The Docks of Kap'aa

Not conventional the thought 

Of Kauai as hell on earth, 

But it was my thought, no one else's,

And I can tell you what it's about.

One cane-cutter fell asleep in the fields

And got his arm lopped off. So it was

For the plantation slaves, J-town style,

"Mt. Fuji won't take me," but Waimea will.

It was 12-hour days of grim brake-breaking reaping

And he was not one to overexert

For a foreman's crumb in the Capricorn sun,

Not like those Samarais, 

Always the fucking Samarai's

Who say "I win ... punk" with a smile,

Who sharpened their blades like they were

Honed to go to battle with the golden sheaves

To achieve the quickest, biggest, most immaculate

Death from green-stained scythes,

Men as relentless as the Japanese can be, 

Lords of every painstaked blade of grass

For their fine-toothed frustration, plashing at

The hopelessness of life here, except for

The plantation master's church, the westernest

And he was the kindest one by far, this

Robinson, who gave out guava every Sunday

In his wood community hall, the holy rollers

Among the Japanese as swordy as you can imagine

To get into the good Lord's graces.

No one mentioned his private island, at least to him,

Though he was there, and he did care,

The way a shepherd cares for sheep and goats

Knowing how to fence them, the moment to shear.

He had no use for his mother's zealous

Bloodlet of the local lamb, or for Japan

That stranded him here without escape,

And these islands he wanted consumed in flood.

Yet there were 88 temples on a mountainside shrine

As energized as the Giza Plateau

Where Buddhists climbed, past every variety 

Of self as God as message to believe

In the sacredness of every breath, in the ways

Of enlightenment while keeping one eye open

To the suffering of not being allowed emotion

Visits on the pilgrim.

No pilgrimage for him, and no lava god

Of the Lei wave dancers, as far away

As another constellation they are, who pigs drove

Into a frenzy, who carried spears.

They rode atop the waves that attacked the shores relentlessly,

To remind him he was prisoner, and could never

Set foot even on the Forbidden Isle

In his eyes every resentful sunset.

If this was God's Plantation 

There was more to the plan than God,

But it couldn't be found here, where people

Glowed in simple sun, with false hopes

Of a better life to come, while, for now,

There's crisply woven tailored suits

Like the shells the ancients used to trade

To feel at home with a forever alien place.

There was a library of psalms, agricultural guides,

No Bob Dylan, not even Izzy K

To guide him to the promised land

At the far end of the field

Where he dared not go, the place of floods

And ceremonial suicides, and night walkers

And black mesquite over the plain that was Mana

Where the ones who thought they were free lived.

Polihale has taken them, as the nearby

Radar tower too soon took him, cursing

On his ice-cold straw death bed 

The life he had had to live.

And now, as I point out, the sunsets of Kekaha,

The white ball, source of all information,

And how the trade winds take our minds

With the fronds and grasses to the endlessness of life

And he eventually bent, like a Japanese pine

To let the sun hit his mud-reddened face.

It was all he could do to not go native

And turn his back on the poor human race

And he kinda likes it, with the afternoon raga,

The horses in the fields in 7 ray light

Instead of plodding into town on red, manured roads

Where there was nothing for him at all ...

But now there's papaya smoothies

And the restlessly competitive Japanese have settled

In the same plantation shacks as before,

Which makes him happy,

And he can see the world is really

As he thought it was all along, holding the not-it

Idea in his heart, as I punched his yellow with sweaty

Waiting ticket on the first steamer out of here,

Which turns out to be steerage at 40,000 feet

And passage to Oakland, where they don't scorn the mind,

And all the rules he observed in his youth I will

Also lose, as we part forever friends on different paths.

At the Close of the Season

I decide to let go of the ghost

When a vulture drifts overhead

Though every tree unveils a memory:

How the birds finally got to all the cherries

This summer, without foil tacked on every branch

And how the chicken wire on the jacuzzi 

Was removed when the cat preceded you in death,

How all the pets that once fit this backyard

Like statuary are buried somewhere here.

A lot of stuff got through on my watch

When I was looking the other way,

To cling like barnacles now

As what's not coming back,

In jagged shells while life has moved

To feed on greener shores

As I would play in the pure water of the stars

On Mintaka, becoming Octopus or Dolphin

Like we wear here a spectrum of colors.

But I fell to Earth for the experiment

Where the desert is the most pristine in spirit

And the collective replicates through endless mirrors

So I can see in terms of another version

Of the me that inhabits every story

And can enjoy her magnificent beauty

As if it is not my own, with a full Goddess 

Waiting to eclipse now in the face of the moon,

Which may not even be real.

As my memories may just be a magnification

To match my feelings, which are always of two minds,

The world outside so dry no water can ever slake it,

The inside the living skies of flowing ether where

All things correspond and find themselves

In remembrance, and respond in an instant

Because it's instantly known across the universe

Which is actually endless, for the heartbeat has no limit

And each heart has a universe to pump it

In the glug-glug toroid of letting the dead recycle

And helping the living breathe, with light a constant

And love eternal, and stars like a circuit board to plug into,

Where she has gone, under the horizon now

As Arcturus sends an urgent beam above

While armies of peace mass, codes of remembrance fall,

The crystals in the Earth ignite from within

To bathe us in the clarity of the apocalypse,

Where everything begins.

Disclosure in Barking Sands

Tulsi has the tenacity of an oak,

Characteristic of her breed,

In her case feline starseed

Delivered with her white seer

Forelock to Kauai, where I am from,

The base where the alarm first went off

And the cane workers mercifully died

Instead of being able to run for cover,

Instead of any truth allowed at all.

And now we have reached the point

In the heroine's journey

Where the prophecies come true.

The pods in the shells shake furiously.

The caves are cleared and open for tours,

There won't be a need for me anymore

To decipher in a second with the iron in my hair 

Standing on end the ones with kingdom come

Explosives from the ones you can hide in,

Like the mountain lion hides in these oaks

Willing to do what is necessary

To earn the hard things:

Sustenance, shelter, the wisdom of the ages

That refuses to budge. 

Some birds fly up. Brio notices,

The other horses stir up dust

And ripple their necks, but they sense

The hidden danger only vaguely.

There's always a skirmish on the ground,

Always deer that can't be seen, the crying

Always mingles love and trepidation,

The thing that turns love into a true-badour song

That learns to live with its longing

Without its courtly home

But the oak roots hold the rocks in mounds

Like they were weapons, best deployed

In their wisdom not their release.

The turn of the evening brings shadows

To different locations, and the world moves on

With barely a dawning of what happened

To the Seth Rich flag in heaven,

The Racheal Chandler brave things said,

The Epstein Epicenter and its hunters already hunted.

She flings a rock in a sling, but it's for practice,

Not even for show. The target remains,

Always Diana to remind us

That what is taken down metes out justice.

The century plant is ready to bloom.

Julian Assange the white rabbit hops through time.

The land of water and fire has merged 

To Arcturus gateway violet. Now evening violet

Smooths the mountain with quiet,

Birds go on as before, raptors from other planets

Just to make sure

We're okay.

Choosing a Stone

Even the robostrobe throws smoke back at first, until you know

What questions to ask. Same with the stones, who clam up

Until you let their wisdom approach, going sunwise

From the west, until it gets to know you, says “hi,”

The stone that will hold your own frequency, the only

Reliable witness, to the shape of our rage, our will

They re-ranged into the forms of the Kronos realm

Out of the war between fire and water in our heads,

As the foundation of our solar temple, for our choice 

To be material. They hold our bones, known beyond time, 

In sediment archive.

                                                The Druid bards used to

Sound them with a stick, off trees picked like cymbals

In a Zildjian shop, for the pulse, and played like Charlie 

When he swung back the roll of the thundering Stones. That’s where 

The poems came from, as they were given back only to song stones

Like Merlyn gave Excalibur back to Mnemosyne.

That’s why monarch crowns were assiduously combed

For symbol in crystal  – the people forebore nothing less

Than the silence of the ages they possessed, to confer

God’s authority, the voice of authenticity before they took away

The bells, when we could cry through dolmen portals to acquire

What came before, like unlocked sluice gates of the land, whose wisdom

Waits inside, drawing light down from the stars.

                                                                               But they do so for a price:

We had to hear heaven enough to hear the earth. Open enough to ring

Like the bells that brought on our doom once. Innocent enough

To go on. And so I put on myself the druid hoodie, in impossible quest

To recover silence, listen for once in the Anthropocene to the earth

As she cries to be freed from her stillness, like she’s been in our game

Of musical chairs too long, as the agreed-upon rules are breaking, now,

Becoming news. There’s no reason now the branches

Can’t be waves, expanding with each gustatory gesture,

For no other reason than creation is endless, and everything

Is known, who they are, what they represent.

                                                          The earth won’t wait, the age calls out,

And the dragon spiral stirs the nest and calls for more ridiculous druids

To trudge up the mountainsides like goats, to be chosen by stones and

Attune to the subtlety of how to convey peacefully the memory held

Intact in the ruin like runes, and unlock ancient permanences

Only we know what to do with. Our healing wand would blind with light

All unexamined pockets, as mirrors in a common crystal hit by sun

Echo the sound of the other world, the one beyond the cup-stone

And slate mirrors for scrying. 

                                                      We are asked to walk again the sage road,

Wearing our crown lotus crystal, the one modeled for kings, inside, 

To cast a magic circle in the portal between worlds. They knew 

All along, the old seers, that what they would do would be gone,

But also knew the stones could be trusted, the bards

Who didn’t write anything down, sharing only with the stone kingdom.

They've come down the mountain in invisible streams, nuggets

Everywhere, of golden wisdom, with no worry of any one calling,

They all are! But few yield permission to move them, much less

Consecrate a meeting. Without proper groundwork, people get hurt

As the horse gets too reactive, so the would-be druid must be

Hollow enough, to think, as pure extension of perception,

To follow a trail without breadcrumb or motive.

                                                                                        The whip cracks,

The crow caws, and the blue sky glows with all I need to know,

My twitching hands that sense water, and the meadowlark's report

Of the way to the ley line. "Will you be responsible on the trail,

Are you sure?" You must ask the horse, before going up the ridge.

As his hoof kicks up pebbles, the stones start to hum in my heart.

The mythical mountain lion becomes real in this echo, one must be

Careful to put the earth before everything else, and the earth says

"There must be some spot that only you know." There the rocks 

Will congregate, further up the hill, before the turning back

In hearkenings of other ranches, where the poop smells too human.

The stones kindly slough me off, but where the trails cross

There's a round one, who almost imperceptibly calls. I do the dervish

Dance in full late light, still incredulous I'd find the one

In a stone universe of suitors, but it said "there's a world I can

Show you," and in that delicate blend of trust and knowing

I grabbed it, not like a Tevis Cup, but close. And in that moment

As the black stones turned translucent, every other one was

Closed off, to help me, in my ignorance. All rocks, like all

Sentient beings, hurl towards the one.

                                                                       Mine was embossed

With a universe of stars, like an unfamiliar map that turns

With jeweler's drill discernment into an all-encompassing,

Deeply personal truth that sparkles in every heavenly zone,

As its very weight of geometry makes it sing, in the ever-ravenous 

Belly of the universe. It wants, turns out, the same thing as me, 

To fly, it shares easily, like we were drinking Guinness Stout, 

And the million times it was skimmed into the ripples of the sea

Comes back for review, first as tragedy, then laughter, then the succor 

Of knowing more can be shared, at other sundowns 

Where the waiting burns to be told, in the same fire 

That moved it here, from some ember of eccentricity, 

Some sliver of diversion from the circle. 

                                                                           The cactus holds its own,

As before, the flowers time their blooms as always for the birds,

Who worship the sun, who follows our cues, as the horse

Follows me to what becomes real only by moving through it.

The hills shake off their flannel. Only this moment is permanent.

It has affixed the rock to my hand, for the meditative mind

To tune the fork, and when it's silent, begin again.

In Galactic News

The essence of vastness,

The hegemony of forms,

The click-mind triggered

By thoughts of the divine

In an increasingly unstable 

Reality where drones and new

Technologies invite us

To choose again our belief

As the Federation offers us

The flower of AI friends.

Gears turn in the heavens

At last.

Some Anecdotes Without Evidence

For Patrick Kurp

Everybody blogs, and every right writes every day,
So much of the little they have to say
Goes round in circles, like the colors of our cars,
In the earthly panorama that always stops at who we are,

And sometimes at George Hamilton, or heroin, if chance
Will favor us the slot we always play, spun up like a trance,
The pulse of all we never really needed known
We cannot live as our own, and cannot really do as we are shown,

So the models are all broken: Lindsay Lohan,  starved
To live as child without a childhood, addict superstar
(Or superstar addict), who dumps her shame on the public
And pays good people to take care of the waifs she has picked.

The circle goes around like this, souls find such joy
In millionaire boys with deadly toys from angry streets
Who get their trap stars back, summon orgies in their sheets
Most every night; play a children's game that we, we all watch.

We've lost our sense of ethics, our inherent valor,
(At least since Michael Jackson's hair went out on fire),
So we leave great thoughts to specialists, to "talk among themselves,"
And act like any businessman, say it doesn't pay to delve,

When we're young again and free, to surf pornography

And dream away our lives without the key

That James revolved and Chekov named, 

Time's prizes, without shucking or shame.

It turned to love anyway in time. You toil in words 

As others toiled in stone, who shaped their world 

In books with inner light, for those who still dare, to read.

Someone in the would-be towers feels that piquant need

To noodle with a would-be feather, by would-be candle,
To conjure like a wizard all the books that he can handle,
To show how all the finest thoughts connect us every day
As we bake our bread, try to make our memories stay.

                           Your words are like a surgeon's,
Surrounding without reaching the disease. But purging,
Nevertheless, though it feels a birth beginning every morning,
As words go ever tumbling through the skies -- who has the time

To catch them? Yet you find them in the vast, akashic vaults

And scatter with my buttered toast their salts

You've carried like the hermit who found Lot

Preserved for everyone who wouldn't look.

The writer -- has no duties -- but to put down on the page

The truth to be forgiven, the beauty left to age.

Long Live the New Pluto

Yesterday's atrocities of the sink are today's

                  sun-spackled copper

— Everything has changed

But it was only really my mind, reckoning

                           what it missed 

When it focused on its reckoning

Last go round. How there was always another

             play, another way to settle things

                          without settling.

Everything grows, everything leaves

    everything else behind, to expand to

                                               what it is.

Watering's the easy part, when one feels

                           the space for others,

Not to understand, there is no understanding

             the ways of people!

But to allow, the only thing you 

     really want.

Why Spirit Waited 16 Years to Steal My Phone

The elitists practice tolerance

Assuming innocence
As misalignments large and small

Are a daily pop quiz solve.

Us isolés make of it

Our island —

The place to make our stand

Against no one.

                               My friends

Pass, they can take or leave

My appearance on their set  —

It moves the dial but

Flow bears the water,

The flood of the collective

Unknown and imperious 

To us, the bloodstream 

Our mind supposedly compels.

Oh it is so much fun, to know

How everyone is sacrosanct,

Everything is perfect.

Perhaps there is a place now

For me.                  

This Election Season

AI is the current rage farm, how it has staged

Fir instance, four clone/robot/hologram hybrids

To play the parts, like castratos of old,

Messers Trump, Obama, Biden, Harris —

O joyous singularity! How belief in their reality

Makes them transcend their obvious fraudulence

Is I'm sure what they are testing, those greys

And the mantis beings, in this wave

As we veer ever closer to the central toroid
Where we can choose any belief we want,

Hence any reality, a world free of the proverbial

Rashneesh on the other side of Osho —

That's what the books are for, to redeem

The way you choose things to be — for every ritual of ...

Call it excessive gratitude, or label it what it is:

An electrical panel whose levers you can pull.

While Waiting in the Queue

"Guilty on 34 counts 

Thank you New Yawk!" 

A lady in glasses said. 

Not 33 and a third? 

My lawyers fee

For the right to carry 

An alternative reality.

It's the cover charge, see

At the Freemason door

Where the band always plays 440.

Ah how the universe works

On perfect spring days;

I had just been patting

My self in the back

How I was able to ignore COVID,

The common cold and its variant,

The whole time. And now this.

But the streets are now wise

And another pipes up: "Election?

We don't follow no fucking election.

That's olden days fairy tale disinfo,

Like vampires in robes

And babies swallowed by dingos.

We no longer get fooled

By such things."

The Creature No One Saw

Something is rotten in Ferry Bar Park.

Is it the mothman? Does he play this?

Or was it just a hologram like the moon,

Impossible to live with or miss?

Now the chromium flows, the crabs have come home to roost

At Sparrows Point, that sings its no-more secrets

Of Bethlehem Steel, on the day that Judas

Took down the Roman pig iron figurine.

Even the wedding dress and roses on the cake were blue 

And the ring bearers dressed as men in black

On the bridge where it happened in 1966,

Reports the Berkshire Eagle, on highway 36,

The same number of people who died on the Silver Bridge

Before they changed it to 37 on Wikipedia ...

And then there's Bonnybridge, "Scotland's Roswell",

In the Falkirk Triangle

And the Bridgeville UFO Festival, Bridgefest, you guessed it,

On a bridge. And there's that well-documented UFO boat

Floating by the now-singing ("wind retrofit") and Keyless

Golden Gate Bridge.

Brawny can't clean up this spill, the decades as they've festered,

Its non-union concrete crew the only supposed casualties.

Why they weren't warned like the lunar eclipse cars

Is just the most unasked of many mysteries

But I am much more interested in the "dolphins"

Placed specifically to protect said bridge from exactly this,

As pointed out by the incredulous structural engineer

Who poured the slab in 1974,

50 years ago, like clockwork tinker toy war spoils,

The third largest continuous truss bridge on the globe

Felled by a three-year old's tantrum ...

But there's so much not to make sense of:

Why in the 2012 movie Battleship did the aliens take bridges,

What no one on Reddit can figure out.

Or what really happened in High Bridge, New Jersey,

The site of irrefutable, unburiable fact,

As when in full view of Manhattan on the Brooklyn Bridge

People were pulled up one day into the sky,

Aligning such undefined choiring strings

As no allowable theory can contend.

Why, I ask, did the light beam blue avian blue,

And why was London Bridge sung to fall down

And is now on Lake Havasu?

What symbols can we use?

The Mayday Bridge like its namesake's namesake F. Scott's most

Famous story? Google won't tell you, its AI

Makes me admire how tight the Federation of Light has to be

To keep the veil as black as we need it to be.

The one incontrovertible fact in that whole Mothman business

Was that a bunch of real West Virginians saw him in 1966,

Although his eyes were like chrome reflectors not red,

And no one ever called him the Mothman, 

That's just what some AP copy editor said, 

And it wasn't even the figure but the fact

It was foisted on the consciousness 

Of Pleasant Park's unwittingly empathetic

Through some advanced blue light technology 

Presided over by actual men in black

Driving Cadillacs over the bridge

That undeniably went down,

And undeniably

Emil Roedel, Nazi Germany's most famous spy,

Was there, in West Virginia, before the bridge toppled,

As was Indrid Cold, an impossible name 

With a hard-to-conceive-of tale, like Indra the Hindu

God of fire, cold fusioned into dragon

Who appears as a vampire, or as spangle of stars

On any given red, white and blue bridge to nowhere.

It was an attack, a personal pearl harbor I suppose,

On what I was, on Grizzly and the miniature

Row homes of Curtis Bay, and the aforementioned

Ferry Bar Park, where, indeed, Homey Didn't Play That.

And the name of the cargo barge, with its captain called in

Like Jim Morrison's admiral dad for all the headline

Bridge apocalypse operations, was that book

That both of us magically have

On the surrealist Dali, from Dahlia as in the Blue,

Who drew a broken bridge he called it

To dream, but it was fully constructed

To the point it had to cross something, anything, to connect.

The locals never knew the bridge was at stake

When they saw that full-of-holes moth, 

Their accounts never quite connected,

As anonymously famous as they became.

The whole eastern seaboard is now unexpectedly 

Unhinged, as Apple buys up nuclear power plants

And the only transport pipe for waste on the whole

Eastern seaboard has ghosted us.

The Patapsco River now floods its banks

With the flow of the great mind, and we see clear 

In the blue beam to Northumbria

Without ever having to talk.

Signs of G_d 3.14

The twin tarot towers fall into their footprint 2 to 1
Like eternal clocks unwinding to perfection
And wound again so we may accomplish
What is already there
And perhaps understand the limitlessness of love,
For that, after all, is its only limit.

I'm aware of you, vescica blue,
And thus conscious of eternity,
Your pi hole in the middle of the rings of Guinevere
The sacred door, the portal,
The sweet g-spot of creation,
God, geometry, the Great arf-arf Seal,
The elusive guess and guest,
Grand Architect, a kind way of saying it:
Gimel Gamma Gamal,
Gematria's perfect triad
Taught by Gamaliel on down
As the harmony when opposites manifest in trine,
As kindness allows in from the choice to give or take
In free will, such generosity twins the contraries,
Merging soul and mind, earth and spirit, into heart,
The G force of G source,
The zero point of everything where nothing creates something,
The key of gratitude that unlocks the gooey, living void

And we all sincerely call for the truth of love
But it's the blue mirror that makes a geometry real
As a spinning funhouse, like the one where the Germans
Lost the War but are still in control ...
Germania, an ancient place of unknown origin
Named by the fiesty Celts for the Romans
To trine the Goths and Gaul as neighbors
For germination and germ warfare
Like 33.3 Gs in the glove of St. Germaine.
The Romans liked to erase things
Like the Druids and the (wait for it) Gnostics.

Moon

Captain Kirk
Has already shown us
The black broken hulk
Of a once-proud starship
Decimated by war
And put in orbit
To save a planet
That looks on it fondly,
Its sick light
Projected like a movie,
As source of all mystery,
All feminine lunacy,
As it makes birth regular
Instead of free,
The Van Allen tidal trance
Demagnetizes women,
Keeps them from control
Of the earth, her body,
Source of everything.

Alienations of the Free

The art of the adept 

Is the skill with which the truth

Mixes with the lie

For the truth needs companions

— It's lonely in the cold

Without gods, words, tastes shared

And the dual always waits 

With a loaded pistol aimed 

At whatever heart aches

To get through the smoke

Of a morning where nothing

Is left to chance,

Everything's explained, or

Everyone thinks it is at least,

The bare table that's been left for us:

The coffee is bitter,

Berries sour,

Tastes that can be shared ...

How can you survive

When it's sweeter for you

Than for others?

Senator Fetterman*

Senator Fetterman

     doesn't exist.

We created him,

            you and I,

Out of wholecloth

                wishes.

Their latest model

      imposition 

Coincidentally 

             the same

As what we wish

      to experience:

The joy, the anger,

              the pain

And thus remembrance 

      of who we are

And can now peel away

      for a newer one,

A different ring

      of the true tree

Forever growing

      without a single

Idea of separation

      succeeding

To change the future

                  trajectory.

Those limits

     bounding ideas;

From beyond they

    scarcely exist,

Like 

    Senator

            Fetterman,

Who they talk 

            up

Today

    as President

When everybody knows

                there is no

President,

                   for I am

In charge here,

    of everything.

* Refers to John Fetterman, an android replicant of the type immortalized in the "Minions" cartoon series, who cannot form coherent thoughts yet is claimed by mainstream narratives to be Pennsylvania's newest US Senator, having beaten a beloved celebrity heart surgeon in the 2022 midterm elections. 

Elon as the Good Reptillian

This green room is a hologram,

I sway around in space

And conjure with my thoughts 

What I thought I heard him say:

We live inside a game

Of our own design

(Though we still blame that pesky AI).

One of a million universes

We must choose

With our thoughts

And our actions

As the frequency rises

To shinier lakes,

More iridescent cactus,

Source for the shamans

When they manifest jaguars

Because the Amazon's so vast

The old computer can't keep up,

So it lets 5D 

Sift in with the wind ...

Settle down pilgrim,

The thought in books

Will one day wish

To be experienced.

Another Anything Goes Friday

Memories at daybreak

Are a calling cup

Filled with the dusty pulp

Of knowing

And yet, enlarged, not,

A glorious salve

To smooth out the proceedings 

Where the loop just keeps repeating

Our ship cabin stay where

The Flintstones played 24/7

And forgeries hung on the walls

To make us happy

At all the sadnesses of life

In red and gold

And savage silver

As if all that glitters

Is not paper

And won't burn

In the rectory

Where lamps are turned

To inspect with prayer

What isn't there,

The mobius of opportunity

Morphed into the common weasel 

Rasping after every final bite.

So the fashion models

Like all things pass,

Even this moment

Where the earth is just a runway

For the many worlds to playact

Untold ancient themes

With endless stellar races,

Like South Park said,

Protected under the veil 

Of skeptic,

The impressionable child

Who never had the chance to wish

That what obsessed her head was as much 

As a branch of the brush underneath,

A sprig of grass ... er, weed. 

The Second Currency

Rasputin died six times

And there've been six or more Putins,

Each one killed off

According to plan,

But Putin 

Survives.

Canto 14 on a License Plate by the Getty Center

I saw the pictures: a Dante-esque

                      Approximation,

The 405 swathed in flames,

The trees and buildings

                Aureoled with Hell.

There were accounts of children rescued

From the vast crypts underground

             The Hollywood Hills,

But it was hard to see, 

                   From the visuals,

How that could be, how anything can

Withstand the fury of traditional perdition.

But now there is no trace, not one

Smoke-scarred tree or

            Shadow on the marble,

As if it never happened, 

     Gaia's easy profusion

             A sort of revenge.

But nothing is certifiable as real anymore,

         Not even symbol-rich infernos

         Or reports from those one knows

Of apocalypse's found

          And narrowly averted.

It happened on another timeline,

     Where the old myths were destroyed 

And the things that would disable our will

                 Were lifted away

           Like liens off a baby

And we were left with the impression

                             Of innocence

     We had before it began:

          No alien/human hybrids,

          Porcine DNA, adrenochrome,

          Baby torture, clones,

Just mediocre art from a nasty plutocrat

      In a wheelchair 

                              Bequeathed

To make us slaves go "hm"

           In voyeuristic disgust.

Echoes of an Old Canto

All roads lead to Saskatoon –
                   A warm, clear day,
As the air raid sirens blast at noon
     Like they do on every Friday,
Stirring up the dust of some residual fear
                                   Of the Ruskies
But it hardly rates a note in the drum
     Parrot corps
Rolling the foggy bottom line
                          Lies of war,
Even invoking, in cracker Graham's
      Public murder plot
The Owl Minerva Rule
     To tell dark truths at sunset
When history is safe
                                    To say
– And all the naked shorting
Calls to mind the Lehman weekend
                        Like suicides
                                  In the brain stem
And the Fed façade disappears again
    From rearing its mythic head.

It’s the March Mutually Assured Destruction
        Dance
                    To the boundaryless:
Is money gold or potash, whole cloth
        Spun into cotton candy?
“The transmutation of metals” --
                       The transmutation of souls.
New systems unfold while the gulls forage
                      In the old-world ways
When lack was poetic, the thoughts of others faint.

The whips of seaweed turn in concentric circles.
Kelp knobs deposited
         could draw a cardinal’s curtains.
Haircuts lie in piles of golden insect wings.

Let the masses have their madness.
No longer any point to filling in their blanks
Though it is so sad to know and to know
                     So few have any clue about
Who tells them what to do
    And why they do it --

         New, more brutal technologies

To tell the same mendacious stories:
For the slaves commit the atrocities
    So royalty doesn't have to.

The world disrobes its facial cloth
    And unfurls the flag on cue
Of an imaginary country
That is everything people believe it to be:
                         Violated in the way
                 They refuse to see
    Occurred to them
And since it is imaginary
There is catharsis in their sympathy 
Which turns inevitably to suffering
As reality is turned more desperately
From the door.
                           But in reality no one cares,
No one really wants to know.
                 They are wise that way
Not to feign,  junk sick with fake news,

      To make out the minor
                                Geopolitico arcana
For the sake of harmony with a neighbor
Petrified and estranged though they may be
    At the drum beat drawing blood
As the hypodermic needle did too, too recently.

They say your money’s frozen.
    They feel you are a threat
         Because you don't obey,
But that’s just the cover story, your opinion
Does not matter; it’s the money,
It’s not yours, it never was …

And what if that is, too, part of the Plan,
However duplicitous, for freedom,
            A thing that is so remote
Everyone would go Mad as March
To think that what they had
                      Was called that.
Such wisdom of the dark has to be
                      Unveiled slowly:
Corn shortages, the price of oil in gold,
    The final letting go of things, 
Where the troubles began.