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
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.
