December, 1988

The passing song,
A Christmas Carol-
So randomly,
Quite arbitrarily
Pandora-played.

The memory that alights in a held-breath moment.
A ruffling of feathers
The trembling thought made black against fading light.
Listening to the tune
I sit on the couch
(an exhausted adult, with a sore back)
My mind a diffusion of reds and blues.

The pain of remembered happiness
Cold cheeks in December
Running home from the fields.
I had laid there in a bed of soft grass
Watched Texas clouds
They were vivid hued
Painted by a tired sun
Dipped its brush into a dark well
An early night that rapidly ensued.
Uncharted hopes sailed overhead
Dreams towered in waning light
Elegant castles that waited to be built.

I could have stayed there forever,
But I remembered it was time to put up the tree
Dress it with ornaments and string the lights.
I ran home-
There was a smell of something good
And the sound of a record on the player,
"Walkin' in a Winter Wonderland."

I could not savor it then,
But sitting in my quiet living room,
After wandering my kitchen at eleven P.M.
Drinking a cup of coffee black
Closing all the cabinet doors
That everyone forgets to shut
I paused,
Looked out the kitchen window
Watched the play of Christmas lights on melting snow.

Pandora plays where you last left off,
My quiet reading time with Vlatko Vedral stopped
When Christmas Eve's music came on.

I remembered,
So clearly,
I remembered!
That evening in December
Lying in my bed of soft grass
Watching the sky and clouds and the setting sun
The hopes and dreams of a ten year old.

Had my Nina, Pinta, and little Santa Maria gotten lost?
Or might they still find a home?

I sat for a awhile,
Then I turned to another station,
The orchestra pieces of Philip Glass.

I took a breath,
Drank some coffee
And then I wrote this poem.

I want to emphasize that despite our pleasant circumstances, we are never TRULY happy in this life, no matter how good things are going or positive the prognosis. I don't want this poem to be interpreted as a product of post-Christmas blues.

I believe it captures a universal message.

How can we  truly be happy, mortal transients that we are. My chain of reasoning is, my kids are making these memories now, just as I made mine then. I could not remember or even guess exactly what I was thinking that evening long ago, just that I had a strong feeling of infinite possibilities. It crossed my mind, quite distinctly in fact, that there were others who I know right now who might be experiencing what I did many years ago, and only just now recalled; I felt a great need to capture this and catalogue it. How can I explain this some day, or at least empathize with my children someday if/when they achieve this realization and I have not mentally excavated it for myself. Yeah. Tough one.

I think part of the melancholy of growing older in our lives comes from the diminishing returns of this infinite possibility into a more narrow approach. Most of us I think, if not all, are born with GREAT hearts. Hearts that wish to move with rhythms larger than ourselves- we all wish we could be part of something passionate and heroic and beautiful. Whether man or woman, part of us yearns for something more, a greater vision. It is more than adventure, it is the intrinsic longing that C.S. Lewis and many others talked about, the cold and clear dawn of our souls from a great height overlooking a shining sea: Sehnsucht. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sehnsucht

Then, when we reach a certain age, our backs hurt, we are more tired, and we just look at the next mile, the next corner. This is middle age, an age where we have secured an identity, but still do not have the wisdom of a long perspective. We are capable but still enmeshed. We know a great deal of what to expect from the future. It is often a lot of work, and usually largely predictable. We feel the weight of the mundane, and do not yet have the satisfaction of a perspective found only in old age, when we can look back and see that these years of slow sluggish walking were actually the gradually formation of an unparalleled pearl.

Yet, when we are young, we saw only possibility without the reality and worry of a parent and spouse. We do not have the motivation of invested time and effort nor the luxury of observing the second and third order effects of our labors. Life is a Tabula Rasa and we have a pen full of ink hungry for white space.

Especially in this age, each generation seems to outdistance the last geometrically. From many centuries, this was not the case, and sons saw what their father's fathers had seen, and did what their great grandfather's did. There was a changeless-ness to some degree in society. Today, we seem to have every possible path in front of us. Yet, it is almost a terrible lie, for we find ourselves forsaking our dreams to meet our responsibilities. This is not an ignoble thing, for it is better survive with honor than savor the thriving of our art in shame. However, this does not discount our inner angst, nor diminish our feeling of sehnsucht. In the words of the urban seer, Tyler Durden:

Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off. 

Well said, my good schizo-friend... but let's forego the pissed-off ear-punching and find a bodhi tree instead.

So, in the midnight hour, drinking my coffee while I sit on the couch,I realize how beautiful some of my childhood moments were and how important it is to give my children beautiful moments.

I realize that I have more than work to do. Of course, I still need to meet my obligations. I have to survive this house of cards life, and that takes a measure of compromise. But not COMPLETE compromise. There are territories that are sacred to me. I will not surrender the central Keep. 

When faced with our waning mortality, we can sit on the couch and feel it for a moment. But, it should never end there. We need to take a drink of coffee, and then struggle to understand it.

We owe it to ourselves, and we owe it to our children.

Thirty is young yet.

There is still a lot to do.

Looking Forward to 2011

"Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men [sic] -- go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers or families -- re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body."

Walt Whitman

A True Experiment

Well, I stepped out on a limb today. Sometimes, you have to try something new. A long time ago, I started collecting old dictionaries, quantum physics books, and computer code books to use as material in my physical art. I will use a page of equations or data function tree from computers as the focal point for a canvas, drawing a portrait over the text/numbers and painting it or filling it in so that only fragments of the original is there. I am a total English major, so when I open a computer book filled with programing language- it is unintelligible to me. However, the terminology is fascinating in a sort of verbal brownian motion- there is a beauty akin to Dylan Thomas' more obtuse verse. Besides... after recently watching the documentary about the artist Basquiat, how he would have music playing in the background, the television going, the radio blaring so that he was constantly incorporating incongruities, weaving a quanta of disparate elements into a balanced final product. I listened to Philip Glass's symphonic music to relax my conscious mind, then opened Data Structures to Computer Applications to Non-Linear Data Structures and just started grabbing random phrases and words. Soon, I was able to fit them together like puzzle pieces, although several times I had to turn the whole thing upside down several times. When stumped several times, I incorporated several random words from Twentieth Century Small Fire-Arms encyclopedia, The History of Tree-Bark, Computer Reversion, and from earlier today, the title of a SyFy episode, Caprica (Apotheosis- I did not know the meaning of the word, but it stuck in my brain, and at the appropriate moment, I inserted it, and then looked it up to verify- I was ecstatic that it was right on target). So, here is the poem:

 Figure 5-1.9 
or
(men as trees walking)

An arbitrary footstep

The careless hand

A casual seed hastened by gravity.

There was a rebellion in the soil

A force-age of celluar stuff

Powered by water

Pushed by a chaos of roots

Mucilage aggression

Terminal advance of lignin and cellouse through loam.

The representation of a tree is not an actual tree.

There are glossaries for representations

But then-

We make glossaries from trees

Bind fibers with mucilage.

This is an ordered forest of binary trees

The represented and the actual

Intrinsic to but one family

Sparse matrices with terminal nodes.

Their every leaf designed

Fragile mazes inscribed  

Facilitation of chemical seraphim.

So listen:

Here we shall describe trees

The manipulation of trees

Nodes between branches

And the sap that flows

In non-linear ways

By a variation of notes

Ordered cues for a biological routine

The linked allocation in an mutually supportive scheme.

Lo the linear engine with traversing gears

Branch and sub-branch

Twigs that bend

Roots in profusion

All this correspondence

Threaded through with sequential cells

Empowered by rare fire atomic hued

Angels who whisper molecular chords:

Grow! Grow!

The cycle endures through repetition.

We borrowed terminology,

This bird sings a song of fluted chrome

There is no silence amid ambient action

Otherwise notes would blend to monotone.

The data structure of lignified matter

Pushed by life

Defies the force of density

Progresses geometrically

Initiates an indefinite recursive procedure.

The infinite triumph through finite components,

Apotheosis.

Trees have a valid logic.

The forest is global.

Here is the algorithm:

To die is human,

To live-

Divine.

So human being: Dying, live!

From Phillip Glass's "Pruit Igoe"

I wrote this listening to Phillip Glasses song "Pruit Igoe" from The Watchmen movie score:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0RKpmjjpLQ&feature=related

His eyes are closed

Descending.

There are ruins and broken walls here.

Children have fled to far away.

Hope has lost its hearing

Her hands are blind

And they have stopped their seeking.

His eye lashes are not locked

They rest-

A reposed disposition.

An exile!

He was an exile.

The exile descends.

This Zarasthustra has wandered.

There were many places

He saw many a sight

He looked but could not find.

The stars were bright, but they were not kind.

Here is but a jagged rust

Twisted beams

Sagging doors 

Empty windows.

The monuments have fallen

A statue's hand lies empty under sky.

Glass shards on cracked pavements reflect the moon.

There is no life here

He descends.

He descends!

His eyes open!

There is no sound 

He looks left and right

Between the gutted walls

Between buildings with missing teeth

He descends.

With arms extended

His foot reaches out,

The stones wait

Stars continue overhead.

He is descended.

The ruins.

He looks upon the ruins.

The exile looks upon the ruins.

When I listen to the song, I always have a distinct mental image of an infinitely tired traveler, a dying god or superhero with a terminal disease who descends over a ruined city at night. It is like a cosmic Gilgamesh who has searched the universe to restore his brother Enkidu, but upon failure, returns to his city. Everything is derelict; he knows this is the case, but he is serene and hence his eyes are closed to in a fruitless attempt to avert the inevitable reality of the true situation. Sort of like an inverse ascension married to Ozymandias moment...

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Amazing how my subconscious blended all that together. 

Parodie de Calme

In a hidden silence
She seeks a blue sky devoid of memory
The bright sun framed 
Sea walls that tower over the world.

But I feel a subtle wind
The slight shudder of a hesitant knock
A knock that shatters the soul of an afternoon.

Do not tremble, small one that lives in the shadow of a tree root
The axis mundi is deliberate reality,
It walks only to walk,
And if its feet are heavy on the ground
It is only because it's feet have weight and gravity is a simple messenger.
Perhaps to the meek, the truth will be kind.

And the stones are worn round by water
And the stones are worn smooth by tides
My skin is rough,
Thirty years plus one do not bring congruence to my uneven utterance.

Let the final flowers fall,
For they perish in the summer wind
And winter comes like a flood
Do not let the autumn of the soul strike without warning
For our lost thoughts are like dead leaves that nightly fall in silence
The earth shall embrace them.

For the Father said
In the name of,
And the son said,
Of the Father,
The Holy ghost said,
Amen,

(a puff of dust, a sparrow falls- is there remembrance? or
the dissonant but steady march of random selection)

Mea culpa, mea culpa!

Mi amor, my small sweet one.

A drop of red below a tiny beak
The feather-light form is framed on the dust
An empty plain is the canvas.


Who will save us?

By Satellite

As I drove
I looked over my shoulder
And I saw:
An empty lot of sky
The looming blue between red-brick buildings

A flock of birds
Searching
Flying

A cloud of birds
Painting the sky with wings.

They flew from the library to the cafe
Back to the library
Then across the square
They surged

Like snowflakes in a snow-globe shaken hard
And I lost them over city hall.

Turning the corner
I drove.

A small town road
A fall afternoon
The golden light.

I was a thinking person
Inside a breathing body;
Pilot to a moving vehicle.

The leaves fell around me
They flew like the birds
The road became a hill
The hill became a tunnel through leaves and light.

I joined the leaves
Became a bird
A bird on the wind.

Circling the city square,
Looked for a door
Castaneda's cave to Ixtlan.

I found only

The space between buildings
Anonymous sky
Empty blue.

Snow

Snow is coming down outside. I don't think it will stick, but there is still hope.

Ha, ha. I've always loved snow, ever since I was a kid.

One of my earliest memories was wandering out of my room at the age of 3 at about 6 AM. I walked into the dining room with the glass sliding door, and suddenly the universe outside was white in the early morning light. Clouds were heavy over the mountains, and from their depths a white army cascaded across the valley. My dad was sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast, dressed in his green flight-suit. My mom wore a green velvet robe with silver vines curling along the hems.

As I looked upon the billowing snow, I was transfixed. It was a paradox of a silent white desert and the muted fury of a storm as the flakes churned around the streetlights.

She took me by my hand, led me to the roaring fire where a large pillow lay. She returned with my special blue plastic cup with a handle-hot chocolate, the marshmellows half melted. I looked into the flames, and hearing my parent's voices at the table, I was happy.

That's the end of the memory.

If it sounds too good to be true, too perfect- too contrived, it's not. Honest.

Maybe that's why I remember it so well.

So, right now... maybe I'll turn off the news, open the curtains- make myself a cup of hot chocolate.

( :

Lost Seraphim at the Red Wind Casino

'Till recently,
Casinos were a mystery to me.
Was I just too serious?
Cursed by many books,
Perhaps not enough oxygen-
Sometimes a lack of flippant green?

Despite these faults,
I drove a beautiful road last evening
Towering trees cathedral-vaulted the road,
Fading light touched lightly the tips of pines.
Amid the rustic forest in the heart of the Reservation
The Red Wind casino sprawled like a blockhouse next to a large gas station.
Trees watched from across the highway as I wove the parking lanes-
A massive blacktop you find at Disney World or mega-churches.
Later, when I left the mandatory dinner in a private room
I entered the open casino floor:
A wide space
A thousand ATM's with gleaming screens
Only they took people's money in.
A casual decadence of cigarette smoke floated overhead
Faded rumpled folks-
Wrinkled laundry souls
Unsmiling faces lit by green screens.
They perched on stools nursing a beer
Solitary stockbrokers with pursed lips
Blond bleach-burned hair
Old men peering through big spectacles
The neatly uniformed workers of doubtful pedigree.
It was a crowded terminal with no planes
A bus station shipwrecked in a forest without roads.
Crowded marketplace of individuals busy with loneliness
Folks who gave up on finding heaven
Spent all their time in a dingy waiting room.

Yet, I paused on the edge of the jaded crimson carpet-
Because:
The sound, the sound!
A subtle music
The blended beauty of singing machines
Somehow harmonized
Not a symphony but a prelude of intangible meaning
The whirring of blown-glass angel wings multiplied
The music of the spheres
Somewhere in the divide between heaven and hell
Tingling like a million small bells
Ice crystals hanging from Siberian trees
Trembling into silver vibration from the wind
The muted whisper of shattered sub-particles in distant space
An off-key fragment from a Vangelis musical score,

I stopped at the entrance
Stood and listened.

In the smoky casino next to the wide doors
People brushed past me,
The greeters glared-

But I took a moment to stand and listen
I think it was the music of lost Seraphim.

Last salvo

Sometimes
Two hours past midnight
I wonder
Wandering
Clutching shreds of text
Tinkering with tattered machines
Compounded and combined
Strewn 'cross the plain of time
Something from Dali's mind
The desperate efforts of whispering madmen
Fleeting forms
The artist and poet
With song and poem
Rusting skeletons with silver plate
Chisel-chipping hieroglyphs in river stone
Thinking twigs forever losing leaves.
A melting of chaos made by angels falling
The hurler and the hurled
The world below,
A pool that is boiling.

We are a raging fever of little cells
Kept in quarantine
It has stretched to hold our minds.

Delusion of the latest hour
Where lettered pages little avail
All books fade and finally fail.
They are but the fuel and foundation
A funeral pyre to warm the incoming generation.
Tomorrow comes quickly.
New cities grow
Bridges are built
And tigers still shred antelope on the plain.

My thoughts are dust
Words are simply shapes.

Anti-Oedipus

Paradox has always been a major part of my life. Defining this paradox as dualism alone does not feel right. I would say it is a cooperative paradox if that makes sense. I see dualism as sun versus moon, good versus evil, male versus female. A cooperative paradox would be sun and shadow, wisdom and knowledge, husband and wife. A cooperative paradox would be a yin yang symbol, or an Ankh. There is a flow between two realities, like a brother and sister ruling the same kingdom. For many years I have been torn between transcendent/cerebral/spiritual pursuits and organic/sexual/desire pursuits. My external struggles have only served to illustrate the internal strife that has plagued me since self awareness.

There have been times where I felt the refined senses, the beauty of spiritual purity was the lonely but true way. However, there was something liberating in the full power of loins, the animal sense of gratuitous fulfillment, the ripe strength and raw pleasure of sexuality. That was where the power of oxygenated blood and sweat and musk fueled real emotion, human feelings and dynamic that pushed dramatic art far beyond the crystalline beauty of the cerebral vision.

I guess that is why we quote Shakespeare, 

What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

Human beings are living earth, and they feel the world the way other beings cannot. Yes, we have no wings. Yes, we are condemned to all the troubles of mortal coil- cold, sweat, shit, spit, influenza, broken bones.... all of it! But we LIVE life more readily than the flickering holograms that watch us in our little rooms, whether those found in palatial Beverly Hill Estates or a Neolithic round house with its thatched roof. We have the palpitating beauty of a hummingbird imbued with the survival instinct of the cockroach.

My whole blasted point is, tonight I am excited because I have begun a book which promises a possible explanation, perhaps a justification or even better, clear interpretation of this cooperative paradox between the bestial and angelic components of a human being.

Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, written by two Frenchmen, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, promises great things within the introduction. 

I am excited.

Cheers.

Anti-Oedipus, Penguin Classics

Friend

Friend


It was…

'Friend!' to you

Across the long water,

The silence, the golden silence that rolled from the horizon in motion.




My word-

A solitary echo that resounded,

Sang like a single bird in lion’s-mane cage

Rang in a silence made golden by

A tired sun resting on the world's curve.

My word soared like an arrow shot over an empty plain.

The silence came in molten waves

Waves rolling in a rhythm of breathing light

A restless seething against the night.



This word sent an echo into a place forgotten

An old word with a lost meaning

Remembered only by

Old men

And the very young.



It was…

“Friend!” to you

Across the long water,

The silence, the golden silence that rolled from the horizon in motion.

Tired

I am tired of life. No suicidal ideation here, but I wish I wasn't so bound by the grid. I wish I wasn't enmeshed in my carefully balanced "house of cards life". Where are the wild OMs? Tired of these Draags.

After watching the show this weekend, my desire to learn French was renewed. "Fantastic Planet" is a cardboard cutout title next to: " La Planète Sauvage".


(the nasal of Fannn - tasss- tic Planit, Texas twang to the rolling elegance in a melodious baritone rumble: La PLAHNETE... Sauvage... )


Life on the savage planet, where most of us live lives of quiet desperation.

Here I go again

drifting right now...
I watched Apocalypse Now last night after drinking 3 cups of coffee. So there I sat, wired with caffeine, watching Colonel Kurtz philosophize and get hacked to pieces. When the screen went to black, I pulled out Philip K Dick and finished his relatively unknown novel, The Maze of Death.

Still couldn't sleep, and everyone was knocked out.

So I sat at my little desk, put on the film score from Inception, cranked the volume and just let my subconscious flow through my fingertips onto the keyboard. The song, "Time" is the best I think:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0kGAz6HYM8

The composer, Hans Zimmer has a solid grasp of conveying strong emotion through subtle tones. I love his work from The Thin Red Line and other pieces.

This song was a powerful, wistful, somber but with a passion that came in slow waves. You could film a warrior's last moments as he carried a friend to safety before bleeding out; or a couple making love in a room with snow outside, the rhythmic weave of bodies with closeups of facial expressions in shadow... It starts out slow, but with an ebbing and flowing that builds to a heavy climax with a slow tapering into single piano keys. Tenderness and strength, vulnerability and power all blended together.

Sweeping sadness. A prizefighter weeping. I don't know, but damn! A beautiful piece.

Often I will pick an amazing piece and write to it. Just let my mind drift like Nostradamus staring at his midnight basin of water, one hand scribbling out the future. So this stuff is personal subconscious stuff. Not exquisite by any means, a little repetitive like "chemical machine". Ever since I left the mortuary, my concept of the human body has changed. That the skin holds a complex set of ongoing chemical reactions dominates my perception of the human form. A woman is still beautiful, two eyes still glisten with humanity, but I cannot shake the image of the decaying form from my mind.

Disgust has long since faded. It is replaced by a sense of reality, a terrible final sadness that death is totally real for these beautiful biological forms. A human being in his or her body is beautiful, arch-angelic. We are made more beautiful by our temporal nature, by our transience in this world. That is the tragedy, and that is what is the most beautiful. My poem from my book A Piece of Cobalt Sky says it best:

Between Sleeping and Waking

All I have
Is this tender castle of my body,
A mist of atoms
Frail in their solemnity
Balanced in a fragile truce between
Potential and actuality
Duality of love and sadness
Linked by a vapor of electric charge.
From the choked orifice of my heart
The universe sings
And I dream of deep waters and tall trees.

For me, poems do not usually spring out of my head in full armor, but this one did in Iraq. I was almost asleep, listening to the beat of distant blackhawk rotors, and suddenly the words came in full sentences. The only change was "this tender castle of my BODY" from "this tender castle of my FLESH". I hardly ever go with the results of a popular poll, but too many women said it conjured up a phallic tower, and that was not my intent in the poem, so I changed it to body. Although I have to say I still place my vote for flesh as opposed to body. Anyway.

So I went with Inception, and switching to Adagio for Strings Tiesto Remix, I had these visions of the crazed Colonel Kurtz dancing in the jungle to trance, muttering lines from the wasteland.... I think I failed on the ending. I don't like it. Here they are.

And if you want to see where they came from, or rather hear:

Inception: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0kGAz6HYM8

Tiesto Adagio for Strings: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGfq57asAzA&feature=related

Poem I

There is a spiraling that goes unnoticed

Lateness comes early.

Judgement

Sentence

Execution.

No defence against mortal prejudice.

Brass trumpets blow

They blow with an iron sound

Steps are heavy and slow

A march inevitable.

His heart has stopped.

Carry him softly.

Carry him softly.

Poem II

After midnight

I sit alone.

There are no words

No thoughts.

Time seems to change

Meld

Morph.

All constants are off.

A sadness comes

A faint but penetrating smell.

My animal senses stir

But my soul is awake.

Sound is less

Touch is in a dream.

I see visuals like a program

A photonic dance on an internal screen.

This sadness says:

Wayfarer, where do you wander?

What dark forests in the night

Breaking holes in frozen waters

Searching for a lost sword to slay the dream-

O wanderer!

O chemical machine!

I exhale

I feel my shirt against my skin

My toes touch the winter floor.

I am here.

I cannot leave.

Tomorrow the alarm will ring

My eyes will open.

I will swallow and clear my throat

Grind beans for coffee

Spill a little water on the floor.

I cannot escape this.

This is real.

But this is not real.

What is real and not real are reversed.

I can get a smell of the real.

It is not intrinsically sad

But I feel a great sadness because the real is close

I can sense it

But I cannot see it and I cannot find it.

So my heart becomes sad.

My son was sleeping in my bed.

When I woke him to move him,

I felt his shoulder and it was hot;

I realized he was a furnace with living blood

He was a combination of chemicals chain reacting

His skin was a sensor that felt my hand and woke him.

His eyelids opened with muscles and he saw me.

But when he saw me

He smiled

And I saw he was a soul and not a chemical machine

But his eyes were still asleep.

So we are slumbering souls
We ride smiling chemical machines.

Our hearts are filled with sadness.

Measure each minute

Organize actions

Make systems

Click Clack

Gears

Circuits

Technology

Grids

Logic

Reason.

Keep it going

Snap

Crack

Green-Yellow-Red-Green-Yellow-Red- Green-Yellow-Red- Green-Yellow-Red- Green-

Copy-Paste

Don’t create, just repeat.

Cycle

Cycle

Cycle

In a desperate rhythm

And the ghosts bid me:

Silence!

But I keep typing

The one man awake.
And the ghosts whispered:
Stop!
But I keep on typing
The one man awake.

I looked at my son

Found a chemical machine.

I looked at this chemical machine

I saw his soul

Within his soul

Sadness.

Desperate man

Alone at midnight

Trying to gauge this ocean.

It is black

The depths have hungry hands.

Leaning on the desk

I look over my shoulder

Every hair stands on end.

Every mental weapon I hurl

Mind an anvil

My thoughts hammers

Beating on the door of time!

A fish on the hook

Turning and tossing

Fighting with the dream.

Poem III

Solace is a lost world.

Love that is unspoken

Dreams unknown.

Finality

Sparrows falling in a storm

In the wind

In the madness

I missed you

But I could not forget you.

Read this note.

I left it pinned

Fluttering

On a random tree

In some field

Outside a small town without suburbs.

People will drive by it tomorrow

They will look straight ahead at the road.

On their way to church

In their Sunday best,

They will not notice it.

It will flutter just for you

Each word an isolated note

An echoing stroke

A gentle finger

Each piano key

Struck singlely.

My note with its small words

In the early morning

A paho waving in the wind.

Remember me.

Poem IV

Mistuh Kurtz

He Dead.

Stood between life and death.

Drank full the cup of horror

Danced into a purple haze

Drank death till he crucified his mind.

Yes, the arms were hacked

Yes, they made a pile

And he wanted strength

A noble army strong with horror

But he thought this was an addition

When it was really a subtraction

The multiplication of a fraction.

You cannot meet fear without trembling

You cannot meet death without dying.

Dancing in the jungle

He was a hollow man.

He met death and he drank death down.

If you drink death and become death

You can meet death without dying.

Fear becomes you, and you are not afraid.

Yet they were hollow men-
Hollow men!

Fear carved them empty

Weak bodies

Chemical machines 

When they held death

Death ate them like acid.

Mistuh Kurtz

He dead because he wanted dem general stars.

He wanted dem stars the way he had wanted airborne wings.

The path from gleam to gleam

Flash to flash

(a secret emptiness)

(a cold wind)

(did we not say they were hollow men?)
They told him, "Do this! We will give them to you."
So he saluted, and he left, because he wanted them.

Kurtz entered the jungle unaware
He thought,
"Just one more mission,
Then I will ascend the gleaming stairs."

But the jungle is different

It has no system.

It was an ambush to his plans

It delivered a primal answer
To the human question.
It answered as the jungle,

In a way grocers do not.

Kurtz left the polished floor and journeyed into muck.

He lost himself

He could not go back.

But he could not go forward.

He short circuited

Crucifying men in rages

Reading poetry under twilight
In a Buddhist temple
Staring into darkness and the canopy

Searching for signs but finding only filth.

Surrounded by sweat and blood and mud
He did not want the stars

The flash, the gleam

He saw reality
The silver haired CEO's
They had sold their souls long ago.

It was all a tinsel dream.

He did not want to be a grocer in uniform

He forsook the line of dusty pictures in a Pentagon hallway.

But lying on cold stones

Empty

Darkness and death found him

In the hollow of his heart

They made their abode.

The jungle was unforgiving

Nature doesn’t lie.

These gods are wild and ruthless.

Mistuh Kurtz

Your horror is not yourself

Your horror is not the final silence

The last rolling in your blood.

It is a wicker man

It is an intelligent and hungry cancer.

It is not chaos,

It is the deliberate choice of chaos.

It is an injection of entropy into the human spirit.

You were hollow back in grocery town.

Your epiphany killed you,

Not your horror-

Even it was only an echo.

You crucified yourself

Each nail was a realization of your true condition.

You died in darkness, self-condemned.

You are a hungry ghost

Your demons?

They are the demons from your mind.

               Photo taken by myself, an awesome shot of a brilliant graffiti on a boxcar down the street.

Turning the Crank

Last night I had the writing bug, so I put on my headphones and listened to John Murphy's Adagio in D, Sunshine. It is an amazing theme from the unforgettable sci-fi movie "Sunshine".

Here are the poems that came out. Not bad poems, but decent. I always try to write my best, so it is frustrating to produce something that is good but not excellent. Too much mind, too much deliberate crafting. I think the best poetry is from "No mind", "No consciousness". But you have to stir the well, pour out the pitcher so that it keeps getting filled.

So... here they are anyway:

Poem I

There was a place we knew once

But,
We lost it.

The sky is empty.

Perhaps the stars are hidden

Maybe the universe didn’t pay the bill.

All we know,

The sky is black.

Long ago
A call went out

Our heart became attuned

Although we don't know the meter

And we don't know the rhyme.

The notes roll

One upon another

With foothills into mountains

Mountains into snow till the granite touches time:

Crescendo.

A child is curled under covers

In early morning

The heat kicks on

Outside the windows
Tree limbs crash in a wild song.

Where is that voice that called to us?

We used to believe

But
I think we lost it.

I am looking for that voice

And the place from where it calls

Please tell me if you find it.

At the very least,

Write to me

Send me a letter with a map. 

Poem II 

In the moment of sunrise

I felt your hand in mine.

The rushing and the whisper

Ebb and flow
Breath of your heart.

A sudden peace

An inward turning.

The wings are silent

They move in air

Each particle of light

Swept by the horizon.

The light and the dark.

Morning,

Night.

(The heart beats softly)

There is a plain under a red sky

In iron armor
Two heroes always fight.

The wings beat

Air shakes.

The anvil,

Your heart

Each breath a hammer,

Every moment

The ringing strike.

 Poem III

I saw the end

That last moment

The closing of the book

Last page turned.

It was beautiful

And terrible

A gushing flame and a roaring wind

The curtain of the world

Torn asunder.

From the uncertain sea over misted continents

God walked like a giant

Each step one thous’n mile

Legs vast and shadowed

Like elephants by Dali

The torso a mountain

Lost in the darkness of the sky.

His beard swayed

The sound of a forest raging

Hands like great tree limbs falling.

His eyes in lower heaven

Two coals of fire burning.

HONORARIUM

Perry

After Touring the Richmond City Morgue

There is a silence
A silence that comes before mourning
(like a sentence without a period)
The words do not come
Finality fills the room
An inevitable cold.

(we did not know him)

Science states
All ways lead to entropy.
Others say the long night waits for everyone.
While many say there is simply nothing.
But
Somewhere in the vacuum of postulating intellects
This intrinsic truth was lost in definitive nouns and adjectives.

(we did not know him)

Within singular silence
Between interior and exterior
The breathing of the wind and
A stagnant stillness

When daylight's residue paints a pale stripe in the air
An empty room with blank floors and bare walls:

A room that waits without knowing
A house without electricity
A husk in a corner.

(we did not know him)

Outside
The sounds of evening
Neighbors behind lighted windows
The smell of woodsmoke and Autumn
Trees that stand quietly in the yard.

The leaves move in the wind but there is no sound.

Inside the room, silence.
There is no observer.

(we did not know him)

There is no emotion.
The gears of the universe clicked,
There was a past
There was a present
And then a sudden motion-
Tonight the sun will set
But there is no emotion.

(we did not know him)

The room is still.

(but for the tag, we did not know him)

The Sun shines on me and I like it.

There is no excuse. We must take on the world.

Build! Build! Carve out great swaths boldly!
The warmth on my face is free. Who can imagine the immensity or beauty of the sky. At any time, those of us who are free may walk beneath it.

There is no excuse. All prevarication must be denied.

If no one else had ever dared to break free of the cave to cartwheel in the open air, then we could rationalize an argument. But too many have escaped. We can see the smoke of their morning fires on the horizon, and we can smell their cooking meat.

We must engage. We must seek out our targets.

No limits.

[the other day, I was trying to describe Thomas Wolfe's work. i am reading "O' Lost!", the unabridged version of "Look Homeward Angel". I was trying to say that you could not "read" Thomas Wolfe because his writing is too rich- you have to "eat" it so to speak, but not like food, more like eating a landscape. Of course, that just sounded crazy- I was trying to say that Wolfe's thoughts are too big to objectify- they have an organic life of their own, and coupled with an immensity of scope, grouping them with the usual clever novel just doesn't work. So here is a metaphorical/poetical attempt to explain my understanding ( : ]



I do not read Thomas Wolfe.
I cannot.
His words are too large.
Textual landscapes
Verdant sentences thick with woven roots.
The chapters loom like organic monoliths
Each inch carved with a biography that records a minute history
Intricate weave
Documenting the progression of synchronistic artifacts
Each breeze
Every thunderstorm
An accounting of each knot and gnarl,
The random scars and deliberate marks
Inscribed, noted and em-poemed in stone.


The splendor of his vision
Gossamer connected arches
Shining nouns and singular verbs with buttresses of adjectives
Conceptual cathedrals ink-hewn
Midnight mortar 
A loom of pencil and pen.


I cannot read Thomas Wolfe.
His work is larger than I am- 
The tyranny of reader and work
Subject and object is overturned:
For Wolfe there is no seventh day.
You cannot close the book 
You cannot stop creation
To play God would be obscene.
The potter becomes the vessel
The vessel becomes a tower and swallows the moon.


Wolfe creates worlds with life
They live and breathe, have form and breadth and exist in space.
Like immense vistas
Continents 
Solar systems with gravity.
He paints pictures that tremble with a pulse:
The sweeping shores and wide waters
The misted islands of Puget Sound
Rich with trees
The smell of moist earth mixed with old leaves
The rough solidity of granite in the sun
Residue of snow on the mountain
Soft sand with a hint of heat.
His man walks
Has meat in his voice
A button is missing on a sleeve
There are wrinkles in the corners of his eyes.


No, you must eat his words
Digest them.
Dig holes in the hills and valleys of his books
Excavate into the loam of his thoughts
And like a heavy cake, eat slow bites.
Dip into the waters
The warm shallows
The translucent mean where silver trout gleam
Into the deep cold where darkness is a current
Sip them
Drink them down
Savor like a connoisseur.


Wolfe carved his Michelangelo's and bound them into books
A universe un-contained by any beach of sand.
Explorers and wanderers walk his shores
Waves wash their feet
The sun is reverent while the land sings. 

The State of Things

My life
It is written in an unknown script.
In rare moments, monthly and at midnight
I comprehend fragments of a line
Then it swirls away to chaos
Coffee and cream- too swift of an integration.
I yearn for delineation
The yin and yang,
Black and white demarcation
But once again
The old man wields his brush-
Stormy grey.

Rain drops have fallen
But they dry quickly
Ghostly ink blot artifacts of water
Transient fireworks etched in dust.
The earth is dry
A journalist's portrait of sun-crackled ground in Africa.

In this corridor of my restless world
A fitful wind blows
Gusts from a blinded Seraphim
Raging like a panicked bird
Against a window pane of heaven.
My history is a row of wine glasses.
Fate? A metal baseball bat swung by a pro
(each glass at impact freeze-framed in primitive animation
an explosion at the moment of ignition).

Segments of this beautiful life
(Buongiorno Principessa!)
Like separate eggshell china cups
Shatter in time to a karmic metronome
Go to pieces on the cobbles of my ground.
In this constant autumn
My careful piles of leaves disperse hourly
Under the burning trees of a purgatory
Mundane in its urbanity
I rake and rake eternally!

A poet prays for visions
For hieroglyphic portraits that define the soul,
Seeks a subtle music to raise the veil-
Blasts the brooding raven into drifting feathers
And reveals the balm of Gilead.

But on the steps of his house
Overlooking the street
He hears the churning of the factory
And smells its smoke.
He sips his cooling coffee
Watches a homeless man on his bicycle pedaling slow.

All is not lost-

Only my Rosetta stone.