If I could just stop
everything
to put you in a frame,
to capture the light around you,
to glorify and rhapsodize you
in exactly the way that you were meant to be seen,
apart from the grime and glitter of the washed up
everyday surface,
then I would get down on bended knee
right here in the middle of the street
to take the picture.
But who will believe in it?
Am I the only witness?
I will simply watch
without taking
a thing.
The moon, shimmering
beneath the surface of your understanding,
a weighted pull towards the inevitable.
Tell me that I am something more
than what I allow myself to be.
Let me be that glimmer of translucent
mercury in the deep sea bottom,
trawling for subsistence.
A watery unseeing eye,
opaque from your desire.
Uncompromising in lonely despair,
an empty surface
of shapes.
The passing of time in its essence defines what is set in stone; the shoreline that divides the breadth of pulsing frenzy from self-preservation; a sculpted passage that unveils only the inevitability of change, the patient endurance of suffering.
In depth of feeling there is danger, the danger of loss, of jealousy, of possession. The surface of the tactful shark looks deceptively smooth. It is amazing, however, how unbarbed our interfacing can be when our immediate reactions are withheld. Behind the face of the dragon lies the warm embrace of wisdom.
Armies are built to fight for causes unknown through daily existence. How cold, how distant our understanding of ourselves. We must struggle through the thick heat of others blood.
Is it to accept everything? Or to reject everything? The shore is broken and built and fallen and resurgent. The sea thinks of nothing, terrifying in its heartless ineluctability. The land is pressed into suffering awareness of the light, shadows bulked across its battlefields. Hold onto this memory of the sunset, even as it sits before your eyes. It is already gone; it has already been resurrected into misunderstanding.
(1997)
And the Lord came down
to see the city and the tower,
which the children of men built.
And the Lord said,
Behold, the people are one,
and now nothing will be restrained
from them, which they have imagined to do.
The tower rises in the midst
of the destitute city, reaching
out in one solitary tendril stretch
to penetrate the heavens.
Like an infinite flower it builds,
striving forever for perfection
as a line struggles for the asymptote.
A river runs by the bright city,
its flowing surface reflecting
a million points of light.
Slime and trash shiver darkly
upon its pitted face–polluted
by the very lives its virile waters feed.
Deep from within the churning river,
where the glaring manufactured lights
cannot reach, where the corruption
cannot penetrate, comes the Voice.
The Voice speaks through movement:
in intangible whisperings of leaves,
in glistening cries of budding flowers,
in the incessant gurgling of the river.
The inhabitants, blinded by their
artificial lights, deafened by their
loud machines, can only hear the river
speaking at night as they lie
curled naked in their beds.
But even then the Voice is indistinct
and detached, and becomes
distorted into extremes.
Chaste and eager boys
with rapt eyes and ivory hands
grasp at the high notes in the Voice,
twisting their tongues
in pretentious articulation
and drool, dreaming of perfect worlds.
They write dry manifestos of idealism,
and march, singing fervent songs
of victory. Fill the void! they cry, aroused
by thoughts of fulfillment.
Fill the void! God is dead.
Seasoned and wrinkly women
with sagging breasts breathe in
moist whispers behind glass,
their stained faces pressed
together in dread, their tongues,
dried and withered, licking their
crucifixes in devout resignation.
They hear only the low notes.
It will fall, they murmur, excited
by masochistic thoughts,
It will fall, and He will return.
And always from outside the city gates–
if you listen closely, deeply, quietly–
moves the trembling notes of the Voice,
the stirring indifferent notes of the river Euphrates.
O beloved earth the river cries how I love thee how I adore thee how I love the mist that rises in thy morning’s breath and how the wind so delicately brushes back the hair of thy leaves and o how so true so true thou ist o earth thy sunrising heralds the fires of a new day and a new day glistens in the morning air and this and this is time slipping bubbling and frothing over into waves that tumble and race for infinity only to fall back only to rise again and again and again endlessly endlessly gurgling like a baby in innocent ecstasy.
And why dost thou strive so for climax?
And why dost thy wind and waves beat
steadily into the soft earth?
O nature, O conflict, O mother of humanity–
because thou must, thou must fight forever,
thou must–to become passive were to die.
The actual fulfillment is not the point,
no–that apocalyptic end of everything
leaving only emptiness–
one final, meaningless, apathetic
resolution where the world means nothing,
where you are nothing, where the tower
stands for nothing but as a reminder
of barren dreams and faded hopes.
It is rather the heat, the spark, the friction,
the continuous rhythm of brick upon brick,
the eternal beating of two restless hearts
melded together in a molding fire,
that keeps the fire burning.
Believe, believe in my mystery,
in my endless offering of hope.
Babylon the Great–
even in your abomination and filth
you have risen this tower.
Have faith in what once was,
now is not, and yet will come.
Perfection, destruction–love, hate–
stillness, movement–you are two and one,
melded together in a molding fire,
fighting forever, yin and yang.
So the tower stands like a phallus
without a head, rearing its
senseless shaft of creation, craving
enwrapping folds of consummation,
aching to penetrate the universe.
And in this lies the brutal splendor of life–
the whole ecstasy of it all
waiting patiently within that simple swelling
of emotions, that building friction
between two embattled worlds–
not within the hopeless burst,
the trembling, shuddering screams
of selfish pigs over slop.
The whole meaning of life
dwells humbly within
drops of anticipation
that dribble out of a word
or a look, or a touch.
The whole beauty of life is
that pulsating heart that pumps
heatedly, the fire thickening
as swollen tongues battle
endlessly for that perfect,
profound revelation of the universe
building up inside like a tower.
(written in 1996)
I
The drip, drip, dripping of time runs in rivulets down
the gaping wound on the side of the eternal boy.
The scabs continuously rub against themselves,
pouring forth new pain from the deep caverns within,
from the hungry depths of resentment and anger,
cutting away at the corpse of the man,
eating away at the decaying walls of the man,
the pain possesses, the snake entwines the host.
His bloody eye, ever roving for release,
settles upon a passing child, a little girl
who reminds him of a forgotten part of himself–
and the storm of suppressed feelings
rages into his mind, the winds blowing past
into his hands–beating, beating, remembering now
the anger, the hatred released upon his head–
he feeds upon the pain–hers–his. To make
another feel this pain, to release, to fill
the hollowness inside with another’s heart
stolen, ripped out with his bare hands–
he flies away crying hoarsely, a dying boy,
a living man.
II
I brush my hands–lightly
against my bruises,
feeling the vestiges
of another’s hurt–I
have always believed
in god until now–now
it is a hollow steel image
nailed above my bed.
I hate him.
I see strange things–
in my dreams–
barren landscapes,
charred by the fires
of wars, ruined
by the havoc of storms.
I hate myself.
Why do people turn
against themselves?
I rub my hands together,
feeling a warmth
only outside.
III
Time, the eternal lacerater, flows forever,
washing the wounds of the injured
in the blind waves of deceitful memory,
leaving restless scars in the belly
that must be stoked with the fiery touch of hope.
But what is the world without hope, where
does one fall to be saved, what is the world
without hope but emptiness and death
and pain and pain and endless pain?
Cut off from herself in the past,
she tries to reunite the shards, the pieces–
blood seeps out the cracks formed
by the forced union–never to be whole again.
There is no hope for one who has already died.
She casts her hands out into the dark space,
groping, and feels the cold rigidity of the crucifix
above her head–the hollow steel image that is him–her–
sparks fly and she wonders if there is a chance–
tobe reborn?.canI. canwe. . .
No–there is Nothing.
But a fire once started cannot be stopped
except by time and time and death.
She looks in the mirror and sees nothing–
and that is the world–everything, anything–
beautiful, the world is horrifyingly beautiful
and it was there all along, before and after
the snake–it takes death to know life–
a shattered image, broken to emptiness,
is life itself in truest form: piercingly aware
of death and its encompassing futility.
IV
I am nothing, nothing,
but part of everything;
I am nothing, nothing,
but the world, the universe;
I am nothing, nothing,
but life and death–
I have tasted the blindness
and now I can see;
I have touched the judgment
and now I can sing–
I am nothing–
nothing–
and I am beautiful.
Where is the beauty of the sunset?
Where is the subtlety of the wind rustling through a thicket of leaves?
Nothing means anything without our participation. If I am shelled, walled with numbness,
then I am a bitter god.
So desperate for the world to see our beauty. To buy into it, to make it grow through collective agreement.
Where is this place where money has no meaning? Where is this place where we are known completely?
The future is destroyed and resurrected daily. The sun is an apocalyptic fire that gives us everything we need from a certain respectful distance.
I want to throw away everything that I own and eat from dumpsters. I want to manage a small village full of folk music festivals. I want to be happy in my confinement. I want to be loved by everyone. I want to be invisible and undefined.
Who am I? What is this world that would skin me, name me, place me? The sunset passes unnoticed except by a happenstance glance. The wind blows unheeded, another subconscious occurrence like refrigerator noises.
What more could they be? I am trying to look and listen, but missing something inside of myself.
Words written out of a necessary desperation.
You go out into the world, far away, distant into the all. Then you come back, dressed in darkness. You come back to me to give to me a light that you had been keeping, that you had been molding hidden from the world, building upon itself like of clay, of hard-soft snow, collected, you give it to me, you bestow it unto me, you place it into my heart like a light into a light, two lights turning blue, the most quietly intense of flames, burning without flicker—and you give yourself back to me, and here in this place far away from everything, far away from yourself, close to me, you give yourself again to me—taking me far away from myself, close to you, far away from both of us, close to divinity, close to something unnamed, unplaced, imperfectly slidingly slipperingly slopingly beautiful. Here, in this place, we are affirmed, confirmed, firmed, fitted, whetted. We were meant to be apart to come together like this to break apart into something new, surprised, glistening in newness, shining in compound simplicity. We go there to know that it has been there, will always be there, for us to find again, for us to forget, to renew, to discover, to share, to shed, to find again. Again, and then again. To go away to return dressed in darkness, to unshroud the light, to build the light, to know the light. Back and forth. The light dancing the shadows of the tree in the wind against the blinded windows into this night. Up and down. The journey of the droplet to its source to tear itself into the earth to know of the ocean. Like this. Just like that.
Loving you is more than loving you. It’s loving strangers on the street, women passing by, couples holding hands, ocean spray in the breeze. It’s loving the feeling of the sun pressing down on my skin, the way ivy climbs up a wall, the way a baby is constantly amazed by attention. It’s loving everyone who has come before, it’s loving myself, it’s loving my family, it’s loving everything in the world that has served to bring us together, that keeps us together, that witnesses this magic to be true. It’s loving the caress of breath out of my lungs, the sense of consciousness leaping across synapses, the vision that filters through my pupils to flip into sensory information, chemical conveyed thought cloud evolution. Like waiting for the rain to come sometimes we sit around, dry, desperate, fighting one another with hope. Then like necessary revolutions of the earth around the sun love breaks into our hearts, undeniable, flooding through to our fingertips, our lips trembling with life force. Loving you is loving nature, loving the cycles of nature, the pull of the earth, the tug of the moon, the kiss of the sun, the blood of the month, the night and the day and the rain and the drought and the leaf and the fall and the wave and the shore. Because through you I am glimpsing insight into all of the universe. You concentrate the power and beauty and might of existence like a lens directly into my consciousness. I love you—and that is enough.
Every single day, you are there, ready to move our lives together forward. I feel like sometimes I force us to squabble, simply to reassure myself that we are still separate, distinct individuals. But by now we are more akin to meshes, blending somewhere between us to form a oneness that is also a trinity–I, you, us. Through you I see not only deeper into myself, but into all of existence. We form together a lens that focuses the light of divinity to a single point of vision. There is nothing beyond this. There is nothing that is not included in this. There is only this love, and all of the world is shaped by it. Like glass blown bubbled worlds, love breathes through our singular hollows to craft harmonies containing everything and nothing. Whole lives are decimated and rebirthed in this song.
I eat, sleep, and write through you, with you, beside you. To even claim that I could exist outside of you would be, by this point, a conceit. We are each other, as the moon on the surface of a stream is still only the sun.
1
I am one
who is afraid
of flying.
When I am born,
it is of a legacy,
of a dream
wrought in the imagination
of the window waves.
I am One
Without Myself,
a pig in a blanket
of solitude;
A God
within a demi-
monde.
A man
on the water.
2
I unwrap
my pieces into a cloth
from which I dangle
into the night
like a child
escaping from
Daddy.
I am born
everyday that I die.
I must speak,
I must move.
3
I am a legacy,
of a legacy,
from the sea
and beyond
the sea.
4
But who will listen
to a dream?
Last time one of Them
came around,
we incorporated Him
into the System.
And so it’s not a matter
of listening any longer–
I will sing of trees,
and of blossoming
buildings
reaching up
to fuck the sky.
5
I am one
who is afraid of crying
loud enough so that
anyone
could ever listen.
When I die,
I feel squares of concrete
screaming in my bones.
I trip in a car,
one block after another,
until it takes me
to where I forgot
I wanted to go.
I am One
Within Myself,
a fish
in a school
of fish;
a sea
that can never make
an unclouded sound.
A rock
within the swaying
break of the earth.
6
I wrap
myself in sheets
in order to preserve
this order of the sun
that has issued forth
from the bellies
of the drums
of the dirt.
I die
every night
that I live.
I must sink,
I must
stop.
7
This peak is climbing me
up up and into the wind
seeping through the space,
tossing the duds on the line
to a smooth dreamy dance.
I feel such gravity
that I feel as one who flies.
The strict buildings
move into the clouds,
creation of man
and sky.
This earth and this sea
within me
makes me tremble in ecstasy–
or is it fear–
at the sight of the sunmoon
rising down
down
against the windows,
just as the darkness
forms into
a
tear.
A thousand teardrops
are worth every moment
you hold me close.
A thousand nights
of solitude
I would gladly surrender for every drop
of suffering from your long black lashes.
We hurt each other to remind ourselves
why we are inseparable.
Two faces, each portending to be one,
draw away from each other,
crafting a mirrored distinction,
all the while tied to the same nurturing root–
the picture of a heart.
The heart is not simply a bloody vessel,
working to sustain our motion.
The heart is a symbol
of life’s struggle for unity:
two spheres at the top–one point at the bottom;
a metaphor for emotion.
Our love is beyond
anything.
In the approach to this open understanding–
this terrifying, beautiful unknown–
we fight,
we dance,
we crash our unshaped differences–
until a shore is formed,
and the waves are freed,
and what was once turbulent pain
is seen for what it always was:
playful, wonderful
bliss.
A thousand tear
drops are worth
every moment
you hold me
close.
It is strange how quickly I can change. I watch myself through a veil of colors falling like tassellated stars, comets of fear and insight between the thing and the soul. The only thing I have become certain of is that my strength is found in permeability and steady state shifting. An armor of waves, a wall of movement. A warrior will tell you to watch the eyes; eyes as a window to the soul. Forget the eyes. I will watch the heart.
Love is an everchanging,
up and down sine wave ride–
sometimes I push you away
just so I can find the space
to breathe–
only to find that I am suffocating
to think that I could lose you
so easily.
I know when I’m being unfair,
when I’m being mean–
which is as much to say
that some part of me
hurts you deliberately.
I watch myself doing it,
loathing myself.
I can only theorize
that I do it because I am scared
and I am looking to make something up
against you, so that I can run away.
Don’t let me run away, beloved.
Fight me, be aflame with righteous anger,
put me in my place–
which is next to you, with you, for you.
Be strong in yourself.
Don’t let me wallow in my fears
by digging into your insecurities.
I can be so cold to myself–
and now that you are in me, in my life,
in my every movement and thought,
I have to learn to be better
to myself, to all of the life
which resides within.
Don’t leave me alone.
Keep me burning, love.
Of how there is this,
only this,
a sensory awareness akin to bliss,
a blossoming of creation,
words and consciousness strung
to a loom of desire so intense
it could never hope
to be satisfied.
In the moon flow of our nature,
we know there is nothing but learning–
all a lesson,
all a student before love,
all a teacher before weakness,
all an unreclaimable glory
pointing its way to beauty
like a sunset–
just like any other,
never to be the same.
Words are necessarily cryptic
in order to say exactly what you know
I mean.
Your body never lies.
It is what lies outside of your sensory understanding
that is illusion.
Watching the buildings from the balcony,
I reflect how everything is movement
standing still.
Acting based upon stone—
thus will you fall.
The night will shield
he who opens his mind in arms
of stillness,
tearing your thoughts
to that which is eternal,
personal, and externally
internal. Therefore, move
in rhythm to your heart
and when it beats hard,
let it go.
Because when the time comes to fight,
you must be able to breathe,
you must be able
to breathe.
You are incredibly brave,
you who place your safety on the line for love.
You who decide to give up your future
for that which you aren’t sure that you can hold.
There is nothing higher than to live your life
based on love.
It might mean giving up everything that you’ve ever had.
It might mean gaining everything you’ve ever wanted.
There’s an easy way to tell:
look at a person who has lived their life
based on security, money, and success.
Then look at a person who has lived their life
based on love and an incurable desire
to be free.
Then look at who is happy in themselves.
Wherever they go,
whatever happens to them,
who holds a light that shines through the darkness?
Love, love is the only way to live.
It is the only way to die.
It is the only way to do anything worth something
in a world that is dying to live.
There, in that pocket of light
called the flesh
sits the one they call
yourself.
Who is you?
They tell you what you are
until you start showing them
that you go down so deep
that your leaves are feathering flowers,
always dropping heat–
phoenix–
always spitting flames,
always and everready
to take on anything and anyone
at their own game.
The treasure that shines outwardly
comes through from somewhere sacred,
drawn far up from your roots,
the silent toil that none can see,
the everyday hungering effort
to make another person happy.
To be rooted
does not mean to stay in one place.
It means to be forever seeking,
to traverse boundaries
in the name of ecstasy,
to burn to know, to learn,
to touch the other side
of the moon goddess’s face.
Here, the water flows
beneath the surface
of everything,
Tierra de Pachamama.
Our bodies pools in a river,
wells in time, we meet,
dip into one another, share,
the stream moves onward.
Worship a tree, worship a flower,
worship yourself,
every action worship.
River of life,
bodies dripping with collection,
sources of energy,
channeling of past into future.
What comes into you
is what you allow into you.
Allow light.
Allow love.
Hollow yourself to be filled.
Lose yourself to be hallowed.
True alchemy is not the transmutation of metals into gold.
It is the transcendence of yourself
into God–
which is another way of saying
the discoverance of the sea
within the raindrop,
the revelation of wholiness
in every little piece of your world.
We make decisions,
we choose to act
for better or for worse.
But what causes the rifts in our hearts
is the fear
that we made the wrong choice,
that we can never go back.
Nothing is wrong,
and we can never go back.
Everything is right,
a matter of acceptance.
Accept, allow, embrace.
Love, love, love.
Shrunk back into my shell,
life passes like wind over me,
a low sonorous sound,
like the mouth of an empty bottle,
the world echoes hollow.
A matter of waiting,
a matter of re-discovering myself
in the absence of changes,
a matter of integrity.
Something higher than this,
birthed in this,
a joy furrowed
in sadness.
I must remember
the seed, the heat, the essence.
Alone again.
More time to know the god within.
Deep snow and solitude,
the popcorn smell of brown rice cooking,
a dark microbrew at the end of the day.
I am missing her,
I am missing the possibility
of her.
She comes and goes throughout my life,
a woman with changing faces,
a heart that knows me better than I know myself.
What is the sound of snow falling in the pines?
Listening to myself I hear the pangs of loneliness.
I devote my time to readying this space
for when it will be filled again.
Maybe someday she will stay.
Un beso no es solo un beso para eses personas con consiensia de la luz; un beso es lleno de sentimiento, es una extensión del corazon, una forma de algo no puede definir. Porque amor esta afuera todo, esta dentro de todo, esta incontenible, movimiento a través de todo, afuera palabras, se bastado solo con manos, con contacto de cascaras–palabras se amoldado de bocas sino allende de sonidos. Amor es un creacion de la luz buscando sí mismo. En aquel momento de unidad, no es nada sino una fuerza fuerte penetrando todo, desterrando el oscuridad. Por supuesto, el oscuridad volverá, cubriendo los espacios lejos del corazon. Necesite crear amor incesantemente para su vida, para que el corazon puede recordar por que se existar, se existar solo para amor, para respirando la luz afuera sí mismo al dentro del mundo. ¡Mantena su respirando, divida la luz! ¿Que mas es en vida que cual esta dentro de su corazon?
You think that you are coiling the thick rope,
but the rope is what guides your looping,
for notice when you turn it wrong
that there is nothing you can do
but surrender;
rope will always yearn to be twisted
in the manner in which it was first twisted.
You can’t fight against something
that can’t be taught anything new.
Coil the rope in the way
it must be coiled.
Teach yourself
how to bend heedless with the wind.
The wind from out of the Sierras
blows into the depths of my heart,
and in a hurricane of drunkenness
I grasp out in the darkness for lines
to myself that can sustain hope.
It is like searching for a fish
in the middle of the deep sea
without a hook.
I fall into this space within myself,
again and again,
learning over and over again
where to place my fear
and my suffering to climb back into the light.
I forget that it is there.
I forget that it is there and then suddenly
none of the outside world can reach me,
and there is nothing I can say
and there is noone who can understand.
God, divine interconnected fabric of the universe:
give me a golden thread to find some source
of joy in the midst of such sorrow.
I keep remembering our last night,
the way we struggled to create
chains that would bind us through eternity,
knowing that nothing would last.
The way we finally fell asleep,
til the alarm on my phone
came buzzing like a call
that someone had just died,
3:45,
and you immediately
began mourning
as I set about being practical,
like a puppet
hollowly enacting higher commands.
Our love was amputated, no matter what long distance conversations filled with silence we gave. Hopeless seances, groping longingly for something no longer there except in memory. And here you live still in my heart, an apparition of what could have been.
Being with you was like constructing an intricate pyre of our desire, carving out all of our deepest dreams in each other and setting it on fire. It was desperate, it was everything that reality could not be. I don’t regret a minute of it. I don’t regret breaking our hearts. Because it was the right thing to do, there was never a question in my mind that creating a window of beauty only to be broken was worth it. I finally understood, with you, that true love is always worth the sacrifice of long periods of lonely suffering. Even if it might mean a lifetime of sadness. There is never a reason to hold back when love is near. We must give all, we must give everything for something that can never be possessed.
So yeah, I miss you. More perhaps now than I ever did, missing the very idea of you, the place in imagination that allowed you to exist within me.
It’s amazing how something so fleeting can be worth all of my life. One must, of course, always look back down at the ground and climb back from the mountain top and return home. I walked in the front door and everything was the same but everything was different, and would never be as it was. Every time something in me dies, another world opens up before me and it is like being born again, shuddering in the light with only pain to wake me.
I walk through the world with your emptiness before me. And I will remember you when my heart is filled with love again.
Point to point, what is in-between?
People are gathered in grids of energy
like thickets to crevices of stream,
crowding dense to catch a trickle
of light filtering from shafts in the towering
trees down to their spread desire,
vulnerable as baby birds
waiting for god to fulfill her duty.
What is outside of their wordless yearning?
What is uncovered by names?
What is the space, what the invisible, where will they never go–
only pass through on their way back
home?
everywhere, a ghetto. suburbs, skyscrapers, apartments, schools, hospitals,
prisons. everywhere a boxed glossed around the outside containing an
addictive core leading to emptiness. cars, tvs, computers, radios. the
small dry twigs of impoverished children everywhere. the deadened hollows
of working parents. where can you go to escape the fire? it is waiting to
happen. we all know that it is waiting to happen. you think you’re safe in
your office? you think you’re safe in your classroom? you think you’re
safe in your car? hell no you don’t. you’re scared, just like all the rest
of us, waiting for the bomb to drop, waiting for the spark to catch, waiting
for the world to explode. who has hope? who can have hope when it doesn’t
matter whether you’re inside or outside, you’re still gonna burn? who can
have hope when we’re all waiting, waiting breathlessly to die an unknown
death?
we’re all so attached to each other, so wound bound intertwined. we’re all
so interconnected, interpenetrated, hyphenated. and yet we are all so
alone, we are all so lonely, we are all so scared, we are all so alienated
from ourselves and each other and our families and our enemies. we are all
living in hell together and each trying to create a bubbled dream for
ourselves at the expense of another. we drink together and try to lose
ourselves in a vision of unity that ends with the barfight or the puke or
the depression the next day. we take pills together and try to lose
ourselves in a vision of unity that ends when the drug wears off or the
music ends or sunlight unveils the reality beyond the pulsating lights. we
gather together in churches, in assembly halls, trying to lose ourselves in
a vision of unity that ends when we begin pointing fingers of blame from out
of the blindness of righteousness. we gather together around tvs and movie
screens and try to lose ourselves in a vision of unity that ends, that is
always to be continued.
i’m angry. i’m scared. i’m covering my ears and my eyes and my heart. i’m
trying to reach out beyond my understanding. i’m hiding a .22 in my closet.
i’m loving my baby tonight. i’m watching the news of the latest local,
national, and international tragedies. i’m reading the autobiography of
malcolm x. i’m drinking pepsi. i’m eating organic foods. i’m suffocating.
i’m on fire. i’m on fire. i’m on fucking fire.
by striving for excellence,
you doom yourself to loneliness.
by struggling always to understand,
you will never be understood.
to truly live,
you must die.
flitting from building to building, window to window, it’s ashen wings
spluttering in the night air,
the moth, possessed by the call of electricital filamentation,
visits us, in our balcony smoking, speaking of the chemicals which rush
through our connections, together, smashed off the grappa.
we fall silent for a moment in the pause between a sentence, watching it
swirl amongst us, wings, flapping beyond the rate of our visual intake,
illumined in the fall of the living room light through the window.
somewhere in our physical systems, are we, too, drawn by manufactured
warders of what-we-can’t-see with the same urgency?
(we drive out to the vast silent darkness of the deserts to fill it with
pulsing lights, neon tubes a-swirl, the steady blinding throb of our
city’s noise)
in the space between the flickering in which nothing can be processed,
what crevices do our souls file into?
the moth’s own organic purposes betrayed, it stumbles like a drunk through
the by-ways of our hidden lives, alleyways barred with the business of
waste.
A ghost,
a leftover of the past, the moth
spends its short life fractured in confusion,
hypnotized by an oscillating light sealed behind glass,
a life consumed with a certain death.
here’s a little drip-dropping flow for you, bro, sis, mister, miss: i dive into the alien elements like a dolphin through the light shafted sonorous medium of words, the media of existence, reverent movement of the lettered masses to the radiance of an individual creating, network flashing across unchartered space with a train of thought to carry the coals burning for you all to capture in your scopes, stationed, shameless, timeless,
us.
i share my shadow for the world’s shine, in the spirit of the spoken earth i dig, rhymes like jewels crevicing into the microscope of this moment, nodal points, subliminal ambience beating against the linear fragments of time–
and i am creating to be captured, felt, rhythmed into your skin spirited mind,
represented, reflected, released
into the blind eternity
of nothingness,
divine,
i am.
read me, listen to this song i sing to ease my struggle,
disarm my pain, despite the distance that i feel
in between my heart and the keys boarded along the crawling subterranean
fingers of broken waves;
it’s a process, you see,
the apple and the snake,
seeding, shedding, 1 + 2
and the outcome, you know,
is in the balance of you
and me and our acceptance
of the today in the tomorrow
of the child sanctified moon woman sensualizing sun,
of the old man in the sea,
fishing for the mystery
of giving ourselves,
of sharing ourselves
with one another.
i am here. now get you over, bring your elevation to the bridge, build this positive energy that we need like watered green for the soul, synapse stretch your spirit across the distance, breathe together and look at how the fear of our loneliness falls around our wonder like we one, like we tear drops dropping from the eyes of almighty everything–wordless, endless, forever feeding from our lives unfolding into now.
i think that we are beautiful. i think that we are alive. i think that all of the ugliness in the armored coinage of imprisoned emotions, all the loaded blindness of boxed-in shells, all of the fucking greed of the marketed surface world
can’t stop us from living
beautifully.
it’s a new year, my friends, my memories, my possibilities, my intertwining compatriots on the dance floor of our generation. shed beautiful art for me, for yourselves, cause our creation, our motion, our explored direction is what we’re going
to be treading over
to keep going, to move on,
to love.
this is dedicated
to all of you
who have made the effort
to show me your way
as you pass
by my path.
thank you.
a vision: when a being dies,
its energy passes into the world,
it moves, formless,
into all forms of life,
such that it is present everywhere,
and collected nowhere.
(life here includes rocks, oceans, plastics, metals.)
thus the world changes,
accepting the spirit.
this is what is called
“the river of energy.”
the more energy you have in life, aroused,
supple, billowing with the breath of ocean wind,
the more the world is filled
with your passing.
this is what is meant by
“gathering treasure in heaven.”
to be alive is to clear yourself
of knowledge
and mold yourself
to the wind,
to let your surface act
without you.
in this way you will float balanced,
all of your energy still, silent,
deep. the world passes around you,
such that all that is in you
is you.
death is the time
when you give yourself to the world.
until then,
let nothing separate you
from yourself.
a shroud cast off to pass the light around, the breath moving balanced, her body against mine, honestly touching. I have learned how to tell the difference between the light others attribute to me, and take, and the light which I bear, and give.
I fill the space I move within—there is nowhere, now, that I cannot fall. Indefensible, I break open my eyes into every interrogator I pass, and it is their minds that must deal with me.
woman,
channel of flame,
it is to you I owe this passage.
the bat wraps about himself and hangs suspended from the ceiling, filled with blood. the night dissipates into the warmth of the sun outside of the cave as he sleeps, dreaming.
there is a wisdom that floats in our veins.
a voice of the sun:
it is important to know how to open oneself to another being, to draw from its energy and share a life between.
a voice of the moon:
it is also important to know when to leave. there are some things that are not ready to be shared. casting light upon the darkness can become a kind of violence. there are whole worlds that exist without you, that have nothing to do with you.
a voice of the earth:
to live, i must breathe. i have fallen into a space from which i grow. a life requires the independence to be dependent. the singularity of a tree in a forest. a cell in a body. taking what you need to serve yourself to serve others.
a voice of the bat:
i love the world, life, multitudinous perceptions. thus, i share what i no longer need, and i take what others let go.
if you love another being, then let them live
apart from you,
so you can meet freely
in the night shining,
the shores of bodies
coming up against the surface of seas,
heeding the call of gravity.
planet-world-lives circle each other
and do not crash.
they hold themselves together.
this is about time, and how to let it break against, sculpt, caress.
do not deny the shape once were. the limbs can still feel moving, ghosts in dreams.
slowly change. different surfaces in different light.
every day a kind of violence. every day an acceptance.
you
you broke me yesterday
and today i took you in my eyes
and made you whole.
and tomorrow
i will see you nothing.
pieces of myself yearn unreachable in the night.
a phone call to a machine in a distant room, playback.
time, the water tears away brittle,
smooths sharp,
my hollows defined.
time breaks the shore of bodies
to the form that years shaped
that is language, now, speaking
in the barreling baby hurting lungs
of ancient alien timeless meeting.
This day begins with silence,
this day begins with confusion, with muscles tensing splashing afraid
against the sea.
This day begins with flooding lungs. This day begins with the letting go
of struggle, this day begins with the affirmation
of death, this day begins
with the unfolding of a pearl of breath out of the ocean depth
within the chaos, centered, dispersing,
into nothing that can be found,
nothing
that can be held close , nothing
that can be made
simple.
This day begin
To make pictures from,
these pebbles in the order
I feel. Hours in the sun,
mom cries, pulling
at her air, where
is your father? I know,
I saw his face filling
with blood–
with stones moves
my voice. Listen.
The bearded man, he tries
to tear out my emotions,
how are we today? I watch
the clouds, how they would look
in stone. I throw up
in the bathroom, remembering.
Grey is safe, my heart
is black and red.
I kneel, drool spilling from my mouth,
see the hollows of my eyes in the water.
I stand, break the mirror, rocks are
my fists. Listen.
The nurses they come, mom watching
her TV, stuffing the phoneline with her tears.
All the drugs make me distant.
Where is your father? He is dead,
I scream, Dead.
I throw stones at the sky,
listen to them fall like rain in the trees,
like bullets, like blood.
I graze my tongue among the cracks on the floor like braille;
I love the jagged experience of chaos. New suns spring past
the window, pitching shadow bars across the concrete. Cards? the guards
sometimes ask, hunger in their eyes for escape. No, today the ants have moved
right here the dirt and it is changing, yes. Pavement wrinkles
like water–bugs fitting their transit to its ruptures–
and I sit–for twenty years I observe–like an alien–the light running by
in rectangles—ashes and dust and grime shifting –my mouth growing
dry behind my beard. How I breathe to understand the life that breaks
beneath my feet! And still I have no roots. And still my mind
wanders–even as these sordid sensations make me hard.
You taught me how to eat
by growing me to hunger.
You drifted by, fins spread,
until I was man enough to frighten you.
fishing fingers,
crossing mouths,
we have broken apart,
and now you are gone.
You split in the rebirth of a sun.
I reeled on the beach of time,
swollen with new breath.
I chased your memory with wine.
Now I walk the earth
as god swam the sea.
I loved one fish
to feed myself.
I use this forum in an attempt to voice what is within and establish a deeper relation with the world in which I live. To write is to explore inner dimensions as well as to discuss the everyday. It is, therefore, to unite two universes—the unseen and the seen, the unsaid ... Continue reading »
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