THE LOVE THAT DIED

 

                       

 

                        A BOOK OF POETRY WRITTEN FOR LESLIE RHOADES POLSON.

 

            by

 

MICHAEL J. CLARK

HOUSE 35A,

ALLEY

HANOI, VIETNAM

 

JUNE 21, 2011

 

mclark7 @ mindspring.com

 

 

 

 

THE LOVE THAT DIED

 

There was a love that died.

It died three decades ago.

It died in a sad, sacred contortion;

It fell in a sad mess on the ground;

And it turned what was good and light and nakedly true

Into something scored and beaten:

Melodius interruptus.

A tragedy of motion.

 

      “I still love you,” I said – though no one heard me say it.

      “I still love you. I have never stopped loving you. Dearest one.”

 

She can dance; she can dance in classical slippers; she can fill up a room with light when she moves.

      The river carries everything away, even your smile. Especially your smile.

      Your hair is long and brown and like a river too. Like a toast-colored brown river. Like a toast-colored brown

            river as it floats into a sea as blue and as pure as your purebleu eyes. I said.

      There was a time when we were wed, in our souls, braided together like strings of candle-wax fused by fire.

      You were married then; a man moved about you like petrified wood. Keeping you in. Promising you strength.

      Yes, he had money in his pocket; and money in his future. Yes, he had friends in high places, stilted places, monumental temples and tabernacles.

      No, he did not believe in fairy tales. He thought the ‘Little Prince’ was about some Italian Philosopher

            dedicated to the principles of political empire and world conquest.

 

There was a love that died.

It did not die.

If merely suffocated from too much reason,

Too much concern for social rules of stability,

The opinions of friends and family,

Too much fidelity to the fear of abandonment.

 

It did not die.

It merely withered from too much regret,

Too little soil,

And too much social denial of the primal rights of Eros,

In the company of the barely-civilized

And amid soldiers and defenders of petrified patterns

Who make our behaviors and our lives always less grand than they might be.

 

      “Stick to the map!” the husband said – the engineer husband.

      “Without a map you might get lost!”

      “Stick to the map!” the mother said.

      “Stick to the map!” the father said.

 

There was a love that died.

It died of starvation.

It died of an arid silence

That was mistaken for the forthrightness of law.

 

The Prosecutor cries:

      Protect, protect the statist’s crow!

      Protect, protect our sacred property rights!

I respond:

      Damn the League of Decency!

      Damn the Latter Day Saints!

      Damn the Heritage of Love’s Suffocation!

      And damn Time’s ardent diminishment of Soul!

      For Soul and Love are one; when one dies, the other one cries;

      When one retreats, the other one is beaten;

      When one declines, the other one pines,

      And can never stop crying!

     

There was a love that died

But did not quite vanish.

      God bless the pearl of your throat,

      The Beauty who touched my hand,

      The Princess who kissed my lips

      And could not stop kissing them.

      In my dream you kissed me until dead.

      You kissed me until I was dead.

      Happily, for we were one

      Melted together, like threads of your hair.

     

      God bless the girl in the dream.

      God bless the Fox in the Little Prince.

      God bless the Little Princess in the Fox in the Little Prince.

 

They will meet again in Heaven, it is said.

If God believes that their love was true.

 

25 February 2010

 

 

THE RAIN KEEPS SPEAKING YOUR NAME

 

The rain keeps speaking your name.

The wind keeps hammering out some tune

In the tempo of your vanished voice,

Beating a diadem on the pane of my bedroom window,

Breaking not glass, but breaking my heart slowly again.

 

What is it now, this music,

This threatening decadent cadence,

After thirty years of silence?

 

Something in the bloodstream bursts.

Something in the bloodstream cranes,

Gives out a stiffening shout.

I loved you once, the voice cries.

I loved you once.

I went away.

I loved you once.

 

The Sun is coming around again.

Each 36 years the clock returns to the same hour, the same minute, the same day.

      The day I left; the day we ate watermelon on the grass in the park; the day I kissed you like a man condemned

      to an exile of no love; the night I watched you dance Dvorak’s Serenade; the day you opened your blouse to me,

and let me embrace your feminine directorate; this day has slumbered within me for three decades, slumbered for two half-lives, slumbered for one Trinitarian sequence. Slumbered for an eternity.

 

Now the rain is exacting some price for my listening.

The rain tells a story I cannot believe,

A story of love lost and a fragmented life,

A tortured miscreant thing;

And a damaged man who went crawling to God on both knees,

Bloodied, broken, diseased by Love.

This is what you did not see.

 

The wind is suggesting something unbearable and unbelievable.

It is suggesting that your voice is coming again,

Being carried on some magic channel

Toward me, circling back again toward me,

A snake about to bless me

A snake about to curse me again.

 

A ghost; a marvelous animation;

Time’s miraculous cyclical crescendo…

Is hammering in my ear.

 

I am living in a hurricane. And the hurricane is you.

 

 

12 March 2010

 

 

ARE YOU LISTENING?

 

Are you listening?

I am sitting at the mike,

Proposing some arcane understanding of Love’s statutory limits,

Love’s capacity to bridge times and spaces

And three decades of non-expansive developments

Fueled by God’s geometrical calendar.

Are you hearing me?

 

I am proposing that a love that was once grand,

When I was an innocent child,

Has not really died but has been frozen only in a static point of Time.

 

36 years, 360 degrees, removed from the place where it began.

In this theory, our love remains intact, in location, fixed in time,

Spiraling not into a deconstructed heaven or hell

But awaiting re-awakening in 2013

By a bee, a radio transmitter,

And by the animating power of simple Greek logic.

 

If I step on an egg and wake you,

At just the right moment,

You will appear before me again,

The delicate woman you once were,

The spirited dancer from Berkeley Heights.

Your long brown hair will crown your grace,

An amber glass,

An auburn evangelical windstorm.

You will kiss me.

You will let me kiss you.

You will still protest against too much bodily contact –

You have still a ring on your finger –

And you will declare that Love is a misguided missile,

That Love is an unrealistic tattler on a inconvenient rattler

Threatening us (the three of us) with danger.

 

Can I strip off your clothes this time when I see you?

Or must we wait again until we are dead

And fashioning our next existence out of mental regrets

For not grasping first the sacred fruit ,

The elaborating crown,

As it passed?

 

Is the truth in your ringing in your head still more sacred

Than the truth echoing in your heart,

Which the fire burns and burns,

And then rebuilds to replace me?

The black deed, the black thought, through the sacred agency of Fire,

Becoming magically the white ash of the Dionysiac epiphany?

 

We are all lost in this numerical round.

I am the Sun.

And the Sun Hero has 36 arrows to fire at thee;

18 honeycombs he has stolen from your private sea;

9 vocations inside of which he can find your orbital seasons;

3 obituaries, which announce personal love’s undedicated remorse

Is but an empty decree doomed by the breeze’s hyperventilating volition.

 

You can watch the Sun fall every night

From your house on Granito Drive.

Backyard barbecues go well with merthiolated Solar flares.

The children are grown now – Gelsey, Wendy, Lindsay --

Their sorrows perch on some nearby wind-savaged cottonwood tree;

Or on a porch shielded by hollyhocks.

 

Time has penetrated everything with its sad deliberate heavy brevity.

You can hear only very faintly the radio transmission,

Which is starting to grow inside your delicate daisy fatalities.

A bee is looking for a house with hollyhocks.

A dream, a dream, my kingdom for a dream.

 

13 March 2010

 

 

AM I AFRAID OF THE TRUTH YET

 

I.

 

Am I afraid of the Truth yet?

Have I begun to reel

As the soul is made to stand before his judge

And proclaim his life a success or an empty desperation?

 

Have I moved the world to take a step toward thee, grim and grainy cadaver,

But in the right direction?

Or is my energy all coiled in Destruction’s Corner,

Longing for Death as a young girl longs for summer’s first kiss,

Or summer’s last perfumed handkerchief?

Is my heart turned to sulfur?

Has my love been turned to shale?

     

Why is your face so long and so harsh?

Have I oppressed you yet?

Have I stood above you in the Sun’s portended glory

And proclaimed myself your lord and master evermore,

Forcing you into shadows; and sown paupers, and slippery obligations:

And are you now here to get even?

Is the grandmother in you even more vital

Than the girl who once broke laws

Just to see me alone

In the inconvenience of our passion?

     

All of this is uncertain.

The dark ‘cumulating shadow becomes arrogant and angry

And begins to exact a tyrant’s revenge on the suddenly ancient tyrant

The white-haired tyrant white-bearded, angelically crested.

 

It is a shadow play, just beginning.

It is the top of the sphere coming down into the venereal lowlands,

Where the advocates of justice take over from the advocates of will.

Stakes are put out on the road for the heads of the vagrant Sun Hero to wear,

Along with his old alliances.

He moves now unsteadily from shadow to shadow,

Avoiding old colleagues who suddenly insist

That he be shattered or shunned or stunted or steeled.

For the good of history, of course.

For the good of social obligations, and truth.

     

The wife of the Sun Hero, herself, carries a broad machete

And threatens to exact retribution for her husband’s long-standing sins of ego violation.

There is nothing good waiting here, in this bottomland

Where the Sun vanishes and the Moon laughs riotously

And the men are all hunted down in the moonlight by the spirits of excess

And the remedies of succubi.

Grim Diana is carrying a stick, a bow, a rifle, and a tear in a glass,

A tear for an unknown love she lost during some famous hunt

Back in the time of an overweight Homer, blinded by lust and motivated by song,

Turned away from the analog virtue and emphasizing the meteoric incendiary theme.

Pass the wine if you can.

We are all Greeks at the bottom of our human wells.

We are all Greeks in our battered solar templates.

We are all sorry Greeks, when the Turks appear on the border of our lands,

Saying: “God has spoken; it is time now to find your knees or be barbecued.”

 

 

II.

 

Am I afraid of the truth yet?

Am I afraid that your love did not save me

And would not have saved me?

And that you were wise to choose the other,

For I bear nothing but a sorry capacity for love

And for sorrow’s robust greenery?

 

You have penetrated sanctity.

Your three children should be blessed –

I knew about three girls, a runner, an engineer, a dancer like yourself:

Biographies pop across the silent radar screen.

Pop, full and bright, wearing a Malaysian scarf,

A wooden hand,

A bow made of bamboo

And a banshee cry that he would kill any molester

Of her mother’s great carriage

In which she rode from Jakarta to Jerusalem by way of Laramie, Wyoming.

Beware of change.

     

Beware of change. Beware the truth.

Beware the truth that changes,

For this is even more dangerous

Than Malay warriors blessed by the armory

Of their integral and volumetric insanity.

     

I love you.

I am not the man that I think I am.

I am not the man that you think I was.

I am a lost man, a crippled man,

A man who has battled through dark conditions of lonely exile,

Seeking to find the fireplace in the heart,

Seeking to find the ardent nativity of your bright love,

The candle that excavates the dark pleasure of solitary grace,

Replacing it, in a moment, with incapacitated disbelief.

     

I am nothing.

You have chosen life and I have chosen death.

You have chosen light and I have chosen shadow.

You have chosen family and I have chosen October resistance,

When the rain falls suddenly like Dylan Thomas in a late-night winter ecstasy

Drunken and bruised on a sea-path in Cardiff.

 

 

III.

 

Am I afraid of the truth yet?

The truth is that I loved you with a pure love,

The love of a gambling prince betting on your beauty.

I offered you a dance in the coign of my magical cavern,

A manner of existing in my heart as a vaulting star.

You chose the solid world.

This was probably wise of you.

Sometimes I regret I am not more solid myself.

I regret that my wish was not a fortune in your house of speech.

I collected you in my bosom and brain.

I collected your smile and your scent and your language;

I collected your silent innocent condition.

 

You were God’s angelic virtues offered to save me from the mutilations of doubt.

You were the last light I saw before the daylight expired.

I watched you fade into a blue-black cauldron.

You went up, the Evening Star.

And I went down, a captain of the Dragon’s maelstrom.

I am God’s black eye.

I am God’s clairvoyance in Ezekiel’s black tube.

 

I have prayed for you often.

I have watched your daughter Gelsey, like a cat has watched the moon.

There is nothing arbitrary in heaven’s torch or in the planet’s fatal geometry.

Let the girls all live in the eye of the storm.

And let you, yourself, be the center of immaculate virtue.

     

You are, yourself, dear one, the sanctuary.

When the rude vision passes by Granito Drive

I will use my flaming brand

To drive Despair into a northern vapor.

And I will do this silently –

If I am truly capable of such a silent feat.

Or I will make a bit of noise, if I must,

If I am driven to do so by some monumental vacancy,

Please say: “I hear you, Michael.”

     

If you hear a faded singing, or a crashing, or a trumpet,

Or a bit of steel rattling, at an inappropriate time

Or in an inappropriate manner,

At some significant station of your life,

It might be me again, though invisible now,

Reminding you that I care most even now

For your abundant and elegant secruity.

Love was not enough -- perhaps.

But love was all we had; and it remains, today,

All that I can offer thee.

 

 

IV.

 

I am afraid of the truth.

The truth is not always friendly.

The truth is not a complacent memory.

The truth is a vacant precision of comprehending

That what was said and what was done were often leagues apart.

 

Speech is an empty catalog inside of which

Truth does not always live but sometimes inhabits.

 

14 March 2010

ARE YOU THERE, STILL – OR HAVE YOU GONE?

 

 

I.

 

Are you there, dear one,

Hiding in the memory of grass,

Hiding in the memory of trees,

Hiding in the green fragrance of the stately buildings

That keep everyone from knowing too much

Seeing too many trysts, too much touching,

Too many breaking or bending of vows?

Are you there, still – or have you gone?

     

I remember you.

I remember your grace; and your elegant nature;

Your neck looked like a pearl.

I remember the soft cadence of your voice,

The friendly storm of your auburn hair.

You were everywhere at once.

You were the epitome of petite genius.

I loved you dearly.

But then something happened?

 

Did we awaken from a dream?

Did we fall off a cliff and die?

Did we manufacture some Romanian fantasy from a Berlioz cantata,

Or perhaps from the diadem of your beloved Giselle,

And simply vanish?

Did we cross a magnetic line that was designed to limit mistakes

We might and ought not make in our love?

Or was the line designed

To create mistakes in our own judgment for the sake

Of later guaranteed punishment?

Was this line designed to create for us

Sorrows and insidious circumstance

From which we might never awaken,

Might never emerge?

 

The emergency happened.

That is what stopped us.

My flight stopped us.

My inability to remain in love’s addled saddle

And ride the wild horse of triangular infection

As it retched and tethered back and forth,

As it shook and craned and reeled and floundered:

Your devotion was split.

You had a husband;

A husband in a small marriage that had just begun,

Getting smaller, getting more constricted,

More morally strictured by a husband flexing personalized theology,

A small mirage that beckoned you forward,

With both fear and promise – but with mostly with fear.

 

And I appeared, broken, confused.

I appeared as a small prince,

A thin principle, an adulterous engagement,

Away from which you could not tear yourself

But, also to which or to whom

You could never give yourself fully.

So we both bled.

Perhaps he bled too, the other man,

The engineer, who longed to build buildings,

Build families, build himself a grand staircase

Into Mormon Heaven on the basis of your fertile loins

And your adherence to his newly-meaningful ideology.

You had to comply with his wishes –

Or he would never be elevated as a master in Brigham Young’s

Propagation temple of Patriarchs and Patented Tyrants

Dedicated to the Ark.

 

 

II.

 

Who was I?

I was a lapsed Catholic who saw in you

The image of angelic female creation.

It was love-at-first sight.

I could not turn away.

You burned your image into my brain;

And you caved into my heart the craving for a matrimonial

Occasion of my own.

Children also, but at your temporal discretion.

Love children; not duty-born offspring;

Not children who became a toll paid for God’s greater intervention,

Grafting material bliss on the obedient pitar of the household.

A material kingdom crafted on the submission of the wife

To the mastery of an intolerant begetter’s burgundy captain’s hook.

You told me that you loved me

And that we might be married in the next life.

You could not leave a heavy-hand in heaven

For a lighter-hand in hell, an open-hand in hell,

Even if his gentile hand was tender and oscillated irregularly

Into arcane cinnamon octaves of worship.

 

A bitter known ingredient is often less unpleasant

Than an unknown violent bliss

That might evaporate in time and leave a greater emptiness

In its spectacularly non-ardent wake.

 

 

III.

 

So I ran.

I ran to save my sanity.

I ran to save my Soul, for your denial of my love

Made love, for me, a city of Dis,

Made for me a coffin for fish,

Made for me a consequent bath of acid and brine.

So I ran.

From what did I run?

 

And now you are lost to me.

It is 33 years later; and I am waking from a dream.

In 3 years time, the arc will have made a complete tour

Of the spyre.

1977 becomes 2013.

And your ghost is back.

I cannot forget you apparently.

 

We walked upon the campus green, beneath the disciplined towers above us,

Gods made of stones watching how we broke their laws,

Laws generating order,

Laws generating fidelity,

Laws generating orderly behavior,

Laws designed to guarantee the amassing of wealth

And the amassing of public titles earmarked by Sanctity.

 

The gods did not want us to be lovers apparently.

They did not want us to demolish their society

With our passion.

You turned away from me, leaving me brown, evacuated, wind-obliterated

And involuted into a grainery meant for abandonment.

And so I ran.

I ran when you said no, I will not wed thee.

No I will not follow thee.

No, I shall never join thee – except, perhaps, in heaven,

If God is a good God, a just God, if God has mercy, if God forgives us.

 

I look for you in my dreams.

Now I look everywhere.

Did I do you injustice when I ran to save my life?

Did I do myself diminishment when I did not stand and fight,

And accept death as the honorable outcome of Love’s

Toxic, potent and portentous majesty?

 

Come to visit me in my next dream, please.

Are you still there – or have you gone?

 

16 March 2010

 

THIS LOVE DID NOT GO DOWN EASILY

 

This love did not go down easily.

This love absorbed years of separation, decades of abandonment:

Still it is not destroyed.

     

This love was not made for the ordinary life.

This love was not composed by the mundane recorders

Of modern romance for moderate suburban half-hearted consumption,

Followed by senile decline.

 

This love was not read out of the hollow tree;

Rather, from the sacred elm.

 

Once upon a time there was a girl

Who desired nothing so much as to be loved and treasured

For ever by a man who manufactured sacred dreams.

But she was scared.

“It is not real!” she cried.

He replied: “And that is its gift.

For it is composed of both reality and myth, fused by supple desire;

A little bit of air, a little bit of earth; a little bit of water, a little bit of fire.”

     

“But there are people watching us!”

“But they cannot see us. Look, I will turn us into mirrors!”

Poof.

“We will became… reflective.”

 

“How do you make the world perfect?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You love perfectly the one who is given to you.”

“But I have been given to another,” she replied.

“You can love him perfectly by leaving him,” he said. “And you can love me perfectly by taking my hand.”

“And you can love me perfectly by sacrificing yourself, by sacrificing our pleasure, and by leaving me in peace, by giving me back to my husband.”

 

But this sacrificial love did not go down easily.

This pleasure was not a game played by adults for their ease.

This monstrosity was a fire in the heart, a fire in the forest, a fire on the hilltop.

It burned like the sun.

It evaporated many oceans.

     

It should have gone out quickly – that was the plan.

      “We will remove the source of the fire from the inspiration of the flame.”

      “We will send him away, and we will allow her to return to her simple progression through life as a loving wife

            and as mother to her children.”

      “It is simple: women always do this. Children will help. Three daughters for instance; she will forget about

            him soon.”

      Mister Chisum said: “We need to find that friend of yours his own girl-friend, don’t you think?”

 

But this love did not go down easily.

      “This dog is sick with fever. Get me my rifle.”

This love did not go down easily.

      “We will dismiss it as a fever in the brain and prescribe medication for the eruption. That will save her.”

      “We will describe other women for his grainy imagination. Love is three-fourths lust: new pretty flesh will

            inspire him. That will save him, and make him release her from his pathological, even demonic, fixation.”

But this love did not go down easily.

      “It he does not accept the cure, then I will drive him mad. I will twist him into a sheave. I will tear out his guts

            through sorrow and deprivation. I will hang him on a tree, call him a satan, strip him of every human

            dignity.”

     

He is laughing on the tree, envisioning her face, her dancing soul.

Pirouetting above the Sacred Fire.

Who is at the door?

Is that Susan Michaels?

If it is Susan Michaels, do not dare letter open that let her!

When she puts her lips on his, no force of law will be able to stop them.

 

The memory is a terrible thing.

      “The invisible dog is sick with invisible fever. Get me my invisible rifle.”

This love did not go down easily.

      “She is a phone call away. She is a phone call away.”

      “She is 33 years and a phone call away.”

This love did not go down easily.

      “What are you waiting for?”

      “She is a phone call away, a blog away, a stealthy email message away.”

      “Water hue wet herring fair?”

 

This love did not go down easily.

 

18 March 2010

 

YOU ARE THE LOVE THAT DIED

 

 

I.

 

You are the love that died.

How is that possible?

You are the love that bloomed,

And from a delicate tulip

Transformed herself into a magnificent

      Tiger Lily.

 

How did that happen?

You danced into the picture of my life,

A fragile reed in a ballet breeze,

Turning powerfully on iridescent thighs,

Toes that held the world in tow,

A drum in your heart,

A miracle in your smile,

A fragrance you embodied, a fragrance somewhere between lilac and aphrodisiac peach,

Churning a nearly-perfect ocean of emotion,

Into which you motioned me to jump, to fall, to join you, hurry, quickly, quietly, please;

Into which calm sea you pulled me, gravely and emphatically,

Thinking you did not really pull me

But that I jumped or fell eagerly instead.

Which was equally true.

 

Two truths, each ample,

Both serving Truth’s amplification,

And the joyous duplication of Love’s magnetic

Sacred Rhythm.

 

 

II.

 

You were rising. I was falling.

We met in Venus, your morning, my evening.

You came to mourn the loss of me.

I evened out the world,

Giving with one hand to the poor,

Taking with one hand from the rich.

We passed.

It was a twilight world, everything silent, magical, like a dream transmission.

It was a dream transmission.

There were none in the world but you and I:

No thoughts, no morality, no expectations, no mortality:

Just fatal concupiscence locked up in one transfixed stare.

And then a frothy surrender.

 

 

III.

 

I kissed your lips.

You mouth was a tangerine, amaretto cocktail.

You said my kisses were too wet.

You said my cocktails were too emboldened.

Please be more circumspect.

 

I was too wet to see.

I was drowning in your magic magenta calypsodic episodic

Wine-dark sea, dear,

Drowning through my own insistence.

 

I said: “Am I Hercules; and Icarus also?”

And you said: “Can you swim?”

And I said: “I can always drown!”

And you said: “Are you a True Heart for me?

And, if so: are you prepared, then, to suffer greatly for me?”

Tiger Lily has a broken stem.

 

I was not prepared to suffer so greatly.

I did not believe in losing you.

I did not believe you would let me lose you.

I did not believe you would allow me to fall.

How did this come to be?

How did you float away from me so abjectly and so religiously,

And not bother to look back once

Not bother to look back and smile one last smile

Before I faded finally into an elegiac photograph

Curled up in the chronic fetal obituary position?

 

How was Time’s gravity more disciplined and more regal

Than Love’s sincere levity and virtuous merit?

The law of deep private tea.

The law of deep probity also.

All wrapped into the same stocking, under the same blanket;

All stuffed into a Degas’ blue-silver slipper.

Give me one more kiss, one more kiss before I leave, one more kiss before I go!

One more smile!

Before I die!

 

Will you worship Love?

Or will you worship the fealty of the Uttered Oath?

 

 

IV.

 

How does the ship not see the rock that, kissing it, contorts it?

How does the gull not see the current of wind that smiles and then

      devours it?

How did we not see our own evaporation on that grim horizon,

That vast Laramie indelicate remorseless privatizing enervating wilderness?

We had Youth to guide us – but still, Age misled us.

Age counseled us to be patient, to follow the social code of moral behavior,

To put Law above Love,

To put your marriage above our passion,

To put staid Realism above the golden fruit of Imagination

That Venus had joyously given to us to devour

And by which to initiate our own immortal devouring

And ride the horse our love created

For ever on a sacred wind to Eden.

 

Which god do we worship?

The sober, sad god who gives us Time and Death and Mourning?

Or the joyous, young god who gives us life and ecstatic union?

Why did we choose to worship the God of Death?

Why did you choose this?

Did we choose, you and I, through your rational accounting,

The wrong god to worship,

The God of tragic submission to order

And to the destruction of unrealistic dreams on the contour?

Did we walk away, sadly, from the fruit-bearing tree

That offered us immortal cognizance,

Choosing instead the black cloth,

The black cognizance of adulthood,

The black coffin and the derelict crescent,

And the implication that sorrow is more real than is joy?

That pleasure is selfishness; and pain is a solitary and ecstatic anniversary

Of God’s common and communal direction to the grave?

Why did we worship the god of destruction, you and I?

The god of convention, the god of the blind vision,

Known almost regally as Tradition?

Why did we worship the god of blind justice?

Why did we not worship the god of resurrection?

 

We were offered an eternity.

What did we choose?

We chose another path.

We chose to follow the sad, sober law

That our parents, too,

And our ancestors before them, followed.

Grimly, reluctantly, sullenly, joining to parade our eyes to the grave,

Forcing our children to complete the dreams

That we, ourselves, had not the heart to confront, and master.

Only we can choose to elevate grim and grainy Reality

To the heavenly level of Love and Dream,

Raising Earth into non-practical paradise,

The home where God desires us to be.

 

 

V.

 

We are lost now, lost for ever, lost to one another.

I look for you on the horizon of my dreams.

But you are sad and sober now, in my dreams,

With a face that counsels patience and dry virtue.

Ecstasy is something to fear.

Ecstasy is a devil’s temptation.

Ecstasy is something meaningful only for children.

Not, certainly, today, something for practical adults.

 

I am the devil apparently;

And you are the love that died, but did not die.

There is an ember burning still, somewhere,

Somewhere in a silent shadow,

Somewhere inside a jar,

In a well where the jar was put,

Beneath the clay’s dampening gravity,

So that no one would ever know of its (former) existence.

The ember is inside my heart;

And my heart is in the shadow, in the jar, in the well,

Where it still smolders and will continue to smolder

For an eternity or more

Until you free it.

 

What is the Sun, after all,

If not the heart of your unwavering lover

Still proclaiming his undying passion

And his fidelity for thee.

 

The Tiger Lily has a broken stem.

And I am still trying to fix it.

 

21 March 2010

 

WHAT YOU LIKED MOST ABOUT ME

 

What you liked most about me

Is that I made you feel free.

That is why your anger at me

never lasted.

That is why your desire to shake me off

Like a bug attached too long to your lovely skin

Survived and flourished only in my absence.

 

What you missed most about me

Was my willingness to say almost anything,

To declare my love for you in the loudest voice,

In the most spirited, animated fashion,

As you an I were alone on an island,

Not surrounded by human judgments and human illusions

Based on and within human unhappiness.

 

What you liked least about me you also liked most.

I refused to acknowledge the Reality bug, the Reality Circus.

I did not believe that Reality was relevant to us.

And that gave us power, a strange power,

And ability to fly.

But to try to live in the world of flight

Would demand a very strong heart,

And a very strong vision of what was real,

A vision colliding with the mainstream voice.

 

What you liked least about me you also liked most.

My impatience to love you, to possess you, to capture your love.

I could not contain my passion, could not play a safe hand,

Waiting for the world to change its view,

And for you to weary of the prescribed world

You had subscribed to earlier,

Before your parents and family,

Before you sister, your aunt, your grandmother.

‘You have to be patient,’ you said.

I could not be patient.

I was on fire with love for you.

I was being consumed by this fire.

How could you ask a man on fire to be patient a little longer?

 

What I liked most about you

Was your grace.

Grace is the highest virtue because it contains all others.

 

What did I like most about losing you,

What did I like least about losing you?

Losing the presence of this utter grace.

This loss nearly destroyed me.

 

I have never had such pain before.

The letters that never came.

The phone call that I expected at some point:

It never came.

A day became a year;

A year became twenty;

Twenty years became thirty.

 

Where is that grace now,

That grace I needed so,

That grace I decided to capture for ever?

Where are our children, dear?

Where was the Good God to save us?

We do know the Bad God, who deleted us.

Perhaps it was just a mistake.

God can make mistakes too, I guess.

 

I loved your eyes;

But now they are gone, glazed by a kind of madness.

I loved your mouth, your smile;

Your unwillingness to accept my compliments.

I love to tell you of your beauty,

Of your charm, and of your sweet nature –

And you loved to tell me I was wrong,

That I simply knew you if a different way,

In an ‘unrealistic way’ –

I would come to hate your selfish nature

If we ever were allowed to manifest our dream.

 

I loved kissing you.

I wanted to die kissing you.

I still want to die kissing you.

The wine of your mouth was the nectar of Heaven’s Glory.

Why did you take this from me?

Why did you turn off the radio –

And simply move into the Real World

And accept its silence?

 

We are drifting in the water;

And there is a chance our boats might cross,

Might pass next to one another –

I might look up and find you.

If this occurs, then God loves us.

If it does not occur, then a kind of damnation is declared.

 

I have been damned before.

It is not the damnation, itself, that I dread.

I dread the finality of the murder of the dream’s gold.

 

Say sayonnara at least.

Your silence is like a death sentence

That my heart decries.

 

9 July 2011

THE VOCABULARY OF LOSS

 

The vocabulary of loss.

What is in a word?

What is in a series of words, a sentence, a paragraph?

What is in the tempest of the heart

When a door shuts and a second door does not open?

When the world darkens and the future loses its air,

Loses its shape,

And becomes a vacuum of loss,

An emptiness that surges and suffocates Hope,

Promising, instead, a cross?

Go south, young man! Go south; and assume your cross!

 

This is nothing, in truth.

Just a way to talk about Night-Cycle’s woes.

Deaths come; family deaths come.

One cannot stop them.

One is in a giant atom and the atom is dynamic;

Elements, articles, particles, crash all the time;

Chemical processes happen;

And no one can be blamed or confronted about this:

It is Life’s season-to-season authoritarian migration only,

Life’s season-to-season transmission

Of beliefs scrolled on the head of a pin.

Life’s capacity to bruise;

Life’s capacity to embolden through disembodiment

And through transgressions

And transformed mesons.

 

When did I lose you?

Was it before the whispering began;

Or was it after the shouting began?

Did we ever shout, in fact?

We did not shout, even after the whispering stopped.

 

Was it before the world fell in to water,

And the Night-Cycle began to devastate material accretion?

We are falling in to the water again, 2010.

When I last fell into the water, in 1974,

You were waiting to rescue me.

But then you did not rescue me.

You pulled me up by the hair into the air – and then you let me fall again.

Into the deep chasm

Where only God and God’s angel Michael

Could find me.

 

Dante was there.

Beatrice was not there.

But Beatrice was apparently still thinking of Dante

While she was in Heaven --

At least that is what Dante wanted to believe –

Dropping him a lifeline, a sutratma thread,

Down into hell to silently guide him back to light.

 

You were not there either, my love.

You were not there when I sank to the bottom of the sea, a common stone.

Were you thinking of me while you were up your silent northern ecstasy?

Were you speaking my name?

Were you hearing my prayer?

Did you drop me your own thread of light,

An umbilicus that touched me deeply with its doctrine,

Inspiring suddenly in me my exaggerated revival?

 

Were you learning the vocabulary of loss

For your own self?

Or were you teaching me the vocabulary of loss,

For my sake?

 

Nothing is easy now.

The joy has ended.

The fireworks are gone.

We learn to live the quiet decline into stillness.

The vocabulary of loss we have learned,

Together and alone,

We will each use this diction again I am sure.

 

The vocabulary of loss is the language we learn

To prepare ourselves for our own

Unnoticed and unrecognized

Quiet but resolute descent into

Our thankful, kind dismemberment.

 

23 March 2010

THE BLACK TOWER

 

There is a black tower in the town.

There is a black priest who guards the black tower.

There is a black nun who guards the black priest

Who guards the black tower in the town.

 

How do I know this tower?

 

There is a black tower in the town

Under which I first kissed you,

In a dream,
In a dream town,

In a dream symphony,

After I first met you: Summer 1976.

 

There is a black tower in the town.

There is a sad hour in the town under the black tower.

The sad hour is when I last left you, sitting at the library door: Summer 1978,

Never to see you again.

 

The black tower is a shadow of my sorrow.

The black tower is the shadow of a raven who saw me cry

As I left the black town, never to return.

Summer 1978.

A tear is in my heart for ever.

 

26 March 2010

 

 

GOOD FRIDAY

 

Good Friday is not so good.

Good Friday demands blood and splinters,

Demands bones on a cross,

Demands flesh in a tempest.

 

The hurricane of your soul complies with the creed

Of the proto-generative myth.

Let us offer to the world a lover of the sad woman

Who, herself, bears a tree.

     

We all have a cross, sad to say.

The cross manifests before the Sun is lifted,

Before Spring blessings strike.

     

Put this man on the cross.

This bearded man.

This bearded lover of the pure heart who burns, night after night,

For her, his lost love.

     

Put him on the cross

So we can return to the business of the world,

Making profits,

Building buildings,

Manifesting cities,

Inculcating empires,

Manufacturing civilizations!

Ready the army, for the work of creation is nigh!

Call out the engineers: they will save us!

 

Good Friday is not so good.

Good Friday is a magic moment that arrives just in time

To ruin one man’s life and to save many lives from the reign of violent retribution.

Shall we call this man Jesus?

Or might we call this man Paul instead?

Jesus was a socialist;

Paul, not Paul, Paul was a righteous capitalist

Soldier of God.

Which of these shall we kill?

And which shall we resurrect?

     

Shall I be the only man you strike, Mister Lightning?

You shall lower only me into the black hole

And surround me with angry vipers

And women’s fears of material comfort’s evaporation –

And I shall let them pierce me with weapons of iron

And tongues of ornate methodology,

Bejeweled with candelabras of rage.

Note: the theology is twisted at Dawn.

 

Daggers; clubs; fornications; curses that bind me.

Hearts, diamonds, clubs and then spades.

I shall be bound for thee.

I shall be mutilated for thee.

I shall be violated for thee.

And what, in turn, shall I give to my destroyers?

I shall give them an even blacker world

Than the one they are perceive coming for themselves;

I shall teach them that the greatest damning illusion

Man can grasp

Is the black one that follows

The grim Roman destruction

Of the Sun,

Which they will surely blame

On Jews and Goths.

 

Good Friday is not so good, is not a good day;

But it is a day that is good for he who is freed.

 

Free me from worry; free me from pain.

Gather about me in my upward arc

The good fortune of birds

And the beautiful beatific balance

Of the acrobat’s vault.

     

I shall fly; I shall be free.

Hammer and nails deliver me.

The Tree of Life accepts the son back

Through the gates of his perpetual Byzantium.

The cartoon Messiah asks without laughing:

How many miles to Phoenix from here?

Do you know the way to San Jose?

 

26 March 2010

 

YOU ARE THE OCCULT DREAM; YOU ARE MY BEATRICE

 

You are the occult dream: you are my Beatrice!

You are the one who sacrificed me to the gods of disorder,

The gods of sound,

The gods of ecstatic, emphatic aboriginated mediumship.

And for this I thank you.

Only, please, don’t do it again.

 

The old manor-house in the swamp has its ghosts.

The poets all gather there.

Indeed, the poets swap stories of history’s great loves,

Great lovers,

And descents into real poetic injustice;

Muse-Oracles and Muse-Destructions through the mad power of Eros,

The carpenter and his rose.

 

God have mercy; God prepare the ambulance!

      “Who, where is the next Beatrice?” they ask.

     

You are the next Beatrice, I respond.

You are the occult dream: you are my Beatrice!

 

I heard someone say:

 

“Can you a poet be, as you are now, all academic learning and scrubbed catholic innocence? Not very likely. You write like a schoolboy who has read too much Wordsworth, too much Milton in a single sitting! Your heart is a shallow dish, a sallow fish, that has not seen yet the ocean’s distemper. You have not loved! You have not burned your heart to its quick through the intercession of Luna’s musing princess – and her arbitrary governance! You have not lived! You must be hurt! You must be scorched by Love’s flaming filament, Love’s anarchic tongue; brought to your knees through Luna’s savage and perverse appreciation for her devotion! There is no depth in you, poor lad! You are all sound of madness, fury, mediocre logic and surface rebellion! Romantic insistence on the brave new world of a lad’s precise imaginings, born of literature and naïve reconstitution of the poles. I will send someone to cure you. I will send a vision to you, a pure vision of God’s pale embodiment. She will dance; she will sing; she will become a flower for you, an opening sesame seed, a veneration of Love’s watery principles, inclusive of monsters. She will be for you Venus’ glad mouth, fondling hand, orange breath, alabaster neck, watermelon nativity. She will dance at Swan’s Lake for you. She will make canaries cry, make tulips flame up and part, make new suns be born, all in your presence, all as proof to you of her divinity. You will kiss her once; then again. You will devote your life to her worship. You will long for death with her, for her sake. You will wish to kill her. You will wish to possess her. You will gladly go mad for her: kiss her, miss her, devour her, empower her. You will take her hand and bless it. You will proffer her a ring of gold, beg her to wed you, entreat her to bear your children for you. But she will turn away. She is taken. The Moon, after all, does not marry the falling Sun-God; for she cannot remain where the Sun cannot reside. She cannot come down from her Moon-Castle to be with the fallen memory of her secondary allegiance. Her honor will not allow it. Her husband would be unseated by this. And prosperity for the world might die because of such unalloyed vice.

    Beatrice gives you genius to touch, genius through suffering, genius through pain. You say you wish to be a poet: then you must suffer. You must go deeper and deeper into pain. You must have a wound. For a shallow verse-maker is God’s greatest abomination. If you would speak of God’s creation, God’s utter and first and final genius, through the majesty of the Word, then be prepared for sorrow, be prepared for injustice, be prepared for disappointment. You will be cast into Love’s furnace. And, when you emerge, from the last fruit you will be made the first seed and stem and root. Fire will re-make you. Happiness is part of the tale. Yet even the tale of joy is better told by he who masters Dagon’s epitome, by he who gains from the Dragon his metre and his lexicon of Night’s deep Wisdom, beneath the surface light of epitomes scattered star-like by a virgin hand. You must pay dearly for such sustenance and guidance.

    I will send you Leslie Rhoades. She will be your Beatrice. But be careful what you wish for. She is fire, joy, pleasure, sweetness, poison and volatile nitroglycerine in a jar. She is dangerous to you, as you are dangerous to her. ‘Don’t play with me’ – isn’t that what the song says? She is fire to you; and you are fire to her also. And she will not fully realize this until you are gone and she is left managing the smoke, memorizing its thinning shape, on a solitary moor, weeping and wondering where the true sacrament went, why the flame vanished so resolutely and with such violent remorselessness…”

     

Love deeply, love bitterly, love blindly, love graciously, love generously, love greedily, love provocatively and love earnestly, eternally…

When I take her away from you, your life ends and my life through you begins.”

 

26 March 2010

THERE IS NO STRATEGY IN THIS LOVE

 

There is no strategy in this love.

There is no playing of angles,

No positioning oneself for the rebound,

No analyzing reactions and body motions

To anticipate the next adroit move,

As if love were like a game of chess,

With a king to be conquer, and a queen to serve and be served,

A queen to sabotage, a king to be skewered.

Always warring for advantage,

Seeking to destroy one another

And win some imaginary title,

A solitary square of purport,

Which square, in reality, no one gains;

No one can endure.

 

Love demolishes everyone who plays.

And everyone plays.

It is the only game in town.

 

There is no strategy here.

There is no amplitude in the wave patterns of harmonies,

No arbitrary consideration hidden in the clairaudient powers

At the waters edge,

Powers that will turn this painful erotic self-condemnation

Into something other than what it is:

A passionate embrace of life and death

And a manufactured future etched by one love

In hopes of influencing the other

To make dreams evolve into stones,

To make heavenly anticipations

Manifest as concrete objects,

As literal paths upon the plain

Upon which both might tread,

From one pole – Sunlight –

Toward the other pole – Moonlight –

Arm-in-arm,

Escorting one’s well-loved shadow

And one’s death as well

Into the green future

Anticipated pleasantly by Love….

 

I wanted you with me for ever.

You said no.

You said you could not abandon your commitment

To your own precedent virtues.

Love, apparently, was a virtue less exalted

Than devotion to law

Or stolid loyalty to convention

Or the oath, so cold and lonely and provocative.

That one uttered when live was dead

And practical boundaries were the only explanation.

That was one consideration.

 

I wanted you to complete my life.

You said no.

You said that marital complications

Etched in blood of a set of vows

Signed and dated only days before we met

Meant that life with me was a possible bliss

Of no consideration.

You said that I was late.

I said that you were early.

“Why did you not wait for me?” I cried. “I waited for you!”

“I did not know you were coming,” you said to me.

 

There is no strategy in this love;

There was no strategy in our love’s ascent,

Or in our love’s demise

Into quiet irrelevance

And iridescent grief.

The clock has hands;

The clock’s hands are digging our separate graves

In different hemispheres of the Earth today.

 

I cannot see you now.

I can see your name.

I can feel your movement in the air,

Feel the strength in your dancing thighs,

Feel the texture of your complicit and elevated laughter.

I remember your eyes, like innocent blue bird’s-eggs,

Magnetic forces that, too, pulled sacred oaths out of me.

I smell the rich fertility of hair, umber, amber, honored silken hair.

I can touch your tender, slender even grace –

The delicate way you use your smile to abbreviate my torture.

But even that has begun to fade into anomaly.

 

We have been apart for 33 years.

I have not stopped loving you.

Sometimes I even wonder if a missing strategy

Resulted in a missing declaration

Causing the absence of movement

In the direction of my covenant.

You were a resolute stone;

You could not move yourself.

I could move you.

But, instead, I moved myself –

It was either move or fractionate coldly

Into ten thousand atomic conditions of blue madness.

 

The word ‘yes’ could have resolved my distant anarchy.

But ‘yes’ you could not utter;

You could not move my unanchored strategy

Of tortured unceremonious resistance to Time.

You could not; or you would not.

 

I believed that honesty and innocence

Were the same as virtue.

I still believe this.

But honesty and innocence held up an empty cup,

To your lovely visage.

You would not drink; you could not consecrate our love.

 

I should honor you too for your nobility.

I know that you are noble.

I know that you resisted temptation

For the sake of the oath you uttered before God.

I love this grandeur in you, this nobility.

I know that you sacrificed yourself and your own heart –

And myself –

For the commitment, the oath,

You made to your husband.

If I lament my own evaporation in time,

At your insistence,

I lament even more the bitter exile from your presence,

Which to me accumulated and mirrored and emulated in me

An exile from my God.

 

I understand fully that your own self-elimination

Was an act of selfless honor

Dedicated to the promises you earlier had made.

I honor you for this virtuous gravity.

I fear, however, a torturous loss of love and a durable desiccation of heart

Might lead resolutely, irrevocably, to the slow destruction of your gallant

Spirit,

A result that, in me, would be met

By guilt, sorrow, tendentious pain, and utter disconsolation.

My original intent was to save you from this fatality.

 

We come into the world alone.

We come into the world alone;

And then we leave alone also.

We begin empty.

We fill up with joy and empathy and love

And then power and children and wealth and corruption.

We begin to empty;

We are also empty when we are completed.

And then God begins to fill us again,

In a round that never ends but only amplifies

With credulous context.

 

We come into the world alone;

We leave the world alone --

And when we leave this world

My search again begins for you.

 

31 March 2010

REASON IS A GHOST HERE

 

 

Reason is a ghost here,

In this land of obligations,

Inside of which the monsters of love

Have raged and collected souls by the thousands.

 

This love is not a specialist

In the iconography of broken parts and tokened hearts exceedingly grained.

This love is a specialist only

In the passing of the hat,

The grim return,

The missing service,

The oblique pandemonium,

The staved hull,

The broken furnace of futurity,

The classical imperative of lost belief,

The icy heritage of northern demarcation

Into the demonisms of enforced archaisms.

 

The soul is blasted into the next century.

The grace of living is swept away,

Replaced by a carnival anticipation,

Grim deceptions, mostly self-served,

A remembered kiss,

A forgotten exposure,

A photograph in the mind bleeding and blanching

Until its negative appears

But its positive values vanish slowly

Like something too long exposed to acid

As the art of remembering evaporates by degrees

Into broken scents and discontinuous voices,

Clouded by lines and distorted by passing

Conversations with the demon also calling himself Sorrow.

 

Something that was, something that enriched exposure,

Has turned in cubic cadence and sequence into nothing.

A void is a terrible force to confront.

A void slowly eats one’s vigor.

A void – a black hole – slowly emancipates Hope.

Nothing remains here of what was there,

Except a few remarkable letters exchanged,

Which have now become digital representations

Of the same expressions they once foreshadowed.

 

Your smile: where is it now?

Your electric countenance.

Your sharp step.

Your fear of procreation?

Your disbelief in the Mormonic Century?

Your mother’s suffering?

Your father’s hairless fear of ending up naked on the shoals,

Penniless in the pews?

That is where we all end up:

Naked on the shoals; penniless in the pews.

Is it not?

     

Where is your sister’s friendly enmity?

Where is the practical nationhood of your husband,

The man who builds structures and then shouts at the world

That God is the true reality,

As long as one lives in Utah

Or in Las Vegas?

Are your three daughters Episcopalian?

Did you teach your daughters how to dance the pas-de-deux?

     

Where is our first kiss?

Where is our last kiss?

 

1 April 2010

DREAMS ARE TOXIC; LAWS ARE UBIQUETOUS

 

Dreams are toxic; laws are ubiquitous.

I dreamed of a life with you.

The dream became toxic.

The dream began to undermine the ground,

Damage the superstructure inside of which

My life was hiding and trying to re-learn how to crawl.

     

Could life really ever be so good?

Could love be so real?

Could the dance inside of our hearts

Manufacture for me a dream

Of sustained blessing and conscience and consequence?

     

Your mouth was a dreamy feast,

A mango festival;

Your skin a dreamy soft cylinder of sweet cream.

You touched my hand.

You said this is not real;

You said: it is a dream;

We should taste it while we can, I replied;

But it is not a substance that could survive

When the callow daylight struck the dream black again.

 

Dreams are toxic.

I dreamed you loved me.

I dreamed that the toxic world of greed,

And adult demands and conventions

For pragmatic surrender to trite, safe steeds of acquisition

All was gone,

Had evaporated like cancerous smoke in the wind,

Was replaced by this dream of love and strength and unselfish proximities.

      I dreamed that you loved me.

      You said you loved me.

      You said that you would always care for me.

      You did not say the dream was toxic.

      You did not say that all dreams die,

      Some dreams die in a very hard fashion.

      But I should have prepared myself for this.

 

Laws are ubiquitous.

      Laws are the enemies of dreams.

      Laws are the stumbling catastrophes of masculine limitation in the world.

      Laws are the city walls inside of which one is allowed to move.

      Laws are the rituals of social movement that the clan transfers to all its minute invectives, children, wives, landscapes, properties, kinships, kingdoms, seeking to maintain order and to maximize the power of the king for the sake of material dominance and ever-frightened postponement of Death’s dehumanized frequency.

 

Laws are ubiquitous because…we have a fear of freedom.

      Freedom is a threat to order.

      The dream is a threat to order.

      The dream is a threat to productivity and factory output and maximized investment; and to the rapt appreciation of the ‘real’ estate, the land God has promised the self-defined saints for living as society demands, the promised land apparently a promised prosperous phosphorescent real estate empire.

      The dream is the unreal estate.

      The unreal estate is the promised land God gives to those who can pass through the eye of a needle.

     

     

 

If you live in the dream too long, the real estate (and the law’s eternal opposition to this state of non-being is legendary, this unselfish existence in the background matter, where the foreground spotlight of success cannot find and fashion it, transform it into a consumer culture, the foreground light being about vanity, and greed, and pride, Greek hubris, and about Satanic self-love and earthly corruption, this to the eye of the unreal estate living inside of the dream, the dark background matter) begins to unravel, thereby making the reality (not the dream) become toxic. When the real estate unravels, and with it the law that abetted its expansion, then the believers in law and the real estate blame the dream and the dreamers for the law’s apocalyptic demise.

      One cannot live for love. To live for love is to break the law. To live for power, money, status, material enhancement, property, personal colonies one might own, empires through children: this is what the law supports.

 

I dreamed you loved me.

      I love you still.

      I love my toxic dream with you.

      I love the unreal estate of your heart.

 

6 April 2010

THE RED FLAG IS FLYING AGAIN

 

 

I.

 

The red flag is flying again.

Down on Sukhumvit Road

Truckloads of red-clad peasants,

Red flags flying,

Celebrate the birth of the Night-Cycle.

And the decline of the businessman, the engineer, the lawyer

Whose economic empire blows away

Into the sand from which it was created.

God bless the sands of Time.

 

It is nearly our anniversary, our first.

It is 1974 again.

The red flag is flying

As red soldiers prepare to encircle Saigon

And render the American War a sham,

A shame,

A holocaust,

A burnt offering,

And a major defeat

For capital mismanagement

And corporate tedium, plastic compliance, material deconstruction:

Empire’s decline.

 

We were two years, then,

From our August meeting, 1976,

And three years, then,

From our love and terrible haunting, 1977.

2013 is 1977.

 

The red flag is flying again.

Down Sukhumbit Road,

A child of night, Kuk,

Sells her body with a smile

In the Nana Hotel parking lot.

I smile at her gently.

Love is the gentle soul opening itself

To the gentle heart of another.

Flowers are for sale here, beautiful flowers.

Smiles are given out freely here in Bangkok.

But it will cost you just a bit

To take a flower home for the evening.

 

In two years, we will meet again,

You and I,

The Engineer’s Wife and the boy/poet who loved her,

The Little Prince.

The boy/poet – he still lives inside of me -- who fled the town of ice,

The boy/poet who melted as he descended into Acheron.

Singing your name, singing the eternal graces

Of Leslie Rhoades Polson, for ever to be his muse.

 

In two years’ time I will smell your delicious skin,

Touch your luxuriant hair, again.

What will your name be this time?

And how will you discourage me this time:

With a smile,

With a tear,

Or with a kiss upon my lips,

Like you tried to do the last time?

 

Discourage me not too ungently, my dear.

Send me away with another kiss, if you must.

But do not forget the kiss.

Do not forget the lovely flower in your mouth,

In your heart,

And in your bosom.

 

This flower is the fountain of youth.

Please protect this flower;

Nurture it, keep it alive,

If not for thee,

Then, please, for me.

If you let it die, mine too will die surely.

 

 

II.                          

 

Time is a treasure.

Time is setting traps in the world again.

 

I can hardly wait to see your radiant face again.

I look forward to see the stratagems

By which the world conspires

To keep us apart.

 

You are the moon; I am the sun.

We can love; but we cannot wed.

We can touch; but we cannot meld;

We can weep; but this weeping cannot cure us

Of our mythological directives and limitations apparently.

     

Red is being worn again.

The Soul is on fire again;

The Soul is taking the side of the poor again;

Chaos comes to the ‘real’ world again.

When Chaos comes to the ‘real’ world again,

Perhaps you and I can be together for another year,

For at least a slice of the Moon-time again,

Which governs the slide of the grim Patriarchy

Into the sea.

 

Eating watermelon, we will remember who we are.

 

8 April 2010

THE LOVE THAT DIED IS NOTHING BUT A MEMORY NOW,

A FRAGMENT OF SOMETHING LARGER

 

 

The love that died is nothing but a memory now,

A fragment of something larger,

A pin inside a mortal doll,

A private prayer at some immaculate

Public exorcism.

     

You may not even remember me.

You may have traded the unknown passion

That turned your Soul inside-out

For the known stability offered

By obedience to a norm;

And found that stability and obedience to rules

Were more true to your own nature

Than the brutal emotion and self-abandonment and clean torture

You found with me.

     

You probably don’t remember my face.

You have not watched the lines etch my forehead with age.

My black hair has become white with tension

And vanished muscle and vanquished miracle.

     

You probably do remember my name.

That is what remains when everything else is gone.

The name remains;

The scents pass away;

The taste of the kiss;

The sweetness iris of touch;

The soothing caress of a voice

Dedicated to you;

The reverberating declaration “I would die for you!”

These all pass away.

     

The name doesn’t pass.

But the name gets smoky, insubstantial,

As a dream fades, turns chalky,

With only pieces surviving symbolically intact,

As the daylight erases all the lines and colors and sanctities,

Bleaching everything white and proclaiming this:

God’s intent.

 

If I were to see again today, what would I do?

I am afraid that I would do what I did thirty-four years ago.

I am afraid that I would swallow you up in a current of ravenous love,

Part water, part electricity, part stupidity; part grace,

And attempt again to drown you in myself.

 

I’m afraid that time would be proven again

To be an illusion;

And that the love that died might prove itself to be,

Instead, the love that slept,

The love that drank itself into a long slumbering somnambulance,

A long unharmony of empty utterings

And forgetful forgettings

Dedicated to obscurity

And Time’s resolute but ungenerous passing.

 

You have two years to reach out to me.

Otherwise I am afraid we will seek one another

Only in the grave, only in the next life.

 

That was what you said to me, do you remember:

“What do you think happens after one dies?”

I replied: “Are you telling me that this is where we meet again,

Once we are dead,

Only after your obligations to your first husband

Become finally defunct through the grace

Of the grave?”

He was your first husband; I am your second husband.

 

9 April 2010

 

WHEN DOES THE DRAGON ARRIVE?

 

When does the dragon arrive?

When does the Time of Light begin its evaporation drama again,

Turning water into Fire,

Water into Air?

 

When does Wisdom descend on the heads of children?

When does the new baby of the new religion

Begin to shine and to explicate the future again?

We are not able to resurrect the City of Hope

Merely by placing prayers in the glass and drinking it

Or by offering it to one’s ancestors

As carnivals of genealogical pretense.

 

I am the Dragon; I realize this.

When will I arrive again?

When will I begin to open up the inner flower of life,

The mental imagery that is able to lull the brain

Into magnificent torpor

And let the Soul out in the world,

With its shell-less composition,

Its venerable and vulnerable heritage of Truth

Through the gospel of God’s love?

 

The Mind can cripple all creative achievement in its path.

The Mind can’t create.

The Mind is powerful.

The Mind has more power than the Soul, in a sense.

Although the Soul moves the Mind;

And then the Soul moves the Body,

Stands with the Body against the Mind,

In the interest of balancing the world,

In the interest of manifesting the continuing ritual of life,

The dual process of filling and emptying

The perfect and for-ever completed chalice.

You are the perfect chalice.

 

You said you were not perfect;

No, you were a long way from being perfect.

I said that you were perfect for me;

You are the perfect chalice.

 

The document shows that we are not free. The document shows that we are catalogued, programmed, conditioned, by the roles we assume, the roles we achieve in our fluid movement throughout history: fish in the canal, fish in the sea, then, again, rain falling from clouds, fish in the mountain lake, the mountain stream, just before descending again.

 

When does the dragon arrive, the dragon who justifies Chaos?

His story will remember us.

Karma will remember our deeds.

I loved you.

My love for you was real, durable, vulnerable and Manichaean.

Your heart was a harbor;

And your heart was also a plank on a ship

Riding high above ocean waves, sharks circling downward.

Which is more real: the harbor, the ship, the plank of wood,

The cartilage of the sharks’ teeth?

 

When does the dragon arrive?

My dragon arrives now, 2010.

Your dragon arrives again in 2012.

When does your dragon begin to remember?

 

15 April 2010

A DROP IN TEMPERATURE

 

Has it suddenly become icy;

Has the world suddenly become frozen?

     

If this is so, then please tell me the meaning of this?

Please explain why all the heat of the recent flood

Of seek hawk floridation

Does not travel forever in the medium of the Night.

     

I reach out to you, reach across continents,

Reach across seas and reach deep into oceans.

I speak to you.

I dream of you.

And now I even hear you reach out to me,

Hear your voice demand: “Why did you have to go so far away?

Why did you move to Bangkok, to Hanoi?”

     

What does it matter?

One thousand miles away from you;

Or ten thousand?

In thirty-six years you have never crossed that simple expanse for me,

Never picked up a phone,

Never lifted a pen.

 

I do understand there is danger in being alive.

I do understand that the Past is a beast lightly sleeping.

I do understand that the world of Love is

Precarious and bleeding,

Threatening punctures, penetrations, perilous cluttering enmities.

 

Please don’t suggest that I have forgotten thee.

      Please don’t suggest that my crossing a sea made seeing me become difficult for thee.

      I have heard silence for three decades now.

      I have heard silence.

      I have listened to silence.

      I have befriended silence.

      I have grown accustomed to silence.

      I have grown accustomed to my silent sedentary decline into arid suspension.

      And I have remained silent also, as I was instructed to remain, by you.

      I have learned to walk. I have walked constantly, endlessly, for three straight decades

            never once believing that my legs might betray me.

     

The wind is blowing now, dragging a branch across my window.

      What does it mean to me?

      In which language does the wind speak?

      In which language does the branch converse?

      The rustling sound warns of a drop in temperature.

      It suggests that all longing is built for an incisive repudiation of the past.

      Where there are no regrets there are no ruptured alliances one must lament marking harmonies for new

            destructions.

 

The wind is blowing across West Lake.

I live in Hanoi, not in Bangkok.

I can hear the birds again, finally,

After living a full year in a land with no birds

And no birds’ remorse that I can counsel, for ever, through my own silences.

 

16 April 2010

THE DREAD URGENCY

 

I.

 

The dread urgency of the broken limb

Is beginning to show on the faces of the birds,

As they look down on their fractured branch,

Realizing Time has stopped;

What should be silent is actually making

Far too much noise.

 

Either the continent is drifting in a way it should not –

In a way that was not predicted –

Or birds have been condemned by a secret decree;

A decree not published for universal dissemination.

 

Trees have become unsteady, and unreliable.

Wood has finally joined the side of death, de-construction,

Disintegration.

Disinheritance.

 

Love has grown cold.

Embers have died;

Wind has scattered the smoke again.

 

What is eternal, if Love vanishes?

What is real, if Love turns her back and leaves?

What can be trusted, if Love creates a silent carnival

With instructions only on how to best leave the town quietly,

Escaping notice,

Escaping unheard?          

 

 

II.

 

Noise begins.

Noise begins and does not stop.

Jackhammer noise;

Houses being torn down on both left and right.

The middle is being worn down.

Reds on the left start hammering;

Yellows on the right respond with their own hammering.

The middle says that both sides are wrong

Because they are incomplete.

The middle say: Read Yeats; he understood everything.

But the hammering and the noise

Begin to splinter the house in the middle.

And the house in the middle

Begins to lose its stability,

It considers joining one side or the other.

Before long there will be no middle house at all.

Muddled huddled masses on both sides of the road,

Firing rockets at one another.

Hating, killing, massacring, brutalizing.

That is how Nature works:

The Center breaks so that enemies can kill.

 

Love has grown old.

Memories of frank and loving discussions

Pregnant lovely intamacies

Now become nothing but burnt ashes

And phantasmagoric apostrophes dressed in shadows.

I am not rich enough to hold you.

I am not calculated in the right way.

I love you.

I desire you.

I address you in my dreams.

But you are gone.

 

 

III.

 

The river floods;

And the land takes on new shapes, new hyperboles.

Your face is still in the clouds;

But it appears not as often;

And you are no longer dancing when I see you.

     

Your voice has worn away toward nothingness.

Your eyes frighten me: there is a madness in your eyes now.

You have become bleached with the imperative face

Of a grandmother now –

And I am tempted to fear you,

Thinking I never really could have loved

The woman who now reminds me

Of a cranky bent grandmother

Wearing down like an isolated winter tree

With eyes as cold as an icy island of frost.

Please, make your eyes blue again,

Make your eyes warm and colored with the blue honeysuckle of care.

     

Has your sap grown dark and dense, cold and opaque,

Receptive to memories but immune to life’s passing periods

Preceded by the Great Passion?

Is your life demarcated: A.P; B.P?

Ante-Passion; Before the crippling Passion struck

Reducing Hope to crime?

 

That is the sentence many choose to survive by.

Do you remember when Passion owned us,

Made of us here burning treasury,

Made of us her churning discovery of wonder?

When the fire, raging in our cores,

Made everything clear and cogent and expressive

As though we were characters composing and composed by

An ever-flaming mythology?

 

Was that really us, dancing in some Eden,

Like two friends who had never parted,

Two friends who could never be parted,

Who would love one another for eternity,

From one incarnation into the next,

From one Aeon to another,

Timeless,

Like Osiris and Isis,

Born from myth’s pre-numeric calendar?

Like Tristan and Isolde

Dancing Giselle

Like Gelsey Kirkland and Michael Barysnikov?

 

 

IV.

 

Was that us, you and I?

Or was that just a dream,

A path that we constructed, courted,

But ultimately abandoned

Judging the path unreal and ‘romantic’,

Not practical enough,

Not worthy of adults?

     

You walked away from the dream;

I did not.

(In truth, I walked away; you did not.)

You promised nothing but an honest future;

I promised to love you for ever.

I told you no one would ever love you as I did.

But even that, even a great love,

With a great pair of smoldering souls loving and burning

And being purified before God,

A love dedicated to God,

Beyond God’s assumed arbitrary social morality –

In truth, God loves love even more than he loves virtue –

God says adultery is a crime against society

But not a crime against the Soul,

Not a crime against God,

If the love is noble and selfless and true –

Then God anoints this love as His sacrament.

 

Even such a love as great as our own

Could not survive

In a flatland suburban American harmonium

That believes more in money and golf courses

And new housing developments

And fashion, glamour and stock market rallies

Than it does believe in a rare love.

The philistines cheer.

The lovers have been hanged.

The price of housing in America has bottomed.

 

 

V.

 

Noise begins once more.

There is nothing now,

Some fantasy about 2013,

And the return to the natural surface

Of the year, the same colored light,

Of our Great Love, 1977.

 

I will see you, somehow,

Amid the noise,

Amid the jackhammering political uproar,

The solitude of lonely deaths,

The strife of twin utopias

Girded for murder of one, surely,

And, eventually, both.

 

You will say: ‘Did you have to move so far away, all the way to Bangkok?” –

Suggesting that destiny might have been altered somehow,

If only I had remained behind,

If only I had only resolved into your shadow.

And I will say: ‘In more than thirty years,

You did not pick up a telephone to call,

You did not pick up a pen to write,

You did not deign to send an e-mail message,

To inquire if I was prospering or sick.”

 

I could not contact you – that was understood.

You told me not to contact you at home.

You were a married woman;

And you did not want your husband to be hurt.

You did not contact me.

 

And you will say: ‘I did it for you, so that you could be happy.’

Sacrifice is normal.

And I will say: ‘Happiness.

Happiness is the manner by which children describe their stomachs

If those stomachs are filled to their desired

Level of contentment.’

Such a definition seems to simplify everything.

 

VI.

 

Noise begins again.

I could not convince you to love me as I have loved you.

My powers of declaration and argument

Were not strong enough to sway you.

You wandered away, without looking back.

 

Asia is better for me now.

My skin is not white enough I believe,

For your world.

For the world of the husband you chose.

Modesty is not a virtue in your land –

But a loser’s imprint dismissed by the scorning willful world.

Shoes no longer fit me there,

Where you live,

In the real world of southern Wyoming,

If, indeed, they ever did fit me.

You, yourself, your heart, was the only world there

Into which I could fit.

And, then, for only for a few brief moments.

Before you closed the door; shut the key in a trunk,

With all the love letters, love notes, and poetry I gave you.

 

I am shy; I am bruised; I am bespectacled still.

God has given me a talented, beautiful wife –

Hoa-Lan, whose name means ‘orchid’ in Vietnamese--

Who has a huge heart and a true understanding of virtue,

And I love her dearly.

 

Some day, if I am lucky,

If my wishes are fulfilled through God,

I might be able to make her dreams come true,

As I was not able to make my own dreams come true.

 

That, now, is the only dream I carry with me

Amid noise, and escalating toxic cadences of the ever-maddening

Thundering jackhammering.

 

2 May 2010

 

 

 

WHAT IS THERE LEFT TO SAVE HERE?

 

What is there left to save here?

Not much.

The green aviary is rife with collusion

And the brute forces of nativity

Have all gone black and turned within,

Hoping to hide until the goblins have been hobbled,

And the grinches have been pinched,

And the gringos have been fused to the cross.

 

Corollary to the impeachment of a brave man by an ignoble crowd,

Destruction of Virtue by Anger,

Generosity by Greed.

This era is coming,

The dark clouds have begun to preach

As though the picture is clear

And all the anguish the world is feeling

Will be impeded and transcended

Once the bearded man from Heliopolos

Is tracked down by the angry businessmen,

Condemned for foiling the God-endowed plan for continuous inflation of assets --

Making everyone in the world a millionaire --

Wherein their own pockets get heavier

With gold hijacked from an unsuspecting public treasury

Managed by lawyer politicians.

 

Prices must go up for ever –

Otherwise, we might not have progress any longer.

If the obese merchant gets to build another house

Or another floor to another house each year,

Then civilization is progressing.

That is the gauge we use today.

If the merchant takes a loss,

Then every breathing being

Apparently moves one giant step closer

To barbarism and involution.

     

“Let the merchant take a loss,” the bearded man says.

“Let the merchant go bankrupt.

There is nothing left to save here;

Nothing of any value.

Greed at the top has rotted the plant.

My invocation is for Winter

To render this plant condemned and steady

For discredited evacuation.

 

The crowd cries: “Is this man Noah; or is this man Christ?

Should we kill him;

Or should we trying to attach several additions

To his boat?”

 

The bearded man does not smile.

“Let them run away and hide,

The men whose greed manufactured this storm;

And let the hounds run after them.

It will not be pretty.

Theft is never pretty;

Public graft is a grotesque crime;

Usury and fraud and embezzlement

Are crimes against God’s justice,

And will be punished without mercy

And with a heavy intolerance of human folly and human excuses.

 

Make an example of the thieves.

Let them live out their days in violent remorse,

Caged and tainted,

Learning lessons of nature’s green program for virtue!”

 

What is there left here to save?

Not much at the moment.

The saving time will come later,

After the judgment appears,

After the scorn is passed around

To those most deserving and most bloated with gain.

 

“The worst have triumphed over the best, as they often do,

Through cunning, ego, will, passion, and greed.

Let us not weep too deeply for the fate that these rich criminals

Have brought upon themselves.

 

Dry theft, as a season, is passing.

The desert stands before us.

But, on the horizon, the water is rising;

And the female crow of chaos is ready to

Spread the sword of sorrow.

 

Let your tears be preserved

For the man and the woman who have loved honesty and justly

And who have lost.

For that is real sorrow. Nothing less.”

 

3 May 2010

 

 

DIMINISHING PROSPECTS

 

 

I.

 

Prospects are diminishing.

The Moon is heading toward the waning crescent.

We are not able to distinguish between the rising felicity of light

And the falling cadence of boot-steps on an unlit road.

Danger is at hand.

Emotions begin to rise and become terrible and terribly efficient.

There is a terrible efficiency in the logic of violence,

The logic of murder.

The rich are going to be broken.

Who will steal from the rich, and call it justice,

What they have stolen over the years

And called it capitalism?

 

The most efficient thieves in our history

Are the ones who run the world today.

They are the aristocracy for a reason,

Perhaps involving hard-work and genius…perhaps.

But also involving theft, slavery,

Cheating on wages,

Cheating on taxes,

Raping and pillaging the local population,

Warring against weaker states,

Waging corporate war on the meek.

 

There is a populism on the left;

And there is a populism on the right.

Each is damning; and self-accusing.

The first damns the corrupt corporations, damns Big Business.

The second damns the corrupt legislators, damns Big Government.

Each side is ready to dedicate their lives to overthrowing the problem.

Yet each side is and sees but a half-truth.

The force that fuses the two half-truths

Into a whole is packing her bags quickly at night

And looking for a place to hide when the storm comes.

     

The Middle Principle balances these two extremes.

Love keeps the two warriors from killing one another.

Love chooses the Body first – the Practical Mind –

And gives life to the bankers, and the engineers,

And the force of tradition

The Monetary Impulse.

Then Love chooses the Abstract Mind,

Giving life to liberal plans

For a better world,

Love embraces thinkers, poets, artists:

The Night world.

     

What happens when Love vanishes –

Pulls a ‘French leave’, as James Joyce would call it?

What happens when the Soul, the Middle Principle,

Runs and hides,

Leaving the two sides – the Light Man and the Dark Man –

The practical conservative and the idealistic liberal --

Poised to kill one another

In the name of moral principles and decency and virtue?

 

 

 

II.

 

Prospects are diminishing.

Love is leaving.

Money has been stolen by Fortune and thrown into the sea.

Trillions of dollars have disappeared into private bank accounts

Or into banker bonuses and bunkers in guarded estates,

Or into invisible hedge fund accounts in off-shore island heavens;

And average hard-working people are now massing in the streets,

Demanding an accounting,

One side blaming the government,

The other side blaming the bankers.

     

This is where we are now,

Sitting at the edge of apocalypse,

The Soul having climbed into the Ark with Noah

With the intention to vanish for a fortnight --

While Spiritual Man and Animal Man

Prepare to murder one another for God –

For God, and for Anti-God,

For both are the same, but different.

It’s too complicated to explain now.

I am packing my bag and leaving tonight.

And Professor Flaubert is carrying a large rectangular mirror

Down a side-street making statements about ‘reality’.

 

7 May 2010

 

THE INSTABILITY OF WATER

 

We are in the water now.

We are in a boat and we are drifting.

We can’t control where we are going.

We can’t be sure of anything.

     

Topographical Arcanum.

Two oars placed magically in the oarlocks

Represent something to the mind.

The boat moves of its own volition however.

 

We take the oars and seek to guide the boat back to land

And find that we are able to do nothing.

Everything is for display.

Everything looks good but is hopelessly ineffective.

     

Instability.

Our emotions begin to swell.

We cannot control them.

What time is it in the moon? I ask.

There is no moon to be seen.

We are running out of order, out of organization, out of light.

Void of course.

Where can we go?

Do not ask me what the tributary is saying.

Do not ask me what the obligations of love are now.

Do not ask me how to say hello, how to bark like a dog, how to move a mountain, how to drain a sea.

      Small steps; small ambitions; small recoveries.

      All is fine.

 

The instability of water.

We cannot recover what we have lost.

Once we begin to travel on the water, all hope is lost –

For we now are traveling backward in time,

All thoughts of turning back (or forward) have been lost.

     

Go forward; don’t look back!

This is not a fun adventure any more.

This is not a fun adventure.

People are being killed in the streets.

People’s pensions are being robbed by bankers

And financial adjutants on loan from the mafia.

Bankers have taken everything – as they always do.

     

This is a time of major instability now.

From 2010,

When the land magically disappears beneath our feet,

Until 2019,

When Noah’s craft sails from Portland,

And Noah begins to beg the Sun to start

Drinking up the seas.

 

Who has given me this vision?

Who has made me feel some certainty

Inside of this village of water,

This surging, retreating monstrosity of human discord?

 

My angel has done this.

My daemon.

My protector.

 

My angel is the same angel who led me out of Hell

In 1983.

 

 

9 May 2010

THE TEMPTATIONS OF LOVE

 

There are temptations in love.

There are temptations in hate.

There are temptations everywhere in between.

Temptations to power, to greed, to envy, to deceit.

To adultery, to embezzlement, to murder, to rape.

We live in a world of temptations:

Temptations to breathe, to breed, to be brutal, to be broken –

To beseech silence and solitude.

Temptations as well to not breathe.

Temptations to coil, and to, then, enter the coil.

 

There are schools of love that direct the world

Toward the vacant quarter,

Vacant but filled with emancipating feeling.

Schoolgirls participate here;

But they begin to fail in virtue

Soon after being kissed for the first time.

And then they long for all those pleasures that mothers

Warned them against,

And which their opposites in gender try to wring out of them

On every occasion with wry slyness, decency, flowers, chocolates, lies, pleadings, subterfuge, threats, cajolery, subtle stratagems, alcohol, fingers, tongues, logic, fascinations, deep gazes, poetry, doggerel, letters of proclamations of unending love.

There is no end to the sinister strategies of boys in their teens

Seeking entry in to the very public club of

Penetrated female flesh.

     

The vacant quarter is a magnet fixed for the bayonet.

Men cannot ignore it.

Men are fixed by nature to seek it out.

Men give treasuries to make it their own.

Men abolish worlds, contrive wars, contaminate families and friendships

In order to win the triangular fortune

Through which and through whom they are given

Power over the Earth,

Their own piece of Canaan.

     

There is no power down here without the analogue force.

     

Without love there is an isolation of will,

An inversion of harmony,

A dialectic with disembodied elements and contagions,

Some angelic, some demonic.

But the anchor to the earth comes in the form of the woman

And her necessary prescriptions for sorrow.

 

We can rotate our behavior away from abuse of power;

But we cannot free ourselves from our own tyranny

Simply by turning our back on the clear lunacy of the love ethic.

The love ethic?

There is no ethic in love –

Wait, that is not true;

There was ethic in our love,

Although many will scoff to hear it said –

And those who fight in Venus’ cavern,

Carrying some blueprint for moral thinking

And righteous noumenon as a primal code

Lose always even before the fight has begun.

I know this personally.

To fight for love without cheating is a doomed event.

     

Be thee horrible in the battle for Love’s inauguration,

For the smooth stick of Eros’ infatuating hand,

For the goddess’s cranberry mouth and peach delicatessen.

Get it now, when the getting is good.

Lie, cheat and steal; do whatever is required.

And lament your bad actions only after

Isolde is our your boat;

And after King Mark is crying.

     

There are temptations in love.

But there are also temptations to death.

One should not be too eager to embrace the one

And forsake the other,

Unless one’s is certain which is which.

 

Wisdom helps.

But the rush of the blood in the loins also has its red day,

And its red hour,

And its furious red arcane marsupial scarlet delight.

There is a human swamp to be mastered,

Even as there is a divine mountain to be ascended.

Win her love first; use any method that you can.

Morality is meant to be sacrificed by Love’s urgency.

Pierce her; wound her gladly;

For she wishes to feel your sword,

To be wounded by your love.

Only the fool fails to act out of a sense of fair activity

And conscience.

 

16 January 2010

 

THE ARCHITECTURE OF LOSS

 

It is your birthday today.

All the champagne has been drunk.

All the presents have been opened.

All the songs have been sung.

You are now – let me re-check my math skills –

Still two years younger than I.

And I am: 60 years old.

Making you 58.

This is a time of trouble for you.

Saturn returns for you.

Making everything go black.

 

Light a candle on your cake.

I will send a telegraph to you,

An old form of candy-delivery,

An ancient method of telephone greetings

Sent in dreams so as not to disturb real ghosts

Now cloistered around us, trembling in mortal human fear

That they have wasted their lives.

 

I shall make a toast:

We have been cut off for three decades.

Why not make it four?

Here is a chocolate cake I have built for you –

Built in and through my imagination.

I am sitting in my third-floor bedroom window,

Looking out on a hot Hanoi day,

Little wind,

The steaminess already getting in my skin,

The smell of heat already turning the morning off-white

And smoky and bellicose with regret.

 

I build everything in my imagination now.

My rise to power; the children I never had with you;

My glorious nativity and eventual ascent in the real world,

The world of warped imagination,

Of white-knuckled clinging to Almighty Dollar,

God of the right realm,

The God bestowing power and wealth

And worldly success on his congregation

In fascist white-skinned condominiums everywhere.

 

I married a great woman, Hoa-Lan Tran,

An orchid,

A woman of dreams,

A woman of sweet scents and articulate pleasures,

Gentle manners, noble affections,

Sweeping generosities,

Decent gods and delicate ambitions – but with a will of iron too.

She is much like you.

She is Asian, Vietnamese.

I have been with her since 1989.

She has endured my eccentric manners and behaviors,

For she is eccentric too.

She seeks to be alone with her angels; and I do the same.

She paints; she plays the monochord, the zither, the piano;

She is a master in the kitchen;

Everything she attempts she masters,

Except the social skills leading to the successful arts of

Fraudulence and business expansion.

She can’t abide the political nature of human duplicity,

Of objective mismanagement:

 

The unmeant smile, the soft shoe, the profuse compliment, the glad hand, the profane obsequiousness of tattlers and rattlers; the gossip of women, and women in men’s skins. She sees a large world, a world of large ideas, and a great Nature, of life and growth and death and decay, of God and Heaven and Earth and Humanity. The small considerations of small souls make her ill. She sings to the Night. We both find the moon-lit planes meaningful and lovely, mainly because the humans are gone. The humans make everything small. The humans make life a rude catalog of material desires leading to nothing but betrayals and self-betrayals. It is little wonder that Jesus Christ and his band of disciples – artists all – were hounded in to caves or hung upside-down until their brains bled by traditionalists seeking to block out free thought.

     

Lan and I are riding in an ark.

We are living in Hanoi, contemplating a move to Thailand.

America has become mean again; American egos and sterile living

And hostility to Soul makes us shiver and want to hide.

We ride the moon up and our vision is gleaming;

But when the ride in the arc turns down

All our virtue turns to ash.

We know that White turns Black through sin;

But does Black turn White again through shame?

Black, back-tested by the Fire, turns into

White Ash for the Phoenix.

Easter comes; Ishtar is turning.

 

Fourteen days of bounty; fourteen days of loss, savage decline. We are sailing east to west – but even this is not certain. We are exiles, no longer fitting in with American ego deployment and bank corruption, and no longer fitting in Vietnamese greed for housing and melancholy clinging to an old world of revolutionary ardor that is now a puss-filled surface-dedication to looking good, looking successful, lying like mad to make appearances remain always shiny. The lie for the sake of face becomes a habit – and creates a nation of petty liars.

     

I long to move to Bangkok.

But there is a street-war being fought there.

Bangkok is a beautiful plum.

Bangkok is a magnificent mango.

Ripe, sweet fruit on the street, proud of its beauty,

Proud of its women,

Proud of its happiness,

Proud of its native and natural energy –

Yet not proud at the same time,

Not filled with false pride; not thinking of herself,

Pride being more akin to self-assurance in Bangkok

Than to a defense against insecurity as it is in Hanoi.

 

But we are stuck for the moment, in between the past and the future, in between yes and no, in between red and yellow, white and black, moving with uncertainty, living with a huge void, slouching toward Bethlehem, perhaps; slouching, listening, contemplating, watching stagnant water here seeking to suffocate the moon.

      Twenty centuries of stony sleep. Sleep passing? I long to put myself to sleep again – but apparently I cannot.

 

You are a dragon; Lan is a dog; I am a tiger.

I wish you could meet her; and I wish she could meet you.

 

She knows about us, about our struggle to survive Love’s brutal misdemeanors. She knows about my struggle to survive you. We really knows nothing about you now, about your aftermath, your motherhood, your matrimonial concessions and, perhaps, blissful security. Resignations are part of life. We all have them. Missed opportunities; doubts; regrets. Let your regrets be modest. We live many lives; and we have loved before, and we will love each other again, perhaps in the next life.

     

Pray for a good clean swift death when the time is right,

Before idiocy or helplessness sets in.

     

How do we end this story with a little bit of grandeur,

Like a good novel?

How do we make the ones who read our lives

Weep when we are gone

Because they suddenly miss us

Even if they never really knew us?

 

9 May 2010

INTREPID FORESHADOWING

 

Intrepid foreshadowing.

I am circling above my own death,

Above my own life,

Reading where it ended as I knew it in 2008,

In the sign of Virgo,

When the Father squeezed out the Son

Through the Mother;

And the Son fell to Earth.

Heaven was good.

Earth is not so good.

     

Once, when Earth was not good before, in 1965, I fell into a dismal betrayal of my Father, becoming the prodigal son, embracing the distant, condemning the near. This lasted eighteen years, until 1983. Then I came to life again, stopped apologizing for living, stopped dreading being morally incorrect, politically insolvent. Began embracing personal expansion; stopped fighting Heaven for its injustice – and its betrayal of my own virtuous values of decency and equality and peace and love. Love child came to rest on a tiny island in the stream, the Willamette River, 1983.

      I have fallen again. There is a tiny island in the stream waiting for me in 2019. I see it ahead, a place where my father and I are again reconciled, become One flesh, One substance. Until then, I am falling. I have fallen into materiality and I do not like it. I sailed in spiritual realms. There was always enough of everything.

      Now, after 2008, there is never enough of anything. We are being kicked out of one house after another: kicked out of Eugene, Oregon; kicked out of America; kicked out of Ong Ich Khiem; kicked out of Thailand; kicked out of West Lake…the kicking does not stop.

      The Night is coming to cover us up.

      The material devils all want the same thing now: They want MORE. They panic. Their dream is dissolving. Bankruptcy is calling. What will they do? They will kill the prophets who predict decline, accusing them of cursing the town, of casting spells with demonic quotients, negative energy honoring the tragic.

      But the prophets are agents of God. They come at the end, in a wave, and their verdict is, itself, the thought that delivers demolition; and, through demolition, rebirth; a new dream and a new building.

 

Intrepid foreshadowing.

The female wants death.

The female is the negative force

And her ultimate end is the negation of all being.

 

As such a man is in a dangerous position as he cycles beneath his wife,

For her negative nature is a death to the man’s light.

The wife becomes a negative force through Fear, and related Despair.

She will talk of splitting with you.

This will be worse 2016-2019;

‘Splitting Apart” is an iconographic warning of this

The man and his wife become too much alike.

The man become feminized.

The man and his wife become defeatist together.

She does not like this.

She needs to breath air without her husband always being around.

     

Your brother said the same thing to you in 1983. You were to marry. You were to give him his freedom.

 

Intrepid foreshadowing.

Be prepared to live alone.

Living alone will not kill you.

Living alone is the way you were born;

And it is how you have lived most of your life.

 

14 May 2010

 

SCRAMBLE

 

Scramble.

The assassin has a penchant for gathering leaves,

Gathering friends,

Gathering votives near the tower

As the old clock begins to mumble again

And all the elementary school girls begin to gather again

In the hope of showing you their cotton.

 

Pornographic impression.

The girls of fourteen have been bitten by Satan’s impressions

On the internet

And now all believe that they should be stars

In their own local bedroom extravaganzas.

     

Fathers are left for dead.

There is no reason to assume they are going to recover.

Alcohol may not be enough.

Their daughter’s friends are now sending them secret messages

By phone, with texts, with photos, promising bliss

And wonderful proportionate creameries to be found

In secret places in discrete locations

Under pieces of cloth stained by passionate ceilings.

     

Venus cannot be far away, indeed!

Venus the other that is, Venus the Evening Star,

The one who insists on astral self-destruction,

Emotional clairvoyances,

Love that has no bounds,

Adultery,

Spectacular betrayals,

The dark penetration of love’s most dark obsessive cadenzas.

 

I hear the words of love.

I feel the shaft of love,

The focused rage of love,

The narcotic scent of love,

The black fissure of love,

The massive expression of love,

The wet emancipation of love,

The body,

The soul,

The infrequent death sentences of love.

     

Can I run from this?

 

2010. We hit the water, didn’t we?

     

Aye, the Captain says eighteen more years under water.

You might as well become the White Whale himself,

All punctured and all putrid and all pun-ladened and all post-patriarchal.

Ye shall be as damp and as damaged as Job, himself.

And God will wrap you in the skin of a seal,

And toss you off into the loneliest sea He can find,

Make a sorry corpse of you

Floating to Van Daemon’s Land

Or off to Good Hope or Cape Horn,

Floating in a lonesome scarf,

A box of sorry slats of wood,

A steel boat even,

Maybe a fragmentary colossus,

Like Odysseus himself

Ever trying to get home.

 

Nothing will be permanent here,

Not for you,

Not for a sinner who once was God’s chosen son

And who became, through no fault of his own,

Through Time’s arced key illogical fault,

The insistence of Time’s unfolding flower,

A fallen one,

A wounded one,

Tanned,

Marked,

Splintered,

Fouled,

Split,

Scattered,

Silhouetted,

A kind of shadow of his former self,

His body cast to the opposite shore,

His heart cut,

His thighs sliced,

His feet swollen,

His Achille’s heel doomed and domed.

 

Dead man, we will call him.

Dead man walking on water.

Dead man sinking in water.

Dead man floating in water – face up.

Dead man circulating his light.

     

Scramble.

You shall be the Scrambled Man.

Your name, the letters of your name, are, themselves, scrambled.

     

M I C H A E L.

Make All.

Make Me Call.

Elm Chai.

Call Me Ich.

Call Me Ezekiel, Ishmael.

     

Scramble.

In Ong Ich Khiem.

Call me: M(a)J(i)C.

 

13 February 2010

I DREAMT OF YOU LAST NIGHT

 

 

I dreamt of you last night.

It was like I never left.

You were even younger than I remember you,

Fresh, innocent, more innocent than when I left you.

     

You were in our kitchen, in Sinclair perhaps.

We were all in high school.

You were not a virgin, but you were fresh and innocent;

And you were flirting with my brother.

      And I kissed you.

      And my brother tried to kiss you.

      And you said: “Oh, no! Not the two of you!”

      And I said: “No! Just me!”

      And I kissed you very deeply.

      And you kissed me back.

      And then everything dissolved.

 

You were in our kitchen; and we were kissing in the kitchen.

      My mom and dad were still alive.

      Everything was good.

      You were young and fresh and beautiful; and laughing.

      Your mouth tasted like it always did.

      Your mouth tasted like it was part of my mouth

      The best part of my mouth.

      Why were our mouths every separated? I wondered.

 

Your laughter made me smile – and then cry.

      You were gone, somewhere.

      You were in my arms; but you were gone.

      Because I woke up.

      I did not want to wake up.

 

I am ready to die

If you will be with my in my kitchen

In Sinclair, when I awaken,

With my family all alive again,

And with your mouth attached to mine,

Young and fresh and innocent, laughing:

Yes, I am ready to die into that.

 

17 May 2010

 

SACRIFICE IS NORMAL

 

Sacrifice is normal.

Sacrificing the blue shell for the red conundrum is normal.

Sacrificing the teal treasury

For the manifold ledger in the accountant’s top drawer.

We all sacrifice something to gain something.

But we all do not get everything we want.

 

Why is Bangkok burning?

I do not understand.

When I went there with my wife in March

I found the city of my own nature:

Free, natural, friendly, strangers smiling at one another;

The hot energy in the air being gentle and supple.

Do you want me to love you? the air seemed to ask.

I am willing to love you.

I am willing to trust you.

     

Bangkok is the city of 2010.

Paris was the city of 2001.

What does this mean?

Paris was the city at the climax of the Daylight.

Bangkok is the city at the Twilight, the Dusk.

     

Where does Bethlehem lead?

Why is Jerusalem on the map?

Am I the rough beast slouching toward my own recovery,

Slouching toward my own animation in a sequined snake skin

Sloughing old skins into the wind

Preparatory to resurrection?

     

Italy, perhaps?

Greece? London? Amsterdam?

Sacrifice is normal.

The Sun moves east to west.

 

My God told me not to live in debt,

Not to buy an overpriced house from thieves in white collars,

Not to fix myself into a crux of a permanent debt-storm,

A straight-jacket fueled to enrich bankers.

I was not aware of all this;

I live mostly in a clouds, half here and half there.

And so I move so through life, trusting my angel to lead me.

 

And now we have no home.

We were in Eugene – but Eugene pushed us out.

We are in Hanoi – and Hanoi tries to eject us.

We try to move to Bangkok – but Bangkok is exploding.

We have no way home – and we have no clear future.

We have money in a pension.

But the bankers are trying to steal the pensions too apparently.

 

In 2019 we return to New York City.

Until then, God only knows.

We must pass through Jerusalem to be born again –

This is our only rather certain understanding

Of our futures.

 

17 May 2010

 

THE SAND CRAB KNOCKS AGAINST THE VAPOROUS BAG I TOTE

 

I.

 

The sand crab knocks against the vaporous bag I tote

And call rather carelessly Memory.

Another year has passed.

You are now fifty-nine.

     

I see you running on the beach in Florida,

A misty frame of reference,

A ghost moving like wind on a cloud of breezes,

Your bathing suit blue (I think),

Your auburn hair still long and still tempting angels to fall.

 

You are riding in a fancy car, a GTO perhaps,

That your husband bought in secret

And reassembled piece-by-piece

In some unknown distant garage.

He admires inspirational art,

Such as photos of the Flying Fortress

On its return flight from Japanese combat.

He admires military glory.

He admires patriotic ardor.

     

I resist the urge to say something derogatory about your husband,

For he is unlike myself;

He has tastes that are not my tastes;

He admires the straight line and the engineer’s code of generous

Self-proclamation.

I have this too in me, though in recession again

As this latest Night-Cycle gains.

 

He writes about himself, his triumphs, his daughters,

(Whom he calls ‘the sins of his youth’); his many grandchildren.

The ‘sins’ of his youth are perhaps your sins instead.

A boy-child is missing;

This he laments as a vengeance from God.

But does he see your sin with me

As the real cause of this poison he drinks?

 

I know you are the root of his dream,

That he pulled three daughters out of you

When you were little more than a girl yourself

Wondering what gifts life might bring to you,

Fearful, hesitating, dreading the thought that

Convention was more what you feared it was

Than what you wished it could become.

 

I see your face in a photograph.

I am disheartened.

You have grown old suddenly.

I have not seen your face since 1978,

When I walked away from you that last time,

When you sent me away amid the fragile incentives

I sought that would incline me to remain your consort,

Or suggest, once again, that you leave to re-start

Your new life again with me.

You said: no;

You said I was not allowed to speak such words any longer.

I evaporated, leaving no trace.

     

It is not your age only that moves me today in the photograph.

It is the pain I see in your face,

The pain of a life lived perhaps in doubt and in medieval congestion.

Madness was in your eyes;

Eyes once pure, once blue, once ecstatic and proud with living,

Now seemed transected by the blade of madness,

Now seemed blanked and fired and rouged

By a storm raging under the surfaces of your moons.

 

I had imagined you happy.

I had imagined you living in joy and having forgotten me.

Your photo says this is not so.

You do not seem happy.

Even when you are running alone

On the beach in Fort Lauderdale:

You are running away from some contagion of the heart

That still haunts you.

You seem so sorry and alone.

Is it myself you miss, as I also miss you?

Or have you learned to be dead inside,

As most adults learn,

In order to protect themselves

From the ungrace of having abandoned

Their most decent dreams

To the sullied god of Practical Fortune.

 

Did someone damage your spirit?

Did I damage your spirit?

Are you ill?

Are you breaking?

When the spirit is damaged, illness almost always joins it.

When you betray your heart, the heart tries to gain vengeance.

     

We are the same in this way. We are both haunted.

Haunted both by a life that could not unfold;

And by a life that, truly, still visible in imagination,

Could have unfolded.,

That was not allowed to unfold.

 

You are a grandmother now.

But it is not the years that have taken such a toll;

It is the arid and unkind torture of a life lived inside a glass.

There is nothing so killing

As a life-sentence to an empty formality.

I do not accuse you of this;

I merely ask if this is so.

     

You said you wanted comfort.

But comfort is a quality of the Soul,

Not a collection of objects to surround us as a fortress;

Not a quantity of body parts and animations of the senses

That keeps true comfort from finding and claiming us.

In the silent empty fullness where the Soul is found,

Psyche ruptures the tedious life for an eternity.

     

I feel sad that I have looked into your pain so nakedly.

It is not easy for me to see you unhappy in this way.

You were the uncommon light,

The bright beauty of God’s immense unending imagination,

The first flower of spring’s unfathomable

      Taurean genius.

     

 

9 May 2011

 

HE ASKS FOR THE CLAIRVOYANT UNDERCOAT

 

 

He asks for the clairvoyant undercoat.

She has an ardorous heart.

She remembers things about him

That he no longer knows about himself.

 

At strange times, unexpected times,

He has leapt into her mind;

And then she knows that she is again being exposed,

And that she may begin to cry again,

Without warning, furiously, uncontrollably.

She may sink again into an unfathomable darkness

That might last for days, even weeks.

 

She has hurt him.

Realizing that she has hurt him makes her grow desperate.

She does not care about her own pain.

But his love for her was so pure,

So selfless and ecstatic,

That the thought of having hurt him

Makes her dissolve into a stew

Of inconsolable anxieties and regrets.

 

For thirty years this has gone on.

Her husband understands that when the signs again appear

She will soon vanish from him,

And meet in her mind again, in her soul,

Some strange man whom she once loved

And who still pulls her down into his sea

In magic, destructive, violent cadences.

 

Does she meet him there again on their solitary island,

The private city of their unremorseful love affair?

Or is his wife just mad?

Is she lonely because he is gone –

This man who has vanished –

Or is she simply lonely

At not being able to find him

In her dreams any longer?

 

9 July 2011

 

 

_

 

 

GOD’S HONOR LASTS FOR A VERY SHORT TIME (SHADOWS ARE REMORSELESS)

 

 

Life is long.

God’s honor lasts for a very short time.

Shadows are remorseless.

I wish that I were the eagle

In a young king’s dream.

 

28 January 2010

THE HARBOR IS GOLDEN

 

The harbor is golden.

The boats on the surface all hint at glamour,

Gold and gregarious crafts and cargo.

Adventure is not far off.

That is good.

Adventure will free the spirit;

And it will stop one from thinking about himself

And his coming demolition.

 

I know now that I am in a war.

I am in a war against the Dark Powers that steal and kill and annihilate all innocence.

The Spirits of Separation; the Ghosts of Greed;

The ones who hate the poor and describe the world as a pot of gold to be captured or stolen

By those most chosen by God

Or most callous to decency

Or most gifted in the art of duplicity

And shame.

 

Yes, adventure is good.

It lifts one into the realm of amoral appreciation

Of one’s own immortality.

 

But there is something else also.

There is a dream that lifts one out of his own personal adventure,

Lifts him in to a more magical land

Wherein love and attraction dominate the Spirit of Self-Glorification.

 

Listen to what Plutarch told us.

There is redemption and wisdom in what Plutarch wrote:

 

The problem of life is man. Magic, or rather Wisdom, is the evolved knowledge of the potencies of man's interior being, which forces are divine emanations, as intuition is the perception of their origin, and initiation our induction into that knowledge. We begin with instinct; the end is omniscience.

 

19 May 2010

BLESSINGS OF THE MANOR HOUSE

 

Blessings of the manor house.

Perhaps the king will arrive shortly, King Mark.

Perhaps the queen will come too, Queen Isolde.

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

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

Self-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 the woman in another house nearby,

The married woman in fact,

One who brushed up against the another 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 an ocean of 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 privacy,

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.

She worried that her true love might find another insect.

 

Trouble came receding into the small part of her heart,

The part most easily disturbed by the brushing

And by the memory of that brushing

Which was much more real than she wanted to pretend

At the time.

She did not wish to rise from her 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 that the love died.

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

Who wanted children, in truth, more than he wanted his own queen.

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

 

I AM THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

 

I am the road not taken.

I am the shadow on the path leading into the evening light.

I am the moon’s velvet iridescence shining down on the lonely epiphany

Of our rigorous mortality.

 

I am the path not sanctioned by mothers or grandparents or neighbors

Hoping, even insisting, that you will join their theology

By choosing bondage to tradition

Over individual judgment, over individual destiny.

 

The rules explain that the path on the shadow side of the Hill of Heaven

Is meant only for demonic presences.

Jews. Niggers. Artists. Poets. Mexicans. Sinners. Musicians.

The White Path up above leads through the honoring and hoarding

Of the ancestors’ gifts and grievances;

Leads through obedience, loyalty, loyalty to doctrine,

Willful denial of one’s own Sacred Soul and voice

In favor of the voices and rules of the Mass Mundane Soul.

 

Do not break alliance with the Mass Will

Or you will be cast down into the dark places of Crass Selfish Will,

Crashed Willfulness and Masked Oblivions

Reserved for those unwilling to worship lost emblems of life,

Unable to leash the passions and fall in line with consensus,

With time-tested time-honored Objective Truths and customs.

 

I am the road not taken.

I am the vanishing possibility,

The unreal venture,

The bearded bandit who seeks the heart of the princess.

I am the seducer.

I am the keeper of the flame;

And, of course, the flame destroys the world.

It warms the world first – but it also, eventually, destroys the world.

 

I am the road not taken.

I am the tiny planet on the large arc

That visits sacred beautiful girls each 36-years only.

I am the path of Nothingness,

Of Love as a singular existence,

Rather than Love as the path to other paths and other interests:

Wealth, fame, power, children, righteous ascendancy,

Honor from the family,

Laurels from the church,

A grand funeral with many noted figures

Speaking about one’s goodness,

One’s selflessness,

One’s ability to follow rules.

 

The road not taken leads to a solitary, empty coffin,

And a funeral with an almost silent laudation.

 

The path not taken is singular and filled mostly with soliloquies.

It is peaceful, restful.

The solitary path leads to long hours

Spent listening to angels and choirs of disembodied voices

Singing hymns to God’s Esoteric Conditions.

 

The path not taken is not common and is not mundane

And does not lead to the acquisition of Earthly honors.

The path not taken believes in Wisdom, in Shadows, in Love,

And in Love’s poetic capacity to re-fashion realities.

One cannot eat poetic truth in the shadows on the road not taken.

I understand this.

 

The road not taken protects the uncommon reality it engenders.

The road not taken elevates Love into a sacred sacrament,

But looks with disdain at Man’s crumbling institutional hypocrisies.

 

I am the road not taken.

Sadly, for ever, both you and I

Will always be reminded,

When life becomes terminally soiled

Or threatens catastrophes

Erupting from the interwoven deceptions

Common and generic on the road most often taken,

We will be reminded of the road we did not take together.

 

I am a shadow now.

I am Memory’s long, grainy shadow.

I am the ghost blowing in Sleepy Hollow,

Singing, humming, somewhat out of tune,

“Torn Between Two Lovers, feeling like a fool…”

I watch you now from a balcony

Overlooking West Lake in northwest Hanoi.

 

I have not forgotten you.

I still remember, and will always remember, that I was the road you did not take.

I was the road that, to you, was not real enough.

 

25 June 2011

 

THE SCANDALOUS TREATISE BREAKS A VOW

 

 

The scandalous treatise breaks a vow.

Clairvoyance is a miscreant that harbors deeds inside a box of shoes.

The candidacy of bleak epiphanies finds a solitary cowgirl hidden in snow.

She manipulates the seasons,

Violates the reason of old men contemplating fixed occasions of virtue

Followed by sin:

And she uses this power to forecast grievances against the state.

 

Old men scatter to their graves.

Onomonopoeic scourges lead toward Calvary

Unkempt masses and Scarlet’s fugitive conveyance,

A grainy old carriage driven by the second cousin of Oprah Winfrey,

Seeking clearance to enter Heaven at a trot,

A strain or two above the average speed allowed

In the High Kingdom of Heaven’s gargantua.

     

Consternation moves no one here,

Not here in the land of obsequy,

And Lanolin’s unresolved capacity to hide wrinkles,

Lip gloss and even the pig’s foot formation.

     

The Earth is boiling in a vatted pan.

There is nothing that can be done about it.

When you die, why stay here on Earth,

Lamenting the unscored treatise on redemption?

Scandalous treatise that it is,

Conceived by the grim men in tarpaper slippers,

Those with old scores to settle,

And old annihilations to re-commence?

     

Drift, if you can: drift away from the dismal place,

The arbitrary conditions of pain and remorse;

Allow the scandalous treatise to break a vow,

To break a limb,

To break a bottle of turquoise fortune,

But never allow the scandalous treatise to break you.

     

Take your wife by her hand,

Skip to the music of the silent master,

Up the hill,

Toward the mountain’s summit.

There is nothing to keep you or her here as a witness.

The world will the burned; the Earth will be scorched.

It is written.

You have written it.

     

Let the black angels build their chords.

But you float away.

You float away;

And liberate your wild temptation to grieve.

 

4 July 2009

 

 

THE CEREMONY OF INNOCENCE

 

There is a ceremony of innocence even when there are

No longer real ceremonies and no longer real innocents –

Even when the ceremony of love

Has been bottled and bruited and sold as scent and commodity of fashion

In isolated fantasies coupled with magazine images of good living

And independent fixations of fortune trumpeted in dim novels

And in the cinema.

 

This tells us something about the irresistible sanctity of the human bond.

Even in a time without purity, without spiritual grace, without human harmony,

A time when the love of money consumes even the most decent flames,

And acts of human immolation to the god Plutus

Proliferate and proximate a form of holiness,

Still the faith in human triumph through love exists,

Escalates into moments of clear grandeur and precious clarity.

     

Two souls come together,

A fusion lit by both passion and reason,

By holy declaration,

Generating wholeness in a world fragmented by selfish exclusions

And desires for confiscation of neighbors’ wives and neighbors’ gold,

Neighbors’ properties.

Yes, I am guilty too.

I am guilty of seeking to expropriate my neighbor’s wife.

A sin I would commit again, only too gladly, but with an altered outcome.

 

The God of Death is near, circling the city and waving a sword.

Angry, frightening: this God is not the foundation of a flabby faith

Based in suburban comfort.

The God of Death sets fire to Wall Street,

Contaminates the wells of Greed,

Dishonest Union, and Uncultivated Sanctity.

 

The God of Death shakes the earth and rattles the seas.

The God of Death does not accept the arguments of lawyers,

Does not countenance the rationale of thieving bankers,

Does not accept the cruel legitimacy of the destruction of sanctuaries

And the starvation and solitary sickness and death of the poor.

     

We have come again to this point in the road.

Rich and poor divide.

The Soul must choose which road to take: the Road of Justice; or the Road of Privilege.

The Soul is the votive power of love,

The one who saves the world by the choice she makes.

Will it be Love; or will it be Order?

 

And the side that the Soul chooses,

The lover that she takes,

Comes to power for an age,

Thereby, giving the world Hope again.

 

27 July 2009

DREAMS REPRODUCE

 

 

Dreams reproduce.

The carnival breaks.

Unpublished truths reach unparalleled levels of circulation.

Rumors and gossip become the artifact of culture.

Popes bless liars and murderers and thieves,

And endow them eventually with sainthood

And other titles of favorable transmission of grace.

So long as they donate vast amounts of money

To the church.

 

We are, all of us, subject to the laughter

Of the black joker who asks for crumbs as he passes

Reuben’s Five-Star Smoked-Ribs House of Pleasure,

Hiding a massive erection under the gabardine raincoat

He is currently calling his home.

     

Time ticks away.

The time of wealth and creation and order seems to pass.

When the darkness comes around again,

Class warfare may come with it.

Religion is class-warfare against the poor carried on

By the rich in God’s name –

Or so it seems at the time, during the Sun’s ascendancy.

 

The hierarchy blooms –

The Day is an hierarchical architecture –

With the rich at the top,

Just beneath the church and other forces of form and mundane tyranny:

Banks, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, Wall Street.

 

But the Night loses track of this structure.

All structure, in fact, falls away.

North and South vanish.

East and West suddenly appear.

The horizontal, the bed, trumps the vertical,

The man who can walk.

Let us all sleep for a few moments, what do you say?

     

Moments? Yes, there is not time here.

Let us all sleep for a couple of meters then, a couple of hectares, minuets.

Close your eyes, dear.

I am here with you.

I have not left; I have not forgotten your sweetness.

I will never forget your sweetness.

Nothing is real but God’s voice

And the dreams that God gives us.

     

Something vibrates.

It is the Earth that is vibrating

And it is the earth that is shaking.

Cities are gone now;

And animals begin to wander out from hiding,

Wondering where all the noise went.

Rivers become wild again.

Human beings have gone off to live in caves again.

They are troubled for light –

The white light of the Sun

Now accuses them of sin and threatens to destroy them.

So they hide in caves and only come out at night,

For tenuous sessions of moon-bathing.

 

Lie down.

Of course you will be judged!

Of course you will judge yourself!

Of course you will hate your Father, and accuse him of all misdeed!

You will hate your creation!

You accuse yourself!

It is the negative light that misleads you to do this.

Astral light.

Negative moon light.

But it is also necessary.

     

Love will follow.

Love and retro-fusion replace hate and retro-fission.

Be calm: I will send you a vision –

A vision of my eternal love for you --

And this vision will become you

And you will become the Word

And then the positive light will unfold

And you will rise up and stand again.

     

Regeneration comes in the Night,

Through your Mother’s goodness.

She will make the blood again begin to move.

She will send you a dark adversary,

Through whose defeat you will rise again to Heaven.

 

Lie down.

Make room for me next to you.

In the next world you and I will be together.

God will directly reward your sacrifice –

The sacrifice you have made essential, for both of us, married to Sorrow –

In the next world you and I will be wed.

 

22 January 2010

I REMEMBER THE BETRAYAL

 

There was a dream.

There was a beautiful young girl in the dream;

She was being chased by a beautiful young boy.

She said: “You are so unrealistic.”

And then the dream popped.

“I must be realistic!” she said.

And then the dream popped.

 

There was a fantasy about radio signals being sent by the young man.

He sent these radio signals from his heart

Thousands of miles away,

Telling himself that she, the beautiful young woman,

Could hear his message.

There was a bee trail leading toward a porch in Wyoming,

Toward a porch clustered with hollyhocks.

But then the bee trail vanished.

 

I remember the betrayal as though it were yesterday.

When I block out the bee trail I can imagine only honey-colored scenes,

The girl is still young and beautiful,

I am still young, filled with faith, filled with the optimism of virtue.

Nothing can defeat us –

We are God’s chosen angels….

Until I remember the betrayal.

 

You had to make a choice.

You’re number is 17 – you are 153.

My number is 26 – I am 351.

We mirror one another.

Our mystic marriage was a Sacred Cosmic dream.

You are the Queen of Heaven in this dream.

And I am the King – and I am also your Son.

You were the vesica piscis.

You pulled me into your ark and loved me.

 

In the Celtic Tree Alphabet, you are “Q” -- 17;

And I am “Z” --- 26.

Your fatality, as “Q” is: “A Choice Must Be Made.”

My fatality, as ‘Z” is: “Resentment; confusion; refusing to see the truth.”

 

The only means I can employ

To escape your sweet honey ghost,

To evade the succubus of my memory with you,

Is to remember the betrayal.

You betrayed me.

And you betrayed your own heart in me.

You mind said: “Do the reasonable thing!

“Don’t be a fool!

“Use your head! Be realistic!”

Yes. You did the reasonable thing.

 

I have a wife now, Hoa-Lan, who has never betrayed me,

Who never will, I believe.

I need to turn the radio off, I guess.

Everyone makes choices.

I made a choice to leave you,

To force you to choose your Heart or your Head;

And you chose your Head.

You chose your Ego:

You chose self-defense.

 

I need to set the bee free, too, I suppose.

I remember our callow greatness as one,

Which, to me, was God’s Majesty.

Which, to you apparently, was but a Dangerous Dream.

 

I remember the betrayal.

I remember ten visits daily to the mailbox

Looking for the letter you never sent.

I remember seven years of death, gloom, sorrow, tears,

Waiting for the letter you never sent.

Where was your letter?

Where was your phone call?

 

I remember that last trip to see you,

One thousand miles by train.

I asked you to inform me, in advance,

If you did not want to see me again –

If you did not want me there with you

I would not come.

Where was your letter telling me not to come?

 

I remember the three minutes you gave to me

Near the front door of Coe Library,

Where we had fallen in love.

I remember you saying: “I am not going to be alone with you!”

As if you suspected me of some sort of witchcraft,

Of some black magic art in mesmerizing your heart,

In seducing you to love against your own will.

That is how your mind framed the issue

So you could defend yourself against your own heart.

 

I remember asking you:

“Do you want me to leave your life and never come back?”

You did not say you did not want this.

 

I need to remember the betrayal in order to keep from sliding back

Into that black nothingness,

Which again is calling me.

I need to smash the radio.

I need to crush the bee beneath my step.

Where is the love that died now?

You are the love that died –

Where are you now?

 

If I step on an egg, don’t awaken:

It is not me.

It is only a sorry visitor,

A blind traveler at the wrong address,

Visiting you by mistake,

A foolish ghost following an invisible bee trail

Leading to a nonexistent hollyhock plant

On a nonexistent porch.

Inside, on the couch, a stranger,

A strange woman,

Is sleeping.

 

I have forgotten nothing.

I have not forgotten all the joy and the sweet tonic of your nature.

I have not forgotten the wonderful peach of your being,

The genuine divinity of our love.

But I cannot forget the betrayal;

For, if I did, I would be lost again.

Now, the Head, my Head, comes forward;

The Ego comes forward, this time to protect me.

 

September 27, 2011

I WILL NOT CLOSE THE DOOR

 

I will not close the door;

I will not dismantle the radio transmitter.

I will not slaughter the honeybee

In order to erase its trail leading to your heart.

 

God moves in most dairy house weighs.

Words are doors too.

Words open worlds that we did not know existed.

Words are geometric embodiments of fortune.

When I say: “I love you” –

This opens a door to a whorled we did not previously see or expect.

When I say “Isle of view’:

That, too, is a door to a new promised land,

A land that is seen by the eye newly unfurled,

The eye in the brain that only wakes

When we sleep.

 

Words can be bent, can be skewered, can be stripped, can be tattooed.

Words can be twisted in to new shapes,

New configurations, providing visions of invisible kingdoms,

Never losing their conventional volumes,

But opening within, opening more doors, opening more mirror doors,

Odd infant item.

 

I still say: “I love you.”

The world we opened three decades ago --

When I spoke those words,

And you hesitated,

Saying: “I know what you want me to say, Mike.

I can’t say those words.

I can never allow myself to feel as strongly as you do.

I am not free, so I cannot allow myself to speak freely…” --

I will never close that world.

The door is open,

And will remain open in case you wish to enter again

In this life or in the next.

 

I am transmitting again: “There is a plane you can catch.

There is a hotel near my house.

There is an airport where I can meet you.

There is a kiss.

There is a tear waiting for you.
I will never reject you.

You rejected me; but I will never reject you.

I am the Sun going down.

I am living in a large Indian village now,

Far from your white town and your white civilization.

You have many things that make you comfortable,

Many cars,

At least two houses,

Many children and, now, grandchildren.

That is all good for you, I know.

But something is missing.

The Law of Karma returns every Night-Cycle,

Asking: “Is there unfinished business you must address?

Is there someone in your heart you have shut out?

When you closed the door in his face,

Did you not close the door in your own face?”

 

“There is a plane for you; a booking you can make.

There is a hotel near my house.

There is an airport where I can meet you.

There is a kiss.

There is a series of tears and raptures waiting here to greet you…”

 

Stop. Message sent.

I hear the buzzing of the honey bee;

I smell the aroma of lilac, and honeysuckle too.

The woman I see sleeping on the couch as I stand in the moonlight,

Looking in the window, a ghost peering through the starlight,

Is a woman I will always know.

 

I will never close the door.

I will never disown the history of my heart.

 

Message received: “Please don’t cover your mouth

When you speak to me.

Why do you hide your mouth behind your hand?

Are you afraid of me?”

“Of course, I’m afraid of you,” I reply.

“Why are you afraid of me?” you ask.

“Because you have the power to hurt me,” I reply.

“I’m afraid of you, too,” you answer.

There is silence for a moment.

“Come visit me, my dear.

I am not really afraid of you.

I am afraid only that you will vanish –

And, like Rama and Sita, no more messages

Will be scent or raced Eve.”

 

September 29, 2011