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.