Ode to Artaud

 

He threw a handful of dirt
Into the open grave
Of his own face
And with chattering teeth
Ate there the bared earth
Of delirium
From which he was born.

And his face, a field of death,
Being empty,
Became a door
Through which he welcomed
The angels he needed-
Madness and hallucinations that were real,
An absolute abyss
That opened straight like the bound jacket
Of a book not written,
Not written with words, undefiled,
Opening to a reality
That only the mad
Would consent to read,
To a play stage

That only the mad 

Would consent to attend.

Entering the land of the shamans
Strung-out, deranged, packed half-dead on a horse, 
In high deserts he danced with the ghosts of natives
Among the mountain cacti, escaping reason.

At this borderline, he was deported back
To the land of the sleepwalkers
And, in extremis, performed a drama in Paris streets of death,
A dans macabre, spasming in electro-shock.
A dance-step halfway between thought  and gesture
Inside a theater of cruelty,
An asylum house for insane shepherds
Who won the crown of laurel for cracked eclogues
In those hills where the logic of lies was subverted
In search of the poetry of new laws
To end mental slavery.

Artaud knew hell
Could be escaped
Only through the ruthless discipline of art.
His art looked into the very bottom of things

As he gazed down into an open grave.  

To Bukowski: I Just Wanted To Let You Know That...

Your challenges to the dark
That you hurled, over and over, through a window-
That magically unbreakable radio

Of your raging, drunken voice 

That you tossed through the broken glass of your page.

 

Those nearby, your friends in the darkness,

Can hear it still every night, loud and clear,

In that alleyway of words you spilled

Like low-life rotgut, blaring Mahler or Mozart.

And all the windows your verse
Broke, hungover, black-eyed, shattered in that alley,
They walked through shards of glass
But still managed somehow to get to work- to get written-
Because they had guts...they had a Joan of Arc style.

They were attracted to dangerous living, like her,

But had no intention of becoming a saint.

Yet they knew of martyrdom

Framed in hard times and obscurity.

They knew of the life of a tortured poet

Who ironically became the patron saint

Of anti-social asshole poets,

Who drank, bet on horses, and fought too much,

But was an intriguing character

And a decent writer.

Every morning, unhinged,
You'd haul those broken windows down the street
To get a new pane, like a fresh page,
That you'd insert into the tombstone of your typewriter
And fill with junk yards, city dumps,
Fill with madhouses, with hospitals, fill with graveyards,
Fill with a life lived along the edge of a grimy alley.

Creating yourself there, a self-invention from your typewriter,
You punched the keys in the face to let them know who was boss
And hurled the radio of your voice that night, drunk again,
Through the windows of emptiness and pain.

As the number of shattered windows climbed
Into the hundreds
You just went on breaking them
Although you realized that
You had created, in your words,
 "Very little."

But that radio kept on playing...

A sardonic confession

Like the first movement of Beethoven's Opus 101

That strikes at the wry and nitty-gritty

With a casual, plaintive voice.

 

I hear it playing there

In all the broken glass

Of your life and verse. 

Notes: this poem draws heavily on a poem CB wrote called, "A Radio with Guts."

Hymn To The Winds of Heaven

O, you heavenly winds, I hymn you
On your way across The All's horizon.
Every mote of every point along your journey,
You join them in your swelling progress.

All that radiates before the eyes
Is sheltered inside your sparkling boundary
That opens onto the illimitable.

O, you divine breaths
Everblowing through the innermost chambers
Of the Great Mind in which Man is enmansioned,
I praise thee and am overcome.

At every moment

In the threads of tiny whirlwinds

You catch me, and when I am caught

I see at once a million thoughts

Unrolling in the vast fabric of wind

From which the world is woven.

In clouds you roam, 

Spinners of its halls and domes.

Aureate rays burst through, enrolling the soul 

In your lessons within a university of Light.

You speak and everything listens.

You teach and all things learn.

 

I praise thee, your every act that manifests
Plain and true inside the brilliant mirror of the day,
This rolling sphere of reflection which you draw through the air.

Upon you, winds, images form even as they scatter

In the next quicksilver moment

Recorded in my memory.

And there in a moment's reflection
I see my earthly dress, this human flesh,
A flame of sun and moon,
And I must sing with love of its essence,

O Powers All that are Within me,
How this flame breathes the winds!














        

Three poems for Hawaii

                    I

Beneath the canopy

Of towering mango, coconut, albizia and gunpowder trees

The jungle swells in sun-lit waves of green  

Like the belly of a pregnant woman,

Her womb extending for miles across Puna1

 In layers and layers of luminous green upon green.

 

Within, lush ferns and wild grasses

Compete for sunlight
Where boar trails meander

Amidst wild guava trees

And, occasionally, one finds

A small patch of wild orchids that arise

Like the face of an infant that dreams

Inside its mother.  

Here a multiplicity of flora strive     

To fulfill their highest expression,

Each relentlessly climbing for sunlight 

As if squeezed toward parturition.

 

When it rains,

The damp, sweet air inside the jungle

Is like amniotic fluid 

As the passing clouds over Hawaii

Spill drops from off the ocean as they will

Every day, sometimes every hour.

 

                           ************* 

                                II

In my camp deep inside the Puna jungle

A sudden eruption rips through the canopy:

The cries of cardinals

Symphonize around an urgent group call-

Chigo!   Chigo!   Chigo! 

                                                                                                                  

This is rare.  A truly

Stupendous commotion in the jungle!

Never before have I heard the cardinals

Sound this call for so long!

Chigo!   Chigo!  Chigo!

They have all gone off like synchronized clocks

For at least fifteen seconds,

Their collective soul ringing like Monads 

Inside a network of sense and instinct,

An emotion of mirrored recognition amongst themselves

Of some urgent, prime event. 

 

But what?

The commotion dies down..
Whatever its cause, it was stupendous.
Nonetheless, for me it is
Just one more mysterious occurrence
The sign and signification of which
I will never know or understand.   

What did the cardinals say?

Was it a cry of victory or a cry of fear?

 I can't say.

                   ************ 

                          III

The weathered Tibetan prayer flags

Sway between the branches of a tree near my camp,

Heavily-worn to their last threads by the elements.

They too symphonize, but soundlessly,

Their constant supplications 

Swaying the winds of karma-

The prayers tangling and untangling themselves

From the branches that together toss in the ocean breeze.

 

Each one is a spiral dorje',
A diamond lightning bolt of magical intention

Compassionately made to appease the karma

Of all sentient beings.

 

I have faith in the efficacy of each flag

Until they are completely in tatters.

1) The Puna district lies at south-easternmost tip of the Big Island of Hawaii. It's main town is Pāhoa. The district is long-known for its free-spirit and locals are known as "Punatics". It is also the main volcanic area in the state, with Mauna Loa and Kilauea nearby. Puna is "volcano country". 

2)  Cardinals are to be found everywhere in Hawaii. They are by far the most common bird on the Big Island.  

As a Wheel Turning of Itself

A highway in the distance sounds 
And resounds with the smooth whine 
Of wheels making time.

Shriek of metal and murmur of tires,

The piston's rage firing

The wheel's utterance  

Of a circular complaint 

About the long, convoluted effort it takes  

To move.

 

The caviling cry of countless vehicles 

Devoured by the serpent of highway,  

Its ceaseless hiss of loud warning

Twelve lanes wide, uncoiling  

The infinitude of landscape 

Across an incalculable distance 

Of wheel to pavement, 

That fundamental point of  

The serpent's mouth to the serpent's tail, 

Every vehicle swallowed whole 

By the constant space before it,

Leaving behind a slough 

Of serpentine miles in the blaring wind. 

I lay half awake, listening 

To the force of unseen wheels

Inside of wheels  

Unbend the miles 

In infinite revolutions spinning  

Upon an ambient river of  violet-blue asphalt 

As I lay in a trance 

Absorbed in the paradox of distance 

On top the warm, soft road melting into   

The entrance of dreams 

Where all is near and immediate.

And there... upon the endless surface of the mind,

Along its many roads,

I can almost hear it... 

 

The azimuth of a star

Intersecting with the celestial horizon

In a violet hue of both sound and color.

That point of great interest.
I can almost hear it-

 
The complex mathematics infusing space,

An orbital music

Inside a spiral of wheels  

Meshed inside a cog-works 

Of chakras and vehicles  

All connected to the heart.

Every millimeter of space
Intricately tuned to 
The flaming harmonics
Of a music playing here and in the immeasurable
Distance. 

From my bed 
Nothing has nor requires any direction. 
Perhaps nothing really moves.
And distance? 

All of these vehicles going to and fro

In infinite segments,

Second after geometric second,

Through an artificial arc of horizon. 

Closer and closer, 

Yet always halfway there. 

Driving onward, unmoving,

Over parabolas of overpasses that ascend

To a zenith then return

To start again

At their nadir.

 

Through 360 global degrees  

Spreading without boundaries, 

Every moving vehicle evinces 

The mystery of The Chariot.

This vast threefold embodiment 
Of the One Self in all time and place
Rolling down straightaways shimmering in exigence,
Merging onto transcendental highways 
From off the streets of immanence 
Transporting awareness through the mind
And mind through endless dimensions.

  

Porcelain Breeze

 

Rising before me,

Towering

Six feet tall,

A magnificent Chinese vase.

Like a window 

My imagination opens 

And expands

Within its stillness

I enter deeper

Into its perpetual harmony,

Into new paradigms,

And breeze across its surface

Into an artist's vision 

Come alive from the Yuan dynasty.  

 

Deeper and deeper inside

I expand 

In the fire of its creation, 
In the deep breath of air within it, 
In the cool water of its shape 
And the earthen clay of its substance.

 

Breeze into its empty interior

Where all possibility lies,

Breeze to the whirring center

Of a potter's wheel whose hands

Shaped the potential of clay

Into a solid reality 

Of priceless beauty.

 

 

Like a tree 

I stare into a tall mulberry upon it,

Bending gently in the wind

Upon a cobalt hillside and

Blossoming profusely in a white sky,

Its petals snowing to the ground.

 

I marvel as its blue-white flowers

Rotate perpetually in a porcelain breeze

Astride a glaze of wind

That flows in  a ceaseless fountain 

Of quiet victory.

 

I follow its fluid curvature

To the completion of its arc

And take an excursion at its edge

Upon an azure bridge that leads

To what exists one step beyond

On the next inflection of this vase-

 

A distant shore,

Another state of existence-

Confirmed by art,

That the artist painted there 

From his imagination

Which I cannot see,

But imagine.

                                      *** 

Seasons wander among cerulean blossoms falling

In the blanching heat of a summer day

As the white surface of the vase transforms

Into a quiet, winter scene inside these mountains

Of sunless cobalt ridges embraced

By melting, azure bridges in an emergent spring

With nothing before them,

Nothing behind them, 

And nothing in between, 

Spanning a chasm that opens onto a path 

Everywhere released

Inside these autumn mountains,

A bridge spanning a river of vision

Of what is made real

By the imagination. 

 

Footfalls within the imagination 

Reverberate into new patterns

And reassemble the delicate surface 

Of perception,

Internalizing the external scene

Painted on a vase.

  
                           ***
Inside the painting

I arise before the dawn,
A pilgrim emerging from a hermitage
To climb an arduous, ascending path
And venture higher into these ridges alone,
There to laugh and sing- unseen and unheard,

My heart, my imagination expanded,

Escaped from the exile of these Chinese streets

And regenerated.

Resting in the hollow of a stray, wild mulberry

Where setting suns and emperors rest,
I feel my soul weaving like a silkworm

A home from her marrow
For none but herself,
Transformed by the threads of her own body,
Winding round and round in a weird undergoing

Of forming wings within
The excellence of the heart 

That will always strive to break free

And fly upward to beauty through Art

And find its Way. 

 

 

 

Notes

I saw this vase in a bank display window in one of the cities I visited when I lived in China between '05-07, probably Jiangyin but possibly Qingdao, where I was living at the time when I began this poem. 

In Chinese folk lore, the setting sun and emperors were said to rest in the hollows of a mulberry tree trunk.  

A Kiss Is All The Gravity...

Our diamond skin
Burns in the radiance
Of midnight,
Faceted in tiers of moonlight
Satellited by spiraling gleam 

Together our naked clarity
Glances off the undressed sky
And rolls amidst the twining stars
Arching through the night
Returning firmly to light

Upon our moon-bright bodies
In a luminous kiss upon this shore

Each wave dying
And reborn,
Casting liquid diamonds
Upon the melting shore.

This is the vision of you and I
That I will always remember.

And you whispered me a poem:

"a kiss
is all the gravity
that the tide,
so wide-eyed,

feels
of the moon
tonight".

And with a graceful hand

You wrote it in the sand 

I thought hard
And after a few tries
I wrote this for you: 
 

“I find you in the tide pouring across the shore
And you in the wind following each wave find me
And when we meet the sound we make
Is like the secret of the sea uttered thunderously".  

And this secret we shared that night

By every tide break, unrolling in scrolls of foam
Along the parchment of sand
Caligraphied by the soles of lovers, hand in hand,
This elegant script patterned on the font of stars
Waving on the sea as the moon turned 
The cylinder of the tide across the shore
And sealed back the moment's impress
To be seen only once and never more

And our cries carried on and on, carried on the wind.
The ocean inside our skin pounding all night upon the shore
As our kisses defied gravity.