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?"

whattaya nuts?

 Horror wrapped in denial scented with lies and finally the victim/sacrifice can't comprehend it is all for something bigger, must not understand since such awareness would violate their innocence which is as much an aphrodisiac to power as an Aegis missile.
What beasts crash through the gates of our illusions? Everyone dies anyway there are those who believe they have the gift to give others meaning otherwise unavailable to an unmolested life. The victims who don't become the monster can't kill him lest they lose that last shred they held onto in the well of the agonies.
Dorthy killed the wicked witch on accident, trying to save her from fire in a dream, a storm, a dream storm where the simple survivors pray and beg for you to come back to life. Here in this world of death by gold plated cruelty. Dorothy killed the wicked witch, the wicked witch, Dorothy killed the wicked witch of The West.
An accident in a dream sometimes is the only match we have.


 Still...man it really freaks me out to think that global consiousness is about to be overtaken by this bizarre mutation of Colonel Sanders and Mao Tse Tung (but only because it is an unfamiliar unknown, as opposed to the familiar unknown that is the west). Human rights are not exclusive to any country or ideology, what is fucked up here is fucked up there but on an entirely different level. For every story there of prematurely dead inmates giving up their skin there are ample stories here of people being shot 27 times, even through the bottom of the foot. Good luck accessing RI in Shanghai. Good luck making sense of any of it any where.
Or is it all propoganda? I have only known a few people who have travelled there and their accounts differ significantly from each other and what is commonly filtered here. rRemember that when westerners first were allowed to go there before Mao died many of them came back depressed at having to face their western culture again.
Not everything that happens is something that is defined by what it is against more than what it is for or what it simply is, regardless of the value judgements made from outside observers.


After WWII the military was injecting plutonium into volunteers that were long term prison and most likely also military personnel. Legal maneuvering was essential in light of the Nuremburg Rule after the trials of the gestapo experimentation on holocaust victim. Legally the idea was well....we get some piece of paper drawn up by our best lawyers in case the volunteer's survivors sue so we can cover our ass. At some point their was intercession of the "whattaya nuts?" variety in that the story must be buried because it doesnt matter what legal counsel concludes. The folks in Rapid City and Montaulk must always think we are not like the Nazis.
I sincerely believe that Wikileaks is one of the last great hopes of showing us just how we are, and maybe how we aren't (in which ways the same, in which ways better, and even....in which ways worse in terms of protecting the masses from conscious complicity). It may even unveil an unbroken continuity where wars and politics are simply franchises operated by the illustrious masters of illusion. The idea being if they got away with that shit then, with all the paperclips and monarchs and MKULTRAs what else is there? What else need there be before a catalyst forms? The head may be forming. The vision of it must exist. Like Anne Sexton said all those buildings and cars were once just ideas in someone's head. A revision is possible. A coming to terms. A great unleashing of information that will bowl over a politician as surely as a damn breaking before a kneeling blind preacher praying for it to hold.
It may soon be time to storm the Bastille.
Either that or the next president makes Jim Jones look like Mr. Smith

Someone has a clinic or institute. From previous case studies a specific model is composed. You might be studying, for example, people who have dreams that seem to forsee the future. Let's say 100 people are qualified to participate in this study. Each person is a known "dreamer" who has exhibited some form of having dreams that seem to portend later events.

The laws of physics do not contain a methodology of measuring dreams against reality. Still, you press on.
Let's say you study the 100 dreamers for 100 days and in that time they report 10,000 dreams. You have funding that allows you to maintain data collection and analysis for 5 years. The dreams are categorized into personal (dreams of family), professional (dreams of work life and processes) and global (dreams of outside work-home events).
Imagine that after 5 years you are able to determine that of the 10,000 dreams nearly 3500 of them came "true."
An outside scientist could probably eliminate all but four or five of them as being coincidence. Which isn't saying it couldn't be true, but there is insubstantial proof that it is actually true.
James Joyce asked the greaet pyschological question in Ulysses: "Coincidence, or intuition?" Verification bends away hard and fast from intuition, yet some of the greatest scientific theories originated out of intuitive thinking. But once again, for every Einstein there are 100,000 Hubbards and should be a matter of no small distrubance that one barely outweighs the other.
In other words, If I put a ball on a string and drop it from a wall that is twenty feet away from another wall and the wall I am on top of is 30 ft highter than the wall and the string is attached to the side of the opposite wall I can make various observations based on experiments of varying string length and wall distance and angle as to the arc and impact of the ball as well as size and composition of the ball and even color of ball for phenomenological purposes.
But....
If I have a dream that Michael Vic throws six touch down passes against the Packers and it happens, I have no way of proving that it is not coincidence. Even if I dream the exact outcome of all the other playoff games I cannot prove that I "saw" what happened, (I would be much better going off to Vegas than trying to convince an emeritus professor from Oregon that I have a third eye, dude, I mean really).
I would have to have EXTRAordinary evidence to prove that the dreams were not just an amazing coincidence. I would have to dream about something that could be proven was completely outside my knowledge and experience. For example, If I were a Quaker who had no television or access to internet and only had access to printed materials produced before 1890 I could dream that Benyamin Netanyahu's attache in Tel Aviv dies suddenly from a bleeding ulcer while eating in the 360 Cafe on the Montparnass in Paris and the cause is uranium oxide poisoning.... this would be extraordinary evidence, but not extraordinary proof unless it were a repeated behavior that could be verified.
The time will come when a means is devised for this without muddying the scientific fields with a bunch of egocentric loonies. This will happen from within science itself from all the professionals who have experienced the inexplicable and just can't hide it anymore.

Staring at Goats

The cat is out of the bag, has been for quite some time. The cat is disfigured, grotesque, and in constant, unbearable pain. Once an innocent, beautiful creature she is now a hideous abomination we can scarcely stand to look at. A mere kitty.
The kitty gets to play here so that her existence then becomes a conspiracy theory of whacko lefties. Plausible deniability via guilt through association. Purpose served, novels jotted down.

“’People have been so brainwashed by fiction,’ said Eric as we drove to the local Kinkos to pick up the press releases for the conference, so brainwashed by the Tom Clancy thing, they think, ‘We know this stuff. We know the CIA does this.’ Actually, we know nothing of this. There’s no case of this, and all this fictional stuff is like an immunization against reality. It makes people think they know things that they don’t know and it enables them to have a kind of superficial quasi-sophistication and cynicism which is just a thin layer beyond which they’re not cynical at all.’”
It isn’t that people aren’t interested: it’s that they’re interested in the wrong way.”

-Jon Ronson quoting Eric Olsen in “Men Who Stare at Goats”

In the final stages of the fascist state, immunizations against reality are passed out for next to nothing.
Therefore: Tonight's edition of Entertainment Tonight is being broadcast live, from Jonestown.

All One High Iron Mainway

The saddest fear is the secret wish of your enemies' success. Thus of our dreams we make relics from the scraps of fools that we might avoid our own fate.
If you look hard enough within, you can see Achilles dancing on the oars still. Refusing to join in on any madness but his own.
Warn the hero inide yourself - make not war for another man's desire or the false entertainment of the gods.
Attack instead the lies, as many as the leaves, that fall round your head before the first signs of snow.
They whisper us to their murders, to count the bodies like so many coins and print their notes with the blood ink of innocents and pawns.
Rather die grasping at the wind than in the yoke of their death carriage that moves in their parade that profits a few men
and leaves the rest in mounds...


As a boy he swallowed his magic decoder ring. He did not tell anyone, preferring not to risk the inevitable opprobrium that would follow the how and why. And so it was that the daily inspection of his own feces began that led to his life saving discovery, a grand romantic episode, a deeply abiding love for Mozart and an iron clad conviction that had he never swallowed the ring, he would never have realized who was controlling him.

 There are things outside, there are things inside. Some are mere relics, others are more invasive. You try to put something out of the house, but somehow it comes back in. Oh, you must only have thought you took it out and it converted to memory without action.

It is like waking up one day, your face in pancakes, somewhere you have never been. You know if you ask the waitress, "where am I? How did I get here?" you will disturb whatever balance in effect that allowed you to be there for however long with your face in what you must presume are your pancakes. You stumble outside and look for the memory of what was your car and find it in a lot a block away. You have travelled 175 miles south without any memory of it, you realize, as you recognize the bridges.

Who knows what happened to you? Who knows what you did?

***

 As Kerouack said of Denver and Butte, "all one high iron mainway". Some things you get without all the epistemology.

Like standing in SeaTac 1999, taking a Cambodian friend toward his first flight back home since year zero and finding yourself in a flock of monks as they circle about him, each one stuffing an envelope with cash inside his jacket.

Butte magic of ignorance is no Butte
All one high iron mainway
Denver is the same
-JK

***

Years ago in a fugue state of sorts I wandered on campus with a ghostly pale schizpophrenic fellow who had clothes hangers wired upside down to his cowboy hat and the shoulders of his hunting vest with bits of multi colored cloth streaming in the breeze. I had picked him up on the side of the road where he said he was waiting for the transportellemutation occurence. I asked him if he was hungry and he said only for a happy meal. He told me the real place of the transportellemtation was in the apex zone (which turned out to be the AF Academy campus).
So around a walkway we went and saw a woman with a small crowd gathered round her. She was waving a bible in the air. I could only assume the young men around her were cadets. She was saying something about the everlasting forgiveness for our never ending sins. This sparked outrage in my fellow traveller and he screamed.
"What's your name!"
She stopped, she had on a sexy white dress with a pattern of red roses and small hearts. She looked like (and I later learned was) an ex stripper.
"Why," she answered, "I am known as sister Cindy."
"Well, Cindy, I am known as Tot Four Ninety and your spoutin off a load of shit."
Some of the lads looked at him, their pecs quivering.
"Jesus loves you, ' she said.
"Yeah, well your mother sucks cock in hell!"
It wasn't quite a life flash before your eyes moment, but for an instant I wondered how I would escape the fury of the twelve oclock high brigade. But to my great relief, after an awkward moment of silence, they all burst out laughing and the good sister went off in search of another perch.
I left Tot Four Ninety there to search for his time warp.
This was before the poison set in to the very marrow, I suppose, for later in the day I had a flat and got a free Tibetan eye chart from the guy who fixed it and shared a cigarrette rolled with hash oil with him.
Can't imagine what it's like there now.

While Climbing the Wall

She had 4 younger siblings with her, two whom she had to carry, and five oranges in a net bag. That was it. Somehow she made it. Many other worlds came to an end because no sergeant with an M-16 and a fake Rolex was there to bribe the bastard that last instant before he would have shot her. Like walking through fire for days and being fired on as you lift your brother on board. By your own people. by your own people, which people are mine, she asked, where did we lose each other? The monster's blood floods full now on the utterly unleashed beast. Non Grata in Laos, on his birthday, he spared the sniper in front of his men. We'll take the spell this place put on us back home, he said, letting the sniper loose. It will eat away at us until the last of our empires sink under the sea. Lloyd was never relieved. they kept wanting him back even after he was dying...they are all gone now, but the poison rages on.

 Things have greatly changed, we are no loger even allowed the illusion we once had of the heroic reporter. We are largely informed, if at all, by think tank frankensteins and sleazy bimbos. Freedom isn't free, as they say. I saw John Trudell give a talk about 10 years ago. He said the white man's sense of freedom was perverse as was his concept of knowledge. Warmaker keeps everything far away. And if you are in it, if you live in the gulf, he keeps you far away. If you try to report the truth beyond what warmaker is willing to part with, then he puts you far away, or dresses you up like a clown when you sleep and takes a picture of you with a sheep. If you don't fall apart after that you might get an invitation to join the Washington Press Club

So up on West Seattle's Pigeon Hill my daughter is going over to her boyfriends house (he's black my daughter is white). His mom was not home and had locked the door. He decides he can get in through the side window. While he is climbing the wall a squad car ramps up over the curb. Officer approaches with weapon drawn. Boyfriend sees gun and manages to flip himself inside the house before cop can ....shoot him.
My daughter, who is pretty darn pale, starts thinking fast. Cop asks what's going on. She tells him it is her house and her boyfriend is helping her get inside cause she forgot her key. Cop tells her to have boyfriend open front door. He does. Cop searches him. Other cop car by now arrives backup. There are inside the house several pictures of family members. All black, including boyfriend.
Cop asks daughter "So where does your mom work?"
Boyfriend realizes what is happening and cant stop laughing.
"She works at Dreamgirls," my daughter lies, mentioning a local downtown strip club chain.
"Oh, " says cop, who my daughter says now seems to be more comfortable. She says she mentioned the strip club because in cop movies that is where they all hang out.
"Can I ask you a question, officers?"
"What."
"Why are you standing in my front room?"
The cops looked at each other and then at daughter's boy friend who is writhing on the couch trying to control himself.
"We just wanted to make sure you are okay," the first officer said, looking at her boyfriend with disgust. "Have a good day and get another key made."
It wasn’t her house. All the pictures on the walls and end tables were of black people. Her word as a white girl over rode the obvious aspects of reality. One of the pictures prominently displayed was of her boyfriend.
These guys, sometimes you gotta wonder.



Whatever the hand can grasp, whatever the mind can grasp, a rock or a thought, a bird or a fear, a book or a reality brimming with illusions, a handful of river stream, an incomprehensible history, a tunic, a faith. What it takes to deliver a single slice of toast vs. what it takes to accept one's own hunger in mindful silence. Freedom is doing without. Desire is the how the poison enters us and makes us the poison, too; regardless of what we think we do or do not believe. Every word ever spoken is carried like ash on the wind. This world is not ours but we can still be hers.

No Waking From This

9/11 was the endpoint. The rest is just the fading consciousness of civilization trying like Ambrose Bierce to imagine a different outcome in the instant of final inevitability. Perhaps the dream sparks somewhere in a quasar far far away as everything continues to move further and faster away from everything else.


 The Hubble telescope photos of quasars that quadruple their image because of their gravity look remarkably like Vincent Van Gogh's stars, which never really looked like stars, but something else; at least, than the stars we can see.
The visionary experience can be transmitted in ways we barely comprehend. Our political/cult(ural) fissures are myriad canyons and crevaces that demonstrate the distances between what we know, what we fear, what we suspect, what we can prove, and what, if anything, the pulsating zombietron of humanity cares about it.
For example, when Patti Smith sang "Lenny Bruce was a nigger" one might have understood for the first time the invisible dimension that so many inhabit outside of society.
A little basket of ashes by the fake waterfall, just at the end of the blanket where a nude woman glows in the cool september sun. From her rooftop she felt one of the planes as if it flew through her body, her mind, her soul. She married into this, but was born into what she escaped, and as she watched the flaming black rose of the first impact with an almost orgasmic shudder she wondered, what world was this, what reality?
At the same instant she realized she would never see her husband again she remembered watching Hiroshima Mon Amor sitting next to him at MOMA when he slithered his fingers down her skirt. She dropped the towel over the edge of the building. She remembered her father had said the only ones dreaming are those who escape the horror. He said this in response to her question of what it meant, crater analysis, when he was in Viet Nam. What was crater analysis? What happened to him? What did he do to those people?
She held her grandmother in her arms and felt her spirit pass through her in the last death rattling escape of her breath. Infant's curd of green shit.
There is no waking from this, she whispered, and went back into the building.
Before she got off drugs and met Victor, her favorite dealer often used a phrase she never forgot. "Who's the nigger now?"
A slave can't imagine what is happening to him. A Cambodian goes blind from horror.
Democracy can no longer hide the violence of empire. Western Civilization is coming to an end.
And if there is a next one, perhaps someone will write a song about how fish do have feelings.

The great potential of civilization is largely quashed by regressive power structures. Yes, Nazs built stone circular cells where one man could only stand and then stuffed it with three naked men and watched them go mad. But, on the other hand, the young wermacht soldier at Kalavrita ran and freed a...

The Use of Negative Space

I was in the Central Tavern one night. I am real anal about cleaning my glasses and do it all the time. So I am cleaning my glasses the better to see what the problem is at the entrance where these guys are yelling at each other and there's a yell and a shove and this guy bounces off my table and gets up, grabs my linen hanky specially chosen to keep my spectacles clean and jams it in a blood spurting hole in his side. Willie, my friend, leans forward, sips his Tsing Tao and says to my ear "looks like he got it in the liver." And all hell broke loose. In my inhumanity all I could think about was my hanky I kept all those years that my nephew gave me before he died. Somehow I lost Willie and ended up in Doc Maynards where the lights were just too bright and this pretty young red head asked me if I knew where she could score some crystal. So much for downtown.
Nothing beat the bars where I grew up and the bartenders bought every 3rd or 4th beer and after a while it didn't matter how much money you had as long as you could stay on your barstool and didn't give anybody any shit. But people were always waving guns around and fighting over husbands and wives.

So I tried the late afternoons instead (to coincide with round buying beer delivery truck drivers) and that was ok for a while but it is hard to pack it in just as things start to get interesting. But after a while it is like going to the carnival only it's not fake and nobody knows what they're doing, besides falling apart. By the time I was 18 it was boring.
I only tended bar once and a guy who survived a self inflicted gunshot to the head tried to walk into the beer cooler and as I pulled him away he went into a severe grand mal seisure. The patrons were cruel, one spitting on him saying "let the fucking coward die."
I haven't drank in a bar in years, not even when my mother died and she left $400 in an envelope in the safety deposit box with a note that said have a good time, boys. Wasn't on the bar stool for 5 minutes before there were four buds and three shots in front o' me. Snuck out the back door into the cold new winter wind to wonder when, where and how I'd die, glad I wasn't thinking that on belly fired by booze.
Oddly enough my favorite bartender was a friend who became the state chairman of the John Birch Society. Only person my own age I knew who died in his sleep.

 ***

think it was during the Black Death when people would haul their loved ones up to the boneyard to plant them, and occassionally, one or more would stay behind to save the others the burden of carrying them up to the graveyard in another day or two. One has to have all the strength one can get if one has any hope of any chance.

As far as love goes, I agree with another doctor, Dr. Destouches of Ferdinand Celine's Death on the Installment Plan. "Love is a poodle's chance in hell of attaining the infinite".
But one must take it whenever the slightest turnipy scrap of it appears in whatever form.
Vincent's blossoming almond tree, the use of negative space to convey the emotional acceptance of reality that has more to do with the realization of beauty than mere intellectual precepts. The whole love is beauty and music is matter rearranged back into itself inside the souls of the undead dreamers. The tales of every god are what might have been and could some day be on the darkest shores of myths that won't die, birds that can't fly, and children who don't have to be tricked into believing anything.
Where the old market now crumbles into a gray dissemblence of exchange, the river still runs its rush over the speckled stones. One hand leaves another. Crows open up from branches above.
You are still alive, you must be, you can tell by all these calls.

***

Everything was supposed to be settled. When he turned over the thanksgiving dinner during grace because he thought they were making fun of him, well, they got drastic on him. He seemed mostly the same to me, though he walked like a guy who was in a house full of sleeping people that he dare not awake. I exchanged banal pleasantries with his parents, a knowing look with his sister that I never really knew, then he asked me to come up to his room. He told me he knew he was paranoid but he wasnt' going to let that get him in the way. And he proceded to tell me how drawing maps on the backs of mirrors was the safest way to plan his escape. Though he did not like that word. At one point he stopped, his eyes watering. "You know what's happening, don't you..."
"To you?" I asked.
"No. To all of us."
At the VA they had him down to one massive shot of some unknown dose admistered to his ass. This only fed his suspicion that they were experimenting on him again. The meds make things functional, but the side effects blurred his core personality and his passion to feel the galaxial modality again. What he could not do he did better than anyone I ever knew who thought they could.
He never fails to humble me.

The Moon Inside His Head

there is a moon inside his head he thinks falls out through his eye his sight
and becomes the sums that add up to more than mere ideas
in a real world of wordly illusions heaven cast these nuggets and pearls into the aperture of your dreams
and why, why, why do we ever want to make anyone anywhere think anything?

There are countless moons we cannot see

***

 

 The darkness of the storm reaches into the shadows of the mind. The children screaming, quivering hands trying to cover their mouths; glass breaking under backs as bodies pile into the locker, he thinks of Kurt Vonnegut, he thinks this is a counter attack, he feels the earth lifting, oh shit he thinks, this is not a live bass solo by Less Claypool, this is my viscera about to return to the star dust.

We're gonna be alright.

I love you. I love everybody.

Time to give blood. Time to reach down deep and stop wondering if you can, if anyone understands. That aint what I heard they will say. It caint happin here.

Take my hand. Look, the roof is coming off, we are rising up into the furry of night's unstoppable will, as she bows beneath the stars. As we leave this dream for another, as we depart this nothingness for the unknown nothingness as nothing at last, what do they say?

We're gonna be alright.

I love you. I love everybody.

You come to in an old tomb. Your body is gone. There is soft blue light, it is around you, it is you. You see something that is oddly familiar, oddly sweet.



Among the suffering all flames go out, they are taken by the storm that is the universe, their flames are returned to that same darkness where all light bends and flies away away away. Goodbye, my blaze of dancing souls, may we reform again forgetting all of what we were in these ruins of worship.

Near Life Experience

 Life itself is a near death experience. My own (farm tractor accident) was informed most by serial readings of "Mysteries" by Knut Hamsun, and the fact that he dedicated the novel to the main character, Johan Nilson Nagel. The born again folks with whom I was encamped at the time insisted my mind misinterpreted this experience because it was not dedicated to Christ; and that, Nagel was really Angel They lit candles and laid their hands on me, my wrapped head with a plastic drain pipe and scalp with dozens of stitches and a good flow of 20 grains of morphine in my system. They prayed over me. And when they finished I rose from the bed. With greaet expectation they anticipated what I had to say.
"Jesus, I gotta take a piss."
I insisted on stumbling down the hall on my own. It was all a blur because of the shock, the trauma, the morphine and not being able to wear my glasses since my head was all bundled up, my ear sewn back to my head.
They wanted to help me, but I insisted on going in the bathroom by myself.
It was not easy, by I managed to pee, weaving and wavering. And then suddenly, my consciousness was obliterated by an incredibly intense flash of light. It was as if I had been struck by lightning.
Dang...I thought....I've been saved.
But as I flushed the toilet I made out a blurry object in the toilet bowl. WTF? Is it a turd? A turd with a string tied to it?
As I had blumbered about I had knocked something off of the bathroom sink counter. A curling iron fell into the toilet as I pissed. It was plugged in.
When I emerged from the bathroom, my eyes ablaze with intensity, they cried, "Oh look....look! He has seen the light!"
When they asked me, had I...had I seen the light? I simply said yes to get them off my back and wondered how I would deal with that erection that smelled like burnt hair and if I would figure that out before or after I knew who and where I was.

***

 Sometimes I think it hardly matters what we believe, other times I believe it barely matters what we think. It's like an old friend who'd been pressing faith said to me, restraining his anger, when I said it would be more honest to go to the slaughter house on Sunday than church "well what DO you believe in, man!"

Why do I have to believe anything, and if so why must I proclaim whatever that might be? Isn't it all just a stale pretzel of salty denial burning away in our childish tummies, either way?

I can believe you without believing what you believe and you could save my life without my ever knowing your name for the mystery often ends where the definitions begin.

***

 I once new a man who was in love with this beautiful woman. He could not stop talking about her, he could not stop thinking about her. It was hard to be around him except for the rare moments when he realized how ridiculous he had allowed himself to become. He tried everything he could think of to win her affections. Gifts, wonderful words, supremely organized suprise parties, a well modulated display of devotion even though she had cycled through two or three romances while he remained obsessed with her. Then I went away and travelled and did not see this man for quite some time. One day in a waiting area of LAX I we spotted each other. We caught up on our lives and actually had enough time to remenis . I asked him about the woman, how she was, if anything ever happened between them. "No," he said, "one night I had a dream that I asked her to marry me and she said no and laughed in my face. In a rage I took her throat in my hands and strangled her. When I awoke I was horrified. It felt so real I was sweating and shaking. It was then I realized my so called love was just a dream." He laughed a bit, shaking his head, "in fact," he added "I've come to the conclusion that this whole shooting match is just a dream."
His flight boarding gate called.
We shook hands and embraced like brothers that seldom parted.
I have not heard from him since.

***

Scream me the change unimagined in the fire of revolt. Let the poor and the bourgeois lock arms in an unstoppable rush of the castles. Scream what Kafka said so long ago “the world order is based upon a lie.” Let the fury of the masses rise in a flood to drown out the vile clowns of propaganda and let the politicians, bankers and kings, bow down before our feet and beg us for mercy as we instruct them on how to reorganize society and save some small piece of what we now call life for our progeny - for if we don't, in two generations there will be nothing left to breathe but fire.

***

 Mozart, I think it was, said shitting and believing were two very different things. A quote I am reminded of quite often. Somewhere in the trajectory from Parmenedes to Badiou something is lost in translation. Spiritual & intellectual flatulence have evolved to the point where opinion exculpates explication with such routine precision that one can shit to it in standards weight & measures as well as 3 decimal digital time pieces. And yes, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde all these opinions are just somebody else's ideas anyway, so why care we? Raw fish covered in chocolate smeared on our death masks to a soundtrak of La Traviatta backwards. But are you so devout that if the devil himself thrust an upside down toilet plunger in your face, one from the dirtiest bar in Scotland, and filled in with the blood of Christ - could you drink it? And could you do it while Helen of Troy dropped her robes and threw herself at your feet begging you not to? And what does Job say at the end of it all, the worst day in his life, when he goes into the crapper and there is no toilet paper? Is it perhaps like that mad Frenchman said (ah, which one, you murmer, there are so many...) yes, yes...I believe it was Cocteau, how did he put it? something like...if there is a god I imagine him having a childlike omnipotence wherein he places a chameleon on a plaid fabric just for shits and giggles. The sorrowful and the joyful mysteries together or dissolved can elevate or cramp the center of one's star. What wish would god grant you in a form of unimaginable shape? That ancient indecipherable echo in your dreams. Angels falling in black fluttering droves to hell. Uriel falling asleep on the moon. How long can we be watched before the universe explodes from boredom and our stench gets us banished to another dimension?

Faithful Children of the Legendary Hero

"When the world is reduced to a single dark wood for our four eyes' astonishment, - a beach for two faithful children, - a musical house for one pure sympathy, - I shall find you.
  Should there be here below but a single old man, handsome and calm in the midst of "incredible luxury", I shall be at your feet.
  Should I have realized all your memories, - should I be the one who can bind you hand and foot, - I shall strangle you."
           - Rimbaud

"Love, Arthur, is a poodle's chance of attaining the infinite, and personally I have my pride.”
            - Louis Ferdinand Celine

 Their fates were buried in different souls.  They were so pure they could not hear the cackling demons who pursued their every step, making promises and threats, crying, laughing, pleading, screaming.
  All they heard were the birds and all they saw were the mountains and the trees by the river.
  And so it was they searched for one another.
  And so it is they are searching still.

***

Tell me not how my legendary hero slept with babes on a drunken boat that night he promised to sing them to the lord. Tell me not how my furious Commander built his fire with the fuel of weeping mothers clenching infants to their breasts. Tell me not of my hero, how he lied of his deeds, how he raped and plundered innocent people in a simple land, how he cut off their fingers and ears, laughing, as trophies. Tell me only the lies I want to hear. Tell me only my great white world is still the purest of all pearls. Tell me what must be told, the truth and facts be damned. Be robust in your description of these grand delusions, do it well enough that we will salut all the banners and flags of your deception. Lie to me you fucking traitors, or we will burn this place back to the coal ash of the savage unknown.

The Enemy of Penguins

 He was an enemy of penguins. His eccentricity became too unpredictable for any completion bonders to consider because going over budget was something KR only dealt with when the time came (which was, in the later films, more likely to happen before the most complex scenes were shot because he would have come up with some mad idea before the shots could be marked). As his agent Bobby Litman once said to me via telephone “I’m sorry, but Ken Russel’s imaginative genius does not conform to the pedantry of your fiduciary concerns.” He was a funny guy, and he was not a polygamist to success and his muse. He stayed very honest and crafty that way.
He saw deep into the depths of raw talent of Oliver Reed in a way no one else ever did before 30 pints a day did him in. The Devils is so unreal. The wrestling scene between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates in Women in Love was, at the time it came out, one of the most mind blowing stretches of film I had ever seen. I think that is what KR was good at, hitting a groove in a part of a film that was just…smashing. An English original is hard to come by, at least one that doesn't need footnotes in English below the dialogue so that even people in Wales can understand the dialogue. His love of music informed most of what he did and his love of the lake district and poets thereof. Like Nicholos Roeg he didn't let making sense get in the way of making a cinematic impression. It must have been something when he threw in with Yuri Geller; I'm sure he drove him mad!
He took camera and film with him almost everywhere he ventured. Miles of stuff left behind - probably none of it a "movie", but I am sure some of it is an absolute riot.

***

Tripping introduced to the supposedly Suzy Creamcheese while the looking for Cousin Jimmy not wanting to be part of any scene because in the end all is ruled by the big Phony. Only because we had liberated more than 20,000 hits of orange sunshine from an evidence locker somewhere in the treasure state. Gary said he knew the CIA guy since he could recognize them since his brother was basically one of them having gone from the Montana smoke jumpers to do the secret war in Laos with the Hmong and it was his bogus pokus in Amsterdam during some big protest against the fascist or was it the communists when he blabbed the wrong thing to the wrong plant. He told me that when I looked in the mirror and recognized my face but not my skin that it was natural as was when I recognized my personality but rejected my identity.

But Cousin Jimmy had said he had found a way out from revelations made at the Round River experiment that included time travel and conscious transmigration through the proper reading of John Milton’s “Samson Agonistes hah hah”. Everything was insane everything was coming off the hook but what was being revealed beside the hideous nature of civilized hierarchy was the possibility of something else which the Big Phony caught on to right away. Cousin Jimmy said elevating rock and roll over jazz was the first step in the crush of the revolution and that he himself had foiled the plot to assassinate Herbert Marcuse.

I was with him and KL when they threw all those guns and boom boom off the Aurora Bridge and KL predicted crips crack and bloods splish splash bath of blood. And as they fell and splunked to the same place where the only leaper who had ever survived (a catholic nun of the Blessed Virgin Mary) he said, ‘don’t trust anyone who says it’s all about the music, cause it isn’t, it fucking isn’t.’

Looking back I don’t think she was really Creamy SiouxCheese and we never so much as unloaded anything as we simply lost it, you know, we let it go since everything dissolves along the way.

If you can dig it.

My Guy Lied

 My guy lied as a 16 yr old to jump into Gates of the Montain fire and within a relatively short time was a persona non grata in Laos. Interesting people at his funeral, Hmong, retired spec force brass, a couple of people nobody knew who didn't speack to anybody, and a few guys who were with him "out there". His wife, who knew he had many secrets and was not just making a life "buying and selling timber" whispered in my ear "I half expected these vet guys, I knew he wasn't just a supply captain in Viet Nam. But what did he have to do with those Arab guys in the corner?"

***

 That's a cool movie for sure where you put away the pop corn and the bong, well, maybe the first time, and dig it in different ways especially if you kinda nod off while your watching it. But I don't know, maybe one could try the Ben Franklin trick where you hold a nine pound cannon ball in your hand while sitting in a chair...then boom when you nod off, quick write down your dreams, do it long enough they find you in another county having taken the neighbor's bananna bike with sparklers in the handles, all the way to another county where the difference between sleep and waking is less relevant, though downstairs neighbors might turn on you...then of course there is always writing yourself to sleep where you try to keep writing while you empty your mind and let in the undertow like the time you had the wheezing from the onset asthma and that sound in your chest wass that of a weak baby crying and you were hiding in the coats in the corner of the gym at the dance where everyone threw their coats and you were sure someone had a baby and hid it there and you went digging for it but instead found only Play It As It Lays with this wooden cover and a rusty hinge binding no baby no baby half awake what is that sound in my chest still writing letting go wondering how is it that that shadow seems to be casting the tree and the wind is like a breath this slow thing ever being pronounced never being said the baby below the book whining how did you get here did you believe all of their lies or just pretend as an excuse landing in the water instantly forgetting everything else in that instant coming up to surgeons wearing rings on their plastic gloves with tiny baby heads as he sticks an instrument in your side, the nurse said with a smile painted on her mask, you know, that's right it is the Jesus side, and the Dr. says intercranial my ass this stupid bastard insists fish have feelings peddling in the wind with it like you are the smallest part of an unknowable word with the wind as the wind reacing the ear like light the eye the constant speed of meaning every flower a revolution a dried up forgotten memory of a kiss singing about guns and losing the branches the veins in her eye the baby crying again oh fuck it i'll go ahead and take the prednazone now...

 ***

If we kill your children we'll say they were not yours, if you hold their broken bodies up to the sky screaming God is Great we will say you're nothing but hate. If you say we stole it all and that we have not right to exist we'll say you never did - as our wish to erase you explodes in your home. Whatever we say to whoever is there, whatever eerie voice echoes the call to prayer, no matter if you spend four generations in a sewer it will not really matter who you think you were. And if you don't wish to see your village burn don't even mention the right of return. Go now, bury your dead, put them back together if you can. Give us all your cannons, give us all your bombs, give us all your newsmen singing our song. But if you are ungrateful and don't watch where her heart throws her will drive our resolve right over in a bloody bulldozer. For we are just like you. We mean no harm. Any of these evils were clearly the accidents one must accept. If you disagree, go ahead, grab your rock and throw it at our tank, go ahead and pick up your bullhorn and stand in front of us with your US Passport hanging round your neck. We have always been your friend. Everyone knows what we will never admit. Everyone knows. This isn't no bible, this ain't no Koran, it's it's a long short story by Joseph Conrad.

***

I dont know how we got there you couldn't see anything outside. It was crazy. She was half wild when I told her she reminded me of the pink leather fringe girl with the fancy shooter who shot the side view of Crazy Horse in a shiny piece of sheet metal. She groaned from the deep buy Edgar Fucking Caycee here a drink. We were supposed to go ice fishing. We never made it. "I lived in a hail of bullets," she said, and kissed me on the lips, hard, right in front of Roy who she had just introduced me to as her husband. And just as I thought you know I think he's gonna bring one up he did and that was the last thing I remember till The Wizard brought me too still laughing saying how she had been kidnapped just that night by two guys who broke out of the pen where her husband worked and was always on about his Dodge Challenger how wasn't anything in Deer Lodge County could touch it so these guys broke out and went straight to his house cause they knew right where to find the keys and wrestled the shotgun out of her hands but not before she got off a shot. So they took her as a hostage but it was already too late as they moved under the heavy sky hoping ride ahead of the storm but the road block was there and as they slowed down figuring they'd just go back to their cells she screamed gun it you fucking dick heads or we're all dead meat and so they did just as the first rounds marimba'd into the grill and the impact rather than pulverizing them launched them up in the air, a quiet moment in the sky among the first snowflakes of a long sock and the falling tinkle of buckshot. Not a scracth she screeched, yelping back shots, not a scratch.

I didn't want to go back inside but Roy insisted he buy me some Jack. We got into how most people before they get too drunk are lucky to have more than two stories to tell, and he promised me, right then and there, no matter what, if he outlived me, he would go to my funeral. Gave me a card that he scrambled some fuzzy inkling of who he was. Like in the future, dying, I'd be like "oh, shit, better call what's his name, Roy, and tell him so he can get here before they plant me. I mean, Roy said over and over again as the shots lined up, you never know who you're gonna have to save in this shit hole paradise. I can't remember what the two stories were, The Wizard says that's because I always tell them when I get drunk, and honestly, it's been years. Years. Like, granpa used to say, it barely happened.

1,000,000 Monkeys

Aye....say five moons with 1,000,000 monkeys each overseen by mass murders of web-sensation juice cap sledding crows to arrive at a hypothetical conclusion in a hypothetical universe vs. a funny feeling, an unknown announcing itself as the unspoken revealed, which one more or less might ask, is more or less amazing than what dogs derive from a good ass sniffing. Or, conversationally in a polite Dutchlike offering of an alternative view: When the pre-programmed ancient brain intersects with a slight wrinkle in the cellular automata...visions abound. Just because one is failed by their apothegms doesn't mean they still won't stand by them. I do this consistently, unconsciously and it is a grave and disturbing mystery worth noticing but the attempt to solve it will only result in more television.

Gone through your Head

The shit that goes through your head is unbearable. Damnit...where'd I put it, I can't remember what it looks like, what it's called, why I want it. You bounce off the wall, for a moment a knot hole in the piney flow looks like the hair swept face of Jesus or wait, is it Che or Mitch Miller??. Oh, yeah, that! Who am I! Nevermind, let's see, I am around here somewhere. No...no...no...don't let those thoughts of Fukishima and deepwater horizon melt you fissures again. Oh fuck, we're fucked, we're totally fucked. How'd this bottle of wine get in my hand, who opened it?

It’s okay, where’s the dog? Find the dog, the dog will know. And under no circumstances answer the phone and make sure you stay away from the mirror. I mean, it could be worse, historically, the Russian army isn’t flooding in and raping all the women after all them men have been slaughtered or starved to death, the housewives aren't all spontaneously going out and drowning themselves in the river, the germans aren’t coming in and making us all take off our cloths and shoot us into pits, throwing our wee bairns on top of us to be buried alive with us, no one is sworn to kill us just because we wear glasses. We live in a different world now, really.....we do. And yes yes yes it's bad....but....but

It could be a lot worse.

What really freaks me out of this reality is that
It is going to be.

A very hard

landing.

Need to find that keyhole reality now so I can latch onto some way of escaping it while functioning at the same time...sensless aspects of a dream, it's okay okay it's only a dream. Wait...someone knocking at the door. The neighbor. Oh no. Not her. To ask me to trip her garbage disposal. Caught her licking her lips when I stuck the handle of her toilet plunger in the garbage disposal. Maybe a cold sore. Maybe not. House smells like orange rinds. Some kind of Christian radio station playing, cases of Mona Vie stacked in the hallway, a mercedes and audii in the garage. Will I take the toilet plunger again and go to work to the sound of really white sounding people singing about angels?

This is not reality, it is a statirical farce of a word that once took itself seriously. No...no...don't tell me it never was...okay, okay, breathe deep and say the mantra...Monty Python Monty Python, Monty Python Monty Python.

Flashmem walking over to her house My friend who lives in a lean too up high in the Idaho panhandle was driving his diamond rio into OK city when the Murrah building exploded. He freaked out because he thought whatever it was or whoever it was they’ll be catching somebody, anybody that will do as fast as they can and I live in a lean-to and avoid people for the most part. He has completely disappeared. They are rounding up all the Rainbow People. Don’t be ridiculous the little voice inside says. Who was it, Descartes? If there is a soul it must have a place. Calm down. Come down. Tell her you have lupus. Pour a glass of wine. It’s going to rain. Keep your mouth shut.

If nothing happens more than once it happens all the time.

And it could happen to any of us and we wouldn't know it.

Side of the Road

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 our 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.

***

Within the cave Platonic shadows of the ancient brain that was enwebbed 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.

I Think of Oskar Werner

I think of Oskar Werner in "The Shoes of the Fisherman." Those eyes that seem to recognize the wealth of human sorrow, those lips that find courage in pity, the countenance of face beholding the arc of human existence in all its glorious turpitude. I think of a boy caught up by the river that roared him with millions of other boys to the steel warm bosom of Der Fuhrer, come to murder the Fatherland.

I dig my clay from the garden of a dreaming child. There is no one I can hurt, there is no one I can't help. Chagal made my heart right before he died, and put it in a little box and whispered to me as the flood broke all words are prayers, colors are the genius of the soul longing to love the world. With the moon we have, we might be the only ones who can see them.

Kings and popes, do they ever shed but tears of rage? Bondage by gold and the art of high deceit. Ashen crosses drawn on our heads, silk ribboned candles crossed at our throat, Jesus stripped down to the ninety six wounds, and every week out go the boxes, one by one, into the hearses that roll as silent as a pressed leaves past the dogs who stand to smell the dead. I dig my clay from the garden of a sleeping child where there are no Fuhrers and there are no popes.

I dig my clay from the garden of a sleeping child
where everything is holy and there are no gods

He Didn't Leave a Note

 He didn’t leave a note.

The worst is to come upon them after. Pale blue hue, eyes bulging, blood dark on the floor and bright on glass. You feel that is all your mind is - glass. A grave diving horror reaches out for the last time you saw him. You were walking down the gulch. Said something about if there was magic in the old days it didn’t go away. We did. He talked about why he always wore boots. You can’t remember what he said. You should have known, though it would not have mattered, when he said, “when I die, I want to be cremated.”

“Why you telling me this?”
“So you can roll me up and smoke me.”

A few days of rooms full of trembling hands, feint smiles, eyes you never saw so dark before, and all you want to do is head for the woods, but even that seems crazy. Everyone wanting to know why, and you thought of so many smart ass things to say when people would ask you. There was nothing left. He no longer enjoyed his own farts. As a chemist, it was unacceptable. Things he would have laughed at.

At the end of it his mother comes out of the bedroom she had disappeared to for so long as you lay his sister down dead drunk on the couch. The mother of darkness moves with the sound of windy silk and strokes her hair.

“Thank god she’s nothing like him,” she whispers.

She hands you a small piece of paper without looking at you. Pale blue sticky note. You look at it and on it is your name scrawled in pencil, hard, with a smiley face in the O.

“It was in his boot,” she says.

You look out the window and see the snow still on the highlands clinging to the scars of hard rock beneath the moonlight.

Out on the porch Lucy and Derek are asleep, and old uncle Lucky is on the old davaneu staring off at the stars. You close your eyes and feel your soul hurtling through the exploding abyss of the universe. You hear a voice speak in every fiber of your being. You do not know what any of this means.

And you know it’s him. Inside of you, outside of time.

You can hear the 150 ton engines in the pit. You can see the dust settling along the divide. You realize you are not what you are. And there is no love through love.

***

There's an old gaelic saying "love hides disgust." I grew up understanding the big parade day was more an American than an Irish invention in that, as a certain Harrington explained it to me, "on this day, all people get to be Irish, it isn't just what's in your blood, but what's in your eye." Everyone has to have some form of distinction. Shane McGowan, after all, is not exactly unheard of wherever the reels may echo; Indeed, I've known some that stayed afloat well into their '80's. False pride is a cheap trinket sold outside the baptistrey when the bells can't stop ringing in all those swollen, whiskey soaked brains. But there are these moments, you know, when all the barriers seem to break down. Yes, it is an illusion, and yes, I remember children dancing on the plank. But for an instant here and there it seems like everyone is reflecting everyone, and the old ladies who only go out once a year say stoof like "donna get me wrong sonny, I love the old country, but I wouldn't trade a yard a where I stand now for an acre of that misery over there." Things change. They claimed it as their own that which mystifies and curses since the times of the Nile. The Hibernians will sing of Ragland Road, and toss one back for Bobby Sands. Me, I celebrated reading Heaney to my son whom I named after him...then drank a pint of Guiness. For the road is long and wet and hard to see and it is important to reflect on how one may fall.

***

 If only money were the only thing. If only love or bitterness. All of it chews and all of it tears at that time your brother fell down the stairs and all you could do was laugh. You carry an edge because you couldn’t save your sister from the world, astounded that your mother was not a virgin and you are not the only son of man. So Ride the donkey, bang the bong, blame your pain on whatever comes along. The rich man parked his Lamborghini on my balls, he smashed his whiskey up and down my halls. The poor man fell asleep on the dime I lost, I can’t remember who actually nailed me to this cross. Every breath goes in like the next great gasp, tripping mad down puppy love lane, with dreams of remaining somehow sane. Reach out for the money, reach out for the gun. Let the light out of your eyes, it’s no sin to have a little fun. Inside us all the cancer grows, dancing to the music of 1,000 Jim Crows. A little plant struggles inside your window, it doesn’t need to know what anything is. Dirty Harry was a flower child. If only money were the only thing. If only bitterness. Take me home and bury me in your bed and forget everything we said. We must be leaving, leaving soon, we must escape from all these rooms. The apostles laughed at The Rich Young Man when he ran in madness away. Jesus wrote something in the sand. The only word he ever wrote. We must be leaving soon, we must escape all these rooms.