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.

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)

Autumn is Coming in the Door

Fall comes to Virginia suddenly. Within a week, it is noticeably cooler in the mornings, and there seem to be less birds singing. I wonder if some have already started their long flight south?

Perhaps it is my imagination, but in September the light seems to change to "fall-light", and  there is a hopefullness in the air. I don't really know how to define this feeling better than that, especially when it seems that there should be some sort of mourning or sorrow for the free days of summer, more of melancholia perhaps. Yet, there is a fullness, an autumnal ripeness that descends like heavy apples from trees with coloring leaves. Fall marks a harvest time, the point of the year when maturity still has its virile strength. Later, in the darkness and cold of winter, it will transition with feeble steps to a maturity identified by finality.

But the pleasure of the fall! A gentle breeze, the rattle of leaves down the street in the evening, the golden light in the Sunday afternoon. I am researching my Gilgamesh/Steampunk novel while sitting on my deck. Books on Zeppelin Airships, Illustrated Encylopedias on Sailing Ships and Steamboat are stacked in tumbled disarray on the glass table top. I pause and sit back as a breeze sweeps through, and suddenly leaves are drifting over head. The oak tree drops acorns regularly, and I can see hawks wheeling overhead while a crow scolds them with a gutteral cawing. When winter comes, that "caw-caw" will be a lonely sound that echoes through bare trees and fields of snow; for now, it is simply a vulgar herald of shorter days and the increasing smell of woodsmoke in the air.

My neighbor's garden is beautiful across the lazy street. The flowers will soon fade, but for now, they match the growing orange and redness of the leaves.

It will be a good week, and I look forward pulling the box down from the closet filled with my sweaters.

The Slow Decay of Eternity

What is the real life?

What is smoke and what is solid?

Where is the golden jewel that shines with nuclear majesty?

Cradled amid silver twigs with blood of molten suns

That small and sacred spark shudders with a heartbeat

A surge of breath into a muscle devoid of wonder

So that meat is galvanized by electricity.

This smoke drifts and curls

I follow it in dreams

Sitting in my chair behind my desk

(My brain awake)

I watch it dance and I see clearly.

In the night, though clouds are heavy

I see with rare sight.

I have walked in this world’s streets

Tasted a dreamless sleep

The vacant eyes of people walking

Not awake

Not dreaming

Drifting like flotsam in the sea.

Their faces are worn smooth and their eyes are blind.

They cannot see.

An old man left his village to climb a mountain.

He said he went to see the face of God.

He climbed over jagged rocks

Trudged through bitter snows

Shivered in cold winds.

But he continued through the night

Passing through clouds and up the last steep slope;

In darkness he ascended the spire.

Morning came, and he clung to the pinnacle

Ablaze with brilliant light.

Early evening, he returned to the village

He could not see, his eyes were blind, but his face shone with light.

No one ever knew…

And no one asked…

Was it the fierce sunrise, unfiltered by dust and haze

Or did he see God’s face for a single shining second

Before the frail organs of perception shorted in spiritual sparks?

Yet the old man was not unhappy.

Children, even men and women

They gathered around him, sat and listened.

 He told and retold the story of glimpsing the light of heaven.

He would lean forward, raise a finger, whispering, “The Light! The Light! I have seen it!”

In his blindness he would whisper, “I see it still! All I can see is light.”