“Am actually not “beat”
But strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic”.
J.K.
A
Clap within
The core of air...
Applause of rippling blue...
Peals of concentric light
Bursting through a carillon of clouds,
The tolling of light in the circumference of sight...
One tone
Rumbling through the dome of sky.
Vast stone of golden sound splashing down,
Descending into the convolutions of the ear,
Spiraling into the primordial ...
Splashing waves clapping within the heart:
Ventricles, ventricles
Of sky, heart and bells
Pounding and pounding
One space
Over and over...
A basis for formless faith.
Bells, bells!
Like
Huge goblets overturned
Spilling
Sonic wine
Everywhere
Everywhere
Through North Beach
And Beyond...
Pealing belfries of air unpeeled
Four cornered rush of annunciation
A sky pounding above
The City
Rumbling... ringing...tolling...bringing
A summons
To a place and time
Here and now
.....
I try to speak, my friend
But by Saints Peter and Paul
It is impossible.
Not a word more can be said
Within this discussion.
We have no choice but to wait
And listen
Whilst our thoughts lie flat,
Our tongues numb
From this concussion
Yet rise and quicken
And come with me.
We must attend,
We must swell and thicken
The Mass
Of this silent body
Transformed inside
The transubstantiation of sound.
And though you may say I am crazy
We must cross ourselves
At this entrance,
Must dip our hand
In this font of speechlessness
Inside this god-forsaken room
In which our soul is cloistered
And let this immense volume of bells speak for us,
Let it rebirth us,
Let it be our very reason and Logos,
Let it bring us to that which is unconditioned
As we cross the threshold that tells us
A glorious Beyond awaits,
One very eternal for those with any kind of faith.
Yet for now not a thought can be uttered
Until this clangor of bells that speak
Of the souls in heaven
And the souls in hell
Has come to rest
Like a rock at last reached the bottom
Of a vast well,
Here amidst this congregation
Of streets utterly profane,
Streets most sacred
Gathered here in service;
A hush of worship
Lifting from the sidewalks
As we follow all these forms
Of liturgy arranged before us
Day after day, service after service.
Let us depart
And create our own eucharist
And create our own ecclesia
On the foundation
Of these streets laid before us
As we have spoken.
Let our hands and hearts feed the poor
In flesh and spirit
And let the charity of our blood
Transfuse into this confusion
And let us bring health unto sickness,
And let us give to it
Our entire essence
Whilst the bells
Of Sts. Peter and Paul ring
This moment through North Beach
As we make the street
In the same way we invent the sky
In this golden eternity
That tolls...
Bounding,
Bounding through a score of blocks
Pounding echoes into walls
As we walk through a maze
Of dim, derelict hotel halls
Inside penniless senses,
Barely making purchase of these corridors
As they end in an reverberation of mirrors
That dissolve us...
All is void of identity
Only streams of silver...
Void nor not Void; neither not void nor not not void
There is no self or other
Inside the face of reality's illumination.
Eh ma, There is no percipient at all!
All sworn!
Before the Great Seal of Moonlight
Stamping down this hall at noon.
We roll, we're rolling away, ma vie!
Past all of the livesMine, yours, theirs, ours...
That are going someplace
Without us
Abandoning us
Along a way
In which no one can plainly see but
That very little of what they ever wanted
Was never received,
And because of this emptiness,
They have wanted
So many things, almost the infinite ...
Yet you and I like planets roll down the hall
With ephemerae of poetry,
Drunk, so drunk...divinely, sublimely...
Hearing One Hundred Songs
As we pour past rows of ragged, run-down doors
With so much doom inside,
Lost, closed together, yet like palms conjoined
And pointed toward some magnificent sanctuary
Beyond,
Well beyond these tawdry floors.
And now outside...this,
This is the feast to which we are summoned:
A long service of pavements -
Naves of avenues
Transepts of side streets
The stations of the cross at a dozen cross walks
Past glittering mosaics of storefront windows
Down arcades of retailers like saints in niches
As the voices of cars from the quires of traffic
Sing the canticles of office buildings
Beside lecterns that bear the electric scriptures
Born from the immanence of power lines
As now in Communion we see
Before the altars of commerce
Hands outstretched and yearning to receive
From cashiers, customers, and tellers
The quotidian sacrament
Within the divine economy
And rising up, loftily, far in the East End,
Behind the many pulpits of banks,
The Rood of high-rise corporations
On which this world is sacrificed...
Oh, gloria en excelsis!
Wafer of pavement!
Wine of sound!
We feast!
Yet in the palms of the truly faithful below
Such as we
Bibles of poetry are read with devotion
In pews of public park benches
Beside fonts of holy puddles
Ringing in rainbows,
This vision swaying from a censer of fog
In which we breathe
A din of essences illuminated by the votives
Of oncoming streetlamps and headlights,
Billowing forth an incense of
Formless forms processing down the streets
And alleyways of North Beach
To the jazz-fast metronome
Of SoundLightMovementStillness
Another long swallow of sound
And my ears drown
In this reverberant wine
Bells, belly of sky like a bellyful of wine
Within the ear…surrounding and overpowering everything.
Ringing bells of
Divine Remembrance...
I am drinking again
The tolling of the hours
Of my life pouring
With atone
I close my eyes with you, my friend
Whom I will never really know, but only feel
Yet that is all that is needed
And listen with you to the flight of bells;
See the flight of seagulls, the flights of buildings, the soaring
Wings of high-rise corridors flowing into seraphic clouds of emptiness
Beholding alchemical angels
At this hour come forth in secret
From Lower Assembly
To perform their select and holy office
Of decanting an immense and invisible glory
Down the towering steeple
That subsides into an altar cup
The Moment of
Transubstantiation
Nothing Everything
A golden eternity
Air bread
Wine sound
Blood time
Body city
Atone
At that signal gesture across the sacrament by the priest
You must trust
There are wings
Of blessing and healing there
A gloss of invisible feathers
Like hands
Passing over the loaf and cup
As the faithful solemnly feast
On this alchemic grace bestowed upon them,
Going forward in peace...
.....
This is so, and so shall it be, and it is finished
As pigeons suddenly rise up
Into the Cloud of Witnesses
Towering above Washington Square
In a hosanna of saints and angels...
Wisps of fog and clatter of wings.
Wings
Become
Wafer thin
In the distance,
Taken in
With a sip
Of wine
Merging between rows and rows of downtown buildings,
Rising into the ceiling of the skyline
Portraying the apotheosis of The City
Into a heavenly, heavenly San Francisco fog
And from a bag at a Washington park bench
Outside the cathedral
We celebrate!
O Ignis Spiritus!
O Euchari!
O Ecclesia!
This loaf, this bottle...
You stand and rave
Loudly proclaiming!
"In our very thinking
Is an element that can be strengthened and deepened,
Through practice,
To penetrate all that our senses do not reveal.
You shout
There is no division between faith and knowledge
-They're one and the same-
And there never has, is, or will be
Between the spiritual and physical world"
And now you really roll...
"There's no division between anything!"
And the lady and her miniature,
Well, whatever it is, seemed worried.
Even the dog.
And with a stride you stand on the bench
"All apparent duality is conditioned by the structure of our consciousness,
Which separates our perception and thinking,
But together they give us two views of the same world;
One visible, one invisible.
Neither has primacy, and neither is real
Yet the the two together are necessary
And sufficient
To arrive at a complete understanding of the cosmos.
Christ died on the cross for this!"
Agghhh!!!
.....
I smile
Like Mahakasyapa
With a flower in my hand
From the bunch that you bought
To shower on every homeless person
You will find tonight
For in flesh
I am a few years older
And already know this.
I merely point
To the sky when you are done.
But what the hell, I think
We are poets, poets maudit
And nothing we can ever say
Nor do
Can or will be
Taken serious
And we surrender unto nonsense,
Knowing that we are already saved
And already enlightened
Despite ourselves
And thus we meditate and write
With the aim of going nowhere
And saying
NOTHING.
And that is why we are most holy
Though our relationship
To The Church
As we stand outside it
Drinking
Is a most complicated one,
And even more so our theology.
As Friday night arrives for revelry
And there is
Wine
Wine, sacred and profane.
Wine for Mass
Wine for the masses
Tourists now arriving in North Beach
For beatitude, for communion, for anything.
Droves of urban pilgrims come questing the spectral paths
Of those poets who walked here before and departed in fame
Now many times over translated from these streets
Into many languages.
They trace their footsteps, looking for some charisma left behind
In those alleys renamed in their honor
Near the holy shrines of bars and cafes
In which they read and wrote and drank
And the reliquary of bookstores
That contain their canonized books
For sale, and very nearby, so too a ton of pussy
That swings sideways from poles
And dances in your lap.
And there's no shortage of spirits here to drink.
I know. I know very well.
This place is all still very alive
Where these poets made their mark.
An invisible X authorizing the site where they once stood,
This poet who left a signature of his spirit
And gave ecstatic witness to it all
Now only a mood
Permanently buried in these streets
As you and I stand off to the side
And watch, unnoticed,
Those who come in search of poetry and poets.
.....
And so the masses come to North Beach everyday
To eat, to drink, to shop and be entertained
To take the sacraments of culture in this precinct
To, in their own way, pray to this saint, this beatific, this canon,
This martyr, and this madman
Of the Church of Art.
Street side cafes on charming side streets.
Wine on altars, wine on tables and bars
Decanting the wind,
A wind that needs to take in your four walls
Wafer thin
And listen to your blood
The entirety of the room summoned and arrested
Beside this wine in a bag on the floor
As I peer through my window
And realize that
This is all a test
And attest to this...
Holy mind, holy page
Sanctification
In the substance
Inside a pain of window
Nothing
I have learned
Is everything
And mysteries hurt and I want out
Inside my mind is a broken hip, grinding
A scar left forever
From a wrestling match with an angel
One long night ago I think before I was born
As I wrestle with the window
Sliding open the sky and leaning far into it
Wearing a sash of window frame, bare chested
And loudly hollering for a rematch
From this overlook of North Beach
Pure perception, pure feeling
My friend
Yes, broken syntax, fractured sense
Compression of then and now into a sorcery of metaphor,
The entire collapsing of space and time into words
That stagger
And few adjectives to describe this
Beside many prepositions that
Must be left dangling
From balconies of fire escapes
That spill down narrow, iron ladders of the implausible
Burning in the confusion of subject and object
As we hang on, helplessly.
Our lives on fire
Suffocating not in smoke,
But in the rarefied heights
At the end of the rope
That rings the bells,
Trying to speak
As they toll for us
Whilst we clap
In the joy and peace
That having little in world
Brings...
Reverberating in it endlessly
Open window, sky, diaphane, dimensions
And make up a new mind
To invent this all
For the wind, the wine
Drink the blood
Of ink
Between the stars
Let the page be a wafer
“This is his body
This is his blood”
We are making our souls worthy
Writing with the ink of our blood
Drawn from the well between the stars
Our bones are pens, our souls the point between speechlessness and the page
To write the universe a poem, a love letter to a total stranger
Us
Just us and god
In the beginning
We must not be too overt in our overture
Must find our range and sing it as best we can,
Knowing this is as best we can sing
Though the poem will never be finished
But in the end, we will tell the poem
We are god.
The angels answer to the blood
Hot, moist alchemical substance
Pouring into the retort of the page
Holding it up to the sun,
Turning it to gold...
And so to the dead who speak to the living
And the living who speak to the dead
Seeking a Mysterium Coniunctis, a Magnum Opus
With every sigh when we rise from our chair
And take a step back, frustrated and lost
Because we cannot find words worthy to speak to them
And they not at all to us but
Through the pendulum of November bells that toll,
not just an hour told
But lifetimes
Inside a window in which the transparency of the city glows
In a constant epiphany in glass and concrete...
Flesh of the world
Rooftops of infinity
Horses’ hooves down Columbus in the moonlight
The pyramid glowing in the distance
They all lead us somewhere;
Exhaustion and resurrection
Say a prayer as the jazz begins to steam from the brewery on the first floor
Bitches Brew times 3, a resurrection, an insurrection
As every ecstatic note leads to exhaustion
And tomorrow the bells will ring again
And we will need to find the reason to write another poem
And will need to find the faith to believe there is a reason
And somehow
It and everything
Will be found just where they are,
Already perfect, beyond any reason
Arising without any effort
Just as the bells will always be on time
Beyond any, any expectation.
Forever capturing us by surprise,
Their sound alone enough
To save us
Notes: the epigraph is from Jack Kerouac. It is taken from Lonesome Traveler.
The reference to Saints Peter and Paul is the name of the long serving Catholic church in the North Beach district whose bells inundate the neighborhood when they call for Mass.
LVX
JAL
