Down at the Prisoner's Cinema for Every Saturday Matinee

Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.

You compulsive structuralists bore daylight
out of me! You with your infernal dithering
over unrelated trivial table scraps
and pit fire remains, steadfastly decoding
cave art and sloth scat and tiny chips of burnt bone,
pulling rainbows apart to fashion fragments of
sterile hue into blood-chilling necklaces displayed
under glass in your sacrosanct voice-choked museums!
You, in your fluorescent tube-pale skin, giving
shake-and-bake lectures on meaning in public libraries
to blue-haired ladies who pour you tea and pat your
sports-coat back. You should choke on your little questions
and the way you hobble the minds of your uncrippled
inheritors! Who killed the thrill in you, who cut it
from your living, beating hearts when your were
young and full of power and fire? Have you forgotten
how human brains give birth to symbolic culture? You,
who would dip a test tube into a river and proclaim
hydrologic knowledge unearned, unashamed!

All human beings know first the smell of mother's skin
and a hypnagogic trance, the dark country of sleep
and dream where shamans dance in skins of antelope or large
reptiles and birds. In the dim of human twilight
consciousness we explore the hard-stone crypts cautiously,
seeing no less with fingers than true eyes. Seeing
circumspectly ahead, seeing, seeking. In the theater
of rhythmic tambourines and drums and stomping feet
and metronomic ankle bells and loose bracelets
of scratched glass beads and stones where breathing is thrown
off-kilter and intermittent hyperventilation sets in,
we first learned to dance, then, ever more daring, emitting
sparks and wild purple and green flashing bolts of light; we move,
arms climb, wrists twist, bodies twine, we consume bitter
alkaloids and unhook reasoned consciousness from its restraining
anchor pegs, broadening sensory palettes beyond your feeble
touchstone lexicons, arrived dead on arrival, and we
learn all over again the tentative mutterings of a
mythic, closed-eye phosphenic convoluted pattern of wave
distortion. Everything buzzes; everything vibrates.
Pulsations capture filling lungs and glowing hearts. You
must strike while the iron is hot or else return to squares.
Goochie-goochie-goo! Quick, now! The barge is pulling away
and Alice can't be kept waiting, so climb on board for the trip!

Methinks you're afraid to know what means these sacred clues
and relics you've steadily accumulated. Ah. . . .your fear: of course!

The inevitable, hard-wired neurologic phase comes
and goes, and then you're suddenly plunged down the rapids
and over the falls and hang suspended in the abyss, caught
up in your throat where only cultural experiences can
guide you. Flimsy lifelines! You must learn to sing and dance
anew in the spirit world, to pass it on in its distorted,
waking form, the cosmology of gods and devils, the cooperation
with big game animals that we kill so they can come back
in another season, the keepers at the gateposts, and the
beckoning Scheol darkness down around the world navel. Thin
membranes between stone pillars rupture at too long
a glance; you dance and slip through skin-thin peritoneum sheets
into that other world; you bridge spacetime to an inner
place more real than what you've ever known, and you know
these gates are there, were always there, awaiting just beyond
your swirling fingerprints with their mute keepers watching,
watching, hands on ax pommels, watching you.

How closely did you really think the shamanic cosmos
would map to your desktop neurophysiology? Quit trying
to recreate your stark daylight worlds outside where you
see only with your helpless rolling eyeballs! I hope you
swallow your own Rorschachs and choke on your unimaginative
bits of pottery and the dusty bones of long-dead
cave animals who can tell us nothing helpful today.