bloomsite: 200907

20090730

WANT: The Voice of the Swarm

I had forgotten, until I started converting
Mom's ancient and dusty, scratched country music
vinyl to mp3 the other day, Dad's old cat whisker
crystal radio set, and my own
electronics assembly kit with its parallel rows of
capacitors and resistors and connection springs and
multicolored wires and some tremendous transistors
from the days before printed circuits, and even a
futuristic solar cell. I used to dangle a pair of
headphones I substituted in place of a microphone
in front of the big speakers and play those
old records that I didn't even like into my
personal A.M. broadcasting station for my sisters
in their bedroom, where the radio repeated my
tinny broadcast, which they perfectly ignored.
This was about 1977, I guess.

Now, back to hulu.com.

20090728

Remember a Sunset

you can almost sense it out there, can't you?
whole brave new worlds singing just
millimeters beyond dead skin layers of fingertips.
you can almost even feel the chains that cut
into your ankles with every footstep you drag
through the quicksand of grocery stores and
shambling up to automated bank machines.
it rattles out of your radios in the machinegun
staccato of international updates and bloodies
your white china restaurant plates. what is it?
what's going on?

the wind is not as cool as it used to be.
how'd they take those spectacular sunsets
away? scrubbed out of the sky, or did they
do something more fundamental to the sanctity
of your very own eyeballs? but don't worry
so much about it. no need for paranoia here.
there is no conspiracy. it's just the kneejerk
socialization synergy that emerges from a meeting
of more than two heads. somebody's gotta
keep those productivity figures in mind, you
know; somebody's gotta impose regulation and
control. the medium is the message, and
the message is:

get back in line!

and the bosses know better than you how to
pluck a dulcet tune on your taut-strung
nervous system. hey:
you can always trust them.

* * *

peel back the green god's skin and
eat it.

NKM: further.

IMAX: HISTORY OF LSD 4 OF 4
by Top-Notch112

NKM: further.

IMAX: HISTORY OF LSD 3 OF 4
by Top-Notch112

NKM: further.

IMAX: HISTORY OF LSD 2 OF 4
by Top-Notch112

NKM: further.

IMAX: HISTORY OF LSD 1 OF 4
by Top-Notch112

20090726

tha gaol agam ort

Your native magic
sprinkles your every motion and action
liberally in stardust
that bathes my eyes in encircling,

leaping fires and enchants

my desires, suspending me

in this longstanding
beautiful, waking dream.

You can't conceive of
what your mystic movements
and transitory dimples when you
shyly smile, looking sidewise,
mean to a ramshackle
soul like mine.

All I see are
green highlands and rainbows
that shimmer in a misty dawn.
All I hear are
dark moans from a
cruelly haunted castle
deserving peace it's never known.

You don't know, but you
need a little bit of faith.

(comment)

quinn has written a remarkable thing called "the things i've inherited from my mother" and you are squandering your life if you don't read it right now.

Girl Under Glass

where are you today,
my sweetheart? how
do you feel? i
miss you. always i
miss you. always i'm
thinking of you.
can you hear me
in there? are you
living behind a
three-story brick wall,
or inside a great big
red party balloon, or
trapped within some
kind of glass sphere
like a free-range
house hamster, a
transparent soap bubble
that you take with you
everywhere you go?
if we had been born
fish out in the ocean
i would have spent
my whole short life
swimming by your
side, and you'd
better believe i'd
be there when you
spawned. don't
ever let us zigzag
apart from each other.
i am tapping on
this barrier that
surrounds you.
can you hear me,
or see me? i'm
very happy to be
your fool -- much
better that than
anyone else's genius.
i hate that i
have almost no hope
of hearing from you
before tuesday.
you leave me alone
out in the empty
desert. the nights
get cold out here
without you.
why do you
do that? won't you
tell me what's
going on inside
your pretty head?
i used to drown
in your eyes,
you know. you
have this way of
leaving me
completely breathless.
i guess
i'll go to bed.
look down and
you'll see that
you're holding my heart
in your hands.

don't drop it.

You Who Are Dead

You who are dead,
You speak to me; you do not stutter.
Your words ring on in my inner ear
Across these tiny crevices in time.
I feel your ghostly presence indubitably
Gazing over my shoulder as I refine
One more time the world's longest term paper ‑‑

You who are dead,
You egg me on, and I feel you wince
When my criticism cuts too close to the bone.
But your bones are dry, entombed
Miles and miles beyond the deep blue main,
And yet ‑‑
And yet I feel your presence just the same,
And I know you to be my only reader, and my own
Harshest critic, and rightly so.
Your only demand:
Get it right!

You who are dead,
You died too soon.
You know the way it was
And is, and now will be,
Always between us two.
You were, not too long ago,
Flesh and bone, just like me.
You warned us of our foibles and,
Unintentionally, of your own,
Just as we all do. You reproved
The slumbering bureaucrats and toadies who
Plagued your days and mine; you proclaimed
The genetic call to plunging sentiency.
You wore a long series of personae, one mask
Snapped upon the next, and the next,
The next, and each one shockingly superposable upon
Its predecessor. You, iconoclast, a creature
Of your times! But did your times make you ‑‑
Or were you their architect?

You who are dead,
Holding your breath in cautious astonishment,
For the years since your passing have been unkind.
You exited the stage and they
Burned it down behind you,
And now those marvelous ideas and dreams teeter
On the brink of a doubtful relevancy.
How far tumbled down in death! How ignoble,
Dismissing of a soaring life, a bold and daring
Exemplar! What's happened? What's
Gone wrong? And is this the detached bard
Whose mouth can reinterpret your
Muted song?

You who are dead,
You must know that a few of us still linger
Who heard your call; a few of us still remember
Your words, your deeds, and the joys you engendered.
You who are dead,
Whose only voice now is in your written words,
Need not concern yourself with your legacy.
It shall not fade, no matter
The passing of days and the
Raining of dust, or the cloudy reinterpretations
Of jongleurs sitting around tiny red fires
Outside city walls. The accuracy of their tales
Is less important than that they keep your name
Fresh in fresh minds, who in time will find you.
You who are dead may rest, but
Your words, your ideas,
Can never perish.

20090725

Maculation's Pernicious Insolvency

Defiled.
Debased.

Amphetamine fulgent, or comatoid in
Lethe's lumpy arms,
the universe ticks on, dispassionate,
unfluctuating.

You can't be debased except through
active participation,
witting or no, and/but you

can always come back.

Threshold Dweller

The labyrinthine mind is dark, dark, and ghosts
and monsters lurk in its secret chambers, sneaking
up on you with blood-thirsty menace, or else
sheltering maliciously in place, waiting to pounce
at any unknowable instant. But if an earthquake
comes and shifts its foundations, leaving a little
fissure where the light suddenly manages to penetrate
into the dark world, you should move toward the light,
not slide back deeper into darkness, crouching down
and frozen in fear of new possibility, in love
with neurotic terror for its terrible familiarity.
It's always death or change in this world, in this life,
death or change, and the choice is there,
the choice remains. The challenge is always
dredging up the courage to cross the secret,
newly-revealed threshold that you never imagined
could exist, or that you could ever find. And then,
suddenly. . . .there it is! And your terrorized mind
wonders: how long will the portal remain open?
A secret passage to another series of brand new
worlds lies exposed before your cautious feet. . . .
The labyrinthine mind grows up like poisonous,
thorny vines over years of inaction, obscuring
the self-image and over-whelming all one's
best dreams if you let it. So when earthquakes
come and light spills in, do not let these fleeting
moments pass you by. Crossing the threshold,
you know your old self must perish as a new self's
new-born, and that sounds scary, sure, but it's
just another way of growing up, and trust me,
trust me, it'll turn out fine.

20090722

True Heart

My nerves are strung on pianos of pain.
Your gentle fingers alone know the
sweet refrain that can cool my blighted
conscience and soothe a bruisèd brain
too long banished to a howling
wilderness. My true heart, you turn
my sheets into stone when you're
miles away and I'm sleeping alone.
You remember what's bitter, neglecting
the beauty that's grown, tending
dead gardens and chests stuffed
with hollow emptiness. The horses
were knocking all night in their stalls,
my heart ticking down in the grass
wheresoever it falls. Can you learn
how to breathe again if ever you get
outside the walls where the dark
prince so long ago wickedly misplaced
you? Ah, beloved, you make tombs
of these eyes. With your dune-slope
hips and your tranquilizer thighs, and
your velvety lips and your statecraft
sighs, what deadly orbits must strange
new moons learn to trace around you?

Mind-Trap

What's this human predilection for
growing so engrossed with individual moments
and petty melodramas that we neglect
to notice we exist merely as temporary
expressions of organized energy within an
infinite universe? This mind-trap is in evidence
in all aspects of life, assaulting our sensibilities
on the evening news, in the work place,
within the politics of family life. . . .Everywhere
the noise of fleeting, immediate concerns
floods the senses. Move away from those
channels of social indoctrination and you can't
help recognizing the essential folly of man's most
frequent concerns.

An infinite, eternal universe beyond the
Hypnotizing preoccupations of man is a wellspring
of boundless promise. A life spent pursuing
the goals of selfish social hierarchies must,
in the end, be a life with minimal intrinsic value
‑‑ a squandering of one's human potential. We must
measure our existence against the infinite universe,
not against the meager, shortsighted socioeconomic
webs we spin in which human societies operate.
Continuing to advance into that infinite sphere,
Exposing ourselves to the great unknown that waits
beyond the local, closed socioeconomic prison,
both human individuals and their social aggregations
can only benefit.

Intrigues

Although at odds with literary sensibilities, given
proliferating unknowables, conspirators may judge
their best approach to refrain from embracing any
pet plan exclusively. Launching an overlapping
multitude of mini-plots, one hopes to be on site
and exploit any initiative as it might arise. Any
single, linear conspiracy may fail, but better hope
for success arises from the unpredictable interaction
of synergistic, modular elements, any of which
might fail, but that together might alter
the fundamental situation sufficiently to achieve a
reversal of fortune. Only one fleeting instant of
eternity is forever available to us, and the human
task is not to postpone all action until all the planets
are in propitious alignment, but rather to strike
at the best available opportunity, improvising over
the rough spots. A plot less ad hoc and open to
improvisation might well snake down into
foreordained disaster and personal ruin.

Time to Go

When dignity's been stolen and life
Frozen and up-ended,

And the friends you long relied upon
Are gone and can't be found,

You hear an ancient heartbeat on the
Turning of the wind,

Repack the soul's commodities and
Set out down the road again.

When trust runs thin as onion skin and
Confidence is brittle and fading,

And all the world grows cold and strange,
Your cluttered mind needs rearranging.

When every hope and conceit's been
Dashed to pieces one by one,

Spurn the glowing glyph you've traced and
Set out down the road, my son.

20090721

Invoked Detritus and Dust

Today, strangely clearly, I recall, or rather,
the memory blends, imposing itself
on the projection screen of my mind, thick
beige paint from 1979 on the walls of the
long hallway in my grandparents' house,
and the feel of their coarse, heavy towels,
already probably three decades old, and
the smell of the water from the bathroom
sink. I always remember how water smells
different wherever you go.

Big house like a cave, or a warren for bears,
thin curtains motionless, straight down in
defeat, except when my grandmother spied
out melodramas going down in the shabby
trailer park across the street. Everything
there my grandfather built himself back in the
50s. That house's silent sounds are once more
resounding, or weekend radio when Paul
Harvey was young, and interminable Worldwide
Church of God broadcasts, and the tinny, tacky
commercials on the A.M.

My daughter crawls out of bed, another
late-blooming bear, still in pajamas, her brain
not even trying to come to terms with the singing
cicadas outside, unhearing, unaware that
they're even there. I ask her to get dressed and
she wonders whether we're going somewhere.
We're racing down rivers she doesn't suspect, but
thirty years hence even she may recall a certain
odor of water, or thick paint in a hall.

Your Sempiternal Anguish

You cannot. . . .

Think
Reason
Argue
Deduce
Solve
Resolve
Cogitate
Ruminate
Meditate
Contemplate
Consecrate
Dedicate
Ossify
Signify
Dignify
Sanctify
Ordain
Refrain
Unchain
Supersede
Supplant
Enchant
Imitate
Infiltrate
Hallucinate
Excavate
Educate
Exercise
Evacuate
Eviscerate
Domesticate

Your way out of a nightmare:
You can only

Wake up.

20090720

Gautama and Goldhill Sparing in a Pie Warehouse for a Glimpse of the New World

Who will guide us through these gaping doors?

Ask Tim. Maybe Tim.

Who will show us the way in?

Tim. Ask him.

The people need your kind of heroism. The people need a leader.

The people need a Daniel Boone too, my friend. Somebody to blaze the trail, bronze ax swinging, way up ahead, clearing the path, stumbling down the false-starts, finding the way.

But who will lead us through the new-found doors?

I don't know. Maybe Tim, maybe someone else like him.

But you're one of the heroes, and it's a beautiful thing. But now the fear and the paranoia, the waiting for the knock at the door. . . .I don't know whether you understand. . . .I don't know whether you grok the level of repression. . . .the hunger for a leader. . . .the need is now. The knock at the door. . . .the people are waiting. The people are needful. They hunger. They fear.

. . . .

When I was out in the desert I saw. . . .many things. When I was out in the desert I saw many things you may never know or understand. Well, this is true of any man's path, but. . . .When I was in the desert one night, a blazing lightning storm descended, and there was no place to escape to. Braving the sound and the fury, fearful myself, I beheld the Heavens torn asunder and the exploding skies ablaze, you dig? And all the bruise-blued boiling thunderheads and the lightning bolts licking the desert floor all around me, and the black volcanic cones, and the hellish cries of the coyotes pinned down in distant creosote caves. When I was out there in the desert I took on a second skin of lightning, and I became electric, man. We all: you, me, everyone, everyone, all of us, we, all, we must be superhumans upon the earth; it's the only way, the only choice finally, because it's what we were born to be; it's what we are, underneath these thin sheaths of skin and muddling straight minds. Down deep inside we're all out in the desert; we're all electric already, and my task, my only task, is to go on, on, not to wait, not to tarry at the door, but to blaze on, to blaze away, to hack the notches that others may follow, and if not today, then sometime, some way, some better day when there's less dread of the knock at the door, the repression, the paranoia and the fear.

But what shall I tell the people--

Tell the people what the people must always be told. . . .reminded. Tell them to have faith! For the time of release is coming. It may not be in my lifetime, or in yours, but it is coming, and we will go further. Further! Have hope! Patience! Faith! Bear the burden, for the rewards are sweet, and these temporal distractions are Maya, they are illusions. And that bread seems to afford little nutrition, I know, but the human soul suffices on less than that. Faith. Tell them to be faithful. For it is not a blind faith that is required. The people have at least peeked through the door this time. The people know. They know.

Always a Shock to the System

Two roads to hyperconsciousness
Let me make it clear
Two roads to hyperconsciousness
One requires jolting fear
Two roads to hyperconsciousness
Lift yourself above the slugs
Two roads to hyperconsciousness
The other one is drugs

Utopia

What scapegoat can we raise up?
What superhero to praise, to
Flatter his ego until his humanity
Catches up with him, betraying his
Feet of clay, and we're compelled to
Cast him over the cliff? Or shall it be
The promise of Heaven-on-Earth,
The superhero recast in the
Social order itself? Shall we place
Blind faith in society that we
May avoid personal confrontation
With unfiltered reality? Mommy!
Daddy! Preserve us from the wolves!

Negotiating With the Rapids

We scrape by, we struggle and we doubt,
Forced into confrontation with whatever we've
Long accepted as Truth. Reality comes at us
Fast and flying-glass-sharp, an unavoidable
Head-on collision, unexpected and surprising,
Startling, shocking, defying all preconceptions
And established systems of comprehension, our
Passive, rock-steady coping mechanisms. Leaves
Us standing there like headlight deer foolishly
Staring down the barrel of socially-imposed
Prejudice and myth, and we've no alternative
At last but to transcend new thresholds if we
Hope to grow, or merely to go on living. With no
Time left to think, we leap beyond the bounds
Of the established syntax that chains our minds to
Hoary old perspectives and build a new way of
Explaining the inexplicable. The veil is rent, and
Arcane new truth's precipitously revealed.

20090719

Bickel's Pirouette

..........................An enormous, unseen Eye

................blinks, and the old

familiar universe is jerked out
..............from under our feet, like a white
....................................tablecloth from under our elaborate

........................................................................banquet feast, and

a new universe -- exactly like the old in every detail -- is instantly

........................substituted in, but

............................................................... . . .nothing will ever
..................................................................be the same again.

Dawn

Dip your camel hair brush in fluorescent pools and paint this
Bloodless statue back to life NOW, cos I just can't wait any more.
Wasp-waisted moments trickle away, dribble away uselessly,
And my thaumaturgic dreams languish tardily, unavailing inside
The same kind of steel trap cage where you're confined. A new
Dawn's rays erupt behind expectant purple mountains, ruby red
And golden, and you know there's no one else I'll be beholden to.

Let's go, my love! Let's run down along the shimmering strand
And scare up the pokey sandpipers from surge-effaced sand into
Silly, gawky retreat! Wake up NOW from this Sleeping Beauty
Sluggishness; you're drugged in incubus delusions and illusory
Defeat. Take my hand and we'll claim untramped continents for
Our myriad descendants, whose own astounding dreams we may
Never guess, but they rely on our decisiveness now, so ‑‑ let's!

Dab those eyes ‑‑ this is no time for regret. We'll cast ourselves
Headlong into the rising dawn and never go back again. Come, my
Love, and free yourself from selfish cruelty's decaying tangles and
Mangled saturnine calamity: those clinging briars flourished in an
Extinct era, but we're alive and vibrant NOW; faces turned sunward
In the Eastern door. My darling, the world's young again when we're
Together, like children exhausting our hours laughing forever more.

20090718

Surfer

When surfing volatile time's tricky tides,
One often wants for the luxury of delaying
For the wave one desires. But overleaping
Self-imposed limiting visions, new worlds
Break forth continuously, on the left and right,
Green and foamy, from over remote and
Unheralded horizons, forever abandoning
Yesterday's yawling countersurges in bitter
And insensible embattled retreat.

20090716

Leaf Boat

Stretching fast from the last horizon
To the next, sprinkling stardust lanes
Across the veins of sullen separation
Deep green forest vines entwine and
Wind down along the wayward way
Your hair flows like currents of golden
Air, your ringèd fingers slender on the
Taut, glimmering and ringing steel strings
Of a silver and glass harp, the notes like
Honeycomb dripping to lull these heavy
Eyes to their solemn repose; I suppose
It's all another dream of life after death
With gay leprechauns waltzing in the
Wings among towering toadstools while I
And yes, yes you, too, yes you, go floating
By on a green leaf boat to cross across
The rude dragon-swimming moat to the
Shining crystal palace on the further side
Where burdens subside and all your wishes
And mine happily, finally, at last conclude

20090715

New Kaleidoscope Medicine

This story was written eons before we were born, and its lotus
petals have only barely embarked upon their celestial unfolding.
Always more Prometheus than Perseus, I slipped my bonds
and came searching for you on chastised eagle wings: your voice
calls out for me in your deepest dreams, and I deliver.
Our conventional medicine scarcely heals the body, much less the soul.
Everything past is not mere prelude, Day-Glo poppycock,
huff'n'puff'n'stuff, attaboy here we go.

Hack your consciousness.

A brand-old bohemiaville spills over and washes down
backwater broken glass alleys, and rushing on in fitful torrents
along cracked and pitted hot asphalt metropolitan roads
and city streets that run lung-combusting marathons all the way
from old, crotchety nowhere to shiny new nowheres of tomorrow
that we can neither see nor imagine. All these colorful
carnival people are well-painted, and they're milling about
with mystic street corner shamans and downtown floating,
bobbing whales and teetering big ships and seamen, laughing
and drinking in the largish lobby of the San Mateo County Jail
and swap meet. I see Baby still inside the jewelry store
admiring bracelets and chains. I smell the salt on her, and I see
the rainbow opalescence of lingering fine scales on her crystal
shoes. Gulping psyche food in the back of a black fly-infested
Mexican restaurant. Whose tribe are you?

The druggy saints loitering and loafing under their golden haloes in
matchbox rickety fire escape steps, yellow bristle-beards three days old
in sparse adolescent patches, staring sunward, beaming beneficent smiles,
burning Indian sage and exhaling sandalwood, the girls with bright beaded
headbands beckoning, all nice and friendly, and long, flaxen blonde hair,
baubles and bangles and bells and belts of woven flowers. The tribes
are always threatened, man, by the dark thunderheads brooding outside. . . .
trials. . . .tribulation. . . .threatened madness. But within we glow,
and like fluorescent, blinking fireflies we go on, here, now, peaceful,
happy, blissful, reaching out, seeking, questing forever further.
Vomiting up cryptically pithy aphorisms like a pair of beautiful
five-year-old angels taking dictionaries apart with terrifying sharp,
flashing scissors. Day-Glo lime and Amytal blue swirled letters fill up
the skies, and the gray and yellow people walking by below are all
out looking to buy some of the finely granular new kaleidoscope
medicine.

Fluorescent colors like Doppler radar maps spilled all over your clothes
and the incessant, incandescent chiming of Tibetan prayer cymbals.
We go further, further spilling love paint on the asphalt and wide-eyed
windows. These post-renaissance days of policy are overpopulated with
self-professed and self-possessed realists who can only make you laugh,
or cry. Poetry and prose are the more reliable detours to the truth. Here
in the head world the running water jangle-jingles tangle-tingle along
the curved concrete gutter, seeking out the preordained slope of declining
civilization and its inevitable dark, nether grates. Such is the way with all
devout youth apostles and messiahs of expanding headspace.

The mad dancing carried on well past midnight, ecstatic
and compulsive, where the chimes rang like a continuing spill and flow
of shining amber honey. These euphoric fiestas run on and on,
smashing the love piñatas and spilling creamy coconut milk down
in the streets and sidewalks and splashed up like mind-corroding acid
on straight storefronts and plate glass windows. Everyone and everything
is pulsating and glowing. Billowy suits of parachute silk roving about,
sprouting silvery fish heads with unblinking eyes and full, pouty fish lips
that purse and gape, purse and gape, unspeaking, uttering no comment
or sound, trying to inhale the printed words themselves, or the oily
highness of splashed, still fresh paint. If you never actually leave, then
how can you ever expect to arrive?

The rainbow speckled ceiling shifts and glides smoothly, precariously
tipping, tripping, proposing to propel you headlong into some uncharted
territories of outrageous oblivion. Beyond we go! Ribbons of light flutter
like rainbow flags from the corners of Baby's smiling dark eyes, and her
glowing face illuminates every room she wanders into. To paint something
that's right makes it true; to paint something that's true doesn't necessarily
make it right. That old man the Moon hasn't looked so young since your mom
quit the cave and built the wheel. Trembling, rattling and rolling along
with the hippy hippy shakes. . . .ah, the clear chiming Rickenbacker
and the beehive buzzing sitar transport us beyond the deep blue main
and all the way back to the tiny dancing wildflowers of the highlands.
I will take you there. Beyond the wild blue and cherry yonder! This IS the new
rock'n'roll, and don't you ever forget or doubt it!

All good things must pass they say, but they never said it about you and me.
We got the light down low and the blue lava boiling, bubbling. Electric sparks
all spattered in my hurtling hair, sunset smeared across our mutual consciousness.
Sun rings breaking free and swelling, swelling, skipping across all the wet pools
of light on the thick and furry floor. The time has come, I believe, I'm sure, to
knock one clean out of the park.

20090709

Gold

Stars are hardly radiant pinhole projectors, but
tremendous, seething nuclear furnaces, and when
ours went nova, our dissociated elemental atoms
were flung across the void in divergent directions.
I see you, I see you now above the blazing spilt
psychedelic milkshake horizon of spewing star-guts,
thou wayward, jewelly necklace. On, pass on into the
naked night to rain down on proto-planets yet suspended
in their early spasms of coalescence. Be a vein
of gold to be mined by some sapient race
as yet undreamed, and grace the finger-tentacles of
multitudes in shining rings, for they will surely protest
and avow the same magnitude of undying passion that
once bound our hearts ‑‑ and always will, unto the End.

20090706

Found Flowery Flattery: Mexican Flu

The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO)
recognizes the important contribution
from the US Government of 420,000
treatments of Tamiflu antiviral medications
in support of fellow Member States in Latin America
and the Caribbean in addressing the
public health challenges that Influenza A
(H1N1) continues to present
in the Region.

¿Independent Mucho?

I took my bulging black-green neoprene bags down

to the recycling center, like any post-Bodoni

goodthinknik would, anticipating rolls and rolls of

delicious, hard lucre, although had you asked me,

I'd have readily confessed complete ignorance of the

going rate of exchange. The man there in his

oily blue pinstripe overalls eyed it interestedly, for the

wriggling belly-to-belly bundles filled up the bed of my

silver and red Toyota Tacoma, assembled down south in

Tijuana where pushy union demagogues and firebrands

never rocked the boat. "Whatcha got there, ked?" he said

to me and turned his head to spit, and me sitting there

grinning ear to ear, thinking about me and Veronica heading

out to the casino where we might recycle our take for a single

night's work on fortune's fickle wheel, and why, if that didn't

pan out, there was ever so much other cleaning up we might

still accomplish just outside in that reservation parking lot.

"Well sir, me and my girlfriend been up all night scrubbing

them pearl-and-alabaster skies clean of all the wasted photons

we could find. Guess we rounded up about a couple hundred

pounds of sordid light pollution." But the fool public-servant-

so-called just produced his pig sticker and carved them

beautifully bulbous bladders open, and the after-images of

4 July spilled out and raced to join in the fulgurant daylight,

already in progress. I guess one man's defilement is another

man's candle to light the way. He gave me two dimes and

a penny, and I drove away.

20090705

Panglossing Over the Verifiable

They thought they knew what they were doing.

I was brought up with my curds thoroughly saturated in

the great Chain of Being, then flung neck-deep to a
relative humanism jail, and it's taken all this time
and fiery trials to see the soundness of calling a spade
a spade. I'm beyond sick to death of the kinds of
earthquakes that repeatedly pursued and jolted that
bloody Venetian fool, Candide. I'm beyond sick to death
of seeing justice bomb in the name of roughshod small
town hall law. So how could I, an Occam stoic, wear
so long the medieval rags of counterfeit morality's
scala naturae? All I can say is, that's America, and yes,
they still do it that way here, if you get born into
such and such a family.

We had the Enlightenment, but in some quarters the
incandescent bulbs flared once and the filaments popped;
anyway, there are only certain levels of logic and reason
that any given human mind can take before being
compelled to reject the beliefs of a lifetime, or of
generations, and that's a hard thing to do, Jim, when you're
living out on a farm chewing wheat for your gum and trying
to read unprinted, oracular skies for rain clouds. And even
should you stumble among the shelter of fresher minds,
habits and never-confronted premises aren't so quick
to let you go.

They thought they knew what they were doing, pouring
those lessons in the ear, pouring slurries of exemplars
that had served five hundred generations so well; they
thought they knew what they were doing, but they
skirmished with logic, with reason; they clashed in bloody
civil war, they roared, clashing rocks, smashing unfortified
egos; they thought they knew what they were doing; still
they think they know what they're doing; but they didn't
know what they were doing, and they don't know now.
They clutch at soggy, dissociating straws in a disintegrating
raft, and they'll push you down beneath the waves so they
can continue, for a little while, to gasp for air.

All you well-intentioned Panglosses out there: hasten
to your graves! Your august compositions are spent and this
world's wanting no more snout-rooting slaves!

20090702

4 Abstracts

Just playing with a new camera and software. . . .

Wheat Field

Red Dragon

Ox Bow

African Mask

Saltwater Dreams

Distant red buoys ring-a-ding in the murky darkening,
and her eyelids fall heavily, ponderously, her breath
deepening in the cool sheets. Sleep, darling girl, for you
know not what possibilities tomorrows unnumbered
may unfold before you. The salt breath chuffing through
thin window curtains draws you out in your dreams like a
miscast Wendy who doesn't realize yet she's waiting
for a boy who lives forever to fly her through dejected,
lonely nights on magic pirate adventures full of friendly,
ticking clocks and the snapping jaws of crocodile justice.

When they take you out to play in Great Kills,
you sometimes sneak away to the marina's edge
just to breathe the salty world entire in gulping lungfuls
and envisage something childishly akin to shipping out
with Ishmael and Queequeg and Starbuck and Stubbs,
leaving mad Ahab to his own iconoclastic devices.
Maybe tomorrow Grandfather will hold your little hand
in his big brown one and take you down to watch
the bridge open up and the lights of the huge, silent ships
coming home into the harbor. Remember those lights with
all your heart, little girl; fix them in your mind, for many
years from now when you see their reflection written
in the night skies above, so many miles removed from
any shoreline, you may dream again of a Peter Pan who,
I swear, is still waiting out here, searching everywhere for a
perfect girl just like you.

20090701

The Creature from Another Galaxy Fumbles Reluctantly Within a Turgid Alien Skin

Groggy and sleep-deprived, like
a product of an off-label Rembrandt,
or he having ingested too many
unprescribed mushrooms. Day unchained
slithers irrepressibly back towards
the cool, nether cowl of crawling,
unconfined and unconfirmed night.
Little there is left for the likes of me, in my
brown liquid riving and trembling
cocoon existence, dripping slow fluids across
mute seas of carpeting, but to devour
a long swath of sandwich, to strangle
and submerge feeble consciousness within
a tasteless college comedy, and to probably
edit a few more chapters of an old book I'm
striving to revive. We'll be seeing you around.