New Kaleidoscope Medicine

Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.

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.