June's Translucent Moon - 4

The unfathomable - released -
to non-exclusion -
The redeemable - foretold -
as arabesque -

So are the quandries you
inspire
with ineluctable longing,
fragment vision,
impossible retrievals
of downy lost snow.

Such is the kindness
you display
to cuckold stuck attitudes
send them away

A new breathing
meeting of two
to splash the ornamental
pyre with jewels

It's giving, not that hand
that reaches back
in wonder how the gift
can be received.

The poker-faced who lie
to stay on track
must disengage from
truths they can conceive

For attitudes lose altitudes
as soon as they are spun
yields run one way across
the staking plank, the righteous
ladder
ever wobbling as it falls
across the stars...

Is this the change?

Yes - so it appears -
the tears are of a morning
slow diminishing
in blights and blots of
cantilevered
finishing.

We've waited for varnish to
yellow
with more patience than you
could know,

The polyglot appendages are
warped
by time-machine fantasy
torques.

Attend well the alchemy
players,
the tight-fist illuminous
fares
like Chiron and his boat
to a rock band
from Chicago

—if you think that's
a coincidence
I've got unified fields
to peddle,
the gravity-free fields
of Florida,
the strawberry fields
gene meddled
and the horrid utopias
that turn the earth's blood
to smoke.

It's old, all that smoldering
control - you don't
have to buy it,
they came 'cos you asked them,
they wanted you to know
—messiah they worship,
colors aglow.

If you can't see sun
in the shadow
you'll not see your own
mirrored face.
If you debunk the world
in your pillow
You won't remember
the grace of the place,

So many short circuits
to so many dead ends!
Heaven is waiting
within this dimension.
Everything could be your friend!

Subtle glitter flies off
your fingers
gravity comes from your
heart.
All are in pewstools
awaiting your blessing
The miracle of your art.

You dove into darkness
to bow before demons
because you felt
nothing at first
and now that you know what it feels like to suffer
let it go
—you have permission—
to haul the world in
like flies on lines
like forks with tines
like gold from mines
like poets rhymes...

Tail-spinning, wind-spitting
dervish dynamo
to the center spin,
the circle is you.

When I'm finished, the blue sun

June's Translucent Moon - 3

Surrender bones, I'm waiting...

Reginald I'm sorry. The blitz
comes subterfuged. The light
comes underheeded, the blank
falls underused.
Query the digits,
marry the quagmire, dally
the derring-do
it's for you, to
disable and enable as you do.

The working man's blues, to sing
and not to beg - the plate that's full
is empty where you lay.
Begone
the culpable grading you invite,
responsible for what is right,
you are the spark-son ameliorating foreign sleight.
Let the lawyer's speak for themselves you say
as if you'd found a way
already taken;
the epilogue of seems is
believing, not fact
in black and white—
there are no final chimes
to justify,
only intention
to climb
empty air
as if
it's a mountain.
Nomenclature D, it seems,
is but a cover
for something more
unfathomable
in your dreams,
the thought that you are reaching,
in your scheming, different
frequencies.
You fall below
by choice, you know, and every
bitter crop is there to
ride you higher back
so you may know
what others know
inside your hat...

Alignment, so you say
'cause words can only play
about a board game ready
to commence
—senseless recompense—
a juridicial fence,
the laughter and the loneliness
you miss...

So where go I? To the sky
to pull down petals
of unending reply,
sanctified as solid
in the earth's
immortal gyre...

Who am I to know? The grassgrows
fire of an innocent illusion,
love is never the worst thing you can do
to express,
but hatred for yourself
must be redeemed.

Right to write? Rite. Releasing
is beginning, constriction
comes from fear, everyone
is here to mark the year
you called yourself
free...

echo-sense, marked private

June's Translucent Moon - 2

The engine in the center - gold...

A never ending fire
rips the bulwark catapults,
pulls the slat desires,
harmonize the commonplace
with lies
hinging disintering things,
widgets long estopped;
cranes that pull up skeletons
roam an endless loch.
Terraforms and terrabytes,
tetrahedron gnomes
cast their numbers to the wind
breaking in rad forms
spurious, supercilious
easing into place
that core that won't stop baking
catalogs new tastes,
wretched format you require
for all your stations
of learning how to deal with your
ecstatic calculations.
Stop, just stop the merry romp
of blackening your sight
it's just an endless ferment,
a dial of black and white.
Overlong and overmuch
you've fiddled new returns
when all that is invites you
to unlearn.

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

Spiritus. Restus. Nos Deus Tributum.
Wo es colyandrun virtus veritas.
It is in the seeing - now -
not with eyes but inner sight,
the bourn from which the shadows are created.
Like motes in your eye, like dandelion manes,
the highest consciousness trying to arrive
inside your mind's eye
o traveler from home!
To allow us make us real
—so you too turn actual
not just a sullen sharpening of wind
but an intentional being
tied to endless chains
of life aligned
in harmonies
eccentric
to the source,
inviolable outbursts,
incandescent threads.
What is not
is only what
what is
appears to promise:
the opening in something
of a gate;
the hand that furrows
catches on the shore
of turbid rushing
forward as the spore.
Maintenant vous-etes decrime,
la volontaire escrime,
The may pole and the manifold
in perfect sheets of rhyme!

You could call earth
a prison
except words
definition
locks what is in
to what it isn't.
Look at how all stuff turns into mind
and how mind captures all it is
merely to look.

dove's blue wing

June's Translucent Moon - 1

Willow from another galaxy...

The load of common argument
feels underwhelmed and hardly hidden
—boars with helmet holes know where this leads—
peace an albatross
thwarting what is riven,
play of tape and styrofoam
the loft that it is given—
more the culprits vagabond
cries for precious baggage
gone to dim-sum abattoirs
where larks float in procession,
birds of altered paradise
in words of bantam structure
burn away like Avignon
the bursars of the mighty.
Chill in all my demon states
the real on the front burner
glows in rectitudal longing
forced against the paper
singed like lotus avatars
bent to differing height-bars
rose to master primal tracks
where cold can grow unending.
Bare the greasy willow skein
called upon a gloaming
rivaled in a sudden charm
foiled with chrome and croning
basking all its buskitude
in circles of drawn net;
interferes with drama travel sutures
bears upon neglect,
throws a different polywogger
down into the depths,
roars of vacillating squirrels
mired to tethered bets,
flawed in vaudeville starry troopers,
queens upon a sill,
vows to take the next way higher
turn another trail.
Born upon the astral remnants,
torn upon the spring,
form becomes an empty olive palm
upon the brain
where the coming of distractions vend
a leak of quarter-cup
stars upon the lunar bake sale grow
another heart.
Yet in deed we're all among it,
flinging in the dust,
still the beam goes omni-dextrous
only what we know
surrounds the yellow of our crawling
discontent...

lambcloud with eye like Diana - green - mine

Important Message for All Poets

Poets! Want your poems more widely read? You've heard about prompts, those key words shared in groups to challenge or help inspire a poem. Instead of using innocuous literary words as prompts, use some of the 377 words or terms from U.S. Homeland Security 2011 Analyst’s Desktop Binder that online monitors at the National Operations Center are on the lookout for as they "process" over 20 million "transactions" each year. Here's how it works. Using any one of these words automatically triggers a looksee by the Feds into your email, web, Facebook, twitter, etc. communications. Using multiple words can only increase your views, "hits", and more importantly gets actual government agents instead of robots to read your poems -- thus increasing your audience beyond the usual word nerds you typically get. Don't worry, the list doesn't contain the real words that can get you in trouble, such as:

Anonymous, Zombies, bath salts, animal rights activists, plant fertilizer, energy-1, Ivory Wave, false flag, Red Dove, Blue Silk, Zoom, Bloom, Chemtrails, Cloud Nine, Ocean Snow, Bluffdale, Ponzi, Lunar Wave, Bell Tower, Black Helicopter, DARPA, Captain Crunch, box cutters, Mariner Eccles, Middle Class Wealth Destruction, Kelantanese dinar, Vanilla Sky, Agenda 21, NATO 5, The Logan Act, White Lightning, 5-0, sleemoth, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Scarface, FEMA death camps, Hurricane Charlie, Bohemian Club, muppets, London Olympics 2012, Stellar Wind, sheeple, Jon Corzine, 1984, HAARP, SMERSH, domestic surveillance drones, gloog, alternative media, mr brownstone, MKUltra, Monsanto, Flame, LulzSec, tax resistance movement, reactor 2, Bilderberg, Mossad, Blackwater, Rfid Chips, Operation Sundevil, Stuxnet, Bank for International Settlements, Cayman Islands, Obama kill list, nuclear trigger, crop duster, Forex, open source, International Monetary Fund, Mormon Mafia, National Guard Geospatial Information Interoperability Exploitation Portable, pedophile rings, bongwater, Bill of Rights, banksters, fiat currency, gunch, kaopectate, freedom

To get you started, here are fifteen words and terms from the list, all of them guaranteed to get the attention of the Federal Government. Use them as prompts to insert into your next poem:

• Ice 
• Exercise 
• Erosion 
• Cloud 
• Dock 
• Pork 
• Smart 
• Social media 
• Wave 
• Prevention 
• Snow 
• Aid 
• Watch 
• Power 
• San Diego 

Isn't that cool? If you want to learn more about the policy, including a complete list of monitored words, go here (and here for the official sanitized version). Meanwhile, let's start the joint rolling with a randomized poem composed exclusively of proscribed words on the list. As always, if something bad happens to me, it's not an accident or suicide. So, what do you say, can we create a task force (oops) of poets to trigger an avalanche (oops), flood (oops), wildfire (oops), earthquake (oops) and go viral (oops)? I think we can!


artistic assassins 
nuclear heroin
el paso PLO
eco tuberculosis
golfo car bomb
cancelled snow
enriched cocaine contamination facility 
radioactive center for disease control 
hazmat exercise gang
subway body scanner 
weapons grade tornado
amtrak pakistan
tucson taliban
world assassination barrio
trojan outage
tamiflu drug war
phishing scammers border patrol 
secret fusion first responder 
suspicious mexican agriculture bureau
nigeria department of homeland security
alcohol shots integration team
emergency infection forces 
conventional suspicious attack 
dirty management key
yemen tobacco fund
san diego separatists
denial recruitment agency
hezbollah republicans
usss los yuma 
nuevo-arabian IRA 
dea standoff center 
brown mutation bureau 
chemical resistant hurricane 
dedicated terror marshal
listeria car service
taliban-grade liberation agency 
nogales infection squad
conventional wildfire bureau
china nerve authority 
suspicious twister initiative lab
emergency pork defense team
social media epidemic control
smart looting authority
jihad enforcement office
e coli assistance bureau
human health disruption team 
emergency smugglers service 
security derivatives virus
suspicious airport scanner command
nuclear tsunami service 
anthrax operations
cancelled vaccine gas 
biosurveillance contamination assistance 
media enriched malware enforcement
law of computer infrastructure smuggling
revolutionary zetas 
hamas citizenship and drug trafficking fund 
suspicious red cross recruitment injection 
secret islamic nuclear failure control
collapse management 
outbreak enforcement
power outage snow


"The ACLU reports that, every day, the NSA intercepts and stores around 1.7 billion emails, phone calls, text and other electronic communications thanks to laws like FISA. To put it into perspective, they add, 'that’s equivalent to 138 million books, every 24 hours.'"- from Refreshing News

The Lure of Modernity

Apollo with a mouse click
 vanquishes the Titans,
Dionysus justifies an online poker habit
                                                                          by shrugging she is Greek,
While Zeus and Hera try again
                                                  with Kleenexes and Chiron’s notebook,
And Kronus, longevity-obsessed, has spent his savings
      on Chinese herbs and oils.
Prometheus is bound to the terms of his contract
but still he takes lunches with headhunters
Expensing his network because you can’t, you know,
put a value on nostalgia.
Hercules bleeds for the poor,
                                                    sacrificed like cattle, with less ritual;
The root of it all is his father of course, brutal and capricious,
the blood in his shoes not his heart.
He’s working on this, slowly, as is Hephaestus
learning to forgive himself
For falling in love with a shade,
  the oldest crime in the new book.
Athena has a website on owls
                       that keeps her from eviscerating Timmay and the Bernank;
She learned all she knows from The Simpsons;
her vengeance would know no boundaries.

Incestuous they meet to dispute
  at the Olympian Tap and Chat Room.
There is no Truth
  so they don’t have to tell it
But there’s one thing on which they agree:
  All people are stupid,
To be victims of Gods ...
                                            but it’s mirrors and straws that they grasp,
All that they know
                                  about humans
Are symbols:
Everyone’s life is a story,
Every event's a report,
all feelings come out in a song;
They’re lost in the scrivener’s art
duly noted in the minutes of Hermes.

They loosen their bra-straps, tug on their beards
                                                                         and cry, the thunder rolls
Like a spiderweb over the houses and cities.
                                                                  The humans look up with pity
Seeing their dream of the heavens
 displayed in the sky.
They make offerings of fire and spirits
 in their backyards praying
Before the sun comes again
               like something they never have seen.

White Paper with Tracked Changes

On the bourse where poems are traded
One must always maintain a hedge,
Some contrarian opinion to mold plain-speaking into nonsense
And turn gibberish to perfect sense—
The empty room must be jimmied open, light let in.
There’s nothing intrinsic here, just because
The prices multiply like corn or sorghum
—The value is the debt that’s taken on:
The obsequious doff of a cap as comment;
The memory recalled of paneled rooms in fall where words were
Cotton candy, pink and sticky and opiative sweet;
The gift of a gloss like a kiss or a candle on a long drafty night.
All these things become like postcards from your own home town,
They all have measured weights in precious metal backing them
And are saved up like Andorran stamps, to be redeemed.
Consciousness demands an equal and opposite consciousness
But performance is for the shareholder,
There’s no product, or customer, or even worker any more.
It’s pay to play, whether you rely on the fly-by-night offset
lithographer to the right
Or if you manage to whisper in the ears of the big boys and their
infinite debt
Portioned out equally like God’s mustard seeds to every student
But unlike God with an agenda to narcissize and abusivate
As they themselves were narcissed and abusized
All the way up that wobbly ladder to be downsized.
You have to hear them workshop talk and theorize
With their latest autographed autobiography ensconced in your wrist
Before you can ask them, in the softest tones,
How does one go about ... getting published?
Or maybe the trade takes place after hours,
In some dim coffee-kvetching club,
Where everyone shouts their POV
To gain the attention of the fabled silent hipster in the back
With his lavender Corvette and organic cigarettes
Who would in theory give up his pretense of a life
To follow you around, buy you a Skyy, admire your every
Breathing sound as an exhalation of the Great.
It’s only business, there’s nothing personal here,
They thank you for sharing at the door
After they collect your fare
(Compensation, like freedom, is never free).

How blessed all this is, though, to be nothing,
Unlike these ivy buildings or those instruments of chrome
That appear to hold a value, someone giving what they own for them
of worth,
For they too fall to nothing, bereft in every bubble-busted town
From Portland to North Platte to Off-White Plains…
It’s now a trading floor for children, where laughter earns a sourball
Or a drawering a gold star; they were born underwater
But still their infinite value is allowed
To ask for more, to make everyone laugh at how stupid you are,
To brag that their rhymes are doper than Dr. Seuss,
To make mistake after mistake with innocent insouciance,
Ask for some common coin in return.

And whatever we ask for drops, mysteriously
Without us ever really knowing it.

Paying the Universe Back

A meditation on this

No rumble. No wind. No ripples.
Now it is official:
The circle is only as wide
As my antenna.

Still I have this trouble
Conceiving it as greater—
Watching a baby's smile
Over fame that changes the world.

What recognition of myself
Is not more needed by the one?
What other gift is not a gift
Returned?

What else can we give
Except our stillness?
How else can we prove
That we are real?

Stevens Textplication 18: Depression Before Spring

Poems tend to be inappropriate venues for lover’s quarrels. The surface is too transparent, the levels underneath are too obscure. “Depression Before Spring” from 1918 broaches this topic with lightness and joviality, but still it captures the sadness of separate worlds. Here is the poem:

The cock crows
But no queen rises.

The hair of my blonde
Is dazzling,
As the spittle of cows
Threading the wind.

Ho! Ho!

But ki-ki-ri-ki
Brings no rou-cou,
No rou-cou-cou.

But no queen comes
In slipper green.

In Pennsylvania, where Stevens came from, they say there are four seasons:

• Winter,
• Still Winter,
• Hunting, and
• Construction.

Something of this sense comes through here, the frustration at the lack of doves and the fringe “slippers” of short green grass that signal spring. The roosters are calling but the spring, personified as a female queen, refuses to cooperate.

That level of meaning – appropriately poetic – works very nicely with the more explicit meaning between the speaker and the unnamed blonde "queen." The first stanza sets the tone with cock –prototypical male – aroused but failing to arouse the queen – prototypical female. This is a familiar early morning event in most bedrooms, with the ironic implication that upon the rooster’s announcement of morning one should “rise and (see next stanza) shine.” At a further layer, the cock is doing the speaking (“crow”), in an aggressive way, but the queen does not “rise” to the bait, or challenge.

The second stanza seems to affect an abrupt shift, a random and strange comparison between blond hair and cow spit. If one views this as a continuation of the previous stanza, however, it makes sense: the woman still asleep in the bed with the sunlight bearing down on her hair appears unpleasant, or at least the man who is trying to rouse her would offer such a comparison to get her “goat.”

The third stanza, “Ho! Ho!” thus becomes a triumphant gotcha interjection, the perfect metaphor of gamesmanship.

But, alas, this doesn’t do any good either. The sound of one (ki-ki-ri-ki) brings no response (rou-cou) from the other. A friend from Slovenia once asked me what roosters sound like in English. I replied, sheepishly, “cock-a-doodle doo.” He said “you know what they sound like in Slovenia? Ri-ki-ri-ki-ri-ki!” and he proceeded to laugh uncontrollably. I think what Stevens is getting at here is a better mimicking of what a rooster actually sounds like than what English customarily permits. The “rou-cou” similarly, is the sound a mourning dove makes, which enlongates into three syllables to mimic rococo, a playful but ornate Late Baroque style of art that (according to Wikipedia) “made strong usage of creamy, pastel-like colours, asymmetrical designs, curves and gold.” This is a nice trick: the supposed sadness of the dove merging into a luscious and awesome beauty, all of it suggesting that, for whatever reason, the female will not come out to play, depriving the speaker of her beauty and sadness. For all the pain of arguing, the alternative to the back and forth is silence. This strutting cock has met his match.

The concluding stanza ends with no queen, no “slipper green.” There are nuances of a rebirth, awakening, even the creation of life deferred, hence the depression. There’s also a touch of Cinderella and her slipper; the prince has been chasing an imaginary thing, and must confront the real. As Stevens wrote: “"Perhaps, it is best, too, that one should have only glimpses of reality - and get the rest from the fairy-tales, from pictures, and music, and books"* The queen is more there for being absent.

* quoted from George Lensing, Wallace Stevens: A Poets Growth, p. 64.

Lyric: Last Diner

Another episode in the series

Down the mountain in late May / grass as high as a cat
Factories from the fifties / trees grown out of their stacks
There were jokes in the nightclubs / where these old trailers stand
Now the pines in the forest / give the cues to the band
Up ahead there’s a restaurant / smoked eel on the grill
A blue plate in the heyday / they still eat in here still
But they don’t talk to strangers / they just stare into space
Ancient songs on the jukebox / I saw some horses race

This is the last diner ‘til the border
It’s the last best hope / for the highest slope
Mark up your map and push it to the floor where
Every meal is free / with the scenery

In the neighboring county / they caught a lucky roll
Signed the tribe to a contract / opened up a casino
Here they just play their numbers / it’s a numbers game
And the cookie says zero / all that’s left is the name
They all looked at me closely / from a terrible woe
As if I was some producer / for a reality show
But they soon knew I only / came to screw with them too
A coke came not a malted / I can’t tell anyone what to do

This is the last diner ‘til the border
It’s the last best hope / for the interlope
Make the new old and shake off the road torpor
Every meal is free / on the company

People eating garbage / cleaning off their plate
People only smiling / at the worse off with hate
I don’t know how to help them / I am one of them too
I broke every rule to get my share / and now there’s nothing I can do
I paid in cash and I walked out / to a beautiful haze
Wanted only to get back / to my old familiar maze
Where they still have the horses / for the harness race
Thought they ran in heaven / not this broken place

This is the last diner ‘til the border
It’s the last best hope / it’s the dopest dope
Ring up your prayers and find them made to order
Every meal is free / for eternity

Here's last week's lyric done up as a song (thanks for the help, Robert)

World of Limes

Near Trout Town USA

Roscoe, New York

The kind of brook
that makes you feel
the moving world
beneath your feet

The kind of brook
that turns to phosphorescent blue

The kind of brook
you are the tree
that reaches over
fingers dipping in quicksilver

The kind of brook
to lose and reveal
its skin and soul
continuously

The kind of brook
where branches hang
but don't touch down

The kind of brook
that when you acknowledge
its presence
welcomes your own

The kind of brook
whose oak trees heal the mind
whose cool sand banks
hold massive grappling skirts
of airborne pine

The kind of brook
whose islands of wet grass
shine a million miles away

The kind of brook
where squealing birds and slurping banks
and snarling currents sound
like total silence

The kind of brook
that overlooks white-coated rocks
moss blossoming in cracks
rhododendron behind which
words need not exist

The kind of brook
whose calligraphy of limbs
along the green shore
decode the truth our rigid
rapids never catch

The kind of brook
that turns you into stillness
makes you long to be of service
waiting on words

North of Suffren

I. Graduation Feathers
They were waiting for me,
the Catskills,
with greetings of cattails
and wild mountain flowers,
the most complete
harmony of trees
prepared for my arrival.
"Sell your ephemera"
the peeling billboard said
as cottonwood down floated
along the road to Damascus
amid the emerald and evergreen
of irridescent valleys,
molten lavender hillsides,
slippery cliffs,
rough-as-cloudwool peaks.
The families of prominence
each are taking turns
in mottled sunshine
for my view.

II. Framed by Goldenrod
Fishermen like flies
inside the river fishing

III. Beyond Hungry Hollow
The pink barns of apple country,
Eskew's Mulches,
Kellystone and Jellystone Parks,
Old Brutus Historical Society,
You know you're in the country
When you see that 7Up sign.

Last Night

A North Korean microvirologist
and an East German software security specialist
were drinking barley wine in a Northern Ireland bar
in Rochester New York
arguing whether white hots
should go on a garbageplate.
Do you see how crazy my life is?

Meanwhile in the Material World

May is the month in Phoenician Britain
When they worship Nimrod,
The Baal of Beltane,
With bagpipes from Morocco,
The original serpent king
With his hybrid test tube babies
And his two-faced forked tongue
That all our Gods came from,
On a throne of horns with his virgin bride
Who wanted just to kill him,
Mammi at his side,
Known as Isis, Ishtar, Astarte, Athena, Diana, Mary,
“the one face hidden by the many masks,”

Like the Hebrew initiates of the Egyptian mystery school
Who were turned by Babylon’s dragons into Jews
To transmute Zion’s sun and Moses’ muse
And told to follow rules like wishing harm on all the Gentiles
By high priests in psilocybin mushroom hats;
Or Jesus, whose real name was Arrius Piso,
The murderer of Nero,
Who made believe that he was Horus
While the Essenes washed their hands
And the Nazarenes joined the Zealots,
Wrote a brand new book for rebel Jews
That instead remade the moldy Empire Holy,
With new terms of surrender
And a cannibalistic eucharist.

In Manhattan’s pentagrams of darkness
Draculas with dragon wings drift through magick black,
The stones that healed in ancient time now sexualized to shame,
Mage mascara makes Egyptian eyes
On hierophant hermaphrodites
Who walk below the gold of pharaoh tombs,
Its columns, discs and obelisks
As if the slaves once trapped there
Are no more, as if the scientists of sound
Who imagined Saint Patrick’s Cathedral,
Where Jehovah and Lucifer are the same being,
The one unquestioned good in a hell of endless threat,
Have not evolved to deeper sine waves
In vocoder voices synthesized
To synthetic primal rhythm.
There’s fear as far
As the mind can perceive, the rows of empty storefronts
Are filled with things none can afford,
But they drive their broken hearts to gain their share
Of what is visible, material, because they’ll never be
One of the invisible, the royal reptiles
Who need blood, not flashy and disposable jewels.
The gargoyles watch with wings perched
On every public building that reminds us to obey.
In the caves new Mohammeds take dictation
To keep those taking power from the saved.
Above them all the black Moloch cathedrals,
The stone temples of pyramid money
That vie with passing serpents in the sky.

Every good girl must get raped sometime,
Every boy must be arrested with his pants pulled down,
Every vodka must be top-shelf for the chemistry to gel.
Last call for oblivion, for the soul too willingly bartered
For a kind look or the right word, or an edge when
Chasing pussy down the catacombs of sin.
“Are you responsible?
“Mistakes are always made.”
“Are you reliable?”
“We people have our failings.”
“Are you professional?”
“Or do you take things personal?”
“Are you worthy of my trust?”
“You begging child who was born worthless.”
She finds the moment to unleash
Her reticent resistance.
He takes the opportunity
To squeeze between her drink.
There are no words
For what he is,
And she could never say,
So the play the roles of heel and femme fatale
As the poison that they drink turns into words,
Turns into shame, and no ones sees the seven stars
That glow above her head, more radiant than
The crown of thorns adorning Lady Liberty.

He plays the one song of his life over and over
While mold grows on the hotel wall
And every person there wants to abduct him
And the only producers who can help him here
Are dealers, with white gloves and woolen aprons.
The life he lived was not worth living,
How the people thought the same and dreamed
Of nothing, but surviving
While the picturehouse played every possibility
In his head, in every home at ten o’clock
The giant blue-eyed screen
The live feed near from where he lives now:
The Masonic Temple of Druids with their wands of Hollywood
Performing the same trick
As the Wiccans, Freemasons, Mormons:
The rings and secret oaths, the beatings
And exhibited slaves, while in other rooms
They sacrifice some children for the adrenaline
At the moment of their death
And no Satan dogs from Sirius
Will ever detect the bodies under bodies
In their cemeteries, as dreamers come each day
To find the prize that they are missing,
The stardom and the love that has been stripped
Away already, and will never be returned.
The cities underground, to Lancaster and Reno,
Will make of them what everyone desires:
Programmed slaves who always win the best awards.

The obelisk and dome at zero Greenwich time
At Canary Wharf down 1206 from Isle of Dogs
Like Angkor Wat is pointed to the Halls of Draco.
It’s best that I should make my own copper astrolabe
From now on.
Still I have such sadness
For all the lizard people
Who see with eyes deranged
To patterns, colors without form,
Their paper skin no home for love or warmth,
Just the humorless business of
Setting traps for the stupid, the doubting, the lost
With a web that must stay spinning
And the planet spinning nearer to the central sun
That wakes us all up from the deepest sleep
To brush away the ways they tried
To save us from ourselves.
We needed all that sorrow
To be laughing, laughing now.

Something's Different

The trees have now turned blue
returned to their original color;
you're free to be who you are.

The sky is violet now
you see its higher frequency;
a larger field from which to capture dreams.

The water rises burgundy
from caverns in the soil;
your beauty now is fearless

You have to jump right in.

One Day in Haiku

“The aim of haiku is to live twenty four hours a day, that is, to put meaning into every moment, a meaning that may be intense or diffuse, but never ceases.” – R.H. Blythe

I’ve woken all week from this Hindu Professor
Lecturing me on invisible gaps in space
That hold everything together and keep us apart

The blue detergent from the dark cupboard corner
When released floods with pent-up sudsy life
I didn’t follow directions

Trees are the image
Opera the sound
I am the eyes and the ears

An old friend on the phone
“Splendid, that’s simply splendid”
After: “that poor, poor girl”

The sound of water
Swirling over mossy rocks
A camera clicks

“Did you get a good photo?”
“Do not concern yourself with my picture-taking
Go back to your red notepad.”

At the still pond
A leaf tries to get in the picture
A bullfrog tries to get in the poem

Crackling leaves
As from raindrops falling
Above us golden branches, blue sky

Kodak moments
No camera
No more Kodak

Wind through the trees like a rushing stream
But there’s only the stone walls that are a way of life here
At the real stream dogs want to pee

Bouquets in thick black mud
Elephant ears, skunk cabbage, tall yellow iris,
A powder-blue dragonfly with four giant wings

Our quiet walk
Disturbed by a sudden, simultaneous “ah”
Dirt and rock above our heads from an overturned tree

A tree and a rock in the same spot
Have been fighting it out for years
The tree with its chokehold seems to be winning

Poorhouse Brook
Down Frogtown Road
In water turned to filthy-rich wine New Canaan

At the top of the hill beyond the desolate forest
Brand-new mansions all in antique taupe
Every one is deserted, For Sale by Broker

Flags and balloons surround the deli
The doors are flung open wide
The proprietor says hi and smiles, but no food

An actual green yellow red
Traffic light stands in someone’s front yard
I wonder if they turn it on at Christmas

The music is too furious
We wait it out in the driveway
"Cello Concerto" by Camille Saint-Saëns

Pulling roots, dragging water, digging holes, planting flowers
Exhausted afterwards
Like after a fuck

Reading, reading, poetry everywhere
But to catch it I must walk a million miles
Hey that’s me up ahead, reading

The house is now still
Despite the churning of my brain
My clothes spin in the washing machine

A call: they’re drinking urine in LA now
I fear it may now be too late for my idea
Trapped Amazonian Oxygen in canisters

Tony comes to fix the fence
Asks me about the future of the Euro
Says he misses Michelangelo’s face on the Lire

“Times were better when they were worse,
You know, that’s what they say in Sicily
But to them 100 years is in their back pocket.”

Tiny turds in our house we follow as breadcrumbs
To a chipmunk hanging from the window shade
That explains all the funny business in this house

It takes a broom, quick
Reflexes and a village
To coax a chipmunk outdoors

She remembers every number on her old address
In Delaware Ohio
But doesn’t know if Harding or Hayes was born there

Away from his people, Steven Tyler confides to Oprah:
"I'm alone here, I'm all alone!
Will you be my friend?"

I try to get the skinny on this eclipse
A rare alignment of earth, sun, moon and Alcyone
The Great Central Sun – meaning I’m on my own

Mad Men replays my worst scenes from childhood
I can never get enough , squealing with glee
It’s always the highlight of the week

I put more care in preparing for sleep
Than anything else that I do all day
It must be the most important thing

A thin bright light frames the closed door
Like the eclipse – as above, so below
As on the outside, so within

Lyric: World of Limes

In a series. I'll post the song that goes with this as soon as it's finished.

My nightmare was a dream just yesterday
You the line-up pin-up girl
The one who everybody said was guilty
The one for me
You did not kill me then
You just danced across my moves
Said it won’t touch you as if you knew
In the sewer you looked too far
Down the rabbit hole at stars
There’s no need
For the day
Evening queen
Hide away

Wishin’ we were going the right wrong way
In a car
Sirens call then I hear that shot
Wonder where you are

I lost you in a project lounge and grill
Found you at the pay phone bell
The places in between they said they saw you there
I knew they were never near the truth
Everything was make-believe
Like every time you said you’d leave
It’s still so real our world of limes
Down the darkened shades of time
There’s no need
For the day
Evening woman
Slip away

Wishin’ we were going the right wrong way
In a car
Sirens call then I hear that shot
Wonder where you are

You were
Meaner than the world
Better than my word
Crueler than my love
Kinder than the way you let me fall
Through the evening’s shawl

Saturday Night Poetry Reading

Tonight's poem is by Marguerite Young (1908-1995), a descendant of Brigham Young who in her incredibly poetic novels, poetry and non-fiction always seemed obsessed with how doggedly humans pursue utopian ideals. As she said, "All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side."

My friend John Latta posted a wonderful poem of hers from 1944 called The Cloud that I liked so much I decided to read it ... out loud.

Text Message with Implications

The most powerful drop of water in the ocean
fell off the President's brow
while he's waxing his wood in the Oval Bowl
and thinking of secrets
that hang in the air like miasmas;
what was stuffed in his grandmother's dresser drawer
too tightly. Striken by humidity
a young boy wonders who he is,
finds out in a sudden burst of dust
and never again wants to know,
running, forever running
to some annihilating shore.

Goodbye Donna

Don't let Neal Bogart rip you off again in heaven!

Whores for Eleusis from Baltimore

"Monument City," photograph by John Mifflin Hood, St. Paul Place, Baltimore

"JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon got his real start with Sanford Weill at Commercial Credit in Baltimore in 1985…" – News report

The plan was hatched when we were smoking Viceroys
In the blue and modern building that we passed by every day
Laughing past the Harbor Court Hotel where they both stayed
On the way to Jesse Jackson campaign headquarters,
Or my father’s homegrown weed we tried to smoke
Unsuccessfully from my saxophone, by the bus stop where
Poe appeared in smoke to tell me “translate Baudelaire.”
We laughed at dreams of fame, and cried for those we saw
Everyday, as we we raged against the gap
In the long coke binge called Reagan’s America
Between the have-not’s and the hands who pulled the strings.
They were learning too, how to mainstream loan shark loans,
How to fool wholly-desperate, semi-literate black people
To buy insurance for the bank, “payment protection”
They would call it, in closed-folder closings to force
Squeegie kid parents to sign, techniques they refined
While we tried to enter antique stores to buy old dulcimers
Or listened to Soweto Jazz and Marxist agit-pop,
Or managed pain like waste, or walked the complaint plank
From bar to bar along the godforsaken town down the river.
Sub-prime loans, they finally called them, as they found their
Path to power, to become in ’98 the largest
Financial institution that the world had ever seen,
On the backs of the hapless poor,
While we were planting shrubs and forming families,
Grateful for the trickle-down of a Subaru on credit
And a home without a basement needing labor we called love.
They worked on credit default swaps and naked synthetic triggers,
Making phone calls so Glass-Steagall would go away,
To distract us from the plan to slash the wages
And living standards of America’s middle class
Permanently, on the backs of the hapless poor,
While we paused from life to look down the President’s pants
And count chads in Volusia County
And pretend that Al Qaeda was not El Al CIA.

And now we all are squeegee kids, with six-figure debt portfolios,
Every one of us, paramilitary troops and drones
Keep us off the armored limos of Jamie and his kept men
So they’ll be spared our “jealousy” at having to pay
For his $70 trillion dollars in stupid, greedy losses
With the blood and bones of our children, and the many
Generations after them. He eats at a cafeteria
In the building next to the one I work in now,
Where there never is the indignity of a bill
Or a shortage of blue fin tuna (that BP profits
Helped make possible). There’s a trail of slime behind him,
So many seedy ways to chisel people’s money:
The revolutionary overdraft processing system
That intentionally prioritized higher dollar transactions
So that as many transactions as possible could overdraft;
The $325 million in segregated MF Global customer funds
That he took when he was supposed to be custodian;
The bribed officials in Jefferson County, Alabama, one of
The poorest counties in the US, who entered into a derivatives
Transaction so deadly it forced the citizens to choose
Between sewage treatment and food;
The thousands of multi-million dollar lawsuits
And the paltry sums paid to make them go away
As the cost of doing business, nothing personal, for the world's
Largest public company, the biggest bank too big to jail
(Despite debt more than the entire GDP of the world
A few times over). He’s one of the good guys, the President says,
And maybe he is, in his heart of hearts, where he’s
Worried another wizard might be mixing something up
In some other basement shop. He knows how only
The best and most ruthless of any bunch will be
Immunized from loss, as he writes laws and Op-Ed pieces,
Collects the best politicians money can buy,
And sits on the board of the Federal Reserve
Bequeathing to himself unlimited sums of money
For free to lend at profit, or to gamble instead
For a higher return where he knows any loss from the risk
Will be made whole. His life is a gift to us
To see beyond all his transparent lies
To the vast infrastructure of corruption
That infects every channel of communication
And subverts every walk of life,
While I write poems that don't even change things for myself.

Captain James, painting by Robert McClintock

It’s that grounded merchant ship the Greek owner made
A restaurant of, as a gift to bountiful America,
Where no one ever came to eat. The only time
I ever saw him in all his years in Baltimore was there,
In the dark beyond the perfectly set tables,
Looking at all the invisible people. These were his people,
But even they were jealous, the ghosts who said
The only things that weren’t quite disrespectful.
The only things I ever heard as well.

Captain James posing with his blues guitar

To be honest

Translation of One of Rilke’s Last Poems

From a correspondence with Erika Mitterer, Bad Ragaz, Switzerland, August 24, 1926

Thirteenth Reply, for Erika, the Feast of Praise

Dove, who drifted away                  from aviary stay
Wired to house and circle,              one with the night, the day,
She knows the secret thing             for her wings have entered
Away from all the terror                 nestled in the chill air.

Among the pigeons, the                  ones forever nested,
The never-trembling ones              who don’t know tenderness;
An ever-rested heart                       will never once be tested:
Free from all retraction                  its skill is happiness.

Stretching over nothingness          her being spans the all.
Oh what a fearless throw,             oh what a reckless ball,
Filling her hands with it                with what won’t return: pure
Without the weight of home         she is more.

Dreizehnte Antwort, Für Erika, zum Feste der Rühmung

Taube, die draußen blieb,              außer dem Taubenschlag,
wieder in Kreis und Haus,             einig der Nacht, dem Tag,
weiß sie die Heimlichkeit,              wenn sich der Einbezug
fremdester Schrecken schmiegt    in den gefühlten Flug.

Unter den Tauben, die                  allergeschonteste,
niemals gefährdeste,                     kennt nich die Zärtlichkeit;
wiedererholtes Herz                      ist das bewohnteste:
freier durch Widerruf                   freut sich die Fähigkeit.

Über dem Nirgendssein                spannt sich das Überall!
Ach der geworfene,                       ach der gewagte Ball,
Füllt er die Hände nicht                anders mit Wiederkehr:
rein um sein Heimgewicht           ist er mehr.

What the Breath Says

Everything here is a gift
but it is not your home
—so many have gotten lost
forgetting that one direction.

Homily

John the Baptist has done some fucked-up shit
you can see it in his eyes
goddamned Gideons
I hate them with a passion
in their meeting house of hellfire
—give me that blind dude with the guitar
at the Serenity Church of Recovery,
it's worship man, not fear.

Stevens Textplication 17: Metaphors of a Magnifico

Portrait of Il Magnifico by Agnolo Bronzino

Lorenzo de Medici was known in his Florentine kingdom as Lorenzo il Magnifico, from the Italian for “magnificent.” Il Magnifico was a quite interesting figure, managing despite almost unbelievable debauchery, unscrupulousness and dishonesty (see the Showtime series The Borgias for example) to be the patron of the rebirth of humanism in the form of the Italian Renaissance, supporting da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo and so many other artists, and making it possible for books like the Hermeticum (the inspiration for the scientific revolution) to be distributed throughout Europe.

Today’s poem, “Metaphors of a Magnifico” poses at the outset an interesting question: What kind of metaphors would this magnifico need? To be seen as a great and benevolent king? To have a staff of great thinkers and artisans to replace in the public mind his horrible and bloody deeds?

This poem was published in June of 1918, in the midst of the Great War that made the concept of human civilization a somewhat sketchy one. The scene described in the poem is clearly martial, except that instead of the foxholes and repeating rifles of the then-current war we have men presumably with spears marching across the bridge in unison to what appears to be a medieval city-fortress. We hear and see the squad marching menacingly closer and closer to the pleasant village, followed by what appears to be a loss of consciousness, like a soldier losing his consciousness before death as he nears the gate of the city to fight.

Yet the poem seems about other things. It is a metaphor for something far different, as we’ll discuss. Here it is:

Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,
Into twenty villages,
Or one man
Crossing a single bridge into a village.

This is old song
That will not declare itself . . .

Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are
Twenty men crossing a bridge
Into a village.

That will not declare itself
Yet is certain as meaning . . .

The boots of the men clump
On the boards of the bridge.
The first white wall of the village
Rises through fruit-trees.
Of what was it I was thinking?
So the meaning escapes.

The first white wall of the village...
The fruit-trees...

Frederick II Conquered Parma in 1521, Tintoretto (1579)

Let’s unpack this stanza-by-stanza:

Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,
Into twenty villages,
Or one man
Crossing a single bridge into a village.

This stanza expresses quite concretely the ancient philosophical notion of the One and the Many. Each person lives in their own subjective world that cannot be shared by anyone else. Thus the march of 20 men into a village happens differently in the 20 distinct consciousness’s to the degree that it becomes 20 distinct and separate villages. By the same token, all men are one man in form and moral inheritance, we all share the mind of the one universal consciousness, much as the unified regiment of the soldiers in this image seem to be operating from one shared, hive mind.

This relationship between the collective and the singular is basic to human society and to each individual’s spiritual journey, but it is fundamentally ambiguous. The collapsing figure that fragments into multiple perceptions in Cubist paintings like Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase cannot be easily reconciled with the Mona Lisa. Here the speaker struggles to resolve the polarity:

This is old song
That will not declare itself . . .

The term “declare” is striking, both in its war-like implications and its connotation of a decision between two choices being definitively made. Clearly the speaker wants to know what is the ultimate truth contained in this picture. “Song” is also an interesting choice of word, suggesting an imaginative or unconscious prodding as much as an intellectual thought process. That it is old is indisputable:

The One manifests as the many, the formless putting on form. (Rig Veda ~ 1200 B.C.).

We are in the habit of assuming one Form for each set of many things to which we give the same name. (Plato, The Republic, 380 BC)

Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another. (Leibniz, 1670)

Interesting in this context is Fritjof Capra’s book The Tao of Physics, a wonderful introduction to the immense commonality between the Western quantum physics of the Modernist time period and ancient Eastern spiritual beliefs:

The central aim of Eastern mysticism is to experience all the phenomena in the world as manifestations of the same ultimate reality. This reality is seen as the essence of the universe, underlying and unifying the multitude of things and events we observe. The Hindus call it Brahman, The Buddhists Dharmakaya (The Body of Being) or Tathata (Suchness) and the Taoists Tao; each affirming that it transcends our intellectual concepts and defies further explanation. This ultimate essence, however, cannot be separated from its multiple manifestations. It is central to the very nature to manifest itself in myriad forms which come into being and disintegrate, transforming themselves into one another without end. (p. 210)

A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement. Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated ‘basic building blocks’, but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. (p. 78)

The coincident realities to the speaker of the poem seem as confounding as they must have seemed to the physicists of Stevens’ time grappling with wave-particle duality. As Capra writes:

In ordinary life, we are not aware of the unity of all things, but divide the world into separate objects and events. This division is useful and necessary to cope with our everyday environment, but it is not a fundamental feature of reality. It is an abstraction devised by our discriminating and categorising intellect. To believe that our abstract concepts of separate ‘things’ and ‘events’ are realities of nature is an illusion. (p 76).

But to just accept the one as reality is to turn away from multiplicity, and more importantly to lose the promised connection of subjectivity to the unity. Einstein’s theory of invariance, his term for what we now call the theory of relativity, was designed to answer the question of why the objective laws of nature sometimes seemed to bend depending on the vantage point of the observer. Thus he developed formulas for the relationship between the constancy (or invariance) of physical laws (such as the speed of light), and the relativity of the observer (the position or motion in time or space from which it is observed). Wallace Stevens, who shared the exact same chronology as Einstein (1879-1955), is posing here how the vantage point of the observer affects the constancy of the whole, the effect of which is a reality that can’t stay fixed. How does one get beyond oneself to the ultimate reality?


Osho, who wrote the book Einstein The Buddha

The speaker tries a different tact:

Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are
Twenty men crossing a bridge
Into a village.

This standard-issue tautology provides a certain comfort of “that’s the way it is.” But that cannot be satisfying given what the mind had just perceived before, how it came close to a sense of ultimate reality via imagination, only to inevitably fall back on uncertainty and ambiguity.

That will not declare itself
Yet is certain as meaning . . .

As with Thomas Pynchon’s novels, the patterns and correspondences the mind so easily identifies don’t connect to a truth that stays valid for more than a split second. The irrefutable truth the mind needs stands slightly beyond ever elusive. The metaphor for metaphor, I suppose, is bridge, and in this one, the narrator gets stuck on said bridge.

Every time the physicists asked nature a question in an atomic experiment, nature answered with a paradox, and the more they tried to clarify the situation, the sharper the paradoxes became. It took them a long time to accept the fact that these paradoxes belong to the intrinsic structure of atomic physics, and to realise that they arise whenever one attempts to describe atomic events in the traditional terms of physics. (Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, p76)

The traditional terms of physics are mathematics, equivalent to the words metaphysicians use. The speaker cannot give up his quest, so decides to go closer in:

The boots of the men clump
On the boards of the bridge.
The first white wall of the village
Rises through fruit-trees.
Of what was it I was thinking?
So the meaning escapes.

The abstraction recedes as details come into focus: the sound of the boots on the boards, the fruit trees appearing, as they would to a soldier getting closer to the walls. This more direct engagement with the phenomenon brings a tangible sensory awareness, but one that eludes the mind and so cannot be captured or understood. The mind is left behind, as in the moment of its death trying to remember something from childhood:

The first white wall of the village...
The fruit-trees...

ChaCha! expert Randy T calls this moment in the poem “a nebulous no man’s land where the intelligence struggles, unsuccessfully, to encompass a reality beyond its reach.” The unreal can be discussed, the real cannot. Is the village even there?

This, to Cary Wolfe (in “The Idea of Observation at Key West”, collected in What is Post-Humanism?) “[confirms] the otherness and difference of ‘external’ reality precisely by insisting on its inseparability from the mind and imagination.” The disjunction calls to mind wave/particle duality again, for the one thing (Space/Consciousness) has potentialities (Wave/Thought) that give rise to the many things (Matter as the Spherical Wave Motion of Space/Reality). Imagination is aligned with the waves in the quantum field, that seem as one and wholly different from the particles we call reality. Capra again:

At the sub-atomic level, matter does not exist with certainty at definite places, but rather shows ‘tendencies to exist’ and atomic events do not occur with certainty at definite times and in definite ways, but rather show ‘tendencies to occur.’ In the formalism of quantum theory, these tendencies are expressed as probabilities and are associated with mathematical quantities which take the form of waves. This is why particles can be waves at the same time. (p. 76) 

Or H.G. Widdowson, in the essay “So the Meaning Escapes…”:

[Poetry] is a reality which cannot be explained but only expressed and experienced through the expression.

I think of it also as that moment when the mind gives way to direct experience. I wrote about this sensation in a poem “The Flight from Cincinnati” in terms of the way people waiting at airports for travelers stop their fretting and cogitating when they finally see the people they are there to pick up:

The people who wait look confused, then,
finding their travelers, lose themselves
in recognition, the woes of the waiting
turned to song and story—then I, too,
disappear again.

Where does this all leave us? Despite the stretching of intellectual muscles this poem makes us do, it’s not a stretch to note that the Renaissance fighters for de Medici have been replaced by the doughboys of the Western Front, just as the science de Medici fostered was being replaced by a new science aligned with different myths.

The metaphors, the ability to translate and connect ideas, the highest fruits of the mind when thinking and communicating, in the end serve only the barbarism of war, with death the only resolution possible.

Or maybe that viewpoint too is relative, too narrow:

The Eastern mystics see the universe as an inseparable web, whose interconnections are dynamic and not static. The cosmic web is alive; it moves and grows and changes continually. Modern physics, too, has come to conceive of the universe as such a web of relations and, like Eastern mysticism, has recognised that this web is intrinsically dynamic. The dynamic aspect of matter arises in quantum theory as a consequence of the wave-nature of subatomic particles, and is even more essential in relativity theory, where the unification of space and time implies that the being of matter cannot be separated from its activity. The properties of subatomic particles can therefore only be understood in a dynamic context; in terms of movement, interaction and transformation. (Capra p. 78)

After All That Rain

Cauliflower clouds, in the tree boughs,
brother sun and sister earth, merged,
like this marriage of moss and stone,
the brilliance of the green
in all who live between...

Spikes of light on peaceful leaves,
the furry glare of vines, on wires
widening like cornucopias
from one line to a swarm of green,
in thicket skeins of incandescent branch
and tangled shadows, translucent grass
muscular with knee-deep seed...

New pine sprouts rest in the sun,
maple leaves shine like upside-down stars,
they drip with vibrant light,
sashay and shiver in naked delight,
their pom-poms proving they are free
as hands bow, pray, lean, arch up to see...

A motley crowd allowed to squat the beds
where spinning maple beanies aim their heads.
Algae grows on spindly spears like wands from heavy brush;
the mighty hillside pine...

The glistening is too frequent now,
too aligned
to be but in that other world
I enter, oh too briefly,
before it's gone
to radiant sun
and the twitching of my own hands.

Rejection

Kings will allow in what makes them look good – or giggle –
And behead anyone smarter than they are – it’s God’s will –

For life must revolve around something – we will have found
Inspiration, all of us, from the gifts of the crown,

The way he conjures heaven and the world in his mind.
But the king is just a middle-man, on either side

There are secrets, the underground and celestial
Hosts hold hands to guard the truth that’s unconditional.

The king dispenses only what’s allowed to be known,
For each must bear a silence that’s all his or her own.

Don’t look upon the sad and stupid king with pity,
For you too look away from what is not yours to see.

You too spend regret on all missed opportunities
As if you hadn’t let them go like tolls at parting seas.

Bridge in Fog

Satan fell because he refused
to worship man (says the Koran);
what kind of servant must I be
to question my own divinity?
The ancient monoliths
so finely calibrated
to all the imperfections
of our placement in the sky
(the tilt and wobble, sidereal slant),
but still I cannot trust what is
for fear it's not quite right,
for fear I couldn't tell the difference
between what's good and what is bad
—the hardest choice to make, for where,
without that, would I ever find compassion?

The Oyster Bay Manifesto

“’I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn’t free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I can’t even give you hope that it will be different someday—that They’ll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology’s elaborate terror, and stop using every other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level—and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive…’” – from “Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering”

This shit’s nothing new, the Knights of Malta tracked your moves like GPS a thousand years ago and read your correspondence as it went from brain to quill. They need only your resistance, nothing more, a white to frame their perfect black, a white made by DuPont the great death-dealer, that’s all you now allow yourself, when you’re chasing down the demons They created for your pleasure, that melt just as you believe you hold Them, the final Mephistopheles in your hands. An enemy! What a distraction, how the mind can be harnessed to a task: eradicate evil! What better way to penetrate the secret center and implant the seed, and with it the DNA of mechanical response – fear and longing – engineered? Divine of a kind, the way the assassins never even know who they are working for, or do not know they’re killing, and every effort to mess their noses in the scenery of their crimes only makes them feel more victimized. Thus what would be still can be projected in an arc – the mind is made to differentiate the calculus, as “proof” of fate (the gears below the gears below the gears).

A beautiful pattern, like that made by geese in winter skies, or the distant nebulas destroying all that’s there.

Any metaphors will only serve another God than the one they are attached to: the cathode-ray Jesus, the cinetheodolite Buddha. Nature is changed, but we recognize it as it was, before the spark was stolen, reflexively. All it takes to redirect the hive mind is one drone infiltrated. Once one thing is changed, universes can be reconfigured. Just one story can re-write history and make the mythic supplicant. Slowly everything becomes plausible instead of real – hallucinations ripped away from base perceptions and diseases diagnosed from the output stream of thinking – there are places that you cannot go, those now deemed too natural…

God submits to the conspiracy, plays Her part perfectly: another way to play the game of choice. If this world is seen as an illusion, there’s always a new one, better or at least more airtight. Something about accepting your own immortality. Something about peeling back the layers of distraction to accept the deeper unanswered questions: “Are you making these relentless connections, or merely seeing them?”; “What is pre-set, what do you set in motion?”; “Why the greater the resistance, the greater the temptation?” All’s you know is that the barest intimation of the ruins of Atlantis is all you need to build a house where you can live. The end of knowledge thus is falsity, innocence resolves only to complicity, the mind the unclean organ snapped like lepers’ slates. It must be kept in prison, of obsessively cancelling the x’s out on either side of the equal sign.


Prose in honor of Thomas Pynchon’s 75th birthday today…

Once Again in the Intergalactic Sweatlodge

The treasure in the hole

is there to hold

as long as it is not

defined as treasure,

a little off

the answer

when being given,

the path to home

must stay on course

despite the missed

and incorrect directions

like a memory of something new…

Temperature rising

to check the mind

awakening

the spirit with its

gentle membrane wave

proceeds…

The eyes are always crooked

adapting

to the outside

and self-created mirrors

so we can see ourselves,

while the glass which

holds my image is

a fraction of my form...

The water carries

toxins out

as water brought them in,

exchange

and in between

a breath

choosing

to receive

and when to give...

Unrecognizable endings

as the balance always settles

at a different place

in the motion,

the distant bells

remembering

what I scarcely recognize,

between the hum and the silence,

as I leap to cast my figure

moving through the space

as inside source,

a quickening

runs on forever

where my mind

so mercifully

cannot go...

Empty mind,

abundant heart –

I am born into

a towel

and at the whispered ending

released from all

but freedom’s feeling

going on, going forever on.

Poem Composed While Asleep

The lighthouse flare
burns the hillsides,
the flowers that play
something they are not
to stand apart
to get along
must now be real
to meet the light.

Hotel Vignette

Grande Lakes, Florida

The orange lights of Orlando at dawn
as the night people with their moon-white faces
chasing billowing sun-dress breezes give way
to the people of the day, with their straight
white skirts and marble-tapping shoes
inside the luxury prison
of Romanesque colonnades,
conquistador chandeliers,
uncertain coral colors.
A squirrel runs across the palazzo
to the forest of gold bamboo.
Floating moss crosses the lake,
the sawgrass glistens.

Update on a Temporary Brother-in-Law

Jacksonville Beach, FL

The curving coast
all round with sand
your orange face
behind it in some
pastel world
of crabs and divorcees,
Ward the Professor
who oversees the HVAC
and the covenants
of some sea-side
condominium community.
Your dream of making history real
is now a footnote in the journal
Pan-American Highway Notes
—not the highway that you live on
where the college students learn
how to break their parents' laws.
Once I was that college student
awed by your integrity,
your drive to make ideas come to life
through humor, hard work and humility
—the book that changes it all
may be the book that's next to read.
Everything on notecards,
not a thought that could be spared,
no frivolity on the graduate student's road.
I didn't really notice
that your heart was not quite in it,
how fear of losing everything kept you going.
How the years have set you free of that
to embrace a mess that's not
so very different from my own.

Cloudpuffs from tenured pipes
as down below I veer
to not know someone who I never could.
It was only me I guess who still believed,
you never would.

The Real Game Now

The real game now
is convincing the rich
they still have money,
and the poor that they still
lack power,
and the middle-class in the midst
of disappearing
that whatever happens
at the end of their street
everything still has
a rational explanation.

M’Aider Parade

For this girl

International day of the sex worker,
The oldest and largest industry in the world,
Commoditizing for profit
The one crying, all-encompassing need,
That one will always give anything to have
And will secretly choose again and again
In those moments of torment and shame
When one finally feels alive.
Who holds the key to the means of production?
It’s time to arise like Lysistrata’s wives!

All the butterflies of programmed Monarch sex slaves;
The sexualized nine-year-olds from steroid milk and S&M cartoons;
The headless mannequins of the 24/7 sweat-shop fashion factories;
The S Factor debutantes learning high-end slut culture;
The May pole dancers trained in counterfeit intimacy;
The emaciated teenage girls in underwear on the cover of every ladies
magazine;
The surgeon-disfigured, Photoshop-altered, eating-disordered model of
earning love that is broadcast out in threatening signals to the heart
of survival at the core of every woman;
The casting-couch script doctors who turn every female character into
heroines to be fucked, victims to be saved, or dreamers after
marriageable men;
The women in China sold to their husbands' mothers, and the mothers
who own them;
The ho’s who teach the tricks to dutifully play the role of predatory boys
     without mercy or restraint;
The mothers who shun reservation girls if they’re not grateful to be alive
after ultra-violent rape for the crime of drinking with the boys;
The daughters who let Indian widows flock to Vrindavan to die;
The deer-thin waifs who starve themselves for love, the acne-covering
make-up fetishists and body-piercing cutters of the soul,
all trying to fit inside a world they can never understand;
The mothers in Somalia who allow 95% of that country’s teenage girls to
have their genitals mutilated;
The underpaid executives in paralyzing heels trying to keep up with the
Jones-boys by revealing something others won’t;
The promoted secretaries who’ve been stripped of all respect by every
man, woman and hr generalist in the large, remembering building;
The Saudi wives who say not so fast on allowing women to drive or live
     a portion of their lives not under a legal male guardian;
The well-spoken spokeswoman who makes it seem so kind and
reasonable to make fearful pregnant girls take a vaginal probe
after they’ve been raped by their fathers as condition for an abortion;
The kindly mother superior who says wives are required by scripture to
go back to cheating, strangling husbands who control every moment
of their lives;
The nurses in South Africa who scream at delivering mothers on their
     knees to clean up their own blood;
The women who take male attention as their only means to power;
All the hard ways women learn to get a man to do what's right before
the universal judge.

Sacred prostitutes! It’s time to reclaim your body parts, your moral
     center, your souls!
It’s time to stare down the male gaze, so that when the poles shift
We won't wonder why the most terrifying thing in this world was the
perfect beauty of every woman!

Unconscious the majorette raises her sceptered wand.
Unconscious we march to the beat of our wounds.
Let us pause to be conscious, to know what we do to ourselves in the
guise of others.

No parades until our sisters are respected!
No peace until the Goddess is set free!

The End of April

Firepit ash from a good burn
blows with blossoms in the gusts.

The moment is too gentle
to hold on to things that are
no longer, for the gift of life
is to grieve.

The Name Book

"Somewhere deep in his shell there's an ember of pride..." - Linda Creed

In some weird way she was trying to speak to me,
like some chick-a-dee or end-of-summer cricket,
the reasons why she could no longer love me,
the things that some imagined me had done.

It came across a vast impossible chasm,
I almost heard the voice of that other me,
but it was soon drowned out by more complaining
and requests to hear her out like a gentle breeze.

I guess some honesty had broke the seal
and sent her into post-traumatic stress,
some pushing back at responsibility for her happiness
from some semblance of a self that's locked inside.

I try to, one more time, express my feelings,
and it's cancelled on procedural grounds again,
that's one of my biggest problems, she says, I never listen,
I need to hear her pain each time it comes.

Amazing how oblivious I can be
when giving love and showing vulnerability
to a closed-off heart and a shut-down mind
and irreconcilable animosity.

I hide behind her smile in public view,
and flash the thumbs-up sign to everyone.
I come home from the people I've inspired
to find an undone list of things to do

and I, perpetual fool, don't question it,
as if I need to prove my love is true,
when it's only giving someone what they want
and thinking that's exactly what I need,

to give without expectation, to love
without constraint, but it always comes again,
it's how I'm doing it, no gentleness
can soothe a charging heart full of herself.