Incan Roads

Building A Way Into The Blood Of The Stars

2011-02-25T08:53:00.000-08:00

As silence builds
Within I build within

The way into the blood of stars,
And find the stairs of many steps inside

Through flights of nerves and veins
Densities unravel with every breath

A winding canal of stairs and stars and vertebrae
Stirring up the spine in floors and planes

Vestibule upon vestibule of
Microcosmic space

Hollows inside a remote place,
Recesses from time constructed out of emptiness

Entrance upon entrance into a vaster anatomy
I climb another stair in utter stillness, out of breath

And stare well into the stairwell's advance
Transfusing in nexuses still ahead

Of subtle blood and stars and neural paths
Pouring down and down

Into this vast tower
Of body, mind, and spirit

On this journey I am but a mendicant,
An exile standing on the border

Between every step of flesh and spirit
Reliant on the alms of stars

Their fresh transfusions of blood
Whose largess I barely merit

My arteries flush with aethers
My blood, my blood of the stars

I build with what builds within my veins
A shelter for the heart of space

One floor at a time, each lain upon single breath
A doorway between my tiny life and death

I reach for now the final floor
Where for me all constructions cease

I light my consciousness aflame with peace
And let my heart lay down its hammer

There I sit me down and receive
And sit me down and receive.

Recital

2010-08-04T10:33:00.000-07:00

There weren’t enough places

In the hall of my voice

For the words to be seated

The auditorium, though merely a blink

Was filled to capacity

And beyond that opening,

From all the ways which they had come

The words stood
In ovation

At the podium, a prism of seven rays,

I was silent, waiting,

But the words wouldn’t cease their ovation

My voice attempted a recital

But was drowned inside this plenum

Into the merest whispers

I could only barely say,
"Every moment is sacred"
But my voice and the occasion were submerged
In ovation

JAL

Ode to Joy by Friedrich von Schiller.

2010-05-07T18:09:00.000-07:00

O friends, not these sounds!
Let us strike up something more
pleasant, full of gladness.

Joy, beautiful divine spark,
Daughter of Elysium,
We enter, drunk with fire,
O heavenly one, your holy shrine.
Your magic once again bonds together
What custom strictly divided,
All Mankind become brothers
Where your gentle wings hold sway.

He who has the great good fortune
To be friend to a friend,
He who has won a dear wife,
Let him mix his rejoicing with ours!
Yes--and whoever has but one soul
Somewhere in the world to call his own!
And he who cannot, let him steal away,
Weeping, out of this company.

Joy is drunk by every creature
From Nature's breast;
Every good one, every bad one
Follows her rosy pathway.
She gave us kisses, and wine,
And one friend, tried unto death;
Even to the worm ecstasy is given,
and the cherub stands before God.

Gladly, as his Suns fly through
The magnificent plan of the heavens,
Run, my brothers, your own course
Joyfully, like a hero off to conquest.

Joy, beautiful divine spark, etc.

Let me embrace you, O millions!
This kiss is for the whole world!
Brothers, above the starry firmament
A loving Father must surely dwell.
Do you fall down, O millions?
Are you aware of your Creator, world?
Seek Him above the starry firmament!
For above the stars He must dwell.

Est Certum Quia Est Impossible

2010-05-03T18:55:00.000-07:00

The turning of the world and its orbit ‘round the sun:
It is certain                          because it is impossible
I believe                                because it is absurd
In each new flight of dawn…

And the resurrection of solar song
That enrings the hills
Is sung by a choir of Seven Rays
Only for fools to scrub their hearts in

Hills on which the robe of dreams
Is beaten and battered upon
And washed in a shower of laughter,
Naked and mystical before the new sun

Pounded and pounded with rocks...
The cloth of the heart freshly cleansed in a corona of laughter
In which to bring the wearer to the mountain
And cry, cry like a beast within

The soap and lather of tears
That must prepare the carried wound
And wrap it in a long guffaw of bandage
In which to heal the world

Rearrange the robes you have
Laughed and cried in    and
Immediately be still
Inside this cosmic sacrifice, staged behind the eyes
As indigo tints and anoints the day and revives it,
Resuscitating the absurdity of Light from out of darkness

For everything you move in
Is a mystery of faith that either shines or blackens
As you negotiate the inscrutable

This labor of madness…
Soul’s fever like a little bird
Fallen from its nest
In the first rays of morn.

As dawn alights, perched on a branch of perpetual beginnerhood,
Twittering its radiant song in the distance
From out of the shapeless dark

Await and be shown its triumphant return,
A vision reserved only for those who have failed horribly
But still believe they have wings

And know of no other impossibility that is as great as
The dawn's impossible and absurd journey back
To the fledgling nest of this strange world.

LVX
JAL

Bells Through North Beach

2010-04-03T18:42:00.000-07:00

“Am actually not “beat”
But strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic”.
J.K.

A
Clap within
The core of air...
Applause of blinding blue...
Peals of concentric light
Bursting through a carillon of clouds,
The tolling of prisms at the corners of sight...
One tone
Racing across the ocean of sky.
Vast stone of multi-crystal hurtling down
Into a maze of ears,
Down past the rippling surface of sound
Into the primordial...
Splashing waves invented from the heart:

Ventricles, ventricles
Of sky 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
                                   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 hotel
                                   And let this volume speak 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
   In stone,
                                   As souls writhe in flames there,
                                   That in the external
                                   Man stands in the portal of hell,
   Burning in greed, hate, and delusion
                                  Yet somehow, as he enters Here,
                                   Beyond,
                                  And very eternal.

                                                       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 bottom
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 souls 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 lives
...mine, yours, theirs, ours...
That are going someplace
Without them
Abandoning them
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, like palms conjoined
And pointed toward some magnificent sanctuary
Beyond,
Well beyond these sublunary 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 pave!
                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;

Hear the flight of seagulls, the flights of buildings, the soaring

Wings of high-rise corridors flowing into seraphic clouds of emptiness

Witnessing 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 therein to a 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

Now that all have cannibalized one the other

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

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 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 Shariputra

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.
Neither of us is published,
Nor will ever be.

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 revelery

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 more than a dozen 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 and names
                     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 poets and poetry.

.....

And 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 atest 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

This overlook of North Beach
Pure perception, pure feeling
My friend
Yes, broken syntax, fractured sense
Compression of then and now into sorcery and 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 toilsomely clap

In the serenity

That

Nothingness

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

LVX
JAL

God the Vintner

2009-10-30T12:48:00.000-07:00

Wild grape blossoms disperse upon a midnight breeze...
I see through this procession of vines
That the parade of all these vessels
Is empty, completely consumed
By a celebration of gusts
Trickling inside the belly of the wind,
Scattering confetti upon the wedding feast of
Time and Space

Yes, the air is thoroughly intoxicated again
The galaxies gather 'round to sing
Drinking songs
The sky above is an endless revel
And the stars fill his Lord's drinking bowl,
Pouring out their essence
Proffering this wine to any soul
Who might keep up
Because this drunken universe knows
But an insatiable thirst
And it swiftly empties that bowl
And fills it again

Drinking of Its Self
To the bottom of all phenomena,
Drinking of Its Self
To the bottom of
Thought and substance,
Drinking of Its Self
Into oblivion,
A riot of fruit
Amidst fields forgotten
But ever bearing.

This universe
Rolls beneath the tables of infinity
The cloth of All dragged down
To cover Its nakedness,
Wandering through the orchards
Of spacious eternity,
Reeling in the clay
Atop beds of minute grape blossoms

Stars and galaxies
A mist of white inside a dream...

LVX
JAL

Passer-By, These Are Words: Yves Bonnefoy

2009-10-03T05:57:00.000-07:00

Passer-by, these are words. But instead of reading
I want you to listen: to this frail
Voice like that of letters eaten by grass.

Lend an ear, hear first of all the happy bee
Foraging in our almost rubbed-out names.
It flits between two sprays of leaves,
Carrying the sound of branches that are real
To those that filigree the still unseen.

Then know an even fainter sound, and let it be
The endless murmuring of all our shades.
Their whisper rises from beneath the stones
To fuse into a single heat with that blind
Light you are as yet, who can still gaze.

May your listening be good! Silence
Is a threshold where a twig breaks in your hand,
Imperceptibly, as you attempt to disengage
A name upon a stone:

And so our absent names untangle your alarms.
And for you who move away, pensively,
Here becomes there without ceasing to be.

Dayears

2009-09-11T09:28:00.000-07:00

Concealed
Before awakening
Seconds, minutes, days, years,
Dayears in a blink of an eye
Seeking to open anew

A place for a dream,
A pillow to display a jewel
Of concealed imagery
Floating on a surface of silk
Feeling
The unveiling
Of beauty
Sealed in power
Of unrevealed knowledge
Encased deep within the soul
Lost in dayears
Of slumber

Seeking to surrender,
To remember
A dream
Fleeing at the opening
Of the eyes
In a blinding flash
Of returning
To a dream

Days
Years,
Dayears later
As it is lived
In the hidden time
Of dayears
Spent dreaming
Until, at last, vaguely
For a moment
You Remember
Where it is
Or maybe never...

LVX
JAL

The Path Leading out of the Heart

2009-08-30T02:12:00.000-07:00

I hear so many, so many whispers

In my veins

I hear so many names, so many

At the edge of silence and seas

They circle perfectly

In a dance of blood

Holding hands with the stars,

Ever leaping on

Fluid music, incarnadine, relentless beat!

Cantillations! Cantillations!

Of the invocable, of the unseen

Secret of All

Men’s lives

That is beyond description.

This circle hymning everything

In which the names, the stars

Do not speak, do not say

Only sing

In whispers spinning

In the circle of blood that is

The violet doorway

Through starlight

Leaving themselves behind in whispers

Dancing with the liquid weight

Of names along the dusty path

Of their blood pulsing in the wind,

This soil of absolute mystery

In which I hear my footsteps

Moving of themselves beside theirs

Along the mute, empty paths of my body.

This flowing outline cut by the wind

Against the blackness of space

Bearing only the fallen signposts

Of fallen stars

Leading the way out of the heart

And the names, so many, so many

Stars in the sky, the fruit of wine

Overripe upon the long, dark vines of night

Plunging down their own secret route

Through veins

To the final ground of blood

Breaking apart atop the empty source

Seeding its own end

Upon the gnarled, ancient roots of the universe

Feeding the soil of all names

That have wed the earth

That have known the long path

Leading out of the heart

That have known the vow of

I do.

The vow of I Am.

The vow of I Will Be

Undone, finished, undone, never finished

Merely undressed, naked, divest

Like a lover’s dress tossed upon the limbs

Of the universe

In a midnight rendezvous

The faint rustling of a dress in the breeze

The faint, unmistakable rustlings of lovers

In the leaves, in the stars and vines

The faint, unmistakable rustlings

Of blood, of names

Straining to communicate, to reach out

To be known, but unable to speak

Unable to say who they are in the darkness,

In the darkness

In which lover’s lose their names

Upon this path leading out of the heart

I see in the darkness

I must travel light

I must travel more light

I see in the darkness

That if I am to go beyond here

I must travel light, and dance upon it.

I must leave my name behind

I must leave it behind

In a whisper

Which I sing.

LVX

JAL

A Drop from a Fountain, a Waft from a Fan.

2009-08-03T13:14:00.000-07:00

Listen: “Good bye.”
These words always deep
Within the air

The wings of a passing butterfly -
Bright sails fading away over a horizon
Surging into the ocean of sky...

All these drops from a fountain
Fanning through the air
To answer for themselves
Their own mysterious question.
Don’t ask,
Listen: “Good bye”

Wings and sails
Are ultimately beyond ken…
Beyond doing…
Almost hallucinatory
Flashes scattering into the white sprays of sun:
A foam of brocaded wings
A jet of crystalline sails
The sweep of a fan
Reaching everywhere
In the Permanence of Wind

All Thus Come…

Filled with tremendous greeting -
Splashing over with endless gratitude at leaving
And leaping into the air with
A brief, but forceful waving
Good bye.

And more than a thousand years ago in China
A young student asked,
"What is one drop
From the fountain
At the Master Hui Neng's temple
Like…?"

One wonders how long he remained
When told by an elder
Who had been there
That it was just like…
One drop
From the fountain
At the Master’s temple.

Repeatedly the solution
Of a question such as this
Flows directly from within
The question itself,
But words bind the way.
How deaf and blind we become
From our own rhetoric.

When will all the rhetorical questions
End?

Yet, we want so badly to understand
What just one drop
From the source
Is really like
While all the fleeting time, it’s here.
Always like nothing else
Only thus come,
Fountaining with suchness
Deep within the air.

Listen: “Good bye”.
The ancient masters
Urge us to leave ourselves behind.
Each of their words is
But One drop from the fountain,
Fanning through the air:

A long stretching path
Leading invisibly back into form
On a ray of light down a transparent river
Circulating through the formlessness of sky
Into one drop
From the temple fountain.

The silent event of an answer
That is just as
The fanning of one’s self
To acknowledge a question respecting
The Permanent Nature of Wind,
And how it is that it reaches Everywhere.

As the Master remained silent
Wafting the air about him,
Insousciant as a butterfly,
The student simply bowed and departed,
Not uttering a sound.
“Thank you”
Was already very deep within the air.

JAL

This Time Is Mine. Michael McCulloh

2009-06-22T07:05:00.000-07:00

The time is mine

I am of normal night

There are many heads

Wrenched upwards

From the tidal swarm

In the antipodes

But no man who dies here

Is buried

In his opposite yearning

Thin ground that blends feet to dust

Here is a placid library

Only stacked with the written rock

Some horde must steal the ship now

And sail out over what is written

Steal all heads stiffening upward

Riding on this… rodeo hide

I’ve never been sold

To the bragging operas

I tear only tunes from any score

Believing song a vice, a tornado

I’ll bring a dance storm for the dead, now

Who must strangle rocks even

To own their broken fingers

We’ll go marching rightside up

Against the opposite tide

Here’s the white bicycle

Where a man fell down, unfortunate

He was not buried there

A mere insomniac

On his own block

He follows me, sleeping now

While I drag his loud forest scream

At the crossing of wide streets

Here many drunks fell silent

Lamenting as I do, of burial and upward air

Struck by sudden impulses, I’d think

They decided then for themselves

And march, if they please, very loudly

While I tune up the edges of our own private tide

All these deaths written

Are so easy to ride on, their memories…

They toss me forward in pure folly

And I shock them beyond burial

As always toward Antipodes:

“I will untrace

What you are written

I’ve come to sow you

As forgotten”

Windows slammed then

And shutters too

And my written trade

Became too rough for wrangling

The winds that sting sideways:

Blood had swarmed here wrong

Stumbled neither toward me

Nor lively death

I could not read this sidewalk

Nor sing the dance of onetime

Toward the brutal broken truth

I lure only the dead from cities

But I know not the living spell

To break those shuttered windows

Rats, I believe, someone, who charmed from there

And children too, according to good legend

Was never paid in gold, but took his own…

I wish to peer inside those faces

That drop their terrible fear

On sidewalks the dead must leave

I am only caretaker

Of the Antipodes

Wrenching heads upward

From its opposite tide

To trance their spirits

Downward toward good ground

Still I wish to peer

Inside the sound of slamming

Shutters, do you sense

What happened there?

Those seamless whispers cause

My robes to crumble…

I am a legend too, no ghost

And remember nothing of my birth

But it was some shuttering window

That crumbled me to this:

Sweeper only of memories

Herding always the glad willing

From such places cursed by living hearts.

Kkachi

2009-05-12T12:04:00.001-07:00

Kkachi
Omen of good luck, harbinger of guests
The Koreans said.
Kkachi
Bird of fables, trickster, figure of the oppressed.
Kkachi
“Springtime of our hope”, the children sang.
Kkachi
Clever survivor inside the concrete forest.
Kkachi
A place in nature for you best,
Your nest upon the tallest tree of every hill.

Kkachi,
Royal blue wings, clean white breast
Kkachi
Tail feathers nearly a foot long

Kkachi
Was your Name,
Your only Name.
Kkachi,
Was like no bird I had ever seen.

With infinite seriousness it flew
Sincerity the substance of its wings
Carried between Heaven and Earth
By the Sons and Daughters of the Elements
Lifted in the Emptiness of its progress
Upon unmoving wings
Its destination already perfectly Accomplished.

Flying across the fields, then gone…
Yet the image of this bird was creased in my mind.
Its flight an utter epiphany

As if nothing had ever moved
As if nothing had ever occurred
As if nothing had ever arisen

But had always been there
Because it had always been here now
Within this field so subtle
That it cannot perceive itself

Within my mind
Without words to describe
What I had just seen,
Everything so wondrously Nameless.

And I asked beautiful Hyun Yoon that day
What was this bird I had just seen.
I could only draw a foolish picture on a scrap of paper
That did little to convey the wonder
I had felt at seeing this prodigy
That had blessed the rice fields like
A Buddhist priest
And rose above the pines,
Its tail feathers trailing long robes
Across the temple floors of sky.
A headcrest like a bonze’s cap
And a song in its throat
Like a small bell with a broken clapper
Like one used in a meditation hall
To end a session.

And full of charm she informed me:

“Oh, yes, that’s Kkachi.”
I still didn’t understand.
What was the name of this bird in English
That had translated me into the Nameless?
And the dictionary said,
Magpie. Nothing more or else.

But Kkachi,
Not Korean magpie
Is its only name

And I realized that there were endless names
Throughout human languages
For the same things, often just bare equivalencies.
Yet throughout this huge world
Each land held unique treasures
That only were seen in that land, only were known
In that country’s language,
Everything else only
Mere approximation.

And I knew
That all Dharmas,
All things, are but temporary
Names taking place in the void
And not real.
Only brief addresses
To aid us on our journey through
The Unknowable.
And I realized then...

JAL

The Birds of Asia

2009-05-11T05:38:00.000-07:00

There are birds in Asia
Which I have never seen
And will never see
That I do not know
And will never know
The Names of
In any Language

Like shimmering dawns
Rising within
Plumes of violet mist
The rays of Sun
Startle into a horizon’s wingspan
Upon the vans of whistling dawn…

Ball of blazing feathers
Across kaleidoscopic cliffs
Swirling into the prism of sky;
Plumages of stone and vapor,
Crags of claws, eminences of beaks
Pointed suddenly toward the Infinite.

Aura of sun and wings, sun and wings
Above jagged spires
Of temple candles.

New flames
Like stars still upon the firmament.
An eruption of wicks
Secreting soft downs of wax molting into sunrise…

Feathery clouds arising from joss sticks
Circling above the Buddha altar,
Flocks of incense spiraling into blue-white wings
Overflowing into a thousand temple courtyards
Awaking to the brilliant singing
Of the birds of Asia.

And dawn’s swift choir of eyes,
Piercing rays and voices of eyes,
Singing mindlessly into eternity…
Exotic chorale of chanting colors:
Indigo pupils, fountaining pools
In which rainbows play…
Spectrums of streaming light
Splaying within the temples
Of my mind

I hear…
Sun rise, sun
Rise sweet
Hear here

Songs viewed in a beating instant
Of visual music
Inside the aviaries of one winging thought.
Birds I have seen and birds I have known.
Those assembled in a concert of memory,
Fluttering like qifu strings into the soaring wings
Of the deep revery
Of my life’s journey through Asia.

Unfolding across the dressing screen
Of my vision,
A coy hint of flesh only hinting
At what truly dwelt
Behind it all:

The sweet call of an Asian bird
Coming forth from behind
An ethereal screen of painted sky,
Giving soft wing
To a downy robe of silk,
Molting nakedly
Before my gaze
And leaping gracefully into my arms
To delicately alight upon my lips
Endless night songs.

Ah, so many…
Wings and bodies coalescing
In soft, feathery beds
Between midnight and dawn.
Spiraling in the air,

Springing in coils of flight;
Gliding daydreams
Streaming aside a ray of light
Abounding with the sweet, eager faces
Of birds and women singing
As they took flight.

Of oriels of golden orioles
Inside the Maiden’s Hair,
Of radiant presences of gold and silver
Pheasants bursting through sylvan ravines
Past carved stone bridges over rushing streams, and
Winging rainbows
Of Mandarin ducks
Splashing into jade pools,
Of Egrets sunning beside tea fields
In ponds of setting bronze that beckoned from afar
The rays of the sun heralded
In the loud, colorful necks
Of boldly crowing roosters
Ringing rudely, day after day,
Through cackling Korean neighborhoods.

These are birds I have seen.
These are birds I have known.

And everywhere
The mythical image of the Phoenix
Throughout Asia, drawn and carved
In a continual reincarnation of carving,
Rebirthing the wood
In which it forever arises in chisled flames.
And I too beside
Her and the incredible remains
Of ancient palaces
Faithfully guarded still
By magnificent peacocks making of them
Perpetual nesting grounds.

Yet the breasts of birds
The color of jasmine tea
Were the breasts of birds
I loved most to drink
And meditate upon
As I sipped a morning’s cup.

Pouring in endless flights
To find the Real
Mountains, temples, palaces and
Birds of Asia.
And knowing the mountain
I needed to climb
Was just the very beginning of thousands
Not even conceived of yet
And all aflutter with birds
I would never know the names of.

Only
Envisioning them forever
At Move or Rest.
Metaphysically suspended
… endlessly… stretching
Within the Supreme Ultimate.

Living arrows of birds and women
Held inside the timeless extensions
Of bending bows and arches

Of exotic trees hurtling toward me in dreams,
Shafts entwined in Maiden’s Hair,
Speeding through
The tiny limbs of Rose of Sharon:
Quivering darts of leaves like gorgeous faces
Tipped with soft, languorous arms
And long, long silk kisses
That pierced keenly to my heart.
And only when it was done, when I entered
Dreamless sleep,
Only then did relief come
As a bird that comes to a tree for rest.

These birds and women of dreams and remembrance:
Captivatingly bound together with them
From midnight until dawn
In Asian forests.
Under sheets of pine
Upon a bed of orange or apple, pear or cherry blossoms,
A whiteness of spring
For my journeys took me past all such flowers
And all such faces,
Flying between flowering magnolias or mulberries
Amidst the limbs of small peonies or
Across wind-swept rice fields.
All these birds and women
Suffused against an opiate-like liquid
Drop of blue-green silk
The electrical color of Asia.

Only
Before I came,
Inlayed in shimmering, metallic rainbows
Of mother of pearl
Into exquisite boxes and chests
A conception swiftly brushed
In a delicate wash of water colors,
Or a stream of thread deeply embossed
In robes of finest tailor,
Embroidered into sweeping fans
Or evenly sliced into endless paper cuts.

Only there had I seen before
The birds of Asia.

But now in this valley of clouds
Which I discover myself,
Filled with a sea of electric
Green-blue rice fields
Beneath the endless blue-green
Mountains of Korea, Taiwan and China,
All is One,
And
All Times and Places are Now,
And too, All embodiments of Persons.
And that is the mystery I ponder here and now
From a house I newly call home,
Atop this rooftop garden
Languidly drinking tea
Beside a woman I have loved.

And as of her
I see for the first time
A bird spontaneously arising
Before my eyes,
Beginninglessly gliding
Across the durationless sky,
Never reaching the end of its element
In this place so
Nameless for me

One married to another sky
As all birds, it appears, must be.
In this place of mysterious dawns,
Mysterious evenings. Imponderable nights.
The streets of endless cities filled with multitudes
Of light and bodies
Extending through them for centuries
Below skies that forever await the flight of dawn.

And all days and all nights in Asia long, I would learn,
If there were no birds, unattached to even the sky,
To greet my waking eyes
In the morning.

Only loneliness
And yearning for the bird
Who could fly into my heart
And freely accompany my travels,
Unattached to it all,
One knowing only how to sing and fly.

It is said that
Journeying Far
Can arouse
Enlightenment.

To gaze upon a flower,
To hear the sound of
A waterfall
Or the song of a bird
In a foreign land
Can arouse
Sudden enlightenment.

Yet, I have found that the only thing
That arouses enlightenment
Suddenly
Is love.

More has been gained by one kiss
From an exotic woman
Than a thousand hours of sitting.

JAL

In the Book of the Disappearing Book, John Gallaher

2009-05-01T05:42:00.000-07:00

It's a spring flowered dress that was her effacement.

On a train, and because of what windows do sometimes.
Her face is floating above the landscape
unaware.

I used to think that I was reporting my life to someone.
I was a radio.

I used to think things happening was unfolding.

The trees are blooming all through her
and there's no one to tell.

And the discipline of roads.
The icy discipline of to and from.

In the air of nothing, I used to think
I was understanding distance.

Green God, in your language of silences, tell me.

Maithuna

2009-04-24T07:26:00.000-07:00

You come
Rose for my kiss
Your face an effloresce

A fountain of whorls
Within a rosarium of gazing
An effervesce cascading
At the center
Of sudden beauty

A raising up
Of liquid petals
Into a pillar of giving

You flow
In sheets of silver
Down the undressed stone
Of my body

As birds of the garden
Applaud us in secret calls
“Shakti-shakta-shakti, yab-yum-yab-yum”
A twilight language below the rose
That, teamed together, a part of each of us
Decodes a feather

As we take from the edge
Of a flower bed
And not even knowing it
We are inside a temple
Entirely by accident

Cast into a myth
Two slight figures.
Neither a sage or adept
Nor in any way equipped
To play the role
Of a god or goddess

But with a tender kiss
Any lovers, whosoever,
May enter the archetype
And what was carnal
Is now transcendent…

Your soul to mine,
My timeless Savitri,
You who have selected me
As your chosen one,
Your Satyavan
I behold you now

Eternal soul of Woman
In splendid form of youth
You lift me
In upward election
With every reigning glance
To re-embark with you
On the long ancient tale
Of how we both began
And hearing it once more
To die in your arms
And so to truly live again

As you take me deeper in embrace
And soon we are hand in hand
In the halls of Shiva and Paravati
Lotus hipped
And hard as rock

The echo of our clothes there
Like those of our names
Fallen like a tree
Heard by none
Save the gods
At the core
Of eternity

In which we move
Inside each other
Like they through this very power
Of love
Conjugating a million verbs
That never move, never separate
Our mouths closed
Upon each other’s in hunger
Within this stone
Of our becoming
The secret language of stone
Accruing no way else, this cibation
This feeding of the crucible
This act of taking food
This mixing of the inner elixirs
This rolling and spinning
Vocabulary of speechless bodies
And forgotten names
For a man and woman
To pass on through eternity
In sighs and moans

Your body speaks of knowing
What it is that made the stone
And mine the temple made from it
As we build higher and higher, making it
A tender edifice we adorn
Like maithuna

Your stunning caresses
Turning me to stone,
Your kisses carving me, your laughter
Sculpting a river in my ears
Your beauty a river in my eyes
These four openings overflowing
With the rivers of innocent paradise
Winding intimately
Through molten interiors
Of granite...
Ringing with pleasure

Throughout this breathless gallery
Of the gods
We emerge in clear relief
From a panoply of reverberations
Hammering within our hearts

As we pass through the archway of each other,
Exploring every hidden recess
Of the sacred and profane,
Past every last bold, exhibition there
Until we find
Within this insatiable gallery
The alcove reserved for us

Coupling amidst
Anatomies of lapping stone,
Tier upon tier
Inside this fluid earth of timelessness
That part of us that has no time-
Quickly carried away
Down the confluences of limbs
To merge in a final sea
Writhing delicately upon telluric tides
Gently turning
As we turn
Into one another
Solidified in ecstasy

Forever together possessed
With the appetite of stars
We devour the fruit of each other’s flesh,
Through layers and layers of sensation,
Down to the stone
To the seed we throw to the earth
That once finished, immediately re-grows
Into an astrocast of our bodies:
Oppositions, conjunctions, strange and rare alignments
Of sextiles and quin cunxes.
All of these erotic poses
The syzygy of heirogamos

As we recreate in the fields of procreation
Like fools gaming at horoscopes
Like babes toying with holy fire
Yet, we are the only children
That we desire for now
And we give birth but to each other
A boy and a girl

Our birth signaled by cries
Yours building
Into a screeching monsoon
My breathing
A shrieking wind therein
Gusts of wind and rain beneath
Mad cloud chase
Our bodies forks of lightning
Inside this hurricane
Our limbs uprooted by
A storm no walls can sustain
We lie drenched:
Naked casualties beneath a rubble of sheets

Dying, we learn we survive
All possible disasters:
The carnivals of treachery
These masquerades
Of adulteries and deceits
These saint’s feasts
Of vengeful martyrdom
The birthday parties
Inside an orphanage of needs
The casinos of love’s bankruptcies
These medal games
Of all of love’s defeats

You remain in my arms anyway
Safely sheathed in my embrace
For we are both edges of the blade
Of the legendary sword of Zain
With which we have brought each other,
From out of stone, to life
And we sharpen each other to a fault
Blade to stone, stone to blade
Until the blade vanishes
And the stone is sanded away.
Honed to nothingness, both.
Just a final sigh between them

JAL

Maithuna, Octavio Paz

2009-04-12T00:51:00.000-07:00

My eyes discover you

naked

and cover you

with a warm rain

of glances.

A cage of sounds

open

to the morning

whiter

than your thighs

at night

your laughter

and even more your foliage

your blouse of the moon

as you leap from bed

Sifted light

the singing spiral

reels-in whiteness

Chiasm

planted in a chasm.

My day

exploded

in your night

Your cry

leaps in pieces

Night

spreads

your body

washing under

your bodies

knot

Your body once again.

Vertical hour

drought

spins its flashing wheels

Garden of knives

feast of deceit

Through these reverberations

you enter

unscathed

the river of my hands.

Quicker than fever

you swim in the darkness

your shadow clearer

between caresses

your body blacker

You leap

to the bank of the improbable

toboggans of how when because yes

Your laughter burns your clothes

your laughter

wets my forehead my eyes my reasons

Your body burns your shadow

You swing on the trapeze of fear

the terrors of your childhood

watch me

from your cliffhanging eyes

wide-open

making love

at the cliff

Your body clearer

Your shadow blacker

You laugh over your ashes

Burgandy tongue of the flayed sun

tongue that licks your land of sleepless dunes

hair unpinned

tongue of whips

spoken tongues

unfastened on your back

enlaced

on your breasts

writing that writes you

with spurred letters

disowns you

with branded signs

dress that undresses you

writing that dresses you in riddles

writing in which I am buried

Hair unpinned

the great night swift over your body

jar of hot wine

spilled

on the tablets of the law

howling nude and the silent cloud

cluster of snakes

cluster of grapes

trampled

by the cold soles of the moon

rain of hands leaves fingers wind

on your body

on my body on your body

Hair unpinned

foliage of the tree of bones

the tree of aerial roots that drink night from the sun

The tree of flesh

The tree of death.

Last night

in your bed

we were three:

the moon you & me.

I open

the lips of your night

damp hollows

unborn

echoes:

whiteness

a rush

of unchained water

To sleep to sleep in you

or even better to wake

to open my eyes

at your centerblack white black

white

To be the unsleeping sun

your memory ignites

(and

the memory of me in your memory

And again the sap skywise

rises

(salvia your name

is flame)

Sapling crackling

(rain

of blazing snow)

My tongue is there

(Your rose

burns through the snow)

is now

(I seal your sex)

dawn

from danger drawn

circa late 50's, early-mid 60's

Temple within a Seashell

2009-04-10T17:24:00.000-07:00

Unseen seas within you sound…intimately…
Spiraling currents of space weave slowly round
An absence living deep inside, without bound
Its murmur dreaming you out…infinitely…

And you are all that you know... this vast depth
That within you flows… layers of being
Billowing out, liquidly emptying
In hollow waves of sound… a long song of breath…

Birds cries, galing winds, screeling sands, tide impacts.
The sound of every force and form that has moved
Across the seas… indelibly grooved
Within your core… one vast note held awax…

Measure after measure, which your ear begins
To behold … to encircle… each instance
That unfolds as you deepen into trance,
Awakening as you look into the winds…

Listening steadfastly to your treasure store
Resounding with boundless echoing
This teeming absence within… beckoning
You to the entrance of the ocean’s endless roar…

JAL circa 93

Vigil, Arthur Rimbaud. 1875

2009-04-09T17:23:00.000-07:00

It is a repose in the light, neither fever nor langour, on the bed or on the meadow.

It is the friend neither violent nor weak. The friend.

It is the beloved neither tormenting nor tormented. The beloved.

Air and the world not sought. Life.

- Was it really this?

- And the dream grew cold.

The lighting comes round to the crown post again. From the two extremities of the room - decorations negligible - harmonic elevations join. The wall opposite the watcher is a psychological succession of atmospheric sections of friezes, bands, and geological accidents. Intense quick dream of sentimental groups with people of all possible characters amidst all possible appearances.

III

The lamps and the rugs of the vigil make the noise of waves in the night, along the hull and around the steerage. The sea of the vigil, like Emily's breasts. The hangings, halfway up, undergrowth of emerald tinted lace, where dart the vigil doves.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The plaque of the black hearth, real suns of seashores; ah! magic wells; only sight of dawn, this time.

Cardinal Motions, Michael McCulloh

2009-04-01T16:08:00.000-07:00

Leaning up against
All cardinal motions

When frozen

Otherwise roiling out,
Wraithsmoke:

Exhalation compressed
Or otherwise decompressed

By a slight flaw
In the mathematics
Of distance

Washes over
The battered trails

And curdled mud,

I had a bad day once.

I found my way down through
The hideous freeways

Clanking and guttering

To a very long, silent stretch
Of dangerous rocksand

Deserted,

For such things existed then
On the edge of Mall-hell

Where the riptide threatened
And generated signs of warning

Against itself

I think I dipped my toe in
And then dived

And paddled around
And wallowed

In the deadly contagion of
Riptide

Without the slightest
Inoculation of
Lifeguard

And the grains of rocksand
Though not your classical

Powders of seaside comfort,
Were the very diamond fragments

The very purest remnant
Of any bang

Big or otherwise
That might have shattered them

Into such a raw state
There by the unfettered
Desert of no boundary

And I think now
That I knew the future:

Walking by a corner several times
That had some wispy tree
With cranberries in it

Ought to paint that tree
Somebody

It has a pretty good
Corner under it…

And I think then
That I lost my
Fear of sharks

Knowing that
I had become one
Of the riptides myself

Such a pretty place
Down through the Clanking
Beyond the edge of the Hell-mall

I remember that place
As the definition
Of battleship gray

Without the blood
And without the fire and kamikazes

Just a shard-diamond sharksoup
In a free-wailing whirlpool
Of no fear…

I did have a sinking feeling
Because the loss of then
Was happening

Then as it is now

But I didn’t have vagrant books
Or planted thoughts
Or any possessions

Beyond prurient organs
And a blob of clothing

Left to the vengeance of any tide
And that loss of then
Still seems to bother me now

When cranberries don’t grow
In trees
On just any corner

Just on my corner now

When the exhalations beyond cardinal action
Blow me out of the present

Into all other shattered winters
Of loss and never

But that wasn’t
The bad day part…

Actually,
I’m just not sure at all

There might have been
Some demented
Woman involved…

Maybe she spruced up
Some quarrel
To ruin the day for all time

I should try to remember…

I’d like to count her in too
You know

Maybe name her
A frozen fiend
Of the bad mathematics

Maybe call her
A smoke friend.

Curtain of an Eye, Part I

2009-03-30T20:15:00.000-07:00

Lifting,
Drifting
Inside
A door of wind
Dreams
Sway through
The Pleroma
Of white curtain

Shifting
In the re-creating breeze,
Billowing in

An aroma of salt
Over the sill
Of a wandering dune...

Tracing
Pleats of sand
Beneath the surf...

The streets below in six ungraspable directions
All a dream’s dispersion and a dream’s return:
A recollection of
The sea, the sky, the earth
Inside the eternity of awakening...

Contained within the Seven rays and rays
Of lines and light
Penetrating the radiant glass
Of a single wave,
A suspended prism
Within an open frame, glittering...

As a seagull’s cries
Turn the sky, the wind
Into the room

JAL

Dragons In The Stillness

2009-03-29T15:54:00.000-07:00

Within the Stillness
At the impossible end
Of darkest, silken vastness
Only One Star of Silver burns…

This is where I love you...
Within the Stillness
Of an ultraviolet kiss
Lain upon unstirring seas of blackness…

Where I find your face
Cascading out of starlight
And hold it in my hands
For the first… always the first…

Holding it where the hearts of stars
Are married altogether everywhere
At the vanishing point of sight,
Where only the heart's thirst

Remains to perceive… to understand
Throughout the vast incomprehensibility
Of space, time and love
Tremulous perfection…

This is where I love you...
Within the Stillness.
Where dragons gain the waters, subtle bodies aflash
As we pass through silver seagates…

Onward into Wisdom’s central body,
Through the long shadow of Wisdom’s essence,
Descending deeper beneath those waves
Where only One Star of Silver burns…

A light pulsing there in endless extension:
This state of mystic paralysis
That can only sigh, only moan, only
Move its lips for one more kiss…

This is where I love you.
Where the moon’s soft breath
Presses against the lips
Of eve and dawn

Tasting them past the bounds
Of all endurance,

Melting them into pools of emptiness
That spill as wine

Into the Aqua Permanens -
Where motionless, wild swans
White as falling stars
Plunge suddenly beneath

The iridescent surface
Of swirling dreams
And are gone, chasing after the phases
Of the moon dissolved

In timeless streams of Aquaster,
Plunging to the bottom
Where all images cease,
Where a love so sudden and new

Rises to the surface
Of this brilliant emptiness
And looks into your face,
Blinding you from out the mirrory depths of space…

Radiant solution of love and being
In which all bodies find Supreme Release,
Floating into the cream of gold
Upon the river of the sun’s voice…

Reaching the end of things
And returning to the immediate center
Of love…
Rising into a pillar of starlight…

This wine spilling in lightning storms
From the maws of speechless dragons
Together entwined in empyrean seas…
Ravishing within movement and stillness…

Lost in waves of sound and light forever,
As we sail forward on wings of fire
Beyond the farthest reaches of the sea…
Flying through waters far deeper than sleep…

But not love…
In which I and Thou are One
In this bodiless dimension that unites us …

This is where I love you…
Where love is immortal, where
We merge and emerge...
Dragons in the Stillness.

JAL, circa 2000

Onion Peelings/ The Pole Star: Aleister Crowley, The Book Of Lies (1913)

2009-03-25T07:58:00.000-07:00

Onion Peelings

The Universe is the Practical Joke of the General
At the Expense of the Particular,
Quoth FRATER PERDURABO, and laughed.

But those disciples nearest to him wept,
Seeing the Universal Sorrow.
Those next to them laughed,
Seeing the Universal Joke.

Below these certain disciples wept.
Then certain laughed.
Others next wept.
Others next laughed.
Next others wept.
Next others laughed.

Last came those that wept
Because they could not see the Joke,
And those that laughed lest they
Should be thought not to see the Joke, and thought
It safe to act like FRATER PERDURABO.

But though FRATER PERDURABO laughed openly,
He also at the same time wept secretly;
And in Himself He neither laughed nor wept.

Nor did He mean what He said.

The Pole Star

Love is all virtue, since the pleasure of love is but
Love, And the pain of love is but
Love. Love taketh no heed
Of that which is not
And of that which is.

Absence exalteth love,
And presence exalteth love.
Love moveth ever from height to height of ecstasy
And faileth never.

The wings of love droop not with time, nor slacken
For life or for death.

Love destroyeth self,
Uniting self with that which is
Not-self,
So that Love breedeth All and None in
One.

Is it not so?...No?...
Then thou art not lost in love;
Speak not of love.

Love Alway Yieldeth: Love Alway Hardeneth.
Maybe I write it but to write Her name,

...Layla...

A Climb...

2009-03-23T08:39:00.000-07:00

A Climb to a point beyond reach
Touching the soaring reaches of sky
As doves in exalted circles fly
Through aisles of orange and white sun

This climb the long attaining
Of a deeply hoped for rendezvous;
To once more behold the divine view
Of an unforgetable lover.

Lovers created for the sake of love
None other desire of heaven than this.
The sole reason the stars exist
Burning merely for a glimpse of love

As thou, my angel, lay enchambered
In wonders, alone along the edge
Listening as the sighing clouds stretch
To embrace the horizon's offer

Now stone gowned choirs of chanting rock
Ripple in tiers of chiming granite,
Singing of earth to other planets,
Building their songs from within your ears

As doves gently escalade the currents
In whispered scales of soundless flight,
Spiraling through fields of sculptured light
On wings conducted by song-filled winds

Streaming above this sceptered place
Like facets arraying a jewel.
Glints of wonder teeming with renewal
Upon countless wings of diamond.

Seeing them rove this heaven within
The light behind your dove-filled eyes.
This endless moment molded by
The rare perfection of your thought

Only for this union soul endures
As lovers dream such rare fortune
To join the heights and depths, the moon
The sun, the stars and mountaintops

Their tight embrace molding time’s substance
Into structures of grace, eidolons
Conceived from the ecstasies of suns
Flaming inside the hearts of lovers

All separation swiftly dissolved,
Dovetailed within the passion growing
From the heart, melting time, overflowing
In a life begetting kiss:

It is this place that lovers seek;
To embrace the stars in the earthly shape
Of one who lifts them above the mountain peak,
Reuniting them with the Universe

JAL, circa 92-93

Silence, Pierre Reverdy. 1918

2009-03-23T05:43:00.000-07:00

Someone was still behind there speaking

Men passed two by two

Perhaps it was a prayer

That climbed the heart of everyone

Between walls in the clearing

A voice echoed on the water

The bird took a different route

And woke up in the morning

with a gloomy head

No one knew the number

Of those that passed

Between the wall and the garden

When the night falls and becomes hard

In the distance

You hear the whistle of a train

Topography, Sharon Olds

2009-03-20T07:26:00.000-07:00

After we flew across the country we
got in bed, laid our bodies
delicately together, like maps laid
face to face, East to West, my
San Francisco against your New York, your
Fire Island against my Sonoma, my
New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho
bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas
burning against your Kansas your Kansas
burning against my Kansas, your Eastern
Standard Time pressing into my
Pacific Time, my Mountain Time
beating against your Central Time, your
sun rising swiftly from the right my
sun rising swiftly from the left your
moon rising slowly form the left my
moon rising slowly form the right until
all four bodies of the sky
burn above us, sealing us together,
all our cities twin cities,
all our states united, one
nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

And So I’ve Awoken… Michael McCulloh

2009-03-06T01:37:00.001-08:00

And so I’ve awoken
With a sulfur taste

Of an afternoon
After one hour’s sleep

Drilled down to ten,
Ten thousand…hours

And the arrival
Then completed

All departure.

For I was not slapped back
Into the same manchild,

And I believe
I, he… truly died then

In a desolate moment,

Abandoning all that had then
Forsaken him

And diving into all that remains
When the world is truly gone,

Severing as sure
As birds from eggs

All visceral slimes
And cords of connection:

Yes, this joy of flight
Is the core of all prison breaks,

But I mother you with
No regurgitations of Christ,

And the term “forsaken”
Is not cribbed from Jesus:

This egg/flight prison chisel
Is a handy tool

For anyone all-contained
Or all-removed

And is much described
In many forms…

And so I’ve awoken
With the sulfur taste

Several times
In automobiles

Which were my sleeping quarters,

Sometimes on a long journey,
Under the pressures of haste,

At others by utter necessity
In large cities, randomly parked

Or under that first
Wind-spoken,

Branch, leaf and
Scent speaking

Eucalyptus tree

Where stopping
Insisted like a magnet.

I’ve awoken so
On beaches:

When love is gone
Or seems gone

By the abandonment
Of either party,

I have found that beaches
Are often the dying

And the waking place,

However the getting there
Is accomplished:

You could be in Nebraska,

But you’d still find
That beach to die on

And wake up different.

I would not recommend
Traveling to escape

As an overt means
For such self-annihilation

As a practical matter,

Until, of course,

All the hotels are booked,
Or you are penniless

Or lost on night-trams

Far from your own mental maps
And beyond the conceivable

Memory of friends,

And thus you have driven, or ridden
To final exhaustion

And awake by the roadway,

Down the mountain slope

Or on the church-bitten rocks
Of north-eastern Spain,

Which,
Like the plummeting Big Sur,

Or the weedsnaking
Quartz-graveled North shore

Of the South Fork
Of Long Island,

Or the black-phantomed
Sands of San Torini,

You can be sure,

Will have preserved
No imprint of… me

To disturb your dying.

Not Known. M. McCulloh

2009-03-06T01:14:00.000-08:00

Not Known

I am not known
To be effusive

But it is Death
That is pouring out

Of my veins

And dropping
Unwelcome tears

On strangers’ laps.
I have led a hard life
Held close, and in
Circumstances

Unforetold

I’ve made my way
Foreseeing

The sure, electric pain
That unmans me

Is not of bodily
Dismemberment

I scream not
Nor beg for pity

I crave not water…

I am made Not
By grief

Which is the only
Whole-formed
Frame of Death.

The Mind Has Put Up A Swing, Kabir

2009-01-07T00:45:00.000-08:00

Between the conscious and the unconscious,

The mind has put up a swing:

All earth creatures, even the supernovas,

Sway between these two trees,

And it never winds down.

Angels, animals, humans, insects by the million,

Also the wheeling sun and moon;

Ages go by, and it goes on.

Everything is swinging: heaven, earth, water, fire,

And the secret one slowly growing a body.

Kabir saw that for fifteen seconds,

And it made him a servant for life.

Lean of the Atlantes

2009-01-03T16:37:00.000-08:00

The Moon passeth
over, over, over...
Her exhausted Atlantes

Sand, wind, light ...the wake of planets
Creased into their visages ...deeply absorbed...
Staring vacuously
Into the swollen desert
Of time
A wind howling one note
Across drifting sand

Leaning
In frozen sweat
of space,
Exerted to the absolute
Extent
Of reflection.

In the cold pool of air
Extravagant granite folds
Of chitons dripping, heaving
In predawn mirages of continuum
Arms splayed...hands and feet where once knees
Doubled-over, catching their breath
In windless pain,
Cramped with eidos,
Unable to speak one clear word

Face down... awry
Stammering into the endless
Grains of silver sand

A sound of grit scraping stone like

"...wwwait..."

And vortices within
Deep, huge curves of eyes,
Parabolas
Bending
Into auras of voyance.

Inside the cone of moonlight
Foci congeal at the directrix of desert floor
Searching for the solution of stone.

Attention sempiternally fixed
Memories circling,
Straining into hidden images, vague deductions

Attenuating
Into figments of arid reason, and slowly then
Into mere intuitions;
All faculties stretched ...coalescing
In the expansion and contraction of

Prophecy and the laws of symbols
To face the task of
The future within the fleeting moment
Inside the granite ring of necessity
In which they lie in dream,
Imaging forth their selves within it,
Solidified

As the Moon passeth demandingly
Over, over, over

Emblued ruins-
Disjecta membra;
Like stones floating on an ocean
Of pale sands, transfixed, ...vestiges of limbs scattered
Together in a massacre of moonlight, its medusa glare
Petrifying them
Into the furthest reaches of the most remote
Desert of thought imaginable:

Wrinkled script engraved on broken pedestals
Beneath the bodies of these
Grave thinkers;
Gods faces in ruins, geometric calamities and
Eldritch dreams
Still choate within the precinct
Of ever-dawning antiquity
Suffused in lustres of chrome emanations

Of the ancient future
Inside the dissolving temple
Of Time
At a million midnights in one light
And a million rays of one morning
Breaking in absolute perfections of fragmentation
Of days divided into hours, divided again into minutes, and divided once more
Into seconds multiplied by years, then added
To the impossible irrational sum
Of nights
Shattering into multifaceted, flawless
Diamonds of energy
With one swift
Omnipotent stroke from a primary diamond
Striking down
From an adjacent dimension…
Diamonds slicing diamonds
Into dust.

Taking shape before
The vision of lapidary suns
Carving time, slicing through space
In shimmering, coalescent cutting rooms
Beyond the entrance display
of the desert of continuum.
Crafting stellar causal diamonds
Into angular seconds with
Swift, sedulous precision:

Garlands and lays of broaches, rings and pendants
Myriad forms of moments suspended, laid dazzlingly upon
The gorgeous breasts of space
Adorned with the necklace of time
Her cleavage broached by
Intersecting rings of entropy
As each diamond second
Emits the jewel light of the universe

Atlantean figures extrapolating themselves,
Pressing every granite muscle of thought
Inside the dressed stone of time
Until neither noemata nor noesis
Can stand
Falling down, down, and further down
Becoming bits of sand
Beneath the glow of the substanceless light
Of the moon

That passeth over and over

And over again - never the same - always
Indescribable as a dream each morning
As the world in this night.

Here duration has no meaning
Only emergence,

The forming of bodies

From the embryonic operands of the virgin moon
Distended in creative darkness, fashioning shapes
In ecstatic frigidity
A world and a universe made of her labor tears

As the sky goes submarine
With light

Blue, golden blue
Luminescing in glittering dusts of stars
Shedding crystal down into the desert like dead slough,
Crawling out of it every dawn,
Piled high into drifting dunes enringing these Atlantes

The lather of sand constellated
In kaleidoscopic seas of category
Shifting, overlapping in piezoelectro fields
Sitting down
Upon their heads, leaving them only able to
Meditate silently
On the mysteries outside of them
Nexus those within

Lux tenebris, lux en extensis

Huge figures of stone spilt into remoteness,
Pressing patterns of thought deep into aporias of sand
For thousands and thousands of years
Of caravan passage

Their charisma annealing the sands
Until they become a shoreless lens
Viewing boundless vistas.
Its surface stretched inside the moon's speculations,
A concave mirror of Anamorphosis
Rebounding in visual echoes;
Absorbed in possibility and its actual
Endurance

Dovetailed into variegated dimensions
Stationed within the direct flow of time,
Pointed toward the refulgent blaze of futurity bent backwards
Their figures forged within this fiery architecture
Unfolding the past behind them, suspended in condition
Within the cardinal zone of pure actuality
Inside their enormous eyes

The atlantes fallen, but the caryatids mostly standing
The eternal feminine more enduring
Than the eternal masculine
Clearly so
But telamons all, and all comprising
Ruins

And on their pediment engraved this sentence
Abraded, but
My mind able to read it

Still

“Time is an indecipherable script of characters
An illegible text written in minute letters,
A mysterious code
Forming a tangled, complicated premise contradicting itself
Between what is forgotten and what is unknown

But in us is Capitalized its meaning and its essence,
We who are made of time.

The blood of it rushes from our decapitated necks,
For we have endured and witnessed and endured
Its monotony of silence to which we were forced
To give meaning
And in our limitation have become inured to the pain of limitation.
In us all intent emerges and is clear
For though we have read all that has been written
In the heavens, we know that here below there is more
Than can ever be known
And before it
We have fallen”.

J. Landon

The Gull: to Jeffers

2008-12-29T09:23:00.000-08:00

I strove for reckoning upon these shores
Of battered stone, sand and shattering waves.
I watched a seagull above them soar
And know the cold, but know no pain.

And through the blackness I strode with that strange gull
Pressing into the wind above the roar,
Headlong toward a goal that with all its might pulled -
Leaving a subtle impress across the moor

And down the sandstone cliffs to the sandy shores
Left it… like a feather through a cleft
Of rock and time, fading. Yet in my core
The defile my footprints made was mere spindrift

And let each step be done, as best I could.
When I came here, I brought no polemic –
Only unwritten poems that tossed like driftwood
Inside my blood, and from it pulled a gnarled stick…

Tracing my thoughts in the sand beneath the moon.
Watched them spill, cast in silver, yet of no worth.
Watched them linger before the erasing surf
As I their singer, slowly wandered, marooned

And again I saw that same gull, just a ghost
Suspended in the wind, plying its course
As though it couldn’t leave and haunted this coast.
It complained, yea, it shrieked above these shores

A face lean and rough as a cypress
It couldn’t pass. It shrieked as if it deplored
My presence, and wanted to halt my trespass
For I was a man, a thing it abhorred.

J. Landon

The Timbered Choir, Wendell Berry

2008-12-20T01:23:00.000-08:00

Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling,

for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake

of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted.

Those who had wanted to go home would never get there now.

I visited the offices where for the sake of the objective the planners planned

at blank desks set in rows. I visited the loud factories

where the machines were made that would drive ever forward

toward the objective. I saw the forest reduced to stumps and gullies; I saw

the poisoned river, the mountain cast into the valley;

I came to the city that nobody recognized because it looked like every other city.

I saw the passages worn by the unnumbered

footfalls of those whose eyes were fixed upon the objective.

Their passing had obliterated the graves and the monuments

of those who had died in pursuit of the objective

and who had long ago forever been forgotten, according

to the inevitable rule that those who have forgotten forget

that they have forgotten. Men, women, and children now pursued the objective

as if nobody ever had pursued it before.

The races and the sexes now intermingled perfectly in pursuit of the objective.

the once-enslaved, the once-oppressed were now free

to sell themselves to the highest bidder

and to enter the best paying prisons

in pursuit of the objective, which was the destruction of all enemies,

which was the destruction of all obstacles, which was the destruction of all objects,

which was to clear the way to victory, which was to clear the way to promotion, to salvation,

to progress, to the completed sale, to the signature

on the contract, which was to clear the way

to self-realization, to self-creation, from which nobody who ever wanted to go home

would ever get there now, for every remembered place

had been displaced; the signposts had been bent to the ground and covered over.

Every place had been displaced, every love

unloved, every vow unsworn, every word unmeant

to make way for the passage of the crowd

of the individuated, the autonomous, the self-actuated, the homeless

with their many eyes opened toward the objective

which they did not yet perceive in the far distance,

having never known where they were going,

having never known where they came from.

Everybody Gets It, Michael McCulloh

2008-12-16T03:34:00.000-08:00

Everybody always gets this thing.

And how to say it in physics
And not just pretty words.

I guess I'll go diving down
The deep tunnel of life now

And hazard all of my belongings
And scream through sharp blizzards

And hope and hold and let go
Until the brief, forgiving sunrise
On that warm beach reminds me

That every speckle of sand
Is it's own entire world.

Everybody gets this.
Everybody knows this.

I'll just go diving down
That deep tunnel of life...

The Answer, Robinson Jeffers

2008-12-08T11:47:00.000-08:00

Then what is the answer ? -- Not to be deluded by dreams.

To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence,

And their tyrants come, many times before.

When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose

The least ugly faction; these evils are essential.

To keep one's own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted

And not wish for evil ; and not be duped

By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will

Not be fulfilled.

To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear

The whole remains beautiful. A severed hand

Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars

And his history... for contemplation or in fact...

Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,

The greatest beauty is

Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty

Of the universe. Love that, not man

Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,

Or drown in despair when his days darken.

Between Going and Staying, Octavio Paz

2008-11-25T10:49:00.000-08:00

Between going and staying the day wavers,

In love with its own transparency.

The circular afternoon is now a bay

Where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,

All is near and can't be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,

Rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats

The same unchanging syllable of blood.

The light turns the indifferent wall

Into a ghostly theater of reflections.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,

Watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters. Motionless,

I stay and go: I am a pause.

Wind, Women, and Stone.

2008-11-21T16:58:00.000-08:00

From the southern shore of Jeju
There lies an ocean view before us

Beside broad, radiant fields of rape flowers,
Tangerine and orange orchards
Ringed by rustic walls of piled stone
Wave in row after row behind us

And spring light and wind through those flowers
And through the seams of those unmortared walls,
Allowing gales to freely pass between.
Their paths dappled with the windy image of you.

Standing a few fields inland
From the sea running gold and green
The waves lift up in the sunlight,
Splashing with images of you

Wind and stone,
So much wind and stone
I hold a memory like wind and stone
Of you.

Wherever I have walked these last two years
I have seemed to see you, only you.
And though you were with me all day today
You will never remember any of this

As I glance outward, the sea is a mirror
That I dare not look into anymore.
It reflects such emptiness
As again you dance into view
And once more trail off on the wind

Here is song from the shore
Of my bones
Along the long stretch
Of my heart
For you

A sound that becomes
A song in my throat
Without words
A sound outside my words

A sound inside my bones,
A sound, just a sound
That is a song without words
Coming from within my soul...

A moan that would become the sound
Of your voice
Speaking my name in a whisper
To my ear.

Like the walls of Jeju,
It will be ages before
My love for you comes down

J. Landon

Pablo Neruda, from 20 Love Poems; XIX

2008-11-17T08:48:00.000-08:00

I can write the saddest lines tonight.

Write for example: ‘The night is fractured

And they shiver, blue, those stars, in the distance’

The night wind turns in the sky and sings.

I can write the saddest lines tonight.

I loved her, sometimes she loved me too.

On nights like these I held her in my arms.

I kissed her greatly under the infinite sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.

How could I not have loved her huge, still eyes.

I can write the saddest lines tonight.

To think I don’t have her, to feel I have lost her.

Hear the vast night, vaster without her.

Lines fall on the soul like dew on the grass.

What does it matter that I couldn’t keep her.

The night is fractured and she is not with me.

That is all. Someone sings far off. Far off,

My soul is not content to have lost her.

As though to reach her, my sight looks for her.

My heart looks for her: she is not with me

The same night whitens, in the same branches.

We, from that time, we are not the same.

I don’t love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.

My voice tried to find the breeze to reach her.

Another’s kisses on her, like my kisses.

Her voice, her bright body, infinite eyes.

I don’t love her, that’s certain, but perhaps I love her.

Love is brief: forgetting lasts so long.

Since, on these nights, I held her in my arms,

My soul is not content to have lost her.

Though this is the last pain she will make me suffer,

And these are the last lines I will write for her.

The Planet On The Table, Wallace Stevens. 1923

2008-11-13T03:17:00.000-08:00

Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.

Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.

His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.

It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,

Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.

Ode to Rilke, Jon Landon. 2002

2008-11-09T05:44:00.000-08:00

You walked the castle parapets of the poetic
Your gaze turned toward the Open
Breathing the pure element of vision
Sweeping from off the ocean of eternity
Casting forth emptiness from your arms
So that one bird might fly more passionately,
Walking straight into the crushing arms of an Angel.

Engulfed in the wind that fed upon your face,
Polishing it to reflect Cosmic Space,
Transforming you so that you could transform Things
Upon the polished surface of your being
Knowing that they weren’t completely solid, nor you,
Only reflections of the Holy Spirit that shone brightly there.

The World had a need of you.
The Stars waited for you to espy them
Waiting as only lovers can wait for each other

As you stood before a stone tower which a hawk encircled
Which a storm engulfed, never knowing whether
You were the storm, the tower, or the hawk
As you emerged again and again from the mutual depths
You reached within your intimate slumbers with Things,
Brought to a different day that all but few have awakened to
Your self-world charged with violent insight into
Everything you saw, you felt: you embodied.
Yes, you embodied
The tower, the hawk, the storm, the springtime.

Sometimes a wave rolled toward you
As you paced the castle parapets of Duino
Stepping trippingly through the words of a song
A blindman, a drunkard or an idiot might sing,
Letting the world’s sadnesses stumble through you,
Constantly walking directly into the body of an Angel
To see the world “the way a blind angel sees it”

Eyes reversed, looking through your beloved, looking through Her
Nakedness and all that it concealed
As you sang of the unrequited woman, the poet Gaspara Stampa
Who loved for no reason, who loved beyond comprehension, Who loved
Simply because there was no hope and therewith here sole Purpose for being:
To hopelessly love
Saying of here unexampled devotion
That should any girl exclaim “if I could become like her!”
Love might

I say of you

O mighty, mighty poet

If one could become like You.
You understood the autocratic task of Transformation, knew
Its harsh commandments and undertook the bold exposing
Of human treason before this world, rescuing the honey of beauty
And returning it to the invisible like a bee commuting
Through the Living and the Dead
As you plunged onto the path with only your shadow,
Listening, listening to the soil of your heart,
Listening to the flowers there
To whom you lent your fate

Listening to a tree, to the din of innumerable animals
From inside a crude hut inside the wilderness of the World’s soul,
Opening its door and letting them into the temple
Within your ear.
All that listening such hard work, the vocation of a saint,
But you had the blood for it.

You understood with the ruthlessness
Of an Angel
Both love and death
To the end
A wan smile upon your careful, piercing face,
That undying iris
That you enigmatically carried as a young man
Through the streets of Prague
Forever in your hand

You caught up to what was yours in the end, Rilke

Ranier Maria Rilke: Sonnets to Orpheus, Book I, I. (1875 - 1926 / Germany)

2008-11-07T08:27:00.000-08:00

A tree ascended there. Oh pure transendence!
Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear!
And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence
A new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.

Creatures of stillness crowded from the bright
Unbound forest, out of their lairs and nests;
And it was not from any dullness, not
From fear, that they were so quiet in themselves,

But from just listening. Bellow, roar, shriek
Seemed small inside their hearts.
And where there had been at most
A makeshift hut to receive the music,

A shelter nailed up out of their darkest longing,
With an entryway that shuddered in the wind-
You built a temple deep inside their hearing.

1922

Building a Way into the Blood of the Stars

2008-11-06T05:23:00.000-08:00

Building a way into the blood of stars,
I mount the stairs of many steps

A silent process upward through flights
Of nerves and veins

A winding canal of stairs and stars and vertebrae
Stirring up the spine in floors and planes

Vestibule upon vestibule of
Microcosmic space

Hollows inside a remote place,
Recesses from time

Entrance upon entrance to a vaster anatomy
I climb in stillness and inner- balance

And stare well into the stairwells
That transfuse in nexuses still in advance

Of subtle blood and stars and neural paths
Pouring down and down

Into my mind and body
Vanquishing disorder, replenishing health.

On this journey I am but a mendicant,
An exile standing on the border

Between flesh and spirit
Reliant on the stars’ donations

Of fresh transfusions of blood
Which I barely merit

My arteries flush with aethers
My blood, my blood of the stars

I build with what builds within my veins
A shelter for the heart of space

A house beyond the moon
A mansion of countless rooms

One floor at a time, each framed of a single breath
A doorway between life and death

At the final floor where all constructions cease
I light my consciousness aflame with peace

I sit me down and receive,
I sit me down and receive.

Zoo of the Stars.

2008-11-06T04:19:00.000-08:00

I, gone on far too far ahead,
Like a child wandered off in dread
Staring beyond the bars
Deep within the zoo of stars

Alone and wondering why
All the animals in the sky
Don’t run…don’t simply fly?

Lost suddenly inside a stampede of light.
The firmament left carelessly unbolt.
Constellations unpent like zebra colts.
Starry hoofs escapading in heedless flight.

Fleeing toward planes re-opened,
Mere stellar mayhem, a spree of minutes eloped ,
A vision which only a child could cope:

Dancing with kids, a pupil of rams
Taught to catapult seas of side-stepping crabs
Over the backs of rampaging bulls
Floating delicately, hand in hand, with fools

Those twins beside me, milking a lioness
Spooning her cream to a scorpion prioress
Like only a virgin child can, unborn –deathless

Unscalable distance, unweighable time
A rainbow arrow knocking a goat from a mountaintop
Washed down to the sea by jugs of clear wine
Into a school without a bell, swimming non-stop.

Until an adult in consternation might say,
“There you are! …Whew!
Why do you always stray?
We were worried sick about you.”

“Now, go on, get back in line. Not another pause!
We should thank our lucky stars
You didn't find your way through one of those bars."