Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom (20090507).
On the first day we had no luck at all. We unrolled our sleeping bags
under the empurpled marrow-core of the starry firmament and absorbed
the shimmering nightly radiance of the Great Spirit. Intending to raise towers,
palaces to the unbroken dreams of lost generations, we counted our coins
and other media of neurotransmitter exchange systems of barter. Popularity,
hatred and scandal twist like brown twine-spun rope through a seedy past,
but white kinetic energy seethed through our Grateful Dead need-a-miracle
sandwiches, sipping at plastic bottles filled with stream water. Smoking bowls.
Lighters. Pipes and papers. The familiar routines of modern American
accoutrements in a strange and mystical land.
Next morning we found that sand-blackened wedges of Spanish silver pavers
lined the crude dirt path, and we in our multi-colored Indian coats packed
and carted all along that ancient animal trail, wild reverence now welling in our
weary souls. May the sick ones, we duly prayed, lie still and breathe the world
as liquid amber light fades from their temporarily neglected vision quests. Our
spirits were lightly roasting in the toasters that access random dimensions,
glancing off the endlessly scintillating white water wave packets not twenty yards
west from our anti-oasis, the patch of pure yellow desert sand enveloped in our
rainforest lush, and the tinfoil glow of a wise man, a wise land tucked into
asymptotic limits. Sometimes you have to lose a great deal of the flesh sick
before the spirit soars well. Swell. Smell of bacon sizzling and boiling water and
eyes that seize upon the unripened bolting sun in the east, for the stars continued
to illume through the predawn, murmuring of transient blindness and languages
whispered from yawning plant stomas.
We set out, my friend and I, in defiance of immoral law, joined by our ancestors,
and by yours, and complex chemistry, hearing the footsteps of unseen creatures
all around us, in the intermittent shadows of mesquite trees and ironwood and
singing brooks and jungle runners and eye-searing stars. We'd hitchhiked from
the far Northwest only to discover the pleasure of our birthright, knowing truly that
nothing good comes without a price. Simplicity itself knows and loves us in the
secret languages men have forgotten how to speak, or been compelled to forget.
Then, weeks later, on that sundered shore, watching a while the bowl of the
boiling ocean, the gods we sought rose up before us, and we knew instantly how to
properly despise all those we had left behind for their unbroken worship of
false idols, and we were born anew as children: strict but glorious are the
requirements for the new city that is to be forged.
Yes. Delighting in all we saw, and all was alive, and this god, this prairie flesh of
god under fire, under universal purple and green and orange tongues of fire. It was
the music, the Peruvian cumbias, the rattles and pipes, the stars, the light and
the heat on your head and your ears and in your eyes, and then suddenly we were
more real than we had ever been real before. Then the wind came, the great big
wind that blows us apart, and we part ways again, walking the hot coals of
intellectual desire, sensing the power of darkness and light coiled in every rock, in
every tree, in every wave, in every building and airplane and automobile. In every
planet, and in all those outstretched galactic arms. And all this before we vomited
for long minutes, and forgetful Mercurochrome swarthiness took it all away.
under the empurpled marrow-core of the starry firmament and absorbed
the shimmering nightly radiance of the Great Spirit. Intending to raise towers,
palaces to the unbroken dreams of lost generations, we counted our coins
and other media of neurotransmitter exchange systems of barter. Popularity,
hatred and scandal twist like brown twine-spun rope through a seedy past,
but white kinetic energy seethed through our Grateful Dead need-a-miracle
sandwiches, sipping at plastic bottles filled with stream water. Smoking bowls.
Lighters. Pipes and papers. The familiar routines of modern American
accoutrements in a strange and mystical land.
Next morning we found that sand-blackened wedges of Spanish silver pavers
lined the crude dirt path, and we in our multi-colored Indian coats packed
and carted all along that ancient animal trail, wild reverence now welling in our
weary souls. May the sick ones, we duly prayed, lie still and breathe the world
as liquid amber light fades from their temporarily neglected vision quests. Our
spirits were lightly roasting in the toasters that access random dimensions,
glancing off the endlessly scintillating white water wave packets not twenty yards
west from our anti-oasis, the patch of pure yellow desert sand enveloped in our
rainforest lush, and the tinfoil glow of a wise man, a wise land tucked into
asymptotic limits. Sometimes you have to lose a great deal of the flesh sick
before the spirit soars well. Swell. Smell of bacon sizzling and boiling water and
eyes that seize upon the unripened bolting sun in the east, for the stars continued
to illume through the predawn, murmuring of transient blindness and languages
whispered from yawning plant stomas.
We set out, my friend and I, in defiance of immoral law, joined by our ancestors,
and by yours, and complex chemistry, hearing the footsteps of unseen creatures
all around us, in the intermittent shadows of mesquite trees and ironwood and
singing brooks and jungle runners and eye-searing stars. We'd hitchhiked from
the far Northwest only to discover the pleasure of our birthright, knowing truly that
nothing good comes without a price. Simplicity itself knows and loves us in the
secret languages men have forgotten how to speak, or been compelled to forget.
Then, weeks later, on that sundered shore, watching a while the bowl of the
boiling ocean, the gods we sought rose up before us, and we knew instantly how to
properly despise all those we had left behind for their unbroken worship of
false idols, and we were born anew as children: strict but glorious are the
requirements for the new city that is to be forged.
Yes. Delighting in all we saw, and all was alive, and this god, this prairie flesh of
god under fire, under universal purple and green and orange tongues of fire. It was
the music, the Peruvian cumbias, the rattles and pipes, the stars, the light and
the heat on your head and your ears and in your eyes, and then suddenly we were
more real than we had ever been real before. Then the wind came, the great big
wind that blows us apart, and we part ways again, walking the hot coals of
intellectual desire, sensing the power of darkness and light coiled in every rock, in
every tree, in every wave, in every building and airplane and automobile. In every
planet, and in all those outstretched galactic arms. And all this before we vomited
for long minutes, and forgetful Mercurochrome swarthiness took it all away.
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