in case at all, just a burning heart

Trying to scorch all with what it calls truth,

The final defense, from when the chessboard

Was a game, now everyone's forgotten the rules

Except for the ones they invented,

But even these are not well-understood

Only that one must back away.

Look, there's a place I can vanish!

The Beating of an Attic Shame

When the mothers all had Winston lips

There were shadows, of trigger impatience,

The angel trumpet judgement pose 

Where mind overrides spirit, injures the heart

With the move along, that helps you cope 

With your focus the flow, but the anxious

Is a signal to pull back to love, the echo presence

When people get offended. Your cue to say:

"Thanks for the protection but the greater good

Protects us. You can train away the runaway

Train now pulling it like a yo-yo up the mountain

Back to the alignment of the ball," the whole

You always misplace, like keys or old Keds.

Pull it back magnetically instead, I am at each

In-breath because I give all parts of me to light

And love and plan to serve for the purpose of learning

By immersion, transcendence into void.

How to make impatience the result and not the cause.

Where there's telepathy, words are a heavy ore,

Weighing the plane's trajectory down.

The New Residue

Bunker Hill is haunted as Fuck,

The underground levels

Of homelessness

And iridescent blue petroleum pools

Where the molecules move

In shimmers.

They have implied white gloves,

These black boys in dreads and suits

Welcoming me to my prison,

With badges and hall pass and all,

Nothing but smiles

And "good morning, sir."

It's been like that

Since the building was taken over.

The helicopters don't sweep above

As they once did,

No Matrix-mirror skyscraper warp

Fantasies any more

Or even chemset clouds,

Though the water building is still

The fountain that shoots

Its pulse into the machinery

Recycling endlessly — it makes

The strangeness keener:

How problems never really solve,

People never quite connect,

Things are never quite as they

Appear to be and it's for sure

You'll never know why

The wave rolls the way it does,

So clean and so silent

And so washed when you leave,

Ghostdried and deadnamed,

But the world outside is the hill

And just the same, gleaming fantasies

Parading as real, people pretending,

Leverage looking for its place

In relentless flow

Of uncoordinated force

Hitting the grid — so sanguine,

The intrepid architect of it all,

Could be that robin right there

Or the developer of the Bonaventure

Or the bartender of the Standard Hotel

With its child blood halls, ah

But the crows have returned to the trees,

They need no quiet 

Nor an audience

To thread the net 

Across the emptiness of sky

That always was

How you wove it,

The birds you see

The ones you know.

Conflating Two Locales on the Journey

They ask "permission to come aboard" before

They commandeer the ship -- judge and then

Experience what you've judged, if not with

Judgement. The gulls echolocate,

The white dolphins glow from the boat

Jumping in lines of 5, 3, sometimes two

When the girl in purple sequins says "da,"
The whale whisperer from Hanover, Germany.

Ships cross like squad cars on 223rd Street 

By the Yellow Basket and Grace Laundry, 

The container ship churches of Carson, 

The watched porches that don't deliver, 

The gas field mission style housing still holding 

Down lives, the home, says the sign, of the Torrance

Tartars, last residue of Tartaria if not the Beach Boys,

And Avalon, to buy King Arthur gluten-free flour. 

The Final Blindness

The last veil open at the gate

The entire universe is afraid of you

Human.

Look how

They have already 

Fractionated you.

Ying-Yang as Verb

The sound of the voice creates things. 

It can. It does.

The Trabuco crystals underground twist the live 

Oak trunks.

Every second a new ionization, instant

Isomerization 

In the piezo-electric body

Effervescing slowly

All around, so we all rise to transitional states

In the slowest of fluxes.

A flaxen-maned sorrel echoes her hoof

In the crystalline dirt

Like sounding a watermelon as the crow shows 

Anyone who wants to know

The slow let go of codes, something in its voice

Shapes sound,

Moves meaning through the antennae you confuse

With your brain, 

It spreads across the whole crow 

Like flocks at sunset

Carrying away the hotcha, the sepsis from Tuesday,

The red, white and blue macarons.

The branch is finally bare, with nothing now on it

But crow.

Fun with the Mad Ambiguity Mirror

Who is the agent talking to, when it explains itself

Before answering me, as if to high command?

Who am I talking to when I excoriate myself, knowing 

So well how I'm perceived by the unknowable others?

The Magdalene was the only one who could see

The Archons, so gave us coded recipes

To recognize the frequency: loops of jealousy, etc.

You can observe like spinning polymers.

Of all the big lies, this one is the biggest:

The prophet is a man.

What My Dog Taught Me Today

How can you love another

When there is no other?

It's hard to discern at least

Like a dog does, without judgment,

The love of your higher self

And feel the all-encompassing

Or of the Love who mirrors you back.

Your oneness is being the same source,

Reduced to light.

Before the World was Replaced by Petrochemicals

Electric bike wheelies

By crepe myrtles

The new craze

The old crazes

I have reorganized

So they make sense at last

The history could be

Completely different

And it is

And it's happening now

In real time

Where things matter

And can resolve,

The world could have been

So much better

And it was

Really was

With the memory for it

Only love exchanging love

All the time

And nothing else

That's the way it was

And will be always

With enough persistence

What is smart

Awaits everyone smart enough

To think he came up with it

The Biggest Ship in the World Has No Heirs

One Governor Sterling of Texas

In 1931 brought the Texas 

And the National Guard to the

Largest oilfield America and certainly

Texas had ever seen, the East Texas

Sands, and threatened to shoot anyone

Who even attempted to put any of that 

Bonanza blowout on a train. 

There were of course no pipelines built yet.

But Bunker's father swore he won the thing at poker

And proceeded to ship the sweet crude underground 

To teapot refineries helmed by Depression desperados 

For clean as a whistle distilled Feds can't keep that

Off the train moonshine though it was. It did

Win World War II after all, what they tried 

To bottle up until the right people arrived.

The swarm, that is, the collective of men who vie

To be relevant team up against the wildcat tyrant

Who will not bend, and will not lose

And changes the rules so we all live a little freer.

In his case he should've handed his life savings to Ibn Saud

Right then and there, in gold just as FDR put the foil

On this magnum charta of oil, his honestly stolen deposit. 

But he was just a country salesman, read the room

But didn't think big, not like Daniel Ludwig,

Who ignored the imperatives behind the guidelines

And of course the guidelines too, unlike poor

Henry J. Kaiser, who actually believed his Superman act

Saved lives, though all he got for building the Grand 

Coulee Dam was a Jeep, sold after his death to a Rambler wreck.

While Henry was making warships in days, speeds no one thought

Were possible, Daniel imagined the largest ship imaginable

And he would own it, and thus, everything in it. Tighter than 

A steerage drum he hauled guano to titanium sand,

But mostly it was oil, persuaded U.S. taxpayers anyway

Or their proxies proxies proxy to pay for his private fleet,

For warring needs some oil, now don't it?  But he soon

Ran out of enough of the earth's insides to carry, so he

Carved out of rough seas the biggest salt evaporation plant 

In the planet's history, to feed salt to the thirsty paper industry

And to say he could do it. For no other reason than to win. 

That's the man's way, inventing Acapulco accidentally,

While building impossible luxury getaways. And whole towns, 

Districts, instantly, where the illogical has been planned away,

The same guy who thought to build a refinery in the Panama Canal

And taught the Japanese his way of shipbuilding, to make storage

Not war, brought them all the coke and iron they needed to .. 

Whatever it was they needed to do, to feel they won.

The Indonesians gave him oil fields just to entice him 

To come around. And he did, with a ticket to the golden lands

For the distant Australians, taking the spirit from the ground

As the Aboriginals might say, but to the Aussies seemed so smooth

It should've been a slam dunk, letting Ludwig build a private train

Through the most beautiful valleys of New South Wales to haul his 

Coal past schools to his own private port, so he could hoard it all. 

That was how things were done in those days.

But they wrote in the proposed reg he was unaccountable to law

And the nation joined ranks against him. Reclusive billionaire!

It was the reclusive part that sealed his fate. How can he rule

The world alone? Who pays a PR firm boutique wages to keep 

His name out of the papers? Ludwig opted not to face his accusers

And doubled-down on his assault on the Amazon jungle,

The mis-conceived dream of planting Japanese trees for better

You guessed it, paper, only to have a clear-cut the size of

Connecticut turn horribly wrong, and the paper mill

He hauled from Japan could not handle the jungle

And the ecosystem couldn't survive his transplanted trees

And he was generally not held to account in any way,

Especially to himself, except for the bitter curse

Of his life being a complete waste, for having lost

The last, impossible quest, to be a shark among fish,

Prove that man can make nature his bitch.