MJCwriting.htm

PANTOMIME

A Collection of Poetry

Michael J. Clark

mclark7@mindspring.com

THE CARVER HAS HIS HEAD TURNED DOWN

The carver has his head turned down,

Manipulating fear,

Slicing out of wood the combined virtues of the grave

And the many vices of the circumference;

Drifting in and out of consciousness,

Tempted by line and motivated by shape,

Contour,

Dedicated to meaning;

But meaning coming after,

After he has begun,

After he had studied the shape,

Coming only after the first level of chaos

Has been decried,

Abandoned,

The first level of order achieved

Through either conscious accident

Or unconscious necessity.

Meaning is inherent in movement

But it is not apparent in movement.

Meaning is apparent only in calm,

In silent contemplation.

Movement confuses all this.

Movement makes all truths bound up in collision,

Broken glass which once composed the bottle.

The bottle is the meaning.

The broken glass is the movement of the idea.

TWINS

The philosopher who is not a poet is dry

And contaminated by logic,

By the precisions of logic.

The poet who is not a philosopher is a frail reed,

A twisting caricature of something proud,

A musical instrument incapable of meaningful song.

THE REGRESSION

Considerable energy is spent on nothing,

On no one,

Only on turning in a smaller and smaller gyre,

Regressing,

Having the brain contract

In a narrower and narrower arc,

Not-Consciousness if you will,

A hardening of beliefs,

A nut inside a shell,

A rotten nut in a harder and harder shell.

THE FLESH KNOWS ALL THINGS

I.

The flesh knows all things,

Predicts all things,

Expects all things to act according to itself,

And is rarely disappointed.

The crane moves along the long walk of life,

The long epicenter toward home.

Always alone.

Moving like a philosopher walking on the beach,

Seeking to figure the unfigurable.

The unforgivably alone.

The bird of peace, without peace,

Without order,

With no community except water,

Able to build into utter loneliness

Only the profound understanding

That he is thereby allowed to wonder.

II.

But the flesh knows much more.

The flesh is total community,

A community of every desire,

Every fear,

Every impulse to kill,

And steal,

And to be known,

To be discovered.

THE LOVE THAT WILL LAST

She moves with the grace of a being sent from heaven.

She is not heavenly.

She is built for the conveniences of love.

But there is something more.

She has an appetite for truth.

She will not betray me.

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH SWORD

(The Man Who Loves Birds)

I.

The man who loves birds wears my skin

And wears my aptitudes for flight.

Conditioned not for parlance with men of gold

Or women with bitter Mexican fans,

He lives, instead,

In the cup of the sky,

Protected by the silences of crows

And by the starry impresarios,

The grand canaries,

And through their cold blue instruction.

Wisdom is the pearl found in some nest in the sky.

One cannot walk there.

One cannot ride a freight train.

One must traverse earth and fire,

Water and heated gas.

One must climb out on the sea

And stretch a wing or two and pray.

And then the eagles might come down,

The great silences of thought,

These eagles, themselves,

And contain within themselves

These silences,

Vast hammers of language,

Eerie banners of law.

Vision.

Vision out of time.

Angels take the shape of birds;

And speak to men

Who have learned the laws of flight.

II.

The man who loves birds

Wears my sins and my attitudes of fright.

I do not claim salvation;

For there is no salvation.

There is no escape from the air

Unless the air becomes your friend.

Having said this, the man of air speaks mainly to the trees.

And he listens to his friend, the nightingale, sing him home.

LUNAR SAILS

I.

Lunar sails, the broken props.

Lunar sails, all breathing stops.

Every building on the curve

Absorbs the night.

And water drops.

* * *

The archive has a long tail, the midget says.

It is built out of dry memories

And meticulous understandings of the trinity of thought

And of the duality of earth.

The archive is a long memory,

Handed through Time in the mouths of old women,

Built not of stone but of the molecular ozone,

The temperament of water.

Hearty and blinking.

A living document of signs.

II.

We go sailing on the moon--on the earth--on the moon.

We go sailing on the moon.

No one stops us.

We sail 'til noon.

* * *

The archive is nothing, the giant says.

There is no such thing as night.

In the beginning our bodies were transparent.

Light passed right through us.

It is only now,

Now that our bodies have become relative solids,

That we cast our shadows,

Which are the illusions

We call night.

III.

Lunar sails, in manic form.

Manner's ritualistic norm.

No one hears us as we cry.

No one sees the storm come by.

Lunar sails, the carnival's mean.

A meaner ritualistic scene.

No one hears us when we lie.

No one sees the carp pass by.

Lunar sails, the mystic might.

Mighty ritualistic fight.

No one sees us as we spy.

No one feels the crimes go by.

Lunar sails, the mordant height.

High and mordant ritual's right.

No one touches, none can fly.

No one speaks; still, children die.

THE PLANE CRASH

I.

The image is rife.

The plane dips its plaintive cargo south,

Over the broken filaments of clouds,

Dropping down into plain view

Of the patchwork,

The smoke,

The hovering commitments.

A dead energy in the leaves.

Seen only partially from the sky,

The flat catwalk of the drifting names,

The stone imagery,

The classical merit of the bleeding heart.

The broken heart.

The bleeding figurine in the brain.

We fall.

Energy falls.

All that is left is the sinking moment.

The eternal condition of fear.

Eternal fear.

Then a passing into shallow breathing.

Then the crash, the flying.

II.

The image is rife.

All fear has been bled out of me,

All concern with eternity,

All concern with the coaxial;

Everything is gone,

Perforated by fate,

Hung in the deathly manners of chance.

Nothing else being known.

Cats and dogs and perspectives of brief joy

And transitions to fear

And the name of apocalypse all come by,

Rushing in the air,

Above and below,

Thoughts about children and the grief of a parent,

All breaking apart like nothing.

The first tree we hit sheared the plane in two,

Taking a wing,

Sparking a fire which quickly blew away.

We were all nothing.

The mountain absorbed us and gave nothing back.

Just cold eternity.

Cold eternity in a cold breeze on a cold mountain on a cold night in the freezing snow.

Ghosts waiting for someone to come.

But no one came.

THE DEATH OF ED SMYTHE

Consider the dead man in the grass

On the field overlooking the river.

Consider that he once was a small boy,

That he once was nursed by a mother,

Once scolded and then instructed by a father.

That he once loved a small girl

And gave her flowers,

And thought of her often,

Seeing her as his angel.

That he once fought for his sister

When an older boy's sister

Accused her of cheating.

That he fought for her country

When he was only nineteen.

That he married a very nice girl

Who was the niece of the town judge

And had three children

And devoted his life to giving them

Everything he could.

Consider that he watched his wife die slowly

Of stomach cancer;

And that he himself had prostate cancer

But recovered.

Consider that one night

As he walked at dusk

On the bluff overlooking the river,

An angel came down to him,

Spoke his name,

And killed him with a look.

Everything is not forgotten.

DREAMS ARE AT HAND

Dreams are at hand.

Dreams are close to me,

Close to the broken calendar,

Close to the disassembled clock.

Dedicating the plastic hammer,

The beneficial temper,

To the one who no longer

Knows himself as a thing.

The thing begins to pass.

What is it?

A man, an ego, an item of luck,

A temperament, a passing coat,

A flamboyant cognizer,

A frequent filer,

A frozen memory?

The thing begins to pass,

The thing being the unconstant movement

On the surface of the globe;

The window;

The glassy architecture of the soul,

Cast out as a reflection toward which

The lost symptom casually passes.

Breaking oaths

And breaking momentary pleasures in half.

Something seems real:

The girl with the blonde hair touching your arm;

The furious drive into night

Chasing wolves and eluding comets.

Silver.

Cash.

Achievement.

Things put on the black belt

And hauled away by demented horses,

Dragging icons through the snow.

Things.

Not yourself,

But things you might collect,

Memories,

Treasures,

Glories,

Defeats.

Things, pulled through the snow.

Things piled up at Auschwitz.

Things crated for the urn.

Dead things, dead rosaries, dead capacities for understanding.

Clothes pulled off your body.

Clothes being the memories themselves,

Before which one stands naked,

Naked to his god,

Naked to his fatality.

Dreams are at hand.

Dreams are close to me.

DEATH IS IN YOUR SHOE, O MAN OF INIQUITY

I.

Death is in your shoe, o man of iniquity,

man of arrogance.

You believe that you have risen to the occasion.

But, in fact, the occasion has risen inside of you,

Making you small in comparison,

Not the large factor you have been serving in your own mind

for so long,

Not the giant of self-management,

self-love,

self-sustenance,

Able to forge from your own injustices

Some picture of yourself as the captain of your tendencies,

The pope of reduced reason,

Culpable and black and blue on the inside,

As you were friendly and fastened with virtue on the surfaces,

Draining rules from your shoe with the easy sportsmanship of a killer;

Preparing to maim the knight by claiming him to be a bluish dragon.

Dragon pierced with the gold of the lie.

The surly dragon, surely lying, killed by gold.

It is a sad condition, beknownst to few, suspected by many.

Driven by the fears inside the real nature, the child,

Not an angel now, but a wolf,

Driven by fear,

Driven by death,

Stalked by the hungry eye of the condor,

Circling itself,

Kneeling down on the corpse,

Praying to God that the liver is perplexing.

Cordial understanding.

The damned hypotenuse inside the dry mile.

The damned man inside the drunken serpent's tongue,

Speaking a forked frame,

A frozen picture of eden's clay

And Odin's frequently foreign symmetry.

Urging the sprained occasion,

The bloodied mile inside the bloodied smile,

Occasioned by the permanent face of the mother you so diligently

raise up out of your mind.

I know you, sir.

I have walked with you for many days

As you circled the globe,

Expecting some device

To achieve a broken face

And deliver you with evil,

Amen.

Expecting some devil to appear

And pronounce you ready to continue

Your discovery of the angles,

Of which the hypotenuse is but one.

One ghost inside the many.

One Greek occasion for plenty.

The longest angle being the most acute.

The acutest angle being the most spectacular.

The most spectacular angle being the least abrupt and the most caloric.

II.

Time comes on.

The circular necessity.

Time comes on.

The drink that is in the blood.

Time comes on.

The savage appointer of some commonality among men,

the cancer,

the heart boiled,

the blueblood drained by the cock

or the fancy dragon or dog.

Dogged by some demon with a black hand

And a persuasion of mortality.

The furious mouth and the conditioned belief in red ruin.

Tuned with the fork of the franchise,

The fallow mature mark of the hypnotic wonderworker.

Sure, now that emaciation is at hand,

Emancipation from the smile,

From the broken taster,

From the hideous killer,

The compromiser of morals,

The believing shell on which the soul is transplanted

by love.

Sure, now you say that you are sorry.

DRIFTING IN THE FIELDS OF CANE

Drifting in the fields of cane.

Drifting.

Nothing more to do in this life,

Nothing but to drift,

To become something good,

To develop into the best possible drifter.

Nothing more can be done.

All the promise is gone.

All the attempts at greatness.

Everything moves toward nothingness.

It is true that I am a late-bloomer.

That is the key to this.

That is the key.

Blooming late.

Blooming right before death.

Uncompromising unity.

I can see you there, looking at nothing,

Moving in the fast minutes of fear.

You who are the gleaner inside of me,

The one who knows what I cannot know,

The one who feels everything,

Who sees everything,

Who is able to appreciate me to the fullest,

Who can fathom my genius and who periodically

Impels it (my genius) into activity.

Why have you deserted me?

Is it because I cursed you, I accused you of treason?

Is that why you, now, merely circle me,

Far away,

Like a bird without a tether,

Looking off, toward the moon?

Not touching me.

No longer giving me your wisdom.

MR POTATO-HEAD: Don't Talk of Ecclesiastes to Me

Don't talk of Ecclesiastes to me.

You do not understand the name.

Your youth is pleasant;

Therefore your old age shall be hellish.

Had your youth been hellish, well, then....

That is why the old men say:

"Pray for a war in youth and then peace in old age."

Will it, and it will happen.

Will it; so it will be.

The poets say this.

Is it so?

I do not know.

They say will yourself into power over your catastrophe.

They believe we are capable of raising ourselves up over despair.

And it must be true.

The significant other speaks up.

Turning us all into a special conspiracy of fear.

Turning us all into a world of bad experience,

Broken confessions,

Convoluted logic.

Logic is not the same in all of us.

There is no objective logic.

The environment is the logic.

The environment is the logic.

Listen to the man who approaches the world

With a fresh face,

A new capacity for insight.

Take in everything.

Take in the world,

Make it blue with a true word,

Make it the salvation of a manager of the blind.

Keep yourself blue, keep yourself hard, keep yourself a visionary.

Dragons appear in the wildest streets of the city.

Dragons and the vengeful shadows of dragons,

The insubstantial creatures of the deep,

Walking on ice,

Gyring in spirals,

Reflecting on nothing but themselves, being the reflections.

You do not speak like a writer,

Not with your primary rhythms and your

Childish stringing together of words and conditions.

You must dig deep inside yourself.

You must dig into your core.

And cherish analysis.

You do not know what is true.

You know only a fragment of the whole scene.

You grasp the fragment and believe it the entire piece.

But a great deal is missing from your fragment.

You have only one piece of a great ball

Which has been dropped and broken.

It breaks into a thousand pieces.

And one cannot understand the picture

Until one can once again

Reassemble the broken pieces.

Of course, if one were able to travel in time,

To the place where the unbroken ball exists in eternity,

Prior to the fall,

And the splintering of the glass into many small pieces,

Then one would know the picture,

The plan,

And whole again.

However, one cannot do this, except through magic.

One cannot do this, unless he teaches himself the art

of traveling in time.

That is what the magician can do.

* * *

Dreams are not enough, my friend.

You talk as if the dreams were everything,

As if you were a perennial sleeper

Who never once bothered to descend from the clouds,

From the dark amphitheaters of your floating monotonies.

Monotonies? Really? Not monotonies to me. Are you describing my dreams as my monotonies to me, or as monotonies to you?

Unchanging phantoms! Monotonous to the mind.

Not in the least. Ever-changing. Never the same. Always new. Never truly decipherable.

That's why you cling to them, because they're never-decipherable. Ever-mysterious. And you remain that way also, especially to yourself.

Yes, perhaps you have something there.

You agree with me.

Perhaps. I'll have to think on it.

Have you no pride?

What does pride have to do with it?

You lie to yourself. And when you see that you lie to yourself, you don't react. You act like its a normal, worthy thing.

It is not lying to oneself. It is a sense of understanding. You are lost in your understanding which is clear good and evil, clear lying and pride. But I do not see the world so any longer. I do not see it as you see it, so coldly ideological. There is a larger vision, one which you will reach when you must, when your spiritual salvation is at stake.

CANCEL THE VEGETATION

I.

Cancel the vegetation.

The men do not deserve the good years,

Unless they understand that it is a gift to them,

Not some fealty requisite of God or gods,

But a gift;

Something good that comes to them

Because of their own natures.

Something good that rises up out of the soil,

Much as they themselves rise up out of the soil.

The evolution of earth is the story of one life.

That life is rock and plant and animal and man,

Each rising up from the soil, the foundation;

Each being the foundation and,

At the same time, something more

Than the foundation;

Also the pole of the non-foundation,

Which is a foundation, itself,

Not of rock but of anti-rock,

Of dense spirit, so dense as to be considered by us

As having no density:

Such is the nature of absolute density.

II.

So, when the god cries: "Cancel the vegetation!"

This is a very significant thing.

It is not only a curse of drought and famine,

It is a sentence of all kinds of quarrels between men

As concocted by the gods, the planetary natures,

Who look down upon the earth often with mistrust and

A hunger for blood.

Man must understand that he is driven by forces

That often seek his own destruction.

That seek to cancel his vegetation.

PREDICTIONS OF THE LOSS OF FACE

Predictions of the loss of face.

Predictions about the loss of matter.

Predictions about the loss of form.

All these predictions come in, complicating reality,

Making me feel mostly the sad energy of the corrupted few,

The mad energy of an unassociated fury.

The delinquents know best about what murders the soul,

About the dark energy of rebellion from which all sin is born,

The requisite of kings,

The parasite of endives.

Sparkling mercury of the mind,

Driven down into the august nations,

The plastic seasons of the occult,

The servants' quarters.

The iron man coming in to greet you,

The man with two fingers,

The man with an eye for virtue,

And a fist for authority,

The man with a horrible appetite,

The man with gas,

And grace

And a lust after silent women.

Silent women are all he has now.

He left the living ones, the ghosts with flesh,

Many years ago,

Back when they could still shout his name,

Still accuse him of crimes,

Still contend that he was the cause

Of their collective ruin.

But he grew weary of this.

He walked away.

He walked into the desert one day.

And he never stopped walking.

CONCEPTIONS ELEVATED TO THE LEVEL OF

ARCHETYPE

Conceptions elevated to the level of archetype.

Yes, that is where you once felt vision, felt power, flooding through you.

And by this "power" of course I am referring to Luck.

Good fortune.

That is what you desire again.

Luck being associated with the power to see.

Contradictions notwithstanding.

Bringing down the power of the gods

On the side of the hunched protectors

And the men of constant adoration,

Adoring fools,

Painted like tiffany,

Meteors in their smiles,

Carnivores in their brains,

Biographorians,

Castellians for the highest order,

Snakes in venerated poppery,

All aglow with self-conceit.

Which is it?

Jump or fall?

Drop or rise?

Both, at once?

The two principles going one north and one south?

Is that it?

The two elements separating,

Scaling the walls which are merely triangles

reflecting one another?

Perhaps.

Conceptions lowered to the level of archetype.

Yes.

That is where you once felt vision,

Felt power,

Flooding through you.

Luck being the capacity to see what is coming;

But less than this,

Luck being the power to stand in the light

That cannot be seen or felt or ever understood;

The light that merely is.

ARBITRARY CONDITION OF LOVE

Arbitrary condition of love.

The flat condition of dreams embarrasses the world,

The world of claims,

The world of clams and pendants and prophets;

And priests.

I drink them, the conditions of loss.

I drink the wine that makes me real in the fury.

The fascination of turpitude.

The fascination of folly.

Yes, I understand tragedy.

I understand the goal of life,

The precise ministry of death.

Frequent calorie of the dove.

I know the dove is gone.

I know the war machine is revving in Europe.

I know the trenchant colony of coins

Has begun to orbit in the sky over Mars.

Men of taste.

Men of squalor.

The one into the other.

The other out of the one.

Bosnians are only Europeans wearing military rags.

The archons of Paris are merely Bosnians in their wealthy clothes.

We are all killers under our skin.

We all walk in the valley of death,

Pruned for our tastes by the destitute name,

The chloride brain,

The fascination for fire.

We can kill.

We can live to overcome our killing.

We are good and bad.

We can lift the veil of God for a moment.

We can run the blade of Satan over nations,

Over continents,

Not because we are bad;

Rather because we are necessary.

TRANSPOSING THE GREAT THOUGHTS

WITH THE WEAK MIND

Transposing the great thoughts with the weak mind,

The mind not so central to history or philosophy,

Low and broken,

Built for nothingness.

Strange pattern of death.

Strange contamination of the true name,

The heartened pattern of philosophy,

From Plato down the routs of night,

The general conditions of thought,

Spread across the sky,

Spread across the man's firm mind.

Coming out of nowhere.

Coming out of the drunken spigot,

The stumbling catastrophe of men

Finding their way home at night,

Friend more to the bottle than to their own kind,

Friend mostly to the solid dispossessed

and despairing demon,

Glutton of night,

Transposer of articulate thinking.

Friend of one another sometimes.

Sometimes killing one another.

But often friends to one another.

Often circling prey together.

Often fighting off injustice together.

Brothers.

Patriotic friends.

Husbands together and sufferers of adamant blows together.

Circling God together.

Circling understanding.

Knowing it is shy.

THE TOURIST

Agony is in the brain, agony is in the soul.

The tourist does not understand this.

To feel agony one must belong to someone,

to something.

The tourist belongs to nothing.

The tourist has no feelings.

MR POTATO-HEAD: Converses With the Self

You talk too much. You talk nonsense here. Have you no structure to give your words meaning? Tell a story. Tell us something that matters.

What do you know about it? I write to try to save my own balance in life. I write to negate the bad energy that is inside me. I write for more reasons than to merely entertain you.

I don't want to hear about it. You tell me something that impresses me, and I will be impressed. So far you have said nothing. Make me dream, make me understand something about you, make me believe that I can achieve something in my partnership with you. Do something to help me understand myself. Tell me something that will enlighten me. Otherwise, you just take up time. I am weary of your predicament, and your sniveling about it. So you are losing confidence, and energy. Do something to replenish it.

What do you suggest?

It is up to you. Do something good.

What should I do?

Do something noble. Help someone out with something. Be kind. Be generous.

You sound like my better-half speaking.

Perhaps I am. Perhaps I am that better-half, the half you've been denying for some time.

The unselfish side, you mean.

Yes, perhaps that.

And where do I find this unselfish side?

You have to die first.

Die in what way?

You have to triumph over death, so that you will no longer fear it. For the fear of death is the source of all selfishness, is it not?

Perhaps. And how does one die?

I do not know. Someone comes along to kill you.

Is it someone? Or something?

Perhaps some thing, some force, from within.

Then you speak of death as a metaphor for something, some death from within, the death of an idea?

Perhaps. It can come in many forms.

Can it come as actual physical death?

Let us hope not. We are looking for you to experience transformation, not elimination.

So, will this death be merely the passing of some personality?

Or some obsession. Or some world view--which is another expression for an obsession.

But I would be unwise to look for my own anti-particle, would I not?

In the beginning, the particle divides itself from the antiparticle. Each journeys into its own sphere, living its life removed from its death, the particle in the world we call life, the antiparticle in the world we call the death. They arc away from one another (in the pattern of the figure 8). But then gravity begins to draw these back together. When they are drawn back together, they collide, annihilate one another. When one is born, one's death is also born.

Tell me about memory.

What would you like to know about memory?

Tell me why I lost mine?

Because you were re-born.

What does that mean?

Because you passed from reflection, rest, the passive, thoughtful life, where memory is rife, into the active life, the life without memory, Life itself. It is not the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil. That is the tree of Memory. This is the tree which knows itself not, but which knows Life. It is the life of the blood, not the life of the mind. You drank from the River Lethe just prior to your birth.

Is it Life or Art then?

What?

Is it Life or Art then, Art being the manifestation of memory?

There is no creation without memory; just as there is no production with too much memory.

One mind creates, the so-called female mind. One mind produces, the so-called male mind. Man cannot act with too much memory. Guilt comes back when memory comes back. And from guilt comes, eventually, a form of death, and then the creation of art.

You talk as if you know this to be true.

I talk and you listen. If you see the reason, then judge for yourself if it is true.

What about love, then?

What about love?

Is it real?

Yes, it is real. As real as anything else?

Is it more real than anything else?

More real. No, I don't believe so.

Is it more honorable?

Perhaps it is more honorable. Than some things. More honorable than murder. More honorable than treason. Yes, it is.

Is it more honorable than honor?

No, nothing is more honorable than honor.

And what is honor?

Honor is the sum total of good character. Honesty is one element of honor. Courage is another. Wisdom is also an element of honor. And good judgment, which has as its three prongs: intelligence, creative thought and generosity.

Those are all parts of honor.

Yes.

Is love a part of honor?

Generosity is. Generosity is a form of selflessness. So is love, in its true form.

Then you have love being something less in value than honor. But honor is a private thing. Whereas love is a communal thing, that is, involving more than one soul. Is there not more honor in the thing communal than in the thing solitary?

Not at all. All things that are valuable come from the developed individual soul. Two honorable souls, when fused in love, produce the most honorable love. Two (or even one) dishonorable souls, when approximated in love, produce pain and a diseased union. It is not love at all in this case. But it is a form of tyranny, or a form of slavery.

And what of those who believe that love is everything?

It is not everything. It is part of everything.

And what of power?

What of power?

Is it good or evil?

Good and evil; but that is the wrong question to ask. Good or evil? Power exists on every level. Power is not only the ability to affect another's life, it is also the ability to control one's own life. Every quality is good and evil. Even good is evil; and evil good.

You sound like the relativity theory. How is virtue evil?

Virtue is evil when it's expression becomes dogmatism. The communists were virtuous in Cambodia. Their dogmatism was an expression of their virtue.

Then morality is not always virtue?

Morality is virtuous only when the expression of the individual's quest to know. Political morality is almost never virtuous. The Nazis spoke of morality without end. The greatest killers in the world have been spokesmen for political morality.

So, vice is virtuous....when it is the expression of the individual's quest to know?

Precisely.

So, is the individual's quest to know the highest virtue?

It would appear so.

And if the individual's quest to know leads one to become Hitler.....or Charles Manson?

The quest to know is the highest virtue. But murder is not a virtue. Bad knowledge is not a virtue. Knowledge itself is not a virtue. The quest to know is the highest virtue.

Higher than the quest to love?

The quest to love is the quest to know love.

So knowing is greater than being?

Knowing is being. The quest to know is the quest to be.

You have everything pretty much catalogued.

I don't catalog at all. You ask questions. I must answer your words with words on my own. I ideate; and language and thought are the same thing.

Are you saying that what you say, what you think, and what you believe are different?

What I say is based on reason, the language I have inherited. What I believe has no sound, no language, no limitations created by language.

You speak as though you believe that language distorts truth rather than models it.

Language is a poor spectacle of approximation. In describing, it does limit. And the limitations are distortions. Yet it's what we have.

It creates an illusion, according to you. Still, you employ it.

We cannot know. We merely can seek.

We seek to know what we cannot know. Isn't that stupidity?

We dream not to attain our dream, but because to dream is to live. One need not be disillusioned if one's dreams turn black. One's dream is guaranteed to turn black. There is a day and a night to everything. Understanding that the dark dream is merely the night of the idea--this understanding allows one to accept the demise of a dream. And gives one the understanding that the day will return and bring with it a new dream. This is faith, not faith built on belief, but faith built upon knowledge.

THE FOUR-SIDED CIRCLE (A Diagram)

NIGHT

The first man is man. The second man is animal man. The third man is vegetable man. The fourth man is mineral man. The fifth man is again vegetable man. The sixth man is animal man. The seventh man is man again.

DAY

The first man is man. The second man is spiritual man. The third man is a god. The fourth man is God. The fifth man is again a god. The sixth man is spiritual man. The seventh man is man.

SUMMER

The first man is God. The second man is a god. The third man is spiritual man The fourth man is man. The fifth man is again animal man. The sixth man is vegetable man. The seventh man is mineral man.

WINTER

The first man is mineral man. The second man is vegetable man. The third man is animal man. The fourth man is man. The fifth man is again spiritual man. The sixth man is a god. The seventh man is God.

A VISION

The grinding space in the western sky

Illumines the border zones of Nod.

Tripoli has French heels and French skirts.

Around the poles all the architects dance.

Fealty is lost;

Paupers abound

And shop for serpents and dragons.

Moderation dies.

YOU ARE LOST

You are lost.

The vengeances are now circling.

There is no way home.

You are lost.

The woman who saved you will try to kill you.

The woman who tried to kill you will save you.

You move between the two.

When you are dark, the white woman appears to you,

the Moon.

When you are light, when you are the sun,

The dark woman appears to you,

the Earth.

You spend time with each.

Each gives you something.

Each gives you a form of life.

When you are dark, she is light.

When you are light, she is dark.

These are parts of yourself also;

But when you have separated into man and woman

It is impossible to understand the nature of the whole unit.

Then you are in shadows.

Your understanding has been fractured.

THE WIND

Listening to the wind,

I am moved most by the emptiness of life.

The wind is full,

But it is the opposite of life.

The wind is full with ghosts,

Voices,

Disembodied natures.

The wind knows everything.

But the wind cannot be harvested.

The wind collects one's mind,

Seeks to turn it inside,

To join itself to the individual mind.

It draws a man away from life.

IN THE AGE OF THE INDIVIDUAL

In the age of the individual,

Whole races cannot be condemned or praised.

In the age of the individual,

There are good individuals and bad individuals.

In the age of the group,

There is black and white,

Good and bad,

Left and right.

In the age of the individual,

Nothing is right,

Nothing is wrong,

Everything is mixed.

In the age of the group,

Everything is judged.

It is an illusion.

But, of course, it seems true at the time.

Truth is a very funny thing.

What seems true at night.

Often seems false in the daylight.

During the day, there is a hierarchy of values.

During the night, there is just good and evil.

TWO SISTERS

The sisters both have shiny tales to tell,

Both have long histories,

With much glory and with the trophies of love.

But that is not the real thing;

That is the shiny thing,

The things they speak.

Down deep, down in the stony tropics

Where they live most nakedly,

They are stones themselves,

Hardened by the burdens

They carry with such religion.

They are not true, except to their ideals,

Those shiny angels in their bosoms,

The ones in the mirror,

The ones who inform them that

To despair is the greatest sin.

And so they feel guilt

As deeply as they feel

Their own disappointments.

TEMPTATION

TEMPTATION.

The horn is blown,

Soft Sagittarean snow,

Synod of evening miles,

The saxophone scale bringing down

On the night

An unsurly species.

The lover's grainy touch,

Arch and antic,

Spelled in black sand,

Spelled in ample ashes,

Blue cipher,

Amber anthem,

Jazz fish and the master mint

of music,

Night spell,

Flesh forming,

A face,

A hand,

The heinousness of touch;

Venus's randy candy,

A mouth of matter,

A mouth of fat love,

Carved out from a flat manner

By a hammer of blue rouge.

She hears the vapid town grow cold

And old and cloy and critically craven.

Town matters;

The fat hand of the old minds

Dressed in women's clothes and in

Men's fragmented perjuries.

Town fattening itself

On the blood of the young,

Indicting moral cribs,

Moral elevations,

Moral aims and stations:

The big lie.

Fine town,

Fine spokesmen,

Fine president,

Spy.

The aisle a rosary down which she walks,

Wishing life were more like a movie.

The men more gallant;

The gods more remote,

Or less evaporant--

She is not sure which;

The ideology geared to knowledge

More than to style.

But it is not so.

Not in her town.

Where the remote are only

Apparently so.

Where the ideology is geared

To face

And to face's

Ancillary holiness.

Despite the truth of long archeries of deceit,

Long heliotropes of adulteries:

The truth matters less

Than does the formality

Of appearance.

And when she hears the horn of sense,

The long aching decibels of undress,

Indecipherable monotonies of blood,

Brain,

Bruising thought,

Brackish feasance,

Impaling image,

Handsome male,

Knight discovery on the round,

The lesson of loss,

The falling arm,

The failing resistance,

Dreams magnified by the eyeglass of sound,

Loss of seasons,

Age bringing fear,

Dying alone,

Breasts sagging,

No one at home,

Cooking for no one,

Temptation to scream,

To cry aloud,

To fall at the feet

Of any long associate,

She understands poor Tantalus,

Who, at least,

Suffered out of view.

She suffers in full view of town,

Where the folks are either busy laughing

At her unfertile kingdom

Or chastising her provocative appeal.

Keep her where she is,

A pomegranate with dried up juices,

A flower without a bud or a flame.

But the saxophone comes down again,

Down from heaven it seems,

Long feathers of temptation,

Touching her in private moments,

Pinching the sweet sarcophagus alive.

Is there a man nearby?

Someone to tear down the armor,

Insert the calculated hammer,

Grind from her the dried youth,

The flaking ardor,

The incentive of the desert

And the pantomime of nuns?

She is ready for anything,

Willing to do something,

The spear,

The intoxication,

The lies,

The flowers,

The unease,

The candy,

The abuse,

The tenderness,

The darkness,

The full extension.

She does not idolize

Her incarnation,

So dry now,

So empty of contact.

Temptation begins.

But, as always, temptation ends

In the sobering agony of sleep.

Freeing her once again.

Freeing her from

The colloquial majesty of her life.

SCALE BECOMES A KIND OF TRUTH

Scale becomes a kind of truth,

Truth itself perhaps.

And falsehood most surely.

For truth at one scale is falsehood at another.

Relativity being what it is.

It is true that the cat is a giant to the ant.

But to the cow the cat is but a minor irritation.

THE EASIEST LOVE IS THE TRUEST LOVE

The easiest love is the truest love.

Oh, there are others.

Others pulled like teeth from the sky,

Others driven through the brain by a shoe,

Others twisted in the soul like a root.

But the easiest love is the truest love.

The easiest love comes calling like cranes,

Comes silky and sewn,

Comes full with a shawl.

The easiest love is easy

Because it cannot be anything else.

It is like a law of nature;

It cannot be otherwise.

All the others, the ones that don't fit,

They are shadows made of metal,

Puppets made of cane.

They almost are real.

They nearly are true.

But they are torsoed by Time;

A minute cast adrift.

Only you are a love without purpose.

YOU ARE STARVING FOR SOME SUCCESS

You are starving for some success.

You can taste only the bile of your struggling,

The taste of failure,

As you look out on your deeds

And see only fallen corpses

Along the way:

Failed novels,

Dead poems,

Eerie accompaniments of finance....

These are all parts of you,

All parts of your failure.

You knock on many doors

And find them all closed,

Locked,

No windows even to let out

The plaintive sounds

Of the fat old woman

Who is laughing at you

From the second floor,

The cow voice coming out

In long, thick, unimaginative

Chords of scorn.

ESTABLISHED RITUALS DO NOT DIE EASILY

Established rituals do not die easily.

The accompaniments of the test service

Meet with familial identity

And color the fusions of love and duty

A marvelous red tenor.

Tints are manifold,

Driven into momentary panics

By the collusion of mother and daughter,

Of sister and sister,

Of the ghosts of penance,

Convention,

And fear.

Fear of abandonment.

This is the collegiate fear,

The fear that drives the wolf back to the lair,

The killer back to his birthplace,

The gorgon down in the well.

The lonely face and the face

Which cannot smile any longer.

He dreams about the escape from his burden;

But he is fused to the escape,

As he is fused to the burden.

And this makes the burden

Always real and ever tangible.

WE HAVE STAYED HERE TOO LONG

Surface enchantments are many;

Many are the embodiments

Which drive us into the world,

Into the wind,

Into the womb of soft annihilation,

Seeking something stable and enriching.

Seeking something true,

Like blood is true,

Like bone is true.

Driving us away from the abstract,

Where we have lived our lives,

Mostly in satisfaction.

And now the bark does not give us pleasure,

The stone does not make us laugh.

There is little satisfaction here, on the moon,

A dry orb,

Not the moon within,

But the moon which is dead.

Drinking us with its doom,

Its application of monotony,

Its artificial scope and scales and scandals,

Which to us mean nothing,

But which mean much to some.

Drinking us even when we don't know it.

Where we don't care about it.

Drinking us into some stupor of weakness,

Which we believe is ill health

But which is, in fact,

Dracula's way of telling us

That we've stayed here too long.

THEY WONDER WHY I'M LONELY

They wonder why I'm lonely.

I tell them that it's because they are so ordinary.

This makes you lonely?

Yes, this makes me choose loneliness.

I would rather be alone,

Struck by my own solemness,

Than to be tortured by the presence

Of those incapable of sorrow.

A DRINK OF WATER

A drink of water;

A sprig of salt;

A notion of dread,

Coming into the brain,

Associated with night,

With fear,

With the spectre of the dead.

A drink of wine;

A velocity in the gut;

A paean of past greatnesses

All shoved up on the grill

And paraded there

For the sake of someone's

Entertainment.

THE VALUE VISIONARY

Vendidad of all beliefs.

The crows understand what you are saying.

They anticipate your smartest utterings,

Looking at you dryly

As you recognize their own potencies.

It is not that they are prescient.

It's that you are so easy to read,

So bruised by convention.

When you leave, they laugh,

Muttering that you have become a corruption

Of the value visionary.

SHE IS AT IT AGAIN

She is at it again,

Talking in the mode of a

Woman about to break,

About to begin circling her prey,

One eye on the moon,

The other on a fleeting

Jugular vein.

Propped up by the blood of an age,

Which flows through her brain

Like pulp manufactured in vinegar.

Too loose to begin the rude walk

Into obscurity.

Too tight not to fight

The rigid nature

Of the dying breed.

DISCOVER THE IMPLICIT KNOWLEDGE IN THE BRAIN

I.

Discover the implicit knowledge in the brain.

You do not need to go back anywhere to find it.

It is here, right in front of you.

Oh, yes, the ancestors have this knowledge.

But the ancestors are also here, in more tenuous form.

You do not need to flee from this world,

To bury yourself in a world that is lost.

Bury yourself in this world.

But remain sensitive to instruction.

As, at night, the radio waves travel far;

So, in your own personal night,

The voices of the spirits

Travel far and give instruction.

II.

Discover the implicit knowledge in the brain.

It is buried there, below the crucible,

Below the infamous testimony of the damned.

Below the shaping hammer,

The shaped and hammered bellows.

It vibrates to the sound of C sharp.

It is Jehovah's grimy calendar,

Jove's grimacing octagon of understanding.

Nothing is old here.

Everything is current.

The concept of Time fades and becomes nothing,

As everything is here,

Where it has always been,

Eras stacked on eras,

Within eras,

Time merely being the illusion

Of successive states of consciousness.

Thoughts without end.

Thoughts without end.

The universe is made of mental matter.

We do not understand this yet;

But we will very soon come to understand

That the material of the universe

Is mental matter;

And it is pliant to thought.

EVIDENCE OF THE ARCANUM

(Your Impermanence Bothers You)

I.

Your impermanence bothers you.

Perhaps your permanence will bother you more.

You ask where you go when you die.

You go back to your star.

We are all stars;

We all come from a star,

Which is made up of mental matter

And projects its own images

Down out of the sky

Onto a canvas

That is our earth.

When the body breaks open,

The light returns to its source,

That home star,

Which is permanent,

But periodical in manifestation,

Going in and going out.

II.

Evidence of the arcanum.

The dry wit baptizes

The unsurly features of the man

Who does not remember your name.

He remembers instead your

Virgin birthday,

Your perimeter of thought,

Your calendars of appropriate

Penances.

He is your priest.

The cognizer of your impermanence.

Cognizer of your desire for something stable,

Something knowable.

Your life has not been good in that way.

You have raged;

But your rage has gotten you no where.

You have cried, threatened.

But nothing is known.

You know nothing about yourself,

About your own ways of attaining greatness.

We laugh, we love, we implore;

We ignite, we scold, we conduct;

we connive.....nothing.

We hold seances with the great souls

Of the earth,

With the deadly hyperions of the times

Way back;

Nothing happens.

We hold our noses, hold our hearts,

Hold our thoughts,

Hold our balls,

Hoping that some of this will bring for us

Something of merit.

But nothing happens.

III.

The old man begins to move toward perversion,

Seeing in his history some mistake:

His belief in moderation.

But as death comes on, he understands that

He has taken bad counsel.

Moderation kills him slowly only.

He wishes to die fast,

Furiously,

With some boy in his arms,

With some knife in his brain.

Someone has tricked him.

He is desperate to know.

All the things he has been told:

Are they not true really?

Are these truly the only things to believe?

Is this really the only way to live?

MR. POTATO-HEAD:

The Writer Bores the Analyst

With His Self-Analysis

I. The Vision

You understand very little

When the daylight comes back in again,

The body-time.

The radio waves don't carry.

The voices of spirits are lost.

You take on layers of skin,

And the distance between the spirits

And the living men becomes great.

But as the day begins to wane,

As the night begins to grow,

The radio waves come back,

P{enetrating the less dense natures.

This is a frightening time, too.

For the demons are strongest during the night.

And they threaten the living who are now passing

Into their land,

The dark continents.

II. Analysis of the Vision

So, hearing is the sense of night, much as seeing is the primary sense of day?

Sound and smell dominate the night.

We know this already. Tell us something new.

I am not sure if there is anything new. Do you believe there is something new?

I don't know. I know there is something to care about. But I am not sure what it is. Can you understand me?

Not entirely. But I know that you are also myself. I am you; and you are me. I understand this all quite precisely. I am you, at another time. At another time, I will be you. Because there are so many personalities all strung together, like planets in a system of thought. We move from planet to planet. I understand this. I do understand this.

Sure. You understand nothing. Moving from planets to planets, personalities to personalities. What does that really mean? The ancients developed a system of thought which you wish to uncover. But was it true, or was it based on an untruth?

What does the truth of it matter?

I see.

No, I mean what does the truth of their vision of the solar system matter? You question their science. But it is not their physical science that I find so moving. It is their understanding of psychology. They related external events to internal experiences, internal certainties. They related these to planets and stars, for to them the internal and external were the same thing. Even if their understanding of the solar system was flawed, it does not follow that their understanding of the psyche was also flawed. The experience was not flawed, for the experience is eternal. If I can understand what they meant, in assigning a certain experience to a certain god, then I take a very large step toward understanding the history of the psyche. They speak in a symbolic language, the language of dreams. It is this language I wish to rediscover.

You speak too much; you should be quiet some times.

No, I have been silent for too long. And for too long I have been removed from my muse. For too long I have been scolded and ruled by my inability to perceive. I have not been receptive to ideas. That is because I have not written. To write is to be receptive to ideas, to hear, to see. To write opens one up, creates for this energy a cup, a thin receiver. I have had no receiver now for too long; and reception is luck, the ability to hear spirits, voices from the past, voices of one's ancestors. It is those voices which can help one. Those voices can make one generative.

You still talk too much.

You do not need to listen to me. But I need to speak. Speaking, or writing, keeps my brain firing, keeps me alive to impressions. I feel like I have been exiled from myself for too long. A sad thing, indeed. The blessed conditions of belief. Frozen in time, frozen by love, frozen into nothingness. The sad constabulary. Yes, the sad constabulary. Turning on a dime. Turning at a time most propitious to the....what?

To the seance?

Perhaps.

The dead circulating among the living?

The dead always circulate among the living. It is their destiny, this circulation.

As the living circulate?

Yes, but circulating in a different way than the dead.

Circulating with shoes?

Yes, circulating with shoes.

Contaminating nothing?

Ideally.

What more will you have, what can you say?

The troubled natures all come in from the cold and want to sleep in your house. Understand them, their cruelties, in the light of your own. Understand that they are condemned to a world now that has no solace for them.

Does not solace come from the word "sun"?

It does not matter.

Yes, it does. It matters a great deal. For there is some special meaning in that.

According to whom?

According to myself.

I see.

MOSQUITO IN YOUR BRAIN, FELLOW --

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

Mosquito in your brain, fellow.

Mosquito with the long training

And the furious sticker,

Trained for blood and

Trained by religious conditions of thirst.

In your brain, fellow.

Being much the wiser

When it finds its own satiety.

But making you what?

Beside the banquet, I mean?

Does it make you the elixir,

Or the savior?

Does the blood of your own thoughts,

Upon which the bug impales himself,

Like a donor on the bowry,

Like a junkie on the wire,

Conditioned to know nothing so much

As the prick and the prick's

Velvet repercussion;

The slamming of the veins into some

Harmony of trains

Rushing together at ten thousand miles

at a time;

The bug no better than he can be, should be,

Another junkie

Of ideas,

Living in your brain like a flea,

Until he takes you by force,

Siphoning off your force,

Leaving you wasted and washed;

And leaving himself, the leech,

The mosquito in your brain,

Satisfied for a few hours only --

Does it make him any truer?

THE MAN OF STATIONS

I.

Indictment of the seller.

The man of stations arrives in the clear day,

Unable to associate himself with the troubled town;

The hard-pressed town-members all gathering about the well,

Urging the doctor to catalog the ailments of each.

The man of stations does not believe in ailments,

nor doctors.

He dismisses what the doctor says

And tells the town that it will recover only

When this round of nature's decoction is run.

Sampling the hard energy of the source,

The fixed condition of the sea.

Troubled condition.

Believing the harsh factor of pain, atomic negativity.

Chaotic abbreviation.

In his brain like something stewing,

Some felicity of thought,

But with a shadow of brusque confusion.

A kind of cancer,

Which appeared like a snowflake in one guise,

The light side,

But appeared like a rorschach bacteria from the other,

The night side;

Leaving those viewing the two sides unable to ascertain

Which element was true,

Which the portable wisdom

By which the road would become a thoroughfare leading,

Not into hell,

The dark hospital,

But to the light,

The mansion on the hill.

But the man of stations says very little;

He knows the paradox.

He also understands that the less he says,

The more mystery he accrues;

And the more mystery he accrues,

The more power he gains.

A man betrays his own ignorance

When he deigns to speak too much.

The man of stations smiles like an old weathered

Char, a fearless arching salmon.

No one knows the ways of the wind,

The acetate of the seas,

The way our old poacher does.

II.

Indictment of the buyer.

The man of stations watches everything

From his place up on the cross.

The sumptuous women all laugh at him;

The older men with their younger wives are

All afraid to watch,

For they understand that they are, themselves,

The makers of the cross,

They are, themselves, but for fate,

Also on the cross.

TEMPEST IN THE IRON HEAD

Tempest in the iron head.

The calendar being nothing more than

The production of iron and fell spirit.

The calendar being the gross nature turned

From the albatross into the consequent mile,

The strapped, abstract element of fear.

Death.

The ambiguity of death, with its lace,

Its smoke,

Its unreal cab;

Its tenuous loss,

The cleavage between the two,

The ghost and the host,

The lost and the embossed image,

Pictures of plenty,

Fading into tears,

Savage Time, tearer of two,

Tearer of moods,

Of voodoo heat,

Of curlew and cribbage

And the constant negation of the damned,

Tearer of good.

Terror in two.

HUMOR

Humor.

Is there any left?

We have been laughing all our lives.

DEATH BY IMAGINATION

Death by imagination.

A killing sentence.

A killing deed.

The bartender all coiled up

inside himself,

Watching the blonde

With the chevrolet curls;

She touches herself

unconsciously,

Her breasts all boiling and brave;

Her heater all gnarled and gooey

And mesmerizing chocolate.

Candy being her name.

And her vocation.

The school girl calling the school for a loan.

Harping on the incentives of love,

The inventiveness of Candy,

Braided and buxom,

A curlew for chrome.

Carping on the heart,

The heat,

The harmony of the soil and blood,

Harmony of this,

Harmony of that.

A word she loves to use:

Harm-ony.

Har-money.

Lively in debate

And equally lively in de bottom.

Sot and clairvoyant.

Teeth.

Smile.

Used to bring men back to the bed,

Back to the table of union.

Candy Harmony Steele.

Dead by imagination.

Dead by the luck of the draw:

A marriage that went awry somehow.

A marriage to a good man

Who had too little money.

It is a sad story;

One that we hear too often.

He labored for dear Candy,

With dear Candy.

But he was cursed with bad luck.

He was dropped by Fate

Into a lap of love,

A lap of blonde ambitions

And warm thigh cement.

A sweet way to stick, to be sure.

But no less fatal.

They loved and lost.

A death by imagination.

Then something broke.

The jackhammer death.

Too few thrusts of late;

And too many bills.

The birds of debt all collecting

Around the rim.

The unfilled hopper,

A blonde atrocity,

Empty cupboards,

A man about to kill.

Bludgeoned dreams,

Taken down from heaven;

The heavy grate clanking behind;

St. Peter warning about the numbing power

of flesh,

The blonde leg open for many,

The fear of lost youth,

The pounding of plenty,

A husband cooking in silence,

Twenty pounds of flesh

All turned black on the spit.

Thank God for rye.

A mouth full of something,

When everything else was empty.

He wandered away one night,

Old Jack Duncan.

Candy gone,

Having met in the bar

A broom of a man

With too much imagination.

Another killing sentence:

Your place or mine?

A sure ticket to Canaan,

Canaan's sweet underbelly of decay.

Someone again, breathing in her ear.

A man of drink and a wallet with lore.

The bartender all coiled up inside himself,

Watching the chevy girl,

All heavy with inside elixir.

Death by imagination.

Death by imagination.

THE CORTEX IS A STAGGERING METAPHOR, HE SAID

The cortex is a staggering metaphor, he said.

Staggering, indeed.

Heavy with memories of things

That have gone wrong.

The cortex knows too much,

Remembers too much,

Analyzes too much.

The cortex is not your friend.

The cortex does not believe in magic enough.

It remembers, feels the past,

Feels it everywhere,

Sees only the cycle into death,

The cycle into loss.

The cortex rules when the night falls.

The cortex is king of the dark embodiments.

It can be your friend, at times,

When evil is crawling up from the grave,

Seeking to look in your eye

And make you scream.

Usually it is, at best,

An anachronism.

THE ICICLE OF THOUGHT

The icicle of thought,

The brain inside the brain,

The teacup inside the heart,

Achieving something meaningful

Not through thought

But through lack of thought,

Through the one-pointed mind

Which does not talk or sing or analyze or predict.

Which is silent, pointed at something,

Pointed like a lion.

Pointed at something which is unseen

By the majority of people.

Something unseen by the blue eyes,

The crafty men of law and business.

Which is unseen by all except the poets and seers.

The one-pointed thought locked on the invisible,

The distant,

The portentous,

The next world,

The next spectacle,

The next home,

The next creation.

The icicle of thought,

The brain inside the brain.

We are fed our images by some ingredient

in the future.

Elements of light.

Elements of heat.

Ghosts come down and fill up

The brain inside the brain.

They are the voices.

They are the minds which come

Into you when you are ready.

Disembodied,

They seek out the proper body to inhabit;

And then they make you their gospel.

WHY FEAR IS WORSE THAN GREED

Consuming greed is not the worst thing.

Consuming fear is worse.

Yet the two are related,

For greed is fear of loss.

However, there are more fears than merely loss.

There is also fear of gain.

This is even more troubling,

Because it implies duplicity with one's self.

That's why fear is worse than greed.

TRAGEDY IS SOME FORM OF FORTUNE

AFTER IT HAS BEEN DRAINED

OF ALL RESOURCE

Tragedy is some form of fortune

After it has been drained of all resource.

Tragedy is the night-fellow

Walking down the street

After all the markets have closed

And all the decent people have gone home

And locked their doors

And begun to watch television.

Tragedy has a knack for predicting voids,

And telling the rude men and the selfish women

How to fill them.

Tragedy is implicit in greed and lust,

Implicit in the spinning nature,

Prior to self-distrust.

Tragedy carries a spear

Not because he is hunting

But because he wants to look good.

The tragedy is that others who view him

Believe him to be hunting,

And respond to him as though he were a huntsman,

Threatening their own reserve.

Tragedy wears slippers under his trench-coat,

But no one see his feet,

Not until they are dead.

And then everyone understands that

A great tragedy has occurred.

Of course, then it is too late.

CHILDREN BEING SMALL PROTONS OF TIME

Oh, generator god,

Built for time

And by time to build,

Itself,

A timepiece of children,

Children's flowing children,

All hands on the clock,

Atomic substations of activity,

Frozen in the time spectrum,

But, in fact,

Spilling out in all directions,

In all dimensions of actualization.

Children being small protons of time,

Small atomic artifacts of change,

Complete and always seeking completion.

CRAFT. INIMITABLE CRAFT

Craft. Inimitable craft. That is something one can hold on to.

Dedicated to what?

To science, to art, to truth, to justice.

Yes, of course. But what else? What else beside platitudes?

Those are not platitudes. Those are real things, living entities, archetypal humans in the god state.

Representing something?

Being something. Being represented as something perhaps--but being something. Actual living things. Patterns from which the human stock has been cut. Only memory is weak. It is too far back now to see what we once saw. Just after or prior to birth, when all the archetypal forms were illuminated and clear. Now they have risen, or we have fallen, out of view. Now nothing is clear. The only thing clear is that craft must somehow lead back to that truth, the universal eternal island.

SCRIBBLED TO DEATH

Scribbled to death, that was his epitaph.

Scribbled and scrimped, a thin hand,

Frail some would call it,

Holding a bone, a flinty instrument,

Leaden thought,

Scribbling incentives for nothing,

Scribbling thoughts,

Diseases of the mind, in a furied hand,

Nervous method,

Necrimonious nature,

For those with nothing better to do,

Meant for those in the distant future,

Like some Nietzsche built out of thunder.

Innoculated by his own surging will.

Knowing that nothing fills a man like a sense of self;

And nothing crucifies a man, pops his balloon,

Like the understanding that the man, himself,

Has no place in the life,

Is not needed by his society.

THE MAGISTRATE

The magistrate has some unholy garden to attend.

The rich people have a christening.

He must go and feign holiday spirits with the crowd,

Those who finance the church.

But he is growing less and less patient with the rulers.

They do not practice God's will.

They are filled with vanity and with a growing spirit of churlishness.

He wants nothing to do with them.

They are filled with greed, with arrogance;

When he is in their presence, he feels himself sick with self-complaint.

This is degeneration.

THE SACRED IS LOST

The sacred is lost.

The venal predominates.

The lowest common denominator now rules.

Don't get me wrong.

I am no monarchist; no oligarchist.

Democracy is best.

In democracy there is the greatest nobility,

An understanding of equality before God,

An understanding of the equality of the soul.

There is nothing greater.

But even this, this great democracy,

Goes afoul when its leaders go sour.

When the populace lowers itself, it also lowers its standards,

Elevating politicians to the place once reserved for statesmen.

Politicians are no better than businessmen;

They are businessmen polished by advertising agencies.

HERITAGE; AND THE MOON

Heritage; and the moon.

We are all children of the moon,

All brought out of the sea

With a brain full of trouble

And a belly full of salt.

Monstrous in our complexities,

Voyagers in dark parts,

Affiliated with hideous acts,

Sharks, eels, whales and ponderous truths.

We rise up out of the darkness,

Pulled up as it were,

The moon itself lifting us up out of our fears

And our obsessions with death.

The moon hurts us but also saves us,

Drags us down but delivers us too,

As it delivered Jonah

Back in mythological times.

Our heritage is not so simple however.

We are moon and we are sun, two parts in one.

The sun also has a tale to tell.

HYPOCRISY IS THE FACE OF THE DREAM

Hypocrisy is the face of the dream.

Drifting in the old house

And preparing the discussion for the bad angels

In their troubled condition.

I can hear the long tubas arranging notes in the silent fields.

Horns of nothing with the deep tones,

Dark blues and the hellish whimpering of the damned.

The fields all cold and lonely now,

Peeled from the skins,

The warm skins of summer.

Burnt skin only, red and focused on pink nobility.

But nobility is gone too.

Only the long shadows of hopes that have been bruited about,

Turned from rose into stone.

Carping women and men who no longer speak,

Men who have grown old and lonely,

Spending too many nights alone,

Sitting by windows in tall tenements,

Watching the sky turn grey and cold,

Icy-hearted,

As lonely as Hopper's troubled souls,

Urban,

Turned to the cipher.

The women made of glue,

Transforming themselves instantly

From mockers in blue nightgowns

To analytical merchants

In the philosophy of female grace;

Spectacular in their ire,

Magnificent in the tense cravings,

Obligated to march but marching not through their gaols

But to the stores to buy more clothes,

Believing lipstick is more precious

Than is the blood of the savior.

Hearts of children heave in fear.

Nothing to pity here.

The lions have taken over the mouths of the boys

And the girls cling to iron rings piercing bellybuttons and pubic lips

As though such catastrophes were tantamount to Christ.

Not so.

Vanity.

A vanity built on anger;

An anger built on nothing.

Nothing being the only thing left;

The old men, the grandfathers, sitting silently in their urban windows,

Harmonious with the concrete;

The old women having breasts re-shaped

And lips puffed-up like the queens of the bay;

The young women wearing suits

And combing their hair like the men of the 1950's.

And the young men, where have they gone?

BMW's?

Is that all there is?

Leaving their children to learn love from some

noble neighbor

Or from tv's fractured physical cleanness.

Surely if their is no bmw,

Then there must be drink and the needle.

Failed men,

Nothing to do,

No war to fight,

No women to love,

Since they now are beyond love;

The women of the new age,

Each carrying a plastic penis in a briefcase;

Dressed for success;

Filling rooms beneath bankrupt fluorescent light with....

Proactivity.

Hypocrisy is somewhere in all of this.

Always was and always will be.

Hypocrisy is the face of the dream.

And what is the face of the waking?

The face of the waking is the demented Arab

Banging on a door

With a god in his brain

And a bullet carved for the dreamer.

THE CHROMIUM LIE

The chromium lie, the one that glistens,

The one that sells itself to itself:

It is so pretty,

So contrived,

So immaculate a lie that one might wish to eat off it.

The killer lie,

Tumbling down on itself,

Like a skier falling out of the sky,

On his head,

So pleasant and predicated on the turning dime,

The ecclesiastical arbiter of truths.

Momentum is lost.

Lies destroy momentum.

We understand this.

One lie is a manufactory of lies.

Compulsive lying becomes the main game of the politician.

Lying in public.

We don't care if you must chase young girls to give yourself some esteem.

But don't lie about it.

If you have the guts to chase skirts, then at least admit it.

But don't be a liar.

Being a liar is worse than being a shallow man

with a compulsive itch.

Lying is, in fact, the ultimate sign of cowardice.

While cheating on your wife merely indicates

You have no sense of principle

Lying indicates you have no self-respect.

DECAY DOES NOT BELIEVE IN YOU

Decay does not believe in you.

Decay believes only in itself.

It is a kind of worm,

A kind of insistent crab,

A lionized form of indifference,

Capable of waiting,

Unable to think but not needing to think.

Entropy.

It is an instinct with decay,

This kind of knowing.

Time always ends.

Time ends.

Then his time comes,

The time when the energy of the enterprise is broken,

Shackled,

Turned inward.

Then, when everything else is silent,

Weary,

The energy of decay comes screaming out

Like a firestorm.

Certainly, then, the worm has turned.

FASHION BLEEDS THE COLOR BLUE

Fashion bleeds the color blue.

Fashion is a crow living on the blood of the children,

The liver of women,

Eating them turquoise.

Fashion is not some empty metaphor;

Fashion is, instead, a serial killer,

One who murders the world each day

With the doctrine of

Follow the Ones Who Know.

The elite.

The rich and the wonderful.

Fashion is a man creaming in the mouths of thirteen year old girls.

Paris.

Gaiety in grey places.

New York.

Merit in a major stadium of the posture.

Los Angeles.

Home of glitter.

Glitter rock.

Glitter murder.

Everything glitters.

Crows eating the tongues and the words of the blind monks.

Making Tibet a fashion.

Making Buddhism a fad.

Fashion bleeding everything blue.

Wildeyed.

Interrupting grace.

But not for ever.

Fashion creates a world of surface things.

Surfaces begin to mean everything.

Depth is lost.

Only the colors matter, the flat surface of things,

Hue,

Tone.

But the black and the white goes much deeper,

Deeper into the heart,

After the soul and the body divorce.

TROUBLE CONSIDERS ITSELF RED

Trouble considers itself red.

An arbitrary consideration leaves the world whole sometimes.

Sometimes the catalog registers a harsh truth, amid all the fluffy lies.

The list, bold and stuffed with apologies,

And with tricks to separate the man and his money,

The woman and her virtue,

Emits a cold furious deceit.

But then, all at once, there is more,

A gem,

A piece of gold,

A formulation of truth.

Exposed by some contradiction.

Exposing the same;

But creating, in this expose,

A gap,

A kind of door,

Through which the soul can pass

And achieve some kind of rebirth

Before wholly undreamtof.

Capable men begin to dress in red, believing themselves trouble.

They were once capable men.

They carry the catalog, preaching on corners, offering a little red book.

Sometimes the catalog is merely a way to avoid the truth.

Sometimes the catalog is not a catalog at all.

It is a red book, with a red cover, with many rules, none of which are true.

HUMILIATION COMES

Humiliation often comes when one steps out of the shadows.

This is true.

But it is not always the case.

Sometimes one even escapes humiliation

By appearing out of the dark,

Taking on form,

Becoming an entity;

For it is true that, for some,

Glory is a kind of pained existence,

And obscurity is the reward.

So some will avoid the lights as long as they can;

For to be hidden is for them the highest achievement,

Since it accentuates their privacy.

However, often for these,

The ones schooled in privacy,

When they do appear to the world,

The world loves them.

For they have depth,

The thing which others value most highly

Since they are mostly lacking this quality themselves.

And so they come forward to an adoring public

That will not let them return to their privacy.

You probably understand that this is true.

And that is why you devote yourself so

To living in the shadows.

IT HAPPENS ONLY ONCE: THE FIRST LOVE

It happens only once; and then the world

Will no longer let it happen.

It happens only once,

The word, the look, the scent,

The thought, the desire,

The rushing together, the one feeling,

The broken crotch, seeping away into wormwood.

The first love, seeping away into wormwood.

No one talks about it, the rending of the heart,

The scorching of the brain.

If you survive it, then you know.

Many don't.

The highways are strewn with the bodies of those who did not survive it;

The death of the idea of love,

The first wound,

The deep hypnotic ascent and then the fall.

Who makes it so? Who designs this cadenza of feeling,

Designed to change the boy into a man,

The girl into a woman,

The body into a soul?

We know it's there, a passage, a truth hidden behind a door.

We know because we have entered this place, passed,

In our own passion play, through the initiational motif,

Passed out into the world of Cain, into a blue sphere,

Into a major turn in the road, out of one idealism into another.

Prokefiev knows.

Embellished manners and parallel truths come up in the music.

Maturity comes eventually, out of necessity,

Slamming into one as an old skin falls aside

And a less liquid skin begins to shine.

One skin is water, one skin is fire.

One skin is earth. A final skin is air.

Plasmatic air, the plasma that does not exist to modern physics.

The meeting ground of matter and antimatter,

Which is a kind of pure ether,

Without substance but, at the same time,

The substance of substance.

Without thickness, without gravity,

As water moves within water but is said not to be water.

This plasma is the water in which water's moving moves.

A MEMORY OF DANCE

A memory of the dance troubles the body's round archaism,

Now that age has settled in.

Settling in like some mysterious curse.

A memory of the dance frees the mind's alluvial

consternations,

Setting in to operation the picture processing of love:

Love's gait,

Love's furious feelings,

Love's light livery,

Love's convivial conceptions,

Love's long achievements,

Love's arid deceits,

Love's banquets of touch,

happenstance of faces,

bigotry of words,

Love's animalism and love's tokenism,

Love's arbitrary hurts,

Love's ancillary patterns,

Love's full tonics, ripe bodies, innocent first looks;

Love's prayers and love's tears,

Love's music and love's early dance,

when the partner is not yet the same as oneself,

when imagination is fertile, scaled for greatness;

Love's bitter pears and platitudes,

Loves' empty miles and silences,

Love's full-throated terrors,

Love's memory,

Love's dance.

A memory of the dance fills the old woman with

Momentary joy, damning the prison of her body

And the history of disappearing friends.

The old woman dreams of dance and of the dancing ghost;

The ghost dreams of a glass of milk.

GRACE, THE UNRECOVERED APOCALYPSE OF THE SELF

Grace, the unrecovered apocalypse of the self,

Generator of undegenerate rule,

Conqueror of conquest,

Arbiter of judgment,

Will inside the will,

The man inside the tyrant

And the animal inside the selfish king.

Yes, Grace eventually comes to rule,

Comes to live on the outside,

Free from space,

Free from the devastating common law,

Erecting for itself a logic which is clear to the ear,

Easy to see,

A replica of knowledge,

Perhaps the highest, best knowledge,

Clarity itself,

Showing us truly that being a good, a wise, human being

Is better than owning the world,

Better than possessing more nothing than one's neighbor.

It is down into matter that we sink;

But we rise from this also,

Ever better for this clarity,

Able again to see angels,

To talk with the gods,

Able to understand poetry and philosophy.

A land above the waters.

A land above the murky nature;

Living again in the sky.

EXISTENTIAL RIVER ON THE WALL

Existential river on the wall.

A trick of light. Two tricks of light.

An ameliorated being, his head held high,

His nose so sour and prodding,

Investigating the possibilities of the sneeze,

The sniff,

The delinquent messenger of snot

And the abrupt discoloring of cloth.

I know his face, without the snot.

He is a well-kept man.

He labors not for the love of work,

Nor for the glory of the finished task,

The notoriety of excellence.

He labors because he is afraid to not work,

Terrified by emptiness,

The chord of flat confused negative silence.

And so he works like a fiend,

Running from holes,

Manufacturing snot,

Believing he is gaining on that unknown blissful condition

Which is always over there,

Just the other side of death.

THE POOR BASTARDS OF THE MOON

The poor bastards of the moon, with their black hands

Black from mud and blood and the carbon dioxide in their brains.

Poor bastards of the moon, regal in their dreams,

Fixed for the association with demons and the dogs

Who aggregate along their fences in November.

They are poor but they are not without viciousness.

They calculate their own rude natures,

Propose themselves into something wild and closer to God,

For their natural addictions.

Poor bastards.

They are poor less because they have no money

Than they are because they have so much greed for authority.

They have nurtured their anger for so long.

Now they are armed for justice

Which is but another word for vengeance.

THE BLACK FURY IS NEAR

The black fury is near, the wrinkling of light

And the expectation of a great freeze.

Two men aligned for the truce are swept away

by the fire of ideas.

Swept away by the absence of ideas, the heat

Of emotion and anger fueled by mental gnosis.

The fire of nofire,

Sticks rubbed together,

Elucidating shame.

Hat brimming with prejudice.

Hat full of candy, bodied in angst.

I am able to open the door,

To direct the shoe,

To prognosticate shame.

I am able to do this, to do that,

To point the finger of guilt,

To attain great heights in the language of innocence.

I DRESS IN CEREMONIAL GARB

I dress in ceremonial garb.

There is no ceremony.

I merely am dressed in ceremonial garb as a way

To protest that I am not in ceremony.

It is a bit of a paradox.

The dream is a capable aristocracy of values.

The hardest way to find one's hat

Is in a crowd of hatted stooges,

Each looking for a better hat.

Or a different hat at least.

Tired of his own old hat.

Desiring something new, anything but what he already has.

So it is--and so one loses his hat to the crowd.

It is not that the crowd wishes to exist in theft,

To, in fact, become a den of thieves.

The truth is that the crowd despises itself.

And it believes that a new piece of clothing,

Like a new identify,

Might free itself, the true self, from its captivity to the crowd.

That is, its captivity to its patterns.

Time flies, cutting the air which a painful imprecision.

Habit kills, and photographs Time as a prison.

In fact, Time is nothing if not a plastic condition.

One can stretch it; one can re-shape it; one can vanquish it.

Above all, one must celebrate it, by avoiding the killing repetition of patterns.

WHO KNOWS HOW TO SPELL

Who knows how to spell holocaust?

Who knows how to pronounce the grieving victims of the Serbian terror?

The Moslem deceit and hunger for pain?

The blood of revenge and the hypnotic presence of the killer?

The killer is everywhere, drinking white blood, blue blood, red blood, black blood.

Yellow blood.

Angry blood.

Terrible blood.

Energetic blood.

The killer has seventy feet and moves across a sterile land, evoking sterility.

The killer is as much the Muslim who responds as it is the Christian who begins.

The Christian who responds as it is the Muslim who begins.

The killer hides, lurks, equivocates, then strikes.

Sexual energy is the brutal hand, the brutal conquest:

He begins to need this sexual thrill.

And so, instead of death, the act becomes for him life,

Life-engaging,

Life-enriching.

The killer needs most to be recognized for his work.

I do not speak here of the killer in some rage of spark, some spark of rage.

I speak here of the clinical killer, the professional killer, the serial destroyer.

Nothing can make him stop;

There is no emotion greater than his rage.

Because, in his act, he achieves the height of sexual dominance

And also the apex of moral vexity.

He kills, in his mind, the thing that needs most the killing,

Evil,

Drunkenness,

Lewdness,

Prostitution.

Religious infidelity.

He kills the very thing that tortured him into cruelty.

EXCELLENT ENTROPY

Excellent entropy and the founder's water.

Walking achieves returns of the foremost nature.

THE CARNIVAL IS BETTER THAN THE BULLET IN THE BRAIN

They scramble for power.

It is not real power, that which moves the world.

It is the appearance of power, the unclandestine form

of power,

Glass, color, photographs;

Images moving and coloring the world;

Personalities all moving into splendid comprehension.

But they are not true.

Dole moves.

Buchanan follows.

Then the man in the plaid shirt, pretending that he is plaid.

The aluminum siding salesman in the White House.

The gargantuan mouse living somewhere on the plains,

A Texas bread in his hand,

A Texas bone in his condition.

The mortician with only one hand.

A college of imprecisions.

Yes, it is folly.

The angry autocrats rule without folly, without public folly,

Preferring much the clean antagonism of murder

To the foolish fantasy of the vote.

Puppets aplenty.

Puppets amour.

No one knows where the power resides.

Yet there is nothing to change to.

We are foolish and we are trite.

But the opposite natures merely bring hell along a long silence,

Carrying Death in their shadows.

Perhaps it is better to be imperfect.

Perhaps it is better to laugh.

Perhaps it is better that our carnival sings, our carnival whimpers.

The carnival is better than the bullet in the brain.

MR POTATO-HEAD AND THE IDEOLOGUE:

The Nature of the Ruling Class

That's what they say, about life. It can't hurt you. In the long run.

Who says that?

I don't know. Whoever they are. The ones who are able to create something out of nothing. The ones who rule everything. The ruling class. You know.

I don't believe there is a ruling class.

Oh, you're naive.

Who is this ruling class?

The ones who have the money, of course.

Oh, I see. They rule us?

Sure.

How do they do this?

They decide what we will read, what we will eat, what we will think... They own the television stations, the publishing companies, the movie companies.

These are all owned by different people.

Yes, but they all are members of the ruling class.

Even if they think differently?

Yes.

Rich people all don't think alike.

Yes they do.

No--some are conservative, some are liberal. Some believe in helping the poor; others believe that the poor must help themselves.

You don't get it, do you?

You are ideologically hardened. But as long as there is a middle class, then there is the ladder by which the high can go down, can lose their advantage, and the poor can go up, can gain an advantage. The richest man in the world today was a nineteen year old with no money, working in his garage a few years ago.

But now he is part of the ruling class.

If your definition is that the rich are always wrong, always bad, then, yes, you have your point. You must always be poor to be good. However, virtue does not reside with the poor, any more than it does with the rich. Many of the poor are worthless, soulless human beings. The same is true of each station of wealth, high to low. Morality resides in the individual. Class does not figure into this equation.

PLASTIC NATION, THE HORRIBLE CITY

Plastic nation, the horrible city.

Ground into dust, fine white dust, pieces of thought,

Memories of bad associations, crimes against youth,

Felicities against the body.

Carmen Gruel and the popcycle thief.

Hijacking childhood and making faces at the living.

A hand turned. A hand with a ring.

A supple finger.

The woman seems old--she is young to all but me.

The nativity of the bone.

Fresh catalog name and frozen cadillac venture.

All built out of some surgery of thought,

By some doctor inside yourself, Doctor B, as in B-Movie.

Promulgating a fat narrative, one that moves no one immediately,

But, like a cancer, or an emotional laceration,

Takes much time to emerge from unseen tissue.

The fat narrative comes home, dressed in the seance motif,

Carved out of some bleak man's evidentiary temple.

Handed out to those who care about narratives,

Those standing in the rain, reading papers that gently dissolve.

And Carmen Gruel moves a mountain,

Appearing like a raven in a fragment of evening,

A crust in her beak,

A human heart in her bloodied tong.

She gives us our scenarios,

Hollywood madam that she is,

A screenwriter and a screenblighter,

Everybody's maiden

And no man's mental blade.

Holy only in the most vagrant way;

Steeped in the tradition of the punished bride

Seeking vengeance on the marble tale,

Insinuating herself into every man's dream,

Knife-wielding,

Armed with gloria steinen's rural preoccupation with blood,

Menses and nonmenses,

Blood of calves and blood of testes,

Sexually consanguine,

The haired heretic of Minos.

Bitter that Nature gives out laws.

Bitter than butter comes from cows.

Bitter than brains are boiled by butchers.

Bitter that cocks rise up and crow.

Bitter against a father's rejecting word, scorn, betrayal,

Whether it be real or not,

Whether it be only a father's pushing away of his daughter

Lest incest result.

Why does a man push away his daughter? To let her live.

Why does a son push away his mother? To let himself live.

Because one doesn't like imperfection does not mean that imperfection will lose.

Carmen Gruel kills, and mentally triumphs,

For the sake of the perfect nature,

Which exists only in her mind.

Nature is not perfect.

Nature is only tireless.

Yes, Nature is without tires.

Nature walks, but does not ride.

THE SAMOVAR BOILS

The samovar boils; and it is believed that the samovar has logic.

It is a truth, somehow, a spoken truth --

But I don't know about its logic.

The truth being in the nature of fire,

With which it is connected, this samovar.

Elements touching, fire and iron, metal, aluminum...

All the elements related to fire.

All the elements coming out of the soil, when the night

Falls and the fire illumines itself.

Night is the time to see all the things

That are hidden until the fire comes.

Illuminating posture.

Illuminating might.

Illuminating demons, carved into trees, coming out of smoke,

Dancing on leaves, parroting the sound of wild dogs.

Illuminating night.

Making everything real somehow.

The fire in the sky peering out over the god's condominium.

Ecclesiastical nonsense coming in here, here where we sleep,

Where we make bread,

Where we write poetry,

Where we consult our own gods.

Not the gods of fire, the gods of the elements.

But the gods inside our own memories, our own psychological motives.

Our memories, couched in the darkest parts of our natures;

Not memories of our own immediate lives; but memories

Of something ancestral,

Back when we were no longer men, but even more so, no longer angels.

Back when we were angels and men both hidden inside the animal frame,

The one with the erection and the mating urge, looking for a hole to fill;

Before we broke down again, once more,

Into plants and vegetables and conifers.

Meager entity.

School for nothing but bones and veins and becoming minerals and rocks.

Fragmented surgeries; fragmented nurturings.

Episcopal vocation and the like.

Harboring none of the ambitions of the potent gods;

But, being trapped in the rocks, being eager for escape.

The crystalline is good, and beautiful;

But the slavery to gravity is a fury to be withstood,

To be transformed,

If one has will and judgment.

Breaking back up again, back up into light,

Seeking motion.

The sun transforming the plain.

The moon passing now, a judgment passing into obscurity.

Plants beginning to walk in the sunlight.

Seeking extension.

The ravaging nature of the wind coming to comb the hair

Of the small fellows on the land.

Plants will come; and then animals.

And then men eventually,

Who will begin to climb the stairs again,

Out of the body,

Back into the planets.

Each soul comes from its own star.

It is, in fact a piece of its star, which is a kind of projector.

We wander down into our own light, our own movie.

We are trapped as we become denser and denser,

Moving further away from our source of light.

But the movie is the same for all, back at the source.

It is only in this very distant land, very far from our magic lantern,

That confusion reigns and multiplicity is the law.

When we are taken back again to our star, the parent star,

All is revealed.

And we are again home.

Yes, it was all a wonderful dream.

NOW I LIVE HERE IN THE TROPICS

The whole scene is broken.

The men in the choir are gone.

The children playing in the valley, near the skating rink,

Building snowmen with noses of carrots--gone.

The pretty women with their muffs have vanished.

All the good things are gone.

Winter has stolen them.

I do not feel things deeply any longer.

Something has happened to me.

Now I live here in the tropics.

The deadly nature seems far away.

And, again, so very near.

LIVING IN THE MODERN WORLD

Living in the modern world.

Ecstasy is only a moment away.

Ecstasy is what we seek, what we chase.

But it is all rather shapeless.

We feel it for a moment, for a second--but then it goes.

Ecstasy is like a perfect date, the one we think of,

fantasize about,

The love that makes the world turn blue and quiet.

It can happen here, down here where the life begins;

In fact, it does happen where the life begins;

But here, where the life has lived too long,

It is just a stony memory,

Something that either came long ago

Or has not yet come

And may be, in fact, myth.

FAME IS LOST

Fame is lost.

Fame is the implicit hope inside the barrel,

Down in the place where the water stands.

The apples having rotted and becoming nothing but

bad sugar.

That's where fame is,

At the bottom of that same barrel.

THE SAVAGE COMES IN

The savage comes in, knowing full well that all the others

have lost heart.

The savage takes advantage of the loss of will by the average man.

The helplessness of the middle class, in the face of evil,

Makes it too easy for the savage to turn loose the hurricane.

He can kill without authority; but also without resistance.

The good people all fade away, like wax under a hot beam.

The hounds of hell are loosed, those with bad souls, angry natures,

Who set the world on fire, killing as many as they can, raping, looting.

The devils.

It is clear that devils exist.

Once one has seen the work, the face, one cannot doubt it.

The savage comes in. Sometimes the savage is wise and poetic.

Sometimes he has the judgment of a king or a great judge.

More often, however, he is nothing more than a swilling brute

Who arranges the world according to his own wish.

As Mao used to enjoy thirteen-year-old boys and girls after dinner,

Using them sexually for his own pleasure,

Telling them that they were doing it for the revolution.

He was little more than a savage.

He killed for his own pleasure.

The intellectuals may love Mao;

But he is little more than a savage.

HARBORS ARE BUILT

Harbors are built. The pennies are tossed into the pond.

Wishes are made; dreams are conceived.

A tableland of troubles.

Constructing the fabulous conditions of trust.

To make you believe in the impossibility of matter.

But you know better.

You know you can deal.

And the cities begin to rise, block by block, square by square.

It is all a matter of choice.

And you make the choices.

And the cities begin to fill with people.

There is water nearby, to move goods.

Or a railroad.

And roads leading in and out of the city.

Circulation is like the blood stream of the body.

Vitality moves in and out as transportation systems abound.

And you are the builder, the one who raises these cities out of nothing.

You move with an energy that makes your adversaries fear you.

But you know that all things have cycles.

And the time will come when your detractors will gain power over you,

When some indiscretion will bring you down;

And those who are incapable of building, but who talk as though they are great,

Because they are enamored of criticism,

Will preside over the degeneration of the cities,

Into dark spots of trouble,

Murder,

Infestation of drugs,

Rats,

Corpusculent breeders of disease.

They are the lovers of darkness, the lovers of night.

They do not come.

They are here from the very beginning.

They are the first to come and the last to leave.

Because they are Death itself.

Death comes first and never leaves.

He is the last one to shut out the light

Before closing the door.

And taking the world on a track to beyond.

CLAIRVOYANT TROUBLE

IN THE MAIN BRAIN

Clairvoyant trouble in the main brain.

Conditions of love bring about the man's lonely memory.

Loss of something. Many years lost.

Many years passing into nothing.

Except for lost time.

Exculpable ardor, driven in to dirt by the love angel.

In the manner of Michael in his grim passage into history.

Explaining nothing, nothing by moving, nothing by carrying the ank

and Mercury's red groove.

A tempest in a tiny patina.

Uncovered by the unsteady hand of the painter, Leonardo,

Who rules, iron hand in iron glove.

A part of everything that glows.

Plastic machete.

Razing plastic flowers in the tiny impresario of the grove.

Dictating tiny remonstrances.

As the night grows heavy with a deep blue sheen, imitating bad humor,

A moon about to gargoyle.

Prick in hand, manipulating hairs, the friar emerges from his prayer,

Covered with the milk of maidens, deep in the bruited base of the sacristy.

The sacristy of his thought.

The night coiled about his brain

Like the heavy snake of disorder stevedored in Eden's grainy memory of trees.

Callisto knows no name to ease the painting.

Believing colors are akin to the planetary order.

Bach tapping the endocrine bells;

The plains all bustling with tales to tell,

Rondos and structures that shadow the true shadow

of something.

Bach isn't sure.

The true shadow of the true shadow,

Turning on a gyre of numerals and incentives to proportion.

There are others too.

Building monuments to the Unknown's barely known breath.

Arguing that love is possible: here in this arcane grief.

As the building turns itself around, showing its backside to the public.

The 1960's.

Showing its backside to the public.

Indian red harmony and the shovel to bury the image of propriety.

Proprietary flaws.

Dabbling in the art of rebellion.

The Horus of revolution.

Hours of the dark, dismal fury,

The night taking on wings and seeking itself in itself

But finding only its approximate metaphor.

Not even its real metaphor, the image in the mirror.

Bach truly conceived.

Beethoven's grim appointment with the demon.

Devil of hearing. Devil of a man.

Without con...con...consubstantiation.

An orphan of the lord.

Glory be to the father and the son and the holy host.

Grace pricked in the eye.

Unsurly prick in the hand of the satisfied rector.

Counting hairs with one hand; saying the rosary too.

Hoping all is forgiven.

The dark age; and the middle centuries being a place of living

For this man of the cloth.

Wiping the evidence away.

He has forgotten all about Bach, in that moment of celisium.

Thinking only of the girl he saw down on the road outside of Love, Kentucky,

Selling flowers in a blue cotton dress.

As fresh as spring herself.

An apple in her eye.

A berry in her lip.

A breast to take the dark away.

Saying: "Hello, miss. A precious day it is."

Her white skin with a morning down soft and white, dewly awakened;

And manifisting pure beauty.

He had things on his mind.

Love of God, yes.

But something primary.

The fist of love, yes.

He was a sinner surely.

He couldn't wait.

Into the trees behind the girl. Looking out.

Having clairvoyant trouble in the main brain.

Surely.

Splashing seed upon the main tree.

The milky way down here.

Closing his eyes; uttering no sound.

The blue dress and the soft down never leaving.

Friar tucked. And friar tuckered.

The friar suckered by a long thought and an act of annihilation.

The girl untouched, selling flowers on the road, still in sight, Eden's wonder.

Friar undone.

Bach gone.

Biblically unchained.

Give him a cross.

Give him a fixed latitude.

Make him wander for ever dusty roads that lead to Athens, Georgia.

Looking for Bach in the grasses and the high seeds.

Looking for Bach in the high grasses and the low seeds.

Seedy being his own nature.

Seedy being his own premise and picture

Of the archetype.

But love is a hard habit to break. Especially here in the rectory.

The night grows heavy with a deep blue sheen.

The friar remembers the light blue frock, the manipulated cock.

He is not too old or holy to be stirred for one more go.

It is after midnight.

Iron hand in an iron glove.

That is him.

He sends out sparks.

Love can never hide in this darkness.

Love can never be framed until it sparkles.

BLESSED FRAGMENT OF THOUGHT

Blessed fragment of thought.

The fragment that pleases, the insight which returns

One to the place of the molecule,

Near hydrogen's hurried beginnings.

We, too, are this hydrogen atom.

That is us; that is our beginning.

It is our story, our one story, of beginning in one and breaking into more than one.

The one becoming heavier and building light into denser things.

Material foundations upon which to stand, upon which to rotate;

In which to plant oneself, in which to walk in and fly over,

And over which to pontificate and finally plead for salvation.

Is it knowledge which saves; or does salvation itself save?

There is a kind of knowledge, which we might call vision instead,

Which saves us from the chaos of the mind.

There is no doubting this.

The vision of the Earth generating cells to do her work,

Cells which she calls men, among other things.

To do her bidding. To create; to destroy.

This vision offers one peace; for one begins to see that

The larger intelligences include in themselves the lesser ones.

And that we, generally speaking, are among the lesser ones.

There are a series of rings, awarenesses.

You climb through one heaven to get to the next.

PRACTICAL MAGIC

Practical magic. Unleavened bread.

I watch the children all follow the ice-cream truck,

As we used to follow the truck that sprayed a fog

Of mosquito-repellent all around the town:

A ddt extravaganza for the kids of Sinclair.

I drank in the fog, moving in and out of the strong

White cloud on my bicycle. Gliding in with

Other children, weaving in and out of perfume.

Night after night.

Why, even now, a mosquito won't drink from my blood.

Practical magic. Practical magic.

The unleavened bread is myself afterall.

Only no on wants to tell me this.

PERHAPS THE SINKING DARKNESS

OF GREECE

The language changes and the men collect themselves,

Believing something has changed or is about to change.

We hear that they will be lost, broken.

But then something changes.

They are instead made whole; and then we understand

That they have been broken before, only part-men,

Whole men perhaps, but only part human;

And now they appear before us as whole humans,

Men and women fixed together, like the first races,

Back in the deep night, when the ancestors and the living were

Locked together in an eerie communication in the dark.

We weep when we see this;

Because we know that the darkness is surely returning.

Rome was a great empire.

It broke apart, a grainy giant, giving birth to the nations of Europe.

Is America today not also the Roman Empire?

And will America not also be, after the dark age,

The great new city-states of Europe?

And the old Europe being what?

Perhaps Greece. Perhaps the sinking darkness of Greece.

HE COMES IN OUT OF THE RAIN

He comes in out of the rain,

Just in time to be told by the man

In an iron blue jumpsuit that

The paradigm has changed

Now the fear is not global warming

But the coming again

Of the ice age.

Just when he had gotten used to the one scenario of mass death;

Now he has to accept another.

On the horizon is the man in white shorts which remind him of tennis gear.

He warns of the coming mass poisoning through biological material,

Brought into the country by Arabs calling themselves righteous religious zealots.

Yes, this death scenario is hairy.

But none of these are too precise.

Still, he does not like the third story.

He finds this one especially troubling --

When he sees his skin puff into a blue ball,

Sees the blood in his veins begin to boil and spill out of arteries,

Filling up his body with a red dye death;

Sees his eyes swell and his face grow fat and harsh,

Carbuncles all aglow.

No breath.

No touch.

Lying in a dirty bed.

No doctors.

No food.

No nothing, waiting for death.

Yes, it is enough to hate the Arabs for this.

The Arabs are easy to hate.

They are cowards who strike out only at children and women,

Never confronting their enemies face to face

Unless they have the bully's advantage.

That is the stereotype.

And all stereotypes are false, oversimplifications.

Are all Jews greedy?

Are all blacks lazy?

Are all whites violent?

Are all Chinese corrupt?

Oversimplifications.

But sometimes the crowd needs precisely that,

A simplified reality,

Especially when the alternative, the true picture,

Has become so confused, so convoluted with unclear associations.

Simplification is the ability to ignore the real complicated world

Which steals away one's passion and ability to act.

Simplify things; make it clear who your enemy is;

And the ennui in which you have been dissolving becomes, instead,

A nectar of polarized activity,

Bringing you back to life,

Back to power,

If only for the killing fields.

There is a solar cycle, where the soul,

The unification of varieties, rules:

Internationalism.

And there is a racial cycle, a lunar cycle,

Where nationalism comes in, pitting color against color,

Block against block,

Family against family.

A unification of the small against the large.

Each race, each nation, fighting for dominion of the earth.

The day is the psalm of the soul; the night is the tragedy of the terrarian.

DOGMA

Dogma.

One dogma replaces another.

Because freedom can be so...terrifying.

Yes, a dogma helps.

Once it was communism,

Then socialism,

Then what.....

Religion?

Formalism?

Something to protect the present.

The three steps of Vishnu.

One step being Vishnu herself, the preserver.

Brahma builds; Vishnu protects; Siva destroys.

The Father builds; the Son protects; the Holy Ghost destroys.

Vishnu is the eastern god who is the three persons in one.

One dogma replaces another.

Is not this freedom of yours also a dogma?

HARD FIST, CARRIED BY MEN OF MARS

Hard fist, carried by men of Mars, men of topics,

Down the village streets to the church where Father O'Grady

Passes the hat for a case of the best.

Hard fists pass the village into the cold trance of November.

Men all coiled and troubled by sin, by lost virtue,

By lost precision of morality.

Their daughters threatened, their wives unwound:

They are ready to kill, in the name of both God and country.

And the priest knows how to raise the fire on their passions.

He does it with drink first, communion, the fair shake,

The element of friendship; then the spirit of God.

Mores pass into something harder, like the hard fist.

Too much freedom has brought the community to the edge of the abyss.

It is time to knuckle down.

It is time to learn by the hard fist.

Before the town is wiped away by the huns.

MARSHALL YOUR FORCES

Marshall your forces, the ones who are hidden

In the place where you stand,

Who are voices inside your voice,

Ancestors who all have something to say

About how you live your life,

About how you believe in nothing.

They believe in everything;

And they know that their own liberation depends,

Not on your goodness only, but on your ability

To perceive the final, fixed truth,

The one about propagation.

LOVE'S LAST ARROW FALLS

Love's fast arrow falls when the boy needs to breathe.

When the boy needs direction most.

When he needs to escape himself.

Then the arrow falls; and the object of desire is given him.

And if he has fortune, the object of his desire is good and has a heart.

If so, she will treat him with respect, with delicacy.

If not, then she will torture him, steal from him,

Seek to ruin him, all with a pleasing smile.

His angel chooses, in fact; chooses the object of desire;

So, if the angel has a trained eye,

The experience will be plentiful.

Even though it is sure to cause the boy pain.

If he has a bad angel, on the other hand,

Then he will be given up to the manifestations of crime.

NOTHING ENDURES

Nothing endures.

You say this not really believing it.

Because it is also true to say that everything endures.

That is the hard part: the paradox.

The paradox is true.

The opposites are both true;

And we look to scale to answer this discussion.

YOU ARE LIKE A GERMAN POET

You are like a German poet,

One who blends philosophy with his verse,

A kind of Nietzsche without the bitterness.

You do not hate as much as he did.

You have learned that the world is imperfect --

And this is ok.

The world does not need to be perfect.

Cannot, in fact, be perfect.

The world is Time, and Time, by definition changes.

Change implies imperfection.

You are like a German poet. But no one knows it.

You are like Goethe.

You understand the doctrine of ever becoming.

But no one knows this.

You are hidden from the view of most men.

They see nothing when they look at you.

They understand that you are different.

But they do not recognize your nature.

You are like a German poet.

But no one understands what that really means.

Good for the world they do not.

MR POTATO-HEAD: What About Perjury Then?

Have your learned anything yet, after all this thrashing about, pretending to be educated, or poetical, or whatever it is you do?

I am not sure what it is I do.

Is that progress then?

Is what progress then?

The knowledge that you don't know.

I fear it is the opposite of progress.

Why do you say this?

Progress is a moving forward. Uncertainty is mostly a lack of motion. Progress is the diameter of a circle. Uncertainty, I fear, is the circle itself, a kind of container in which the uncertain one resides. There is a period of building a mental sphere, a place to live, containing ideas and beliefs. But there is a period of building which does not last forever. It is the diameter; and the soul races from one point on the circumference, call it the beginning of time, across that straight line in Time, taking the shortcut across space. And when one reaches the other end of the diameter, one essentially kills Time. And one must live for an eternity in the circle, the mental mile, one has built, during his privileged time of building.

He builds a house, out of mental matter; and then he is forced to live in that house.

Yes, until the Light comes back again.

And what Light are we discussing.

The Diameter of the Circle.

The Diameter is a Light?

Yes. The Diameter is Light itself; the day; Time.

What you say is that the division of the self and the anti-self is tantamount to the creation of life. The particle of life is divided from the particle of anti-life. Time and Space are divided. And the anti-particle remains on the outer rim of the circle, the circumference. And the particle races across the straight line, which is, an abstract sense, the diameter. And when it reaches the other end of the line, it meets its death, the anti-particle. Space absorbs Time. Death absorbs Life. But you once spoke of this as a figure 8. Now you speak of it as a circle.

It is a paradox. As science speaks of matter as being a particle and a wave; spirit, too, is a particle and a wave. Time-Space is a particle and a wave, that is, a circle and a moving circle, a figure eight.

So, what is worse: murder or perjury?

Why do you ask such a question?

I was riding on a train this week; and a man said: "One would think he had killed a man; all he did was lie a bit. Yes, it was under oath. But he did not murder anyone." And I thought: Yes, he did not kill anyone.

And this made you feel better?

Yes.

Why?

Because....I am a liberal man. I try to be a liberal man. But....because I had been feeling that the perjury issue...well, it was troubling.

Perjury is a greater crime than murder.

What?

Perjury is a greater crime than murder.

How can you say such a thing? A murder ends a life. There can be no higher crime than murder.

Perjury takes many lives. Perjury murders Justice, which is a good higher than any single man, even many men. Perjury is the death-blow to a judicial system. And without a judicial system, no matter how imperfect it may be in fact, humanity must revert to the primitive justice of a murder for a murder, a second blow for any first blow delivered. Which blows become a war surely, as they escalate and multiply over time.

Honesty under oath is an absolute. Lying shows a weak character, a lack of courage, a man without principles. That is bad enough. But lying under oath is a desecration of civilization; it shows evidence of a man who is not only weak, cowardly, and without principles, but one who cares nothing for the common good, who puts himself above everything, who is totally without a soul. He will take the path always which is in his interest. No universal truth will stand in his way. He believes in nothing but his own selfish gain.

Law is the basis of civilization. And without a sacred oath there is no law. In fact, truth under oath will defeat murder, through Justice. But perjury is the final rotting of the fruit of justice. There is no greater crime than perjury. Perjury destroys all law, for it laughs at the rules by which we avoid falling into chaos. After perjury comes murder; then war; then a retreat to the jungle. Lying can be tolerated, understood, since we are all human. But perjury can never be tolerated. For, once perjury is accepted as a mere function of human weakness, then there is no society. Then there is no sacred trust greater than one's own self interest.

Perjury is the greatest of all evils.

But surely there is a grey area here. All perjuries are not equal.

All perjuries are equal.

Surely the man who lies about killing 100 children and the man who lies about an infidelity is not equal.

The crimes are not equal. Killing 100 children is not equal with a mere infidelity. But perjury. lying under oath about any crime, is exactly equal.

Ok. One man lies under oath to protect a killer in the mafia; a woman lies under oath to protect her son who stole money to give to his wife and children so they could pay the rent.

Nothing changes. The same is true. The perjury is equal. The crimes, themselves, are clearly different, the scale and gravity is of a different order. But perjury is perjury. The laws don't work unless each individual respects the oath. Justice must come from an understanding of the nature of the underlying crime. The woman must tell the truth under oath; and her son must be treated with leniency since his intent was to provide for his wife and child. Under no circumstances, however, is the destructive power of perjury to be minimized.

THE ORCHESTRA IS TOP-HEAVY

The orchestra is top-heavy. Everyone knows this.

The orchestra has too many conductors; no one is willing to follow.

The beat is lost.

The tempo is absorbed by the audience

As they hurry out the front doors.

No one will buy a ticket.

People lose their sense of smell.

Finally, all the musicians leave;

They are forced to get a real job.

This is called the destruction of the union.

There is a great sense of loss, because all the great talents have gone away,

Looking for the next kingdom.

The weak always follow the money.

Those with no soul.

Following the easy life, like maggots for the crumb.

The beautiful people, enfeebled by cosmetics, condemned by a lack of attachment:

They belong no where;

They are like dust carried in the wind, belonging to no one,

Belonging to the wind.

But to belong to the wind

Is to belong only to the destiny

Of force

When it sneezes.

MR POTATO-HEAD: Beginning to Distrust Words

Words. Incomplete thoughts. We know nothing. We are lost. We ramble, we truncate, we dissemble, believing knowledge lies hidden in this intricacy of language, and in the gaps between sounds. But it is a smokescreen really. We know nothing. We pretend to know something, often believing that we do. But the energy of life exists beyond language; and the structure we place on energy tells us much about the structure but often very little about the energy itself.

Your words are incomplete, friend.

As they must be.

Your words are hollow, then.

Undeniably.

Your words are the conditions of your own enslavement to something, to sound perhaps, to the absence of thought, to the congealing of harmonies at best, to the black feeling of loss at worst.

And what of your words?

What?

What of your words?

My words are designed to offer...

Critical mass?

Perhaps.

Brittle fashion a leg to stand on?

Even rarer than I expected--a truth built on nothing but truth itself.

Truth is rarer, in fact, than almost anything else one can imagine.

Imagining truth is even rarer than believing truth.

You know it's so. Because you have imagined it.

Ruthless condition of knowing too much that is possibly true; and knowing, potentially, how little truth is understood.

You understand something at least.

How little is understood.

That is something.

But if so little is understood, then how can man place a man on the moon?

Much is understood in terms of practical mechanics. There is no denying this. But little is understood in terms of what is found after practical mechanics suddenly dies of a heart attack. And then the world is left without her man.

Undeniably, without understanding.

WALKING ON NOTHING

Out on a knock about the park, taking it all in,

A horny man in a horny face,

Fractured by the love lump,

Humping himself in his brain,

Frying young fish,

Keeling the rapturous consanguine myth,

The young girls in love puppy bikinis,

Breasts beginning to ooze,

Butts futuristic with accentuation;

And the horny man all noxious and pumped up on love.

Walking in the sand. Sitting in the sand,

Watching the forest of desires rise in his body like tears.

He is a lonely man, a man untethered to any other

Human being, a man to whom freedom

Is just a word used to make him feel a little better.

Walking on nothing. And running out of time.

MR POTATO-HEAD: Looking For the Door

You get what you get. Why cry about it? What makes you believe you deserve more?

That is not what this is about.

What is it about then?

This is about justice.

I see. Justice for you? In the eyes of history, I mean?

Yes.

And you believe history cares about you?

Yes. It must. I must make it care. Not just about me, but about every living soul.

That is where God comes in, friend.

What?

You say you are not religious. You demand that man recognize your existence. But that is where God comes in. If there is any power or being that will recognize every living soul, then that will be God surely, not man, not History, whatever History is -- Time run amok.

I do not accept that.

I know. And that is why you are locked in this little room, unable to find the door into the next world. You hate the world you are in; you truly need to escape it. Your bitterness grows. Your sense of betrayal, rejection. You hate the world because it does not accept you. But it is not this world's duty to recognize and accept you. It is your duty, to yourself, to find the door to a larger world, one that will absorb your anger and bitterness. God is the only way through that next door, friend. You resist. But your brain gets smaller and smaller. Ultimately it will burn out, unless it finds some kind of expansion.

How do you know so much?

I am you, friend. We are all the same. I was standing where you stand some time ago, until I died and passed through the open door.

MJCwriting.htm