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

And the joy of pain ceasing.

What has no words, no way

Of comprehending, it is only

What the heart struggles 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

Feels the most 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.

The Defamiliar

Nelly Larson was at my vibrational boundary

Writing her aloneness, before she turned

Alone to stone on me, while Zora continued on,

Seeing but shielding her own.

There are journals. They exist.

Just harder to find, ensconced in drawers,

The secrets that everybody knows

But not how to say.

There's a Parakeet Gate on Waxwing Circle,

A Wet Lab Life Science spot. The ground dries up,

Stones like little candies, straw wandering,

Tails waving in sync with the leaves.

All the streams are now crystal, dissolved

Like the Ascension Church's way of the waters,

Grape vines yellowed, Jackson Ranch

Line Dancing Space for Lease.

Different choices, different result.

I think of the flat plains with my trailering shot

And little gestures that show the bloom is

Recovering, but it's too soon to tell

Hubris must be swallowed first, yet again.

The cottonwood, translucent in its dance

Brings the thirst, as their sun mirror

Snakes along the cool valleys to Lake Viejo.

Even in these Space Goose houses

Inclined high in ashen flax they look beyond

Where they came from, ancient temple or old church,

With the PTSD of ruined pioneers

Like the Light Rail at Patriot

Never built but it could be here

For the enthusiasts of hummingbird moths

And fire authority helicopters.

But no matter where they are now,

Shopping at the marketplace with the waterfall,

Golfing or gazing on the irrigation, they'll be here

Come Sunday feeling upside down, stumbling

Between program bands, green lights risen

Over the Tustin aircraft yard, the Free Chapel

With a giant Betsy at its entrance. You know what they say:

Cleanliness is next to Commerce West.

Masonic compass on that strawberry Tesla,

B.W. Boyd shears, Experian happy to be here,

The privacy invasion people, its only the tomatoes

The nursery throws away that can be nurtured,

The tagged flats are just algorithms, measures

Of contentment, but they have no such worries here.

The smiles creep into everyday conversation

And though there is nothing to laugh at, we all do.

Still Life with Wood Shavings

I no longer have to be 

Every human who's ever been born,

Because I am every

Human who's ever been born.

Pinoy cuisine by Shoreline Ministries,

Lunar Orthodontics by the Wagyu Factory.

They are instituting a shavings regime

In the quiet before the symbols bellow meaning 

And the mules snort uncle and hoses swallow

The thirst like the date oases that dot Cabo,

Aligned with whale birthing noises

That creak through the flagpoles breeze

From deep in the seas, even up here

On the old volcano, the soil still metal and glass,

Water has no resistance here to flow.

The alfalfa is wheeled in on an EZ-Go

With a canopy and sombrero

And some Spanish by way of Guadalajara

To nourish the oaks. The gold is good

For a glow-up in the arena, in a spiral,

The way the galaxy arms explode

Into what you are, light, and light only,

Though the shadows in the shavings

So bright are hauled away by force

With fuming machines, the trace of us

Still more than a rumor, a note,

It must be distributed, like thought

Leadership into the still wilderness,

A first-cut gold that too

Will be consumed

With one eye

To the woods.

Sesquicentennial for Dogs

Cones everywhere, you have to have the tools

For the war zone, the bazooka in your poncho,

For a pressure shot that presents itself continually,

Each fire display a demolished village

And the sound of guns coming after me

On the Born in the USA beach.

Every family's staked a fire in the sand

Like the barren lands, for sparklers 

And fire dancers, the flames alive with the moment.

Each mortar has the will to create a universe,

But the sea clears the smoke, lets everything explode.

Everyone has a few barrels to shoot.

It's only safe at the edges of the sea.

Car alarms go off from every side,

Fire flowers in every direction but one,

A multi-dimensional explosion,

Multiple detonations of the same urge,

Confetti snake, sorcerer's spore,

The swarming of stars, while whole

Neighborhoods are under siege, exploding

Joy pop gunfire, clouds rolling east.

White smoke coats the neighborhood roofs,

The phosphorous left over

After play.

The 4th, When Californians Stay Home

Even though you're innocent 

You still have to have clean hands.

And the streets of Lake Forest are immaculate

With red, white and blue bouquets

And chairs of the same brave colors placed

Along the roadside days away from the parade,

And traffic on Toledo, with those breeze-scream yellow 

Tape rolls ribboning off the open trenches

So Tacos Ensenada and Ballpark Buns and Rolls

Can rest easier, afterwards, when there's rest,

And the four F's of the Fourth are over.

It was what we photojournalists called the crazy day,

Festivals, Family, Fireworks, Food

But no Fun, my light flicked onto the red Firetruck

On their day of hell, they're out there already

Mean streeting to avert some boys with brush fires.

The dangers are legion to public enforcement,

Dogs, cats, squirrels, kids

And the controls are few,

Sunglasses, a haughty look,

To disguise that you have eyes, ever-compassionate one.

You have to make nice and let the city skies burn

In the name of freedom, whose cost is gut bombs

At midnight, clearing out the animals,

Reminding us our warrior nature is our freedom,

Our willingness to say no, that does not

Work for me, no, sir, now, where's my hot dog?

I have to keep my eyes on the game, and don't want to

Have to search for where the horse radish root

Has been bedded. For I am finally a King,

Licking my fingers of pomegranate.

There's an Acrisure nearby, a Blooming Onion Dales.

"We Get It," the license plate says, "Santa Marguerita,"

Here in her town now to bless, and I to snap

A life strapped on top of a Kia, poignant toys, 

A pathos-filled mattress, a voyage to a new beginning

As yet unknown, still red, white and blue somehow, 

Like on a floatie in a start-your-engines parade, in Fountain Valley, 

Say, there are so many stories, but still you can count the daylight

In waiting for the perfect dog to traipse upon your perfect

Sunburst yard of a hundred flags. There it is, exit 9A,

The elusive sea route to Pepperdine, where they marry

The mermaid that is California, and disappear

At the western dome of what we now know as freedom.

Song of the Would-Be Backyard Pets

The hummingbird trills what I need to hear

From somewhere up the bottlebrush tree.

The heavy fruitfall avocado bounty 

Bears the elsewhere wisdom of the elders.

Sometimes it's merely the wind

Rings the chimes.

There are other collectives

But none of them talk to us.

Dolphins? No. Whales? 

Forget about that.

But the crow

Is sharp-tongued guide

And now the spider caught in light

Is only dancing.

Past the Party on the Front Lawn House

The East remembers the past,

Recycling what memory

Only holds

To look at it fresh,

New eyes

Rising with the sun,

Both power and agency,

The sovereign

And their fire.

When's the last time

You had a really good

Ego death?

A dark night of the soul?

Not like it's

One and done.

It keeps whispering

As long as you are silent,

As long as you can listen

To what does not present itself,

To perform for you who are

An extension of what it thinks.

The true you has no such

Fixed parameters;

You are as fluid as they are

Content with any hermit crab

Identity the wind blows

Like cow dung to your nose,

The better to savor the aromas

Of everything that's missing,

The one thing

That always is, missing, that is,

The indefinable ineffable

Be-all and end-all disruptor

Black swan unicorn event

That shows us what was there

The whole time

Or would, if time

Existed in any way except to

Mark the moments.

High Lonesome Song

The eerieness is that it is not

A clanging of gears, longing of gong

But the song of the whales,

Sirians too

And an old shortwave that received

Static from deep in space

Where frequencies are far more malleable

Than they seem to be here

Where life goes in stages, graduation days

Like partitions in between, not a steady state

Of easy flowing to and fro

Between malleable time, ambiguous space.

That slide is a call

Through a resonant channel

That hums with the body entire,

A million beads of you included,

To know you are protected

By your very being

That extends in love from every part of you;

That's why they call it a tree,

Roots within, expansion without

For as far as it goes, as far as

Your stretching soul chooses

To reach to the light

Or not. Hell, we wouldn't even be on Earth

Face it if we didn't have a dark addiction

To learning, for the black stuff,

Which, of course, is nothing at all.

Though the lap steel

Threading its way through the living

Electricity lines, commences its moan,

How it begs to differ.

The Tower as Exploding Phallus

Another rescue horse put down,

I saw it in his eyes.

He didn't want to be here, too much

Pain on this here

Earth grid with its malevolent

Algorithms. I wasn't

Supposed to look

Of course, nor speak

In any way, either

Ack-knowledge-ing

Or inter-venous-ly,

Not even supposed to be there

Of course, some experiences

Are too private or at least

Too shameful to share

But I needed some timothy

And it was the only way in, through

The barn where the pain is made

In eyes kept dark, without even

Blinders on. But the sky is so blue,

The transparency today so complete 

I want to retire to Portugal, so the breeze

At least will match the vibe, such silence

When every word is in a poem.

It's where they grow the cork,

It grows on trees, like money does here

Before it bursts like 10 million penises

Into every aortic expressway

Carrying some unseen germ, in each car,

A virus or a gift, take your pick.

It's probably a little of both.

Anything out of the ordinary unified whole

Is a flaw, but it is that very quality

That makes it so very highly prized,

Like the pock stamp of beauty, or the fly

On the Eindhoven still-life of fruit,

The unique. You can't read that shit aloud.

Every cell beyond the ear vibrates with its own ...

Insanity you could call it, an inability

To conform, the breeze that makes our freak flag fly

Always stirs some goosies, conjuring within that tiny

Heart of yours an egg chair for two.

June's Translucent Moon 15

And Brigid is now on the grid

Clacking horror that a grown man

Wears a brony instead of a St. Christopher it’s

Another confluence at the Confusion River

Is all, the birds sing to be heard,

Use their minds to reduce as we do

What happened to what it is, meaning.

The woman agreed to be with the beast

After all, Avalon the red stone of Lemuria

Has value as a gratitude platitude 

For virtuous full circles that don’t drift

As much as float, and float as much as watch

Like Mary Oliver’s swan, unconcerned

With how beautiful it is, how rare and fragile,

But tired of being admired turns surly,

Such are the dues paid for beauty, the elusive

Gratitude it would change before its own life.

They fall so hard for what they came for,

The rainbow flag day, but there’s no paper bag

Test for this, the exclusion. That’s the problem

With leverage, nobody bats an eye, as

The problem with connection is those who don't

Bat back, that is, there’s no compassion

For what can’t be understood, what is outside,

Unable to be seen, not like the ice today

In the urinal in Taft, the paintball on the grapevine

Roadside looking like shooting gallery tombs or honey homes,

The Arvin Chevron with half a million dollars sold

In ticket winnings, and beyond

Dirty Bird Guns and Ammo are rainbow umbrellas

Artfully poised over the champagne grape pickers, 

Rainbows in the mirrors of the bird sparkles

So families might look think see at the hard-working

Migrant families and what they do for us, then

Maya Cinema, Pixley Pixies in HD, makes us think

Of Epiphany, will she take one of the fairies?

But there are warnings of spotted lanternflies

As Porcupine Tree sings of “somewhere, but not

Here.” Is it OK to drive, is it OK to be alive?

The silence of the pallet trucks hydrofoils by.

After Helix High School, I ran into Ruben Arthur

What-was-it, Torre, at the Church of the Open Door,

Directly above the California Club, below the fried iron

Scents of the Bunker Hill tenements, he was the one

Who put me into the room of beauty, and before

You know it we’re listening to Castro’s clandestine

Radio station after the sirens have stopped

During the bible college summer program

And knowing from the frenzy change was at hand.

And for me it came at Muroc, Air Corps Base,

Where proof-of-concept prototypes were trucked

Wings tucked from San Diego for the old out-of-the-box

In run flow and tension then thin air envelopes

Trying to beat the speed of sound brick wall, sneak

Around it, but the sound peeled the Shooting Star

Red enamel paint right off, the controls reversed, 

The upside down world, dimensions transgressed, 

Or was it the Seed Dart, no no that was the sea plane 

Built to pontoon down and taxi on dry concrete 

Like Patton wanted to roll all the way to Moscow. 

The Navy wanted no part of that, it wanted Skunkworks

And it was such a long way from Niobrara, Nebraska, 

Driving a Nash Metropolitan convertible, but he gave me,

My dad, a 51 Studebaker, looked like a rocket ship.

I riveted to it a top-secret military-grade seatbeat

Harness, but it buckled under the pressure

Of ordinary roads. Then there was the lemon

Maserati as signing bonus; that PI’d collected many

Such temperamental Hollywood beauties, that one

Some starlet committed suicide in, or was it

A different Maserati? It’s res judicata, baby,

Precedent has supplanted the memory

Of Belle Benchley, say, Grandmama of the San Diego

Zoo, or how the tools of ignorance get to be worn

By the smartest men, or how Nadine Remick

Played the clarinet, years later I was teased

Lightly once over about Naughty Nadine, as I was

Teased for wearing lamb with leopardskin

Before the coolest took to wearing lamb of course,

When other opinions mattered more than one’s own …

Twinkle twinkle little car how I wonder

How you are Burma Shave but the partitions

Are lost, only the ragtime nostalgia remains,

Like concrete teepees on the mother highway

To sleep in, more done up now than when they were

In neon, tomahawk windmills drawing in the windfall

Of gulches, with Gila River beaded lizards that lead you 

To prototypes as playground planes outside of Bisbee,

To the enormous golden age wooden roller coasters

We scholars scour to polish from fading

But Rosemary Walker of Fall River has gone dark

As the YMCA pool she taught at, with those

Beginning swimmers she miraculously

Shepherded through the Great Blackout

Of 1965 sure as Eddie my friend made Ted

Williams’ mother crazy for calling him

Sluggish Ted, ah but the Navy guys

Are such soft touches, they would always be

Relied upon on shore leave for a nickel

To ride atop the Giant Dipper,

All that pageantry even though

There was a war on and we all knew it

Every moment, an air raid siren

Whenever a UFO was spotted,

San Diego blacked herself out

Based on warnings out of Alamogordo

For three or four hours of power down

Before the all-clear returned

And the father pleased as punch

To have the gift on His day of knowing

Sonny got close enough to his secret

Space programs to be moon landing skeptical.

Ah, but there's the plein air bin

And the oboe repair tray to attend to

And Magic Touch RV, Tipton farm and dairy

Supply, the Idle Spur Cafe, Milt's Five and Dimer,

But that's what it looks like from Buttonwillow,

Of the welding gas, Zingo's, the hungry valley

Echoes, the Super Ego Load Board (just for me).

Translucent the beauty as the amber rolls us on,

Norms we never close, and I can't get rid of

The ghost I picked up at the casino, the moments

Relentlessly going, to live long enough, in my case,

To declare Fictitious Sports the best solo Pink Floyd album.

Euphoria of an Empty Fortune Cookie

The horse

Runs round and around

From the center

Where it already is.

Carrots like antennae

In the hanging ball

Twirl around the stall

In late sun

With the creak of

Something speaking

Or trying at least

To be heard.

It comes and goes

The nonchalance of being

But when it returns

The heart has prepared the journey,

Doesn't matter the road.

Hell, there aren't any

Until you decide, 

Much less end.

Another Money Shot Successfully Evaded

Photojo PTSD kicked in again,

That China Syndrome chemical spill

According to the BBC

Five miles away but

No one would know it

On the ground here

Were it not for the news

Media and I am so glad

I'm incommunicado now

Because they would be calling

To check if I could check out how much

Exposure had to be swabbed down

Or drop in on the evacuation center

In Fountain Valley. It's just that

I've been to too, too many

Hazmat situations

For one lifetime, and they cut 

The media off any way

Not like the good old days

Of transparent horror, 

The anthrax stations

And the tire fires

Worst of the worse,

What hell looks and smells like.

The thing is

It was my job

To remind people

They lived in a fire zone,

Those poor, chosen

Doomed people.

What if they had to let

The horses free? is a question

Most people don't have to ask.

The only way to survive

Is with an escape route,

A valuable skill for a rat

But it makes normal life

Claustrophobic, forces a course

Correction, a re-routing reset

Of just stopping the watching

For the blue lights of cop cars

And their perfect algorithm of surveillance

At least that's the way it looks

From the mountain, where the hawks,

The messengers you're not supposed to kill,

Don't care what flag you wave.

There's no residue way up here

Of the latest apocalypse,

Up here it can only exist

As a belief. The peek-a-boo view

Of the ocean from the Daily Seagull

Must be considered in the frame

Of the panorama that bursts

In your back yard.

She herself is incommunicable by Kinga Fabó

The title continues: Let her be completely unmarked. The heavy, claustrophobic tension here between the desperate urge to be known and the absolute terror of leaving a trace—that’s pure Fabó. I'm posting it here as an act of defiance against her (and my own) desire to disappear

My diaries! My letters!

My letters! My diary!

Pure porno!

And my poems too!

Want em; huh?

I'll bet. (The toilet drips

Intimately. Two answering machines 

Converse. A language school

Advertises for itself.)

Won't let them go, no.

No go if they begged.

For me, it's all a dead 

Letter. Objective, nothing personal 

Violence.

Not the scream.

The absence of the scream is complete.

My fear is taxidermy by curation.

I do not want to leave a trace.

If only no one could know who

Is speaking. Or even

What is said. In one’s free

Time, it’s just

Fine. Then

Nothing is said. Then

Want it; huh? I’ll

Bet. My undertow is small-
Minded, melancholic kiddo. 

Why is my tragedy being

Filmed in the shadows?

Botched and unresolved I

Depart, early. Not a word

About it. My great

Accomplishment, this. I am quitting.

Yes. I’ve

decided to quit.

Just split like that, for myself.

Repetitions, tomorrows.

Always in bold at times like this.

And why not? He doesn’t even

Know that I am

In the world.

And what if he did.

 

-----------------------------------------

Ő maga közölhetetlen. Hadd legyen egész jeltelen

A naplóim! A levelem!

A leveleim! A naplóm!

Tiszta pornó!

Hát még a verseim!

Kéne; mi?

Azt meghiszem. (Meghitten

csöpög a vécé. Két

üzenetrögzítő beszélget. Egy

nyelviskola hirdeti magát.)

Nem, nem adom.

Ha kérnék, se adnám.

Számomra mindez holt

anyag. Semleges, személytelen

erőszak.

Nem a sikoly.

A sikoly hiánya hiánytalan.

Félek, félek a múzeumban.

Nem akarok jelet hagyni.

Csak ne lehessen tudni, ki

beszél. És azt se,

amit mond. Szabad

idejében pont

jó. Akkor

nem mond semmit. Akkor

kéne; mi? Azt meg-

hiszem. Sodrásom

sötét, kisszerű. Miért nem

kapok fényeket?

Kurtán-furcsán és

korán távozom. Szó se

róla. Nagy

érdem ez. Abba

hagyom. Igen. Úgy

döntöttem, hogy abbahagyom.

De csak úgy, magamnak.

Ismétlődések, holnapok.

Ilyenkor mindig vastagon.

Mért is ne? Azt se

tudja, hogy a

világon vagyok.

Hát még, ha tudná.

How should I extinguish the beautiful? by Kinga Fabó

Here's another concise theory, about poetry.

My word’s poison that slowly kills.

Slowly it eliminates the beautiful.

It grinds down and bores into

The heart’s dead center.

Machine,  machine

Now not evil:

Full like empty

Silent monasteries.

--------------------------------------

Hogy szüntessem a szépet

Szavam lassan ölő méreg.

Lassan szünteti a szépet.

Felőröl és beletalál

a szív közepébe.

A gép, a gép

most nem gonosz:

telt mint üres,

néma kolostorok.

Surgeon or Jeweler ... by Kinga Fabó

The sub-head of this micro philosophy of art translates as "Be glad, so long as there's something to lie about."

The overtones of dawn 

Break like glass the truth open:

A cold-blue surgeon, a jeweler.

Its tremor is shrill, hard as a diamond.

So it goes, so it goes.

I write 

It. Who gives 

A shit?

And the reader?

How good it is

Sometimes to lie.

If that doesn't work, then art's scalpel

May set the wound.

------------------------

Sebész, vagy ékszerész; addig örülj, amíg van mit hazudnod

Hajnalban a hajnal

metsző üveghang:

hideg-kék sebész, ékszerész.

Kristálykemény csengése van.

Bizony, bizony.

Én meg

írom. De kit

érdekel?

És az olvasó?

Milyen jó

néha hazudni.

Ha nem megy, a művészeti

beavatkozás segít.

Sylvia, Marilyn; dawn, suicidal games by Kinga Fabó

This darkly comic critique of the Marilyn mystique finds her conflated, by the eighth sentence, with Sylvia Plath, another public suicide, both turned, like all paraded women,  into virtual versions of Eve.

“ … these proud, haughty, / supremely self-assured / and hard, cynical people, …”

(A motto not about them, but I project it onto them.)

Marilyn Monroe. Her floodgates down entirely caught me. The perfect lack of boundaries. Her sexual magnetism: pure void. The gears, the gears. The machine runs. The clear vacuum. The hatred, where she draws her erotic power. The bell jar that walled her inside of its glass. She dragged it with her everywhere she went. Her insomnia. All her attempts to kill herself. Her gaping mouth. Her breasts. Her ordinariness. Her never being entirely there where she happens to be. She’s not there inside of her flesh. The inside of her flesh crawls. Did she have her own feelings? Her breasts. Mailer is very excited about Marilyn’s bra. More, in fact, than what is inside it. Monroe twists her body on a spit. Monroe is an object of use. Monroe broadcasts her vacuity. Her only existence is in sex acts. She can’t explain things. She can’t enjoy things. Sex is plainly joyless for her. Her desire is nowhere, but must be satisfied, at any price. Selfish, single-occupancy pleasure. It might as well be self-gratification. Ecstasy? Just maintenance. This is her natural default setting. Like whenever someone switches on the power. I don’t know about Monroe’s actual life. Only of her legend. For me: beauty and engineering. The mechanical maneuver moment.

---------------------

Sylvia, Marilyn; hajnal, öngyilkos játékok

„ ... ezek a gőgös, büszke,

fölényesen magabiztos

és cinikusan kemény emberek, ..."

(A mottó nem róluk szól, de én rájuk vonatkoztatom.)

Marilyn Monroe. A gátlástalansága vonzott. Az a tö kéletes gátlásnélküliség. Szexuális vonzereje: a hiány. A gép, a gép. A működés. Az üresség. A gyűlölet, amely ből az erőt merítette. Az üvegbúra, amely körülvette. Amelyet mindenhová magával vitt. Álmatlansága. Ön gyilkossági kísérletei. Tátott szája. A mellei. Közön-ségessége. Az, hogy sosincs egészen ott, ahol éppen van. Nincs ott a saját testében. Saját testében föl-lejár. Voltak saját érzései? A mellei. Mailért nagyon izgatja Monroe melltartója. Jobban, mint az, ami benne van. Monroe kifordítja a testét. Monroe használati tárgy. Monroe-ból az üresség árad. Csak nemi aktusokban létezik. Nem tud beszélni. Nem tud élvezni. Örömtelen neki a szex. Puszta vágy, amelyet ki kell elégíteni, bármi áron. Önző, egyszemélyes gyönyör. Akár ön kielégítés is lehetne. Gyönyör? Csak szükséglet. Szá mára ez így természetes. Mint mikor egy gombot kapcsol be az ember. Monroe valós életét nem ismerem. Csak a legendáját. Nekem: szépség és technika. A mechanikus mozgások maximuma.

The third: the neutered by Kinga Fabó

Another micro-poem poking at the macro-cosm.

Now I don't feel like changing

Clothes.

I don't feel like smiling

Back.

I had a male guest.

Or female.

Or an observer.

No third sex.

--------------------------------

A harmadik: a semleges

Most nincs kedvem át

öltözni.

Nincs kedvem hozzá-

mosolyogni.

Férfivendégem volt.

Vagy nő.

Vagy megfigyelő.

A harmadik nem.

Lesbos, maybe, now really by Kinga Fabó

A continuation of yesterday's poem, sort of.

Neither beautiful, both magnetic.

Why then bother with a horoscope,

Wars, the turning of the solstices?

A single gesture is enough.

The girl is young, gleaming, masculine.

And I, the perfect woman, am

Irreconcilable. Put us together:

Androgyne, Sappho, Lesbia.

-----------------------

Leszbosz, talán, most igazán

Egyikünk se szép, de vonzó.

Minek akkor a horoszkóp

háború, a napforduló?

Elég egyetlen mozdulat.

A lány fiatal, fényes, férfias.

Én meg az abszolút nő, az

ambivalencia. Ketten együtt:

Androgin, Szapphó, Lesbia.