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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Just playing with a new camera and software. . . .
Wheat Field
Red Dragon
Ox Bow
African Mask
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.
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.
