You've become the hot ocean
Under a raging moon
Attributing to me this petty crime
Of having mistaken. . . .this thing
Of course I have mistaken many things
In my time
But not this thing
The runt in the pig's litter
Should not live
But living, it must remember
(Or suffer an almost-memory of remembering)
The sleepy and fat life of potency
Conveyed here and there under
These inadequate, inescapable conditions
Seldom penetrated to interior
Glittering stars, but
Oscillating wildly, perturbed,
We learn to compensate for a while
For a while
We learn to compensate for a while until
Our balance falters
This mad circus, or dance,
Parade of stochastic circumstance,
Dazzles the unsophisticated eye
Splashing across
My bare feet and toes
Like blood, or a red tide
Walking along your midnight beach
I long to fling my arms around you, but
You're so far out of reach
20090930
Red Tide
The Weight of Your Waist
The weight of your waist in
My arms
You turn about, back arching.
The light
In your eyes, shining,
Shining.
When we were otherwise
Sometime
In some other lifetimes.
Spider web's
Silky connections keep us
Reeling.
The taste of your mouth
And heat,
Your feet executing
Light steps,
And your hair swirling,
Swirling:
Must always draw me back
To you.
Smoke and Ashes
The last echo's faded from the evening's final song
The applause is all over and the audience has gone
They lower the lights, sweep out any lingering trace of delight
The world's been burnt down to smoke and ashes tonight
Injustices you witnessed spurred you to bold activity
Now you stare back at yourself from dark mirrors of exclusivity
The ground seems so distant from such spectacular height
The world's been burnt down to smoke and ashes tonight
They say no man's saddled with any more weight than he can bear
They say you'll get what you need but they never tell you where
No mentors can guide you when chaos supplants all the rules
All the happiest songs are written by the most fatuous fools
Everything you believed in was systematically stolen away
By bandits in courtrooms and the wolfish games that they play
With no place to go you sit motionless at the traffic light
The world's been burnt down to smoke and ashes tonight
And you know that it's wrong but some things can't be made right
The world's been burnt down to smoke and ashes tonight
20090928
Everyday Transcendental Blues
They pumped sludge in your waters,
mainlined you with Novocain,
paved the meadows and felled the forests,
snipped the stem from your rollicking brain.
Now you lean back and mock these
wide-eyed pupils for which you've no use,
lambaste me for childlike hypersensitivity, but
I've just got the everyday
transcendental blues.
So 9/11 rocked your deep foundations,
made you question the company you keep.
But it was only a bad dream, and these days
everyone's fallen blessedly back asleep.
Embroiled in office politics and controversy,
each day combating a new rival and ruse.
But such amusements bore one to death
who's suffering from the everyday
transcendental blues.
Manic Cassandra wants to be my friend,
she says we've got so much in common.
But if she knows the troubles I've seen, how come
she can't penetrate to the crux of my problem?
Euclid never meant to hurt a soul.
It's the same excuse all tyrants use.
Your ordered world's so far out of control,
and I've got the everyday
transcendental blues.
Must I embrace every enemy?
Sometimes I find I’d rather not.
But we're brothers ‑‑ and more ‑‑ beneath the marrow,
ticking off each sand grain and fallen sparrow.
Every cactus and soaring hawk,
every silk glove, every fraying hem,
all the villains and heroic desperados:
they're part of me, and I of them;
all the wise men and many more fools,
those who trade in sorrows and sundry pains,
decades spent in baking deserts
or drowning under the bombs of hurricanes,
immersed in Brahman and cosmic tenderness
where heartbreak lingers, yet nothing's amiss,
all tragedy rectified with monocular glee:
only peace and love shall set souls free.
Was it like this for Christ and the Buddha
in wilderness crowds of somnambulists?
Driving miles and miles with both headlights on
through swirling mires of subconscious mists?
Down in dank basements before dualities
get broken into wars you can't win or lose.
But once your eyes have been opened
you can't turn away from everyday
transcendental blues.
20090927
Immense Head
shaking off stars and planets
like a wet dog
flings off water,
i can heal your sickness; just
come inside my immense head.
new worlds bursting from this
electric skin continually
in loud, vibrating
fractal helices. can i
so readily salvage this
crying kingdom when one
suffering soul so
steadfastly resists me?
Business as Usual at Lovers Leap
Your timing's off, darling
Your chain's slipped the sprockets
Living life like one of those girls who
Plots to sell herself for
Love or affection
Like a refugee from too many
High school football games
Hot and sweaty and hormone-addled
Exciting like a stirred hornet nest
On a Friday night
Bulked up young bulls in shoulder pads
Clashing like brutally mindless storm fronts
While the girls out advertising
Competing for salacious eyeballs
Your timing's off, darling
So be about discarding these habitual
Posturings that don't suit you so well
The rest of your life's waiting right here
When you get ready to extend your hand
20090926
Horns of the Dilemma
Would you really risk making a
Rhett Butler of me? Too many
devils abound; mine are all too
familiar; yours too much the
strangers to you. Devouring
books for barbiturates, in
full-blown retreat from a world
of terrors, but to blame you
for that would merely render me
another hypocrite of no possible
value to you. I actively
shut down my options, all in
the name of you, beautiful you,
gladly, deliberate and willful.
No other I could ever consider
turning to. Sometimes our
values dictate we do what we
most fear, no matter how
our actions are fated to
be misunderstood. Time's
fickle trickles remain a joke
you're still afraid to laugh at,
to break spontaneity out of
grim-faced nuns decked out in
their traditional sphenisciforman
habits, pulling perfectly
serviceable silk top hats
out of sensibly astonished
rabbits.
Me and the Chief
When I was a boy, about seven years old, my parents and I were making one of our annual summer drives from San Jose to Springfield, Missouri. That's where my mother's family lived. It was a two day drive, and typically we would spend the first night in a motel in Albuquerque. But this year, back in about '69, I guess, when we were fifty miles out of Kingman, Arizona, the right rear tire of the '66 Buick Electra suffered a blowout. Dad quickly replaced the tire, but against all odds, within ten miles the left rear tire also blew. Dad had to hitchhike on to Flagstaff to get a replacement, leaving Mom with Clarissa and me to wait in the hot, stranded vehicle on the side of the road. It was about three hours before Dad returned with the new tire and we were on our way again, but by now it was late afternoon. Mom wanted to stay in Flagstaff for the night, but Dad insisted we press on to make up for lost time. Impatience, do you see? That determination to make up for lost time turned out to have devastating implications for me, and for many others. If only we had spent the night in Flagstaff. If only. But the world doesn't work that way.
Nowadays this kind of cross-country family trip is a different experience. I look at you sitting there with your short hair and young skin and neat black ties and I see that I'll have to try to illustrate an era you never knew. Draw you a picture. Okay.
In the first place, while now there's always the option of taking a plane instead of driving, most people didn't think that way back in the late 60s. If you wanted to go cross-country, you drove. Road trips are also so much more comfortable now than they were back when. The cars these days are universally air-conditioned, and the air conditioning works to cool the whole car uniformly. That wasn't always the case, believe me. A family road trip used to be an ongoing quarrel about who got to sit in the front, and when, and for how long, and who had to be seated next to the window where the sun came in. We had no car stereo systems, no CDs, no personal mp3 players, and certainly no one could imagine anything like a personable DVD player. VHS didn't even come along until the 80s, or maybe the late, late 70s. I don't really remember. Or Betamax. But you wouldn't know about that. . . .
No such amenities back in the day. Dad in the front seat controlled the radio with absolute dictatorial authority, and for most families, including my own, that meant country-western: none of that West Coast hippy rock-and-roll on a family vacation. So we'd pile up pillows and blankets and whatever paperbacks and magazines we could find and settle down for extended sessions of utter mind-numbing boredom whose only reward was eventually going to be the arrival at an unfamiliar house in Springfield full of even stranger relatives whom you hardly knew.
I don't know what books I was reading. Maybe comic books, or The Hardy Boys, or one or two year old issues of Boys Life that I'd read time after time before. Just a normal boy like any other, you see? I remember Dad had some magazines about the old West that I sometimes read, so maybe they were there, too. Whatever, I usually kept my face embedded deep in reading material to try to avoid having to entertain Clarissa, who would have been about five years old when we made this trip. Poor little blonde kid, happy then, now twice-divorced and trying to raise three kids on her own. Mom spent the entire trip crocheting blankets with her big paper bag stuffed full of brightly colored balls of yarn up in the front seat, or trading places sometimes with me to keep Clarissa company, playing the usual car games, tic-tac-toe, or I-Spy.
Across the Arizona high country we drove as the sun plunged to the horizon behind us, past the turnoff to Meteor Crater where Dad had hoped to take us today before fate had upset his plans and contaminated my whole life. We were passing through Winslow as the pale aqua-blue Arizona sky deepened to shades of leafy green and soft violet. By the time we reached Holbrook the thin crescent of the new moon was itself almost finished setting below the horizon behind us. Evening gave way to a heavy black blanket of night that was blitzed with thousands of shimmering jewel stars. It was too dark to read. Clarissa's chatter was falling away in the back as the day wore down. Next to me I could see in the light from the instrument panel how Dad's fingers were tight on the wheel, his eyes set far ahead at the most remote extent of the headlights' reach. I knew he was frustrated by the delays. He wanted to go on. But it could not be.
Within ninety minutes we'd approached the outskirts of Gallup, New Mexico, and our speed dropped down precipitously as we got behind a flatbed truck on the back of which rode probably eight or nine Indians. I don't know if they were some kind of laborers or what. Probably not: probably they were just on the way in to town looking for something to do. The truck was creeping ahead. It couldn't have been making more than fifteen miles per hour. Between the curves of the road and oncoming traffic, Dad couldn't pass.
"I wish they'd just pull over and let us get around!" Dad growled.
"Take it easy, Harold," Mom soothed from the back seat. "We'll get there when we get there."
"Well, this is crazy! Do they think they own the whole road?"
It must have been another fifteen minutes before we finally crept into the city, although it seemed like a lifetime. By now Dad was extremely frustrated, naturally, and he declared his determination to rush ahead for Albuquerque despite the late hour. If only he had! But of course Mom squelched that idea immediately, and we all started watching for a motel.
Gallup didn't look too impressive, and yet I found myself staring out the window in wonder. In a way I can't explain, it seemed oddly familiar to me. Did you ever have the experience of arriving in a place you've never been before, but feeling like it was part of you, part of your past? It was like that. Odd. We'd been in the hot car all day gazing at the glaring asphalt unrolling steadily before us all the way to the horizon, and we were all sweaty and tired and beat, but something about this place struck a strange chord in me. Most of the streetlights seemed to be broken or buzzing and fizzling dimly, half burned out. The buildings were low and seedy, with a lot of antennas sticking up haphazardly at crazy angles wherever you looked, and low-slung power lines were sagging down everywhere, almost as though a whole soul-depleted, extraterrestrial city had fallen out of the sky to deteriorate impotently over the ensuing decades where it had struck the earth. The town appeared to be a loose network of shoddy shopping centers and liquor stores and decrepit gas stations and shattered cement sidewalks and dead, ghostly trees and bent basketball hoops without nets and dangerously leaning chain link fence and dusty, ancient cars on cinder blocks. And standing around outside, everywhere you looked, even though it was already rather late and very dark out, you saw the Indians.
The Indians. What can I say about them? I wouldn't learn so for years, but as you know, Gallup is sometimes referred to as the Indian capital of the world. That night the reason why was already evident to me. Great tribes of Zuni, Hopi, and Navajo are all situated in the surrounding desert regions, and their people seem to be inescapably drawn to Gallup like iron filings are pulled toward a magnet. God alone knows why. I mean, there's nothing compelling in Gallup. Nothing. And yet, already I knew there, already I could feel, that there was something enigmatically captivating about these ponderous and impenetrable Indians haunting the night streets of Gallup, these great bears of humanity whom I saw everywhere I looked as our car inched forward from one stoplight to the next. To my young mind it was like we'd accidentally stumbled into some kind of weird alternate reality. Obviously this strange world existed unto itself according to some mysterious rules that had no application to my own world. Here was a confused, isolated nation buried well within the borders of my own nation. Here were mystical creatures breathing the same air I breathed, beings like angels or devils, or both, incarnated in human form, mystical, magical, and mortal, all at the same time.
Dad was nervous. I could feel it. Mom was nervous too, but she was adamant. She was tired of being in the car, and although she usually didn't show these feelings directly, she remained in the aftermath of a bad temper from having had to wait on the roadside for so long. We drove for four or five blocks, I think, before finding a motel, all white plaster and pink and green neon. We waited in the car while Dad went inside to sign the register and get a key.
"Where are we?" Clarissa asked. She was stirring in the back seat, waking up from her sleep.
"It's okay, baby," Mom said. "We're going to get something to eat, and then you'll be in your bed soon."
"I don't want to eat."
"Hush, baby."
"What's that?" I said.
"What's what?"
"That. Across the street. Is that a restaurant?"
It was a large, glass-fronted building hugging the curbside, with blazing white fluorescent light bathing the surrounding dirty sidewalks in milky, surreal radiation from its jutting eaves. This intense and schlocky, brilliant luminance boiling out of the place spilled into the streets toward the savage darkness waiting beyond, that lurking, watchful desert darkness perched high over Gallup, surreptitiously sucking the life out of the rest of the city. The blinding glare had initially confused me, but as soon as I looked through the enormous glass panes I had my answer. Red-and-white checkered tablecloths plastic-wrapped over their tables were arranged down along the windows, and farther inside a long lunch counter fronted by a line of pivoting stainless steel stools with padded brown vinyl seats proved that it was indeed a café of some sort. Mom saw this as soon as I did and declared that here we would have our late dinner.
Dad came back and drove us around to the back of the motel. We quickly moved our minimal belongings in, packed separately from the rest of our luggage just to get us through this one night. Nothing unusual or interesting about the hotel. Within a few minutes we were on our way back to the front of the place and across the street, Dad carrying Clarissa and Mom clutching my hand. I now read the name of the place painted on the glass double doors facing the corner: The Chief's All-Night Diner.
Before we passed through the doors I felt a quick twinge of pressure pulse through Mom's grip on my hand. I turned to look up at her, but then I saw what had precipitated the spasm. There, less than three feet away on the sidewalk, an ancient Indian lay sprawling, his left shoulder slouched up against the wall. His right hand was lifted a few inches up from the ground and his fingers were outstretched, as if he were reaching toward us. But Dad very quickly herded us through the doors, and we were inside.
We all came to an abrupt stop just inside the doors and stood there blinking for a few seconds. The distracting bright lights outside had obscured the tableau awaiting us. The diner proved smaller than it had seemed. The windows were tinted and everything was in fact rather dim. A few people were hunched together down at the far end of the counter, and one or two other derelict-types were half-collapsed at a table, or rather, they almost seemed to have been poured into their seats and had been steadily melting in place ever since. But the lighting was the strangest aspect of the diner. The whole room seemed to be illuminated with weird fluorescence and neon, dying all interior surfaces in ghoulish shades of green. I could feel Dad hesitating beside me, but once again Mom's determination won out.
"Shall we get a table, Harold?"
We did get a table, and soon a heavyset Indian waitress came for our order. Sleepy Clarissa, toting around her spit-stained stuffed rabbit, was eye-level with the tabletop next to Mom, chanting lines from some nursery rhyme over and over. Dad kept surreptitiously grumbling his grumpy opinions about this dirty city and the freakish café with its drunks passed out on the sidewalk outside, but Mom was insistent on pretending that everything was normal and would have none of it. Eventually they brought our burgers, and any inclination to conversation fell away, although Clarissa alternated between biting the ends off fries and softly singing her nonsense song.
During the meal I myself remained fixated on the boozed up Indian outside, if he was indeed drunk as Dad claimed, although for some reason I was doubtful about that. In the fraction of a second I'd seen him, he'd definitely made an impression on my pliant young psyche, and to this day I can still picture him quite clearly. His clothing had seemed old and stiff and gray, buckram-coarse and more like glue-stiffened burlap than contour-flowing fabric, I thought, encrusted and thoroughly impregnated with the dust of the primordial desert. He was actually marvelously thin for an Indian, skinny and almost completely wasted away, ancient and withered, a filthy bandana tying back a thick mane of silky silver-gray hair that poured down over his bony shoulders. The years had melted most of the flesh from his face so that the resinous brown skin rode the bones like a thin shell of sun-tanned leather, only deeply furrowed by wrinkles resembling the intricate snaking of dry desert washes as seen from an airplane passing overhead. But it's the eyes I remember most clearly even now, impossibly clear and brilliant, like a pair of glowing blue-white crystal orbs lodged in his archaic skull and looking directly, unquestioningly into my own eyes as Dad shoved us through the café doors. Those bright eyes were full of light and life and perceptivity in a way that no old man's eyes should be. Even as the old relic had seemed to be suffering the pain of imminent death, his eyes were laughing. I don't know if the striking disparity of his eyes suggested to me good or evil. You can believe it or not, but we're all mixtures of both good and evil, you know? It's not as if they're isolated poles in the way the Judeo-Christian tradition would have us believe. They blend, those cosmic forces, and many others, too, and of course the experiences we have, and the random events that happen to us, that by accident are imposed on is, all those external forces, they also influence the roads we pass down. Well, I know this must sound like a stream of half-rationalizations to you. That's your job, and that's the mythology you must function under. I understand that, and I have no desire to try to persuade you, or anyone else, of anything. I couldn't change your minds even if I tried. No matter. I'm just trying to tell you my story the best way I know how, and you can take it or leave it. I've thought about it often enough in the long years since, and I have no better words to convey what I saw that night.
In the café, then. In The Chief's All-Night Diner. At some point Mom realized I wasn't eating my hamburger.
"Hurry up and eat, David. It's late."
"Something wrong with your burger, Son?" Dad asked.
"No. I don't feel very well."
"What," Dad asked, "are you still car-sick?"
Mom reached across the table and put her hand on my forehead. She jerked it back as if she'd been burned.
"Harold! He's burning up!"
That's when we all found out I was sick.
We didn't stay much longer at the diner. Mom and Dad rushed through their meals, and I sipped just a little bit of my soda. Then Dad paid and we hurried back across the street to the motel, where Mom dug through her overnight case and found some aspirin for me. Remember the bitterness of aspirin dissolved in a spoon of water? No? Of course not. Then we all tried to get some sleep, Dad and Clarissa ending up in one of the twin beds, Mom watching over me in the other all through the rest of the night.
One thing that was strange was that my temperature was so high during the night, and during the rest of our drive to Springfield the next day, that I was actually hallucinating. It was such a strange experience that I still remember it quite vividly. They were not really frightening hallucinations, but their reality was overwhelming. I mean, at the time I knew they were not real, but that did nothing to affect their extreme detail and apparent veracity. For the most part I found myself in an active volcanic landscape, as if I were present at the beginning of the world, these glassy black volcanic cinder cones surrounding me on all sides, bleeding fiery red lava everywhere, everywhere, and spewing it high up against the dark sky with its oppressive, hot clouds close to the ground throwing back the lambent red light with every new seething spew of lava. I remember distinctly at one point I tried to escape these towering volcanoes and I buried my face deep into my pillow and squeezed my eyes very tight and there I saw a teeny, tiny volcanic eruption. During the night, although not during the drive the next day, I also kept catching furtive glimpses of pterodactyls soaring overhead, hungrily searching for prey, I had no doubt. Every time I'd hear their shrill, bestial cry I'd try to hide, only my own body appeared to be absent from my hallucination, and there was no physical "me" who could seek cover.
Now, I could have told you this whole story and omitted the part about being sick that night, but that would be intellectually dishonest, and at this point what have I got left but my story? My old man died fifteen years ago, and I expect my dear old Mom, if you were so heartless as to hassle her about my problems, would never connect this particular summer vacation trip to everything that happened later. Even if you did harass her, and even if she did remember that night in Gallup, I doubt she'd remember to tell you about my fever. I wonder. . . .
See, I know what your shrinks are going to say about all this. Of course I do. Don't forget that I went on to become a psychologist myself, with, of course, my special interest in ethnobotany and Native American studies, as the politically-correct cynics like to call it. They're going to come up with some kind of fairytale about how the events that I'm reporting from The Chief's All-Night Diner were themselves part of my hallucinations, and all this somehow or other got folded into my sick mind in a way that would unfold with horrific results decades later. Don't you see? I'm a well-compensated expert, many times over, with plenty of experience making up such fairytales for various lawyers and judges and juries. Expert witnesses? That's what we're called. But no, really we're professional witchdoctors whose myths and fables help society see what society wants to see rather than what's really there.
What's really there? Well, I'm not going to tell you that. That would get me in real trouble with my colleagues. Professional secrets, you know? But I will tell you what else I saw when we came out of that diner that night, Dad holding me in his arms as we hurried across the street and back to the motel. What I saw over Dad's shoulder.
That old Indian was still there on the ground, but now there were a couple of cops standing over him. I knew the old man had died. I knew it as well as I ever knew anything; I mean, I knew it with absolutely no uncertainty or doubt. Or fear, I might add. Here I was, a little kid regarding a dead body for the first time, and it didn't bother me. It was funny because Mom and Dad were in such a hurry to get back to the motel that they never even looked back. But I did. I saw his body, and that's when I understood what had happened.
That old medicine man's soul had left his withered corpse and entered into my own body while we were in the restaurant.
No: I don't care if you laugh, or what you say or what you think. It doesn't matter to me. Think about it. I've got nothing to win or lose. I've already lost everything anyway. My wife. My own children. My whole life is over. I know that. I'll die in your brightly-lit, sanitized, stinking correctional facility. It's all over for me.
Am I sorry for the ones who died? Of course I am. I'm not the emotionless psychopath you think I am. If I thought it would make a bit of difference, I'd apologize to all their families. Sixteen murders? If you say so. Maybe more. Who knows? Certainly not me. I have no memory of any of it.
Don't you see? It wasn't me who killed them.
It was the Chief.
The End.
20090925
Black Hole Heart
X-ray galactic mandala
Hypnotize the eye of God, turning,
Churning, yearning, fiery
Burning, round and round a
Black hole heart.
20090924
I Am Subject
No memory exists of
Plunging into the oceanic realm, that
Infinity of drifting, of eternity's flow.
Volumes
Deepened continually deep beneath my
Ego-absent point-self,
Center and wellspring of an infinite
Unfolding creation and creativity where
Foolish conception of linear time is
Expressly contemptible, and not
A little bit sad.
But the pleasure of boundlessness
Ballooned in a process of runaway inflation,
Spacetime
Dilating urgently, necessarily,
In the moment of ecstatic clarity
And definition.
I-the-knower had peeled away from
Me-the-known, that egocentric conglomerate
Gliding over the surface of subconscious pools,
That one whom you might identify most closely with
My soul.
I am subject, not your
Object of expectations, responsibilities,
Relationships to engage
On a stage of
Bright-lit Dasein.
The joy of life is extraordinary,
Serene strength and beauty.
Feeling pretty good, feeling
Groovy.
20090921
To Unknown Harbors
So much beauty breaking
Out of the unity, slipping free:
Bowls me down and brings me
To my knees. Our
Great white mains snapping
In the fresh morning wind,
Transports my heart beyond life's sorrows
To unknown harbors of
Thanksgiving and relief.
20090920
Diseases of Conscience
I know Freud's sound reasons that led him to his conclusions.
I know also how our belief systems are entangled in
cultural assumptions and biases to which we are blind.
I can't swallow the trinity of Id/Ego/Superego.
I come down closer to Jung, but I am no Jungian.
Symbolic iconography and eidetic archetypes are the nonverbal language
of the deeply dreaming mind.
Ego consciousness, which is
perdurably fused to spoken language, is an
evolutionary recent invention, an afterthought,
an abstracting overlay on the phylogenetic mammalian mind,
that enormous, subconscious, symbolic, analog
data processing machine.
Words like subconscious and unconscious imply a
misleading primacy for conscious awareness such as
Freud's culture demanded. Implicit assumptions are sometimes
explicitly, exquisitely misguided.
Our minds,
our souls,
are conveyed about in clumsy bodies: gene machines
preoccupied with fight-or-flight and
making more gene machines. Our bodies, our
physical presentations to the world, may or may not correspond
to our interior beliefs and dreams, the true realm of I.
Books and their covers, you know. . . .Any person's world is only
an interior creation, a production, or reproduction, delimited
by the borders of his flesh: Existenz. We have no
objective knowledge of the Dasein, that theoretical world
external to the flesh. Of that quantum, soupy realm we have only
such claims of reality that our sensory organs
modulate into the Morse code of neurologic impulses,
interpreted by lonely and isolated, conjecturing brains, dripping
down into the musty basements of subconsciousness, of which
only the barest minimum, infinitesimal lamina can be accessed
(and further corrupted) by
transitory conscious focus.
Now, we're all familiar with
certain psychic disease states. We all know
certain people who are not exactly
right in the head.
But in this hierarchical ecosphere we inhabit,
there are also psychiatric syndromes acting on
other levels, or tiers, of organization. Sometimes
individual human beings are single cells
in a larger, coordinated body. There are certain
diseases of conscience that infect society-as-unit.
These syndromes, striking a society, go on to poison
its individual cells one by one, resulting in a pervasive
and irresistible process of dissemination that eventually
compromises one's personal integrity.
I think of how my own nation in recent decades
has rushed madly away from a rural lifestyle
to an urban and corporate modus vivendi.
In the agricultural-based societies of our grandparents
and their parents and grandparents, a man's handshake
was his bond, and a request to put an agreement in writing
was an insult to a man's honor. Honor itself possessed
universally-recognized value. If you have honor, you
always concern yourself with doing the right thing. That means you
have to know what the right thing is. Such knowledge requires
knowing very clearly what your personal values are.
But personal survival in our present
industrial-corporate-urban society requires that we
constantly shift among mutually incompatible value systems. Successfully
negotiating these exclusive and antipathetical dynamos
churning in the corporate milieu is vital to one's economic stability, not to mention
simply avoiding being fired from one job after another.
Mere survival now requires that we
actively refrain from closely examining our
personal values. Adhering to
personal values is an anti-survival strategy in this society.
This is the disease of conscience which has sickened us collectively,
and as individuals: we are actively discouraged from developing,
or fortifying, any personal values.
Now, do you know that
we desire what we value?
20090916
Planet San Francisco
Set the Way-Back Machine for 1967, Sherman, we're
hoisting sail for Planet San Francisco!
Bless the seasons, bless the beasts and
golden seas and reason, treason! Dip your
quills in late California red and violet sunsets,
and remember a day absorbed in thirsty blotting paper.
Don't forget that the antithesis of love is fear,
not hate! Never hate. It's not too late my
beamish boy, so close your eyes and let's run, let's
run! We're nearly there, if only you can
believe it.
20090914
Brown Eyes, Blonde Hair
When I see someone standing there with the
same dirty blonde hair I go mad. When I
see someone standing there with the same wisps
of blonde hair falling haphazardly down
around her ears I go mad. When I see
her brown eyes and they glance up into mine
I try not to stare, but I can't help it,
I can't help it. Whatever my brain knows
remains unintelligible private
argot to my simple heart. When I see
someone standing there with the same smile on
her faint pink lips I go mad. I don't know
why you don't know here's where you belong. When
I don't hear from you it's all I can do
to struggle and hold onto my place in
this grim, melancholic world. Everywhere
I turn your sweet brown eyes are looking back
into mine, driving me mad, and I can't
help it, I can't help it. Why aren't you here?
Unity
A series of doors down
the long, white corridor open with
diminishing panic. You witness
your death and separation of soul
from flesh, over and over again.
Step across the threshold and awaken:
catharsis! You're the newborn superman
suspended in fresh magic: your self,
your cosmos, all at the same time.
The serenity is profound.
Gelid Notes
it's a
hell of a thing when
listening to your favorite tune's been
transmuted into an exercise in
data mining
all these
fossils and relics from
so many successive and parallel
dicey lifelines and slithering
lifetimes
it all unravels and unwinds and
this much documentation like
precision pinning of butterflies
in narrow daubs of yellowing
spacetime and whose spinning
vinyl i happened to nab while slopping
altar wine across the transom
of the percentage sign and how many
of them have been abandoned or otherwise
left behind on the dark side of life's
last abrupt threshold beyond which waits
substantial arcana in rich
and pregnant solitude
20090911
Key X
All of those thousands, those
Hapless and fate-infected hundreds of thousands caught
Up in the buckets of life's Ferris wheel turning, turning,
That huge, mechanical insectoid wheel grinding
Steadily onward, relentless; some going
Up, happy, hopeful, drunk on prosperity's
Bountiful joys, full of optimism and dreams;
Some on the descendant like a fat, green moon
In its waning, jostled and jolted, struggling to
Hang on by bleeding fingernails, false
Grin to the world, determined to turn
Everything to rights again; and those
Nearer the bottom at the abrading
Millstone interface, those struggling
Hordes of almost skeletal people, unfortunately
Recognizable, and not too much unlike
You, or me; those desperados crying out,
Beyond coping, beyond rescue or hope for hoping,
Being ground up and crushed and crumpled, those
Victims of time, slipping and dipping down into
Brown, murky pools, where all sound
Skitters to a stop.
Downin' a Few Beers With Some Friendly Quangoeers (White Itself)
the crash blossoms flower by
the hour behind yellow
trash bins of love, walkin' in a
buzz saw wonderland. hier-
archical values of skin
color molest ex-quangoeers
beset by miserable days
imprinted with the proposition that
white itself must always be viewed with
unmitigated suspicion.
20090909
20090907
Contemplations: "unholding dear hard sleep"
i think your antilanguage is developing
a fuller syntax now that does not )yet(
feel like expressive english hiding
itself around the expansive skirts of
schizophrenic word salad. my eyes were
caught and thoughts ensnared on two
inflexion points; viz., (1) i do
sometimes i think see past the themes
of classic plots and feel without
thinking and think full -- this self-
deprecating sometimes i think does not
ring true; you grok, clearly, without
question; i know all about the cataloging
compulsion and the capturing of words/
sounds/images/preserving moments in
formaldehyde jars kinda trip but you,
you're in it, yeah, embedded; but these
'classic plots' are not recipes no but
recapitulations of jungian archetypal
stories embedded also w/in subconscious
human machine language hero w a
thousand faces kind of gobbledygook
which art makes temporarily accessible
expressible not mere embellishment as
many claim which is the job of the
shoeshine girl and (2) i wouldn't get it
right now being too awake to compromise
or close my eyes on terror peace ‑‑ this
is really the same subject matter after all
it's all about thresholds and how much is
suppressed or repressed down into the
darkness so humans are engineered to be
somnambulists and hallucinogens are really
just extrinsic neurotransmitters that lower
thresholds waking humans up so that more
of the subconscious mind is immediately
available for conscious consideration
whether directly or through fantasy i'm
uncertain and somehow i doubt the
distinction much matters.
20090906
Unreality Reel
Who remembers or respects
Atom Heart Mother
Whose production values are not
So far up to snuff
Who unchains whose brains
Whose car planes across diamond highways
And falls into the sun
Who glides low over croplands
Watching history come undone
Whose derelict voice choirs
Modulate the fateful fabrics of
Brainstem existence and desires
Counting out pennies of remittance
And penalties for resistance
Who grows out long hair and dances
Traipsing beneath black bridges
Who presses the accelerator
Slowly to the floor
Launching into a new excursion
Past boundaries never penetrated before
Ride astride a musical chord like a
Neon light beam we seem to be
Leaving the desert scrub and memory stream
Unpeeling lightyears back behind us
Beyond the beach and unto the breach of
Thickening oceans of ordeals
Do you think these guys are
On something or are they just a
Little bit unreal
A New Hull Design
When they all are so young again
Their bodies lanky and thin and
Long-drawn like lizards
They wrap them together and gyrate
In space travel music for their
Own generation
We break bottles of champagne over
A new hull design
Welcome to the Heavens, children,
And whatsoever promising new
Edens you may find
An Elephant on Labor Day
You know how it is when you're trying not to think of an elephant on Labor Day, and the gray and soft red gravel is crunching under your boot heels as you walk slowly along the path trying to be quiet, your eyes alert up ahead and peripherally, continuously swinging about like searchlights for a rattlesnake that could be coiled up and impassively waiting, or one of the baby ones harder to see and with no rattle, but no less venomous. Baby snakes without their rattles. The cottonwood leaves flutter like sap-sticky green tongues in the breeze, and the local odors fill your nostrils to remind you of wet places, earthworms and flatworms and sulfur and methane, that sick-sweet summer syrupy river smell that reminds you of childhood. The only sounds are the branches and bulrushes tussling in the wind and the random, startled blasts of waterfowl, and the keening black birds with bright orange epaulettes, or the sudden startling plashing of a frog hitting the water from some secret perch on the bank. It's rough, his thick pachydermal skin, like baked mud, silvery-white, bristling with coarse hair, and a small tail like a bell pull that swings lightly as he lumbers along, and this is what you're trying not to think about, but there it is again and you've failed.
When it is just beginning to be no longer so unbearably hot in the early evenings the snakes venture out from their cool subterranean dens and come gliding over the path, making for the river's edge. Their heavy bodies, like dragging ropes, bend down the reeds as they loop up into their pliant green spline-like walls, limberly mashing them down into a mat that rides close above the surface of the water where snakes, slowly waking up, can stay cool and hunt their prey: the abundant brown wood rats that scurry constantly away from your hushed footfalls. Many snakes have glassy scale armor, but the rattlesnake's skin is rough and bleached out sandy-brown, making it that much harder to see, even with the long chain of diamonds down his powerful, muscly back. A single supple muscle attached to a network of delicately articulated yellow-white bone-spines with a mouth full of fangs and flicking black tongue and poison at one end and a rattle of successive dead skin sloughings at the other. That's all a snake is. A living tentacle, independent, driven by the reptilian consciousness. Deep hindbrain circuitry, unadulterated fight or flight. Low-level machine language programming, but the absence of interfering doubt makes it supremely and deadly effective. None of those complicated overlays that get mammals into so much trouble. Higher function calls. Higher? If you say so. These the kind of mental traps our culturally-programmed verbal language-construct games use to enclose consciousness. Control.
What are the secret thoughts of elephants? They are not simple reptilian chip processors. They say elephants never forget. Imagine the weight of elephant brain. All that processing capacity, but no opposable thumb. Is that what makes the difference? Can't make tools and so can't modify the environment sufficiently to recoil back with instant feedback and jump-start an intellectual existence? Elephants sleepwalking through whole lifetimes. Hindus say they hold up the experiential universe. Holy elephants. Something to that. Lines of elephants trudging ahead through sun-baked African plain trunk to tail, trunk to tail, and the sun intolerable on their bulging shoulders and bellies. No subterranean dens for them; no mat-building above the refreshing whirlpools of a flowing river. They must endure the heat just as they endure time.
The river is an inevitable metaphor for mind-consciousness, always, cross-culturally. Inescapably attractive for objectification. The way it is never the same from instant to instant, and those whirlpools turning, and how the surface conceals everything lying beneath. Thin skin of sensory interface between interior Existenz and the phenomenal Dasein. But the Dasein is only the objective, manifested world. At heart I am an acosmist. I reject the objective as Maya: the Dasein is useful and utilitarian, an embedding matrix upon which Existenz operates, but this objective reality, universally mistaken in the Western mind as the Reality, is only a reflection of Brahman. Christian, Hindu, Buddha, it little matters. No matter. There is no matter. We waltz through a maze of mirrors, light flashing transiently in our eyes like sparkles from a gently flowing river, and we arrogantly believe we understand rivers from these constricted observations.
But what power these wonderful illusions wield! The call of body for body, and although I know about the molecular crosstalk of intrinsic and extrinsic neurotransmitters, this knowledge matters nothing at all. This is wisdom without impact. Thick, horny gray elephant skin is not undesirable among discerning elephants. No. Cascades of chemical messengers, and the neuroanatomical switchboard ignites. What triggers, then? Memories and desires. Powerful, powerful words that preclude cultural definition. Too strong and primitive. Some words emerge not from the mind or the heart but from the marrow.
A verdant green algal scum lies close in to the shore, cracked like transverse tectonic fault lines by invisible sub-currents and vortices, and the puffs of vagrant breezes. The clouds are really piling up in the east, pouring in from a long migration out of Mexico. No atmospheric inspection stations. I can clearly feel the electricity raging in my muscles and nerves. Fists clench, relax: clench, relax. Jaw pressed tightly closed. Voices in the flesh. Imagine it for elephants. So much more mass to work with. Driven forward we are by chemistry and demanding hurricanes of nucleotides. My mind is boiling over from subconscious cauldrons I can't fathom, but I know the effects from much experience, and the sources. Not think of elephants. I am swearing constantly in my mind in hoary, crude, copulative terminology that has endured for centuries, for a millennium or more, formulating demanding questions whose answers I already know and understand far too clearly and completely. No matter. No matter. My genes speak a different language, though, like trying to reason with the reptilian hindbrain. Unassailable Baptist revival anti-logical knowing. Cannot be appeased or assuaged. Starving. Hunger. Thirst. Demanding. Expecting. Requiring. Requisite needs. Desires. Boiling up and over, foaming, frothing. Hungry. Do not think about elephants. As if. As though. I am a mind alone in this cold universe demanding. . . .demanding. . . .
I cannot help wondering whether these inescapable ponderings of elephants preoccupy her thoughts, too.
20090905
20090904
20090902
Oh, Grow Up!
Society recognizes, or requires,
the amnesia that permits one to mistake his
perceptions of external reality for
reality as proof-positive of maturity.
Is it possible that all of the subconscious
mind arises out of years of socially-enforced
repression of fantasy and imagination?