Never to Awaken

 

 

Your eyes grasped the whisper of shore, 

Heard it speak in its sleep-

Heard it say 

As you glided quietly through the sand...leaving no trace...

“Roar of a thousand lions”, 

Heard it murmur, 

“Hiss of enormous serpents”, 

Heard it state, 

“Non verbis sed rebus”.

Oracularly, you heard the shore's reflections 

Mirrored in your ears

As it moaned like a Pythia, ancient beyond all reckoning,

In a trance deep as the ocean,

Uttering copious gibberish of tides, 

Compendious rants of sea wrack, 

Complicated riddles of wind born prophecy

Recorded by the priesthood of cliffs

And given to you to interpret.

Various meanings through your mind meandering

Like the swift journey of the moon 

Through the Twelve Houses,

The future construed by you, a clever astrologist

Of moods, whims, and intuitions.

 

You found as you walked across the shore

That it was fast asleep, 

Never to awaken but to breathe 

Heavily inside a dream.

Beneath the black coverlet of night 

It wore only stars and surf

And lay before the long caress 

Of delicate feet.

 nōn verbīs sed rebus = “not by words but by things”. Lit. “not words but things”

 

The Desert of the Real

 

I was in a desert.

A cold wind came off it.

I looked upward

As dust swirled all around

As if inside a dream.

 

There in the sky I received omens

From birds in flight.  

I augured their directions, sounds, and kinds,

Their number, their flight patterns, and behavior. 

 

They relayed messages of what I believed  

Were the ancient gods

Foretelling what I thought   

Was the future

In the desert of the real.

 

I had no map.

 

Like arrows of God,

Harriers pierced the sky.

In the wane of day, I counted five.

In silent spirals from out of the north

They flew in diminishing light

Searching prey.

Then departed, one by one,

Until the last let out a fierce cry above me.   

 

I carried on my pilgrimage 

As if inside a dream

To the mountain in the distance,

Certain God or a god was near.

From out of the unknown,

From out of the permanence of eternity,

Adventuring in freedom within the sky, 

Driven by the hunger for existence, 

In spirals of birth and rebirth

The birds flew then vanished

As dust blew in clouds across 

The desert of the real.

 

I had no map. 

 

Standing now at the foot of the mountain 

I performed divination in the dust.  

In the palm of my hand 

I drew an oracle of the fine, granular powder of earth.

I uncovered many possibilities. 

I discerned several probabilities. 

But my readings bore nothing definitive 

Except the existence of the dust itself

 

Many vortices, like a maze, formed in my hand

And I entered them

As if inside a dream

In the desert of the real.

 

I had no map.  

 

With labyrinthine steps

Many possible directions emerged

Inside a maze of many mazes.

A series of galleries opened

Starred with masks.

Row after row, layer upon layer of masks

Arose in the desert of the real.

 

A superior mirage 

Horizontally diffuse, vertically stacked,

Of this maze of masks

Tore through my mind

As if inside a dream.

 

l witnessed the intense multiplicity of life
In all its boggling grandeur and confusion,
Layer upon layer of distortions,
But at the bottom
That which was concealed, 

That from which the masks emanated

Never moved yet never rest, 

And was naked in its presence
Yet fully dressed.  

 

The further I entered the more I discovered

There was no labyrinth.

It had all been an elaborate mirage.

All modern delusion.

There was only the barren waste

Of the desert of the real

 

All was wide open.

Only my mind was serpentine, 

Only my thoughts 

Followed crooked and narrow passages, 

Only they came to dead ends. 

There were no puzzling corridors to excogitate. 

There was only an even, straight path

That led through the desert of the real.

 

I had no map.  

Only the countenance of eternity

Shone in the late sky,

And I stood before it, 

The masks now gone,

Stripped of all illusions

In the desert of the real.

 

I had no map. 

From high above its barren emptiness,

My pilgrimage complete,

I stood upon a summit

As if inside a dream.

There and then, at that moment,

I met God 

In the poverty of my spirit.    

 

I was but a mendicant

Reliant on the alms of stars,

An exile standing at the terminus

Of flesh, at the borderland of spirit,

A suppliant provided for by the benefaction

Of stars, and dust and dreams

In the desert of the real.

 

I had no map

For I required none.

 

All was God 

And eternity,

And with He as my compass 

I found my way through

All space and time.  

 

Notes: abacomancy- divination by dust

House of Ten Thousand Windows

Not an opulent mansion but a diffuse estate-

Expanding edifice of manifold reflections.

Perimeter of elastic attention-

Unbound...ambient.

Scattered dimensions swept through protracted portals.

Radiations of vision-

Hyaline arrays of intuition-

Dilations of thought and perception

Constellated through thousands of apertures.

The representations of the world compounded

In a house of ten thousand windows...

The world a bee sees when it alights on a flower:

Myriad petals...striations of color after color-

Scattered images of shattered jewels-

A realm of blazing ultraviolet and polarized light-

Thousands of hexagonal lenses driven by the sun-

Global vision turning and turning like kaleidoscopes-

Honeycombed vistas flashing from out of themselves

In a house of ten thousand windows...

Every window meticulously polished into a lens,

Lustrous and fine as angels' hair,

Magnifying reality in tenfold transparency,

The scouring pressure compacting each 

To multifaceted diamond

Revealing the Absolute

In all its commonplaceness, in all its simplicity

Of Oneness

In a house of ten thousand windows.

 

Each crystalline pane made as

Where an object begins

And where it ends

Is nearly impossible to say:

Its immanence bleeds

Into the transcendent

In a house of ten thousand windows. 

A place of I-shaped rooms

Fixed on the celestial axis

Of the celestial sphere,

The turning point 

On which all celestial objects

Are reckoned to revolve

In a house of ten thousand windows.

Imaginary concepts all,

The pivoting heart of perception

Called the observer, called I

Spinning and spinning, whirled

On the wheel of cosmos

In a house of ten thousand windows. 

Confessions of an Amateur Cartographer

 

From a tossing raft, imperiled coast after scrawled coast,

I surveyed the world alone-

Its complexity beyond my capacity to encapsulate.

All my many maps were but mere topoi of convention.

Simulacra all, a reflection of a reflection,

A pretense of reality that perhaps had no reality at all, 

Merely malformations of the actual I had typified.

My facsimiles of the world were but crude caricatures of it. 

I couldn't convince myself otherwise, going around in circles

In a maelstrom of sight,

Part objective, part subjective, in which the compass of my senses

Spun dizzily,

In which my tiny telescope vacuumed the world into my eye

But brought it no closer to my understanding.

And my sad collection of archaic maps 

That were my guides,

Faulty, all faulty.  

 

All my tools and methods impaired and faulty.

My flawed abstractions finally brought the realization that

A symbolist, not a topographer, was I. 

For decades I drifted, tracing the shape of remote, desolate coasts

That led to bestial, uncivilized interiors- savage and unknown.

The heartland core forever a secret into which I bewilderedly gazed, 

Able to see only so far within, shocked by the brutishness that emerged.

With a shaking hand

I devised one final map upon a tormented sea,

With one jittery line

I drew the whole rootless projection of the world

Into two dimensions: a point, a line, a point.

I drew a map that led

To the edge of the world, and there

Many monsters thrashed and writhed

In apocalyptic corners that waterfalled into an abyss.

I carefully charted their location on my map

For other mariners to avoid,

Having valiantly met 

Their desperate basilisk gaze

Eye to eye.

I had always tangled the bounded finite

With the unbounded infinite,

But now my maps successfully

Were unable to distinguish

Any difference at all.

I am done drawing this world on a flat surface.

As my long, loving, dangerous voyage in it 

Now approaches its end,

It is the curvature of space and time that bend as one

That I wish henceforth to survey and explore.

I am confident that I will not need a map there.

The stars' topography, the topography of my mind.

 

Topos: a convention or motif, especially in a literary work; a rhetorical convention.

 

 

The Tarantulas

 "Therefore, do I tear at your web, that your rage may lure you out of your den of lies, and that your revenge may leap forth from behind your word 'justice'".

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, XXIX The Tarantulas, 

Friedrich Nietzsche.

I see the "Tarantulas"

Crawling out of their foul holes

Of Marxist Conflict theory,

Scrambling out of their manifold tunnels

Of noisome Critical Theory,

Clambering from out of their benighted dens

Of Post-Modernist theory,

Creeping from out of their chthonic burrows of moral insanity

Reaching all the way to hell.

I see the moonlight of all these aberrant theories

Grossly illuminating their demented, night eyes.

There they balefully crawl on bristling legs,

Their casuistries clamoring against injustice and oppression,

Depravedly hustling for power, 

A cunning rampage of psychopaths

Charged with the venom of resentment and revenge,

Their beguiling fraud creeping everywhere

With stunning perfidy,

Beware the "Tarantula Hawk" whose sting shall devoureth...

I see inside their despotic dens a morass of silk webs,

The tangled threads of their paralogical dogma

With which they decree a specious morality

That has established its dark, spurious reality

Across the terrain of Western man,

A series of thick epistemological webs and tripwires 

Lain everywhere, seizing and confiscating truth and reality.

Long have they plotted. 

Decades spent digging deep underground,

Crafting their devious, insidious holes,

Slowly undermining the normative terrain.

More than a hundred years of laying filthy germ

Dormant for decades, yet the slow, steady increase

Of their pathological number over time

In every subverted cranny of the terrain.

And now the explosion of a deluded, insane population

Of tarantulas across the land, invading and trampling 

The schools, the media, the companies, the churches, the family,

And even the State,

Injecting tyrannical toxins into them masked as virtue, 

Destroying them. 

With these manipulative falsehoods they have bitten many

Weak, cowardly, and idiotic mice  

Vulnerable to the tarantulas' potent, psychopathic poisons,

Poisons that have rendered them semi-dead

But still very useful

To spreading Tarantula morality and pseudo-reality,

Idiot mice useful to the Tarantulas' larceny,

Idiot mice useful to the Tarantulas' moral extortion,

Idiot mice useful to the Tarantulas' great swindle.  

The Tarantulas' poisons making them giddy,

Turning them into "flying monkeys"

Who chant the Tarantula slogan, "DIE!" 

Beware the "Tarantula Hawk" whose sting shall devoureth...

The warped lens of their Tarantula vision

Seeing only in black and white,

A twisted perception of hypocrisy and bigoted fanaticism

Myopic in its self-righteousness,

Focused on dismantling all before them 

That they brand and whip as evil,

Yea, even if it be an entire civilization itself. 

I see them scamper fervidly toward their false horizon,

Envisioning a scam utopia which awaits the world

Upon the plenary realization of their false, corrupt ideology.

There they psychopathically trample

Everything in their path to reach this place

That is literally "nowhere". Wherever it be,

Mayhem, mass torture and murder are the likely terminus.

With cultic zeal they claim that they are conductors of lightning

For a day of cosmic justice that will come

When all Tarantulas are liberated from the trauma

Of the all-encompassing oppression which they allege they suffer,

A day to come only when they obtain complete control

And their revolution is permanent,

Their tyranny forever advancing in all directions...

Beware the "Tarantula Hawk" whose sting shall devoureth...

Note: A tarantula hawk is a spider wasp (Pompilidae) that preys on tarantulas. Using a sting to paralyze the tarantula before dragging it to a brood nest as living food; a single egg is laid on the victim, hatching to a larva which then eats the still-living prey. 

Janus Poems, 2022

 

Arch of Janus, Rome

At the threshold of a new year

I pray to the ancient god of beginnings.

The ancient god of doorways.

Janus. 

Before me the vista is fresh,

A complete transformation of landscape

Totally dissimilar from the previous landscape

In which I lived. 

I have departed the jungle of Puna Hawaii, 

Have left behind me the lava flows of Kalapana

And the turquoise waves of Pohoiki,

Have left behind me all the hard times

Of my nine years in Hawaii,

Have left behind all the good times, too.

Have left behind heaven and hell.

Never will I forget the demonic entities

That swept out of the astral plane

And attacked me in Hilo. 

Long torturous hours, weeks of onslaught

During which I could not sleep

And was forced to listen to their conniving stories,

But survived them, though they tried

To kill me. 

Now I wander the Mojave Desert of Nevada

And gaze upon the surrounding mountains,

Steep and barren, blazing in winter sunlight.

The Sheep Range and the Las Vegas Range.

Their austere beauty is consoling.

The terrain before me

Is one that I have mapped out 

Over the course of many years.

Long have I envisioned this course of action.

In so doing,

I have given over my life

To chance.

Long ago I gave it over 

To faith. 

I rest my fate in the arbitrary hands 

Of the ancient Roman goddess, Fortuna,

A goddess who has become for me a tutelary

I now supplicate daily.

How could it be otherwise?

I bounce and roll like a pair of dice

Thrown by the blindfolded goddess.

I come to a halt

Inside the doorway where I stand

In spirit with the ancient god, Bicephalic Janus,

Who looks in two directions at once.

I too project myself into the past and future.

I examine both intensely

For misunderstandings and delusions.

My sense of things, however, is split.

In the present I am confused and ambivalent

About the course I have chosen. 

How does Janus see things?

What I see

Fills me with a deep sense of uncertainty

And at times, trepidation. 

It is a huge change to leave Hawaii

And I am taking a huge chance

To come to this dessert,

The Mojave,

And this city,

Las Vegas. 

Though I will survive somehow

It is not clear during the brief time 

That I have been here

That I am on the right track or in the right place.

At times I feel such a deep-seated feeling of uneasiness here.

Nevertheless, I will forge onward

As best I can for as long as I can

In the desert of Nevada.

This time of my life called for a bold new direction. 

Today, New Year's Eve, 2022

I pray to the god of beginnings

And pray to the goddess of fortune,

Two uniquely Roman gods

Whom the Greeks had no counterparts for

Whose origins arise out of the mistiest realms

Of Roman history, the age of Roman Kings.

I dwell in those mists

And I dwell in their eternal munificence. 

The door to tomorrow and a new year

Is cracked open.  

The light of the future pours in.

The wheel spins. 

I stand at the inflection point

Between one place and another,

At the inflection point

Between one age and another, it seems.

The curvature of the world is changing

In ways that I find chilling.

The entire shape of the world

Seems to be transforming in so many places

Into a broad-based tyranny.

I see the horizon darkening

For what a human being can think,

For what a human being can say. 

I see the horizon darkening

For human freedom. 

I see the children confused, deluded;

Their teachers madder than they are. 

So many bad ideas are being taught.

So many bad ideas are being spread

By "tarantulas" who have spun their webs

In institutions of all shape and size,

Tarantulas that need to be crushed

And the hold of their tricky webs swept away. 

The bastard child of Marx,

Identity politics and cultural revolution,

Bawls like a wretched brat

With its erroneous critique

Of Western civilization,

A critique fueled by the curdled resentment, deceit, and arrogance

Of psychopaths. 

They claim to champion the marginalized, but

They espouse hatred for competence and merit,

The only things that can raise a person up.

In the name of their so-called justice

That masks their tyranny of revenge

They demand conformity to their lies.

Sordidly, many of the "tarantulas" state

That there is no truth.  

They have little regard for reason.

They are enemies of both truth and reason.

All thought stops when the tarantulas speak.

They have usurped power

Through subversions, perversions, and inversions

Of the Truth,

And people quail before their accusations.

People succumb to their faulty assertions

In the face of the demanded conformity

Of the "tarantula" mob who have infiltrated

Many institutions and taken control of

The wheel, pulleys and levers of those institutions.  

A fight is on for the soul of the country,

But not just the country but that of the western world.

All of Western civilization is under attack

By these psychopaths.

It's beautiful and noble soul

Assailed by these barbarians. 

They must be rolled back.

I see the boorish, aggressive, bellicose behavior of China, 

A place I once lived for three years

And came to loath. 

I traveled widely there, lived in 6 cities

And saw many more.

It is not a pretty place nor an honorable and noble one.

It has much in common with the tarantulas.

It too has usurped power.

It too specializes in subversions, perversions, and inversions

Of the truth. 

It lies, it cheats, it steals, it commits tyranny on mass scale, 

Then it claims victimhood when it is called out.

It whines, it snivels, it has temper-tantrums

Like them, too. 

By the CCP the sovereignty of the Chinese individual 

Has long been under siege. 

The ruling regime has an enduring history of internal genocide

And its tyranny and totalitarian oppression

Are like the fangs and maw of a titanic monster

No longer satisfied to feed upon its own people

But now wants to devour the rest of the world. 

The world, they think, is to be crushed by China's hammer

And cut down by its scythe.

They must be rolled back.

And I see the oligarchs, all the oligarchs of the world.

I see that the world is in many ways a huge oligarchy

Operating successfully in the shadows

And probably always has been,

Or has at least always been menaced by them 

From their wealthy, dark hiding places.  

All freedom, opportunity, and justice

Is and always has been obstructed by the oligarchs

Of this world. 

Their immense greed for money and power

Is inhuman.

They must be rolled back.

I see that humanity stands at the inflection point

Of a world subverted, perverted, and inverted by these 3 tyrants,

But there is a strong hope that all them

Can still be vanquished. 

I have faith that this can and will happen.

The soul of humanity will be perfected

In building the pyre for these tyrants.

In needs to do so or the course

Of the remainder of this century 

Will take horrific directions. 

Through all this, I envision a better life and world for myself.

I see myself improving, becoming more

Meritorious, more competent, more spiritually fit.

I see humanity becoming so, too,

But only if the horizon can be reclaimed 

From these liars and tyrants.

Much is at stake in this coming year. 

As I enter the final years of my life

I am committed to the perfecting of my soul

In the fire of struggle and strife

In what time remains for me. 

I am indomitable in the face of tyranny.

I am indomitable in the face of misfortune.

I shall survive and more. 

I am immortal. 

I have nothing to fear.