They are as gnats, these fantasies,
Weaving and circling in implicate paths,
Never quite breaking from the real
That holds them to float, in suspension
And motion, something unobservable
To observe, unreachable to claw after,
Far from the hotel morning aperitifs
In Marrakech or, say, Bologna,
The gifts of the road, the sun on the porch
The only light exhaustion affords, those
Are only implied. It's the force of the sun
Through fingers and a mind that is cottoned
Like candy, what appears, in other words,
Not what is, the light, not the bearer of light,
But it is, the bearer only, we create ...
II.
Out of the creation. There is only
The creation, the form labeled illusion,
That is real, so the actual person,
The separate creator, becomes imprisoned
In who I am, or, rather, want to be,
The skin I wish to shed, as pelt, or scalp
To prove, in how I felt about another's
Work, that I am ... worthy, or complete,
Or that I fit into an interesting world,
Not the one we both inhabit, where vapors
Bleed from other rooms, the beats
Of central and essential drummers
After truth and beauty ... We are somehow them
In hearing it so, yet so apart we have to
Draw their essences back to still their sound.
III.
We have to wear their colors and their hair
In some invisible approximation
That will bend, as phantom individuals,
To a larger drummer, so conform to
The one who drums, the one who takes on
A life of its own, as simulacrum, Frankendrum
But kind enough to let the voices that are,
After all, distinct, speak, for the most part,
With only a slight revision required,
A part of the individual lives
Must be erased, to let the story play
And make room, after all, for the all.
We are one. Once we believe in that lie
All deceptions are available, and
Even the bare individual must yield.
IV.
He must be reformed to the invisible,
The illusions that form co-creates.
One is only as good as ... what one makes,
What one is turned into, baked in the heat
Of desire and will to overcome another
For the beauty they have left behind.
The space within the acoustical void
Is too much more filled with echo than stuff
To hum on its own, without an ear
To own its moment, momentarily --
And the residue bleeds through
The echoing rooms of the brain,
Where the dust of old libraries pullullate
In golden light: gathered facts, names like
Talismans, ideas and images that cling.
V.
They need some place to go, where they can
Commune among themselves, and interact
Without need of our organizing minds
Sweeping up the notes of the melody
As it weaves and circles, like so much dust
In and out of place, to sift, endlessly
And return to the same location
On the disc, in the archives of the sounds,
Cataloged by circumspect collectors
Of the original, lost, and thus preserved,
As a value, a vinyl
Itself. For, in fact, we never left
Our childhood, our imaginary friends
Of invasive Martian vines, pre-pubescent
Gumshoes, coyotes in cowboy hats ...
VI.
The spinning wheel of karma was always on
To be lost in, platters of beat-itudes
That never seemed to begin or end,
Only seemed to. One needs to be
Rescued from the past, by being immersed
In the radiant essence of what had been lost,
An impossibility that could only be
Navigated by this monstrosity
Of implied wires and freeze-dried sparks,
The imaginary creator trapped
In the half-life of what was once created,
That exists now only as a virus
Accepted by the mind as part of itself,
To multiply inside the host as something else,
Growing larger as its possibility shrinks.
