DEATH IN JUNE

Dirge Written Upon The Theft Of A Democracy

By Michael J. Clark

House 35a

Alley 31/46

Xuan Dieu Road

HoTay District

Hanoi, Vietnam

mclark7@mindspring.com

home telephone

84 4 221 92210

DEATH IN JUNE

DANGER IN THE FORECAST

I.

There is danger in the forecast.

People are expecting rain;

And, suddenly, rain comes.

It cannot be that everyone is a prophet today.

There must be some other explanation.

I listen for it, this explanation.

It must have something to do with the wind,

Or with disembodied players singing love songs to their living loves,

Their moving partners, hurrying away from the singers,

Away in fear from the ghosts inhabiting their archipelagoes.

I hear shouting in the trees, anger,

Lovers abandoned who are now shouting threats,

Implementing curses,

Forsaking beauties and dealing scathingly with broken dreams.

We must walk carefully now, in the city,

Since bodies fall regularly out of bank windows

And off of stock market roofs.

A dime falling 300 stories hitting a man on the head

Can split that head like a ripe melon –

Think when a 300-pound man who has lost his life-savings

Can do to a weakened soul slinking in a dark street of a night-town,

Head uncovered, partly exposed,

Cranium painted with an invisible eye of the bull.

II,

There is danger in the forecast.

A storm is coming.

People are massing at the city gates demanding to be let out.

But there is no where to go.

Out in the countryside people starve and go mad.

But there are threats being made to open the gates.

A revolution is being promised, unless the gates are opened immediately.

Thunder means nothing today.

Thunder and the crying of birds.

Old women have all but stopped talking.

I see dried blood on the streets each day, each morning,

As I climb up the sidewalk toward the Mountain of Dreams,

Which is now all but deserted.

Snakes refuse to come in to town now.

Young girls promise not to marry.

And all the priests of the town are hiding in the tower,

Afraid that the authorities mean to blame them for the sad, sad demise

Of the spirit of the town.

III.

Danger is in the forecast.

More rain is certain.

Something is contracting.

Something in everyone’s skin, everyone’s gut.

Money is gone, vanished, like dried rice powder,

Blown away like nothing.

Those without families are nothing.

Those with families are something;

But acts of violence in the houses among family members

Are reported every night.

I hear sirens, wolf-sirens, blowing every night.

There is danger in the forecast.

It is like a bad dream.

I try to awaken but the sirens suffocate my designs.

June 1, 2008

HE IS LOST – AND HE IS LOSING ALTITUDE

He is lost.

He has been dealt a deadly blow.

Someone has killed him.

The bore Castration has gored him under his right rib-cage.

He has died from too much exposure.

Time is lost.

Flight buckles.

The deception is not enough to make him bold again.

The bubble bursts.

Air goes out.

Sparks fly; but sparks fly all in the wrong directions.

Herr Greenspan listens.

He listens.

And then he resigns.

Where are the angels now?

Why are the angels not looking for me,

Saying hello again to me, to the man of their dreams?

Why is the world turning black again,

Blue with intrigue,

Sad, lonely, incapable of touch, incapable of honor,

Devoid of integrity?

Someone asks where Noah’s telephone number can be found.

Something falls.

Many people ask about it.

Many people have heard the sounds of the breaking glass,

The inconsistency, the frozen sequence.: crystal knocked.

A tributary is forced.

What is the sequence of death and rebirth?

What is the fantastic excruciation we remember, Osiris?

***** ***** ****** ***** *****

Now, today, retirement completed, I am nothing again.

I am entering the land of nothingness,

Without a home, without a place to exist.

I must rejuvenate myself,

And become the force of nature I have claimed to be,

The ‘late-bloomer’ I have been pretending to be for so long.

The secret lies in self-generation.

This much I know.

How much of this is possible?

How much strength can I regain in here,

In this place of quiet exile,
Searching for my God,

Searching for the light of my soul.

How can I gain a sense of a positive Future again?

How can I regain my strength except through prayer?

How can I pass through this darkness and rise again, toward my beliefs?

Down-sizing has begun.

Emptying-out is now the law.

The Full Moon starts getting small once again.

3 June 2008

WHERE ARE THE RUDIMENTS?

I.

Where are the rudiments?

We know that the Apocalypse –

Wherein all parts collapse –

Is inching closer, in the guise of Red Men Units,

Penetrating the land of the Sun Kings.

This will be a tragedy,

When the Forces of Darkness collapse –

Killing hopes as they fall –

Upon the beautiful people.

There will be tragedy in this.

The gap between here and there,

Between modernity and eternity, must be filled,

As opposites ineluctably crash in to one another.

Death is furious.

Death is angry at the superficial ritual of greed and gain –

The bankers’ creed of false friendship greeting --

And Death seeks to exact the great price,

Turning loose upon the earth

All the troubled cadavers who take pleasure

In a failing drama

And in crucifying man.

We are not able to oppose this Evil, this Force;

The falling Darkness swallows up all light

And the furious cadences inside the Darkness

Begin to emancipate the horde element

from its captivating guardians:

Assuring the monster energy of despair –

Dead spears carried by midgets –

Will become armed again

With the fury of a Primordial Force.

II.

Where are the rudiments?

The rudiments begin in mud.

The rudiments collect hair and blood and excrement –

Eggs grow men, we remember from mythology –

And channel this detritus in to a formal function

Of solitary construction;

Tantamount to a tamed demented tool, Tantalus,

A paltry god prefiguring hypnosis as a frequency inside of which

Creative affixation can be begun.

Blood and crud and pieces of bladder;

Bone, sinew, laughter, horrible egoisms, tortures, cavernisms,

Crammed in to some arbitrary design,

The cells, themselves, of this condensed matter,

Having freedom to build according to old blueprints fixed in memory,

And to innovate, within certain limits,

In their version of the construction of the perfect beast.

Is this what is meant by hell, then?

Death in June.

A heavy footfall.

A shot in the dark.

Someone falls, wounded by change.

Death in June.

What comes next?

Where are the rude demons then?

Those who congregate on the edge of town?

Contraction has begun.

The God of Contraction stands above life

Shaking a fist and inaugurating mortality.

A contract has been revoked.

A coven’s aunt stands on a hill and shrieks shrike-like

About revenge about to be exacted.

Eighteen years of remission

Following eighteen years of contrition.

You must come to understand that you, yourself,

Are the Principle of Eternity, the preacher said.

That inside your own self

Runs the course of grave demise and inflated current manifest destiny.

If you do not grasp this thoroughly,

Then prepare to extinguish your light.

Game is done.

6 May 2008

ENRICHING THE PANDOMONIUM

Enriching the pandemonium.

I hear you climb the stairs.

There is a vacant presence in the air;

And your climbing the stairs only makes this more apparent.

Dreams evolve.

That is an unexpected revelation,

One unsupported by experts in the field.

* * * *

Ambassadors of the equinoxes arrive.

They appear to be the deliverers of the world;

And, at least in one sense, they are.

They bring balance back to the world.

But what does this mean, balance?

The White Giants have fallen

And the Black Giants have not yet come.

But something has changed;

And the new-found reason (stipulation as some re-formation)

Will not necessarily enrich the pandemonium.

Remember: things transform into their opposites.

This is the law.

The White Giant becomes the Black Giant.

The Black Giant becomes the White Giant.

It is not clear if guilt, alone, causes this.

But guilt does play a role.

Karma plays a role.

The White Giant becomes the Black Giant through Sin,

Through the blackening of the Soul;

The Black Giant becomes the White Giant through the Fiery Holocaust,

Through the Fire turning the blackened matter white as ash.

The nature of Matter and Antimatter also play a role.

But the nature of these two forms of Matter

Are driven by internal changes that occur because of an external factor:

Saturn’s cutting off of Time

And castigating the Sun Hero with wound and condemnation –

This starts the castrating act of the White Giant –

And the falling of the world in to a deep hole

And into spiritual despair.

The White Giant manufactures summer,

Wealth and all the other forms of life-pleasure.

For which the Sun is responsible and notorious.

The White Giant is soulless.

The White Giant commits crimes because he understands Will only,

The rites of Force,

And the Power inherent in an individual

Always getting what he wants.

The Black Giant has a very large soul and

Suffers unimaginable pain at the hands of the White Giant.

Of course, the White Giant and the Black Giant are the same principle separated in time,

And by the elemental water.

The White Giant expresses monumental self-love,

Which translates as self-hatred of his black side.

The Black Giant has a similar experience.

Self-love (the victimized principle) leads to the self-hate

Of the White God within.

As time unfolds, the Black Giant becomes less black

And the White Giant becomes less white.

They meet in the middle when they are ‘balanced’,

To use an over-used phrase.

Then the White Giant continues to darken as the Romantic Man appears

Leading humanity back toward an embracing of the Mother, the Black Queen,

Nature.

The White Giant becomes the Black Giant in time;
And the Black Giant continues to lighten and becomes the White Giant in time,

Becoming Renaissance Man at the balance however, at the Dawn,

Leadiing humanity back away from the Mother, away from Nature,

Back toward an embracing of Man, Civilization, Law, Empire and the City.

Matter.

Spirit-Matter.

White Man’s rule is a triumph of Practical Religion.

Pragmatism, of course, is a ‘skin of clothes’ designed by Satan

To make Man believe that the worship of money is, in fact,

An act of religion.

The world is a giant paint mixer.

Hell is eternal; Heaven is eternal.

But the elements composing each

Are in constant change and recirculation.

In goes Flux; out goes Re-Flux.

The Black Giant moves against Time, from 10 to 8 to 6 to 4 to 2 to 0.

The White Giant moves with Time, from 1 to 3 to 5 to 7 to 9.

Thus, each enriches the Pandemonium.

The Pandemonium is completed by each,

Even as these are both created by the Pandemonium,

After the Pandemonium awakens from its sleep.

The Pandemonium, of course, is the paint-mixer itself.

Sleep comes first; then Evolution and Activity;

Then Sleep returns.

That is the law.

Sleep governs the evolution of anti-matter, the dream;

Daylight governs the evolution of matter.

Get ready to relax.

Think of falling in love.

The Night is designed for falling in love.

5 June 2008

THE RICH ARE CURSED TO BE POOR

The rich are cursed to be poor –

There is no other way I can see this.

The rich are cursed.

The history of theft and greed trumps all, for a term or two.

No denial of this truth is allowed.

Greed is a disease that rots all the better natures --

Rots the fibers of a man’s soul --

And leads him down in to the dark, cold place

Below the ground, below the earth:

That place where the shadows gloam and retard thought

And cannot swim.

Alan Greenspan is a lost thought.

Greenspan is a lost man in a lost continent in a lost invective.

Nothing much good coming out of this,

Except the try-athletic quest for a man capable of achieving

The ability to disappear when the winds begin to blow

Hard enough.

Hank Paulson? Did he save Goldman-Sachs?

Ben Bernanke? Will he prove to be as great an enemy to America

As Alan Greenspan has been?

The white Protestant mafia on Wall Street

Is falling on its head, like an over-ripe plum in Eden.

The last grasp at survival is to let the investment bankers

Raid the American Treasury

One last, epic time.

Hank Paulson is leading this raid for the rabid rich.

Bernanke and Geithner go along for the ride.

Oh, well – let them fall.

Wall Street is doomed, as an idea.

As an idea, Wall Street is heading into a Winter Season

A hellish complication,

A freeze.

Then a dismemberment.

That is all.

The Sun Hero has been wounded.

The force for order has been broken.

This will be the end of something.

The end.

But also a new beginning.

When the Sun Hero is resurrected, the world will also come back to prosperity.

But without the Sun Hero bringing his light in to the northern sphere,

The Rich are cursed to be poor, and to be robbed and abused.

And to fight one another for grim methods of survival.

And that’s what is meant by the ‘War In Heaven’.

The Bible, after all, is history as an archetype,

This pattern of Nature’s most irregular regularities.

During Day-Cycles: the ‘Lord gives’.

18 years of plenty: 1983-2001.

During Night-Cycles: the ‘Lord takes away’.

18 years of hardship, political crisis, and social disintegration:

2001-2019.

16 June 2010

THERE IS NOTHING IN THIS SIMILE THAT WILL MAKE ME SMILE AGAIN

There is nothing in this simile that can make me smile again.

Nothing in this crater of a heart that will make me hear

More truth or less convenience.

Trouble ascends from the dark place.

That is where the monster lives, Leviathan, near to you,

Creator of the dark shell, the inconvenient truth.

The participle place in the distance is a rude delivery

Of the messiah complex

And an even ruder historical necessity f\

For us to leave the close precincts of habitation

And enclose ourselves in the habitual condition of unbelief.

We can grieve.

We are allowed to grieve.

We understand the tepid condition of our natures

Is now pushing against real resistance.

Granite is in the air.

Inescapable granite that pours into the room

A force of 10,000 drums,

Forcing the two lovers apart,

Generating in them watery repulsion.

They have loved and endured and laughed for 20 years.

But now financial emergency is breaking them into parts

And forcing them to re-think the purpose of their existence.

Pluto? Pluto with the force of amazing dark-will,

Negative impulse.

The dead all gather near the fountain of loss,

A sloping hill upon which are mounted heads on spears,

Mutilated former friends of self-expression.

Where did they go wrong?

Why did their lives go wrong?

Was it something they did,

Something they didn’t do,

Something they thought,

Or just some influence of a star

Or a passing planet that became a contagion?

13 June 2008

WHERE DO THE DEAD GO WHEN IT IS TIME TO HIDE?

Where do the Dead go when it is time to hide?

We do not know.

The horrible natures of despair can move in and out of the cadavered streets.

Nothing stops them now.

Crime is second-nature.

Violence is a hereditary accord.

Someone runs down the street and some others are chasing him.

Put yourself to sleep! Put yourself to sleep!

Fear gets you nothing but a stomach full of gas.

Can I see something wonderful again? Can I see something precious?

Turn on the TV: watch anything but the news.

The horrible black cast is not really the same thing

As the temperate condition of the nativity.

And it is the nativity that I want.

My plea for fealty goes unheard.

My plea for calm is met by tornadoes.

I am a joke in a place of worship.

Because I call for an honoring of the decent, peaceful and prosperous nature.

And no one believes there ever has been such a condition.

I see that the Son God is persecuted by the Father God.

This becomes a terrible burden on the soul.

The racism of the Father God is a horrible threat, an hideous understanding.

Images of the hanging tree again creep into our minds.

The racist’s in the patriarch’s camp want to hang Chief of State Obama because his skin is black.

Or yellow.

Or brown; maybe gray.

It doesn’t matter.

The power of Hate grows; and the Sun’s illumination is weakening.

I want to run and hide.

But where do I go?

The father has killed me and kicked me out of my temporal heaven;

And now I find myself a wounded lad with no place to go

And with not much to claim for cover.

Where do the Dead go when it is time to hide?

Do they go to Asia, to India, to France?

Trouble comes, today, in all colors.

All dogs today are turned against all other dogs.

Can I make myself invisible for a year or two?

Is that too much to ask?

Is that too much to bargain?

16 June 2008

ABSTRACT THE FUTURE; AND THEN REAP THE CYCLONE

Abstract the future; and then reap the cyclone.

Is that what has happened here?

Has there been an abstracting of the future?

I can look out on something.

There is a window.

There is a forecast of something special; something spatial.

A person who appears only at the darkest moment.

This man’s name is Light; and he is the one who is coming,

The one who has been here before,

The one who never leaves.

The one.

Who is this one who is coming?.

It is not BHO.

It is not HBO.

Turn on the TV: they will tell you.

It is MJC.

There is m(a)j(i)c in this man.

I know that there is a god inside of him.

But he has lost contact with the god in some fashion,

in some manner.

And now he is trying to re-connect with the god who is his eternal principle.

That’s why he wants to hide for two or three years,

To try to get his vision back

Abstract the future; and then reap the cyclone.

Something is coming; and the world is turning blue again.

20 June 2008

WHO IS HAVING THE VISION NOW?

Who is having the vision now?

Who is the man who can peer into the black cannister

And see the future of China, Germany, Arabia, Rome?

Has Nostradamus left us now?

Are we not able to see the world as it will be,

Through symbolic cadences,

Reaching back into the depth of Orion’s origin,

Origen’s oral genesis,

Oregon’s moral nemesis,

Seeing pain and death as manifestations of logic.

Numbers spun into webs, for our own well-being?

Knowledge is a numerical association with space;

Time’s girdle worn by a queen of approximate advantage.

And what does destiny do for us now?

As we fear the fall of the Wall Straight’s Old Parr,

And his subsequent internment in the land down under,

We are reminded that the Sun builds empires

And the Moon oversees that empire’s demise.

I love Jehovah.

Jehovah is hidden in the Moon.

Jehovah is the voice of prophets.

Jehovah is the voice of the Spirit condemning man’s

Greedy vanity and condemning man’s arrogance to replace Him as God.

Jehovah is not my enemy.

Jehovah is my temperament.

Jehovah is my dream.

I speak in Saturn’s voice now.

The Sun believes in the unity of the spirit.

The Moon believes in the separation of parts,

Back toward a new unity through subtraction.

21 June 2008

THE EXAGGERATION OF WATER

There is an exaggeration in water.

There is a duplicity in air.

There is a contagion in fire,

A vengeful contamination of the decent carnival.

There is trouble in the frozen history of fire,

From which all kinds of plagues ascend,

Mostly through the homage fire pays to absolute monarchs

And killers of children.

The harshest manifesto possibly contaminates virtue at the very outset.

The child must be sacrificed, because the world is for devils,

For money, for power, for greed.

You can argue that this is not the way it should be.

No one will contest you in this.

But what is good and what is bad have a way of dancing

With one another,

Changing places,

Changing shoes,

Changing metaphors,

Exchanging bodily fluids,

Corrupting themselves and others as they touch,

Becoming the apostles of their opposites and then becoming again

The antithesis of these oppositions.

Unity does not ask which side of the tree you are one.

Unity embraces all sides and understands

That the drama of life has only light and shade,

Has only misconception and immaculate conception to guide it.

We understand nothing about the detailing here;

We understand that the recompense of one surgeon

Is the sacrifice of the next.

And this makes us hate ourselves a bit less,

Judge our fathers a bit less,

Scold our mothers and daughters a bit less.

Yes, the water is an exaggeration.

But that is what gives it power.

When the water exaggerates itself successfully,

It gives birth to Noah,

The army of ravens and the army of doves.

And this presents to our eye a picture of reality

That triggers in us again a reason for our own existence.

22 June 2008

A PAIN IN MY STOMACH

There is a pain in my stomach.

What does this mean?

I am not able to say exactly.

But the furious nature of the question tells us all something.

I don’t know if I am completing someone’s dream,

Oor merely evoking fate’s missed management of the cipher.

The void comes in, creating pain where there was no pain,

Creating death where the death was gone.

Nothing survives.

Nothing endures in the face of so much broken wax.

The moon is somewhere.

The moon is annihilating notions of understanding.

There is no understanding here, where the void lives.

There is nothing here but a sense of rest,

A sense of broken fame,

Fatality in the blue zone,

Broken myths,

Empty cadences.

I am nothing here.

I am less than nothing.

I beseech the arbitrary scale here.

I nourish my empty natures, promulgating the broken sequence –

which is not really broken.

Which appears to be broken.

The rest is not available here.

All the talking and the fancy frequencies,

And the obliterating cotton-candy of emotion.

Gone.

Gone with the pain in the stomach.

Gone with the body’s popping.

The bubble pops – the isolated ego is hidden inside this distended bubble.

When the pops, the Sun breaks down;

The Moon Body takes over,

Water rising,

Destiny fragmented;

Time stopped abruptly.

Arbitrarily

Is Saturn coming in again?

Is Pluto breaking me down?

Emptiness approaching.

Death, or what?

Loss of direction.

The diameter is absorbed back into the circle.

The divided world becomes unified.

Nothingness as somethingness.

That’s why we are here?

To sleep?

To rest?

To be lost again?

Where is the river that separates Heaven and Earth?

I am searching for the river.

The Ferryman is there, waiting for a coin,

To carry me forward in my search.

But I cannot find the river.

I cannot find the river.

26 June 2008

WHEN TIME HAS COME

When time has come for me to step away from the fountain

And walk the long walk with Deacon Daemon

Down the terraced road toward Incognition –

I pray that I will tread with head held high,

Having generated a comfortable life for my only wife,

My only love and solace for my soul – my dear Hoa-Lan.

27 June 2008

WHEN I LOOK OUT MY WINDOW

When I look out my window

I no longer see the quiet movement of parts of the great circus

Moving in and out of time in a rhythm designed

To produce peace in the world.

Now the world has become dark and brusque.

“Learn to fear God.”

This is the message I have been sent as the day falls,

And the night begins to gather in strength.

And where is my strength?

I have become old and rusted from too much dreaming and too much sitting.

And the shadows have been growing,

Against my will and against my judgment.

The shadows did not ask what I would like;

They did not knock at my window and ask me if my desire

Was to have global greed capsize the boat we were all traveling in.

Destiny is a mean man, a vindictive woman,

A child who does not care if the world be black or blue or red or green

But only governed by invisible law.

The same invisible law of the aboriginal Australians.

The child understands the burnt skin of the native,

The horrible exactment of the sun

Calculating rude odds under the cover of imprecise devilment.

You will be safe, he said to me –

The child inside me with the skin of the native.

You will be safe because you have the mark now,

The mark of the chosen.

We will take you to the gas chamber first.

We will promise to be gentle.

20 November 2008

THE IMAGERY OF A BIRTH CRISIS RETURNS AGAIN AND AGAIN

The imagery of a birth crisis returns again and again.

Perhaps something is hidden in a mysterious, rigid word: contraction.

Rigid because it is so cold and brittle.

Mysterious because it suggests one thing

(The shrinking of somethingness into nothingness)

And implies its opposite

(The re-appearance of somethingness,

After its pause in the nothingness;

The re-appearance of Horus).

Cunt’s traction.

Cunt’s trick, son.

Cunt’s vehement covenant, through God’s vain agreement to soldier on.

Yes, this is the story of the woman,

The story of the Moon,

The story of the cold Winter Night

Settling on a town;

And of a town sinking in to blindness,

Losing its vision of the future.

Madness? Surely.

What is the Moon’s is also a form of crazy wisdom,

A form of mad genius,

A form of irrational congnizance.

Night swallows up the eyes and renders then useless.

Why did Noah build an ark?

Because he was going blind?

No, of course not.

But because the Crazy Moon, in the form of the talking Jehovah,

Instructed him to do this.

Contractions start before the child is born.

Contractions signal a great pain,

A period of nightmare,

A term of ludicrous uncertainty,

One in which Death hovers over the town

With implicit emotional disregard.

It is the woman, of course,

Who is pained by these contractions –

But what we don’t realize at first is that,

During the contraction phase, in the Moon Body,

We are all women, all emotional creatures,

Floating in a boat on a sea of angry imagery.

There are three moon bodies when the Night comes in,

One for those picked to die in the low zones,

The greedy and the violent zones;

Another for those picked to die in the high zones,

Those ticketed for Valhalla and for a new life among the angels;

And the third body, the middle body,

For the few who are chosen to survive the storm,

To survive the heavy wind,

The freezing stars,

The explosive Wintry evacuations,

In the boat which contains all the pieces in totality:

Black and white together,

Man and woman in a unity,

Animal, vegetable, mineral and man.

The imagery of a birth crisis returns again and again.

I am the one who is dying here;

And I am the one who is looking for rebirth.

Perhaps I am Noah too.

Perhaps the body that survives is the moon itself, the Night Soul,

In which the Sacred Spirit takes in refugees

And hides from savagery.

November 11, 2008

THE MASTERS OF DECEIT

Who are these men from after my father’s world?

These master’s of deceit, with their heads shaved,

And their suits from Italy, and their cars from Germany?

Why are they here now,

Tramping on the stage before lights and cameras,

Trumpeting their knowledge of economic cycles

And their brief judgments that all will be well

Once we empty out the public coffers

To keep investment bankers from falling in the dust

And cheating Chinese bankers and Saudi crypt-keepers

From losing their shirts after having promised these foreign lords

That extortion is a practical form of immortality.

It would be embarrassing…. Indeed!

It is embarrassing.

You have laid the cupboards bare with manipulations designed

To buy yourself another house,

A larger, better more exotic car,

A second or third yacht,

More investment for the future of your children:

Where does it stop?.

The world is a huge bird that flies and cries

And you have murdered this bird

And now you are all hoping

We will not notice what you have done.

But we have noticed.

We are beginning to circle you;

Perhaps you have not noticed this.

We are circling you,

Trying to decide what kind of punishment is most appropriate for you:

You who have turned our country into a garbage heap.

Objects vanish.

That is the nature of objects.

They appear; they are touched and explored;

They vanish.

Why do you worship so these object that vanish by nature?

Shall we become a great civilization,

Or remain, as we are, the one who eats the world,

The obese craver after minute flavors,

Obscene particles,

Goods,

Material venues,

Baskets of empty games,

Articles of motion,

Cadenzas of craft,

Calypsos of self-delusion?

Shall we write great poetry,

Great history,

Great philosophy?

Or shall we remain trite consumers

Wanting only more dollars in our pockets,

Only more programs to watch on the tale of vision…

The tale of visions lost?

Shall we be real?

Finally: shall we be real?

Objects vanish.

We vanish.

That is our nature.

We appear; we are touched and explored; we weep and we articulate; we compose; we love; we calculate; we lament; we decompose; we rot; and then we vanish.

Let us be a great civilization.

Let us have soul and gentle authority,

And a great vision to make the world whole once again.

Our own wealth is not the primary concern.

If we fail in a great undertaking,

Well, at least we can then claim

That we have tried to achieve something great noble at least.

Before we have vanished.

20 November 2008

THE IMPRECISE CLAIMS TO VIRTUE CLUTTER THE HEAVENS

The imprecise claims to virtue clutter the heavens.

We know that there is hot air up there.

We know that the virtuous are gathering their claims

And they are hiring lawyers from the church

Who will make impassioned pleas at the beginning of Armageddon.

Or at the end of Armageddon.

Some will be judged early;

And some will be judged later.

Guillotines will be discussed again.

Some will urge their use,

Their ascendancy as moral figments

In the unending battle for virtue.

Others will argue that a slug in the jaw

Does not justify a bullet in the brain.

But there is disagreement about that.

Ultimately, the forces of violence last only until

The democracy is established.

Then balance comes in to the form of the society.

And daily life comes back again; personal life.

Politics leads to hell and back.

Demons stand on both sides, ready to kill for ideology.

Both sides are wrong.

Both sides are short-sided.

Both sides commit crimes.

Both sides abuse authority and commit sins against decency.

Both sides suffocate someone, ether the rich or the poor.

So you pick your sides with an understanding

That nothing is perfect or even real,

Un an absolute sense;

And you will come back to oppose yourself, for ever and ever,

Until you reach an understanding that

The Grand Illusion is but God’s play,

Designed for someone’s entertainment,

But not for the peace of mind of decent humans,

Nor for rest,

Nor for philosophical clairvoyance.

God’s play has been written by Nature,

And is a law handed down by Earth’s own primate condition.

Four arms of God turning like a threshing machine.

Sometimes this machine plants; sometimes it harvests.

This mechanism disturbs the Earth;

But, also, this mechanism guides the Earth.

Some call this mechanism the Guardian Angels.

And some call this mechanism the Wheel of Incarnation.

We ride this wheel into heaven and, then, back to the earth.

At some point, we want to get off this wheel.

This wheel carries us from continent to continent,

East to west, then north to south,

Subscribing a square, where the two axes touch:

This square is the Arc of the Covent

Made with God through Spiritual Man

And his opposite Animal Man,

And their fight to possess woman, the Fourth Incarnation.

This wheel is us and is not us.

This wheel is a carnival ride; but it is more, and less, than this.

The wheel is the vehicle which carries us to and fro,

Into sin and back toward virtue again,

Onto earth, into water, purified by fire, cleansed again by air.

Plasma, gas, liquid, solid.

Solid, liquid, gas, plasma.

Back and forth: addition; subtraction.

We put on skins, expanding our bodies.

Then we take off skins, and expand our inner cultures.

As spirit shrinks, matter grows;

And as matter shrinks, spirit grows.

We can never know what Truth is, in an eternal sense.

We can know at best our own perceptions.

Saturn turns us out, and turns us back in again, out and in.

Every twenty-eight years we change:

One wheel leads to empire;

The next wheel leads to empyre.

We rise and fall like stars imposing gravity on Time,

Stars imposing anti-gravity upon Time’s

Celestial mirror of construction.

And then everyone sleeps.

Everyone reverts back to One.

Then One becomes Nothing.

Then everyone sleeps.

21 November 2008

THE CHLORINE GRAVE

The chlorine grave erupts.

Time vanishes.

A purple air impales children with songs about

Death and collapse and intricate betrayals.

The home life is gone.

The future turns black, like smoke in a rubber fire,

And then vanishes too.

Banks close their doors.

Fathers hang themselves when their wives go looking

For dandelion stems beyond the park to make a thin broth.

Mothers seek dinner for children

From the remainder of someone else’s dreams,

Raiding abandoned gardens where ghosts attack sluggish stragglers

With garden shears made of gold.

Here we are, dislocated from Time,

Stripped of our confidence,

Suddenly disoriented and cowed

Because of some magistrate’s intent to rob every last breath

From the old women living on Crane Street.

Chlorine does not provide us with hope, someone shouts.

Bring the chlorine; pass it out.

Chlorine does not provide us with sustenance.

Everyone take a drink of this magical potion.

The chlorine grave lies before us now, unopened.

Arrogance has been thrown in here also;

Military hedonism; pride; national imperative.

Someone is blaming the immigrants.

There is an order being circulated

That all mirrors are to be broken by Saturday.

Typewriters are impounded.

Foreign bank accounts are confiscated by the government.

Citizens can only deposit money in local banks –

Any attempt to withdraw funds will be construed as an act of treason.

And to kill a banker will result in the highest of punishments:

No chocolate for each family branch for seven generations.

The chlorine grave erupts.

Melodrama, only, can save us now.

Hollywood pours out flashy pablum for the public to eat, night after night.

Stars walk in rapturous glory,

While foolish idolizers forget their own tragic sur-names

And believe their personal failures are insignificant,

Compared to the chlorine-smoothies being served between movies

By the stars of stage and screen.

Oprah thrives.

Keep them smiling.

Keep them dreaming.

Signs begin to appear around the compound:

“Those who don’t smile will be forced to read poetry

Written in the seventeenth century all night long

Until overexposure to obscure sounds and phrases

Renders them incapable of continuing to frown.”

That is enough to drive the masses

To ask for bottles of chlorine.

Chlorine makes one smile.

Eventually.

For ever.

The chlorine grave erupts.

It is good to die.

The earth is open.

What is the point of being bitter

About being deceived

And being rendered futureless and scolded by Fortune?

What is the point of being bitter?

Give me a nickel and I will climb down in to that chlorine grave.

People make mistakes. What else is a man to do?

Give me a nickel and I will climb down in to that chlorine grave.

Admonish me if you must.

I have made mistakes.

I have not taken care of all the details of historical necessity.

Money has triumphed over me –

There, I have confessed it!

Money has trickled through me,

Making me appear like a sieve,

A calendar with holes punch in every New Moon!

Give me a nickel; give me a dime.

Time is an unlucky authority.

There is a carnival coming to town next millennium.

If I am lucky I will catch the freight train passing south

And meet the carnival before it arrives in our town.

I will paint my face jet black

So no one will recognize the new man I have become,

The new man who walks upon the tightrope

Seven miles above the earth

With no netting below to protect him.

He needs no surface protection now,

For he has become immortal.

23 November 2008

PRECARIOUS BREATH IN THE BRAIN

Precarious breath in the brain rises up like candle smoke.

A wisp.

A very small condition of movement.

The brain is experiencing pain, no doubt.

The brain is calling out for assistance.

Why is this so?

The abstraction of the residual momentum which life --

(The wind of life) –

Blew into the brain --

(All kinds of desires and fantasies of conquest,

Wealth, power, expanding opportunities) –

Is waning into detachment from the object of felicity

Inclining gently now toward the subject of death,

Toward the subject of demise.

Precious breath in the brain spins and spurns and sparks and sputters.

The future vanishes in a heart-beat.

The past rises up like a dream cinema,

First as an accusation;

second, as a much preferred (less complexly-corrupted)

Option of steady truth,

Wholesome humanism,

Compared with the plastic, grasping world we’ve created.

How does this happen?

Why?

The expansion of the dream was so majestic, so complete,

Including all the struggling atoms of the world.

Everyone was getting rich.

Well, at least that was the feeling.

Everything was possible.

Then, suddenly, a rock hit the sea-captain’s windshield.

The ship veered off path.

Someone stumbled in the tower.

Do not look! someone called.

If we don’t see the fallen captain, there in his sea-craft,

Shriveled up like a crumpet,

Then we won’t have to believe it!

Was the collision actually the planes hitting the Twin Towers?

Sound travels much slower than light.

We all know this.

The world popped long ago and we are only hearing about it now?

Is that a possibility?

The brain creates figments – that is what it does.

What are figments?

Fictions in fragments.

Lies, which the brain then conspires to represent as truths.

The American Dream is that everyone owns his own house.

That is not the American Dream –

But that is a figment that the brain has tried to create,

Proving that the American Dream is something one can attain.

The American Dream is about much more than

Helping the bank to own one’s house.

But we hear half-truths and we believe them..

The brain is breathing uneasy now.

Too many lies –

And too much time spent in self-judgment,

In shame,

In a sense of failure,

Has made the brain begin to hate itself.

Failure is not a kind thing.

Failure is the way we view the world’s viewing of us,

Using our own words to most visciously,

Most successfully,

Most diabolically

Condemn ourselves.

Loser.

Failure.

He aint got a pot to piss in.

These are all vulgar descriptions of the brain

At war with its own creation,

The shadow creeping down below his judgments

The world is pissing over a cliff today.

Many failures are lining up to piss over the cliff.

There will be a lake below when all the failures have finished their pissing

And have said good-night,

And then jumped.

We can laugh, if we wish, just as easily

As fasten a noose.

24 November 2008

DERANGED PERSPECTIVE OF THE MOON’S DIALECT

Deranged perspective of the Moon’s dialect.

A fist of unsubtle moods descends on me.

The oceans, in which the horrors move, rise and fall,

Calculate and correlate,

Rise in me too.

Spring Tides; Neap Tides.

Rise up and sink down below the surface,

Leaving ghosts and corpses and scattered memories on the shore,

Uncovered by the troubled light of the reflected embassy of Hecate.

What does the Moon mean to me?

Ghosts and demons and dragons of light.

Psychologically vast. Psychologically cruel.

What rises up in me when my heart becomes elegiac?

The Day Body has no need of the Moon and its mores.

The Day Body is all muscle and all hope and all sense of potential.

And arrogant pride.

It has four parts.

It is a square.

It is as solid as Greek Logic.

Nothing threatens it.

Nothing defeats it in combat.

It is heroic.

It manifests the king.

Holdfast, the king.

The Day Body breeds children and makes the women

Idealize its robust virtues.

But the Day Body pops.

The clock expires; the alarm goes off.

The Sun takes his wound – and psychic expansion disappears.

The Moon comes in.

When the Moon comes in, the contraction has already begun.

The universe has begun to fall in on itself,

As matter breaks down, implodes, decomposes, losing its coherency.

Sunlight organizes matter – and expands matter.

As matter collapses, the more subtle bodies are exposed.

The inner bodies.

The Moon Bodies, which fill with water and then

Unfill with water,

Becoming ponds for our own reflection.

The Moon nourishes the inner bodies;

And it also re-creates the seed within.

The seed in the proud father plant decays and falls back to Earth.

The seed is buried in the deepest soul,

The primitive and primordial nature,

At its ultimate origin.

The Source.

The stream of life.

The pool of life inside,

Where the amino acids are already forming again.

It is water that gives life;

But water also creates madness.

Up the mountain, down the mountain;

The push and pull of the tides.

Prince on one ecliptic;

Anti-prince on the other.

Imagery as ripe as myth, and as practical as myth.

What comes when the fire in the belly is lit in Sagittarius?

Is that the Sun-Child already in the belly of the dragon down below?

Burning at a low heat, surrounded by waves, surrounded by darkness?

Cooking in an alchemical stew?

A stew through which the Soul transforms itself back

Into Solar Gilt?

The star knows nothing; but the star is everything.

25 November 2008

WHAT IS THE MOON SAYING NOW

What is the Moon saying now,

As it begins to crawl out of hiding,

Becoming a scythe pointing toward the West?

The Moon is not a friendly felon here,

Peering down, as it does,

With an armory of steel exposed,

Looking for victims,

Looking for gratuities.

The Moon speaks Arabic at these moments of frail illumination.

The Moon heralds ‘traditional’ culture,

Which despises women

And kills women for sins against the almighty prerogative.

The Moon is a seismic gargantuan thing,

Casting spells down on the Earth,

Hurling insults at man,

Epithets of judgment,

Generating glandular discomforts,

Sucking air from the bubbles men create out of imagination.

Who is swinging the scythe which the Moon has now become?

It is the anniversary of Darkness coming back around again, he said.

The Darkness is your friend.

Do not forget this.

Oh, yes – the Darkness is the enemy of physical expansion,

Financial extension, and political empire.

But the Darkness is the friend of metaphysical expansion,

Artistic extension

And social ambitions for justice and the sharing of wealth.

Darkness is no friend of business and engineering, he said.

Darkness is a friend to the poet, the painter, the musician, and the composer.

And Darkness is a friend of the lover,

A friend of erotic madness,

A friend of true love, unpractical love.

In the Darkness the god comes down to meet his own moon,

A daughter of man,

And kiss her with the spear of anointment,

Poison her with his talk of eternities,

Potions of magnetic hypnotic promises

That his love will be grander and more durable and more complete

Than any other man’s love ever could possible be.

And she believes him – because he is not real – not made of real flesh.

And then he vanishes.

Watch the Moon carefully as it grows, changes, swells with child.

It is re-building the world slowly, brick by brick,

Plant by plant,

Lake by lake,

Incipient hero by incipient anti-hero.

But remember: fear of God is now an appropriate emotion to be experiencing.

Because nothing from here to there,

From the apex of light through the apex of night,

Will be easy again.

3 December 2008

TAMMUZ CRIED

Tammuz cried.

The whole world cried with him.

Horrible incentives were thrown away with him;

Cities vanished;

Populations dried up;

Crops disappeared;

Animals performed ritual suicide;

Plants succumbed to despair.

Why was this so?

Because the young Sun-Hero had been murdered.

Tammuz cried.

He cried out that he was being killed,

Murdered by political deception.

Witnesses tried to warn him.

The old woman in question stabbed him in the back

When he was preparing his place in the highest heaven,

Thinking he might rest,

Write his memoirs,

Experience his golden years.

But the old crone, an agent of Saturn, no doubt,

Blindly Brutal,

Brackisly Brokered,

Brilliantly Blackened,

Snuck into the garden and snuffed out the flame.

Tammuz cried.

Tammuz had a sister, Ishtar – Ishtar the Orchid --who also cried.

Tammuz had a wife, Ishtar, -- Ishtar the Orchid -- who also cried.

Tammuz fell.

He fell into doubt and fear and the loss of masculine self-sufficiency.

Then, almost immediately, the whole world fell with him.

And the high sky operation of expansion and hope and power and wealth

Was wiped out with a broad stroke of defeat.

Markets collapsed. Banks panicked. Credit was lost. Commodities sank.

Countries prepared for civil war.

The Sun was gone.

The Moon was somewhere; but the Sun was gone.

Sterility was certain;

War and poverty had been born,

Although the priests loyal to the king

Promised him that nothing of note had occured.

Tammuz cried.

Ishtar followed him down into hell,

Hoping she could save the world from its black cycle

If only she could re-assemble and resurrect Tammuz in time.

But the cycle is precise.

Tammuz spends half a year with the kings and the queens,

And the beautiful people,

And the bourgeoisie,

Defending their prerogative, their right to be rich,

And the fertility of life.

And he spends half a year with the hopeless,

The poor, the wounded and the unfortunate.

And when Tammuz is down-under,

With the unfortunate,

Nothing grows,

Businesses fail,

Money stops its circulation –

Money is blood afterall –

Money is the blood in the human form –

Contraction rules up above.

Tammuz has died.

He will come again some day.

He will come back again, to be re-born, at the dawn.

Tammuz will be re-born when I am re-born.

I am Tammuz.

I am also Ishtar, dressed in seven sets of clothes.

And the Law is immutable.

Cry if you must.

9 December 2008

ARE WE BROKEN YET?

Are we broken yet?

Have the hammers all been used;

And has the glue all been hidden?

Have the architects

All been executed yet?

And have the builders all been sent to the Eastern Front

To oppose and seek to destroy the rising archons of Islam?

Smash us again! We are not broken enough!

Have the bankers smashed us yet!

Have the lawyers smashed us again!

Have the politicians smashed in our brains!

Who are we?

We are nothing but the ants of history –

Nickel and dime – t

To their grand and heroic merchandising of Time.

We are apologists for failure.

We are clerks and drivers and hash-cookers and electricians.

We are typists and sawyers and seam-stitchers and students and wives.

We are nothing.

We are grist for History’s noble mill.

We are worthless lives to be crushed in the vise,

Shattered by hammers wielded by the great conquistadores

Of noble material conquest.

Are we broken yet?

George Bush: smash us some more!

Hank Paulson: smash us again!

Herr Greenspan: kick us while we are down!

Barak Obama: keep us from rising!

We are nothing, after all.

We are the small men and women of the world.

We are not the kings and the titans who make the wheels roll.

Break us again! Make our pain go away! Make our fears fade to nothing!

(Are we broken yet?)

Please break us again.

9 December 2008

THE EMANCIPATION OF LIGHT COMES TOO SUDDENLY

The emancipation of Light comes too suddenly.

It is turning.

Expansion is lost.

The id-caress has not fully begun to bloom as yet.

Suddenly, everything turns black.

It is not the blackness of an absence of light.

It is not merely a shadow appearing suddenly,

Swallowing up all the prestigious candidates for heroic dementia, squashing plant life and sending animal life fleeing into the mouths of owls. This blackness is a force and a color and a harrowing nature apart from shadows.

All expansion ends. The Future, as an entity for vision, turns as black as charcoal.

Perhaps Light has gone somewhere. Perhaps a palace of light, eternal in the upper atmospheres, continues, undisturbed by the grinding extreme. Lunar subtraction scales everything in to negative phosphorescence. The world is sucked into the photographic negative – and everything is turned backwards, everything is reversed.

Suddenly we are all falling. Suddenly gravity rules everything – perhaps the subatomic world has been shattered, or magnetic poles reversed.

The Sun becomes killing.

The Sun becomes empirically brash and deadly.

Light is emancipated; or Light turns inside out, becoming Blackness, burning itself out, toasting its own essence, burning out its own star: Cinderella.

The emancipation of Light comes too suddenly, turning itself blue, first; then proclaiming Death a guardian, sending this guardian out on the earth, generating landscapes.

The Black Light comes.

The waking world becomes a dream.

The waking world becomes a nightmare.

Light is riding on a Black Horse, and calling itself, now, Pestilence.

11 December 2008

CONTAMINATION OF THE WELL

What happens when the world-star collapses on itself? When the Sun-of-the-World becomes a black hole, sucking in all light?

Contamination of the well.

Is that not what has happened? The expansion of Life has ended; the Sun has collapsed inward: and everything has turned black.

And the well has been contaminated.

As above, so below.

The Sun God has created the world of light, the world of wealth and power, the world of expansion and empire. But now the Sun has imploded and become a huge vacuum, sucking in light, energy, money, houses, boats, cars, all material objects. Paulson and Bernanke throw trillions into the mouth of the beast. They seek to pacify this monster; they only feed him, making him larger.

The Darkness will be served.

The Darkness will not be bribed or pacified.

Greed has contaminated our well. Greed has fueled out expansion; and Greed will witness our demise.

Many will be judged. Many wells will deliver poison. Many worlds will experience disintegration. Then the Sun will turn his attention out again.

Fear of God is wisdom now. Fear of God is a form of prayer.

12 December 2008

ORGANZA IS IN THE SOUL OF THINGS

Organza is in the soul of things;

Organic resources make of the sky an habitual photograph.

All our deeds, all our thoughts, are recorded there.

Who does this thing? I do not know.

Why is it done? I have no idea.

But the organza in the soul records all things using a different method. Horrible gifts are passed on from children to parents, for the children are older than the parts, know more, entertain more thoughts, carry more wounds, inflict abuse on their parents, generate and transmit karmic retaliations, as though God sends sons and daughters as a form of punishment to unsuspecting fornicating souls.

Organza does not talk –

But it weaves a record of lives

And a record of sedentary sedimentary natures

Whose thoughts take on material substance,

And, because of this, affect Time.

Who are wearing the brown-shirts now?

An edifice falls. Jews will be blamed. Blacks blamed. Asians blamed. Mexicans blamed.

A world is being lost. A world founded on the white man’s domination.

It is alright that it is falling. Lessons must be taught; lessons must be learned. And God is punishing the white man’s arrogance and his brutality. This does not mean that the white man has not done good. The white man is good and bad. He has organized a slumbering world, taught it modern education. But greed has brought the white man down to his knees.

Yes, brownshirts appear, especially in Europe again.

When America turns red, Europe turns white.

When America turns white, Europeans turn red.

This is not the end of the white man’s power.

But the Night has fallen. And the Night will swallow up the dreams of a generation.

Chaos is at hand.

Do not forget to listen to the organza.

Listen to the wind in the evening.

Listen to Bach and Mozart.

Listen to the poetry of Dante and Shakespeare,

Rilke and Dylan Thomas,

Blake and John Donne.

.

But, also, listen to the organza.

26 November 2008

IS THAT THE REICH I HEAR PROCLAIMING THE THUNDER AND THE RAIN

Is that the Reich I hear proclaiming the thunder and the rain,

Proclaiming Thor and proclaiming Odin?

Heroic tutelage of the Northern Sky Heaven

As the thunder presents itself to the frightened humans

Coagulating near the center of the court,

Praying for protection,

Praying for guidance.

The Kings have all fled the city

And are leaving in yachts

With the idea of re-assembling armies in the hinterlands;

But this is all a ruse.

The kingdom has been shattered

And the streets are now overflowing with drunken men,

Frightened women and soldiers from a new reich

Who are proclaiming themselves to be

The conquistadors of the new broken dreams.

Who has done this to us?

Drunken bankers; blind politicians; frenzied brokers and greedy housing developers?

Greenspan? What is in a name I ask you.

Here come the Reichstadt boys,

Shouting racial slurs at the world and demanding an accounting.

Blaming jews, negroes, Asians, hypnotists;

Condemning the southern world with its lunar worship,

Its weak association with matriarchal natures and its motherly contrivances.

Some Reichstagboys are sharpening swords.

Wise men on Wall Street are betting on bullish action in the funeral parlor sector.

Some things never change.

1 December 2008

LET’S ESTABLISH A MIRACLE

Let’s establish a miracle.

Establish a grim carnival in the sky

And bring the carnival down to earth

Where we can embrace it, being children of the time.

Perhaps we can establish ourselves

As mighty canine for the heavenly family.

We can color our selves many colors,

Rainbow colors, for the family of man.

We can do all this above,

Where we are safe and fixed for a legion of love.

But when bringing it down to the earth

To give to trembling humanity,

We may have to come as torrents of rain – and perhaps the colors will be lost in all the terrors of the catastrophe.

Let’s establish a miracle in the dark places where the mind goes during frequent flights from the damaging material sphere. Backing away from physical existence – is that what we are doing now? Letting the forms of matter all fall away like so many unfrozen cadences? Has someone unplugged the world so that all the organizations we have build up into crystalline shapes have no animating essences any longer. Electricity has been cut off.

That’s what death is, after all. The electricity plugged into and animating the body withdraws and the body simply falls away, like old clothes. Nothing else. When the electricity leaves, and returns to its source, the body falls away; and then matter disassembles.

18 December 2008

WHO IS COMING DOWN AMONG THE REEDS

Who is coming down among the reeds;

Is that you, Moses?

Who is coming down, bearing gifts from heaven? Is that you, Abraham?

Brahma walked here first,

When there were only shadows among us,

Only intimations of bodiless men

Who passed through here wearing smocks and smiles,

Similes and featureless conditions later described as gain.

We can’t see back far enough to find them now.

Who is coming up the mount of Sinai?

Who is seeking a law to hand down to his children on Earth?

Those who clamor for more discipline,

Those who seek the manly destruction

Of the gold calves of Mammon?

Who are we in this open plain,

Searching the sky for bits of manna,

Bits of birds carrying bread for our salvation?

Who are we now?

Lions? Snakes? Horses? Dragons?

Alligators perhaps?

From which direction have we arrived?

Who condemns us now?

Who beseeches our salvation?

Who is coming down among the reeds?

Is it you, Miriam?

Is it Ishtar clothed in seven robes,

Seeking the door to the dark kingdom

In order to save the Sun, her brother and lover?

We are nothing without our dreams.

But if our dreams are only material objects,

Money, fame, status among our unequals…

When we identify with nothing, then we are nothing also.

When we nominate ourselves for positions of honor among the dishonorable,

Then we become dishonorable.

We become less than the shadows that represent us.

19 December 2008

THE ARCHETYPE OF THE APOCALYPSE

The archetype of the apocalypse.

There is nothing else now.

Entropy has ground us down to the nub,

The hard black stone,

The hard black stone hidden in the core of the mineral atom.

That is where we are,

The night coming in to proclaim the dead expansion,

Reducing us to rotten fruit, seed husks, seeds, then precious points

Inside the circle.

We breathe quietly, hoping no one will hear us,

Hoping no one will know we are there.

For shadows have elapsed.

Body weight has become negative.

Fortunes have evaporated.

Scandals are coming next.

Deceptions. Betrayals.

Nothingness is not far off,

The kind of Nothingness that has substance and a body.

Hell is just another word for this.

It has a name, a foreign name –

But it is not foreign;

We have not heard its real name yet.

And we will be shocked to discover its true nature,

Hidden in agnomen.

That is just the beginning.

Then the four horsemen will arrive.

From above this all looks like a chessboard;

But from here, on the ground, it looks more like the beginnings of a massacre.

The bishop is there, saying prayers for both sides.

That makes everyone grimace a bit, out of embarrassment, out of shame.

Then the battle begins and children begin to fight like frightened hellions.

There will be a judge who will rise out of all of this,

Who will rise to set the world a-right a-gain,

To punish greed, cruelty, dishonor and exploitation.

The judge will become the New King;

And a new covenant will be signed with God

And then a New World will rise up from the ruins of discord

On the backs of a new set of commandments.

But then the same greedy bastards will ruin it.

The same greedy bastards will explain that their profits are good for all

And they will proceed to take all the good land,

The good produce,

The good women

And the best art for themselves.

That is how it works – does it not?

That’s why I cheer the approach of the apocalypse.

That’s why I cheer the four horsemen.

That’s why I cheer when I hear the words “Ark” and “Rain” and “Flood” and “Noah”.

The Darkness is winning now.

I can hear the rain falling;

And I can hear the sound of hammers against wood.

I understand, through Saturn, that time is running out.

The moon is glowering again,

Idol-fueled and insane,

Vituperative and filled with the strength of its half-truth vengeance.

The ideal now is transformation.

20 December 2008

THE DISRUPTED SEQUENCE

The disrupted sequence becomes a problem

When the man who believes he is king

Sees a huge gap separating himself from his dreams

And from his capacities to move.

This creates a problem.

He is not the kind of man who indulges in fantasies.

He has a visionary nature that builds a plan methodically,

ne in the context of history, patiently.

But now he is suddenly awake and sees nothing before him

But a Void, a shapeless Chaos.

The king is now standing in the Primordial Deep,

At the very edge of the Yawning Abyss.

The king knows who he was;

And he even knows vaguely who he will become;

But he does not really understand how A moves through B to get to C.

C is not the problem at the moment; B is the problem.

He looks out and sees only a deadly chasm before him.

His own death is in the chasm somewhere,

Hiding like a gnarled hideous venomous black shadow.

A murderer hides in the brush,

Carrying a picture of the King

And the King’s family in his front pocket.

Nothing is certain now.

How to live; how to manufacture life;

How to bring light back in order to illuminate the future?

He has lost his power to envision the development of his life.

He is standing at the Gap.

He understands the mythology of the Gap,

The history of the Gap,

Even the meaning of the Gap.

But he does not know, in his very fiber,

If he will be able to survive this monster, this absence,

This precipice, an active heritage,

With inverse dimension.

Every 28 years this void comes and goes.

Saturn carries a heavy sword.

Saturn gives; and Saturn takes away.

Mortality is a rough bedfellow.

Mortality is a savage playmate;

Mortality now hides in the cavern,

And watches the king closely through his binocular vision,

Laughing with a mean unyielding unforgiving laugh.

22 December 2008

THE VANISHING SANCTUARY

The sanctuary vanishes.

The sanctuary has a primary purpose.

But when the need for that purpose evaporates,

Then the sanctuary, too, expires.

And then begins the fight for life.

Then begins the wrestling with God’s angel,

The apocalyptical ordering of elements

In an attempt to begin to re-build the central core.

I dream.

I manufacture meanings I have carried inside my heart

In from the manvantaric empire.

Pieces of actuality, laid upon the altar,

From which a prayer can be built.

A prayer for clarity.

A prayer for sustenance.

A prayer for the dreamer’s soul to be awakened

At the next great chiming of the Dawn bell.

Aurora’s gay matriculation of the living:

A horizon painted light blue;

A scale tipping ineluctably back toward the sanctuary,

Back toward order,

Back toward the Sun God’s ascendancy.

But we are far away from this thing,

This entity, this emergence.

Far away from this ascendancy.

We are back here with the dead,

Back with Siva and Saturn and Jehovah.

The world is crumbling.

The bricks of Wall Street are breaking.

The house is in decay.

There is a sign on the front door reading:

‘Time is Running Out. It is finished. Sabbath has come.’

Put the red cross on your door;

Or run into the mountains, never looking back,

Giving up all you own.

The Man wearing Black designates your town for destruction.

It may be a dream;

It may be a distortion of reality,

Manufactured by fears.

No matter what source creates this image:

It is real and it is etched upon this landscape by blood.

23 December 2008

THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE SHADOW

What are the implications of the Shadow?

Why is it that the man detaches himself from himself

When he begins his arching conquest of his life?

There is a man he leaves behind,

A man who is part of himself,

The imperfect part of himself,

The brother,

The inarticulate part of himself,

he failure aspect of his own nature,

That he betrays.

There is no life without this separation.

However, the life created by this separation is not real life –

It is an illusory life,

A life in a false spotlight,

A life from which the man must eventually die,

In order to return to the Shadow Land again,

o return to his most essential and natural root,

Which is himself;

And, again, his brother.

The man and his shadow are endlessly intertwined.

The Cowboy and the Indian are endlessly intertwined too.

They fight and kill one another too, but not endlessly.

They do not hate one another endlessly.

That is what is meant by ‘endlessly intertwined’.

Roots endlessly intertwine.

God intertwines roots;

And then the clock goes off,

And the roots go wild,

One root growing up,

And the other root growing down.

7 January 2009

MY LOVE NEVER DIES

My love never dies.

My love is a flame which rises and falls

As the Moon rises and falls.

The flame never dies,

Even though the winds blow hard,

The rains pound down,

Lighting threatens,

Thunder blunders.

My love never dies.

My love is a horse with broad girth and powerful thighs.

The horse never dies,

Even though the road is hard,

The mountain impedes him,

The rivers rise up,

The cougars are stalking.

My love never dies.

My love is a sun in the sky, the spirit of life.

The sun never dies,

Even though the darkness conspires to cut off his light,

To cast him in shadows,

To imprison his grace.

My love never dies.

My love is a wild river, itself, raging and running,

Breaking down dikes,

Overflowing banks,

Threatening towns,

Smashing against mountains.

The wild river never dies even when the sun tries to kill it,

To dry it out with its Summer anger.

My love never dies.

My love for Hoa-Lan never dies.

My love for Hoa-Lan is triumphant.

11 January 2009

THERE IS NOTHING IN THE DARK PART OF THE BRAIN

There is nothing in the dark part of the brain

That explains why the sea is rising.

There is nothing that explains the evolving leviathan

Named after your own father.

There is nothing that computes the dry mathematics of fatality’s point.

There is nothing that dictates taste, mechanism, or the machinery of fear.

There is nothing in the dark part of the brain that can calculate fair interest rates.

There is nothing in the dark part of the brain that collates emergencies of lost love in to columns of gained virtues.

But there is something in the dark part of the brain that does something for me.

Hollow entities have come in to power now. Hollow entities post majestic coins on non-majestic eyes and repeat incantations to Shakespearean lore. Bards were celestial creatures falling heavenward, pierced on a sharp stick of intellect, broiled over the rude public’s love of filth and silver. Plucked by rich boss’ tarts for romance’s stew, then betrayed when casual needs arose centered on financial security.

There is no true love for the god of Surety’s balance, unless this grim god can flip himself from bleach to bronze, and flip his wife from tar to moonsome moonshine white. Alabastros albatross.

An eye blinks; nothing is seen.

An eye closes; in the darkness there is some geometry. A map. A plan. He tries to see it more clearly. Darkness is a mast, he knows. Darkness is not the complete misunderstanding it advertises itself as being.

Comprehension is not far off.

He touches the mast.

Someone has strapped him to the mast. He can hear the songs of the sirens – but he can’t take a step, left or right, toward some comfort.

29 January 2009

READY TO GO DOWN?

Are you ready to go down? Are you ready to roam the streets at night

To find the carnival fellows who are stealing turnips they can sell during the daylight?

The eyes become flat squares and begin to suck in light

And emit sounds of terror, damaged children, horrified geese.

What is the color of this madness now?

The sun has turned black.

The sun is wounded, and the sun falls, and the sun turns black.

Hexagons are beginning to come out now,

Meaning that the descent will be over soon.

The climb will not begin soon however;

But the horrible fall that is gaining momentum and will slacken soon.

If the fall doesn’t kill you, then the impact will surely wake you.

Black burns and turns to ash.

The moon is golden.

The moon is the color of wheat, the color of a yellow rose.

This means that the moon is being observed through a dark pond, reversed.

There is nothing clean down here.

People are rude and touched with sin.

People are crude and singed with torches.

People are cowed and tinged with sources of pride, greed, envy, collusion.

Bad taste is now the popular, the common doctrine of achievement.

Crude natures are now celebrated.

Decency is not a humorous exaltation of bad innocence.

Indecency is the right we all have to shame ourselves in public.

It is a right we have, a right the government must honor.

Surely something bad is arriving.

29 January 2009

UNSUBSTANTIATED RUMORS OF ADVANCEMENT

Unsubstantiated rumors of advancement appear around the city

Posted on flyers hanging from walls and trees.

There is much talk about the possibilities involved in these suggestions.

Hope begins to grow wings and Hope begins to marshal forces

Praying that the dark energy of the black wind will abate;

And all the children will be allowed to sing and dance again.

The priests all seem to believe that the scourge has been left behind.

The dragon-dance has helped, no doubt.

The dragon-dance and the washing of the brothels with white wash

And the choir singing in a horticultural ritual demanding Sun-Rise in the face of Sun-Set reality to trick the devil. But the devil is rarely tricked. We know that tricks don’t work against the ultimate dark consternation.

There is a pond outside of town, a black pond, which no children will approach, in which the moon refuses to show her reflection.

Drop a hammer in this pond and the hammer disintegrates before touching the surface, breaks in to pieces that appear to melt upon entering the water. Lean over the pond and hold a hammer in your hand and the hammer will break apart and a man’s hand, wrist and forearm, with it. At least two men have become one-armed men resisting this hypothesis.

The pond is the place where spells reside, wherein the Devil lives, and from which the Devil emerges at night to prey upon the world, carrying cherries he will give to children.

No one approaches this pond any longer. No one even mentions the pond. It is bad luck, they say, to think of this pond unless in church or when riding a horse in an easterly direction.

Unsubstantiated rumors of advancement are used to try to console the fears of the villagers.

We will all be advancing when He comes to take his children home.

One man in this town will be hired by the company and given a salary distinctly less than the factory owner’s own salary.

The train will begin to run again and no one will be excluded from a trip on this train, except when the moon is in a full or a new condition or a storm appears.

The first child born this season will be blessed by the gods from the mountain kingdom.

And the train will be named after this first born as a sign of community solidarity.

There are many things we can learn from this. Many things indeed.

Life is good. At the bottom of the barrel there is Hope. Hope is the last thing found when times become dark, and the first thing forgotten when prosperity begins to fill our coffers with ambition and advancement again, when all the sharks are either killed or set free, dressed in suits, overpriced watches, European reading glasses, and honored as ‘entrepreneurs’.

Beware: when the world honors ‘entrepreneurs’ we are near the cliff and we are beginning to look down again.

We are all sad animals. We are all sad animals.

Look what the sharks have done to our land.

1 February 2009

COSMIC GRISTLE

Cosmic gristle comes to us. Cosmic gristle in our mouth, giving us a sense of glory and prosperity. Cosmic gristle announces the good times have returned. We will all be fat and sassy now; we will all be inclined to charity again; we will all protect the poor women and the poor children with annual donations.

But nothing good comes; the illusion of progress is sunk; and the gristle is ripped from our mouths by the insane prophet who calls out to us: ‘This is the Day of the Lord you are living through! This is the Day of the Lord that afflicts you!’

Everything stops.

Rest! Rest if you can! We are sending energy in a different direction now. We are turning energy back on ourselves, making us comprehend our sins, making us understanding pride, hubris, exponential expansions, aggressiveness against the world, theft, con-jobs, greedy lies.

The gristle tastes like fat. The gristle does not make us salvage our truest memories.

We are dead now. A hole has been ruptured inside of us; and now the black hole is gaping and drawing to itself all the matter we have accumulated through years of hard work, sweat and blood, cheating, manipulating, twisting, aggravating.

Death comes fast and hard. Death is a mask we wear so that no one can approach us. Death is an island we inhabit when the positive becomes negative. Death is a carnival in our soul, separated from daylight, mitigated by nothing, transcending our trite little lives of accumulating status and objects, all at the cost of our own sacraments and sacred natures.

Cosmic gristle comes to us. Cosmic gristle promises us rest.

13 February 2009

WHEN THE SHADOWS DANCE

When the shadows dance, watch out. They are too happy.

When the shadows dance, beware. Something is burning.

When the shadows dance, look at the source of their mirth. Trouble is brewing.

Who marvels at the falling of the light? Who celebrates the death of the delightful circumstance, the passing of law and logic into nothingness? Who delights in this?

The Sons of Chaos are beginning to dance – and we understand from this that pain is entering the system on a large scale. There will be much trial, much discontent, much horrible disorder. There will be death. Muslims will be killed in Europe; Europeans will be killed by crazed, angry, frightened God-imploded Muslims.

That is just the beginning of things.

World war will be loosed upon the world.

Shadows will celebrate.

Economic despair will scold us and accuse us of having lost our companionship with God. And this will all be true.

Shadows will leap about the room.

Women will be hurt. Women will be blamed. Jews will be blamed.

All of this has happened before. And it will happen again.

The world turns. The clock makes a halting sound, and stops.

Every atom has a time to live, a time to die, a time of decay into nothingness.

Our economy decayed into nothingness.

The greed of bankers was the decaying into nothingness.

The bubble popped. The shadows began dancing.

Heil, Hitler! Heil, Hitler!

18 February 2009

EXCALIBER IS OBITUARIAL

Excaliber is obituarial. But that is only one of its problems. In fact, the obituarial part of the prophecy speaks volumes about the value of the thing-in-itself. We are not sorry that it is obituarial. This projection of the death camp actually lifts our hearts and gives our lives meaning. Nothing is more gruesome than growing old and dying alone. It is the great sorrow of life. Death for a holy cause is a great value when seen in the right light.

Excaliber speaks of nobility and meaning in the prestige. Excaliber speaks of a death for a reason, of a magnanimous entrenchment for life and for communal living.

But is this not also a lie?

We move from one ardor to the next, from one passion to its opposite, creating bodies as we go, bodies for others, our own oppositions, to inhabit when they, too, turn.

We turn and become what we were not. They turn and become what we once were, filling a void.

Blowing bubbles. We are always blowing bubbles; and then weeping when the bubbles pop.

We know that the masculine arc is lost in June. We know that excaliber is lost when the arc is complete. We know that Saturn in the Seventh Day; and that he cuts off all the electricity.

Then we travel in darkness for many years, in the water of darkness. There is a boat outside; and the wounded hero is placed in the boat by some unknown woman. Some say it is his sister; some say it is his wife. But it is possible that this woman is a ghost, or an old woman with no family, or perhaps an element of religious vocation, a religious metaphor, or an insubstantial vision illuminated by song and by the moon.

He is gone for years, drifting alone in a boat behind the world toward the east.

When the time comes for excaliber, something grows, the sun rises, a young girl appears, a sacrifice is made. He enters an open door. There is some kind of celebration. The world becomes big with child.

There is a moment of revelation, a new life, an expansion of the good light, the warm light.

But with excaliber comes also a contract with Death.

Saturn has signed this contract already.

In that sense, excaliber is obituarial.

13 March 2009

CONTINUITY IS LOST: BUSINESS IS THE DEVIL’S MAELSTROM

Continuity has been lost. An epiphany comes: Business is the Devil’s Maelstrom.

The Devil chooses the Businessman, telling him: ‘I will give you the world if you will serve me, serve money, if you will cheat and steal and lie for the sake of your indecent lifestyle. If you will persecute the poor, and make alliance with only the rich of the world, the kings, the violent forces of the kings. If you will turn your armies into the international police force that guards the rich and makes the world safe for business, for the exploitation of the poor, all over the face of the earth. If you do this, I will make you rich.’

But continuity is lost. The bankers cannot stop themselves. They put in place a great machinery for the perpetual increase of the capital system. This system-as-machine will endure for a millennium if nurtured and respected and, of course, protected by the government.

But the bankers cannot help themselves. More money is flooding in; more money; more money. We can get all the money in the world if we just look the other way. Of course the world may end. Of course there is danger of an earthquake. Perhaps the buildings will fall; but perhaps we can insure ourselves so that the buildings ds not fall on us; or even insure ourselves so that we make a killing when the building does fall on us. That is the risk we take…but fortune favors the brave.

Continuity is lost. An epiphany comes: Business is the Devil’s Maelstrom.

The businessman and the bankers have sold their souls to the American Devil.

The world is ending.

Saturn will now get his periodical revenge.

You had better keep your head down if you live on the north side of the moon.

13 March 2009

UNCONSCIOUS EXTINCTION

The unconscious nature approaches extinction without a fear. There is no dread; there is no hypertense mechanism involved in the denial of death and the aggrieved ecstasy of damnation. The cortex bleeds. The biscuit of romance has been tossed. Animals die. Animals die without grief but in a wild combat that pits first against last, black against white, no emotional value inherent, no unemotional value of elite mental equivalency. Just brute muscle against acute energy. Just solitary incentive against the great build-up of hate and conquest.

Unconscious extinction is a gift, is it not -- a deep drink of the dirty water of Lethe? Consciousness is pain. Consciousness is anguish. Consciousness, itself, is the sin against Life.

The unconscious man charges into life and out of life as if it were a dream. He has no dread, he has no pathetic examination of self, tears not lost on flacid thoughts, no hysteria for lost time, no castigation of self for mismanaged accomplishments. There is none of that. Just an embodied lust for deep satisfaction, root to core, essence to perimeter, leaping at form like an animal unvanquished.

Unconscious extinction is a blessing in disguise. Drink water here. Forget yourself. Your fall will be regulated by well-meaning arbitrage factors. Your extinction will be lost in the picture of the happy family. Your failure will be fixed by politicians handing our money. Did you fail to provide for your family? Did you forget to buy a house, a new car, a beautiful vacation package, condominiums on the lake? That’s no problem. You will be saved by all the decent bankers who will lend you money at negative interest rates. Life will be good again. Life will be so easy that you will soon be a billionaire simply by borrowing money as fast as you can. And if you can’t pay the money back Congress will pay it back for you. Life will be so good you will offer several of your own rebirths to others simply for the sake of prolonging this existence a bit longer. You will borrow against future lives, in order to extend this life for a few more months, a few more years. You don’t have to die. You can live for ever. Everything is simple again. Maybe Alan Greenspan was right all along? All we need to do is to keep blowing bubbles with cheap money. Bubbles are good. Let’s all blow bubbles endlessly…maybe well never have to come down. It worked for Lawrence Welk. Maybe Lawrence Welk was God’s true prophet.

The unconscious nature has no idea what a bubble is. The unconscious nature lives, dies, lives again. Death is nothing but a sleep. Sleep is good. Life is nothing but a different kind of sleep.

26 March 2009

TARMONEY BABY

Tarmoney Baby speaks a thousand words a second. Casting out from the void a backward talking sobriquet. We are lonely, all of us. We have taps on our shoes and we have wings on our feet. Our soliloquies are built with bricks and our elementary negotiations begin with ourselves and end with the tomahawk in our hands, painted brusquely, manners of thought.

Metaphorical tomahawk. We see that the rudimentary nativity has stalled. I seek to be re-born but the rudimentary nativity has been stalled. There is not enough darkness in this room I guess. We speak about the savage request for thought and prayer. In this darkness God abides, listening for prayer, smelling wonderful draughts of storax, onycha, galbanum. Prayers are like incense rising up to God in a gentle soliloquy of happenstance. Our darkness does not light up the room enough, so we cannot see the ribs of the great leviathan, we cannot understand the labyrinthian mechanism for passages leading beyond this frightening nothingness.

Tarmoney Baby waits in second gear, stemming the tide of nothing, listening to gross inventive silence, seeing black only, black not turning to something less black. I am as black as I can be without being roasted over the fire, indelicately. Black, black, black. I see a red door and I want it painted black. Conceiving nothing in the mean time about the scale of unbelieving. Believing nothing in time meaning the scale conceiving involution begins any second now and achieves the opposite of piling atoms upon atoms, building upon buildings, families upon families, clerical associations upon whatnot and wherefore. Dropping, dropping down, dropping down into a hole here. Where did the light go?

We cannot breathe properly – what is falling? We see only dusk and dusk’s clay shadow, Mister Montebank – what is diminishing? We can hear the remarkable Mister Cheevers muttering something about evangelical madness – who is waving an axe at the sun.

Tarmoney Baby believes we all can capture the big top. He will be the one to do it then. Paint his face black – he is a white baby, but no one will know that if we only paint his face and arms and legs and back black black black– and start calling him, ‘yo, homey’!

31 March 2009

MOM, WHY DID THE BANKERS STEAL AMERICA?

Mom, why did the bankers steal America?

I don’t know, dear. Perhaps they wanted to own everything.

Why did they sell America to China?

I don’t know, dear. Perhaps they have no sense of loyalty.

Why did they play the role of the Trojan horsemen?

Perhaps they were sent by God to punish Americans for forgetting God in the frenzy of their material fortune.

Mom, will the bankers be punished for their treason?

I don’t know, dear. Americans tend to be forgiving.

Will they be forced to leave this country and re-locate in Argentina or in Chile? Or perhaps in Canada?

Is that what you’d like, dear?

No, mother. I am not so forgiving. I would propose that they be hanged from the nearest tree and all their heirs be reduced to the abject state they have created for so many throughout the world.

Have no you forgiveness in your heart, dear?

Very little, mother. They have burned the world to a black cinder. The arrogant shall be like moths in the flame. The proud shall fall like dust in the lakebed. And the rich and heartless shall be cut off, and treated like scallions.

Dear, would you be the first to cut away the head of such a scoundrel?

Aye, mother. Bring Paulson here; bring Greenspan. Guilt is a rope that wears thin when used appropriately.

1 April 2009

EXPLAIN THIS TO ME

Explain this to me, he said. Explain to me how the sea can incorporate in its own body thousands of species and thousands of fragmentary apostrophes. Thousands of camps of feelings and millions of artificial incandescences. Explain this to me.

Explain this to me, he said. Explain to me how the sky can be home to everything we know. If the sky is home to everything is it not also home to the anti-sky – and, if so, is this not a conflict of interest.

Explain this to me. How can all the thieves of the world live in Washington, D.C. and New York City? Is that not so?

Is it possible that all the horrible creatures have emerged out of the hot vat of decadence and have appeared here in the darkest spots, manifesting as death and disease in the heart of our country?

Thieves everywhere; thieves everywhere!

Haul out the guillotine!

Thieves everywhere; thieves everywhere!

Is it true that nearly everyone really dies of shame? And is not death-by-shame a kind of torturous suicide?

1 April 2009

DIAMOND-CUTTERS LAMENT

Diamond-cutters lament. There is not enough evaporated dream-stuff in the atmosphere. Too much dry pragmatism has turned the world into a tinder-box. A fire is coming that will burn each tree to the ground, render each city a charcoal iconography of Hellish homage’s to indecent progress.

The Sun is an arid kingdom. The Sun burns up the world. The Sun has allegiance, first, to the threatened Father; then he has allegiance to those in open rebellion against the Old World.

Diamond-cutters understand very little when it comes to political natures and urban gambits; they understand even less of the celestial hip-hop clairvoyances of New Age merchants of inner peace. They understand the movements of markets, the fluctuations of merit and theft, the harmony hidden in the struggle against Death as an abstract phenomenon.

Geometry appears as a Saturnian condition. A surface of planes all commingle in a tight condition of angles, determining the fresh calendar of vision. Water carriers are near. Water carriers despise the fire-men. Water-carriers hate the incandescent natures of the Daylight.

Diamond-cutters understand that the beautiful creation of Western civilization has been fire-bombed by the Masters of the Universe, the doctors and king-makers at Goldman Sachs. Diamond-cutters are angry. Diamond-cutters are turning gray, beginning to contemplate travel, name-changes, suicide.

Diamond-cutters want someone to blame.

Diamond-cutters are no longer needed. No one is buying their product. No one is buying their line of religion and their scenarios of need.

The diamond-cutters are insurance salesmen, afterall.

Insurance is dead.

The diamond-cutters are now hiring out as political assassins. Someone needs to be dead. Someone needs someone dead. Ok.

A man has to do what a man has to do.

16 April 2009

ARTIFICIAL CHARACTER – POLITICAL EXPERTISE

Artificial character. They say that he has one. They say that he is all smiles, that he speaks in clichés, that he works both sides of the aisle. They say that he is made of plastic; they say that he has a Teflon nature. Nothing sticks to him. No corruption destroys him. No catalog of degeneration spoils his image.

The problem is that the image is not the man.

We worship the image in America too much. The image is a kind of surface breeding, one is which all the knowledge we seek about a man or a concept or a set of ideas resides only on the surface of things, is really a patina containing all information except depth. And depth is truth.

The plastic surface reflects nicely on the wall. His house is clean; his car is shiny; you can almost comb your hair in his reflection as he smiles at you, perfect teeth, winsome wife, photogenic children. A real politician. A real hero. Lots of money. Really successful. A power couple really. Who could have a better life than they do?

He is so successful; and she is so blonde.

He has an artificial character. So what? you say. He looks hot. He moves well on the dance floor. I especially like that hot car he drives. He has all the latest electronics in his house.

He has an artificial character. He is a fraud, a phony. So what? He’s a winner. You’re just jealous. He’s not some stupid loser with an obsession about social justice or about economic equality or about God or about the meaning of life.

That much is true. He is selfish, greedy, self-infatuated, willing to lie and cheat and steal to get ahead.

You say: Life is ugly sometimes. Sometimes you have to be ugly to get ahead.

The idea of getting ahead creates the artificial character. There is no Number 1. Type A is a city in Taiwan. Being plastic and artificial, with a perfect smile and perfect hair and a perfect façade and a perfect image and a surface knowledge of things and a surface depth of understanding and a surface quality of ethics is artificial and self-damning. It is a sign of a very lonely society, one that could admire such a travesty as the artificial character.

I think he’s cool.

Cool is the artificial character. Cool is the mortal sin of this country. Cool is the quality of fraudulence. Distancing oneself from what’s real, projecting an image and watching oneself perform in a false movie. Only Quentin Tarantino could be proud of such a travesty.

17 April 2009

THE DREAM WILL BE SHATTERED

The dream will be shattered. This means that the sky will fall very soon and that you will be carried up in a shout of soldiers wishing you well. You are not allowed to look directly into the sun as the sun is a contagion to all but the very best, those capable of godhood. This also includes you.

The dream shattering is not to be feared. The dream shattering is the chance for you to escape the dreary fortress you have built for the sake of your own imprisonment.

No one understands you. No one can comprehend what it is you have just managed to address so carefully in your intricate image. Dogs run free. Dogs in the heaven have access to many stations in your own zodiac, howling at you, befriending you, chasing you in the dark night when the snow covers the street and when the lamps above are swaying in the wind, casting horrible rocking shadows down below, filled with horror-filled manifestations embodied in myths of Hecate’s latest destruction of men gathering near the Moon without their armor on.

Actaeon, please re-negotiate with the sweet sky the color of your self-flagellation. You are entering now the land of no returns. You are entering now the forest of loss, the unquiet capacity of revenge and sacred retaliation. Actaeon: Mars is not welcome here; Mars has no votive power down under here, where the school is transformed to the thin-ice-version of some madcap Guillaume the Guillotine slicing Adam’s apples into a veritable haven of pies, conditioned by the logic of famine nests and their animated co-regencies of dark-skinned federales seeking kin to fire the kiln and destroy Time, shoveling bourgeois remains into creed-addled crematoriums to be homage to Agni and the mountain-dwelling Parsis.

Please be aware of this, Actaeon.

22 April 2009

EXPONENTIAL EQUIVALENCY

Exponential equivalency. The tempest abates only for a moment, evoking a shade of reason and peace, just enough to allow the world to remember the potential for bliss, the capability for expansion. But the moment of calm is merely the eye of the storm. Iris. Horny Corneus. Trouble’s brewing. Night descends.

As far as we expanded our balloon, just that far we will also contract it. And then all kinds of troubles will appear. Pandora has a harsh nature. Cain has a surly temperament. The class of doctors will try to hide inside their country club regalia. But the party has declined. The party has dissolved. The party is now black; and all the renegades who once delivered pizzas for the kings and queens now begin killing royalty, kidnapping children, oscillating between potentialities for knighthood and the dregs of annihilation, drug addiction and early death protecting the innocent.

The party is over. The party is unwinding.

Whom shall we invite to leave the party first, as quickly as possible?

Bankers are gone; insurance executives next; politicians must leave or be killed; lawyers will be sent to New Siberia in Manitoba, Canada.

This will not make the party more fun; but we must punish those who put themselves ahead of the lives of their cronies. The crime has been whitewashed. Laws have been crafted for the rich.

There will be no more fun for some time now. There will be simple exponential equivalency of justice. Exponential equivalency.

Exponential equivalency is another phrase indicating….an exaggerated revenge.

It may not be fun; perhaps not even fair. But it will manifest. It will turn everything green, after first turning everything red.

25 April 2009

DREAMS DIE

Dreams die. A vacuum comes in. Iridescent vocabulary tumbles. Something noteworthy passes. Nobility is not a problem to be solved. Not a delinquent facsimile of something real. Nobility is the high step in the low desert of phantom trajectories. Temporary occlusion occurs. The dream falters, flickers, flattens. Something is hidden here. Under a bright blue sky: heliotropes break. Heliotropes are fractured; and the jade bleaches heliotropes white. Inexplicably. Hard is the stage of recovery, here in the Pale Kingdom. Dream-figures fragment. Feuds fuel fear. Phoenix freezes; frenzies foil. The void is not a place to build a castle, Pink said to Ptolemy. Archetypes blanche. Archaic streets crack and begin speaking Latin. What is a man to do? A lightman is running out of candles; and he has lost his sack of cloth Castaneda-replicas: Nagual made out of nylon. Balls roll off the flat plain, sinking in gravity’s stew down toward Hell’s parking lot, conditioned by Mack Adam, who offends one and all by announcing that the street is not straight enough.

The invasion has begun. The invasion in the belly of the beast. Bad things on the horizon. Bad things approaching. What can we know now, now that we’ve dropped the rock into the sea? Has Time become exempt from itself? Has the category of retribution ceased to bring to the eye a tear, to the heart a trembling arid day-sense? Substantial grieving. Occupancy of the Rhine, a clinging to vituperous conditions. German pomp. German aristocracy. Turned under by a scythe. European hegemony trembles too. Scales fall from the eyes. Dragons leave the premises. The crescent; the crescent. The iridescent crescent. I’ll have another crescent with my cappuccino, please.

Time is abandoned, like a ship that has been stove in, crippled. I’ll take Primordial Essences for ten dollars, Alex. Ghosts and fog. Give me a one-thousand yard stare and I will give you the world, Adam Kadmon. Dual-light. Dual-light.

It takes God long to be angered. But when He is finally angered He remains angry for almost too long.

Dreams die. Dreams die.

And I am beginning to be angry.

5 May 2009

ESCALLATING THE ARCHIVE

I escalate the archive. The salmon comes and go. I escalate the archive. The salmon calls; and then is gone.

I escalate the archive; but the sumptuous anniversary reaches the vocabulary of the trumpet; and then all hell breaks loose.

We are lost. We have become avengers in the plot to overthrow the smallest atoms in the universe. The biggest atoms have armies to help them. But the smallest atoms have nothing. How can we take sides against those who have nothing?

Thousands of Asian farmers commit suicide in their fields because of landlord abuse and market manipulation.

What do we care about this? Do we stop the world; do we tilt the plane back toward ‘balance’?

We do not.

We escalate the archive.

That is all we do.

Jupiter, great god of balance: come to our rescue.

Saturn is coming near and he is raising a very seditious harvesting sickle that reflects blood in the light of the moon, blood which drops down to the Earth, branding the world with terror.

Venus is gone.

Mercury has turned grey.

Mars has a pact with Saturn and is coming closer and closer, angry for action.

The Sun has been crucified again, and cast down into the dungeon, cast under the water where he must float, unseen, West to East, until Time comes again.

Is that not what it is to journey in this life cycle, Son? Why do you travel to Vietnam? For symbolic reasons? Because you think you are this Sun-God himself, the one under water?

Or is it for some other reason?

Do you sacrifice your own comfort for the sake of the world?

Is this your personal form of climbing up on the cross offering yourself for the sins of the world?

12 May 2009

THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF MONEY

The absolute monarchy of money hits the world in the face

With a wet fish.

All illusions of equality are passed up the chimney –

And all the lords of the universe pass into the Halls of Valhalla,

Passing down word that the poor will not be allowed to follow;

Orders are issued to execute strangers who dare approach the gates of the aristocracy.

We are back where we started; we are back at the beginning again.

The beginning of our demise.

Kings cannot be trifled with.

They can kill swiftly with a smile,

And a bag of money paid to the local butcher down on Gravity Street.

Beware: they have ears in every pub;

They have licenses to command the police force;

They own the whores and merchants and the military lords.

They are allowed to kill homeless men for mere sport,

Or in order to train their children to become computer game maestros.

The rich are not the same as the rest of us.

They are monsters wearing suits and ties, dresses and minks;

Friends of the arts;

Benefactors of humanity.

And also mutilators of small children

Who have body parts they need for their own flesh and blood.

They are not the same as us.

They believe they were gods in an earlier life

And will be gods again, when they re-prove their own cold-blooded weal.

Kings cannot lose.

They can lose other men’s money; but not their own.

They can lose other men’s wives; but not their own.

They can lose nations one whole grip at a time; but they will not lose their own.

Their blood is deep in their soil they tell themselves.

In fact, the blood that is deep in the soil is the blood of those men

(And ancestors of the same men)

They have killed to make their fortune here,

Shrouded with myth and now with the glamour of nondenominational wealth.

We love the rich.

They are better than we are.

We are nothing without them.

Give me Hollywood; give me the rich bankers of New York;

Give me faces that live in magazines;

Give me plastic lives, plastic surgeries, plastic money, plastic breasts;

Let me believe that my television is the new god

When it commands me to go down to the Walmart

And buy some form of lip gloss that makes me loved

By the whole world over for ever and ever.

Popularity makes me glow.

Popularity sells.

Popularity makes me happy.

Absolute monarchy.

It is passing. It never dwindles.

Killers make the best kings.

Thieves makes the best overlords.

Snakes make the best queens.

Chameleons make the best ladies in waiting.

16 May 2009

DREAMY DRUMS COLLIDE IN NOWHERE

Dreamy drums collide in Nowhere. Established rhythms break. Established creeds begin to bulge.

We are not long for this world of supreme order. The forces of brutal conquest are never buried far from the surface, always clustering below earth in a shaded realm, commanding the view of the soft underside. Viciousness is easy to tame, but only by force. We dare not convince ourselves that the world is only good and that all people desire peace and prosperity. The world is complex. There are many different gods circling overhead, circling underhead, claiming pockets of land, resources, reservoirs, demanding orthodox worship, if not preparing outright slavery.

Dreamy drums collide in the Land we call Nowhere. This Nowhere is bathed in black, covered by Night, is not bringing us something golden, but something unspectacularly remote and cold. Saturnian images prevail. It is the end of a world – beyond a bridge, a new world is being created, a new world is being born in light. Yet it is not easy to get to the new world, to that new creation.

There is a huge gap there, an abyss. We are approaching it, this gaping void. It is death; it is a horrible voidness. But it is not the end. Leaping from one womb to the next womb. Leaping with faith or leaping without faith, we cannot simply pretend that nothing is happening here, we cannot simply go back in time to that place where we had comfort and certainty.

Certainty died in June 2008. Someone shot me. Someone struck and kicked me out of the great sequence I had been inhabiting for many years. That was when things were kind, and fresh, and positive. But that has ended now; that reality is gone, dead, soon to be buried. We tally up the consequences of our sins, of our ignorances, of our victories. We tally up the prides and the selfishnesses, the sins of greed and the sins of abandonment. We tally these all up. And then prepare for the sky to fall and be broken on top of us. Nothing endures. Not even Sorrow endures. Not even Terror.

22 May 2009

EXILE BEGINS

Exile begins in the mind, in the heart. Exile begins as a rude condition created by an invisible framework, a fear, a vision of dark consequences. So many dreams that mean nothing; and then the dream comes, the one in a thousand, which teleports future contrivances back in to the soul, fueling apocalypse, fueling exile, fueling a nonbenign condition of dark salvation.

The devils are in the cards; but those cards are found below the water mark. It’s better if you don’t look down there yet, in fact.

Exile begins in the mind and then moves into the body. At the point where the body moves, the trajectory has been established and fatality is assured. Fatality, in the sense of destiny. Nothing can be changed. We are heading into the world without a care. We have left our home and family. Something is being moved religiously from above. Many deadly things will happen, we know. Many virtues are possible; but also many dark moments are activated for crime. Self-examination. And sacrifice.

3 June 2009

WHO IS THE TEMPEST?

Who is the Tempest? And what is a name? What is the spectacle of the blood that drives us all to this sad alley without light in which our own mortality awaits us? We are not dark natures. We are not criminal seasons. But we are driven here, down here, into the vale of flat sorrow, where all parts collapse, by some force in the sky, by some god or demon who derives joy from our suffering. We are not able to appreciate simple virtues of living decently any longer. That is our tragedy.

The Tempest is a force in our blood that longs for more, that demands extra credentials, that seeks to dominate the lost bravados, that calculates all value in terms of bank accounts and frightened manners of intricate gain. That puts death on a higher plane than virtue; that sees the image quest as the sacrosanct plank of common living.

The world gets ugly down here. The world gets evil and dark and lost and anxious and starved and crippled and cruel and anticipates apocalypse. We are, all of us, angels forced into a dark zone, against our will. We have been thrown out of the Garden, out of the good life, by a force of order that appeals not to our sorrow or suffering, but who sentences us to death, to mortal collisions with fatality’s vague promise, extended in space like a trap that leaves us no sense or thought of feeling or emotion but dread.

The Common Dread is, itself, the Tempest. The Tempest is coming, gaining speed, over the water. Gaining a brutal name and a brutal condition of equalization. Blow down everything: that is his goal, his epidemic template. He will singe the world, collapse brick and concrete, scatter decent and greedy souls in the same wind. The Tempest will strike everyone, will not applaud the rich and the specially treated. Everyone is equal – and equally abused – and equally culpable – in the eyes of the Tempest.

The Tempest has orders: he will strike down everyone in his path, high and low, old and young, male and female, hostile and kind.

The Tempest is coming. There will be no rainbow until 2019.

5 June 2009

INESCAPABLE TROUBLE APPEARS

Inescapable trouble appears. What are we now? Are we particular shadows that seek to devastate the land or the landed aristocracy? Are we troubled incendiary griefs which produce multiple associations of broken conveniences both in social order and in economic contrivances? Tarpaper producers of unrest? Eschatological remissions from the grave teleology of Ezekiel? Gloom managers hovering on the white cliffs of Dover, preparing some magical injection of torpor into the bloodstream of rational men and reasonable societies, declaring war and pestilence and a prophet’s jest (with a long face) upon the sad innocent faces of abundantly decent families, stern men and supporters of the current order of peace, prosperity, kindness, clever remonstrances, and convenient defense of the existing calendar and ordering class.

If we just maintain our positive frame of mind we will continue to lead the world in living standards, military might and the most square footage per individual residences in the world – nothing to worry about.

But inescapable trouble appears, first as a man’s frightened face, then as a bent left small finger, an emblem of an open Devil’s contract with implicit trouble for the near future. White faces all coalesce around the dead face of a boy who has fallen down a deep hole from the high sky and without whom the Earth will not be able to proceed in a straight line. All progress escalates into the solid core of nothingness.

The Solar God has been killed.

It was an accident. No one wished to kill the Golden Goose who laid the Golden Egg – but now the act is done. Inescapable trouble appears, and steadily expands. It cannot be stopped. It is like a large pool of magnesium that grows larger when fed with like contaminants. It will swallow the world. Nothing will be left except gaps and chloride vengeances, and broken veins in old women’s legs that tell story after story about how things could have been different, how things could have been more benign, if only we had exercised self-discipline and good judgment.

Inescapable trouble now appears on the horizon. In each man’s life there is a time of light and a time of darkness. If the light comes in the first half of life, the darkness comes in the second.

15 June 2009

THE CHAPEL IS CLOSED

The chapel is closed.

The doors have been locked.

The congregation has been given passes to Rick’s Sauna

And to the Crocodile Lounge and to the Green Acres Nursing Home

And to the Twilight Bowling Center.

There will be fun for everyone –

Until the fellow in the black suit shows up

To begin collecting the debt, that is.

Then the sorrow becomes manifold.

Then the lack of a chapel begins to make sense

As a symbolical occasion for the interpretation

Of a lost condition of soul.

And then it’s too late.

The ‘tittie bar’ will be open all night.

One can drink whiskey and talk about old love

And whine about preoccupations with power’s decline,

The waning of youth,

And the promise of pills to reinstate phallic composition

And wealth (for the two are mates apparently),

While overweight young girls jiggle and jaggle,

Giggle and gaggle,

And try to give out phone numbers

For late night private entertainment.

The man can convince himself that little has been lost.

But the truth is much more difficult to digest,

Since the truth is a kind of medicine

That strips all pretense away,

Exposing bone and sinew, culpabilities, and shames.

The chapel is closed.

It is not that the chapel being open would have made a difference –

Because the life of the soul had already vanished

And been replaced by a middle-class, suburban spiritual motif,

One in which wealth was the new garment,

And plastic, sterile cleanliness was the new metaphor of

Healthy solar living.

One in which extroversion was the law;

And the laws of God and Christ were dismissed

With a few self-flattering words,

Since everyone knew now that the biblical period was over,

That the realistic phase of adulthood

Demanded different responses to realistic problems

That myth and superstition provided for a nation of shepherds only

And such composite congregations living in the dark land of medieval

Misunderstanding of the daylight.

The churches shrank and the banks got bigger.

The churches shrank; office buildings got larger.

Everything got larger:

Houses, farms, portfolios, breasts, lips, phalluses.

Everything got bigger.

But churches got smaller.

And then the smallest church of all was merely closed, locked;

And the pastor was sent away.

No one needed him any longer.

Everything was perfect.

Everyone was rich.

We had Walmart; we had McDonalds.

The land didn’t really need a god any longer.

There was peace, prosperity;

There was success and sexual delight;

Drugs and conditions of godhood.

Go ahead: Lock the door.

Send the priest out of town.

Everything is fine.

11 June 2009

APOCALYPSE BY EDEMA

Apocalypse by edema.

There is too much water here, Noah – and not enough animals.

We need to dry out; we need to un-puff ourselves,

Scatter our debts to the wind,

Scatter our calendars,

Scatter our scenarios of death by water.

We have become unconscious with matter.

Too many kings scaling too many mountains of wealth and glory

All in extravagant throes of self-satisfaction.

But that has all ended now.

We are drifting lower and lower.

There is a kind of death that has occurs

As the great spirits fall down into matter,

Down into the pursuit of death,

The pursuit of the defiled nature,

Through the womb of pleasure

Into the womb of doubt and destruction.

Death. Edema. Tumescence.

Holding on to things we don’t deserve

And should not have for too long

As we fear to give them up,

Fear to have to face life without the objects that seem to shield us

From all the bad energies associated with living,

Such as dark turns, poverties, losses, damages.

Apocalypse by edema.

We are swollen.

We think that we are fine but we grow fatter and fatter,

Thinking that this fatness is somehow the triumph over darkness,

Rather than a symptom of a different darkness.

Our fat features are implications

That our lifestyle has become a problem,

Leading away from life,

Not into life,

Not closer to the core of life.

A bubble that removes us from life,

Further isolating us from our real nature,

Our real family of friends,

And creating the kind of situation

Where only a catastrophe, an apocalypse, can regenerate us.

Apocalypse by edema.

We are heading into deflation.

We are heading into a lost generation.

The deflation is not the problem.

The inflation was, in fact, the problem.

19 June 2009

ENCAPSULATION OF THE TREATISE ON MARS

Encapsulation of the treatise on Mars.

A sluggish character almost always gives way

To the masculine entity who believes that a world in flames,

Filled with manly death-in-action,

Is preferable to a world in water,

A drowning parti,

Situated in a brown bed under the covers

With an angry mame

With an angry mime.

Why do men start wars?

Because they can’t stand the slow death of time unwinding,

The calendar abusing them with cancer, or heart break,

Or the rigid condition of a paralytic colon.

There is not much to choose from once Saturn takes over,

Once the endless hyperbole of options –

Juno’s jovial conditions of life –

Vanish and the future becomes hard-boiled suddenly

And falls like a piece of over-ripe fruit

Into one’s lap bearing the catastrophe of worms.

Mars is a less-kind word for Adam, is he not?

Adam, who is blood red, not only from his spilling Eve’s first blood –

High men are notorious for low deeds, afterall –

But red also, as Cain was red, from anger, tribalism, fury, blushing rage.

Adam sets the world ablaze.

But that was in another sense, in another story,

Far removed from the abstract condition of the garden

And the silvery moonlight walk,

The lake-side rest,

The hand on the thigh,

The lip on the nipple,

The scrotum quotum,

The phallus steam-riddle put inside Phyllis Stein.

As quick as saying Jackie Robinson, the deed was done.

There was some embarrassment.

Then the deed was done a second time.

It became obvious to both pairs of virginal conjunctions

That it would be nice to continue this experiment –

There was some initial awkwardness –

Hence, the tiny trace of blood left behind on the grass.

Other than that, not much resistance,

A lot of warm nectar,

A frenzied give and take,

A vigorous attempt to climb inside one another,

And then stars everywhere,

A milky way scattered out in space,

A sappy tree,

A sappy former tree become a kind of mushroom,

His old age being less than advertised,

His youth being more stone than tree in fact.

A tree and two stones.

Aye, a Trinitarian’s expert knowledge of trajectory.

No, my name is not Tristan.

And, yes, we can have another dessert,

If you’re still hungry.

Where did Mars go?

Where did Mars come from?

How can we encapsulate his story?

First there is a man who fears the sin his village has embraced;

And then he fears the crime it has become;

And then his life is threatened, so he girds himself for war.

Then he defeats the darkness in open-field combat.

Then he is rewarded and becomes the king of the town.

Then he declares war on all the darkness of the world.

And he leads a great crusade against the darkness.

He is successful in his combat,

So successful, in fact, that he becomes, himself,

The darkness he once fear and sought to destroy.

And then he falls.

And then the sun goes out.

And the village sinks back in to fear, sin, dissoluteness, and confusion.

The women of the village begin to carry around huge dildos,

Mocking the men of the town for their loss of virility,

Their loss of ardor.

It is mockery, yes;

But underneath it is also a kind of prayer for the resurrection of phallic heat.

Fill us; fill us, with magic heat – the women seem to be calling.

Adam searches everywhere for his old flame, Connie Lingus.

Something inside Adam is moving.

There is a seed in his heart.

Any moment he will become a full-flowered violet.

Or perhaps a violent heliotrope.

Adam is buried in wet earth.

Something is burrowing in his chest.

Above, in the dark sky somewhere,

Mars is beginning to become agitated again.

Venus is near.

Mercury watches.

The Sun is coming up.

Casey, the beagle puppy, squats beneath the bush

And deposits his own mud in the rain.

All the elements are rude.

Mix them up:

And, magically, they separate

And seek to refine themselves.

3 July 2009

LET’S SING AND DANCE BEFORE WE ALL FALL DEAD

Let’s sing and dance before we all fall dead.

Let’s grind the organ; let’s emancipate the claws for old impresarios a la Django Reinhardt to rend our suffering a higher cataclysm of extravaganzas. Let’s clean house with the old derelict establishment. Let’s rob the banks; let’s hang the bankers, the lawyers, the politicians and the insurance executives. Let’s dance on the graves of the professional elite, the smiling circus trainers in their suits and in their German cars, their plastic lives, their plastic debts, their plastic families. Let’s cultivate honesty and reality at least once before the sun falls. Let’s burn all magazines and let’s take the magnanimous oath to never again seek to live in a magazine. Let’s disconnect from the conventions of middle-American false virtues, of following every voice leading us to war who claims we are fighting for freedom and democracy, who does not also say we are fighting for money for the presidents of our corporations. Let’s not allow politicians to wrap themselves in either the flag or the bible as a way of justifying their own misdeeds. Let’s consider Bach the highest of high ideals our own children should surpass, instead of Donald Trump. Put Michelangelo, Dante, Shakespeare, Leonardo ahead of Bret Favre and John Elway. Can we leave something of greatness behind for the world, before we leave? We will exit; we will be trumped into the dust like dandelions and silver-dollar plants; and when we look at ourselves from heaven, let us be convinced we have given our souls to the world, not just our images and the projections of our more selfish natures. Let us be examples of solar titans, those who are remembered in time as the ones who held light in the darkness, and showed those lost a path leading forward into heavenly light.

Let’s sing and dance before we all fall dead. Before we all fall dead, let us makes of ourselves men of understanding, and men of vision and vocation. Before we all fall dead, let us make peace with ourselves, peace with our shadows, peace with our wives, our sisters, and brothers. Before we all fall dead, let us sing and dance. And remember that the hollow space is also full.

7 July 2009

IMAGINE THERE IS NO HEAVEN

In the dry cavern of holiday thought, ritual achieves distance from the mundane circle of abbreviated giving. The circuit breaks. Freight is abandoned. The savage consistency of reason is muted, and begins to wag a finger in its own face, disturbed by finality, transformed by the reality of mortality.

We can imagine many things. We can imagine a rude conspiracy to control every last dime and every last penitent obituary. We can imagine a crude foreign obligation approaching from the east, from the west, from the south. But Time talks in a blank cadaver, emitting symbols on a craven black persimmon papyrus, from which we gain sense, sensate reason, and, even more, nonsensical visionary awareness, transcendence. Occult misperception of dreams does not evoke in the wise dread or even a dark premonition. Fear nothing. Especially fear nothing when and where Fear is lord, Fear is omnipresent, Fear is blanked for the unregenerate will of necessity. In this environment, where Fear rules, achieve Fear’s opposite, achieve Fear’s complement.

Hope rises out of Fear, in a magical dance, appearing from a fog of trouble in such a way that one can barely remember Fear when it passes. Hope is a Waking State, which rises out of Fear, the Dreaming State, after which the dream is forgotten.

Imagine there is no Heaven, just a passing between poles that we can call almost anything. The expanded Breath; the contracted Breath. Brahma; Vishnu. Negentropy; Entropy. God and Devil. North and South. One and Zero. Time and Eternity.

Imagine there is no Heaven. Imagine there is no Hell. Turbulent sequences followed by comfortable states of stasis.

MOST OF MY FRIENDS COME FROM THE SKY

I.

Most of my friends come from the sky.

Most of my friends are windy and cloudy and speak in syllables

Unrecognizable on the Earth,

Undecipherable by those amassing wealth and power

And clandestine associations

And trunks filled with family secrets,

Conspiracies,

Blood cloths,

Sharp objects,

Transitions to dark nights on secluded roads

In river districts

With men whose last names all end in vowels.

Most of my friends do not speak the language of self,

Of Maslow, of Freud,

(‘You are a sick man, Freud!’).

Some speak of Marx;

But these friends seem destined to hover on some borderland,

Some high plateau,

Screaming at the sky,

Condemning both man and God,

Condemning man for stupidity in believing in God,

And condemning God, too, for believing in man.

Poor German fellows.

They hate their fathers so;

And I can understand this;

Their fathers have given up the sky

And now sit, ensconced on the earth,

Kings of nothing but a small tract of land,

A small consideration of greed,

A small empire of lost dreams,

Coagulated wrath attached to a business myth,

A patent,

A convenience undeveloped,

A gold vein in someone else’s garden,

A military wrath to steal the neighbor’s second wife,

Some nagging undevelopment that haunts the creed

Of dad’s unremitting self-horror

That drives him ever-deeper into daemon-denial,

Sin, loathing, contemporary values, lost measurement,

Fog, arbitrary science, arbitrary faith, arbitrary unincandescence,

A shadow believing itself a lamp,

A sorrow believing itself a joy,

A recondite extravagance believing itself truly modest.

The mirror man, frozen by Time,

Into a grim trajectory ever away from home,

Away from joy,

Away from love,

Away from God,

Away from emancipation.

But God (Time) forgives even your father for his lost compass.

II.

Most of my friends come from the sky.

Most of my friends are young and refuse to get old.

Most of my friends are colored – non-white, non-black –

Built up out of elements of Nature,

Not out of bones and blood and stones and conditions of trees.

Not petrified.

(‘Peter, I build this church upon you. Erection’s end pyre’s next.’)

Most are barely living, children really;

More bird than man,

More owl than sparrow,

More hawk than isolated lector or manifested tern.

Most of my friends speak a secret language.

Most of my friends are engraved with broken alphabets.

Most of my friends speak of spring and of spring’s archaic heaven.

Most of my friends collect leaves, branches, fragments of trees,

Periodical mushrooms,

Berries assembled in magic forest shades.

Most of my friends would rather fly than be King of the Earth.

The King of the Earth knows nothing of Eternal Manners, Eternal Grace.

He cannot fly because his pockets are filled.

He is ruled by the gravity of his possessions and his prepositions.

There is a time to fill up.

The Sun comes to fill one up.

Expansion is, then, the law.

There is a time to empty out.

The Moon comes to empty the Sun.

Contraction conquers the Night.

Everything runs down.

De beaucoup de mes amis sont venus des nouages.

Below, school children are singing.

They wake me up.

I, myself, am also in the sky, flying above Nice, 1962.

But no one can see me.

I like to be invisible.

14 July 2009

CONCOCT SOMETHING; CONCOCT ANYTHING

Concoct something; concoct anything. There is a rubics cube in the bathroom. By turning the pieces I can establish my own genius in less that fifteen minutes. I smile when I do this, knowing that it means something, but not knowing what it means exactly.

My mother says: “Concoct something; concoct anything!” It is her way of chastising me for my laziness, my lack of direction, my inability to maintain material momentum in this world.

My father says: “Leave the boy alone. He’ll be ok. He’s a bit sensitive. He’s a thinker, that’s all.” This infuriates my mother, for she thinks my father is encouraging me to become a loser, a drifter, an unmarried object of justified ridicule in the family.

“Can’t you be an investment genius, or something. You are bright. You always did well in school. Can’t you turn that IQ of yours toward something practical for a change. Philosophy does not pay. Poetry does not pay.”

Concoct something; concoct anything.

Roger Moon is a silly boy across town who has developed software that determines comparative values of condominiums. He says he is on the verge of making big bucks from a major real estate concern. My sister says: “Why can’t you be more like Roger Moon? You’re smarter than he is. But you sit around all day, reading books by Germans and looking out the window at the rain.”

Why do I hate this world, you ask? This world has no need for the skills I bring to it. This world rejects my talents and tells me that it is better to be a mediocre barber than a brilliant philosophical. This world tells me that the only thing that matters is the bottom line, the swelling column of your bank account. No one respects you unless you have money in your pocket; you drive a nice new shiny car. No one cares about your dreams, your spirit, your soul, unless you can prove you are financially solvent. Try to get a loan based on the brilliance of your verse. They’d be laughing Keats out of the town. They’d be laughing Shakespeare out of the county.

Why do I hate this world?

Why do I hate this world?

Concoct something; concoct anything. Be an inventor. Develop the can opener that is also a knife-sharpener that also flosses one’s teeth. Now that really would be something!

17 July 2009

ESCHATOLOGY TRIUMPHS

Eschatology triumphs. And the reason for this is….Justice. Balance. We die because Shame overtakes us, shame at our own failure, shame at the gravity of our own sins.

We fly; we dream; we are children forsaking nets and cardigan dress and the fortune of rural conceptions, in heaven. Nothing holds us back, presses us near the ground. All of our ambitions leave us free to float, free to expect, free to imagine. But then the hammer comes down. Saturn returns with a vengeance: a long face, black clothing, intermediate obligations to turn the world inside out, for the sake of Sin and from sin’s calumnious bravura.

The Ego, the Hero, is a horrible soul. The Eagle, our Helio, builds his cities and his networks, and his trade centers, and his railroads and his shipyards and his airports, without thought to anyone but himself, loyal to none but to his own dream of Progress. All the shadows suffer, dragged along, forced into slavery to help build up this dream. Yes, the Invader is never far from his dreams. The Dark Invader is always coming back to consume the masterpiece, to slip inside of Rome inside a wooden crate or calf or horseshoe-shaped container and torch the dreary city while all the pale saints are resting in bed.

The Shadow is a soulless creature, a friend of the Devil, and enemy of progress, wealth, education, redemption. The Shadow is a soulless soldier, a part of the war-lord group, tribal, on the verge of starvation, hideous in his ritual atrocities, human sacrifices, blank minds in eternal brusque stand-still non-animations, living for fire and blood and especially for the blood of the Hero, the blood of the Aryan Helio, who moves from place to place, building up wealth, and enslaving the locals through technology.

Eschatology returns, triumphing over time. The Hero is wounded; and the Town loses its source of energy. Then the Invaders from the hills descend on the town and manifest Progress’s Primary Fear in the form of the Scythe, the Crescent Moon. Then all hell breaks loose.

1 August 2009

THE CARBUNCLE PLAIN

The carbuncle plain is anonymous at first, like a dry speck on the hand of some monstrous achievement, a pimple on a donkey’s ass. But the area of meaning begins to associate itself with the primary authority on diseases, the old man who lives in the mountain under a dark aura, telephoning images down into the valley to prepare them for an assault on their senses and their mentality, as the number 7 invades them with deadly diseases, including the Black Death, the Bubonic Plague. Consternation fills the land. The arbitrary escalation of belief is mandated by the government. Economic growth is mandated by the government. Positive thinking is mandated by the government. Ecclesiastical expertise is called in to help manage growth of positive thinking. Discussion in public of plague is outlawed. Negative thought is outlawed.

There is too much freedom here! Things are becoming very serious now! We are not able to fulfill your request for the anonymous precondition of red harmony. Those is no precedence for what your are asking – a temper of achievement wrapped in a generous package of dreamy reconciliation with Life. I will have to speak with my supervisor. Perhaps he can suggest an alternative approach.

We die because we allow the carbuncle to hatch; we allow the rub to develop, a grainy cause, a brainy hyperbole, believing it a pearl perhaps, instead of the manical killer hiding in our body, desirous of murder. Perhaps we view it as our best side; the fish that got away; the great love of our life that just, for some mysterious reason, did not work out. Our last chance to be rich, to win the lottery, to achieve greatness. A seed of doubt, a plastic intention never spoken; an indelible note from eternity to our own souls, prophecying our own divilnity. An island, this carbuncle is. A tomb, riding just beneath the etheric sheath. A casket, round, hideously hard, stoic and grave, demanding attention, like Napoleon demanded the Russians accept his rule. (That little bastard will be the best of me. That little bastard will win. But no one wins here. Everything becomes neutral at the end, dismissing every creed and every convoluted antagonism and material scheme.)

We are nothing but juice and resolve, dream and horrible vengeance, childish believe, fantasy, and the terminal carbuncle. We have a closet filled with masks, identifies that we don’t even believe, we don’t even recognize any longer. The dream has vanished. Now there is only the long walk through the back door, through the meadow, down to the lake, where all mud is transformed into smoke and cinnamon. I am not a man any longer, am I? I am a horrible cavern. I am a black-faced crane. I am a butterfly dreaming I am no longer a man, and no longer dreaming. Dusk is precious.

7 August 2009

ENERGY ACCOMPLISHES NOTHING BUT NOURISHES GRAIN

Energy accomplishes nothing but nourishes grain. The Sun presupposes a crane sitting on a rock in the middle of the river looking down at creation, composing songs to the Trout God who composes worlds in his mind under the water.

The Sun preconceives everything, seeing in the hollow of all objects the seed which entitles creation to utter the magic word of ‘germination’. The German nation likes to use the words ‘expansionary creed’ – indicating that God’s purpose implies an expansion of water on to dry land and an invasion of eastern land by western emancipators. This is self-serving is its extreme; but the crux is implicit in Nature’s winds, which justifies this movement in the minds of the elders who watch the moon carefully estimating time’s shadow as a command of God toward understanding of his commands.

Numbers build the world; but, before building the world, numbers compose the blueprint that is used to construct the accurate building. The circle is the compass. This circle is the manifestor of Time. Everything comes from the sun God then, the Golden Circle, broken in to 360 minutes, from which are constructed all containers of the divine energy, inside of which Time gets its instructions.

Energy nourishes the grain. Energy stimulates the seed. The passive energy of the moon provides the germination bed with its bedtime story, read by Grandmother Time. Everything rests.

Energy will not work now, positive type-a energy, construction energy, scientific notation energy. Gravity ensues; and all things are drawn down to the lowest valley, the deepest meadow, the broken crevice, the cave. Going down. Going down.

God punishes greed.

God punishes the energy exaggerated toward selfish intent.

God gives life, wealth, powr, individual experience – but He also takes these things away.

11 August 2009

ADD ME TO YOUR LIST OF ADMIRERS

We are not the same, you and I. I am small and languid, and moved mostly by lyrical vocations and words offering mixed meanings, mixed associations, confused understandings. You are straight and framed by virtue. You are an unrecovering optimist. I am not unrecovering. I am solicitous. I am coached by my conscience, and cleaved by remorse for all of my failed epitomes.

Grain moves me because it is metaphorically full. Beer, to me, is a symptom of nature’s regal planning. God is a name we have given to a series of laws through which Nature seeks to balance man’s inhumanity to everything that moves. Night saves us from inhumanity; Day saves us from fossilized mud. Night saves us from martial expertise. Night saves us from material obsessions and literalism. Cows and bulls are emblems of Nature’s astrological escalation in heaven. One moving and the other being moved. And this passive movement being the first step in a lifetime of correlated anguishes and joys, tumults and obsessions and prayers and penance: all of the things that give life an association with grain.

You do not see the round vision. You see the straight line, the path you walk to get things done. This is an admirable condition. You exclude, without recognition, amenities to progress, adjutants to the engineering act by which darkness is made to evaporate and clandestine radical militarism gets its name and vocation. You kill when you need to. You eradicate problems. You eliminate options. You calculate probabilities; and act in accord with science’s true wisdom, the immaculate ration of personal desire. You collect slaves; you administer the weaker sex, and the darker-skinned smaller entities who appear to be remnants from an earlier experiment that did not work. Your ancestors mean less to you than you children’s children. You build the future; the past does not fascinate or terrorize you. You do not see the ghosts hanging in the trees, blowing in the wind, hair distorted by electric cadenzas of feelings, memories of atrocities, sins committed by the Day against the Night.

Those ghosts were a lot like you are now. Those ghosts believed only in the moment, only in the vision of will and force and superior reason. The longest club. The most leviathan of all motives and mentalities.

The ghosts you cannot see are trying to tell you not to follow the road to the sea, the scenario in which your soul becomes exploded by the dark atrocities you perform for your throne. The ghosts are trying to warn you to beware. The ghosts are shaking the trees, rattling the rooftops, hoping you will hear and see. It is a long road back down to the beginning.

Add me to your long list of admirers. You are a star. You own the world. Your legend will live about as long as the lotus bulb. And then you will regret for the rest of eternity – and become dark. And become a leader of the Night.

Nothing changes. Some time the memory sleeps. And, when it does, sins are committed.

20 August 2009

ANNIVERSARY OF THE TRIANGLE

This is the anniversary of the triangle. This is a reminder of when all things went well, when life was red and rough and rugged; and all the tributaries raced to the center of the world, joining the big river which washes away the sins of the world. Lethe. The big river in the fourth part of the universe. Lying in the sector that resolves into decency and justice.

There was a time when the triangle was king. There was a time when the intrepid view of life fond itself married to the objective rational of utopia. And then the forest burned; and then the translucent obligation of the sun became blackened with the mirror of atrocity, became deadened with doubt, and turned to lead, turned to horrible mass evacuation. The dream part dissolved. The prison time became rude and obligated to renounce willful indiscretion. Became obliged to achieve the dark context of regeneration.

The sluice is now opening up again. There must be something inside that wants to come out, that has to come out. A new era, a new age, a new conception of truth, a new dimension of true consequence. But there is always the dark old undertoe, the Roman soldier with his iron shirt, his bullet hat, his phalanx understanding, and the great spear he carries, blood on his pocket, blood on his cheek, having pierced the sacrificial lamb with his triangle serpent by which the world becomes saved and re-educated, slowly.

Paul, himself, should have been that centaur, the one who pierced, beat, dragged, drugged, stripped, sold, crowned and deflated the king of the jews. Paul, himself, should have been the force of death – for the killer was required certainly as eloquently as the victim. Without the enraged or the copious or the enslaved or the mindless copy of the soldier following orders none of this could have happened, none of the hard bargaining, none of the denial by the old line Jewish sect, none of the rising of Islam and the kneeling of Christians, and none of the split between power sources of church and merchant class, whereby the giant was fed and now the giant is about to be eaten.

Civilization is the sow that feeds the giants of extermination, the black hands, during the time of trouble. During the Age of Unrneason. During the Age of Darkness.

1 September 2009

ABSTRACTING THE RELIGIOUS VIEW

Abstract the religious view, please. Abstract the tendency toward obedience and phallic seas and moral tea parties and replace moody inhuman glandular fellowship with the kind of religion that has ideas as its root, vision as its manifest destiny, and motive as its covenant and oracular penance.

Abstract the religious view. Cast the bankers out of the temple, and explain to them the parable of the camel’s eye pierced by the needle. The rich need not apply here. Remember, the rishis nod neat up-light regularly, creating Winter shadows and inappropriate fasle language where before there was only….a savage adoration of cash.

Abstract the religious view. In the dark cauldron we are all equal. In the dark cauldron we all taste like chicken, smell like fish, melt like cheese, perform acrobats to make a fish blush, to make a dolphin applaud with dull fins. The cross is being prepared on Wall Street. It has not been decided who will be the sacrifice; although it is clear that those who build the cross are not offering themselves as a decade-ending morsel with Marcel’s tea. Death will be handed out in large vats in the coming days. That is what Winter is: death on a large scale; a harvesting instrument gouges the Earth but also skims it. Seeds are being preserved. Many people will starve. Magma almost sounds like smegma. Irritation will kill you faster than will irrationality. Concubines are scorned. In fact, pleasure means about as much in this environment as ice cubes matter to eskimos. The cauldron is getting hotter by the moment. We are melting, smelting, smolting, volting. We are registering our outrageous discontent by signing petitions to make the billionaires at Goldman Sachs give back the government. They are the ones who are adding firewood under the cauldron, laughing about populism and talking about how the devil is more powerful than God, everything else being equal.

Abstract the religious view. Make yourself invisible. Heavenly men scatter like pigeon when the Terror comes. Men in uniforms attempt to bring back the glory days, the days of their youth. But glory does not return to the same man twice in a lifetime.

Abstract the view; find the leaf on the tree instructive.

We are the leaf, but we are also the limb, the bark, the sap, the meal, the root system, the seed. We are also the Earth. And we are also the Sun that feeds the Earth and the Tree.

The universe is the empty bubble we live in until it bursts.

Life is a form of imprisonment inside this bubble.

The end of the bubble marks a return from captivity.

5 September 2009

CONFISCATION OF THE PAST

The past has been confiscated. The past has been lost. Now we hang in some arbitrary plane, suspended between times, suspended between places, between bodies, between relations, neither here nor there, but accumulating both debts for salvation’s army and debts for a materialist’s compromise. Escalation of dreams progresses in both directions, rushing past our station here where Dawn rises and Dusk falls. We have a treasury here, but it is invisible – and it can be only a treasury to those who value invisible riches, gifts from Heaven. No one really recognizes us as they pass. The dead are coming to get bodies and the living are losing their bodies, giving them up to the chosen dead. We write notes in a notebook. We use a secret language that few people understand. We do this because we cannot do otherwise. We write for the sake of the angels; they understand what we write; but we often do not understand what they realize. Scripts are made for the dead, for the unliving – and one must be unliving in order to comprehend such abstract footprints.

The past has been confiscated. Who has taken it? Madmen have too much past. Sometimes it stretches back past life, back past human history, into the hearts of cranes and leopards, the core of daisies and lotus seeds, the adamant natures of coral and granite, into the mathematical simplicities and transmogrifications of atomic additions and subtractions, back into stars, back into comets, back into planets’ names and mythological gravities. Back into God. These thriving scalers of anti-heights have no future and almost no present. They are often locked away in dungeons. They often speak foreign tongues, make clandestine handsigns, formulate elegiac conversations with dust, invisible molecules of motion, governors of spectral contrivances and sacrificial silence. Sometimes these wish that their pasts were oblique, were less present, were less horribly dominating. Gravity from the past’s mass confiscates the arc of their being, and diminishes their available extention. Blinded by the crush of darkness, they do not move, do not hope, do not formulate, do not laugh.

The past has been confiscated. The errors of love have been forgotten. The heirs of love have been executed or deported. The airs of love freeze and become icycled roses, broken if dropped. The future turns black. Still, it is all we have. Fear is a wall to be climbed, a wall to be painted with illusions, or bombed or filled with cyanide. Life contained by fear is not worth our time, our love, our sane forgiveness, our toleration. All walls are Berlin Walls. All walls keep us tied to masters, keep us chained to great or grim or green or gregarious illusions. Wall Street is no different: a series of walls that project an imagery of empire, of pyre of sacrifices to Plutus. Let it fall. Let this Great Wall go down, tumble into nothingness, tumble into the shards of history from which poor religious herdsman build their huts in future times far removed from the vanities of empires. Plutus doesn’t fly, he pontificates. Plutus doesn’t live, he oppresses. Plutus does not deserve the honors of the worthy. Let him go, let him pass, let his obsessions become nothing but a flavor of the month honorarium.

16 September 2009

THE ECLIPSE DOES NOT HAPPEN ALWAYS WHEN WE EXPECT IT

The eclipse always comes, always happens, no matter when we expect, or why we expect it. It does not come when we predict it necessarily. Even when we know it is coming, that does not mean it will arrive at eh crack of dawn, or on the morning of the seventeenth. We do not, we cannot, know everything. So when we begin to act as if we know the schedule or reality, that is the very time we will find ourselves disappointed by our own limitations. We are not perfect. We are not cleared by God for the sake of oracular truth so that always we will be predicting the grandiose vision, seeing the train as it appears at the station. We are mortal after all. We are subject to the unknown glitch. We prevaricate. We often lie to ourselves rather than face squarely the duodecimal contagion that implicates not only our adversaries, whomever they are at a give moment, but also ourselves.

The eclipse will come. We know that it will come. We know that the eclipse is a troubling dilemma. We know that it speaks volumes about the triumph of a dark stain upon a formerly unsullied character that was dirty and deadly but was unknown as such. Someone falls, a former god, a former sun hero, a former military leader, a former banker, a former trust officer. It could be anyone. A shot is fired. The Russian General perhaps. There is a body in the field. Three cormorants and two pelicans began to argue about property rights, and whose obligations come first, blissful hunger or baleful ardor for property. The rabbit sits as judge. There is a silence that is utterly transforming. The corpse has no where to go. Time is already beginning to unencumber it of its reason and physical stitching. Soon maggots will appear out of no where and will begin devouring all the evidence. Someone tries to call the police – but the phones are down. The FDIC is hurriedly gathered, as the man in question once had a bank account, before all the bank accounts were frozen. Was this a political crime? Is not every act of violence a political crime at its nexus?

The eclipse has a name; and the name has a sequence. Every eighteen years the eclipse returns, telling its story again, taking the story one step further, embellishing its own history by prevaricating high and low, speaking apex, nadir, midsentence, dusk, all in a sweeping gesture, turning from north into south. Then its history is finished.

If you wish to predict this story, understand that every eclipse is made up of threes, which becomes nines that resolve themselves always in to other nines. Nine comes before ten. Nine is the resolution of all that has come before. Ten is completion; and the pre-beginning of all that comes next.

9-26-09

ATHABASCAN

There is a river in my blood at which tribes of people gather and begin asking me questions about Time and about the fragility of human resources. These tribes are my family many times removed from the present tense, many times removed from the spatial expanse of modernity.

The water flows. Crows move about the sky performing feats of athletic lemniscates, suggesting in their flight a philosophical treatise inherent in patterned movement.

Snakes move in the river, dancing in pulses over waves and over rocks. Snakes are very feminine; and have feminine implications. Athabascans do not hate the female figure however. They understand that Nature is real and true, if also unreal and malignant and dangerous. If there is a figure of substance, there is also a shadow that follows this figure around. And the shadow is as real as the figure itself. These both move together, but not always in the same direction, and not always with the same level of ambition and presage and countenanced obligation.

The river is me. The river composes me, and eliminates me, and seeks eventually the ocean that is also me. By then the clear rainwater, pure and new, has fallen into the crystal blue mountain stream and begins its descent from the high terraces into the valleys and the rock-bed mountain rivers turn into the mud-bottom valley waterways that race and then spread toward the tidewater plains and ultimately the corrupt oceanic salt-flats and deep salty seas.

But each of these stages, these transitions, is also me.

I speak of the trout as being my best nature, the rainbow trout, the brook trout, the German Brown. From here the descent begins.

We will be saved eventually by the ocean-going salmon, who will risk everything, and lose everything, for the sake of returning his seeds, her eggs, back to the mountain stream, the pure place of my birth.

I am Athabascan. I am Athabascan, and everything in between.

2 October 2009

THE TREATISE OF DESTRUCITON NOW POSSESSES ME

The Treatise of Destruction now possesses me as surely as the Treatise of Progress and Wealth and Creation possessed me before, when Mars ran his bold red ribbon on my sleeve, handed me his bloody sword, and commanded me to execute all those standing between myself and my first million. Peasants in the field watched me ride by, in all my aristocratic royalty, seeking Muslims to kill in the name of the expanding God. Muslims who were killing me, killing my children, killing my family, with hidden bombs inside shoes, and hidden bombs inside of school children’s schoolbags, blowing up ice-cream shops and schools and churches.

I have defended my own people, and I have turned a blind eye on their horrors in order to do this.

But Time changes all things.

Now I despise the world I have created through violence, will and a paper currency. I wish, like Samson, to shake down the structure I have pushed up from nothing. I wish the Sun to fall down, the Moon to rise to power, to the apex; I wish water to run uphill. Banks burn; bankers hanged. Factories shut down; workers angry and vengeful. I wish for suffering to be heightened, not for the sake of the Muslims who have sought my death, but for the sake of punishing my own people who have forgotten their covenant with God. The covenant is not about car loans, and mortgages, and credit cards, and recreational vehicles, and a second house on the coast, and more clothes and more electronics as a way of pronouncing to the surface of things my belief in a false god of consumer accretion, a fasle god of annulated heavens for socially graced, entrepreneurs.

When the entrepreneur believes that he is a god, that is the apex of man’s vanity and the end of his reign on Earth. That is when I am born, no longer the light, but the shadow instead. That’s when I begin to pray for destruction, pray for pain, pray for despair, war, cataclysm, natural storms that rend and drown, terrify, lightning, hurricanes, terror nadirs, excellent conflagrations.

Prophecy is first-nature; greed and theft is second-nature. When greed and theft become too dense for the world to absorb, prophecy replaces greed and theft. After this happens, the hellhounds run wild in the streets. The daylight world is painted black, both for the sake of mourning and also for the sake of primitive moss-gathering.

The End is a time of weeping and self-mortification. Climb down on your knees. You have been arrogant and selfish. Climb down on your knees. In eighteen years the darkness passes.

5 October 2009

THE EMBASSY IN THE DRY EYE

There is an embassy in the dry eye; the unmoved mover abandons all but the most dedicated incentive to live for his god and to move only when he god commands it. The ecclesiastical impulse drives almost everyone at some point, drives the lowest to the highest creature: but there is one who listens for ever to God’s will, and abandons all hope except that which is driven by the master of his destiny.

He never cries. He did once. Now he forgets almost everything except his mission. His mission which is God’s mission. And God’s mission is to punish humans. God’s mission is to exact revenge for the imperfection of the human creature.

There is an embassy in the dry eye, the uncraven ego, the master of the unseen ship, who moves above the curious eve on an ocean of bitter enmity and grim salvage. I know this man. I have seen him in my dreams. He prays for the destruction of the smile, the annihilation of all laughter.

The sounds of machinery makes him scream.

If he can stamp out all sound, then he will know his objective is near.

He wishes to find atonement with his father, the father on the lonely Sinai, the lonely place in the moon from which he receives absolution and a new birth, a new body, a pure extinction from his sinful isolated emancipation from death.

5 October 2009

CALIBRATING THE CONSCIENCE

Calibrating the conscience is not a joyful act, but a perturbed, transcendent achievement usually attained in the face of some horrible inconsistency of character, trial of spiritual nativity. Usually this character wars with his dual measurements, his double purposes, his Day Manufactory of bloody and callous Empire opposed to his soft Night Judgment of Temporal Excess and Personal Ambition (read as, ‘crimes against nature’). The Man of the Day is all selfish, all power, all productive loins and over-masculation (read sexual domination of the female) for the purposes of entry, conquest and emancipating fertilization, which Nature instructs in cells and genetic instructions to which the Man is bound by tribal truths and exigencies, but which Day Man translates as the Prerogative of the Penis. Ascending the Mountain and Mounting the Maid are but two pins of the same configuration for which he must find solution, must solve as a problem. Erecting buildings and building erections are the same scale-management of the same energy by which the Sun proclaims itself a Monarch (before the Ark arrives and announces the king’s manifest trespass).

The Man of the Night is all broken marble, fracture egoic calendar, herald of penance, justifier of nothing but martyrdom, balancer of self-hatred, self-abandonment, punisher of imperfect manifestation of soul – his own, not his brother’s (as is the contagion of the Day Man).

The Day has no soul, no conscience, no empty capacity to see. The Day is filled with dramatic ambitions, filled with war, with rage, with needs, with desires, with power of choice, with physical virtuosity, without doubt, without fear, without judgment, without tremors. No obstructions. Will only, will magnified, will propagated, will made manifest.

The Night is unfilled, unfulfilled, foiled and always tragically fallow; and, becoming unfilled, develops pain, sorrow, weakness, fear, calculated morality, as the Night has no body and, hence, no physical power by and through which it might render the world its personal artifact.

The Night strikes out at the self, at his own failures, at his own weakness, at his own loss of momentum, at this own misjudgment, at his own Karmic ledger, at his own (self-)castrated vigor.

There is no real love for the Man of Night. The Man of Night has no lower preoccupations, no solar sentence manifesting a tubular raja. The Man of Night is feelings, thoughts, ideas, platonic love, virtuous desire, longing for ecstatic vision, sight, soul intentions, and calendars (calendars again) of prophecy. The love of the Man of Night is an equality of purpose, is a hand touching, a moonlight flickering, a shadow on a pond glimpsed through leaves on a lunar trajectory. Nothing lasts. Everything shimmers. A loon calls quietly, with a lonely resonance. Man and Woman move through one another without touching, enter each other without calculation, re-make one another with a glance, and with a provision for eternal returns. Love-making happens through the eyes, through the senses, rather than through distended flesh-organs.

Sex does not calculate, but neither does it catalog remunerations. The Karmic God (remember grim Hecate) allows some leniency in the darkness for compassionate humanity, but none in the dark for inflated egos existing on the consumptive arc when they fall toward the trough after losing body and wings. We would all like to believe that this dream can go one for ever and for ever. But sometimes we are forced to awaken and see that the bridge we have used to cross the river to the sunny side is not a bride at all but an illusion made of water – and that the river level is rising.

The conscience is designed to save us from our own obsessions to godhood, our own megalomania. We are men; we are not gods. Our attempt to be gods is always punished by a horrid Hades-descent. Do we learn? We learn some things.

Greed is not a dimension of the spirit; it is a dimension of the lack of spirit. Jesus threw the money-changers out of the temple so that they could no longer claim they were rich because of God’s blessing, because of an imaginary covenant they had with Jehovah. The rich are rich because they rob the poor, and steal from widows. We all understand this. The rich are rich because of a contract they have with the Devil.

In calibrating the conscience, this truth becomes perpetually manifest, and creates armies of resistance to this hypocrisy.

9 October 2009

TOXIC ASSETS

You are a toxic asset, he said.

I am an asset?

That is a positive view, I guess.

I should feel complimented,

I should feel as though I am on the light side of the ledger,

A wonder for my society to honor;

A prestige for the world to admire.

Existentialists, of course, focus on the adjective –

Qnd this is rather a common fault of academics.

I like nouns.

I like monuments to action.

I have little respect for the value judgments of old men

Who are not able to calculate the odds of survival

In a land of mixed virtues.

Do not judge me.

I must deliver profits to my clan,

I must deliver profits to my banker,

I must deliver profits for the sake of my workers.

I am corrupt?

Yes, I am corrupt.

Yes, I break laws,

I hire lawyers to save me from the police,

I hire police to save me from my competitors.

Yes, I have had people killed.

That is what business is.

Business is not a walk in the park.

I was not able to devote myself to study

Because my family needed money.

You say I am no better than a Mafioso.

That is true.

I am no better than them.

I have had people killed.

I have destroyed people’s lives.

I am not in business for fun or to make friends.

I am in business to win.

I like a fixed game.

I am a toxic asset.

Life is a war.

I am simply a warrior doing my best in a non-ideal environment.

13 October 2009

SPECTACULAR OCCURRENCES ARE LOST

The spectacular occurrences are lost and are finally recognized for what they are: illusions; tricks of light; bad manners in the hands of a group of magicians. Nothing spectacular should really be occurring now, not at this time, not in the era of science and reason and amalgamation of causal indemnities.

Eclipses? Do they really suggest that the male principle is being gored and eaten by the darkness in nature? Of course they do? They suggest this, metaphorically. But no one believes it today. No one stoops to consider the metaphorical truth in some magical way a literal reality.

The magic lantern has been put into the closet. The magic lantern re-negotiates itself right out of the picture; the harp is put away; theatre is transferred into the back room, where the light is broken and dust is allowed to collect and the bleachers are all broken. The loud speakers have been dismantled. There will be no miracles now, for we believe only un unspectacular occurrences, the kind that measure the distance a rock can be thrown considering gravity’s grave condition weighting on the stone. That is spectacular knowledge – but not a spectacular occurrence.

We are grieving now, we are in pain, we see no vision of the future: because we have no room in our lives for the spectacular occurrences.

30 October 2009

EXTRAPOLATING THE GREEN CHALICE FROM THE BLUE ROOM

We have begun a new cycle.

We are built for encapsulation,

But the world is built from metaphor.

Each act is but a semblance of something else,

And a sacrifice of another testimony,

Erased partially,

But exemplified in a tempest of arrogant reprieve.

Absolute anniversaries begin to appear in numbers

Marking a time of historical manifestations.

The cult of the horror’s scope begins to turn back on its creators;

Those who have filled the cavern with magic

Now begin to wish they had not been so blithe,

Since the cavern now is filled with testimony from aggrieved

Who claim witches have spoiled the cauldron,

Witches have polluted the ark and the covenant.

We dream.

But the dream is interrupted.

We are moving in fast speed reverse;

But the landscape is not moving at all.

There is a dread in the landscape;

And there is a weeper present who enumerates each sin

Committed by the magician during his hour of probity.

Someone is being accused of pride

And Greek tumult and Hubris and Nemesis appear

And promise a cruel death for the guilty party.

All the women begin to cry.

When the ‘Master’s of the Universe’

Proclaim themselves to be Gods and shake their fists at the world –

And when Muhammed Ali calls himself ‘the Greatest”

And stands above Sonny Liston, his fallen opponent,

Mocking him and challenging him to rise…

These are acts of national Hubris;

And the payment for Hubris is death and destruction,

Ministered by Nemesis.

Nothing is worse than arrogant violence against the world.

The American military should remember this also.

We do not need the pretense of power.

We do not need the illusory admonition of dominating the world. Dominating the world does not end well.

13 November 2009

YOU ARE NOTHING, IN FACT

You re nothing, in fact. You have been injured: a falling log has struck you; you have been the falling log; you have attained a very high fever and your brain has boiled and baked. And now you have lost your way. You are not the person you believe you are. In fact, you cling to an image you have of yourself, a strong man leading a crusade against corruption….but this is not really you. The world is changing very fast. Things disappear. The knots that hold phenomena in shape suddenly vanish and become rivers of motion. Everything becomes its opposite; one pole flows into its opposite pole. And you find that you are both of these things; you are both poles at once.

NOTHING IS SACRED

Nothing is sacred. Nothing is sacred enough. We understand that we have fallen a long way; and we want the world to tell us something positive about our spirits. But all we see, instead, is the junk culture spread out for ever, the greed and the gruesome quest for personal aggrandizement. Cold incendiary self-interest.

I am nothing. I am a bag of crushed wind. I am a encapsulated treatise on the vanity of men and on the interchangeable parts in this vast accident of organic life we have come to believe is a vital product of a vital exercise, blinding ourselves, of necessity, from the very real possibility that the vitality in the process is nothing more than the stone in the groin and the holocausting of the girl through the power of sexual urge, all else following from echonomics as they say, as they say; and all of life’s grim making of ego that follows is just a response to the void and to the fear of being alone in this world, without meaning and without friends.

A dream comes in and finds itself broken and unfixable. What does that mean for us? The nomenclature is gone. We have begun to feel around in the bottom of the barrel again, as if we believe there might be something down below which might help to lift us up out of the broken picture. The assumptions lead no where. This does not seem to matter. The assumption is that we may be nothing again, lost, spinning in some aggravated condition of loss. Alone. In a spidery cylinder. Distracted vision implies a descent of some kind into a clear unfocused manifestation of unregal obituaries. The adamant is not lost easily. The adamant is a broken convenience. The adamant becomes a circular understanding that ministers itself in long draughts of understanding, and categorical implications of arbitrary unclarity. Soon the dream buckles. And the troubled incentives become uncategorical improvements over time, and over time’s red menace. We drip. We uncover something. We uncover a drip and we understand the nuclear archive inside of which we move and on top of which we achieve unrecovery. A spasmodic abbreviation helps us to achieve a momentary consequence of unbelief. Dragging a red occurrence into the blue vat of convenience. We drink love in through our brains. Accomplishing the utmost convenience in the dream of the brocade which achieves the dragon in the blue shelf, and we have begun to embellish the yellow cavern with the temptation of rich cruising inside the harsh mentality that might make nearly every endorsement true, although hidden inside a fear, a promise, a threat, a condition. Someone is watching. Someone is able to exact the tincture from the apocalypse in order to free it from the storm-natures. But the storm-natures are not easily resolved into nothingness.

12 December 2009

THE ANNIVERSARY OF TRUTH

The anniversary of Truth. There is no escapade that escapes the Truth’s attention. But the Truth is shy. The Sky is bold. The heritage of bliss lives nearby; and the path of Truth does lead to the Mountain of Bliss eventually.

THE CUP HAS FALLEN OVER

The cup has fallen over. What does it mean? The arcana of the drypoint felicity moves in larger and larger circles, beating its rhythmic drum on the brain of the mayfly, transposing itself with the raw melody of antagonism, as the beetle pushes dung, the scarab rolls his future, his future progeny, his future self, on the ground toward the new imaginary starting point. An overturned cup means nothing to him. A broken piece of pottery, a man-made thing, like a machine, a city – for what is a city but a machine animated by human cells – that has ceased its expansion: a cup overturned.

Life unplugs itself. What does it mean? Why did sophisticated savages in Mayan towns wander off to die in caves when expansion ceased, when electricity was lost? These savages read signs in everything. These savages all saw the future as it was written in Nature’s archetypes. Seasons and tracks within time; minutes everywhere: a time for age, degeneration, decline. A time when Electric Life is unplugged and the world falls into a silent darkness.

The cup has fallen over. Ants are everywhere. There was sugar in the tea; and the ants have a feast for a day or so.

The fallen cup feeds something, someone apparently.

And, afterward, the ants retreat, seeking the next overturned cup.

Civilizations are like flowers. Flowers rise; flowers fall.

Raise your cup to the great civilization of the West.

Is that the Dusk drawing near? Another war? Another dimensional catastrophe? Another ransacking of values at the hands of the prodigal sons, the Romantics, who’ve turned their backs on feeble Time, condemning Man, City, Industry and Kapital.

Run! Run quickly! Someone approaches on a red-metal horse drawn down from Heaven! There is an army in his wake; and they are taking no prisoners!

3 January 2010

ANNOUNCING THE REPLICA OF THE GREEN FUSE

The green fuse reproduces itself in a dramatic release of furious ecstasy. Something is in the air. Something rich and fertile and fundamental. Earth is wet. Nature is preoccupied with noise and thrashing in the bush. Something creative is being condoned, generated, produced at random, by cycles of the moon, something generated by the brushing together of the wings of locusts.

The delicate sausage takes a turn at the table, turning east in search of a more potent breath. Canine feast on vapors. Cries fill the night. We are getting somewhere, aren’t we?

The turqoise night takes on a difficult tone. It becomes mixed with black; and it begins to sprout a kind of violet danger, a texture where violence is near and almost guaranteed to happen. We can walk away from nothing. We are schooled in the fine art of ancient denial, as old as humanity, and as grievous as the crude aristocracy of death.

Steely. The night gets hard. Many things get hard. The tree becomes a stone. The Treestone becomes an iceholder. A myth develops from this, a story that guides the world toward truths about the nature of life and about the seasons of manifested reality. Some understand. Some hide the truth as far as they can,, burying it inside the story and pronouncing the story a myth, a lie, a stupidity, superstition.

Foresaking the dream is an option. Choosing another dream, a self-created dream of one’s own vision – some do that. But it is not superior to the other dreams, simply because it belongs to oneself. The other dreams are not corrupt because they do not include you. They are build out of other fabric, out of other material, with a different ethic at work. But each is a part of the colossal dream, your dream merely one of many pieces to an optimum project, The cadences all fit, even though the cadences are abbreviated with different tone and different sets of beats. Escallation is possible; pauses work; crescendos are iinevitable. But the underlying theme, melody and structure do not tolerate a broken fugue.

The green fuse lights itself. The green fuse has a name. It is pronounced with a southern accent in most place. It mentions itself in a roundabout way, suggesting its own clairvoyance through the powers of blood and passion and colloquial expertise.

The green fuse reproduces itself. It is hidden in the cold weather where all the snow come from. But the ice cannot solve the blue trajectory from firing; and the equilateral alignment from this and that, of love’s grave nuisances, up and down, hard and soft, rigid and supple, in and out, dark and light, cone and anti-cone, centripetal and centrifugal, concave and convex, high and low, day and night, tree and stone, water and fire, summer and winter, man and wife, brother and sister, the high discipline losing itself in the spring of the day, the fire in the water’s cocoon, the temperature in the ecclesiastical garment, running up and down, running inside out, dragon and lion, fuse growing, fuse hammering, fuse collapsing, fuse expanding, fuse stripping the world of its leaves, rhe receptive receptacle becomes the fuse and the glass, the fire and the fuse, the water and the air, the cream and the cob, the savage condition of lift and portage, the boat in the sea and the sea inside the boat. It is a dreary piece of vocabulary, a trite condition of syntax, manipulated by fore and aft, manufactured by the dramas of hopes lost, illuminated by the séances of destiny: history’s shadow marches at a fast pace, moving to the left, moving against history’s northern grace, righteous cadavers all lined up in strict precision, moving as Hours move; the shadow has a different time, a different tempo, a different set of heroes, anti-heroes, anti-Christs, moving against civilization, moving for civilization, a tempo of bankers, surgeons, revolutionaries…they all rush up the hill, down the hill, destroying whatever they touch, creating cities with a wish, building societies which favor thieves and killers, lawyers and men of commerce, sawyers and grim mafia barons, giving land to those who take it, condemning to poverty and the dark underside of the earth those who have too much honor and too much dignity to steal and cheat. Nobility is lost where commercial gain and property are considered paramount.

21 January 2010

LISTEN TO ME WHEN I CRY

Listen to me when I cry. Because my crying is a rare occurrence. My crying only happens when I approach the precipice – again.

Watch my face for tears. Because this will mean that, again, the precipice is near and gaining.

21 January 2010

THE CADENZAS BEGIN IN EARNEST

The cadenzas begin in earnest. This is not always a good thing. It is a good thing when one is either invisible or when one is preparing an assault on the castle. It is not good to be living in the castle with the king and all his bankers and government officials because the masses have assembled below and have begun to light torches and tar-poles and they are talking very loud about overthrowing the bastards on the hill.

The cadenzas begin in earnest.

If I was conscious I might be afraid.

If I was conscious I might start to worry about the amassing of soldiers on the border; and the negotiations about which I read in the press, between the church and the state, between the old money and the merchant class. These negotiations, of course, are to see who gets the most money, which side the army will support, and that happens to the old rulers when they finally fall and become fodder for the revolution.

The cadenzas begin in earnest. I don’t want to heart them. I am tired. And my find is filled with images of pleasure, with young girls playing monochords, singing ca tru, dancing slow seductive elemental movements.

I want to sleep.

I want to go so deep into sleep I can make myself invisible.

23 January 2010

Establish the list of mercury’s gray ministry. There are many names we can attach to the directory of youth. The Fountain of Youth is somewhere. We can look for it in Florida, if you wish. We can look for it in some land beyond the dark phantom light – white light turning mysterious into an amber-colored transparency, before it flashes out into total blackness.

Sunset. Sunset going down. Sunset falling. I have a dream but the dream has not come in to view yet. It is still light; but the light has turned down, has become fragile, has begun to die, has begun to leave corpses visible on the horizon, idea discarded, garbage heaps, junk yards, empty factories, idle plants, graveyards being unearthed, houses in foreclosure, communities backing bags and hurrying south. Idleness is not a virtue, but it can become a virtue if the activity it replaces is transferred to the interior space in which Wisdom is met.

The Sunset is the amber glass, reflecting youth, and reflecting youth’s perfection.

Black Light is something different. Black Light reflects absolutes; but in a reversed projection. What was I becomes Not-I. What was This becomes That. What was Right before Left or Wrong. What was the Father’s Wrath becomes the Mother’s Thraw. What was the Summer’s Order becomes the Winter’s Gold Door.

I am archaic. I am bold and storied for a lamb’s grim eviction. I am lost and catalogued for a balm, a breech, a doctrine and a grim conviction. There is no king standing before me but I. I judge myself. I am not perfect, always, and I am religiously green. I am chronically tentative, and poised to relieve the diabolical Old Soldier manning stations along Gethsemane’s border. The Teuton’s are heard before they are seen. Razors are passed out. All the cadamite natures are gone. All the unsuitable heretics have turned black – that is to say, have become less visible. All the priests have lost their faith. All the man-monsters have dwindled, purchased tickets to Nairobi, or Swaziland, or Naziland, or New Zeeland.

I can sleep. I can produce dreams that rush up from hell’s golden kitchen and imprint themselves on the social conscience like a bad tattoo on a bourgeois girl’s back-hip. Pretending to be black. Pretending to be cool. Pretending to not be hideously cold, with a carmelite’s adamantine clairvoyance and will.

Do not underestimate me. I look weak. I look old. I look defeated. But I am longing for a last dance, a lanced stance, a lust tense, a lost density. I am ready to emerge from nothingness, put on my shield, razor up my sordid gain, invoke the name of Minister Michael the last dark angel, ready the masses for extinction, in God’s mainlined manifesto manifested in Red Veiled Asians.

I love my opposite. I admire my enemy. I adore my killer, my animus, my absolute re-creator.

10 February 2010

THE VILLAGE DOCTOR IS REBUKED

The village doctor is rebuked. Everything he has ever said is now considered the opposite of the truth. This came about because he supported the corrupt class when they conceived of a scam to steal all the people’s money quietly. The bankers hatched the idea; and they recruited the doctor, saying he would be rewarded with land and stock options. The doctor knew it was wrong; but he also knew that the losers in society got no where, fell by the wayside, slumbered for ever in broken fantasies and dreary preoccupations with love, equality, poetry, and ideas of justice. To throw one’s future in with the dregs of society made no sense. Yes, the rich were corrupt; but the rich made the world, brought about civilization to the poor creatures below, represented light, decent morality (aside from the stealing and cheating that is), and lived in well-lit, large houses, drove fancy cars, and married beautiful women.

Is ambition a sin for a man?

The village doctor is rebuked. He is paraded through the town and forced to wear an ‘I am a Thief’ sign up and down the streets, while being pelted with rotten fruit by the angry villagers.

His house is set on fire. He is forced to escape the town by night in a foreign sailing vessel having no money in his pocket.

This is a vision.

22 February 2010

ABSTINENCE IS NOT THE SAME AS DENIAL OF THE DREAM

Abstinence is not the same as denial of the Dream.

Abstinence is, instead, affirmation of another dream,

An opposite dream, the Anti-Dream if you will.

The caravan follows the Dream.

Why?

Because it is easy to see, it is visible,

Many people pat one on the back

When he says that he sees and believes in the Dream

And will dedicate his life to the Dream.

When one says he will dedicate his life to the Anti-Dream, the family seeks to have him committed, and the medical police attached a faux-gold name-plate to his forehead, bearing a clinical description of many of the things that are wrong with him. Schizophrenic. Paranoid. Borderline. Anti-social.

There was a time when these Anti-Dream advocates were simply burned at the stake. Now, in our unending generosity, and compassionate spirit, we shoot them full of Haldol until they break and get in line with the rest of us.

AGAMEMNON IS A SALESMAN

Agamemnon is a salesman in the land of potential empires. This is not the land of the heroic quest, nor the land of the wild stallions in Gaul, or the land of Roman squadrons moving in phalanxes for the arbitrary achievement of something noble in the language of Romulus. Agamemnon is now a salesman in the great civilization of the capital achievement. We are all salesmen here, afterall. The philosophers have all been sent away; poets are now only excuses for a robust drink or a goblet of brandy in the faculty hall where dead bones collect around flesh and call themselves ‘doctor’, in the spirit of fools on parade, phools have degrees and discuss Eliot’s homeoshocksschool impulses and Pound’s education of classical politics.

Agamemnon is a salesman of grim beachfront property in Florida, swampland. He has no ethic now; he dreams the dream of materials expansion, the first and second house, the second and third car, the individual retirement account, the speculative ascent of the mountain of nearby gratuities.

Agamemnon is a salesman. We are all salesmen at heart, once we realize that nothing is true except the pocketbook. It is a grand land in which we live, a great sanctuary for grifters and goblins. If you are going to steal, steal big. If you are going to be moved by the criminal impulse, then worship Michael Milkin, worship Henry Paulson. America doesn’t necessarily love a thief; but America necessarily loves a thief who thinks big.

Go ahead, tell the big lie. Agamemnon says…it’s buying time again…in the Realist’s State.

But beware: Clytemnestra is taking out insurance.

13 March 2010

VENGEANCE IS NOT REQUIRED

Vengeance is not required. The artificial lore of epistolary Arcanum makes of me something that was but something that cannot be again, cannot be for long, something that achieves a light cadence only when the light passes, before the window shade is pulled, and then transforms suddenly to nothingness, bleached out by a tributary franchise equal to the passing of love’s logic into something mystically blue and brutally consecutive in the sense of establishing the rude carnal obituary out of which a ghost emerges and begins reciting lines from T.S. Elliot in the voice of James Earl Jones, admonishing all color and all sequence into a rude carnival of lust that it misquotes suddenly manifest destiny and portrays it as Jesus’ dead-red souvenir of five wounds generated by three nails and a spear. We are here; we are everywhere. Time has become dependent upon me now, and upon my Time-Wheel and the logic of fall-filling onion spring-sapping, seeing in the law a kind of prototypical embellishment of autobiography.

Make yourself a God. There is no other way you can get up into heaven again.

I dream of you.

I hear your voice again.

You chastise me for slipping into the kingdom of lust.

You are good and clean and animated by duty now.

I am not good and not clean and not animated by duty now.

Setting fires as I go. Undiminishing in my creed, able to leap tall building and all the rest, in an unsingle bound. Married to the hilt, as are you, yourself, if I remember correctly.

Dreams conspire to save us; to destroy us. We circle ourselves, put up walls to trap ourselves; put up walls to keep the rushing energy of Nature from infecting us with negative genius. Vision. We like more now to walk forward without fears and with a body sinking into grim annihilation. Time has passed. No longer able to rush forward into the ring of stupendous understanding and heroic brocades littering seasons of brief courage, seasons of belief tinged with horrible will. Can I sleep longer? Noise knocks on my door; noise tries to knock down my house. Noise punishes the priest in me, the lover of silent forethought, the penitent priest who watches now as chaos and street battles and parliamentary battles pass from East to West, as does the Sun itself.

Vengeance is not required. Vengeance kills, sentences us to remorse, destroys doors, roads, windows, acts of sweet contrition. We are not vengeful in our essence. Fear makes us vengeful.

Strike out fear. Make death our friend. Death relieves us from our pain. Death is our friend, the one who solves all of our problems, carries us back into clean water.

We are not dry here. We are not horrible friends or enemies.

You are me and I am you.

In our essence we are the same root, the same soil, the same soul; the same rood we carry.

28 April 2010

BLESSINGS EVAPORATE

Blessings evaporate. That is the nature of the cycle. For each step up the mountain, there are many steps down, some supporting the claims of eviction.

The wind howls. The wind speaks about conjunctions of the evaporating heat, the water turning to steam, the earth boiling over.

Blessings evaporate; and then curses replace them.

We are, all of us, subject to the transitions and the passages leading away from something good and in to something horrible. The land is beginning to become unlivable again. The land is beginning to call out, proclaiming itself rich and misunderstood and cursed by those who rebel against the obvious. We are those who rebel against the obvious. We rebel because the obvious is blue and cantankerous, etched with no inner values, no gods, no tributes, not spirit-gold, but just the tracks of animals, living and dying, procreating and restricting, animals of fatality. Smiles are optional. Alcoholism is also optional.

1 May 2010

SPLITTING APART –

FLYING, FIRST, ABOVE THE HUMAN RACE; NOW IMPRISONED BENEATH IT

We split apart. There is nothing that can change it apparently. Nature has this splitting apart built in to the Saggitarrean quest. The wooden structure becomes top heavy and begins to fall asunder.

Is this our marriage that is crashing? Something is beginning to burn. Some of the spit wood is being cast into the fire and before long there will be a very big fire. The turbulence will begin to swell and kill everything in its path.

Splitting apart. We are being buffeted by a hurricane: we have been thrown out of three houses in two years; our money in the bank in America cannot be accessed in Asia. We are breaking. Something is forcing us into a horrible hole. We are emptying out and getting rid of possessions.

Emptying out and splitting apart. We had stagnation; then we have contemplation; then we have splitting apart. Then we have the Earth again, the receptive. This is the road on which we are heading. Each term this cycle appears under different forms. But it is always the same spirit on the inside, acting in different clothes, generating different dreams and historical catastrophes, different figures, based on the figures hidden on the inside.

I have never seen so much human greed, so much unmitigated human disease. For years my wife and I have lived the spiritual life, quiet in Heaven, far from human company, far from the face of such lowly sniveling for material gain. Now it is in our face. Desperation. Conspiring. Cheating. Stealing. The money is running out and the small man has taken over; and the large man, the large vision, is worth nothing, is cast aside, is considered a false man because he is not scheming to get ahead. The real man is scheming to get ahead.

This makes us hate the human race. This makes us want the human race destroyed. We are now on the side of physical catastrophes, earthquakes, floods, fires, accidents, wars, rumors of war, economic depressions: the human race has become so greedy and so small and selfish that it needs to be punished, needs to be destroyed.

They say that Noah could have chosen to save the entire human race. Instead he chose to only save the seeds. I understand now why Noah saved only the seeds. The human contagion is like a cancer. Spit it apart. Split it; and burn it.

13 May 2010

FLY BY NIGHT

Fly by night.

I have heard it said that all the beings in the graves

Can pass through dirt and enter directly

Into the hearts of captive birds by night.

Birds captured by darkness, fearing flight in a landscape of blindness.

I know not if it’s true.

I suspect that the Earth-Dwellers who are left standing suddenly above the fallen afflict the decent ones with plots for gain, and ambitions for small ascendancies so much that the angels in their darkened state begin to plot the destruction of the world in order to punish the sins of those whose ambitions are so small and so aligned with nothingness, and with debt and imprisonment to men of means as the only known antidote for fear of mortality.

They have chosen the prison of debt to buy junk, snowmobiles, trucks, computer games, second or third houses. Am I to pity them? They have only done what they were instructed to do, by their god inside their television set.

They wish to fly by night. But to fly by night one must be dead already, dead and buried under the Earth’s shadow, tasting dirt, tasting contaminated air, searching captive birds in black glasses, black capes, black beards, black conveyances. I have heart that it is possible to grow wings, black wings, by night, to pass beyond the sight of the Earth-Dwellers who are all making plans on how to make a killing, either by killing someone outright, or simply by stealing so much from the man that it will end up killing him.

How did we get so small, so greedy and so trite?

In my dream I am an angel wearing white wings, white light, white conditions of fury. God asks me if we should save the Human Kingdom from destruction. And I respond: ‘Not yet. They need to be shown that their avarice leads to terrible consequences such as loss of their soul. Life without a soul is truly a horrible condition. They need to be reminded of this. Let the hammer fall.’

25 May 2010

WHO IS THIS DARK GOD OF OBSTACLES?

Who is this Dark God of Obstacles,

The one born in 2001,

The one who has made everything difficult since then,

Who has made the simplest tasks seem like major intrusions

Into the spirit world,

Requiring the strength of the soul,

Making the labors of Hercules appear all the more true and real,

And their symbolism even more evocative?

Does this Dark God wear a mustache?

Does this Dark God achieve satisfaction through watching men fail,

Watching women panic, or change natures into stone?

Negation: is that his only name?

Or does he wear even a more formidable accentuation of purpose?

Is he the Shadow we have treated so roughly, during our expansive pride?

Is he the poor force, the downtrodden, the black, the discarded?

Is he not that part of ourselves that we wished to discard,

To brutalize,

The ‘loser’ we have dismissed,

The rotten egg, the spoiled nature,

We have hated and which, for us,

Has borne the brunt of our moniker ‘failure’?

He is getting back at us now,

Crashing our buildings, flailing our markets,

Throwing up obstacles before us,

Damning our plans,

Sucking blood our of our expansions,

Hurling our bonds into disarray,

Throwing doubts upon our solvency,

Casting huge shadows over our hopes and futures,

Driving us back to our God, back to shuttered churcesh,

Back to our knees,

Our futures blistered with the negative,

Blistered with the grim animation of our dread.

How can we blame him?

The Devil likes only the ones who succeed.

Now those who have succeeded are being driven down to nothing.

The champagne has been removed from the premises,

Sold off to the highest bidders.

And arsenic is being silence hoarded.

We are not going back to the high ground

We considered our home, our true nature.

The path down the mountain guarantees further limitation

And unanswered material need;

The path up the mountain is now a memory,

An ascent into spirit, into clouds,

Beyond the lake and driven up by the thunder.

Aesclepius’ rotund manner does not alleviate

For the main children of the land

Any of the judgment that comes out of a time of perdition.

Round and round the judgments go;

Many arbitrary rulings fall out of heaven;

Many gifts are snatched out of the mouths of children.

Wine is spoiled.

Greed becomes the holiday nocturn.

But there is nothing left.

Everything has been broken.

Conditions create monsters who walk in green boots,

Carry rifles and accentuate the demands of plain-speaking people

For virtue in the face of disaster.

The sanctuary has been stolen, broken, sold.

The sanctuary has been taken away

By the women who wants to charge more money

For their possessions.

Dear Landlord, please don’t put a price on my soul…

We are not impressed by the quality of the human beings we meet.

Yet this is not quite true.

The quality of the human beings is not low.

The quality of the human beings in positions of power

Has never been so low,

Has never evinced so much heartlessness.

The thieves run everything.

The common man, he and she who live in their heart,

Are decent, noble, and generous.

Those in power, however, are nothing but grasping,

Selfish, self-serving petty natures.

Indeed, the lowly men have gained power.

The men who have no capacity or need for philosophy,

For aesthetics, for poetry, for wisdom,

These men now run the world;

And they are proud of their own pragmatism,

Feeling such practicality is a form of positive male virtue and strength.

This is tradition.

Who is this Dark God of Obstacles?

Who is this Dark God of Crystallization?

Who is this Dark God of Shattering Realities?

Can it be that this Dark God is Ourselves, as we never wanted to become?

28 May 2010

BLESSINGS OF THE MANOR HOUSE

Blessings of the manor house.

Perhaps the king will arrive shortly.

Perhaps the queen will come too.

We are all excited by the prospect of a real royal to raise us up

Into some sort of dignified historical presentment,

A blessing that will make of us,

In the eyes of the world at least,

A family worthy of grand and grandiloquent recognition.

Time passes.

Time passes and the clouds of history pass over the town also,

And over the manor house.

The hard edge of time passes between this honor and that fealty,

And the grandness is lost because of some unmentionable irregularity,

Something to do with a man in the house and a woman in another house nearby,

A married woman in fact,

One who brushed up against the man

And drove him insane for a time or two,

Drove him insane like an insect drives another insane

By brushing her wings against his.

The word ‘infidelity’ was spoken more than once.

It was less shame than heart-break however

That tumbled the life in the manor house to dust.

There is something about love and about desire

And about the act of brushing up against another,

And then the retreat into a safe distance

Once one has completed the brushing

That triggers the desire that has manifest the love,

Something deadly and viral and wholly invigorating and destroying

To change its form and become a madness.

That was the story.

This love dragged on for a time.

There was apparently quite a bit of brushing up against the another,

Even kissing,

Even declarations of love exchanged.

But no actual invasion of the other’s personal envelopes,

For the sake of conjugal conquest or erotic satisfactions.

The animation of love touched both,

And turned the man, the one without, into a mad phantom,

Ghostly and hollow,

Living life to its ultimate emptiness,

Aware of his negative association with bliss.

Turned the one within, the woman taken,

Into a ghostly incomplete wandering silent thing,

Drifting into and out of dreams,

Afraid at night, sickly, troubled.

She worried that she had damaged her true love.

She worried that she had wronged her husband.

Trouble came receding into the small part of her heart,

The part most easily disturbed by the brushing.

She did not wish to rise from bed in the morning.

She struggled with too many fears,

Too much sorrow;

She accused herself of being a bad soul,

And of ruining two men’s lives.

That was the story.

Love dragged on for many years.

Then, one day, love died.

Perhaps today is the day.

There will be blessings for the manor house.

There will be blessings, celebrations.

Children have been born.

Yes, children have made someone whole again.

Perhaps not the woman in question.

Perhaps only the peripheral man,

The man excluded from the earlier touching.

We will see what love is really about.

We will see what friendship and honor are all about.

Then, something happened.

Someone died.

The manor house was closed up and sold.

Another family moved inside.

They heard about tragedies in the house,

And a ghost they sometimes could see

Wandering in vapors

In early mornings to the west,

Near the river.

Someone died.

Someone always dies.

2 June 2010

WE BECOME AWARE OF OUR OWN MORTALITY

We become aware of our own mortality.

This is a good thing.

This is a good thing because our mortality warns us that our Soul –

The best side of our own natures, the perfect side –

Is about to become naked and vulnerable in a very difficult environment.

We can prepare our Soul for this experience

By loving her and becoming one with her.

We become aware of our own mortality.

There is no real Wisdom without this understanding.

We are kings for a day, perhaps.

We are lions for a fortnight.

But there is nothing eternal about this strength.

We will be forced on to our knees just like everyone else is eventually.

Kings, sailors, soldiers, stevedores, engineers, craftsmen…

All those once certain of their own invincibility in this world…

Will be found next to one another on their knees,

Tortured to tears by fears of weakness.

We are all the same.

We are all angels and all tyrants –

And it falls upon Time to elicit our current manifested image.

And then the Soul comes.

We become aware of our own mortality.

The leaves around us fall.

Our friends begin to die.

We begin to ask God to give us a good death,

Without illness and without dependency on others.

A sudden death while sleeping.

A silent furious killer in the brain, in the rhizome: the wry zone.

A plane crash.

An unlucky train ride.

A fortuitous exhalation while sleeping.

Please, God, take me gently

And allow me to have dignity when I leave.

Allow my life to have a formal resolution

And let me give everything for those I love,

Leaving them some comfort when I leave,

Some grace and some resolution to continue living

When I am gone.

We become aware of our own mortality.

Awareness is good.

Tragedy is the nature of life only if we don’t believe

The Soul has eternity

Even as the body needs to be exchanged

As it grows weaker.

3 June 2010

There is a report in the news. Greek will default; and the lost love of 34 years will divorce her husband. What that means to all of us is open to speculation. Will she appear suddenly, telling our man that she misses him, needs him, will do anything to wind his love back; or does she merely walk away from both her old husband and her old lover and begin building a new life with either a new man, a new woman, or no one?

There is much concern in the air, much distrust, and much confusion. She told me to go on with my life, to not dream too much, because dreams can’t be everything. My dream of her was everything. And when she me “Go on, have a good life, write me if you feel like it…” I did not know what that meant. She was going to come to live with me. How ironic, she said, plans change. Funny how things work out. Funny, indeed.

I told her that I needed here; she told me that she needed peace and quiet, something I did not give to her. So I gave her thirty-four years of peace and quiet. I married my best friend, my wife Hoa-Lan, my beautiful orchid. We moved to Vietnam. She said nothing. She didn’t seem to notice. Now there is rumor in the press that she is leaving her husband, anxious now to start again, after thirty-five years of marriage, three children, six grandchildren, more on the way.

I told her she could not live in a Mormon family, in a community of followers, a franchise against free thought. She was a liberal girl from New Jersey. She had campaigned door-to-door for McGovern. How would she fit into the grim neo-fascists in Salt Lake? She almost said to me: if he wants to live in Salt Lake, I will leave him and move to Oregon to live with you. She almost said it; she did think it. But they stayed in Laramie; the crisis was broken. She said to me: Take care; have a good life. Write if you feel like it.

Will you write me back if I write to you? She did not write back. I went to see her in 1978. I told her: I am coming to see you. That is the only reason I am coming. If you don’t wish to see me, if you are going to turn me away at your door, without spending time with me, please write me now and tell me not to come. I do not wish to face the pain of having you reject me again. Reject me by mail if you must. It would please me if you rejected me by mail, instead of rejecting me to my face when I arrive. She did not write. When I arrived, she told me she was not going to talk with me, that she needed to try to make her marriage work; she refused to be alone with me. I asked her: Do you want me to go away and never come back? She did not say she did not want this.

Thirty-four years later, there has not been a sound, not a word, attempting to shorter this distance.

Facts don’t amount to much. The rich condition of delivery is bleak. Establish the perfect stability in your life and then you can begin to balance the horrible stress between the Present and the Past, which is the Night-Cycle. There is a Present, Hoa-Lan; there is a lewd Future, Amanda, or perhaps someone else, someone with flesh, concupiscence, seeds delivered to their destination, the frothy cave; there is a Past, the woman I once loved, who has suddenly rose up from the deep, demanding I recognize her as a fact in my life, a karmic fact if nothing else, residue of a shattered heart. This is Vulcan, pounding on my soul, attempting to batter it in to a new shape, a new quality, pounding it back and forth, black and white, making sparks fly, trying to set the world on fire a bit, trying to use the sparks to generate light, and a golden soul.

Cupid had two arrows in his quiver, one dipper in gold, the Sun’s glue, to generate love, and a second arrow, dipped in lead, dipped in Saturn’s mustard, generating repulsion. Careful what arrow Cupid aims at you.

Dreams vanish. You are not me. You are not the one I once knew. You did not love me the way I loved you; you did not need me. You went on with your life. You told me, when I asked you: “What are we going to do now?” – you said: “Nothing! Just go on with our lives!” You did not add (“as if nothing happened”) – but that was what you apparently met.