Closed Captioned For The Thinking Impaired

I am weary of the garden, said the blogger.

2012-02-17T12:31:00.008-08:00

Writing for me has always been an act of sacred communion.

The conjoining of minds is the holiest and purest form of human interaction.

The written without the reader is an unbitten fruit:

A thing formed and existing, but without savor because flavor is only experienced on the tongue of the taster; just as writing only reaches its fullest expression in the mind of the reader.

I am not a diarist.

I write for expression, yes, but also for impression...

Yours.. the reader's.

I want to infect you with bits of myself, true, but I want, in turn, to witness the metamorphosis of my ideas as they merge with your concepts of them. I can only know this through the miracle of interactivity. I need the exchange of energy. Ours, that which exists between writer & reader, is a true symbiosis. Each benefits from sharing his respective resources with the other...

I am not interested in parasitical relationships.

Unilateral, lop-sided exchanges benefit no one.

In the end, both the parasite and its host dies.

I am weary of the garden, said the rose. I am ready to prick someone... anyone... with my thorns. Being a rose is a bloodthirsting business. Cultivation is as boring as monk fuck. Give me the battlefield of finger vs petal and prepare for the impending storm! Or else, pluck me and wear me behind your ear, but I do not wish to wither on the vine. It is a slow, sad death.

I wish you all great luck in your future endeavors.

I am done with online writing.

It Is Not The Sky That's Falling...

2012-02-16T16:43:00.005-08:00

It is not the sky that's falling

It is only the rain

Beating

against the concrete pavement

Black as crow's wings

With a tacked hardness

Piercing the winter song

Making the Night long

For the kiss of light

Dark-cloaked and

Praying with weary lips

for

the sun to rise

Once more

In Day's teary eyes....

Ecce Homo

2012-02-15T13:41:00.003-08:00

He lifted the receiver

The weight of it felt heavy

in his hand.

Odd...

to think

of a connection

to anyone

these days

Even such a remote one.

Maybe it was only in his mind,

The walk down to Polk Street in the rain to that one payphone

The one that had somehow survived the graffiti, the vandals, and

the drunkard's holy baptism

of cold puke mingled with warm piss

riding the sepulchral bus to slow oblivion

just to call someone he didn't want any trace of afterward...

Could he even remember the number?

Click.

He heard only the dead tone

in the apocryphal song

of lost epochs' static...

still clinging.

When was the last time he heard

those words? The ones he longed for?

Or his mother's voice?

Or the tender plea of reason?

Gullible…

That's what he was.

Day after day

Night after night

He swam in an ocean of improbability

Coughing up his rage into ashes

as he took another drag from his pipe dreams.

Hell had a mouth

red-lipped and full

sweet as a kiss

until it swallowed him whole

like Leviathan.

And then there were none...

Changeable. Alterable. Mutable. Variable. Versatile. Moldable. Movable. Fluctuate. Undulate. Flicker. Flutter. Pulsate. Vibrate. Alternate. Plastic. Spastic. Elastic. Fantastic.....

A brave new world spun on...

Lobotomized

Mechanized

Marginalized

Frayed nerves like wires

jolt the briny blood kiss

where gods and politicians

merge into the cohesive collusion

of the collective unconscious

Reality never bit as hard now

The sound of shrill echoes

might shatter the vacuum-tubed babies

Their incubation fed the march

of wooden toy soldiers

clearing the way

to the tinny grinding of robotic futility.

Man continued to wind down...

Beneath the branch of the kneeling willow

were fomenting worlds…

Long catacombed, but seething with need

They were dust bunnies spinning like dervishes

A karmic haboob

spiraling its larval nebulae

Succumbing to the will

of an aging architect

intent upon splitting seeds and grinding roots

to resurrect what was and what could be again…

No longer satisfied with that place of unbeing

sought by those bodhi seeking

hoping to drown memory in rivers

of forget fullness under shady branches

The forfeiture of

His Id Entity

on a floating lotus leaf calm...

No longer.

No.

He was ready to explode

in his ME-ness

Serenity was over-rated.

The graves of his Celestine fathers

were ticking bombs.

His was the apple yet unbitten

And somewhere in Earth's future

lay dark skies and blinding sun.

The stars...

His destination.

With the sirens sweetly singing....

Negative Kiss

2012-02-14T13:19:00.002-08:00

There are things to be said
places in felt

locked away though not quite forgotten.

They are sealed in impossible old dented tin with wax
vacuum-packed
carefully stored and preserved
like July's sweetest peaches.

They sit precariously
suspended
on the muted lip of a shelf in a cupboard
where dusty old skeletons jangle their x-rayed bones
heard only by the tone-deaf ear
of Duty's stalwart resignation.

They glow with an eerie phosphorescence
on cold, moonless nights.

And I would a thousand morrows
surrender
for the promise
of that one true kiss
still not yet
unremembered.

Metamorphoses (w V-log)

2012-02-13T10:47:00.002-08:00

"I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane."

~ Sylvia Plath

Love is a religion

It has zealots who keep

Its alabaster vessel untainted

by the poison of doubt

With that madness

of habitual ritual comes

The sublime sacrifice

of the sanctity of the self

It's like CS Lewis' Lion

on an ego-thumping acid trip

Feral, ferociously scathing when challenged,

yet willingly surrenders itself on the altar

of stony resolve.

Love is like all others

who would call themselves God,

Be they gods of grace or science or just

the Ayatollah of rock and rolla

Spreading wings of desire

like the seraphim

Transmogrified into

a reverie of Revelations.

When it's unrequited, its wistful mendicant is

Like a hungry waif

Peering into a bakery shop window

His Pavlovian foaming blood dog juices

Flowing

Going going gone

A gong of ultraviolet waves

Crashing into crimson tides
with a sibyl's Cymbals

Feeling a depraved deprivation

that guards the mouth of hell like Cerberus

until a tune crooning Orpheus comes along

to make that junkyard dog

wag his tail with his bard song

Desire becomes a cosmic brawl

where all Hell breaks loose

With howling peeping tom Moons ambushing you

and six point Ninja pinwheel Stars thrown into

A whorling

All sugar-frosted death spirals

Sambaing to the patterns of Venus' capricious

crookfingered come hither

The planets turn into drunken sailors on shore leave

laughing and wobbling on their axes

Seducing you with their carefree charm & easy saunter...

Slipsliding into you
under the black satin sheets of night

Your universe seems like a schoolyard game.

Red light, green light 1, 2, 3

Yes No...
Yes No...

Green red green red

Go Stop Go Stop Go...

Stop

But you want

To scream out NOOO!!!

Don't stop!

Don't...

Stop.

Please don't

Ever

Stop.

Run those red lights like hungry Ethiopians

in an Olympic deathmatch,

a marathon for the dazed & damned.

That's how I feel anyway...

But I'm just a bunch of scattered iron filings

Magnetized

By you

You radiate true light....

Van Gogh sunflower bright

Plucking hearts that spin and dive

like clouds of starlings

with every petaled touch of your thoughts

to create the sonorous sigh that is the universe

Beyond...

Beyond..

Beyond...

Light years beyond

Dali's wetdreams couldn't imagine

Anything more seductively surreal than you

With all that Teutonic symphonic voodoo

Your futuristic dystopia

becomes a cornucopia

feeding my rising New Tower of Babel

but I know that the heart must be the mediator

between the head and the hands

For my Metropolis to stand

I want to be your Maria

You

With your singing bones

tickling those liquid piano string veins insane

Your blood red soul

streaking and seeking the higher clime.

A place with no boundary, no borderline;

But you are earthbound,

your snaky tendrils

rooted in the sensual

as you take me

Sky-fucking...

to a rhythmic rhapsody

A Dante Diamond Dog daemon,

An incubus of Sumerian seething seedings

Crosspollinating with mankind

Your looming blooming

Bodhi tree shadows

Make me burning bush blind

Sometimes I feel like Cassandra...

but the impending doom

bubbling in the canal

of Pele's molten womb

That I foresee

Is just a Mr. Spock raised brow speck

in the lash of an unblinking galaxial eye

An aborted afterbirth

A stigmatic chorus of indulgentia

forming a karmic stye

Life is probably pointless:

the backward glance

in the twisted fate of

some toric variety thrill

yet I treasure it still.

It's such a fragile thing...

Love and happiness may just be

a snowflake on Baal's tongue,

something that dissolves

evanescing into vapor

before it is even done

but I don't care...

maybe it's all just helium bubble dreams

blown by Venetian glassmakers

in a Cinderella slippered

fairytale...

Still... my pumpkin coach ride is sweet

And I caught it; I caught you
holding your breath...

fighting to keep your choke hold on love

Your only weakness
is the strength of your pride

In the war of you versus us

At the end of the day,

After all the heartache

After the battle axes have been wielded

And fallen

And the blood of the vanquished

is running thickly in the gutters

Clogging them like a fat greedy man's arteries...

After the carnage has been photodocumented,

CNN has done its coverage

And the bodies have been buried...

We live and love on..

Maybe no love can survive

The fallout of such a thermonuclear meltdown...

But the true believer will try to breathe those toxic fumes

Pretending that it's just a little fog....

We all have to die of something sometime anyway...

Love is a better reason than most
of the other demagogues'...

And nothing is without flaw

I'd rather have the man than the muse.

You can't fuck the ideal.

You can't cuddle up on a sofa

to watch The Thin Man series with a Beatrice.

Goddamn the Beatrice, I'd pop a cap in the bitch

if I were armed with something more than desire.

However I am the eternal feminine...

with nothing above my shoulders but the evening.

My head is not in the clouds...
it IS the clouds

And the sun and the moon and
the Van Gogh stars
that burn life firebrands
in the diamond-cut brilliance of your eyes.

I want to feel the rasp
Of your stubble

When you kiss me on the morning.

I don't need the hasp
of orange blossoms,
candlelight and
violins to lock me into you.

I want the pregnant scent
of your body musk

to be the oil I bathe in...
I want to be lathed
by the boil in your roiling sea

I want the gasp
In the moans
Of your pleasure

To be the music I dance to,

I want to feel your pain

Drink your tears,

Swallow your cum.

Perfection is a fatuous child's dream.

I want the crack in Henry James' golden bowl,..

Makes it look all the more beautiful to me

Because I know it has a gossamer fragility
an intrinsic tangible nobility
A beauty that defies the lark flight of mere fancy

But I'm a believer...

This is a re-post from last March.

Play my video reading, if you like. Oh and Happy Valentine's Day!!!

You Think Too Much...

2012-02-12T18:36:00.001-08:00

"Concordantly, while your first question may be the most pertinent, you may or may not realize it is also the most irrelevant."
— The Architect, The Matrix Reloaded

Love is a many splendored thing, but one thing it does NOT bear well is too much scrutiny.

The brain makes mistakes.
It misperceives, it overanalyzes , it can get stuck in a recursive loop like a defragmented computer program.

It's HAL without all the logic or the computative power of artificial intelligence.
Making the same mistakes over & over again because of a defect in the way the programming was uploaded or a virus that attacks the integrity of the stored data.

Sometimes we just need to close our eyes, open our minds, and feel our heartbeat.
We cannot live without the visceral.
All those ganglions humming harmoniously waiting to be stimulated by the flood of hormones.
Doused in love juices we are nourished, we are ALIVE!

But we must really learn to love selflessly, that is the key.
There is a difference between true love and compulsion, obsession or lust.

The former seeks nothing more that deepest intercourse of mind, spirit and body.
The latter seeks only to own for the sake of owning. To stake a claim in the gold mines of a persona . Not to tend it and gently draw from it, but to raid it and eventually eviscerate it...

The old "If I can't have you, nobody can" mentality.
Exceedingly ugly & destructive for all involved.

I was having a long discussion one night a while back with someone who thinks love is a crock of shit & only used by manipulators to get what they want.
It saddened me.

The heart full of the truest love is not manipulative, it is meant to be liberating...
Those who love us wish only the best and most rewarding experiences for us.
Even if it means they must step aside to make way for our well-being.
I think we all know that intuitively, but refuse to believe it and so we fight the love and lose the battle to our happiness.

Why?

Fear.

Fear of rejection.
Fear of pain.
Fear of sorrow.

It snuffs out the flame of love.
Deadening the pain, yes, but to what avail?

Okay so now, you're all cosy and protected. The force fields are up, the phasers set to stun. you are manning the com of your Starship Enterprise except the crew of the Enterprise had a mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

What's your mission?
Where are you going?
Who are you meeting?
When will you be happy?

Sitting there pondering the imponderable.

"Why are we here?" "What does existence mean?" "What is love?"

These are all questions we ask ourselves at some point.
Some of us more than others.
Wanting answers to the unanswerable.

I think that is why religion is so important to the many... because it gives them some refuge from, some general purpose to a confounding world. Wish I could have such faith in sky-bound deities, rigorously guiding our daily lives, but I don't.

I do, however, have faith in love.

Man is a social animal.
Nature has conspired against even the most introverted, self-subsisting loners among us in that regard. Eventually, we seek distraction from our own thoughts.

We seek converse, discourse, intercourse.

We need each other.
Even if it is just the few or the one...

Someone who understands us.
Often time, that is why we who write do so
For self-expression, yes, but also to seek...

We seek like-minded souls to empathize with us.
We seek even the dissonant souls to give us new perspective.
We seek the love... even in the lusty, the carnal...

I'm ALL about the quality! In ALL aspects of my life.
Every thought brings the purest frisson of pleasure.
Delicious, tantalizing, delectable...
Yet, unless brought to action, to realization, it is a still-born child in a mother's arms.
A sad contemplation of what could be...

Every kiss is like a snowflake, beautiful, unique & ephemeral in nature...
Something to be delighted in, treasured... desired...

Hence, the no sex for so long.
Not only because I am a married woman with a husband who has no interest in such interaction, but also because a random fuck is worthless.
Lovemaking (& YES, to me, it is ALWAYS LOVEMAKING, dammit!) is far too important to me to trivialize.

No matter how tasty hot the prospect may seem.
Look, I KNOW how to satisfy my own sexual urges on my own quite well.
I am not going to tolerate anyone to treat me like a hole in the mattress or WORSE get so intimidated with my voracity that they feel inadequate.

I'd rather have NOTHING, than settle for a lot of shitty near misses.
A connection with a man FIRST before the fucking is paramount.
It is the prelude to the concerto that is the beautiful music of real sensual pleasure...

There is great pleasure in just thinking about what it would be like with him first before doing it.
It is exquisite torture, that kind of anticipation. That wanting, that yearning... gets me aroused just thinking about it!

Nothing can beat it... but it takes love to get me to that luscious place where the rush of the rapids finally takes me over the edge of that waterfall.

*sigh*

Sometimes words alone can take me to the crush of the broken dam.
Words...
Like so many Tahitian pearls strung seamlessly, beautifully concordantly together...

These days, I feel like I live in a roiling ocean of words.
Being tossed about in a rollicking ship, at times.
Yet at other times, I feel myself gliding smoothly on a sea of colored glass. A mosaic of all of the collective thoughts & feelings of you, my sweet cyberpals.

There are many roads to Love's nirvana.
To that transcendent state of idyllic existence...

I have often cynically called this little piece of cyberheaven we all reside in the world wide circle jerk.
Perhaps, it is.
But it is more than just a place for instant ego-gratification and mutual admiration.
Much more.
It is another mode of transport for those on the great quest of life, love & that uncertain but never fatuous thing called happiness.

I am happy to be here and to have you all along for the ride when you decide to hop aboard the Goodship C.C..
Just wanted to take this moment to thank you.

But as per usual, I digress...
hahaha...

Think less. Love more. Something wonderful might just happen...

En Vogue

2012-02-10T09:29:00.001-08:00

She wore her mind loosely

Like a garment carelessly thrown

Over a hanger on a sale rack

Its threads slightly unraveling

at the seams,

picked over and discarded

by more discerning shoppers.

The cut of her cranial cloth

was no longer fashionable.

It lacked bold clean lines,

but its shirred

diaphanous folds draped her thoughts

nicely

and its swathes of nebulae

sheltered her.

She dreamed in the language of sand and sea

The call of sandpipers and the flight of pelicans

became the alphabet that feathered her tongue
singing
out to the break of sky

as she walked

along salt flecked shores

breathing deep the green

and suffused by the calm certainty

of fathomless blue

obscurity.

Memo To A Fisher King

2012-02-08T15:33:00.004-08:00

“Even in warmest glow
how cold my shadow”

10 fingers
10 toes
Last time I checked
But down I look anyhow
Taking inventory...

I see scuff marks
On shoes well worn
Pacing their way
Along
A graveled path

These shoes could probably walk
Without me
by now

I wear them
Not because
I lack choice
But because they're comfortable

I choose
The path
of least resistance
these days

Low light
And long shadows
Cast doubts
As the seemingly endless line
of irrelevancy baits itself
On autumn's late afternoon

What kind of fish will I catch
Without certainty's promises,
I wonder...
My tackle has lost its lure
My future remains unsure
But I've learned patience
With age

And the difference
Between want and need

There is a guy fishing here
As I write this
under the bridge
that spans a golden gateway
between sea and sky.

He never seems to catch anything.
He just fishes to fish, I think,
But then again...
Don't we all?

Beyond The Blue Horizon

2012-02-08T12:02:00.001-08:00

The train moves dreamily
forward
Its rickety clack clack
clanging
along open track ways...

snaking through the rivers and skyscapes
of a once great land
to the tombs of long dead Emperors
and their pottery shard remnants

encased
in the much dusted glassy memory
of what used to be.

Such is the cycle of life...

Everything eventually becomes a tourist trap
for the weary traveler.

Jolting impulses
shift flesh uneasily
over bony contentions.

The car lurches.

Suddenly,
Your hand
grey-scaled and determined
juts out an open window
feeling the discarded Sunday flicker
ease by

strewing what remains of us...

just so much heart confetti
flying in three frames:

And this is past
Now this is the past
No, this is the past...

Like the time I was 6
and stood at the back of the 5 train
feeling my life unreel
in the dark taffy pull of a subway tunnel,

mesmerized
by the revelation
that now was nothing more than then
a revolution ago
spun in steely filaments and fireless sparks...

The cold war has never ended.

Don't forget to send me a postcard from the front.

Ban The Hammers

2012-02-06T10:59:00.003-08:00

I am tired of judgments
Of being judged

Of gavels that hammer down
On a hollow-drummed justice
rattling and hooting
In mob jungle orgies

Punch drunk from their own precepts
Feinting in the toxic fumes of
Their own presumption

What is beauty?
What is vanity?
What is truth?

Who is perfect?
What is perfect?

Who is the ultimate arbiter of all that's worthwhile?

You of the high brows, wiki-mind and low opinions?
You who consent only by dissent?
You who inflate your empty-bellowed sense of self-worth
With a fist pump operated
By the hot-aired scorching denigration
Of those whose intents you singe
Willfully on the pyre
of your own egotistical desires?

You of the many accusations?
You of the no solutions?
The best defense is a good offense, isn't it?

The accusers always avoid the executioner's axe.

Fuck that hard!

There is only one universal truth:
We all want to be loved.

Live your way
And let others live their way.
No one ever died
from too much understanding.

Out Of Time

2012-02-04T19:33:00.001-08:00

Light leaks under the doorway
puddled memories ripple uneasily
on the last threads of a bare stained carpet

Are those my own footsteps I hear?
Maybe the bag I'm carrying is too heavy
and my heart is beating fast.
I want inside as I fumble for keys

The wind sputters of the past
gurgling through the crevices
of glassy wokenness beckoning
its airy bubbles to burst

Bending time like waves
in a sea of forgotten shards
splintering minds like wooden bowling pins
struck hard with the clatter of echoes

Ideals dally
playing possum
with a dead-man float

How long can anything hold its breath?

I dive into the room
swimming in thought...

We know starving people subsist
as pity plays their ribs like xylophones
and broken children are bludgeoned
with battering rams wielded
by well-intentioned do-nothingers

We are all dead men waltzing to a samba beat
Out of sight
Out of mind
Out of rhythm
Out of time...

I hope my dance card isn't filled yet.

Do I Dare Disturb The Universe?

2012-02-03T17:37:00.011-08:00

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

~ T.S. Eliot, J. Alfred Prufrock's Love Song

I want to be the storm brewing inside you...

Where dawn and twilight meet

On little catbird feet

To sprawl luxuriantly upon the seat

sieged from greedy Day's hold on Time...

When shall we rise

To raise the tides

That flood the Nile's pride,

And wash the smug glint from Fate's

Narrow eagled eyes?

Tomorrow may never come...
I am ready here and now
to lasso the horizon

And swallow the moon whole...

Do not make me wait so!

The universe has come knocking on our door

Who are we not to let it in?

Through the opiate
of Love's gauzy veil...

Possibility glimmers,
This moment shimmers

to free us from complacency's miserly sin.

S

Take me.

I am already
drunk with you.

Let's savage this diem,

Ripping the day away
from Reality's stony hands
Let us be Monghols
In virgin land
Ravishing each other's conquerables

or drown in your Prufrockian tears

merging sand, sky and sea
Regretfully.

Yes...
All is lost

Unless...
You find me.

On the torpor of the sun's trail,

I will draw your unspoken name with fiery breath

Riding that carriage
in the flight of wings that is your voice
Incarnate

That voice
That voice
with its silken grip
Leading me to...
Pleading me to...

Yes...

You will sing your Orphic come hither
and the stars will dance
a spiral blizzard
to your honeyed-tones

dazed in the melodic maze

that is your diamond-ribboned mind
Until they sever Heaven from the ether
as they strive
ever higher
to seek you

Just as I do.

I have dwelt in these mountains of madness with
Thoughts of you seeping into my glacial pores,
through miles and miles of helical roads
smelting my DNA
setting fever to my mores.

I am infected with you.

Do not doubt our place in time
We are not afterthoughts in the afterbirth
of those idle wooden gods...
We breathe the life into science & art.
Becoming the very embodiment
of every creators fomented heart.
Our Non-Euclidean geometry
leads not
to depravity
or post-Glasnost gravity
its release from linear confines
shakes the world molotov cocktail-fine
Its enlightenment a shine
tracing the elliptical curves of arced wants
intersecting infinity in a holy congress of careful copulation.

We are the golden filigree bliss
woven into every
Klimt black widow kiss
Cocooning portals to other dimensions
Chasing the prayer of
Floating dandelion seed worlds
A beginning, not an end...

Just say when...

There is nothing too big for us...

Yes...
Oh yes...

I want to be the storm brewing inside you...

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Every Day Is Groundhog's Day

2012-02-02T13:39:00.001-08:00

There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left.
What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible?
We’ll dream of being blind.
~ Paul Virilio.

It is beautiful, warm, and sunny out.
Even the omnipresent west wind took a cigarette break and stopped blowing.
WHY must Nature be so damned contrarian?!?
I do NOT want sunshine!
I want black clouds, thunder, and sheets of rain!

I'm in the mood for gale winds that HOWL with a Ginsburgh
ferocity and rip the barn doors off modern Aegean stables.
I want to take lightning bolts like cymbals and smash them together
Til their collision brings me the vision
in Higg's boson-laden dreams...

But instead I get the peace & serenity
And what appears to be the semblance
of the so-called idyllic day in May!
Fuck May flowers!
HARD!
I want the tightly budded promise of April.

I don't even know what day it is anymore.
Is it Monday? Tuesday?
Maybe it's just yesterday again. Why not?
They're all the same puree blend of Gerber baby bottle fodder
for the toothless gerbils of the Now.

Yes, everyday seems like Groundhog's Day
Since you went away.
It's a perpetual limbo.
Poor Punxsutawney Phil!!
The groundhog sees its shadow being stalked
by a cycloptic hydra of media, a beast with
one unseeing eye, no mind, 23 forked tongues and 666 heads,
all head-butting each other like cracked out rams
clamoring for their future fortunes being told.

"Well, you big rat?", the beast demands,
"Is it gonna keep on being cold? I bought stock options in coal...
Damnit, I gotta know!!!"

No wonder the poor rodent runs away from its shadow...
Away from the big bright white spot light...
Away from the 23 waggling Baal tongues
With their circus minds diving back into the future
Until the next winter thaw to kickstart the umbilical cord
and rev the engines of media's monstrous machine
Retreadmilled...
Recycled

Let all compost be tasted rather than wasted
And history repeats itself,
except like Madonna it gets a new hairdo & a change of religion
To keep things hip for all the cool kids.
How else will we keep a record of our crimes?

Lights, Camera, Action!!!!
Yes, you said you were action & I wanted to see you in it.
Swimming upstream... climbing coconut trees
And tearing down Jericho's walls

Is that why you ran?
Was it really away from me?

Burrowing in Borroughs third eye,
Cross your heart and hope to die

Cut up & dried
Buried ostrich fashion from my prying mind.
My oh my...
Because I believed?

Me?
Wanting to believe
In something, in someone, in you

And that heavenly voodoo that you do

Me?
A Catholic turned atheist
Long before the moon rose over the parador
Of my so-called soul's discontent ;

Borne again in the spume of a clam on the half shell... Holy hell!
You'd think Jupiter & Neptune combined
Could find a better vehicle to serve Venus in...
How about a champagne mignonette in a little Red Corvette
with a Prince as the chauffeur?
Or maybe Prince'd make a better gopher.

Oh well, it's raining now.
Or at least,
I am, anyway...

Coffee Talk

2012-01-31T14:49:00.001-08:00

"Why do I sleep so much?", he asks the floor.

He's taken to speaking with his head drooping slightly at the hinges like a wilting flower.

I suspect, probably unfairly, that he no longer looks directly at me when he speaks because he can't stand the sight of my face. Is it the ravages of time that he doesn't wish to bear witness to? While I am far from a Grimm fairytale hag, I am no longer the twenty three year old kid he met & polished the edges of... I'm a woman, fully-faceted.

Or is it that he may be aware that I no longer sympathize with his plight? If that's the case, he's right. I don't. He's fine. These angst-ridden moments are pointless exercises. He should be grateful that when he needs to sleep 10 hours, he can... That there is no slavedriver whipping him into action. He is his own boss and may rise or doze as the mood suits him. Of course, he may just prefer not being awake...

I try to be patient.

I know that he has been through many travails over the past decade, taken huge hits to his psyche as well as his wallet, made mistakes, miscalculations that he is still trying to rectify... that he is contending with aging, with the notion of dying, that he equates material success with others' perception of him... that his ego whiteflags these days... that he knows he has failed me in ways he is not prepared to amend. He can't. He's a creature of habit. What is done cannot be undone, though it has been forgiven, if not entirely unforgotten...

It is morning. The day is gray, cold & unforgiving.

I try to be warm... comforting, though.

I say, "Well, maybe, you need the rest, sweetie. I wouldn't be too concerned. Remember all those nights, all those years, you couldn't sleep? Maybe your mind is finally relaxed enough to make up for all the sleep loss? How about some coffee?"

At first, he demurs, picking up his keys.

A few seconds later... He looks at his briefcase, then his shoes and says, "Yes, ma'am."

His voice is monotone. I feel another brick in the wall between us being laid...

He thinks I am lecturing him, being dismissive about his concerns... maybe I am.

And he goes into the kitchen, stopping me with a pleading, "No, remember your knee!!!" when I get up to pour his coffee in a to-go cup. I started buying to-go cups with lids for him eons ago because he simply cannot relax with a cup of coffee at home before leaving. No matter how early or late he wakes up, he must jump out of bed, into a shower, dress, give me the perfunctory good-bye kiss and fly out of the door...

With or without the cup of Peets Blue Batak Sumatra Blend.

Kodachrome: On Loving In The Present...

2012-01-30T16:55:00.001-08:00

“We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.”

—	T. S. Eliot

"Yesterday is but today's memory, tomorrow is today's dream."

~Kahlil Gibran

Often time we like to think of people in snapshots.

Captured in kodachrome.

Perfect images clearly delineated in a small portal of time.

They were so beautiful in those moments, so we keep them there.

Carefully preserved in the etherless vacuum of a tranquilizing capsule.

It allows us to portray the objects of our misguided affection at their celluloid best.

All bread & roses, ideally framed in suspended animation.

Yes, we're ready for our close-up Mr. DeMille, let's freeze-frame that Hollywood kiss.

We forget that only in fiction does the possibility of tampering with time exist...

And... guess what?

The section for that type of fiction is always labeled "Horror" or "Fantasy".

Why?

Because nothing in reality ( whatever that means... laughable concept that any absolute reality is to me) can ever remain so unevolved, so perfectly encapsulated. To manipulate it is to turn nature in upon itself, to remain petrified or ossified like insect fossils trapped in amber....
To me, it is an attempt to annihilate the human spirit.

Take Dorian Gray who (in his exalted desire to eternally preserve a superficial beauty so expertly depicted on canvas in his portrait) damned his soul, but kept his body pristine while his canvas image transmogrified; festering with the evil bloom of all the wicked deeds he had committed. Of course, perhaps he's right when he says, “You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”

Yes, Oscar Wilde's little morality play seems so trite & melodramatic to modern eyes & ears yet the lessons learned still ring true. The truth is one cannot arrest time without paying a very dear price, spiritually, emotionally or psychologically, if not physically. Such Faustian bargains have never borne well for those who would willingly sacrifice their souls to such a selfish and distorted end. We are only kidding ourselves... it is fool's gold. Utterly worthless. Time and tide have their ebb and flow, but stop for no man (or woman, no matter how beguilingly she bats her eyes and applies her lipgloss).

So, it goes in many a romantic relationship when we strive to retain what we imagine we once had, except the devil is not an outside agent.... no, the devil is our own misguided desire. We can't keep people in tightly-lidded mason jars; with their visages suspended in formaldehyde to preserve what we think is their love for us.

We lose them anyway.... and ultimately, we lose ourselves and our self-respect in the attempt.

Silly of us, isn't it, trying to see people not as they are, but perhaps as they once were and as how we would like them to continue to be. We can't play our lives on continuous loop...

We'd avoid whole worlds of pain if we just remember to live in the present moment & not some idealized version of the past.

I'm going to give that ground-breaking notion a tilt on my own whirl... and see if I can win the game, not with smoke & mirrors, but by playing the hand dealt to me. Looking at the face value of those cards.

Maybe that way I'll stay safely buckled into my seat belt instead of fishtailing out of control crashing through the windshield of some plasticized glorified time warp...

I recommend you all do the same....

Live in the present...

It is always NOW!!!

Death At The White Chapel of Les Folies Bergeres

2012-01-29T11:11:00.004-08:00

"The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
― Rumi

I remember her that day as a smear of lips

and a whirl of fabric.

Her every move was like a hummingbird's...
Blurred yet arresting.

The light seemed to shine right through her

Cutting
lacy swathes of irridescence
along everything that strayed in her brambled path,

Bleeding
photons with a piercing purity

that hurt the wicked and cured the blind.

She was sylphen... diaphanous
A hermetical creature
but thoughts of her clung to me in spidery webbed filaments.
I was caught in the trap of her mythos
and Destiny was mine...

A wild tangle of silken curls surrounded her head like a halo

I could have sworn her feet never touched the ground

She seemed to float above us all
Always...

So effortlessly

As I worshiped her sacred geometry

Every curve and angle on her templed body seemed to validate

the existence of not one god, but of many...

And
Down, down, down, down, down
I go...
To burn in Alighieri's harrowing Inferno

But she was mine
So I took her

***"Where ‘mid the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw
Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell
Their sorrows. Pale were the sweet lips I saw,
Pale were the lips I kiss’d, and fair the form
I floated with, about that melancholy storm."

Yes she was mine
So I took her
As I tore down the altar
Gripping white the vespers of time
traveling on each rung wrung
To the netherplace
Where we shall everbe
A lone
In sublime sacrifice
to
desire's surrender chimed

*** With apologies to Keats for nicking part of his beautiful poem, On A Dream

For my own monstrous purposes....

Thank You In Advance For Your Cooperation

2012-01-26T18:25:00.001-08:00

I felt...

Old today.

Wholly lacking in lustre
Vacillating
Under the shadow

of a golden span that bridges the warps
in etherea's space-time

A continuous discontinuity.

Standing here
watching waves
cresting and yawning their ennui
into frilly forgetfulness

Not unlike mine

Probably wondering the very same things I do...

What are we all but small gasps
panting hotly on the neck of a great dragon

as he distorts his body

with chameleon-like mimicry?

Now his great skull forms the caves that tunnel through the blue
of this liquid planet

with a molten pit belly sitting under a mantel

Of scaly crusted armor
Defending the indefensible while

feeding his igneous passions

whipping his tail into a frenzy of wind and spume

Anon his flaring nostrils fire their expansive readied nothingness
bursting like kindling on the pyre of desire

So wanting to become somethingness...

Something... more...

Always more

Even those who lay claim to want
Nothing but a mindless zephyrdom
blowing through the curtains of Reality's windows,

Strive for more lessness

Wishing to be released from the bonds of ego
is an an arrogance that masks itself as humility.

Such ingratitude!
The temple of the self.
Self-indulgent, self-serving...
Me me me...
That's all we see.
Constantly seeking to save ourselves
from misery.
Our third eyes are monocled or worse, blind-folded...

Ultimately culminating

in the most egotistical

desire a talking monkey can fling his poo at:

To unmake the bed of his being

strip away the sheets, shred the mattress, throw the pillows and say,

"This is my unbed and I will rest upon it
cross-fingered & cross-legged
wearing my thorny crown of laurels
baying like a wolfhound
over my hallowed halo-ed perfection.

For my "my" is not mine
It's yours and his and hers and its
I am blameless
I am shameless
I am fruitless
Sexless and toothless
The willow that bends
to the whim of the oak
To dig its roots
Deep into the earth's gravelly throat

The serene stasis
Of an inert mass
The potential spark
In the unstruck match

Full of possibility
But free from it, too
The cock of a eunuch
Waving the pearly-flagged truth

Venerate me for the wisdom
of my dissociative disorder's
salty ambition!

I have denied suffering.
I have denied loving.
I am fluorescent bulb cold light.
Illuminating the long dark night.
I do not exist
You do not exist
All life is an illusion
It is your mind that creates this world.
"Whatever is subject to origination
is all subject to cessation."

You can never die, if you were never born.
So free yourself now, let your furry needs be shorn.

I could show you the way, but you'd only get lost.
So find it yourself,
but don't forget to pass Go
& give my disciples the $200 you collect
when you show."

Yes...
It's all just ambition...

Ambition is the thread that weaves

Through every sentient being

It is the food of gods

And the fodder for fools

I'm just ambitious enough to aspire to be unambitious.
Though I believe that people need to strive & if it is all handed to them on a plate with parsley & watercress, society at large devolves into the Eloi with the politically savvy Morlocks feasting upon the baa baa sheep. Struggle is essential to growth. The best wine in the world is made from grapes that suffer... suffer too much, of course & you die a fruitless death... it is a balance we need, an equilibrium, but it cannot be achieved through false means and idol worship.
Social engineering of any kind suffocates the of soul man...

The soul thrives on beauty and truth.
Yet both are terrifying mistresses steeped in darkly brewed mystery
Sometimes wearing their black leather bustiers & carrying their ball gags.
They are the pleasure in the pain and the pain in the pleasure.
The altar that's hidden behind all the flowers and incense is the crux of it all...

Tear down the altar.
Accept life as it is.
It is the gift received, but not given.

We can dress up words, feelings all we like, and cover our truths with Salome's seven veils of diaphanous deception, but if what is beneath the gloss and glitter doesn't reveal a truth, a naked raw vulnerable vein that flows with blood and oxygen.
Then it is not beautiful....
Artifice is fun, a gala masked ball, but not revelatory and we all seek some sort of sacred wisdom, don't we?

We create whole new geographies here in this sharing, this probing, this seeking that is online life. Island nations bridging gaps with so much fibre optic cable & bloodlines in Vitruvian man circles...

We are so many ghosts in a vast marvelous machine. We create here what we need, when we need it. Reality, whatever that may be, is vastly over-rated.

You know, it's interesting... There is a phenomenon, a quiet revolution of the way people not only interact with others, but in the way they free themselves from the confines and borders of these solid bodies that we inhabit and the boundaries of oceans and mountain ranges whose geographies often inhibit our ability to mine the minds of fellow pilgrims.

We exist in an alternate reality here where the impossible becomes not only possible, but probable, and it begs the question of a true transcendence. In other words, this online world is expanding our collective consciousnesses in ways that heretofore were not possible.

Perhaps we can take the same feeling of invincibility that we have here in this matrix, in this cyber realm of the prodigal digital and project it onto the screens of our future selves. Perhaps we can learn to open our minds and not allow what we perceive as limitations in our real world, limit us. Perhaps one day we will learn that the only obstacle we have to fulfillment lies in the prisons of our minds.

As I continue my walk on this balmy winter's day along the shore,

listening to the tenebrous tide sigh on these coarse grainy sands,
I suddenly feel a radiance

cast its eyes upon me

and I look up

to see the sun

streaming gladly through the fog

and I realize...

The sun is even older than I,

yet it still shines

Its effulgence coming from a purity of being

Perhaps without purpose,

perhaps with nothing more than a polite gesture
Or a feeling of noblesse that obliges it
to take care of all those little planets that dote upon it.
Or maybe from a habitual ritual long ingrained in its celestial brain.

Its solar needs,

fulfilling in its

joy full ness.
castigat ridendo mores

For there is happiness
and a paradise
residing inside this inkwell being of yours and mine.
Laugh and the world laughs with you,
Just drink deep from that fountain, but do not fear
the pull of the weary moon...
don't be afraid to cry alone.

Our tears help form the oceans

Maybe that's why

every tide sighs with regret

as it evaporates in the bliss of the sun...

The Gods Must Be Crazy

2012-01-24T21:25:00.003-08:00

“Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”

—	Roald Dahl

You may not suspect

that a constellation of stars

is really a celestial battlefield

Or that the stamen

of a flower

yearns

for the sting of its winged lover

We refuse to believe

That each cell within us

cleaves

with a viral God-like need

to plot

our destiny

Collectively

Plowing fields

Mining mores

Breeding universes

That infect conscious thought

Between the chinks

Of prison cell walls

Their Pyramus kiss

inoculating contagions

with dandelion wishes

on acid breath

As we open our stigmata wounds

And tunnel dimensions

of self-replication

The venous tickertape

Streams free

To let our words escape

The sanctity

of an incubating mind's

conjugal bed of ideas

Its seduction

nothing more

than the wink of a third eye

with a locust's lust

Swarming over

Fate's stoic face

Determined,

we scribble

our graffiti

on skulled Lascaux walls

The bicameral foreflex

united with

an introcosmic

resistible prevenient grace

All wet dripping desire

unleashed

in slashes of riotous color

Within friezes of Time

Holding fast the

Stalactite hopes

in pointed

suspension.

Every thread of existence

wends its way down

the labyrinth

to a rampaging bull

outcast

Reality lies

Like the New Moon

stripped naked

and inconsolable

Shivering

in the dark

of its concealments.

Keep Me

2012-01-22T01:02:00.003-08:00

There are moments

that dangle on the chain of illusion

Lustrous & jewel-like

their bevel of jasper

polished to high sheen

Cutting through the maze of mind

to find a quiet nesting place inside of us

It is said every soul

bears the weight of a corpse upon it

towing it

as an unwilling bride does her wedding gown train

that we do not live outside

the smoky silver glint

of inevitability's sleight of hand

but these thoughts have no relevance

in the moonlight

when the promise of the sun rises

through your eyes

and penetrates me

You touch me

deeper

than the lesson of rain

in the whisper of leaves.

Your warm sticky sweet

unctuous as the kiss of bees

trickling their flowery nectar
into nature's private chambers

cloak me

with your skin

keep me

safe

in the covenant of your lips

And I'll glide

on the breath of your word

along the rhyme of your reason

to find meaning

within

VOTE FOR THE NET! STOP PIPA & SOPA! (Updated)

2012-01-18T20:27:00.001-08:00

There is a battle being waged.
The free flow of information on the internet is at stake.
Congress in its infinite idiocy has decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater in its attempt to cut down on copyright infringements that affect the entertainment industry.

The House bill (Stop Online Piracy Act) has been temporarily halted, BUT the Senate came up with a doozy of their own called The Protect Intellectual Property Act... Both bills are likely to be re-drafted and re-introduced. The question is WHY do we need them in an industry that already has protection of its intellectual property? Sounds nice, doesn't it? Who doesn't want their copyrights honored? BUT the way they are going about it will KILL the Internet as we know it. Is it really the government and Hollywood moguls versus the people?
Must it come to that?

The entertainment industry does NOT need the government to act as their personal guard dogs! We don't need ANY further legislation to help them. Let them fight their own battles, goddamnit! The fact of the matter is there ARE IP laws in effect. The entertainment industry needs to use the justice system & pursue their cases in court. To suggest stopping the free flow of information online because someone is copying Madonna's "Like A Virgin" and posting it on their site is LUDICROUS!

Read and learn why these bills are antithetical to a nation whose constitution guarantees its
citizens the right to free speech. These bills are rife with the possibility of abuse of power
and censorship:

THE FOLLOWING COMPANIES ARE PROTESTING BY BLACKING OUT THEIR WEBSITES AND/OR DISPLAYING PROTEST MESSAGES:

503: Service Unavailable

Boing Boing is offline today, because the US Senate is considering legislation that would certainly kill us forever. The legislation is called the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), and would put us in legal jeopardy if we linked to a site anywhere online that had any links to copyright infringement.
This would unmake the Web, just as proposed in the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). We don't want that world. If you don't want it either, visit AmericanCensorship.org for instructions on contacting your Senator. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has more information on this and other issues central to your freedom online.

Thanks,
The Boingers

We’re as addicted to reddit as the rest of you. Many of you stand with us against PIPA/SOPA, but we know support for a blackout isn’t unanimous. We're not taking this action lightly. We wouldn’t do this if we didn’t believe this legislation and the forces behind it were a serious threat to reddit and the Internet as we know it. Blacking out reddit is a hard choice, but we feel focusing on a day of action is the best way we can amplify the voice of the community.
As we have seen yet again in the fight against PIPA/SOPA, the best ideas come from our community. We all have just over a week to figure out exactly what to do with our extra cycles on January 18th. Please join us in the discussion in the comments here and in /r/SOPA.
— the reddit team

Learn More

Get Involved

List of companies that have expressed support for SOPA or PIPA.
List of companies that have expressed concern with SOPA and PIPA.
Take Action Checklist at Stop American Censorship.
Contact Your Representative with info and a widget to find them by EFF and Wired for Change.
Directory of Representatives
Senators of the 112th Congress
Helpful info on making phone calls to your Senator or Representative.
SOPAOpera.org keeps track of where your Congressmembers stand on PROTECT-IP and SOPA.

FRIENDS,
GEEKOIDS
& FELLOW INTERNET USERS

BE A PART OF THE SOLUTION!!!!

JOIN ME &

TAKE A STAND AGAINST CENSORSHIP!!!

Click it: Vote for the Net

Defend the Internet by working to defeat any candidate, of any political party, who supports the Protect IP Act, the Stop Online Piracy Act, or any attempt to censor and stifle the Internet.

You can also speak to your senators' office directly on the internet and help prevent the creation of what many reasonable people
including writers and artists like Neil Gaiman are calling
the Great Firewall of America
by clicking the following link:
Make The Call, Stop The Wall

Also.. see why, according to the Washington Post (and I quite agree with them), the fight is still far from over:
Five Reasons The Internet Is Still Protesting SOPA & PIPA

Here's some additional reading for you on SOPA and PIPA:

Here's further evidence from The Washington Post that there is ZERO need for SOPA or PIPA (yes, the following a link... CLICK IT):
PNewsBreak: US prosecutors shut down one of world's largest file-sharing sites, Megaupload

Thus showing yet another example of why SOPA & PIPA are pure unadulterated BULLSHIT! WHY do we need any further legislation? Especially one that proposes ISP blocks on websites? Apparently, the laws in place already work just fine. Oh & thank you, Justice Department, for proving that the legislative branch is just overstepping its bounds yet again.

Keeping The Dream Alive On Martin Luther King Day (Updated)

2012-01-16T14:49:00.001-08:00

In the very last speech that Martin Luther King, Jr. gave at the Mason Temple in Memphis to a small crowd who braved inclement weather on the day before he was shot on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel by James Earl Ray (a fugitive from the Missouri State Penitentiary and a petty thief who somehow made it out of the country was arrested at London Heathrow Airport and believed to be innocent of King's assassination),

King spoke of the history of freedom:

"As you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of general and panoramic view of the whole human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?"-- I would take my mental flight by Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn't stop there.
I would move on by Greece, and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality.

But I wouldn't stop there. I would go on, even to the great heyday of the Roman Empire. And I would see developments around there, through various emperors and leaders. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even come up to the day of the Renaissance, and get a quick picture of all that the Renaissance did for the cultural and esthetic life of man. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even go by the way that the man for whom I'm named had his habitat. And I would watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church in Wittenberg.

But I wouldn't stop there. I would come on up even to 1863, and watch a vacillating president by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come to the conclusion that he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even come up the early thirties, and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation. And come with an eloquent cry that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.
But I wouldn't stop there. Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, "If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy." Now that's a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up.
The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around.

That's a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding--something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya: Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee--the cry is always the same--"We want to be free."

And another reason that I'm happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we're going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn't force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence.
That is where we are today. And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn't done, and in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed. Now, I'm just happy that God has allowed me to live in this period, to see what is unfolding. And I'm happy that he's allowed me to be in Memphis."

Well, sadly, Dr. King's God allowed him to die in Memphis the next day, but The Promised Land speech was especially significant to me because with an eerie prescience, he mentioned a previous attempt on his life. Not by white supremacists, but by a demented young black girl who went up to him while he was in New York autographing copies of his first book. She simply asked, "Are you Martin Luther King?" and when he replied in the affirmative without even giving her a glance, she plunged a blade into his chest, missing his aorta by fractions of an inch. The NY Times reported that if King had sneezed, he would have died by drowning in a river of his own blood.

King later mentions in the speech a letter he received from another young girl, a white student from White Plains High School in New York. She said, "While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I am a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I'm simply writing you to say that I'm so happy that you didn't sneeze."

Note the relevance of what that young girl said "...while it should not matter, I would like to mention that I am a white girl."

Yet, my friends, even over forty years later, it still matters doesn't it?
Think about it for a minute.
Let it soak into those bloody sponges you have as brains.

How many of you reading that a black girl stabbed the great Civil Rights champion may have been shocked because she was black; not because she was young or because she was a woman or that he had almost been mortally stabbed years before a white James Earl Ray shot him, but that it was done by a black person?

Had you read that the attempted stabbing was perpetrated by angry young white Southern man, you would have shrugged your collective shoulders & said, "Of course." It would seem more natural to you because of your preconceived notions.

What does such deep-rooted stereotyping say about us?

Racism is just one form of stereotyping.
There are many equally toxic precepts and misconceptions held by both the ill-willed and the well-intentioned that sprawl across the border of humanity pervasively.

Reverend King said,
"Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will."
-- "Letter from Birmingham Jail," April 16, 1963

We still have a long way to go, people.
Why we hold onto hate-ridden and purposeful misconceptions about our fellow creatures is a thing that I cannot understand. Why are some so reactionary when they hear the name Sarah Palin, Barack Obama or any person whom we have decided to vilify in order to further our own concepts of ourselves as morally and intellectually superior?

Being contentious, self-righteous & belligerent never served any one well in the long-term.

The overwhelming sense of entitlement these passive aggressive, socially inept, morally bankrupt , functional illiterates have is mind boggling. They are the Eloy which makes them nothing more than slaughterhouse victims for the Morlocks, most of whom are politicians in Washington pretending to give a damn about America and the world at large when in fact all they care about is filling their campaign war chests so that they can stay in power and be perpetual pawnbrokers selling American souls at bargain basement prices.

What have we learned over this past century?
Where are our real teachers? Who are they?

There is such a huge chasm in these modern times.
We have lost the bridge to our past; without the ability to understand history we are doomed to commit the same mistakes over and over again.
We ride perpetually on that demented merry-go-round in a two-dimensional space sans perspective.

The average American citizen today is criminally ill-informed about American history which is just a blink in the galaxial eye of the planet's experiences; no less the history of the great movements of the world's past that have catapulted so-called progress to its latest heights.

We can speak to people a continent away on a device that 100 years ago one could not have imagined outside of an H.G. Wells' story, but we have no knowledge of who they are as a people, except for perhaps a handful of culinary dishes we may or may not recognize from their nations, if we live in cities that expose us a bit to their cultures.

We rely on television & Wikileaks to tell us what we think we ought to know...
I, in my infinite madness, through these writings here and on MySpace on blogs & statuses, strove with my supreme silliness to make us all seekers somehow, but my time here has come to an end, I think.
MySpace was truly the last social networking bastion of creative output on the internet.

A place where one could express one's individuality freely.
It has however collapsed upon itself like a black hole, leaving nothing but a bit of radiation and dark matter upon which a few of us continue to orbit like debris does around a dead moon.

Brace yourself...
I'm going to be very un-Martin Luther King-like & rant a bit...

The zombiefication of the general populace on "BOB"forsaken sites called FaceBook & Google+ with the chirpie chirpie tweet tweet of the Twitwits on Twitter as well as our continuing erosion of free speech as the NewThink takes over our lemminglike souls makes me want to rant & say FUCK! Yes I said FUCK!

But I digress...

I see those with great potential who are hindered only by their cement-lined thought processes...

I try to gently jackhammer that cement away & let the verdant grass grow...

BUT

This is the age of the Lost Boys.

The world has a become one gigantic Neverland.
The Lost Boys are looking for surrogate parents...

The Lost Boys look to the Peter Pans of the world and are betrayed by the leaders who would stunt their followers' growth, so as to continue to remain powerful in this land of Lilliput where the dunces are in confederacy against those who dare challenge their misbegotten though well-broadcasted beliefs fueled only be a need to sell Pampers and Cialis.

The lack of purpose that seems to plague most people these days is the very crux of every other problem; it is from this fundamental lack of identification, structure... this lapse of identity... all manner of other ills are manifested.

YET...

There is no reason why we cannot take the bull of ignorance by the horns and wrestle the bastard down to the ground. It's not too late to tear down those walls of Jericho. To rip them open like Christmas wrappings & reveal the gifts we still have as a species.

We need to accept responsibility for our own lives.

We need to get the fight back in our collective psyches.
We need to be willing to do whatever it takes within ethical and moral limits.
We need to stop this pincushion mentality where every prick who needles us seems to cause us pain.

We are the captains of our fate and the architects of our happiness and such things do not rely upon pop tart culture. I don't give a goddamn what Lindsay Lohan is wearing. I am not defined by a label on the back pocket of my jeans, nor by the opinion of the many headed.

Society has become a voracious hydra of malcontents and we have to say no to conspicuous consumption, but without the pitfalls of socialist dogma.
The truth?

“All the citizens of a state cannot be equally powerful, but they may be equally free”
~ Voltaire

We are all not created equal.
We are all not beautiful.
We are all not brilliant, but we are all human beings and the only thing we absolutely deserve as humans is the opportunity to be and pursue all that we wish to be and pursue.

There has been a slow but steadily pervasive movement in modern society to denigrate those who achieve by equally revering and celebrating those who do not and accusing those who do of elitism.

Strive for excellence in all things... Take pride and joy in the things that you are capable of doing, so long as they improve the quality of just one person's life in some significant way, you are doing well.

"If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well."
– Martin Luther King, Jr.

If a person has no drive to strive for excellence and opts out of such social strata that is his prerogative, freedom allows for such choices, but such a one should not expect to be rewarded for his lack of ambition, creativity or adventure with validation and subsidies from those who do succeed; nor should he seek to punish or berate those who do achieve. Handicapping others to make yourself feel better is a pernicious form of social parisitism.

Yet it happens all the time.
The poison of that green-eyed monster permeates the politics of envy...

Envy is a black eye on the face of humanity.

Black, White
Rich, Poor
Republican, Democrat
Atheist, Deist
Male, Female

These things should not be diametrically opposed to each other.
There is nothing inherent in any of these states of beings or belief systems to make us enemies of what we consider our polar opposites. Such contentious divisiveness serves no purpose. It only cannibalizes mankind.

Open your minds...
Open your hearts...

Stop arguing over the petty differences.
Look at our commonality.
Look at our humanity.
We all share the same genomes.

If people from Planet 10 by way of the 8th Dimension stopped for rocket fuel here on their way to the next big Interplanetary Conference, they would see one race of beings:

Human beings...

Why can't we?

"I've seen too much hate to want to hate, myself, and every time I see it, I say to myself, hate is too great a burden to bear. Somehow we must be able to stand up against our most bitter opponents and say: We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you....

But be assured that we'll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves; we will appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.": ~Martin Luther King Jr., A Christmas Sermon for Peace on Dec 24, 1967

"We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

~April 3rd, 1968, Promised Land Speech, Martin Luther King , Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed the next day.
He was 39 years old.

Here's Dr. King's "I Have A Dream Speech"
It's a great way to celebrate his memory on this Martin Luther King's Day.

Here's a link to a wonderful blog about Reverend King:

Interesting Facts About Martin Luther King

The God Particle

2012-01-11T22:13:00.001-08:00

Before all else, be armed.
Niccolo Machiavelli

The riddler had questions marked in his eyes.

His irised blanks

Haunched in silence
Waiting

Their sharpness pierced his victims
the same way a shark fin cuts through water

with a sense of foreboding

But the shark is only showing curiosity.

His mana's hunger
a tabula rasa

Inevitably left unfulfilled

amidst the clatter of stars

and the jangle of time...

And though

Tonight's prey did not understand the query

The tremor of her thighs tacitly gave him

the answers he sought

Her breath hardened

To foggy glass.

He wiped the carriage windows

Free of Guilt's evidence.

Unchained,
The Voyager of discovery

became its own purpose

His existential crisis

Her Raison être

Their travails gullivered

A marriage unholy in

Its sanctity

Wholly convenient, yet

scunnered in the slither of
unbalanced scales
And Justice sharpened
her rusty sword...

If the universe is the answer,
What is the question?

Identity becomes

The seeking

In the loss

Of the find

As the circle's

Endless cycle

Gives way

To the line

Blogophilia 46.4 Topic: "Any Way The Wind Blows"
Bonus Points:
(Hard, 2pts): use a Machiavelli quote
(Easy, 1pt): incorporate 'tabula rasa'

Anchors Aweigh...

2012-01-09T23:50:00.001-08:00

Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.– François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

The doom of any relationship is in trying to confine it by defining it.

Some things cannot and SHOULD NOT be neatly catalogued and inscribed.

I don't want my presents wrapped in a satiny bow or cellophane lie to know that they are gifts...

Gifts like love and friendship.

~ Me

It was dark.

She lay there... motionless.

Eyes open but unseeing.

Tears welling...

then slowly trickling in a steady stream of sadness,

red tides raking memories down her cheeks...
leaving trails... tracks, traces

evidence of Him, burning hotly on her face.

Ears heard things... sounds of life all around her.

Her husband's raspy sleep breaths, the whirring of the hotel ceiling fan,
the song of early morning doves &
the unrelenting pounding
of an insistent sea against a submissive shore.

That pounding... those sighs of an ocean's laments

Like her heart... when she thought of Him...

Now, here, in the void before dawn...
the hours of danger and damnation
when she could hide nothing from those inken shadows of herself.

When the spectre of the dark angel rose like the red moon...
with excitement & foreboding...
raking in her garden of pain

Her heart was conspiring against her
Transmogrifying.

It had become an anchor...

A black weight that sunk into her chest,
burrowing into her psyche,
dragging her down deeper & deeper into an abyss of anguish...
she was gagging, choking on the fumes of silent sobs
that would betray her,
betray that vacuum of love & life she bubble-wrapped herself in....

Keeping her in the cold warehouse storage she swore to honor forevermore,
for better for worse, for richer for poorer... in sickness & in health...
at a ceremony by the sea,
on a rock of marital Gibraltar that was called Monestary Beach...
a name that would prove far more prescient than she ever realized.

They, she and her spouse, had indeed lived in quiet complacency
like monks sharing a conjugal cell
floating along a placid tide of duty and obligation,
that ebbed & flowed with the cycles of a lunar certitude.

But now the seas had pitched,
throwing her overboard where she swam in electric currents of Him...

The one who sailed so true...
The pirate ship who stole into her harbor & commandeered her heart...
My but he was yar... the phrase from the vernacular of an old film,
one that she knew they would enjoy watching together...
My GOD, how had everything now suddenly become about Him?

She swallowed another piece of herself...
Trying to hard to taste the essence of Him in that torrent of tears,
for now she was no longer she, but instead, she became a part of Him,
The Other
The demon lover who existed incubus-like in her flights of fantasy ...
He was all brown nebula as he stole light & memories
from her dying sun.

Osiris & Isis sitting in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G1

Maybe she didn't really exist...

Not as herself,
this woman dancing frantically on the edge of a doomed rainforest...

Perhaps she was really just his sleeping foot dreaming wildly
or his numb tongue after an hour at the dentist
having a little midday anesthetic reverie.

He would soon nudge himself into consciousness & she would vanish
like Chinese whispers made under fallen moonlight,
like fading cherry blossoms weeping upon a barren winter landscape;
melting like snowflakes on lover's lips.

Maybe she was his phantom limb
Could he miss her like a lost tooth that your tongue kept feeling for?

or a part of his brain....
tissue that had been sacrificed on the altar of experimental science,
a few neurons gone for a wild ride on some bit of pharmocopeia.

An LSD flashback...

Would he feel her firing off in the night ?

As a visceral throwback to some orgasmic moment
when flesh was turbulent, erect, spurting mayhem with sweat & cum?

No... she was being ridiculous.

Desperate and destitute

Deprived and depraved

From the wanton desire to know him...

All of him...

Body and blood.

Sinew and bone.

Thought and deed.

Word and action.

To ease into him as she would a steamy bath of hot oil...

Soak in him.

Immerse and then emerge all perfumed, dewy... glistening in his essence.

Inhaling his incense as she ignited them both.

For him, she could tame the Nile.

Plant forests in the desert

Be the seed and the soil

The lightning rod and the Tesla coil.

For him she would un-become and re-become

Decompose and recompose

Like a phoenix,
like a dragon,
like the dancing Degas star
that Nietzche gave birth to...

For him.

Under the Bodhisattva's Tree

2012-01-08T10:00:00.001-08:00

"I want to do with you what spring does with cherry trees..."
~ Pablo Neruda

Bare branches...

midwinter-wifed,

brimming with the cherry popped

buds of blossoming promise

Listen
to

Smoky dreams sing lazily

in wispy Shanghai-ed streamers

Dangling undaunted

on Longevity's grave-clothes.

In the whispered temple fires,

within a stony Manchurian Fu dog's flaring nostrils,

(those smoky Chinese offerings whispered from my lips to your ears)

Guarded crepe papery hopes,

Incensed and floating

Transubstantiate:

Ashes turning halcyon

on the wings of a kingfisher

Upon the silken cerulean robes

of an idle Wind's breath

That breath... That breath

So heady...

Exhaling its violent perfume

Redolent of the purest violet desire

As it beckons to me, I swoon

Wafting

in its sultry summoning scent

Humming

beneath its jungle

Ruby-taloned caress

where mountains become sandcastles

Their fortresses pulverized
under the Mesmer's gazing glass

I feel

Moon murmurs

Sun drifts

Sand blooms

Hidden in arid seas

So cautiously sequestered

Parched, I drink it all

Straight, no chaser

Like the good Monk would

In a swirling nebula cocktail

The heart

is a lonely hunter

in the night of the fallen...

Of the misbegotten

When everything is possible,

but nothing is permissible...

Yes, Virginia, There Is No Santa Claus

2012-01-06T16:06:00.000-08:00

“If one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour—landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one’s hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one’s hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse.
Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard…
But after life?
The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one’s eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants?”
― Virginia Woolf

A new time has begun

The Living dead speak

in resounding silence

"Are you living

Or just existing?"

Asks the sun of the moon.

The moon smiles wanly in reply

And resumes

its cakewalk

around the earth

In zombie-like obeisance

The family that stays together

Preys together

Clawing their way

Up a mountain of irrelevancy

Reverently

One by one

In the desertscape of the hasbeen

Lost in relativistic reverie

An atavistic haboob

Grinding the gristly

dizzily

And then there were none...

Modern thought

Has sandbagged the sandman

And left us holding the bag

As we waylay

-in the wake of day

-in the still of night

Lifemare's thickly tinseled light.

We can deny inevitability

Only so long...

Reality is many-footed

Ready to drop its other stilleto-ed shoe

Through all the lies we extrude

From the straw houses

We build

Lincoln log tight

In our silly putty Playdoh worlds

Screaming Day-Glo

Burning bush bright

The lies...

The lies we use to pacify

the rattles

In our dried idiophone skulls

shaking them to a 6/8 beat

One if by land

Two if by sea

Bobble heads nodding drowsily

Tomtoms drumming

the message along

Ciphered deep

in our mythic rhythm memories

Til we suckle on what we deem

our fair share of pablum

And dance to mendacity's tune

in Gerber Baby fashioned

satisfaction.

Reality

with its eye of Mu

wears the guise of entertainment

Showing too clearly what can happen

when the ordinary

becomes the theater

of the sublimely absurd

It is avant garde:

Cassandra painting

A bleak horizon

of an Orwellian dawning

With gritted teeth

And tongue firmly

Planted as she turns

the other cheek

We overplay our hand

When we go about the search

and out goes the baby

with the bath water...

Truth is lost in the flavor

of the clamorously unglamorous

Keeping it real is the new black

Real crude

Real stupid

Keep your bow,

just give us the arrows,

Cupid.

We still wear the kabuki make- up,

we still don the iron masks,

but we try to kid ourselves into thinking

that we are not these homogenous pod people

when we pretend to strip away the layers of nacre

And find nothing but a seething mass of cores

Defiling the oyster...

Destroying the pearl

Convinced the universe spirals

At the tip of our finger's whorl

When we unwrap the mummies

of our so-called collective consciousness,

we don't even find old bones

Nor the noble dust of a life well-conceived...

We find only tumbleweeds

on a vast sandblasted plateau

We live like Naples

in the caldera

of a long dormant volcano

Never admitting

she'll ever blow

Instead we call it

Eden,

Nirvana,

Valhalla...

When the stars are right

and the ring of fire glows

We'll yell at the pale rider,

"No....

Wait...

It's only snow!".

Our smoke dreams

More toxic than the opiate

That caterpillars its way

Through Gasoline Alley

Hooked on the hookah flight

of a Pied Piper plight.

Yes, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus

But You'll find another lap to sit on tonight

Still...

Don't tug his beard...

Myopia is the best cure for hindsight.

Word Association

2012-01-04T13:10:00.000-08:00

Sir Thomas Overbury lamented:

"All the carnall beauty of my wife

Is but skin deep."

Carnall = Carn ALL

All Carn

Carnal...

Carn is flesh

Carnal is

All Flesh

Of the flesh

Fleshly

Brings to mind

Freshly

The sweet scent of green

so voluptuously fragrant

that emanates from freshly cut

Grass

Cut grass mown to a shimmer

Shivering in its bareness

Deliciously cool and dewy

Reflecting sunlight

Reflective as cut glass.

Cut glass...

The kind we drink that sip of kindness from

with a whiff of auld lang syne

I don't know who said all flesh is but grass,

probably some biblical hero

with an herb fetish

and an itch to scratch

But what exactly have we other than this skinliness

To touch?

To yearn?

To burn in?

Peter Quince sat at his clavier and sang,

"Beauty is momentary in the mind

The fitful tracing of a portal

But in the flesh it is immortal"

The abstract quality of beauty cannot exist

Apart from the concrete.

It wraps you in its satin sheet.

Fleshly beauty is its own heavenly realm

and we remain it's faithful worshipers

dazed by it as we gaze at its pulsars

so infinitely dense and radiant

the strains of its charms

Pulling us in
to the dead reckoning

of its irresistible gravity

til we and it are one.

One

in its destruction.

And ours.

Carnal

Carnage

Carn Age

Flesh Time

Time ravages beauty...

Memory is the looking glass we walk through

with Alice wonderment

to see old beauty anew.

To relive a past dead as a mummy

but carefully preserved and perfumed

a dessicated flower pressed
between

the pages
wholly of our minds

swallowing the holy host of the past's cum

from a future sucking ghost

All flesh is but grass...

Yeah well fuck that

The purity in the "spirit" of immortal beauty has no appeal to me

What good is pure spirit while we are clad in these skin suits?

You can't fuck a phantom or lick someone's ethereal essence.

You need something alive & veiny surging

to fill the aching void.

When I'm dead, I'm dead

They'll be no second trip on the merry-go-round for me

I'll take my heaven now.

I want your beauty skin deep

Skin deep

Deep in my skin

As you dive

Deeper and deeper

in me.

Last Day: Poet's Round Table 253

2011-12-31T22:18:00.000-08:00

On this last day of the year when love is so precise

I sort through past gatherings of happier times,

long for my father's guidance and sound advice,

wish a path to clear through this dimming light.

I sort through past gatherings of happier times,

holiday celebrations spent with loves left behind

wish a path to clear through this dimming light,

merely toys in the attic of this aging mind.

Holiday celebrations with loves left behind

like discarded paper on packages re-gifted

merely toys in the attic of this aging mind

stored away that one day they may be sifted.

Keeping Memory wrapped in ribbons of Present yet to come

long for my father's guidance and sound advice:

Let the gift of heart's Past grow amidst Hope's longevity unstrung

on this last day of the year when love is so precise.

Gathering Memories:

Eusthacia - www.myspace.com/eusthacia

Grace Spacey - www.facebook.com/my1gracespace

C. C. - www.myspace.com/ccsays

PRT's founder and keeper of Memories:

DJ Myke - www.myspace.com/jmichaeltodd

The Poets' Round Table is a weekly event.

If you'd like to participate please contact DJ Myke or Eusthacia.

Thank you for joining us at the last Table of 2011!

Have a happy and prosperous New Year!!

December Is Just A Volcano With A Cold Spot

2011-12-19T20:58:00.000-08:00

"... children of lava and wind, grandsons of ashes and air, great footsteps were heard in the island: the hands of the wind, the criminal cyclone, Oceania's persistency never worked with such fury. "

~ Pablo Neruda

Time is fast and Space is slow,

but December finally settled in.

The air was hard and cold

Its honed edge

slicing through you

with every breath.

Seemed a fitting time for a death;
Not that anyone she knew was dying.
Not exactly...

though, of course
Life, itself, is a stillborn orphan

Every death is just

the nocturnal prelude to rebirth, isn't it?
The Again
A neverbeen of the everbeing
A continuous loop

Then again...
Can you die if you never really lived?

The days now ended in layers

of frosted pink clouds

piled high and frilly

on powder blue doilies

wrapped daintily

by ribbons of deep coral light

its soft hot glow

like birthday candles
for a newborn bouncing baby night
All of it
Lavishly served atop a platter of pewter sky

It almost seemed

more like a celestial tea party

than a sunset
As a Chesire Cat moon with its wide wily grin
rose, presiding over it all

Who knows?

Maybe God

turns into a 6 year old girl

around Christmas every year

Everybody wants to believe

in Santa Claus.

Even supreme beings.

Omnipotence is a lonely table, set for one

with nothing,

but sacrifices to eat
and beggars scrounging for table scraps
Eyes wide, tongues out
Like Baal's silvery
waggle
Lapping up
the moonlight

Sometimes, it is difficult to distinguish

the supplicant from the almsgiver...

To be needed is a honey trap

set by Pooh bear

looking for Heffalumps
but finding only hungry ghosts
of himself

To be worshiped
creates worshipers
and

a greed to be giving...

Even when it masquerades itself

as munificence

is perhaps ultimately more vulnerable

than the need to receive...

The latter hunger can be easily satisfied

with an indifferent ladleful of rice

and a warm bowl of tea.

It is the immediate
Satisfied

by a bellyful of gratitude.

Not so the former...

The Powerful remain starved

after feeding the unfed.

Noblesse obliges

but never excises

the hull from the seed
the want from the need.

Knowing that what is willingly given can never be reciprocally received
Creates a chasm
in the force of its duty

Obligatory love is an unseasoned reason
An extortion in distortion
A fear twisted by

A daemon's dagger

A feigned swagger

True love cannot be coerced
Under any condition

The gods are very lonely indeed...

One Flesh

2011-12-10T18:45:00.000-08:00

"This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called 'woman' ,
for she was taken out of man."
~ Genesis

'Your eyes that once were never weary of mine
Are bowed in sorrow under pendulous lids,
Because our love is waning.'
And then She:
'Although our love is waning, let us stand
By the lone border of the lake once more,
Together in that hour of gentleness
When the poor tired child, passion, falls asleep.
How far away the stars seem, and how far
Is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!'
~Ephemera, William Butler Yeats

There are deep channels to cross
With Youth on the prow
and Pleasure at the helm
Choice is the very marrow
of every boned existence.

My wrists are rivers

My fingers are words

I lean as close to you with my words as I can

Mine is the touch of

A thousand suns that brand
their imprint

Upon the caul of soul
Dissecting

The sacred skin of
Your fecund mind

Sowing the seeds of a new reality

Reaping it all ecstatically

We clap with one hand

The universe sputters and rages in these veins

My lips are every prophets prayer answered

In the red dust temple of the profane

Just relax and open wide
Let my senses be your guide

I have pitched my tent inside you

Waiting for the puppy dog moon to emerge

Wagging his cosmic tales into songs of romance

Your body will become my fortress

Guarding this

our precious chance

One flesh

The feral caged

With a carnal freedom

Sailing past the vow of Now

Our bodies emergent

Deliciously alit
as we burn

The ephemera in

Our streaming transcendence
Riding the evernight

Poised on the edge
Our backs to the solar winds
basking in Love's immortal shadows.

Calypso

2011-12-09T13:46:00.004-08:00

There were cliffs

At the tips

Of her lacy white

fingers

And at dawn

Arms stretched wide

At the rise of high tide

She could just reach them

The lilt in her walk

Made the chalky soil buckle

And yearn

As she clambered up

Their steppes dreamily

Doused in the heady breath of morning

Coral lips wet and smiling
their torched chalcedony,

til the beckon in her beguiling

Had finally begun

She started her dance

with Day at the edge

of bluffs ledge

Her soles digging deep

Her body a warm supple Gaia

Hungrily seeking

The monument of Olympia's surrender.

Enraptured,

The ocean flung its tentacled arms

To capture her

In salty blue embrace

Til she writhed in the waves

of its pleasure

Hypnotic rhythms versed in body's pulsed rhyme

Her undulations

Orphic hymns played by the

cacophonic symphony

of time
to feral nature's
unencumbered motion

Movement spelling sounds

Reeling in the song of all things
bestial or celestial

The wanton wanting with

a freedom unbound

And she sang,

"Birth is not a beginning; death is not an end.

There is existence without limitation;

there is continuity in the was of Never.

Even if the Never ever was.

Existence without limitation is Space.

Continuity without a starting point is Time.

Time is the ever of was,

the reasoned cause.

The meter in the rhyme.

Live

Live now

in this moment

Be mine....

There is birth,

there is death,

there is issuing forth,

there is entering in.

Enter in... Enter in me...

And be born again and again...."

The wind would demur

And scold her

for daring to lure

Sky's strong sentinels

from their lofty watch

As they rallied

To shade her

But Hyperion with a wry

twinkle in his eye

Would beam the sun bright

upon her uplifted face every day

And feed her the milky moon

every night.

When she waved her bare arms

With the grace

of a thousand spiraling stars,

he could resist her no more...

Tearing off his dark cloak

With one satiny stroke,

The god of sky
moved heaven and earth

to complete the universe

In her...

Somewhere In The Dark (Pt 1)

2011-12-06T17:10:00.000-08:00

The night fell in sheets
Sending her mind whirring
Like a super8 film reel
exploding out of its canister ...
in flight from the endless loop of play...
Every story seeks finality, a final pan out, even the day.
The ~Fin was transcending...
The only way to break the cycle of irrelevancy

Usually she existed in a sort of controlled pandemonium. Chaos embraced her. She could feel it happening but still she couldn't stop it from becoming some unwieldy tangle of clipped blackout flying in the surprised face of its projectionist. It was like opening an old can of snakes or having an orgasm... You half-expected the springloaded pop, but it startled you all the same...

It's not that the fall of darkness felt ominous on this particular night, it's just that it had ambushed her; catching her unaware... She liked to think she was in tune with the elements, yet despite the whisper of air on her cheek, the soft glitter of starlight and the gentle brush of tide that usually soothed the fraying of her ganglionic overdrive, a panic usurped the mantel of serenity wearing her like a cheap whore wore musk oil, stilletos & hotpants... rudely, flagrantly, defiantly...

She didn't know why, but she was petrified.

In the distance, she heard the sound again. The one that had so suddenly unnerved her this evenfall. It was getting closer, she thought... More insistent...

Someone was shouting behind her. It became a mantra, cutting the eerie stillness of the night, ringing in her ears, the same words angrily sputtered at regular intervals. There was the threat of violence in that voice. Violence and madness were always a fatal combination. The desire to harm in it was as evident as the click of a triggerpull. Its pitch never altering as though the voice had been recorded and was being played on continuous loop. Loopy, yes... that's what it was. Loopy.
"Who the fuck stole my Coke?" jangled through her, shooting in her ears & down her spine, detonating her spidery senses. She laughed at herself. Surely that could not be what the man was saying, besides, she was out in the middle of a national park. She was perfectly safe. It's a popular walking trail for fucksake.

Such displays of lunacy were the norm in this asylum by the bay where the mindful and the mindless all co-existed peaceably. There was no reason for fear, she had heard far worse being proclaimed from street corners with no consequence, but accompanying the disembodied voice was a sound, a grating sound with a frenetic urgency spinning the air waves.... someone was pushing something.... something on a cart... Pushing steadily and quickly those wheels... It was the wheels that worried her.

Those wheels turning and turning in the dark

The darkness of the trail was broken in occasional splashes of headlights, casting their wan wash of lumens in milky puddles... Yet somehow knowing that cars were speeding away from this scene only added to her angst...

There it went again.
Louder
Faster
Closing in on her.
The wheels
The wheels turning turning turning maniacally...
scraping against the concrete pavement
squealing desperately in their attempt to speed up...
To catch up...
To her

Even the shouting stopped as the wheels sped up..

She felt the determination in their steady progress..
Their dire need to get there...
Together...
Get together
To get her...

Get her

She walked faster, picking up her pace til her calves screamed
and her achilles tendons snapped at her.
She was nearer the marina now,
the plaintive moan of the dock planks cried out to her in shrill warning
Alerting her...
Alarming her...
With long droning groans...
The water beneath the rotting planks making their way into weary wood grain, giving no rest, it was the eternal struggle... the elements battling civilization. She tried to ignore the sighs of resignation as the docks succumbed to their fates. Reminding her how she would likely succumb to hers, if & when she met it. She tried to ignore the wheels & shake off the irrational feeling of doom that infected her so suddenly.

But her brain would not detach from her spinal column... not this time.
It was pitch black out & now wisps of fog started to curl around the embankment... she could feel the cool mist breathing down her neck. Soon, she'd be swirling in it... gooseflesh broke out in small colonies along her arms.

What had she emailed her lover last night... the night before he pre-empted his fate?

"Tell me something... Why should Paradise be something still and manicured like a garden. Such controlled states are unnatural. From chaos comes creation... Paradise is a fertile place, alive, not barren and stagnant. It gave birth to man... there's only one way to conceive, to create, and to love and that requires a collision.... friction... explosions!!! The angels were warriors! Warriors of LOVE! Like you are... I am rioting at your door, but mostly I am wishing you great joy and fulfillment at this hour when the earth's pale solitary companion rises again. The moon may continue to wane on this midwinter night, but it still beams and I imagining it to be your smiling visage bathe in its milky phosphorescence... "

But he dwelled in the neverwases.
Living in thought clouds...

Clouds... are doubts.
Clouds are natural...
Life was so much precipitation
tears & cum & sweat
But LIFE, she felt, was... for the living!
Living is resisting being inanimate.
And she told him so, arguing with him about his worries about them... how he feared for their future.
His fear he could not provide for her.

"We have free will... we have free wheel!
The day I say I die for shoes is the day I realize that I have obviously never lived. So please, kill me now. You wouldn't be committing a crime for I would have long since died, but you would instead be performing a service to humanity. The living dead are an abomination of nature.

"Do NOT doubt it!", she told him... " I love you."

She'd broken the hamster cycle of dysfunction handed down to her from her barking mad red & white blood cells with DNA that would make a pretzel look like a potato chip, she believed in self-actualization.

"I will not be a statistic... I will not falter...
And I have not!
We are what we wish to be..."

But, unbeknownst to her, he wished to be dead...

A winged Sartre... spinning his prayerwheel in a dharmic roulette game til he disappeared
Another casualty of morality's Bermuda Triangle.
She was married, he was a honey-coated defrocked priest sitting under his Bodhi tree,
waiting for revelations
He was lost before he ever completed his flight...
She, too, was lost... in the corridors of her heart.

A chill sent her jolting back to her reality
The wind picked up, biting her.
The fog thickened, wrapping itself around her bare ankles.

Closing the distance, she heard the wheels...
the wheels kept scraping that pavement angrily,
steadily...
Somewhere ...
Where were they coming from?
The sound seemed to surround her.

A shadowy fear spilled over everything, suffocating her, further obscuring her thoughts
She knew It was out there
On a path coming right for her
Its trajectory would intersect with hers, but who was pushing a cart in the middle of an empty park in the dark? Why was he in such a hurry? What did he want with her?

God it was a horrible sound! The scratching and the scraping of bare metal on cement as those wheels were forced to go faster, pushing their limits.... straining against their axles. Screeching at her...

She could feel them she could feel them
On her, running over her...
Rasping like long jagged nails, digging their treads into her
She could imagine them as gnarled fingers yellow with age viciously gouging her
Tearing at her flesh...

She heard a cry

The night seemed to scream out
Run run now
Soon soon
He'll be here soon...
He sees you
He sees you...

La Boulangerie

2011-12-01T14:10:00.001-08:00

“Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Sophia

Daughter of wisdom

Speak to us in your

Hushed antediluvian tones

Under the canopy of your mists
We breathe information
In exalted inhalation

Ideas dangle like visions of sugarplums

As we lay snug in our unmade beds
dreaming of the presents
in your presence

Those seven veils of ontological wonder
pirouette

a diaphanous deception

Dancing the prance of silk
over our sleepy heads

Sing us a lullaby
Tell us a story

Spin us a gossamer web

Something
Anything
for our unlidded ids to get snagged in
Make us militant believers
We who are about to die salute you
We are your grateful dead

By the angry light of the serpentine fire,

sunless or moonless,

you'll thrive

Sighing the heavy

smoke whispers in our ears
shining burning bush bright,

Painting our worlds in dayglo hues

of Andy Warholian surprise

Our 15 minutes are almost over
Tic Toc Tic Toc
Goes the celestial clock
but who's got the winding key?

We, the mock innocent,
pin the tail on the political donkey

While the pink elephant stomps daintily

on the party's piñata guts

C'mon

Spill all the candy

Spoil us rotten,

we the gluttonous must gorge

Even sans teeth,

we'll gummily gnaw
along

The Son of Man came eating and drinking,
and they who splay the word say,
"Behold a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners."
But wisdom is justified of her children everyday.

Remember

Solomon Grundy?
He died without living...

Born on a Monday,

Christened on Tuesday,

Married on Wednesday,

Took ill on Thursday,

Grew worse on Friday,

Died on Saturday,

Buried on Sunday.

That was the end,

Of Solomon Grundy

The time to enjoy is
NOW
For tomorrow may bring sorrow
So tonight let us be gay...
Fuck that rainy day!
Sploosh!
Wham@!
Zok!
Oooof!
KAPOW!!!!
Holy bill of rights, Batman!
Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb

How will our Sunday

school us

At the end of Fate's ill will?
Where is the wise?
Where are the scribes?
Where is the illustrator of this Nobel worldly comic Booker Prize?

Eenie meenie minie mo

Who will be the first to go?

Truth or some other deluded fellow?

My mother told me to pick you

But if you holler I'll let you go

Eenie meenie minie mo

E Pluribus Unum

The stars in us collide

50 times over

All red and white striped and
star-spangle bannered

A pot of gold

at the foot of every rainbow
Guaranteed
with the right vote

but

Where is the yellow brick road?

Point us and we will follow, follow, follow, follow
Follow the yellow brick road...
Lead by every scarecrow

Humpty Dumpty
Sat on that wall
Humpty Dumpty
Had a great fall

All the kings horses and all the king's men
were too drunk on power
to put Humpty Dumpty
together again

Cross our hearts and hope to die
Stick a needle in Hope's eye

But I tell you, boy
War is hell
Hold the fort! I am coming!

Lie to us, lie to us
Lie

The truth is mind over matter
If you don't mind
It don't matter

Just skewer the truth

with the sharp stake

of Irony's sonorous Trojan sighs
ALERT THE MEDIA!!!!

Every sailor loves a siren song

I like my vampires to glitter darkly in the twilight
as he feeds on me with hollowed eyes

We the people
in order to dissolve a more perfect union
establish envy, insure domestic docility, provide for the common defeat,
promote the general malaise, and secure the
Blessings of politicians to ourselves and our enslavery,
do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Obamanation

Politics is the new religion
Its doctrine is subtraction by division.
That's one helluva superpower.

Tear the masks off...
Open the curtain wide & see....
The wizard is nothing
But a Kansas carny.
Just ask Dorothy.

Soon the wheel of fortune will stop spinning

Soon the four horsemen will ride

And we'll bake them a bundt cake

As Pandora's box bursts with pride

Now open wide

And receive your host
in this unholy communion...
Yeah...

Break on through to the other side

The Fourth Wall crumbles
There are no guards in the Third Estate
because everyone knows
Your sister
Justice is blind,

Deaf
and dumb...
Yo ho ho
and a bottle of rum

Just put the koolaid in the coconut
We'll drink it all up.

Ta politika

is a song sung
by fools

on the hill

But even the fool on the hill

knows better than

to give an answer...

Oh, SIghs aRe In uS

2011-11-29T15:32:00.000-08:00

“.. in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being that has known how to touch it. That being is not selected; it is recognised and obeyed.”
~ George Santayana

Slipping on the wings of night,
my soul climbs free

Free to straddle the overarching sky

and ride...

Be yond -

The black-hooded place of Myth's scythe

Beyond -

The bony reach of blue-fingered Time

The breath of Ra carries me

Til my taste of you lies
in the yon of Being:

In the dream...
That is the
awakening of
Horus' eye

My spine spins like the universe unwound
Madly

Releasing the bolts

Of Captivity's rhyme

I will not be bound
by the psalms of the righteous
I will not be sung
from the mouths of false gods

I have made no vow
to dance to their music
I obey no laws
where Love's heroes are strung

I am free
to fly or fall from
my high

I am free to
find
where I belong...

In the aubade played
with golden fingers
At the encore
of our euphoric
Nocturne

Free,

I tumble through Chaos' dwalen

Free ,

I rip the currents of Cosmo's tides blind

Shorn of the cloaked fear,
I reach you.

Inside your polish of jasper mind,
I dive.

With my breath on your lips
I remember
that once
Your tongue spoke as mine...
Searching
The refuge of your sacred body broken
Whirring,
I resurrect the song
13 silvery slivers of our eclipsed moon
all your beauty bleeding through the cracks

You cry Life
a holy vessel poured
water on my profane desert
falling like ribbons
of satiny want drunk dry

Let the naked and the raw
be covered no more
Cleft, our veins expose
the ichor that flows

Flay the hide of need
Let me sink in thee...
Til we elide

Diffusing
galaxies with perfumed ecstasy

our gamma promise forged...

There in the bend of light
where the sun's rays
terminate

There at the touch of your hands
once more

There where we meld
in the arc of ankh
the loop of life
dangles
like
a
hoop earring
to adorn

Merged,we become both shelter and storm
Merged, we unknot the flesh sublime

One -

In the skin made word

We shudder

One -

And the sighs in us

Combine...

About Osiris & Isis

Click HERE if you're not immediately redirected

2011-11-21T11:47:00.001-08:00

"And the light that blinds my eyes... shines from you"
~Iggy Pop

I suppose I should want to kiss him.
He is my husband, after all.
I suppose I should need his touch.
As much as I need air after my
Long immersions into your words.

I turn off all the lights
And turn on all the water
But the flood of desire
once ocean deep
has finally dissipated
canyon dry

Though my salty want does cling ruggedly
to its Paleozoic strata
like some savage virus
during the thick cap of an ice age
holding on dreaming
about the next thaw.

I don't know...
Maybe our hour is shattered
The sands have spilled their time
hardening into
a Sinai of glass lamentations

Moses scaled that slippery slope
and slid all the way back down again
tangled up in his failed parachute
Losing his grip on a tangible now

How often can one prophet part the Red Sea?
The pharaohs are dead
The children of Zion had already crossed
that bed and still, he was left behind
in a cloud of milk and honey

We all need an eject button, but
that son of the Nile never understood
No 10 laws etched in stone
can replace the glory of it all

Five Pillars
Five Precepts
They all add up just the same
I call it
A-Stigma-t-ism

"How is the gold become dim!
how is the most fine gold changed!
the stones of the sanctuary are poured out..."

Still...
The fatted calf was slain
and dipped in denial's gold
The prodigal son ate his share
but there was nothing rendered
except the fat
off one lost bovine soul

I do not apologize for my desires
I feel no guilt, no remorse.
There is no sin where love lives

But maybe I lie like
The lunatic does on the grass,
thirsting for something new...
licking the dew off fallen stars
Weaving daisy chains and chewing straw
along with the cater pillar crawling
In a maze of butterflied haze
slaying St. George and saving the dragon...

All those talking monkeys
tickle themselves in barrels
til they laugh
And forget...
the tales they lost
In the ark of evolutionary zeal

Lust is a scent that calls to you
like the shadow of the moon.
A fume, a fugue,
the clair de lune hummed
On a gusty blood orange November afternoon
With your taste in my mouth

" in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey
on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night"

Wearing sailor blue...
Odysseus is just another word for delicious...
Delicious is just another word for you
Ithaca awaits its master and Penelope her mate...
Let's give the devil his due

The eagle has landed
We spun the bottle, you won
And I've got moonlight in my mind...

"Votre âme est un paysage choisi
Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques
Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi
Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.

Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur
L'amour vainqueur et la vie opportune,
Ils n'ont pas l'air de croire à leur bonheur
Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune,

Au calme clair de lune triste et beau,
Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres
Et sangloter d'extase les jets d'eau,
Les grands jets d'eau sveltes parmi les marbres."

The sandbox awaits us
We have rainbows to slide...
My cellar door is still open
So come
Inside me

This time the sky is falling
on that fat old sun
We'll rewrite the book
With our own Revelations...
We'll undo the undone...

Yes, come...

Sing to me, sing to me...

Novembercide

2011-11-16T11:21:00.000-08:00

"Upon the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and also cried in our remembering Zion.
Upon the willows in the river's midst, we hung our lyres."
~ The Book of Psalms, Psalm 137

The moon fell heavy with its burden
Cradling the shadow of a skeletal sun
Stumbling unto horizon's shore
Her ship scuttled
under the wanton wreckage
of an anviled heart broken

A lunar moan escaped;
its gossamer sadness
hardened to knifepoint
piercing like a knowing look
from the liquid eyes
of Maya's lost children

"What will I tell my heart?", the moon cried.

Anchored, the trembling earth
held its ground tight while
Willows danced scenically to the wail
of sonar sound
Stretching limbs and grinding limits
Their leafen castes
Unbound

"Like begets like", they sang dangerously
as they waved their willow wands.

The moon owned the willow no more...

Day shrank dim
Fearful of
Night's touch
Its light
Crawling along in puddles
Where a thousand sparrows splashed
Insouciant

Their feathering iridescence
Vying for the last licks
Of sullen sun's cellophane sight

A cautious tide curled its lip
then arched back
Somersaulting away from
The din

The dune stood silently.
Watchful.
Its patches of pachouli and lavender
basking in the blackness
of Melancholia's mortal sin
where hope's dust smoked itself to ashes
and tumbled like weeds in the desert wind

The sky saw nothing with its vacant gray stare
All the world understood
The consumption of the sacrifice was a dull god's
mechanical device.
The 23rd enigma, a naked lunch devoured
with Fortean hunger.

What blackguards would consider this peaceful?
What fiends could celebrate such shrouded blight?
The bonfire of day wrapped in the caul of night...

And where is it written
that every November
ride the pale horse
to suicide?

When The Hurlyburly's Done...

2011-11-16T01:00:00.000-08:00

Histories of ages past
Unenlightened shadows cast
Down through all eternity
The crying of humanity.

'Tis then when the Hurdy Gurdy Man
Comes singing songs of love,
Then when the Hurdy Gurdy Man
Comes singing songs of love.
~ Donovan

And THERE is another doomset
And THERE, two skies have dawned
And Here, where the new moon bled tears
Here, have the old gods shone

Their appointed hour of purpose
suddenly come and gone...

God, if Life
God, if Trust
God, if Love

Is God love?
Is Life lived?
Is trust enough?

Can truth be known?

The tentacled arms
Reach bonelessly
Through windows
Scraping skies
Hovering like the fog
and filthy air.
Thought charred
Wooden ego
splintering
Layered meaning...

Furling sails
in the ship of fools
wave their flags goodbye
romance died

Grey brows furrow deep
The trenches
In a skinless time

Hollow tanks roll
a tireless clang
Slung low
along the edge
of a flaring tongue

And NOW
The arrow will fly
And NOW
Kairos will have won

The Audience stunned
applauds the play

Chronos flayed
Carves out his passage
His veins
A land
Hemorrhaging seeds
Of nothingness

The misbegotten
Shall inherit the wind
And the chaos will begin
Again.

The Eye of Mu

2011-11-15T15:34:00.000-08:00

A monk asked, "Does a dog have a Buddha-nature or not?"
The master said, "Not [Mu]!"

The monk said, "Above to all the Buddhas,
below to the crawling bugs, all have Buddha-nature.
Why is it that the dog has not?"

The master said, "Because he has the nature of karmic delusions"
~ The Gateless Gate, Koan 1

Has a dog Buddha-nature?
This is the most serious question of all.
If you say yes or no,
You lose your own Buddha-nature.
~ Joshu's Dog

Wide open eyes

Stare

Dim-sighted.

Look!
Eye sockets

wink

pupil of eye

gaze
at

eyelid

See particles

like angels

floating
in Vision's
aether.

Do Not Feed The Zoo Animals

2011-11-04T18:24:00.000-07:00

She crossed the street. It was a sparkling, sunlit afternoon. The air was brisk with a bright tang to it, lively as a bugler's cry at revelie.

Suddenly the day darkened....

Looming immediately in her future was a dreadful apparition: the spectre of a man; young, oxy-scrubbed and attractive, but for the menace of his Greenpeace t-shirt and his requisite, army-issue, clipboard bearing petitions of the kind that such militant creatures always burdened a hapless pedestrian public with.

He bared a mouthful of environmentally-active teeth in a coin-operated grin. Seeing her got all his clockwork wound. She imagined she heard the rev of the political machinery vrooming... "Gentlemen, start your engines!!!".

She braced herself for the inevitable onslaught.

"You look like someone who cares!", he said cheerfully, "Hi, my name is Marcus.", thrusting his hand at her for a handshake.

She grasped his hand, feeling the steel-wool of his calloused skin. Being a tactile creature, she loved a bit of texture, especially the friction caused by the rough hands of a man on her, but Marcus failed where he might have succeeded in arresting her attention.

He didn't actually squeeze her hand at all, barely taking hold of it.
He just let it hang there, like a flaccid penis.
Nothing was a bigger turn off to her than a man with a weak handshake.

Handshakes are meant to be visceral... A real connection to an individual.
A nexus to their past and your future.
A bite into their psyche.

A man with a weak handshake would likely fuck you in the ass without having to good grace to give you a reach around and probably go Dutch on the dinner tab afterward, if he bothered to take you out at all.

After feeling his barely modulated touch, she smiled sweetly as she said, "Hi Marcus. Nice to meet you. Bye." and walked on wondering how she could have possibly looked like someone who cared.
The truth was she was someone who really didn't give a shit.
She always thought if she projected anything, any part of her persona, at all, she was more likely to exude a buzzing chainsaw aura than a Save the Whales vibe.
White noise was her mantra.
Thunder was her theme song.

Living was, in practicality, a static panic state, why feed into those hair-triggered notions that fired the gears of futility in motion... the never sated stale, vitamin-fortified, Wonder Bread empty calorie hunger that force-fed us a bologna-wrapped, mayonnaise-dream coating the gluttonous belief-on-a-stick that we served some higher purpose? Wasn't being alive enough? Why were we always so greedy for more? Live well, cause no harm, help someone if you can and dance on til the music stopped playing.

Purpose... what purpose did ANYTHING truly serve? Life, as she saw it, is just one big old trip to the carnival funhouse.... crammed with all manner of amusing distortions to distract us. Distract us from the sober truth that all that we see or seem is just good old Poe's dream within a dream. We're born, then we die somewhere in the blink of mortality's eye. Our perceptions of it all were faulty, but what the hell... it still gave us the occasional laugh! Like Woody Allen so famously said, "What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet."

Like Woody, she was a native New Yorker. Her "give-not-a-shitlessness" was as much an integral part of her nurturing as it was a trait of her cynical, anarchal nature. She ate her sandwiches on dark rye with mustard. Preferably sandwiches made with her own two hands. She was a big girl now. She knew how to feed herself, but never tried to cram her recipes for life down anybody else's throat.

Petition-bearing signature collectors held no place of honor in her planet; be they green and peaceful or red and angry, she'd rather they'd all spontaneously combust to prevent the further contamination of San Francisco street corners on glorious autumn days! But Marcus failed to oblige her by napalming himself. So, she just walked on, still smiling at the thought of him and his kind. Mostly, she loved the circus that life was, but she never fed the zoo animals, no matter how cute they were.

Cinderella's Ashes

2011-11-01T12:09:00.000-07:00

Come, gentle night, — come, loving black brow'd night,
Give me my Romeo; and when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of Heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun.

~ Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene II

The clouds fire their cannons
Thundering...

What's left of us

scatters

like shrapnel

The war is over

We become refugees:

the stuff of burnt out stars
and cindered dreams

Our memories will be

rituals scented

in the ripening flesh

of berries stung by time

and flush with idolatry.

Night after night
I wander
with carefully bandaged step

Picking over the thorny offerings
the prickly fruit found

blooming within the orchard of

Those who bear the scar

that never felt the wound

On I go

Cautiously...

Tiptoeing

To the same forbidding sea wall

Impelled by Morbidity's need

To watch a wounded sun

hurtle to its death

Always watching and hoping
for a different everafter

Thinking
I can clasp
the shattering jewel of twilight

to my breast

And arrest the light that once shined
from your eyes,

now darkened and be-nighted

Hoping to color our world anew

But my crayons are broken
and my watercolors bleed

muddled pleadings

onto yellowing pages...

caking layer after frosted layer

upon fantasy's grim parchment

til it is

fissured and plicated

Dry

as Goya's tears shed on

El Tres De Mayo

Dry

as the wailing bones

in Guernica's graveyard

Desire's mythos long dead

sketched in the ashen language of charcoal

tinted in sepia's regret

And I know that maybe
I've always just blurred
The boundary
Framing love's lines...

Reality crows blackly
The clock strikes
Midnight

So I run away

Resigned

My fate
a stone skip,

a skidding off
glassy surface

My slipper caught in
the cracks
of a concrete memory...


Double Portrait by Dora Maar, 1930 About Dora Maar

Viral Visions

2011-10-28T12:20:00.000-07:00

“I think that we are generally not very good at making decisions. Mostly, things just happen. And there are some very creative human individuals who provide the sparks to drive that process. History is unpredictable, so the important thing is to stay adaptable. When you go to an unknown island, you don’t go with concrete expectations of what you might find there. Evolution and innovation work like the human immune system: There is a library of possible responses to viruses. The body doesn’t plan ahead trying to predict what the next threat is going to be, it is trying to be ready for anything.“

— George Dyson | Evolution and Innovation

He did everything with great timidity these days
Each movement became an unconscious cowering.
Even when he took a bite out of a sandwich.

Deriving little sensual satisfaction from its flavor,
He only felt fearful.
Focused on the crumbs that might scatter
or the greasy smears that might stain his shirt front,
Clouding his stained-glass vision
of an immaculately tailored perfection.

Lately, he took his nourishment
In the form of notions...
Sharp-lined ideas that cut
the halo-ed ness in treads of why.

Every surgical spoonful of life he swallowed
became a threat;
Reminders of a diminished return.
The gold stars earned were tarnishing
Along the sanctioned seer-seeing seen
by the tidy tidings
of an Emily Post
revered reverie.

Cleanliness is next to Godliness,
so he took several showers a day,
dousing himself in the eau of goodness,
sanitizing germs
and pine-freshening
the musty scent
of a minted life in stagnation...

There was no fun, only duty.
No guessing, only provings.
No joy, only scant hope for approbations found
in the canvassing of minds primed, sanded
And ready
for the paint by the numbers sanctity
in the beta waved gravy
of the many mens sana-minded.

Every angle honed
Every surface polished
Every fault magnified
Endlessly examined

It was life lived on the slide of a microscope.
Where every god donned a white coat called hope
as he spliced the dice of man's determinism
with a synthetic Dyson-loaded code.

Vampyra

2011-10-24T09:50:00.000-07:00

Cross the line
Trip the light

Fantastic

Before you say "Come."
I'll go
Just breathe

And know...

Our salvation lies
in the baptism
of sighs.

Free us

NOW

from

Mortality's guise.

Light the wick
with the flick

in candled trust

Feel the steel quench
Drench you

in the punctured

lashings

of a thirsting spun

We'll ride the last rupture
into Rapture's
Smolten desideratum

Peeling back the veil

of viscera

that

barricades our trail...

I offer you

Nothing

Only
Hunger's abatement

A pang
clanging louder here in the after

we've spent

30 pieces of silver...

Betrayal smiles

As it slits

The skin-sin
with my want's
sickled scythe

While you repent

You'll bleed the need
of Now
See how
I lap your soul up

Let's dance
Until the wrath
of my distemper
is impaled

The Gods no longer call the righteous
to wield their red-stained anger
The dark and the damned
Now fight