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.