Everyone Is Rising

Nothing could fall.  Gray worlds turned into each other
 and emptied out their waters into this seeing. 
The worst things people could imagine were outdone. 
In one dream the world was covered in candle wax. 

Every idea made safe.  Every wish remained a secret.
  Somewhere down by the boats where he went to look at the birds
he felt the people rising, rising up
away from everything they made. 
He wanted words unwrapped like pictures or paintings
that let you see the world differently
....after all what more can you give a word than a new meaning?

on the canvas of his soul he chose to use anti paint,
mixing up a single grain of sand from every sand he saw
putting it into his eye to return to us in a tear
fleck by fleck his whole life long, slowly
glimmering far down the passageway
that lead through the hidden gallery of forgotten dreams

Everyone was rising, turning in the air. 
The flowers came unattached from their stems
like so many poets from their bar stools. 
Long ago the armies came this way, they knew. 
Nobler men fell here once, but only because
they stood their ground for other's ideas. 

The whiskey wells held mouths of flame. 
The crazy boys only wanted to destroy. 
Everyone was rising, turning in the air.

If not a single sound is heard,
nor anything recognized as sense,
nor the slightest remnant rise from the surrender...
if not a single song, we will have been all we were,
maybe more imagined than hoped or feared.

Take the other glass.  Look out now there the whale blows.
  Kevin laughs, his hands unable to grasp the snake. 
In the field you run out of words. 
Everything that once seemed a melancholy oppression of the spirit
is now a beautiful truth that cannot be told. 
Bury me in those sands there,
where the waves come in under the moon. 

Unbind these ribs,
let loose the darkened heart.
 I know you like no other. 
I am the same as everyone.

Initiating

Do any of us make the grade? Do any of us get the joke? Do any of us know if it would be worse without SSRI's? Would three of my family members still be alive if they had taken Alprozolam? Would one of them still be alive if he had not taken Avandia? Were the Nazis evil? Can anyone imagine what the Germans might have done with that genius of theirs without them?

Can they make a drug that keeps us from judging each other?
What element within our rage can we convert to love? Or are we too sophisticated for that?

This so called intelligence and this so called society are woven through and through with diabolical cancers, some of which are cancers of deceptive description of them. My dog has more compassion than most the people I meet, but only because I know him.

None of us will be saved by discriminating intellect. To paraphrase and old Islamic saying, every head has a headache.

Everywhere I fail. The ruins within me smothers all sense of future promise. Genius has submerged the fields in geometries of imagination. What I once thought was a soul is now an invisible ghost of an apostolic penitentiary dream. Will we continue to dream as we die? Will we ever understand?

The other day out of the corner of my eye I saw the face of this little boy being carried by his father. For an instant I was granted the view of what is for now his inexhaustible beauty. His life energy entered directly into the insensitive pile of used ideas called my mind. And in that instant I felt as one tied to Dostoyevsky's execution pole, oh all ending, oh all initiating, what will be the final vision?

Ad posse ad esse as the darkness descends. There are stars on the wings of your pig, my friends.

Different Times

  I remember my first day of kindergarten.  The high mountain air was clear, the scant poplars gone to yellow and drifting in the breeze that brought the sound of the dries from the mines and their steam clouds rising to the air.  I walked with my hand in my mother’s and remember letting go in the room to go see the aquarium which I reveled in as a distraction from the buzzing socialization around me.  Behind the aquarium was a statue of The Blessed Virgin Mary standing on top of the world, a snake trapped under her feet.  Her blue cape was the most beautiful color and the look on her face was entirely different than the look on Sister Mary Theodata’s. 

  I didn’t know any of the other kids.  Everyone was dressed up in clothes they did not normally wear and everyone was nervous and at least half of us were scared.  My older brother had said “don’t embarrass us all by getting the shit kicked out of you on day one.”  I looked around, trying to imagine which one of the boys would be able to do that.  I relaxed, as soon as I realized it would take more than one.  I did not have a sister, so being in a room with so many girls, all of them wearing dresses, was a totally unexpected bonus.  Exotic, fragile and ethereal.  I looked for the faerie dust in their wake.  This was a great gift to someone who saw the devil everywhere and woke up frequently with nightmares of his unwanted flaming presence in the world.

  The old nun, who someone said “taught my grandma” smelled like old popcorn.  Thin and tall she told us the number one rule was to only speak if she asked us a question and to keep our hands to ourselves.  No monkey business in here.  I spent much of the rest of the morning thinking of the monkeys that lived in the house down on Quartz St.  The family owned a shoe store and brought the monkeys in as an attraction.  On Sundays we would go by the Victorian house and try to catch a glimpse of them up in the attic windows.

  Before kindergarten started I had contracted a case of the mumps.  It only manifested on one side and the doctor joked that I only had “half a mump.”  Even though the first day of school was not traumatic, I decided that, essentially, it wasn’t for me.  I hated the smell of the ink on the mimeographs we were given to put to the crayons and it freaked me out to see that at least two kids there were surreptitious Elmer’s Paste eaters.  So, in the morning, I tried to play my cards by going out and laying own in the back yard.  I remember staring up into the sky at the clouds and sparrows.  My mother saw me out the kitchen window and poked her head out the back screen yelling for me to get up off the ground where I would get all dirty.  I told her I couldn’t because the other half of the mumps came back.  She came and got me and brought me into the house.  She let me miss the first hour of the second day of kindergarten so she could make me a cup of hot chocolate.

  Those were different times.  I never had to struggle with the guilt of not being in the classroom when the massacre began.  All I had to worry about was wiping my ass right and not letting Robbie Robertson steal any more of my pencils.  I wondered at what Jimmy said about Sister Theodata, that she was too old to die.  I wondered about the Satan snake beneath the feet of Mary and how the big toe of her right foot seemed to be crushing part of Canada which I only knew about because that was where mom went to kindergarten in a horse driven sleigh.

   I didn’t worry about someone coming into the class room and pumping twenty rounds in my head.

To the people who say that this happens because there is not enough god in the classroom I do not know how to respond to them, for how what good does it do to ask an insane person if they are crazy?  To the people who say those who pushed for gun control have the blood of innocents on their hands I can only ask if they will soon be returning to planet Romulus, and when they do, could they all please take their motherfucking guns with them.

   My last day of kindergarten I got in a fight with Robbie Robertson for stealing my pencil.  After some older boys broke it up out on the play ground Mary Anne McCarthy came up and told me how stupid  I was, that she had asked me earlier in the day if she could borrow it.  I had a bloody nose and Robbie had a scraped up chin.

   We became friends after that and I fell in love with Mary Anne McCarthy until I saw her kissing Mike Maloney behind the convent lilacs trees.

  We all made it through grade school without being shot.

Feint Eddy

The testament came on the fierce winds that left our world in a ruin of promising lies.

The distracion we worship
is sinking into the sea.

The very song of being to which we cling
faces the great waves rising above us.

We are not released from our illusions
of freedom and the pain of hatred.

As the darkness descends in eternal slowness
our hearts weep in this our return to the stars.

The very love to which we cling
rises within us
Rises and falls
dreams and fails
comes in and in

And whichever way we are
forgotten, exhalted or condemned
Until the final darkness descends
and the waves return to ice

The feintest eddy yet
carries us to all we are
and all we have (n)ever been.

From jagged stone tool
to remote controlers
A slight ripple of the soul
carries us like a tune

To a forever repeating End.

We dreamed this universe -
She did not dream us.

Kneeling Before the Tanks

You might go off the side of the road and be trapped under your car when it rolls. The trucker who pulls over and cuts you out of your seat belt and drags you out of the windshield before the flames spread might hate your guts if he knew what was in your mind. But he isn't thinking about that when he pulls over. This is essential. All the rigamarole about god and sex and country and money has clouded the air between us. We are one, really, whether we know it like MLK or can't quite conceive of it like Eichmann (or maybe he did in the most perverse way imaginable). The hell of one's life can be measured sometimes by how often they have to swallow their own hate in a single day. I know I have. In someways it's easier to understand than love because there is nothing sentimental about it. Rationality and reason are over rated. You can't reason with someone who's seeing red unless you know them. You can't stop some one from hating by proving how wrong they are. Who the fuck do we think we are, anyway? Your facts and truth mean nothing to some people. So what is the other way? Gather together as an out - in group and smarmilly chortel about what a bunch of ignorant pig weenies thos people are?

We cop to more compassion than we have the heart to excercise. A great deal of fear and terror has made ALL of us what we are. And unless you grew up in the woods without a television or any books and learned the communal sonics of meadowlarks and used that as a spiritual blueprint for your understanding of nature and the universe, brothers and sisters, you are just another fleck of gravel in the asphalt, no matter how small, or big or sharp and sparkly you might be. Like my old man said once it isn't them it's us.

He knelt before a tank with a rosary in his hand with the mayor of the village in France begging that they not destroy the entry arch to the town which was built by Charlemagne. Who hates you now? Who's the slave, who's the master? How many tanks have you stopped today, how many days did you spend behind wire for trying?

How long has it been since you have seen yourself in your brother's eyes? The love that once rose up around you like a mist - has it really disappeared, or have the demons blinded you? Imagine your own death as much as you can. Our fate is sealed. None of us have the slightest fucking clue no matter how much we can pack in our brains or how well we turn a phrase on a gray blue blog. I am collapsing under my own cynicism, what were Jack Spicer's last words?...."my vocabulary did this to me..." Political movements and historical narratives will not uncover the beauty we hope to rediscover and for most here I doubt waxen fumed sundays between priest and choir would either. Im all upside down trying to kiss the stone, but it is floating out into space. I feel the note that never ends you know. I feel it always. My greatest comfort is knowing it will not end with me. Truly, anyone with a heart knows, there is no time to waste on hate.

The Ancient Stain & The Cataclysm Chamber

 

Within the cave Platonic shadows of the ancient brain that was en-webbed with more than one kind of human cortex, different emerging strains of consciousness. Were they dancing yet around the flames, on the brink of discovering shadow art and making sacrifices to the shadow demon? Six hundred generations preceding Wallace Stevens carrying the strain straight to the hand between the candle and the wall/grows large against the wall.

The magic of no knowledge seeking the tree of life which in that moment was the seal who’s blood dripped on the charcoal and became part of the painting, the seal in death, quick grace in her element, the flight of the sea alive in me, the seal as provider, dripping out part of itself like Pollack drunk and cut by glass passing out on the platform above the cave of his canvass, which receives the broken glass, the blood, the wine. Blood and fat in every line with the fallen trees of the holy fire.

An ancient stain holds a mysterious secret that here in the time of the Helix Seal we may not have enough earth soul left to ask the right question. For here we walk in a world that is covered in a crust of bone dust and powdered stars. Paint on. Let life live anew in other eyes through what we leave on this our stone.

Every Head has a Headache

I remember when they started the bombing of Afghanistan I was in a restaurant and they turned on the tv and everyone got silent, motionless....listening to the report. For a moment I felt a sense that the people were wary of what was taking place. And they were. Of course then the weapon's and hero worship set in amid the unqualified demonization of OBL and the anti-war movement. Anti-war = Anti-American; therefore America = war. There were many voices that rose against it (not as many as those against Saddam, but people were still disoriented from 911...it started on 10-7, people were still watching the planes fly into WTC over and over again). The attack had to happen fast before people could process it. No significant debate over it for almost 9 years, not that there weren't ample voices warning of it being a misadventure at best.

The stage was set, the actors well rehearsed. Everyone else was like a member of an audience and if you raised your voice you'd be silenced or removed from the "theater".
Systematic abnegation of dissent is where I agree with Chomsky in that the war was handled like a PR event. It was referred to in the administration as a "roll out", as one would do with the introduction of a major new product to the consumerat.
Liberal brains are not wired differently than conservative ones. I used to live down by the river, between me and the river was a switching yard where they parked the diesel rail engines every night. The first month I couldn't sleep. Then I got used to it. In the spring they moved the yards and the engines and I couldn't sleep again. Point being, the brain is reactive to conditional continuum and adapts it's behavior accordingly.
So does the mind. Perhaps the most brainwashed people are the ones who think they aren't.




The tears for fears are in arears. At the desk today I sat next to a young girl probably nine years old in a hijab. It was my son's spanish class and I thought of the origins of the greeting Hola which has it's roots in Moorish commerce with the spaniards. Oh Allah! By way of greating we hold forth an empty hand with the word of our god on our lips. Why not have an inquiry into the art and culture of Islam? Why not have a kangaroo court for bomb making nazis from Washington state?
Why not convene a meeting of nations to teach our children to focus on keeping their own shit together and respecting everyone else's way of doing the same.
For as the old arabic saying goes "every head has a headache."
Solutions are always part of the problem. They leave their sluggy trace for new whims of empire. The Harry Mulisch evil in the universe is detectable at all times, in all histories.

The young girl in the hijab says "you tengo frio." The sun is breaking through the clouds racing in from the Sound, yet the wind beats bits of branches against the window.
It hit me that in an instant that she looked at me and smiled that I probably have never nor ever would probably see anything in the world more beautiful than she was in that instant.
Life is full of such fleeting moments that contain the jist of symphonies and epic poems and novels one can't put down; indeed, one stalls in mid chapter to prolong the ending.
If such a girl could look at King and say simply "do you know a lie when you speak it, or has your whole life become a servant of the lie? Is your love stronger than your fear? Or is your heart a withered thing that clutches only at bile and the yelow venom that drips from your tongue?"