At Day's End

At day’s end

The river reaches the sea

And not until then.

At day’s end

River and sea amass with the sun

In a conflagration of fire and water

In a tremulous swell that hovers, vibrates-

In a tremulous swell that wavers and hesitates-

In a tremulous swell that can no more linger-

In a tremulous swell that can only take wing

At sunset as the edge of waves roseate and gold

Begin to darken

Here memory captures the substance of the day

Which is written deep in the core of the subconscious,
Which is written in the clouds. 

Time and water, a vagrant team

Roll out their beds of waves

Calling the shore home

As the world becomes deeply quiet

At the outskirts of twilight

The sky breathes out a retrospective of clouds

That streak across the face of the waters,

A mirror of the heavens

As the moon rises

You enter the stillness,
Enter the point where the river meets the sea ,
Where all the currents of memory join.  

(Drunken Moment)

Drunken moment

Slurring its second, butchering its speech

Leaving its tortured sentence

To be completed by the next sotted tongue

Of time.

Time’s intention never clear.

Its point never attained

Its meaning left hanging.

Whatever it was trying to say,

It can’t get it out.

Moments fallen into the stupor of oblivion.

My mind drunk, too

But not as drunk as time.

I parse this conversation

As time tells me

To catch up with it.

I take another swig of seconds.

Eventually, at this rate,

I will fall into oblivion, too.  

I complete the context

Of what time is trying to tell me. 

It’s completely up to me

To discern what time is desperately

Trying to tell me.    

But the whole universe is drunk.

Time and space inebriated

And the word that must be heard

Slurred.

The world a blur in a stupor.

The Void Does Not Exist

Upon the hills are the black towers of nameless mystery, of horror and of fear. All prejudice, all superstition, dead tradition and ancestral loathing, all combine to darken her face before the eyes of men. It needs unconquerable courage to begin to tread this path. Here is a weird, deceptive life.   Such light as there may be is deadlier than darkness, and the silence is wounded by the howling of wild beasts.

A.Crowley

Book of Thoth, Atu 18

                                                     I

                                        Somewhere In The Mind

The wounded moon emanates

Her cold confusion

Over an empty, echoing plaza;

Echoes that distort the dimensions of this time, this place,

Echoes emanating solely from footsteps in your mind

That weave their way in isolation through the dark mystery
Of  life.

You walk on

Inside this plaza overflowing like a glass with the night sky.

.

Quarantined inside your mind,

In the throes of a world crisis

Deep inside the night                              alone

Many strange twists of

Deeply rooted  fictions

Echo within the corners of                   the mind,

Echo in a wilderness                              of reason,

Echo in a confrontation with

All the grotesque masks

Worn over                                       the abyss of ages,

Echo in a phantasmagoria of ancient terrors
Around a bonfire of madness

Wrought with flames of psychomachia

As the weight of centuries

And all of their fractures                       

Resonate in the uranean exteriors

Of cathedral domes

Ascending in the apotheosis of a twisted, mythical sky.

All these fractures and distortions

That echo in the rows of

Enormous plutonian banks

Towering in wealth and menace,  resonating with war and ruin

As the saturnian weight of centuries

Echoes in the arcane lexicon                        

Of an architecture from millennia past that resonates still
While you stand distracted for a moment
Before fine balustrades

Of a long veranda beside dream palazzi

Contemplating the names of the details of the architecture:

Rare nomenclature reflected in your thoughts

Like the moon in a rain plash.

You look upward from this world into the sky

And find  Her lurking  directly above,              resonating brightly.

You dwell in the wound of the moon,

In the tender ache of time and form,
Dwell in a series of reflections

Between appearance and reality,

Dwell in a mere lexicon that resonates in your thoughts.

You are lost among the stars and planets in a dream.

The void does not exist.

                                                     II

                                       The Chess Players In The Plaza

The skeleton 

Of the abstract of the spirit 

Rattles as you walk.

The plaza unfolds like a rose in winds of mystery.

Before your eyes a template of hidden phenomena arises,

That which the superficies of the mind veils,

The pure math of divine architecture

Existing on another plane.

The perceived forms of the eternal world
Are those which are constantly perceived in this one,

You swoon at the complexity of the divine  sorcery

That swirls around existence  

In so many deeply embedded patterns of psyche, 
So many strange conditions.

You plumb the depths of all the distortions
That twist within and around you.

With every step you seem to dive down deeper inside this plaza

There is an history and a culture here completely over your head,

Filled with chaos and beauty.

It places demands on your attention from a time so distant.
That you fitfully oblige

To the point of schizophrenic hallucination.

The lines of the architecture becomes tensile, skeletal
At this late hour.

The ghost of outlines in the moonlit plaza
Subsume your mind

As your footsteps are the only sound heard, echoing

With despair for self and world.

Feeling a sudden strike of blood, holding your breath

You seem to swim,          as you dodge a mirror of rain pool,

Past  reflective stars beside colonnades of light

Sitting in long, etheric rows of tables

Playing chess, slowly

Plotting their next move in the waters of space.

The void does not exist.

Suspended in unfathomable noesis, glowing brightly,

Here  the snowy-headed masters of the heavens

Ply their strenuous exercises of super reason.

Equally matched, thinking countless moves ahead.

They pick up a pawn and

Move you.  

The void does not exist.  

And here the stars sit, retired or vagrant,

Playing game after game of chess in the heavens

They plot their next move of all

Beside the great renaissance merchant houses

Of Venus.

 And the last stars before they fade,

When the sparrows begin to flute,

Move in a brilliant end game of chess.

Night requests a draw.   Dawn accedes.

You drown in the adept play of  the stars.

This is how the true masters perform,
Setting up brilliant decoys and

Inconceivable sacrifices
Made to eliminate the guarding piece

Of the self-clinging ego.   Checkmate.

The void does not exist.

                                                     III

                                        Seafarers in the Clouds

Dazed, you look upward into the starry sky

“All things have the nature of a magical creation”,
said the Awakened One

Patterns in the subtle physical account for all manner of
Conditions in the physical.

Breath is a subtle manifestation of space.

You enter a state of non-thinking
And the space between two thoughts.

Monkey mind is bodhicitta

You ponder these things on this long, misty chaotic night

In which seafarers heave their nets and lines in the clouds,

Fishing for you.

Your thoughts become tangled like the lines of the seafarers

In the storm of cosmic mind.

Language no longer suffices but it won’t go away.

It only tangles like fishing lines in a storm:

What the hooks are caught on not even the 10,000 sages can say.

Still looking upward, still dazed.

The moon is a time bomb in the sky.  

You are the fuse.  You tick away.  

Some day you will explode in the heavens.

Above you, you watch as those toilers in the seas of clouds

Toss the jeweled net into the ocean of roads.

Heaven and earth are captured in the shining mesh

Of One Mind.

You gaze into the vastness of stars

That plot your moves.

The void does not exist.

                                               IV

                                 Key To The Moon

You reach into a pocket of your mind

And pull out the key to the moon

You insert it in the moon inside your heart

And turn the key

And a huge door is ignited open

As music is playing loudly

From orchestras inside lunar ballrooms.

You are surrounded by a festive scene of

Devas, nagas, yaksas, gandharvas, asuras,

Garudas, kimnaras,  mahoragas and countless bodhisatvas

And other celestial beings.
Who celebrate your buddhahood

But at just that moment the moon sets

And is gone like a dream.

You watch her disappear, bearing her wound

Of illusion.

But the music plays on in your mind.

Dawn forever awaits at the cliffs

Of lunar seas that pound the aethers

In which you swim in the dawn of eyes.

The void does not exist. 

                                                IV

You pick up a tarot deck and contemplate the esoteric meanings of Key 18.

This is the key that opens the mysteries of The Moon,
The Corporeal Intelligence.

The Great Work is the Transformation of the Body!

This work is the ultimate aim of alchemy

And its demands are a nearly super-human magnum opus.

You enter the archetype of The Moon

As the symbols play their magic upon your mind.

You understand that the body can undergo a vast transformation

And that the Moon Key and its many symbols

Facilitate this transformation as they explain how
Somatic consciousness

Arises out of the primordial sea of mind-stuff guided by

Superconscious forces of evolution

That sublimate matter  in order to improve vehicles
For their progress along the Path.

You are stunned by the magnitude of it all.

The void does not exist.  

You enter the scene of the card

And find you are a crayfish crawling

Scorpionically out of the seas of primal mind

Headed down a long, moonlit path

That leads to the mountains of understanding and wisdom

As you navigate between the art of the dog

And the nature of the wolf, seeking balance

Between what should properly remain wild

And what is properly brought to art

You find the way to the mountains blocked
By towers of civilization

Still there is a moonlit path that undulates between them

Leading to completion.

You contemplate the divinatory meaning of the card

And find that The Moon is a card of illusion and deception,

And therefore often suggests a time when something is not as it
Appears to be.

Perhaps a misunderstanding on your part, or a truth you cannot
Admit to yourself.

 A Difficult period, one of Insecurity, Mental confusion,
Deception, Hidden things, and Fear. 

 You read Crowley on the subject.

This is the threshold of life; this is the threshold of death. All is doubtful, all is mysterious, all is intoxicating. Not the benign, solar intoxication of Dionysus, but the dreadful madness of pernicious drugs; this is a drunkenness of sense, after the mind has been abolished by the venom of this Moon. This is that which is written of Abraham in the Book of the Beginning: “An horror of great darkness came upon him.” One is reminded of the mental echo of subconscious realization, of that supreme iniquity which mystics have constantly celebrated in their accounts of the Dark Night of the Soul. But the best men, the true men, do not consider the matter in such terms at all. Whatever horrors may afflict the soul, whatever abominations may excite the loathing of the heart, whatever terrors may assail the mind, the answer is the same at every stage: “How splendid is the Adventure!”

You realize you’ve been moving through this key

All night and all these many nights like this one.

But here you understand the stars guide your evolution
And that it is in solitude that one meets
The Hermit
On the Mountain of Completion,
Only in isolation that one passes through the abominable towers of The Moon

Here alone you pull off your own mask to reveal

For a  moment

The Vast Countenance

To entertain the void

And the battle is won

For now. Yet

The void does not exist.