A Moment, Movement, Improvement

I sat in the park. Alone, unwanted and ostracized. Happily I gazed about me in wonder. The rain was pouring, people were scurrying quickly, and cars were making the water yell in anger. I stood up. My life up until this moment was leading up to this moment. I walked slowly, letting the water wash me of all my impurities. I filtered it all through my eyes but more my soul. I felt the water but I did not take notice of it. Most of the world is like that. Feeling but unaware.
These thoughts frightened me. Could I be coming to a logical conclusion? What is logic? The absence of chaos? The object of reason? If reason has an object then is insanity a verb? Yes, it is. That though unleashed a whole new perspective upon me. No longer was I weighed down upon by the laws made up. No longer was I weighed by the eyes of authority to do what is deemed right in their logical eyes. The park was now mine. I decided. Its a public park, I am the state. Gleefully, I ran through my drenched kingdom. This is where I shall build my throne, that tree must be gone. Who's statue is this anyway? I run up to it. An uncared for and little known green statue of a man wearing odd clothes looking what the artist deemed "heroic". I deem it not.
"Be free!" I bellow, uncaring if the unwashed, wet masses hear me. My mind is my own. No Big Brother camera to look at me. The rain blurs my vision and for a moment, a second and a breath, I see the statue nod. Amazing, I declare. The statue of the sailor/general/explorer/tradesman agrees with me. Emboldened by this I begin to climb his pedestal so I may join him. Forever to be green and a roost for flying rats.
The rock is hard at the base but the useless copper plauqe makes a foothold. I slip and slid my ten dollar sneaker onto it gripping with all my strength. I finally reach the top. The summit. Its a maginificent view from 3 feet off the ground. All I see is mine. The rain continues to pour and pool around me. I am happy sitting with my comrade in arms. He doesn't seem to be inclind to sit but thats all right.
I begin to watch the world outside my own. This small nature mecca surrounded by commerce, guilds, business. Millions of dollars flow like the water around these Babel towers. 10,000 languages all meaning the same word for money. Capitalism and and smaller world. I don't want this. I now have decreed no business is to be taken place in my realm. Then everything slows down.
I am unsure the cause at this point. Perhaps I've had an aneurysm perhaps something has kicked in. Perhaps I have reached a Buddha-like level of understanding. I could see every individual drop of rain. Every breath of wind. Every reflection of light on the wet world. This was my moment.I could take up the flag. Start the revolution. Flower Power, Gun Power, Socialism, Fascism anything was possible right at this moment.
Just as quickly as it stared, the world sped up again. An old time movie reel minus the squeal started it. Clips and disjointed images floated around me. Faster and faster more hectic and when it felt as if I would be sick or perhaps just lose myself they all seemed to make themselves unique and make it all work in a glorious symphony of sight, sound, smell and touch.
I was rear-ended back into my mind. The captain was staring down at me. Elitist fuck. I hopped off the pedestal. My body and clothes were trying to do an impression of a puddle. Squelching and slithering like I emerged from the primordial soup itself I stumbled off into the rain. My destination, unknown. One lone moment to make up for billions lost.

FIN

Recoil

I miss the way you were,
- the twinkle in your eyes -
The spark within - of passion -
- of joy -
Ever flowing times of surprise.

But what has happened now?
- orbs all sunken in -
Despair encompasses; depression
- implies -
When shall you shed this -
- this unwelcomed disguise?

Solar rain

We know well the saltburn sting, weaving uneven tracks,
pulled towards the center of the earth, sloppy.
Run for the low spots, evaporate and rain,
fall lightly on the ground, melt into the earth.
Crystal veins pour through viaducts of stone and earth,
tearing to the surface and flashing with muscular force;
crash amongst the rocks lining waterfalls,
and misty-rainbows fall in sheets.
Crisp maple leaves pop and crack, and fly with the summer breeze.
Drop into a fast flowing stream--
lifted floating into white water.
Surf waves around eroding stones,
carried downstream, to the vast oceans.
Ocean surf stings and parches;
great swells roll and push high unto the clear sky.
Green water by the pier- grey morning chop-
white crested rolls- and angry black seas.
Casting the sting of freezing surf,
to run for the low spots,
evaporate and rain.
Tides pull and jostle circular from icy poles,
to sweltering equator- past tropic and tepid-
and echo with life and force, and grace and depth.
Violent force of hurricane,
and smooth soft curve of slow waves push back
against the shoulder of earth,
leaning softly always into water,
with ragged cliffs, or pebbled shore-
constant dialogue between ever sinking earth,
and level seeking water.
Run for the low spots, evaporate and rain.
Land on your cheeks, feel a salt-sting,
and weave an uneven path
towards the center of the earth-
I kiss them off, evaporate, and rain.

Knight Night

I was walking at 11:15pm. No direction or purpose. Much like all of life. I had just had an argument with a spoon. Since I live in my dingy apartment by myself I needed to fight with someone. So a spoon is my choice. That bastard had it coming. The spoon is merely a focal point for my irritation at my sudden dissipation of an elevation of self.
I walk slowly in my ten dollar sneakers. Hands thrust into my cracked leather jacket. I embrace the chill wraiths of night. My head is fogged and bewildered. Street lights deny me the right answer. Buzzing and busying themselves with lighting my darkened path. I go up to one such impudent whelp and begin to harangue it. It has no right to deem me not right. I then raise my left sneaker at a thirty degree angle and give it a sound kick which results in the adjective itself.
I limp slowly down the street. Cars are but a memory. The pavement has long since gone frigid without the grind and groan of mechanical beasts of burden and luxury. My head looks up and the barely seen stars. I was told that outside the city they are seen better. But since I am outside myself and simply cannot find my way home at this point and time then It'll have to do. It's 11:24pm.
This is the night that I have chosen to wander the earth. Like the undead I roam the earth. Not in search of my soul or an unsuspecting mortal. Although both would be entertaining. Heartened by this fact I look for someone.
Sounds fill my head. Whoops and hollers. Teens. Youths in the prime of adolescence. Free in their controlled freedom. Celebrating the night. Like a hero of old on a quest, they look to slay the night. To own it and make it theirs.
I see them with my dilated pupils. There's only 4 of them. Now six. Now 21,594. I shake my head before the numbers can latch on. Clever bastards. They must be in league with the spoon. The spoon. I hid that bastard where he can never get out. My fridge. I wonder if there's any mustard.
Again, I shake my head. Getting distracted from the rail of thought. The pupils are far up the street. I follow the yellow line road. Towards the Emerald City? If their a scarecrow, a lion and a wardrobe I'm out of here. I slowly weave like a rug towards them. What thoughts must run through their heads? What unspeakable horrors must they think I am? Will I scar them for life with my dishevelled looks and rictus smile? I gleefully and gladly think these thoughts when I realize I should've taken a left at Albuquerque. Avenue that is.
I wander slowly down the street. A park off to my left. Night makes everything frightful. Wishing I had a knight in shining armor to protect me from the sanguine darkness. I'm running out of time. Why is time in such a rush? I close of red eyes and breath in the night. It's cold and delightful in my throat. Clearing. There's a clearing up ahead. Deciding a decision I go towards it.
As I lay on this bed of grass full of warmth and chemical enhancers I look up to the satellites. This is my night. This night will remain forever in my mind. I am one with universe or perhaps an ace. The universe always has a card up it's sleeve. Like that bastard spoon. My smile remains fixed while my head is broken, my body swollen and my soul fractured. But I am well. Now I must think of an argument with that conniving fork.

I'm Not

I'm not a writer. I'm not an artist.
I'm not a philosopher. I'm not a sociologist.
I'm not a professor. I'm not a pupil.
I'm not a dreamer. I'm not a nihilist.
I'm not a pessimist. I'm not an optimist.
I'm not a majority. I'm not a minority.
I'm not a gray area. I'm not full colour.
I'm not a revolutionary. I'm not a reactionary.
I'm not simple. I'm not complex.
I'm not in politics. I'm not the people.
I'm not an individual. I'm not the group.
Then what am I? Am I me?

As I sit with my head pressed against this door I think these thoughts in my dingy apartment. Then I realize.

I am a realist. There's more I'm not then I am.

FIN

Absolutely absolute

Absolutist Rationality as a worldview is, ultimately, a method of extreme control over the very world one seeks to form a worldview about. That every sensation, input or observation is ultimately determined by pure ‘objective’ rationality is to elevate the observer above the status of all observed. To demand of the world; of all conceivable thought, all observation, and, at the outer levels of understanding, all truths, sensations and possible entities, to fit within the tight confines of human reason and academic methodology is a frightening method of control.
In a letter of protest, eighteen professors, including Hugh Mellor, Rene Thom, David Armstrong, W.V. Quine, and Ruth Barcan Marcus stated that Derrida did not deserve an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University on the grounds that his body of work did not meet “accepted standards of clarity and vigor”. They go on to state: "Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university."
Such an utter dependence- whether one agrees with Derrida or not- on the flawed faculty of human reason hardly befits the nature of true philosophy, or of true philosophers.
No-one would argue the existence of Paradox, [capitalization most definitely intentional] but academia still seems to insist upon manufacturing what is essentially always a false logical centre for its arguments.
One asserts an accepted logical ‘truth’, and deduces from that the truth of a related, but not yet accepted, understood, or discovered idea. These truths and these deductions only exist on paper, and are, plagiarism aside, always a creation of their author.
Academic rationality could be extrapolated to prove almost anything, and thus proves nothing. The mere existence of paradox points to rationalities’ flaws, which makes the act of logically sound reasoning an exercise in futility. However, academic truths need not be denied or refuted, only understood to be isolated to the paper they are printed on, and the minds of those who hold them.
To pursue with such obvious vigor, the absolute academic rationality displayed by most modern philosophers, academics, scholars, and the institutions, governments, and populations that support them, displays the depths to which a desire for ultimate control will sink. Nothing in this world occurs with the frequency of contradiction, Paradox, and irrationality, yet we banish these things from academia, and therefore from common debate and thought; all in the name of control.
Academia, and the society which propagates and supports it, demands that arguments be cogent, logical- and exceedingly easy to follow, if you’ve any hope of reaching a mass audience. This is nothing short of a wholesale rejection of all things intuitive, mystical, and beyond rationality. At its root, it is a deep seated fear of what cannot be controlled and quantified; held in ones hand and examined on all sides- a fear of those things greater even than ourselves. Leaving the outer edge of philosophy wallowing in existential angst; rather than take that next tentative step into Paradox, mysticism, and rational irrationality.
Choosing to create a far more cloistered and controlled world, with rational rules, laws, and finite boundaries. A place where Paradox, contradiction, and irrationality, all the places truth chooses to hide, can be left securely outside the gate.
A group of frightened little men in suits and robes and sweater vests hiding from what they cannot possibly control, and wishing only to banish these ‘unknowables’ from their presence- a futile attempt to control truth itself.
To relive a scene between Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper starring in “Easy rider”:

“What you represent to them, is freedom.” Jack Nicholson says, as they sit in the fading light of a small fire. Dennis Hopper responds agitatedly “What the hell is wrong with freedom? That’s what it’s all about.”
Oh ya, that’s right, that’s what it’s all about, all right. But talking about it, and being it, that’s two different things. I mean, it’s real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. But course, don’t ever tell anyone they’re not free, cuz then they’re gonna get real busy killing and maiming to prove to you that they are. Oh ya, they’re gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you, about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it’s gonna scare em’.”
Dennis Hopper says with a quiet quiver in his voice “Ya, well, it don’t make em’ running scared.” “No.” Jack Nicholson responds quickly. “It makes em’ dangerous.”

Untouchable

I am a pariah. I came to this conclusion last night while being outside a local coffee shop. Not one of those smooth jazz-playing, $6.95 soy latte with hazelnut drink places. I'm talking about a dark, beneath the city street, dimly lit, throw-back from the Beatnik era coffee shop. The place literally smells of history. The coying smell of tobacco smoke waifs through the air like an unhappy spirit. The shop is where I spend some days to escape the pain of civilized society. A underground resistance to the corporations and drones the work above us. This is where I met Ellie.
I had just finished walking on a cloudy day. It doesn't matter which day. They're all the same to me. I kept thinking that day that I am one of those people who aren't "mold-able". I don't want to be a working man. A bygone relic of the Nuclear Family. I am me. With that statement I realized I need to fill my body with something cheap and legal that can keep me in this frame of mine. Not necessarily nihilistic in my views but more apathetic. So I discovered a small hole in the wall shop.
"Asmodeus". A perfect name to this place. Who knows how many secrets have the walls listened into. I walk down the cement steps worn by the feet of the anti-culture. I move my ten-dollar sneakers down to the cracked, faded brown door. I open it and am brought into a room of silence and quiet anger. A cracked wooden bar painted black lies against the right-side of the room. The shop seems to devour the feeble light. Everything is dark. Moody. My kind of joint. Perfect for the frame of mind that I had painted for myself. I move my legs towards the bar. A blackboard with white chalk lettering tells me my 6 choices. I order a coffee.
I move to the back of the shop to a nice secluded corner. All the corners are secluded. I wrap my hands like a prayer around my cup. Staring intensely at the scratched, graffiti-ed table top. Does RG still love DW? Is Korn the best music? Doubtful to both. I try and think my way out of my box when she came in.
She was neither gorgeous or plain, neither fat nor skinny. She was classical beauty. Her hairy, a dirty blond, was like the after flash of lightning in the thunderstorm of the room. I won't go into more detail. It's best to let you imagine the rest. I couldn't help but stare. Maybe it was the lack of sleep or the coffee buzz hitting me but I knew I had to talk to her. She turned to walk towards me. I froze. Could she be an FBI agent finally tracking me down? She didn't look like one. Her hair was uncombed and unkempt. Her gray sweatshirt was frayed at the collar. Even her blue jeans had tears and rips. She came right over to me. Sat down and started drinking my coffee!
Now, I had seen many things. Monkeys coming out of lampposts. Colors and scents that I can't describe, yet nothing in my world had competed with this...this brazen act of desecration to a mans coffee.

"Excuse me," I politely rasp. Last night must have broken my larynx. "Thats my cup".

"How very capitalist of you" she retorts. I think I am in love.

She reaches across the table. "Names Eleanor Horst, everyone calls me Ellie"

I gave her my hand and my name. This woman was amazing. We spent most of the daylight speaking of philosophy and humanity. Her grassroots ways mirrored my own. We were kindred spirits. If we had a sweat tent we would pass the peace pipe and speak of dreams that the Great Spirit gave us. Instead we talked in hush tones in a downtown, rundown coffee shop. We were on a wavelength that I never dreamed possible. This was my summer of '69.
Over the next weeks Ellie and I became closer. Nights laying on my mattress staring up at the ceiling while watching the smoke curl upwards. Nothing would be said at those points. We were back in the womb. Two people in such semblance that our words would probably shatter this moment. I have felt things in my life but this beats them all. I think I'm happy.
After two months our relationship ended. She became more optimistic. She even got a job. She wanted things out of this life. Me? I want to wander, to search for a higher meaning. To be like a Shaolin monk trying to reach enlightenment. We had to go our separate ways. For about three days after, I maintained a level of buzz that would've killed a lesser man. Then I realized that this was karma at play.
Was this a sign from above that I should make something of myself? Get a job? A wife? A car thats not older then myself? A white picket fence, 2.3 children, and a dog? NO! I refuse. I am a pariah. I need none of these things. I intend to wander this place searching for something that I can't search for. I need to be away from people. That is of course if Nixon doesn't get his grubby hands all over it.
Perhaps she really was a government agent. Sent by the Nixon commies to break me and make me become a lumping socialist. Well, it didn't work. I saw Ellie once and a while after that. Meaningless idle chatter about inane things. We could never get back those months of nirvana. Maybe she was a communist. Or a optimist. Same thing really.
I lurch back to this time period and space. My cup is empty in front of me. Like Ellie and I were. Once filled with steaming energy, now nothing is left but the lingering taste and the dregs at the bottom. I shake my long greasy hair. No, I don't think I will ever find someone like her. She's a good spirit. I am on a different path. Running away from Commies and other agencies that probably want to keep my brain in a stasis pod to be put into a robot in the year 2346 when the world is using cyborgs to take over the last remnants of free society.
I throw a few bills on the table and shuffle out. The place hasn't changed, but it seems my memories have given the black room a whitewash. I leave through the door and enter the brightness.

FIN

A Question on Humanity

Recently, while trolling a political forum, I was asked a question on the nature of humanity. I responded with the following- unedited -for your amusement:

Define humanity. Ironically, that depends on which actual definition youre looking to define. As as already been said [in a previous response], humanity refers to human kind as a whole. of course, there are other definitions. such as humanity (compassion, etc.) or humanity (something that makes us human.)
In regards to this last one- pretty much nothing. It's impossible really to prove that anything physical exists. All science and philosophy is based on the assumption that it does ofcourse, but really noone knows. Therefore to define what makes a human a human you have to prove that a human actually exists. Otherwise you could just say that its a horribally abstact concept created through general interaction with other people. it's-to-say the interaction regarding people in general (or group dynamics, the forces of social conformity) because for all intents and purposes, "humanity" in this definition changes around the world and through out time. If a person were raised by wolves they wouldnt really *be* human. they would not possess humanity in this sence and would be an actual animal (as their "humanity" is now defined by a wolf, or any other dynamic.)

8:03pm sunset

This place is so big, a vast expanse-
and I am so small,

BUT MY VIEW OF THIS PLACE,
IS MAGNIFICENT. orange,
pink, purple, and blue,
radiant and magestic, like-
that noble flock of birds,
winging their way out into it,
soaring out on a high wave of air,
above the deep-green trees,
towards the teal sea, into which the angry,
red sun plunges his seething brow,
as I raise my head, my eyes illuminate,
burn emerald green,
piercing flames reach out and grasp,
this vast expanse,
acsended.

All a man wants to do it show someone else,
his view.
If only you could see what my eyes,
have be-held.
If only I could be-hold what your eyes,
have seen.
Then we'd see-
Then we'd be-hold-

This place is so big, a vaste expanse-
and we are so small,
BUT OUR VIEW OF THIS PLACE,
IS MAGNIFICENT.

Making Sense of the Jest

Young men ramble with their feet, old man with their words. I've been doing both since the day I learned to move myself in both these ways. A writer's work is an extended suicide note, a piece of paper left behind to explain to those who survive his heart's cessation where he might possibly have rambled in the time in which he took up residence in his transient body. An explanation of how he viewed the swirling miriad of phantasms which present themselves as reality to our beleagered eyes. When we read these words we stare into the empty eyes of the one who wrote them, both become aware that they are looking into a void deeper than their own. When those two perspectives fix their gaze upon each other a connection, that for one exquisite moment illuminates all of existence, assures both rambling souls that even if everything is nothing, they can maintain hope in being alone together, drifting through infinite layers of illusion until they reach the ineffable beyond any of the rubbish they thought they had been able to define with their previous languages. Someday I won't have feet or a tongue, but maybe someone someday with both will understand my words and then use his to respond and perpetuate the lost message I passed on while it was my task, while I was stuck in this land of wind and sand.

Mall World

I escape the downpour outside. I have wandered the streets again in my quest. In an almost Taoist way, I look at the world. It comes and goes. Rebirth and a spin of the wheel. Poverty and riches gone like an egg frying on the sidewalk. Yet I cannot find a place of warmth. Of dryness and of dairy products. I must flee the rain. Everyone knows that the agents of evil lace rainwater with PCPs. I hurry along, my head covered by my cracked and worn leather jacket. I find a doorway. I open it.
Sound. Like a thousand angry lions or an army of ancient warriors waiting to fight their accursed foes, the sound washes over me. I still feel dirty. I lower my head out of my jacket and stare in wonder. Lights and shiny things draw your eye like a pencil. I can almost taste the neon coming off the signs. I say to myself, "Yet, this is only the beginning". Could more adventure be found. Or would I crumple under the pressure. Just lay on the soft mat until the security guards hall me away with their unfathomable power.
No, I decide, I must trudge onward. People around me are moving and jostling like cattle. Wheres the man with the prod? As that thought slinks across my brain I begin to panic. So many people. Who's real? Who's fake? Then I remember it's a mall. Everyones fake. I go toward the kaaba of the mall. The directory. Surely this would guide me like a Merlin to my quest. Whatever that may be. YOU ARE HERE, declares a angry red dot. I'm here? Who the bloody flux is watching me? I peer around and see the dark globes of Big Brother. I must stay calm. Mustn't let them know I'm on to them.
I randomly choose a place to run to. Where or what it is is of no matter. I move my lower appendages towards the destination. Cautiously I look back to see if the brown shirts are following me. Theres many brown shirts. Damn, I declare, why can't they wear a new colour? In any event I arrive in a clothing store. I will be cursed by Jupiter himself if I wasn't in the bowels of hell. Teenie boppers shopping for the latest fads wander the store. People that look like their in the Special Services patrol and fold clothes. I am so very frightened.
"Hi there!" exclaims a small overly-happy minimum wage thrall. I just mumble something. It might have been a greeting or a Tibetan curse. Who's to say? I continue deeper into the jungle of tight jeans and low-cut tops. Music is pounding through the speakers. A blend of pseudo-punk with so much sugar I feel a need to go to the dentist. I finally find my way to a brown leather sofa. I join the poor boyfriends dragged here by their shopaholic girlfriends. As I sit and try to get centered I am suddenly hit by a thought. These people are all insane. Granted I have had this thought numerous times and merely laugh about it, this time I can't laugh. Generally people tend to look at you odd when you laugh at nothing. Wierdos.
I decide it's time to leave before I kill someone or wrestle a manikin. That got me kicked out of a different store. I wander back out into the highway of people. The throng moves with experienced mall walkers racing like their shoes are on a fire to the little old couple who've been there since 9 AM and damned if they don't get their 10 mile walk. I walk with my head down staring at the squared, scuffed tiles. I need to get out of here.
In the ten thousand year history of man this is the only time that we have been completely cut off from nature. We can shop, eat, sleep and relieve ourselves at our leisure. All within the comforts of a room temperature box. Foods from a thousand nations are there for you to order and indulge. Peoples from all cultures and classes come together in this capitalist utopia. The mere fact that you can buy anything blows my mind. I think I even saw a human slave store. I digress.
I continue my meandering path towards one of the twenty thousand exits for those who can't go twelve paces without sucking tar. I head out one doors almost bowling over a old man. He glares at me. I don't care. I need to smoke tar. I light up a cigarette and finally get a clear thought. Traffic rumbles in the distance. The voices have finally stopped. I run a hand through my long, greasy hair. A truck backs up its warning sound getting all but the deaf and dead out of the way. I take a last pull from my joy-stick. I flick the butt to the ground. I'll need to steal another pack tomorrow.
I have no idea where I am or what I'm doing but I know one thing. I hate shopping centres. The idea of people following trends hurts my soul. Bored salesclerks peddle their wares like snake oil salesmen. I have no time for this. I have places not to be. I hitch up my coat and begin to walk away from the gargantuan maw of a mall. It begins to rain. Hard. I don't try to avoid it.
FIN

Snow in March

After a night of fevered anxiety, a torrential soul ripping experience resulting in my dissolution, I awoke to see a gentle March snowfall beginning its blanketing work on the freshly power-washed cement outside my window. I beheld the snow-sprites dance up and down, tumbling head over heals to their repose on the cold hard ground which they longed to make their last bed. I watched as they swirled; I could not tell whether they were moving up or down, it seemed that my music was pushing them every which way, in a confused free-fall. I could not figure out whether I wanted to go up or down. To decend into enigmatic understanding or otherwise to loft my soul upwards to indeterminate spires of knowledge. What goes up must come down, but what goes down must also go up. There seems to be some sort of balancing peace which will not allow for one direction to be followed for too long. In order to save ourselves we must go in circles, but it isn't as boring as running around a lonely sport's-field. It's like the swirling of snow, come unexpected on a late March day, we hover in the air for only a short time and then meet our fate on god's freshly cleaned cobble-stones. I will never understand other peoples' lack of connection with the physical world. Why do we lose our child-like capacity to lose ourselves in a mythology of reality that we are creating with every thought on every step w take? Why do we lose our comfortablility with intimacy? Why do we forget that we too are mythical creatures, wandering down (and up) the strange roads and paths of some long forgotten fairy-tale? How can people miss the snow-sprite for the snow?

zikes

Look at them dance and sway, those fragile sacrifices, how their young eyes dart to and fro in horrid anticipation of the horror that awaits them. They quake at the sight of their peers destruction, dashed up on the rocks of organised systems.

I too stand and watching this promiscuous scene, thousands of unwashed souls fit for the Seine, it isn't to long before they become outright, institutions of money grubbing greed for the control of peoples' souls. They deal in salvation, pay the stern man with the greying hair, he is the leader of your community. But who gave him his authority, did it come from God? Is it passed down by heretidy, no, by democracy, no, by any other sort of machination known to man? No, it is born of posturing and magic tricks, leading people along a beautious goose chace from which none of them will return. Deep into the nothing of an unrepresentative life.

I'm not so sure that I've made myself clear, are you all aware that I am stark raving mad. can you not see that I am a fool, a foolish piece of sausage just waiting to be fed to dogs. I am not even glorious in my downfall, I'm doing an ungraceful nose dive into a place far more wonderous that here. A place where you forget to fall when you trip. To just simply disattach your connection to the phsycial world, loom into a different place and find out that there are so many more perspectives on life than buddhas on bodi tree. I'm not talking about salvation, I'm talking about wandering, wondering about. I love the clean clear road with mountains and valleys, trees, rivers and towns. I ramble to these places in my mind. Take trips to places no one has even heard of, so that I can tell people a story that is really unique, not some half baked notion that some historian somewhere is holding the magic piece of the puzzle which makes it all make sense. No, there isn't one, no saviour of our aesthetic design for the unknowable G-D's blasphemed face.

Things got hairy back there did they. ummm yes, i do believe they did. well then, we'de best get out of hereI should say...but what are we to do about Tommy, we just can't leave that savage puke behind like that. i forbit it, I will find your mother and tell her that you are a little ninnie, if you do such an obscene thing. Now then, onto the killing fields of Cambodia, i rather like the right to that name. It is marvelous there in the spring.

Now I sit, all alone by the keyboard once again...hack...

Whose other coloured face is this in front of my knee-

leanin so far back he got cut by a lean mean fighting careening donut...

And that kiddies is why you don't talk to communists

fin

The sun sets during the sunrise

Time flies like a bird. It skips and hops and rises on an air-stream, and pecks in the mud.
It grows like a strawberry vine, flat and fragrant, snaking across the field in waving rows.
We walk through a paradise of green, and admire the statuary; we imagine moving picture shows- morphing dolphins and great apes.
Trees muscle and claw from their hidden upside-down world, a very gradual anchor or great gnarled fingers. Such such huge organic lives, 125% bigger on the bottom than the top, and stronger pound for pound than steel, we casually walk past enormous beings as casually as we do a mailbox or a do-not-walk sign.
Music makes me float away; have to bodily rip away from it to keep from dissolving, a glittering crystal reaction dissolving into pure space.
I can see so deep into the rationalizations, the subtleties of everything around me; can feel the pressure of the air around me, can feel the urging, surging wave that pushes me along.
The music becomes a completely organic part of what I’m seeing and experiencing- a natural soundtrack to reality. Shrubs and bushes threaten to overtake the sidewalk, and I smile.
A neighbor has left a small wooden ladder feeding into the inside of the plant. It’s been there for months, and has grown into the bush itself, a ladder into another world, a teleportator, a true door to perception. I duck my head into the scratching blackness of another world, but am pulled back by Lucy, and her 15 foot leash.
I find my way home and I see an inclusive nothing when I look in the mirror.
We’re not honest enough with ourselves or with one another; we deny our feelings until they cannot be controlled. We’ve lost the instant communication of feeling enjoyed by animals. Filtered through our ego, our fear, and our social grooming, we haven’t the constant banter of a pond full of ducks and mallards, with great flashes of green ripping across their wings. Crying from one end of the pond to the other, there is instant reproach or reward for every action. Breeding rights, access to food and recreation.
We make noise about such different things than ducks, you think?
We’ve been conditioned to live so far away from ourselves; anything that brings you closer to yourself brings you closer to everyone else.
The world around you breaths as we do; in and out, distorting and waving like flags in uneven breezes, colours squeeze and pull into a painters palette dropped on a hard floor, swirling down the grout lines, scooped into the sink and combusted into dizzying patterns, snaking through our plumbing.
Sneaking into other houses, miles down the road; a wave of colour and dizzying reward crawling through the storn drain.
Colour is a refractive experience of reflection into the eye. Rejected light beams, caught by our eye, which is assumed to constitute reality. Only a human being could formulate a reality in which a known distortion of white light perceived as colour, could masquerade as fact.
Perception and thought have died a sloppy death.
I realize how little people usually observe- we look at everyone around us, and see only a perception of ourselves. A reality created by comparison.
The forest exarts a great pull on me, something about it is so evocative, to me, it has a hard, very heavy vibration to it, a swaying force in high wind.
I feel spirits in wood, affinity with the trees, kinship with wild animals, at home in wild places. Cities are more foreign to me, and hold that certain foreign excitement and charm.
But which seem more intolerable for their charm, when conditions go bad.
Any learned behavior or idea must be impressed into us, and it invariably leaves a mark, which is felt more or less based on ones sensitivity. To teach a child shame at their bodily functions is one of the deepest seated and difficult repressions in our psyche. It rips through our lives, with an irrational fear- we don’t usually recognize it, but at its most basic level, our lives are dictated by the whims of our bladder and bowels.
A thought or motivation that begins within is an outward explosion of inner energy propelled with violent force, and is the opposite of being taught or of learning, which is a force applied to you, a rape, a beating. Why allow learning to be associated with shame, pain and guilt?
Now the sun starts to crest the edge of the horizon, and throws its bulk against the earth. Under the new light of the sun, the walls settle into their foundations and cease to melt like cheap candles into a puddle on the floor.
A quietness and completeness is left to settle into an oil slick rainbow on the back of my brain, and I set beneath the horizon as the world wakes.

Sandman

I went to sleep at exactly 1:25 am. Well, I went to my mattress at 1:25 am. In my shoe box apartment I wandered in from an unsuccessful success. I wandered the streets with my cracked leather jacket pulled tight around my frame. Staring at the cloud gray cement while the cement gray clouds poured liquid on me. I was like a barge ship. Every passer-by gave me a wide berth, for reasons I can't fathom. Maybe it was the growth on my face or the dirt on my twelve dollar jeans or the fact that I was mumbling about government Nazis. Such a rat race life we lead.
I got into my shoe-box apartment at 1:02 am. I pealed off my shiny, damp leather jacket and carefully hurled it to the floor. I then stumbled into my living room. Strange. I live in an apartment not a room. I lay my aching and weary body upon a couch that I found. I eat some mustard and apple sauce. The staples of my diet. After stepping into my biological experiment/shower, I rinse off the day and reflect. This has been a good day. I got nothing of worth accomplished. Such is my way.
I then bring my carcass into the bedroom. A stack of cement blocks serve as a nightstand and my mattress is my princely bed. I lay my weary head down and...
I am instantly thinking thoughts. My mind is whirring with endless possibilities. I get up and pace my darkened apartment. I can't sleep. The sandman has been lay-wayed or killed. I try to think of old wives remedies. Although, I myself have no wife. Old or otherwise. I drink warm cream. Does pass due milk heated in a can count? It's all coming together. My little mendula is now too much in the wind. Thoughts, ideas and conundrums collide like an Los Angeles free-way.
Perhaps its my apartment. I decide to go out into the hallway for a brief time. Maybe that will cure my insomnia or insanity. I walk out in my twelve dollar jeans and red-checked shirt. I run a hand through my long, greasy hair. Best to look presentable before one goes out. I open the door and step out into the dreary, barely lit corridor. I then slouch down right outside my door. I close my eyes and try to get my head straight. If it is indeed crooked.
The young couple are arguing again next door. A TV in a another apartment flares up in response. A baby squalls in the distance. A slamming door, a rushing footstep and the thumping of a fist against a wall. Is this what people dream of? I look up to a sudden creak in front of me. Its old Mrs. Leave-me-be. She peers out with a look of terror and/or anger. She sees me slouching by my door. Thinking I'm either too drunk or high to get into my apartment, she snorts like a bull and slams the door. That's not what I am. That was yesterday.
So this isn't working I decide. So I get up on my evolutionary advantage and walk back into my dark apartment. I quickly cross the dirty floor to the window. It takes a few tries but I finally manage to open it enough to crawl through onto the fourth floor fire escape. Good thing the Nixon commies aren't after me today. I go out into the cool night. I sit with my red checked pulled tight around me as I exhale fog from my mouth. I sit on the rusted metal and just listen to the sounds of the city.
A distant siren screams of danger, hurt, or death. The constant roar of traffic is like sitting near the ocean. The orange streetlights give somewhat illumination to the street. An airplane flies unseen in the raining clouds. This is my world. I fear silence. I need to be constantly assaulted by noise. Noise pollution some call it. I call it safety and sanctity. Being out in the woods alone with no noise but the wind frightens me. As a modern man I have been bred over the last two hundred years to avoid the wild frontier and enjoy the civilization around me. I don't want to get away. This is my vacation.
Suddenly as the thought came, weariness hit me like the butt of a pistol. I heaved myself slowly up and crawled back into my shoe box. I close the window without the same amount of effort as before. Strange. Damn Nazis. Always have to fix everything. I then tumble into my room which has a bed in it. I lay my head down and close my poor dead lights. I almost fear falling asleep. Will I wake up? What if some historic event happens during the time of rest? If I close my eyes will they be stuck like that forever?
This is no time for paranoia, I tell my brain. We can worry about that tomorrow. As for now, I need to recharge, re-energize, re-misfit. For tomorrow is a new day. I have two hours to sleep before I need to be up and in that alley. The early bird gets the worm. Worms do not have protein. It is exactly 3:12 am. I cannot sleep.

Sandstorms

The other night as I watched a clip from Monty Python's "Life of Brian" a strange thought occurred to me. I was watching the scene in which Brian is fleeing a fervent horde of prospective acolytes. He is being chased because the crowd believes him to be their long awaited Messiah. As Brian flees he comes along a naked old man with a long flowing beard sitting in a desert culvert. The man waves him away and after some confusion, once Brian has caused him to break it, explains that he has been adhering to a vow of silence for 18 years. It struck me as insightful that a man would hole himself up in a desert not saying a single word for 18 years and suddenly all of his rigour would be upset by a man whom others believe to be their god. And not only that, but the protests of that man then lead to further misunderstandings about the divinity of Brian. It occurred to me that anyone who has anything worth saying can never articulate those things. It seems to me that understanding must necessarily remain uncommunicated, perhaps this is a quality inherent in real understanding. What then do we make of these blabber-mouthed mystics, these figures who unlike Brian, stand up before the multitude and profess to understand the answers to the question that no one in the crowd has even discovered needs to be articulated yet? They are devils of course, manipulators who are themselves manipulated!

What then does this mean for someone who feels the compulsion and dares to have the pretention to write down his thoughts and communicate his own experience to the world? Am I yet another prophet who seeks to channel the eternal into some limited grain of sand so that I can hold it before others and cry with great exhuberance, "LOOK I'VE FOUND IT, I'VE FOUND GOD, AND GOD IS YELLOW!" No! I will not do this, and this I think speaks much to the controversies which are sometimes conjured up around my writing. I often find myself accused of arrogance, of course I'm arrogant it stops me from evaporating, but I'm not arrogant in the sense that the word is being used, I am not attempting to assert control over people with my articulated perceptions. I am attempting to give something to the world, something of myself, but of course it is a selfish exercise too, I am desperately trying to weave together a fabric which I can wind about myself to stop my dissolving self from disappearing into the relentless march of time, into these torrential desert winds.

But, I am not trying to create some sort of post-modern relativistic art, some shlock of brickolage, a haphazard tip of the hat to chaos. I seek to go beyond that chaos, to breech the gap between oblivion and infinity and spread my arms wide in the dark abyss of shimmering eternity. I seek to say something firm amid this mire of watered down art I see around me. (As an aside, the reason I admire Helianthus' poetry is her audacity to put her swiven to rhyme in a generation of artists so desperately attached to irresponsible method and form.) This is not an absolute, or a weak absolute-for-only-myself, it is an absolute beyond perception, a deep understanding which really just brings me to silence. Am I then also a blabber-mouthed mystic, a fool who dresses up like a decent human being and dances his own sick pantomime infront of this crowd of people I think are before me? Can I reconcile mysticism with art? It would seem impossible as of now, since nothing I have hitherto written could possibly be defined as art. If a saintly hermit is seen by another, or even more, written about, are his experiences made void? I have a tentative answer: understanding must necessarily be complete, but the representation thereof must be acknowledged to be inherently partial. I am neither an absolutist nor a relativist, I see those extremes as rather the same thing, for when we perceive the world around us, we see that through to the nothing that everything is, to the oblivion existence is, and the unity that is apparent in that, this can only been seen of course, if you look deeply enough, past the layers of sand swirling in this raging storm. It is perhaps my task to represent with words all this that I see around me in partial form, but I must also be wary not to lead people to those amongst us whom I have seen residing in silence in their own desert culverts.

Work

At secondary point
alone I sit
With nothing to ponder
and little to keep my mind a lit.

This job is grueling,
tiresome at best
Pushing me ever so greatly
- this physical test-

When shall they come and relieve me?
I cry
That I might leave this desk
- for but a moment -
not be left here to die

They wait there, they stand
in that line and glare;
For I shan't help them
- I just sit here -

For us both it is not fair.



Two days in a row
at this second point;
At first it did greatly me irritate
I know idleness here
would soon drive me mad
with nothing to do
I'd fast be irrate

So I sort cards through the day
to occupy time;
I won't wholly use taxpayer money
to linger here,
composing rhyme.

I recommend this choice
as you sit here too;
It will make the time go by,
your hours seem like few.

Cockroaches

"Fuck"
Said my bus neighbor. "Fuckin' cockroaches". As I sit idly or ideally, by him I begin to inch further away. My fears are unjustified though. Why would this lumping proletariat riding the chariot of the people try to harm little whacked out me? These fears are inconsequential though for in that moment of time I thought like a rabbit in a snare. Minus the screaming and kicking. Although that did come to my noodle.
"Pardon?" I ask hesitantly. Pardon? Is that damn judge after me again? I digress however. After getting on this busing vehicle at a street that has no meaning or consequence in this story I went, naturally to the back of the busy. Don't want to hob-nob with the driver, a grumpy baby-boomer who wants nothing more then to let teens not beat the living Matlock outta him. I pay the man. Capitalism is still running smooth. I move my ten dollar sneakers to the back of the bus. Near a sketchy looking character. We are kindred spirits he and I. Shady, unsure of what we're up to. We mostly hang about in darkened alleys waiting. For what, you ask? You'll never know. WE don't even know. Or do we?
"Cockroaches, man" The raspy slightly drunk/high voice of my new found soul mate explains. "They're all cockroaches. Scurry around their pathetic lives and when they see the light the hide from it, Man." I am unsure why he thought I was the Man. I dressed much like him. My red checked shirt sheltered underneath a cracked leather jacket. These questions are meaningless however as I have seen his inner turmoil brought up.
"You mean these people?" I ask, fearing for not my life but the life of...well actually my life. These people who tend to rant to complete strangers usually end up on the bell tower wearing a viking helmet singing John Philip Sousa while popping off passers-by. Oh, wait. That's me. My friend, whom I will name Bob, nods his shaggy bearded head. His look of utter disgust and slightly vacant stare put me into his state of mind. We are one.
Silently I think that he's right. People are afraid of the truth. We hide when the great light of truth goes on. Shy away from its blatant oppressive staring eye. We run around putting on airs of superiority and strut like roosters in our proverbial roost. Kings and queens of all we perceive. Except as far as we can see is the plank. I look with a new found respect at Bob. He has uncovered what most never do. Granted, he had some chemical help but nonetheless he is at the apex of thought.
I stare in new vigor at this new Plato, this peon Socrates, this uncouth Aristotle. Hoping for more of his deep, Buddha like wisdom I eagerly await his new statement of truth. To which he promptly passes out. When I left the bus at a stop that was not mine (although I'm sure that someone has it) I walk with a purpose to a place I don't know. Bobs ramblings could be put down as nothing and I could carry on with my little messed up life and not ever think these things. Too many things rattle in my brain. Too much story, too much narrative, or maybe just too much.
I doubt if I will see Bob again or indeed if he will remember that fantastic Wednesday night. I'd like to think he will. As I lay my head on my mattress in my shoe box apartment I smile a smile of contentment. No cockroaches do I fear. People will be people until that orange ball kills us all. Its just the government Nazis I fear. Cockroaches some may be, but they are cockroaches needed to be turned to the light.

Scientists- the new prophets

I've been seeing posters around campus advertising for some environmentalist get-together. Besides the innitial irony of such paper advertisements posted by folk who care about the trees another more perterbing detail has made me awaken from my long silence here on the blog. The get-together advertised is called "Smells Like Green Spirit". I couldn't help reading this without noticing the irony dripping from the organic ink of its grainy recycled paper. This title is an obvious reference to Nirvana's anthem for the early 90's, "Smells Like Teen Spirit", a time when people had become so disollutioned with the decadence and horrid gaudiness of the 80's that they began to proclaim en mass that they didn't give a shit about anything. The spirit of this song invoked images of raggedy teens swaying apathetically back and forth, arms akimbo, maws gaping, eyes vacant, all embrassing the utter stupidity of life without once cracking a joke about it. Why would an environmental group that obviously cares about something invoke the image of one of North America's most apathetic moments, or perhaps that is it. Perhaps they do not actually care about the environment, perhaps they too are merely wishing to be entertained, standing before their wizzened dildo David Suzuki, painfully aware that he has no capacity to perform anything but intellectual debasement. Incidentally, David Suzuki walked past me on campus last week. I felt to ashamed that I didn't tell anyone. Why didn't I at least do something horrendously strange to make hsi day a bit stranger. Now don't get me wrong, I don't hate he environment, I rather wish that trees and grass would grow over our cement prisons, but I just don't see any life or passion in the so called "environmental movement", or intelligence for that matter. I see politics for sure, people lobbing arguments back and forth in imagined public spheres, but their words mean as little to me as the vegitables thrown by the Paris mob.

Perhaps my issue in this circumstance just goes back to my loathing for isms and ists. If history shows us anything it is that the pulsating wave of human activity moves up and down the beach regardless of the puny humans caught up on it, desperately clinging to driftwood and if they're lucky, a surfboard, or maybe even a boat. Either way the wave will break, dissolution will set in and a new ideal will be set up for us to prostrate ourselves before. We will find a new entertainer who will be both our god and our slave, and we likewise will fullfill both rolls in reciprocation. And so we will find ourselves caught once again in a fruitless attempt to control history, to stack the blocks of each moment, so that we can achieve a dream we had about the future before we were born.