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.