I

February

Einbahnstraße in a
night of black arrowheads/jazz, obliteration perfume/
the twinkle of your
eyes which are engulfed
by youthful nymphs

Fur-lined sable coat
& I
in a jean jacket, hair styled back/
the perspiring windows of Paul Gustavus
open to reveal alizarin (death of day)
velvet curtains
(an appetite for moonlight &
mirrors) the reverberation
echochamber settles over us infused
with alcohol and tea leaves

Basement seclusion,
Deutsch in every direction

Woodstove heat/harsh truths exist in
a Blue Rose of cackling ash, left
disentangled ... duskdancer and copperhue-rooftop Saharas
 billowing madly

conversation as a
room full of isolation, lip -
eye, breath -
hairline/drifting to attic enticement,
bedsheets ruffling like
a winged dove

(insertion/devotion)

I am a North American phantom speaking through written paragraphs

& on my second drink a voice
persuasively licks my thigh/come up from the uneven ground

"feed the moon

relinquish fear

-blindness & burden, parish your
      anticipation for fire"

II

In my restlessness later on, I realize
all I can do is keep my head
high, mimic hope, mimic strength knowing we are
but one brief collision of beautiful
time purposed to split off again
towards a chaos larger than
ourselves.

Remembering The Woman in The Dunes..

"There was a drooling wolf...there was the sun. And, somewhere, he knew not where...there must also be a storm center and lines of discontinuity"

our own repitition of love & labor, warding off the deathhand which always comes back around

... How far do we have to go for lasting tenderness?

III

March


Australian sand/I erase my flesh
in Summer fruit/the air is thick,
I have stopped wearing leather

With iron humility
I task myself to
tillling a steeple into
a breaking cloudbeam

The annual rose garden blushes beneath a soft dress
in May. My crooked puppet's shadow has subsided in the theater it came to make way for fairweather, protest, wet teal ink
flowering the walls as sunlight shines thru and the mechanical
blinking of shadowy eyes now spurred AWAKE.
An Appalachian mind gaze and spiderweb neon
smoke attaching it's warmth to every freckled cheek,
a mint kiss like the opening of a fir tree smelted into the
foggy earth.

Ceramics embroider the shop sills
and ceiling fans wave hello n farewell to every guest
each day longer than the last!
WANDERER slept
sound in the Nagakin Capsule Tower, few nights ago now,
had an idea, lost it, feather flowed it's way across Pacific
to my bedroom and I wrote about her here, and saw a Japanese tea ceremony flash by
her eyes/my eyes
a collective consciousness
sometimes years apart.

She, who's witnessed the debris of catastrophe,
standing over what was a golden vase
filled with Tulips
now ash, forgotten except for in a memorial vague outline
in the bewitched brain(s)
Visionary! Arms twitched to the rapture occurring in plain view of us all
VIOLIN rebounding intangible yet unmistakable sound
on a train in Tokyo city. Cement is damp with Spring's sweet rain,
her feet sore from all this walking!

I appreciate her travels, as they are at once my own,
a second-hand enchantment
the taste of green tea, cherries!
EXPLOSIVE FORMLESS ANIMAL WHITE
feather grazed my skin, startled.

This feeling??
something set free, a violent hue erratic
markings on the cave walls, the one from Plato's allegory,
watching fire light the shape of our bodies and some spectacular image displays itself invisible
but felt, undeniable!
Settled, fire transferred to our lungs.
We call this “ART”
we have left the cave, to Paris, to Senegal, to Jaipur,
to her and I and you.

Animal oh animal caged no longer,
howling paintings and smells to our eyes,
bitten our hands sharp with poetry,
this ghast who's empathy for strangers has made a rare few dizzy. Possession! Willingly accepted nocturnal entity and I write this because I can't help myself.

THIS IS WHAT CREATED THE MANDALA,
COLORS OF AN ANCIENT PEACOCK
LURKING WITHIN US TENDING THE FLORA
which takes inspiration from museums, from brief embers shot up in a chasm fireplace illustrating what we'll call Forever,
vocal alchemist who resides in descending faint harp and opera
a fountain in a mysterious lobby only visited by one person, once every few months,
birds shimmer in planted palms and a crystal ceiling expounds the details of travels to come,
an orb above like an observatory for our OWN universe.

APOLLO IN LAUREL
PIANO, ASIAN INFLUENCE,
Damien Hirst's “Beautiful darkness spreading to every corner of your mind painting"
framed holy upon the walls
Jean Cocteau's “The Blood of a Poet” projected also, side by side.
A painted face, a parrot imitating Sudhana

“This is the abode of those of unobstructed intellect and broad mind,
Enjoying the realm of space, free from dependence,
Penetrating all times, free from obstruction,
Clearly perceiving all being and becoming” - Avatamsaka Sutra

I'm speechless!
She's speechless! Her Tokyo, admittedly imaginary. It's her private
Nagakin Capsule Tower. It's my private Temple, my private Cocteau,
shelves stocked with the poems I'll one day write.
Words which shall knock on my dented skull in sleep mostly, but other times I can't recall as of this moment (Get back to me in July)
retired to literary France
and caught in the quicksand of aging, perhaps medicine will be far along enough that I shall die at 173?
a stretch, but considering that sciences are pushing for immortality by 2045 (pfft)
we shall see.
(??)
Bearded and divine with love
and experience from Airplanes
free jazz, dramatics,
heart to heart, dense libraries,
evening walks to Montmartre
a hand to hold
a kiss to experience.
Meditations,
Rodriguez “Sugar Man” fades out
“Silver magic ships... you carry...”
Sung once by the European barista in British Columbia who kept me caffeinated with a double shot of espresso for guessing the song right which was playing..This just happened, but I realize it'll become such a faint memory by then.
Out and out and out and out there
Far beyond the reaches of consciousness that previously mentioned feather will gather with the other ideas and become the WHITE peacock, infinite.
Carrying us there as wintry atoms
snowdrops on it's back.
One life to another.

Rejoice!
Joyce!
The girl killed in a tragic car accident
in 1973.
Picked up from the earth.
You were lifted tenderly
to a place
coveted by
forlorn corpses
that walk New York City
in their dry-cleaned business suits,
attending the ritualistic Sundays
in cross buildings.
While it soaks in,
while death is now the life
you live
there’s a
ship coming crewed
by all your favorite people you never knew.
Every missed connection,
lost crush,
pets passed away
they echo in song
to the Nursery shores
your bare feet freshly plant
on.
Joyce Wells,
Farewell!
You’re on to another road, now.
This revenant path
with more sudden turns than Lombard street
on clammy mornings.
However the incessant
afterlife treats you
it was nice to know you, Joyce Wells.
We’ll all miss you dearly.
You’re currently in a Morgue
at some cinder block hospital.
You’re currently on a viking ship
set for a frosty-tipped valley across the sea with
Molly, a stray cat your family adopted when you were three,
and Micheal Donahue, your first love.
While the world keeps spinning,
while your casket is buried.
While in 1974 it rains,
there’s an ease in knowing
that Joyce Wells would be
delighted to hear
that she was
freed.

A practice in diverting expectation,
the micrososm perseveres
over the macrocosm

(pale elevator magic)

Sand is not enough, nor the perennial heat, instead, I chase my green-eyed children,
 escaping a slow but forceful
 jewelled jaw, for birth
& secret kissing with the dawn

I act recklessly in
faith of foxgloves, harmonica valley
idlings/the sentence, in your own words/my sentence

The crescent court
decided I wait in Guangzhou for several hours, to compare my many lives with eachother, as I wonder what day it is, what my past-self is doing right now, if he's getting along fine, I'm a little sore

Druidic anthems/harbour &
hibiscus, fulfillment that feels strange to me, tea by my side, paying attention to "Idiot Wind" until it gets too dark to stay out

Surreal in experience,
passing winter castles
& carnivals on stilts, foreign cemetaries,
temperamental waters, Afric breeze/
Art Deco saccharine
pink

Now, to return
for an interval of Pacific Spring, an embrace of the howling shadow, banished by process

cultivating The Farther

(An ivory veil/withdrawn)

Dark spotted room luminous
stage flare and fire
from the bandstand
reverberating energies
I hold a shipwrecked bottle in my hand
people are screaming
to the transient
and the metaphor
and the silent sky
I hold wicked form in my other hand
KURT     VONNEGUT    PLAYS
(Not a piano)
The room is faster
and chuckling heavy set back row phone call
girl scratches her lottery ticket
It's freezing out
I got a job at a movie theater, new time starts NOW
and we're all trying to make something out of tonight
Sylvia is shaking through the ferocious storm
that Sylvia, the same colors as an
inspired tattoo belonging to a year
everyone's on about
including ** Chi Minh City
and all it's superhighway narrowness n sunshine
What a hell of a year this one has been

(Blackout---Springboard--Parade--Pendulum--Butterfly--???)
­
SO LONG!
SEE YOU LATER!
THERE'S AN EASTERN SONG
I MUST PLAY FOR THE CHILDREN OF VIETNAM!
IN A LANGUAGE THEY DON'T YET UNDERSTAND!

After the show is done
I emerge and the modern rebel
puts on his jacket where written on his back with hard tape reads

“WAR IS OVER”

the hysterics go back to their usual voiceless catatonia
and I wonder at that moment
how we can feel so alone
with so many of us here.

wine about me god with dark hair below me moving

i feel incredulous when i look at myself with borrowed eyes

and the room smattering a night paint thorough

immutable triumph you undress like perfect coat

that palm of your mind shakes hands with mine

and obsfucates the sea, sea fog heaves its bright weight

bright alone like god piano the sun piano in church

galician heat and night erode my throat and what it has to

plea for watching the summer die and you begin your

return to israel

the boats are left where no boat belongs, already that sea-line

stone cools and hardens real magic into the apses

later let lay in ruby sheets for however long lacking your wet

dark way like a prayer but the mouth is sealed in a perfect

tomb

Woe is a horned creature
      Color/blue (soft)
      Youth of savage taste
        
Piano is envious for magic
(The noise is disquiet)
    
    Angel wise and
    a whisper

Mother cleaned up her
violent act on stage (a highwire)
    The temple forever stained with
     birth
    
          Garden of age/
          
       A river's foolish plea with the moon,
        
People wrapped in ivy dance holily
   With their April patterns in a truly
    Dionysian scene
    
         I am there (a poet)
             day belonging to death
as death is owed to
life

   I feel balanced in this state
   (on the edge of the river)
  
       we are joined by harmonies from the Valley,
         they can be heard from above
           flowing
           downward
           featherlike
           unafraid
          
           (a warmth/a womb)

II

   The sea is still alone
   (chasm of black)

Thinkers chase its waves &
Our eyelids disappear like marble
into empty flies
  released from a tropic fantasy
  
    The inevitable scream, humid &
     Covered in ash (volcanic)

III

Illness rejuvenates the dream/
questions remain questions

   An elephantine flowerbridal looms/

Smoke erases the memory stained in each ring of each pine,
          burdens relieved from the Antlers of
ancient death
         (smoke, tide, branches crackle in a flame, peace is envisioned here, I love you)
         Narrow ceilings attempt to re
         create
The sky/      
Paint flaking off pathetically (the palace)
darling ember washed away with simple time

    (Where has our capability for survival gone?)
    
         mapmakers and children watch their hair fall into a promising wishwell
    ...kept secret and sacred
    
         those who see the bottom of the well are branded with eternal laughter!

IV

? Healers hand
       (You've arrive
       d
       at the entra
       nce you once saw asleep)
      
                 The conquest for simplicity is finally realized as no conquest at all
                     You're in love again,
                    
(Yellow love)
!

I inhale the goddess spirit
and with open humility
     my heart must honor the sun

       In forward joy
    we ignite and release
         a united
              lotus breath

There's a degeneration of Society
occurring in front of the yacht clubs
here West Island
commute home again (again)
Straight men crave the
wedding dress seduction mechanism (Lingerie will do as well)
Funny we buy these expensive clothes just to take them off
on the nights we're not loveless.
Expense is all commodity anyways...
Charity bins full of grief in a loading truck for those who've been
consistently smiling.

I step off the 4 and into the immediate glorified adult night entity.
Sinister middle-aged animals scatter beneath a common moonlight
and to tenements, motels, upward skinny crackwood staircases
to some unknown neon-advertised Leviathan of
skin and sorrow.
ELECTRICITY burns in those bones.
The bones of the Brittle
The Bottled
The Erratic
The Bearded
and Retreated.

I'm here hands tight on a suitcase of whatever you'd like for ANYONE
who will do some good instead of
lightning another fire!
So many now keep to debt on a clothes hanger or
a bedside cabinet.
We're experiencing a surplus of it!
Deficit Surplus,
what a cruel contrary contagion
(Where's the pesticide for THAT insect??)

Don't take this all as universal truth,
rather, it's my own universal truth...

The best way to keep an enemy close is by continuing to think about them.
I'm rambling on and on
and living in a pendulum
of old things and new.
Goodnight.

Here I wait.
The daily purgatory
continues
trains speed through
the underground
lips neutral
eyes half open
shoe untied
girl three seats ahead
brown hair green eyes
gone
no words
sealed doors
cloudlight
sheds through
the tunnel's end
buildings reflect
off glass
tie my shoe
stand up
rush down stairs
girl three stations behind
brown hair green eyes
on the quiet elevator
fifth floor tired yawn
half past six
the daily purgatory continues
eyes half open while the trains
speed through the underground.
Here I wait.

Years are mixing into decades like tasteless stew
while I sit here in the second floor of a double decker bus affiliated with universal energies that haven't been given names, and gods which haven't yet been killed over.
Sudden Spring makes me sentimental!  I daydream with my eyes shut and sunlight repeatedly washing over my face that Im racing on some enchanted eastern express en route to Benares while Lama peak Nepal is weakened with Earthquakes. Fallen monestaries still romanticized and newly forged in my mind. A few countries North, the radical religious groups are continuing the impractical path of world decay with frequent threats and televized beheadings.  We're guaranteeing ourselves a real apocalypse to save ourselves from a fake one!

Owls in suits recently drycleaned return home,  their bedroom drapes appear ethereal veils of cruelly false night-brides twirling from wind beating fiercely at the door. Next morning the
Hong Kong tram serrates the neon
acid streets where blankface ghosts are observing the hundred thousand faded shoes and wirey laces encircling the larger paths of Chinese cities like a hollow caffeinated sterile ball of yarn thrown over by the communist Cheshire cat. Bluehue sad sickness is the largest global airborne infection we all have to worry about!

Many Summers later, Debt and debt collectors are equal hell,
I'm home and showering off the society sweat and mutual bruises of some mundane corporate copy job where I copy and jab and jib and bob my head outta the sea of slate jaws and somber smiles. Everything has become a bore! The year is 2045 I'm growing gray and I feel like it, the world feels like it, too. Why did I let go of the poems? The rebel heroes in the 1960s who fought off nuclear holocaust with rhyme and meter?
We could really use that now!
Whatever happened to the soul of India budding in my veins and making me stiff with insatiable wanderlust? My prescription needs to be renewed and my passport expired two years ago. Nobody but the dead travel anymore and they aren't getting to their destination by plane. Those greenhouse gases really ****** us for good! All the aircrafts are now modern art and all my dreams are hidden in hypothetical fallout shelters crossing their fingers they survive before the generators power down on them.

Those past inspired goals faint and lifeless carried by anchors to underwater trenches. Back when my hair was down and long. Dandelions were polished in rainwater outside Vietnam Hostels encased in zipper basket backpacks on stock with incense,  teardrop ecstasy stains and cantinas filled on liquid dharma platinum with the zen seal bottlecap. Well off they go! hearts of an aspiring mahasattva sticking to the back ends of sticker stapled scooters gliding
down to the outdoor booths in Saigon.
As was expected, even the scooters were left to fizzle away in the cyclic guyas once all oil tapped out when I was 37.

Sedative Queens have tightened their authority on all of us and I'm sleepy in the wholes of days where thoughts barely catch wind off the finish line. Nobody is a firecracker anymore. Radios no longer work in closets!
I heard they used to. Radios worked anywhere.
All sound is dead. The angry ghost of an eighteen year old watches out his  kitchen window observing the approaching storm and listening to The Velvet Underground feeling like the world is gonna conflegrate to rock & rubble from the creamy ******* skies ready to drown us out.

Hepcat hideous mangled in gradual oppression diseases!
***** teen hormoned out of homosexuality, I thought we'd gotten past that ignorant belief!
Animal axed in syringe oblivion muscles tense then loose, consciousness BLANK.
Ozone overdosed on air miles and morning commutes, they said it would never happen!
Happiness hung on air, we've been told that our experiences depend on how we choose to perceive them, so maybe all this worldly wack has been my fault!
Dragons exist behind snowy beards contrast to a blood red tie sitting up on Senate! Why'd we been told they're make belief? They're burning everything down!

It feels like Summer no matter what season it is these days. Those Alaskans sure work a good tan!

All in all, years are mixing into decades like tasteless stew,

And we're running low on bowls.

I

Sun since discovered, released, now
eclipsed-

-spent shoes & leaves
vanished in
wind

II

It is without shame that I stand tempered
before the fervor
of the sea, sand
beneath my nails/throat heavy
with fog.

..Years become part of the water's process

(this process begins in the center of the Ocean, an unseen thrashing of instruments imitating war, screaming obscured by screaming, cut-
off by itself/bare

intersperse of salts, kelp, monsters without eyes
reside in blackness,
continuously repeating in solitude, where no human heart
can be placed without risk of dissent,
it too, becoming fury)

III

Feral baths
scrape their lyric
into the Dionysian Lid..

Dawns slight flaming fingers/Gökotta/
awake, my features appraise me/an interval now passed for gold
and heliotropes

The Body needs
The World
to hold you

Foreground trumpeting/Impatient Maker
of all which yearns
...now pleading

"Wake from
your underworld and witness
the collapsing of the
night!"






                               (((metamorphosis/strike)))

Starlight
                                           fluttering over
                               the great euphoric episode of
                                                Victoria!
Cosm­os being packaged in the mail,
on its way now from Britain,
Sitar dancer on the inner harbor
jingling end time tunes to the ears
of the grateful.
Today is WEIRD!
Everyone is shaking hands and waving from Summertime fields,
                                 laughs escape the rooftops,
                          Owls begin to wear brighter colors.
                                Near August, post three day
                                  Northwestern Monsoon
                                THUNDER    R a-T-T-linG
                                          Double Decker
                                          past romances
                              on highways approaching
                                        The BC capital!
Articles topic the Utopian evidence
of the current generation
nearing Post Capitalist society.
All peoples smile still!
(Wouldn't that be something?)
Telescopes discovered Kepler 452b!
Another world, very much like our
own (I wonder if I'll see it one day)
Round-frame black hole glasses
Enamel downtown in golden tint,
solidifying this happiness!
                            The day is a colorful child
                            bestowing chalk drawings
                                 upon the asphalt.
            His Years 'round the garbage corner now.
                     India crafts a crown of laurel
                           For the innocent youth!
Sin predates them by centuries and wars, ***** and outta-lucks, paycheck to paycheck psychological warfare with the Western planet!
             But they're predisposed to the silent decade of
                                   internal purity,
              that BIG BIBLE BOOK has granted em'
              A get outta hell free card for some
                                 ####   a-years.

(While Virginia Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel 2011 mind-flash nostalgia permeates in my adult brain.

While North Carolina Top Sail Atlantic
sea salt stings thru my nostrils,
body boarding few miles away from
boardwalks with a nighttime view of
Milky Way Forever! (Age 14)

While Seattle shimmers aluminum skyscraper lights, Emerald City Winter where outside my hotel window I focus on
the Space Needle distantly blinking
the spirit of
Edward E. Carlson and John Graham, Jr.
up up up to Dharmakaya!
That improv performance near Pike Place Market with Charisma, Julie N Severen! SPONTANEOUS WISECRACKS BEING PAID TO BE SPONTANEOUS WISECRACKS.

While Seminyak, Southeastern Orient, Is hailed with cloud-formt waterfalls, and I watch, containing the inexpressible joy of that particular moment. Mind relapsed to whispers of Dakini,
(Contentedness possible in adulthood after all!)

                                   Celestial energy rebounds
                 thru all entities on the sidewalk including myself.
                  delivering metaphysical felicity to all future loves
                   who find occasional joys in the cycle of living.
                         Who make more of themselves than
                                 tying their shoes to sleep.

Cardinal sun rose
blooming as the
budding flower.
Buddha chants in the
chimes of birds
ethereal caught in gradual hot wind,
Darjeeling tea steam rises on tabletop my
mind is waking over Indonesian morning.
Foreign babel as hours draw even
cacophony of hurricane horns
the Denpasar traffic drumming
chorus midst markets where
radio emitting Li Zengguang
dizi dizzily prancing into the
assortments of spice and coiling fabrics
patterns potent azure and golden
royalty brass clatter caged noise
boiling *** cries the Orient!

Overgrowth spots the charring temples
in majesty and abundance cradling the narrow
Balinese streets while tropic palm
and orchid spring swells the soils.
Ardent sun sheaths eastern archipelagos,
religious offerings canvas sidewalks
incense burning in overwhelming
bouquets of efflorescence smelling
daedal tapestries within the paradise.
Sun goes on setting the jewel easing
underneath the horizon,
butterflies sway in rest
hearts on fire
the ceremonies have finished.
Thunder shrieks against the sea
torrential rain firing on villa ceilings.
My eyes set to sleep
consciousness transitioning
between two dreams.

Your final sight
the floor and myself

it is over with as quickly as
you expected

   with your jewelry spilled
   graciously on
    the floor
      your final sight
      
relieved of pain
   your expression mirrors confusion
   and a sort of gladness
  
     it is over quickly
    
     i retreat back into life
  
   your final sight is life
   spread clean with your death

Day debt
night wept
sleep crept
Attachment.
                       Where is my attachment?
                                evening out of balance
                                        The line of my life has broken
                                                  off into separate identities
Flower feather
Hollow weather
Moonlight Canyon
                                      Skylight childhood nostalgia
                                      Stolen star
Battered cheekbones
Of weary workers keeping to
The hornet's nest
                      Reality a constant terror
                     Of city structures                         swallowing
                                                      ­                             them whole.
Blackbird rests
on an Autumn branch of
hidden meadow
checking its wristwatch obsessively for the
             Hydrogen Volcano
                INEVITABLE.
                                         Termite Corporations
                                          Cavernous Hilltops
                                        All that green is gold
(A straw man in Byzantine robes approaches
            the frosty Manhattan
    to become a relic in it's Libraries)
                         People fall in Love with coincidence,
                 (The illusion of order beyond our field or reach)
        All that love is kept in a
                    Conservatory somewhere...
                          Glossy stems connected to palpitating blossoms.

Our tired eyes are focused to the asphalt confluence
whether fever or handhold.

               Hymns ring throughout the forests of
                                                   Vancouver Island
               Dreamers hang from the Niagara Trestle caught in                
                                                   overwhelming sunlight
                                                        ­ Doused in spirit.

Holy Melancholic September
Sweeps away the dusty Summer,
                                                        e­verything seems renewed
                                                        I­n the rain..

The unsettling fishtank
dream remains/ luminous!
& yet confined to it's own/serene state
of sheltered existence, there is no/reaching in and interrupting this Indian fire two thousand years old/only a deep sense of burden that you couldn't n will never/
be a section of its gaze

There will be no kindling of Spirit while whispering the secret of your/madness to
a staircase/
      There will be no eyes & alms to forgive and guide your restlessness at night/the sky will not forget your cowardice in absolute emotional expression
How you stray from kissing a holy lover the way you've always ached to!

The Summer will not reverse its eternal poetry from your skin/
will not smile watching you blunder through childhood, tending to your fear with higher
priority than your great wound

It (this longing to be smothered & worthy rest) will not reschedule to next week
just because you read the daily horoscope
and it "applies" to you now!
/soldier & your MobyDick heart & saintly revelations on the silence of your neighbors & shaving off ur insecurities/causing you to bleed & be sent off to the HOSPITAL & the staff is laughing down at your mangled face, anyways

& you have done with the destruction caused in a moment of blushing cheeks

Dye fills the head with ego painting & unexpressed volumes ! Oh!

      The circus remains fearless but still uninformed, worn down in its senseless practice & schoolboys cry observing the clouds lose train of thought to the music of Berlioz

My terrible soul skips/unblinking from the pondrous black cat who lingers above my dreamworld/to Gustav Klimt & his empyrean entanglement/
      out to the parking lot which cannot mind it's own bussiness

    trees of insoluble space
         haiku lion
                  prisons kept hush hush
                         so its prisoners may forget
                         again where they weep

(how are you dear? I wish I could be a lasting impression)

Since birth
many of us have successfully
avoided the barbaric
heat of life
        I haven't been uplifted by beautiful
        laughter in a long time
the laugh that uplifts this whole Earth

A child to die so early

"just talk about love, or ***, or starving hearts, or just shut up
and I'll go

but" - Jonathan Richman

(..NIGHT)

A drunken man is blown by bathroom paintings,
with shower curtains displaying crowned sparrows
who laugh at his
crowned ****!
and humor his life!
also crowned
(but only subjectively if you were to ask anyone else)
I'm a burning insomniac surrounded by a whole cast of characters tonight, including the one with with a lazy eye who mirrors Chaplin
and arrived to the party disoriented from recent Salvia.
Then there was the one with a sleek current-edge-type haircut
who spent a few good minutes telling me about the film works of Philip Glass
            B E A U T I F U L
They play Bowie,
the whole social palette disintegrated beneath the weight of intoxication.
I, too, am dazzled from pale alcohol already (eight minutes past Midnight!)
The Dancing Athlete ambiguously dances on an absent television while my head hurts from a blue bulb glowing from a nearby lamp because it's too late for all this
and I'm reminded that I know almost nobody here.

(...AND DAY)

Maybe thirteen hours later, walking with Dante the bearded dog,
my friend wheeled a stranger, narcotic-vacuum-cheeked amputee.
He begged for light, as in a lighter, not that light of GOD, no no,
all the while he showed off his stub leg (cut off at the knee) bleeding out all over the sidewalk when his accident first occurred.

"THIS GUY THREW ME FROM THE BALCONY!" he preached

Past the cathedral narcissus
"JESUS COME/
JESUS SAVE MAN/
JESUS MAKE FIRE/
JESUS WAS A HOLY INDIA"
Across the street, village of enduring tombs and firesmoke,
shadowed tent outlines
breathed-in
playing cards and tricks
mandolin reverberations among tents and tents of
sickly or addict, all listening in on the live performance, a blessed Alice with dreads, lively chords emitted from her skull of ideas.

The forgotten noose of man ****** in a parking lot
by a liquor store, while we pick up some wine, which is, and I quote here "DRY AND CHEAP"
A sunny quiet perched on the field
of gleaming downtown streetlights
thru thinning clouds.
Olympic mountains in view, the kind of mountains only seen in magazine articles to be experienced by those unafraid to die.
All these sad people out here, too!
Their faces expand beneath capital industry,
Elephants occupied with jackets sewn in an anonymous factory.
Quick tip, I wanna write it down before I forget: don't listen to that old music when you're feeling lonely, it's all about love and especially in tragedy this is a bad idea.

I'm sick and wept and my teeth have been growing cameras,
the youth are dressed in drag, carpet cleaners bob their heads to unheard tunes but you can see the sound thru a glass window.

This city, oh, this city..
with bodies sprinting hard by each other and who bike across train tracks associated with very vague childhood memories.
We all float on hands electrified by the night!

Jonathan Richman tonite, who's vocal deliveries have been honest
and romantic, in a passionate sort of way.
He's singing that live track "A Plea For Tenderness"
(I know you were waiting for me to get to this)
and past few days have been strange
and past few weeks stranger, still. Not as bad as a lot of people but man, strange..
that night, and day.
Walking by the Victoria Hospice care center and looking down on my wrists which'll soon be tattooed with loving hands yet oh
so
aggressively pained by abuse because of a terminal disease and attempted suicide (NOT my own life, to clarify)
and it got me thinking on how we're all mutually getting thru this place and every face has seen hearts and seen death almost equal.
It can get to be too much, that's why melancholy has been defined to begin with. But ******* Jonathan Richman had to make this song.

"if I'm better than the wall
(tell me now)"

"Because it's dark at night
and I'm alone at night
I'm so sad and I'm so scared"

Things I've said in my own head and felt in my own time
as has everyone else. I don't mean to specify that this has happened RECENTLY, but it's definitely happened before. These times.

"now, I've just read some writers
from the old days
because I knew, I knew that they'd understand"

but BUT everybody is accidental!
even Rimbaud has stubbed his toe and I know that it'll be fine
it'll be fine
it'll be fine
in Vietnam maybe
and it'll be finer in Varanasi
(maybe-r)
but for now I don't know
I can say it I can try and feel it and understand it and pretend I know it
I gotta get away from people to be replaced by a Hindu I've never seen before
and sleep on a mattress that (like a new pair of shoes) hasn't grown in to my spinal chord and hurts ****** bad at first and is unfamiliar and the weather is warmer than usual
and the horns of traffic will be frightening but that too, will dissipate with time.
I gotta save up my money and hug my wallet like a starved cat
Jonathan ******* Richman's "A Plea For Tenderness"
what a fitting title
for a time like this one now.

New poems are written from old tragedies.
Oh I appreciate the selfishness of poets,
stealing death to pocket life.
Life for their sons and daughters
Post secondary tuition.
Life for retirement.
Life for life's own sake.
Let's turn on the TVs and hope
For another war.
Government storms countries for oil,
Parading rifles and bombs to the
Children without education
And the bearded spinners who can't
Afford a break.
Poets claim to be romantics and meditate on dreams of peaceful Eden.
But what poets in recent times have written in yellow ink?
Cynic and Poetry both have a simple
Y.
Y
  Y
     Y?

Outside the barless
Tired wanderer sleeps

softly under the gutter
Of divine prices
and flocks of birds

Tapping on the mind window to suggest

that it's safe outside for the first time he can remember.

He carries himself like a beast of burden

Adjusting to a new pair of glasses he

never asked for!
The Santa Monica Pier

Flashes up like an express elevator in his childlike remembrances

& Screwdrivers &
heels contact with a hardwood floor

Paid for every month with a hard earned dollar
By a hard working family
Who always had it dogged

& Questioning why ah why he's

Slow with the
  kinks in his back nobody knows his name He
  doesn't know theirs either

He remembers the name of routine
offices & the birdsong of three AM

Removed from physicality by then searching for his kneecaps

N constant intervals of unseen shouting from
A block over or upwards to him

The junktruck tumbles down the black Avenues
Another communist is born

& Yawning has grown into language

Poetic verse misunderstood by many

The ministry on ones heels

& Neon has replaced vinework

He's just tired and can't stop rehearsing apologies

Bo Diddley's Nursery Rhyme as the European bus
Cruises past Chinatown a woman

Takes a clove cigarette out from her shirt
Pocket
Laughing to herself

& It travels towards the street vendor
He's making it
and A phone call interrupts the whole scene

A great glowing ship suddenly materializes
(Nobody pays any attention)

The coffee is strong today

His thoughts are being particularly loud lately

The auburn trees
Collapse their shimmering hue

As the sun releases it's hold
The potted plants are writing eulogies

A child runs thru an Island orchard
His shirt sticks to his skin
And the girl
who in eleven years will marry him

Is fifteen miles away sleeping off a fever
She has hazel eyes

& Her mother works at a hospital
She's an only child

She will smell as a poppies seductive
Stare or an Actress perfume
Autumn is

One week off
The ashtrays are in need of cleaning

The ceiling fans turned off
& The desk fans shelved in familiar
Musty closets

Nobody can remember what heartbreak felt like

As for one premature month that year
Everything was just alright

Palace of my happy dreams
burning down to wakefulness,
the golden memory escapes me like cool air
in October bare and I forget what
imaginary Alice's imaginary kisses
felt like to my lips.
Our romance dies in eclipsing days
too often empty of rhapsody,
a nightmare instead built upon addicts impurities
and withdrawal shakes.
She's somewhere in my subconscious
shipwrecked lost in a sea of thoughts and disconnected tangents.
Her perfume makes me stupid silly and sad.
Where is she now but looking far to shore?
like you,
like me,
like this world of pattern and bore.
Never getting any closer.

I (August)

By way of magic theaters
& Volumes of intellectual glitter
& Tragedy in the form of escalator dramas
Replaced with alcoholism and the tile floor in need of cleaning

Bulbs green and vibrant
In accompaniment of nearby mechanical ships/
I'm too spoken and the traffic has been melting against itself for the last three weeks

Doorhandles left empty of the
Torch of lost odors
& Bouquet smiles
& Petrichor thru the window facing the street
A shouting sort
And 25 cents in my back pocket

The dream I had yesterday of Bank Robbery
Solipsism

Also sexuality revealed as
The Camel's endurance
For kind people

Everyone around me in the bookshop starts vocalizing my internal scatterings
& The whole thing becomes surreal
Corso waves as I walk by
I'm afraid if what might happen on acknowledging it

Lamppost summoned and
Violent
Carpet is stained with the footsteps of people you don't want around anymore

Your gigantic ego had a hard time fitting thru the doorframe on exit


II (September)

A woman is reading a japanese book on
Windmills
Cradled by a sweater the tone of
Sunsets

The hour has devolved into silhouttes

An internal voice peaceully sings its way higher into the skull to be remembered/
The melody of September

On the verge of permanence at all times
& feeling it now!

You will never be this shy around
Orchards again,
Once the Hotels quiet down &
Autumn laurel replaces the crow of
Current conciousness

Ur journal is a series of wet shapes
Lucidly mixed with Candlewax air

Have fun transcribing Burmese papers
Or attempting Monkhood in Vermont!

III

It has been easy attending
All these social Funerals
And watching the Hospitals keep busy
As water is drained from countless fountains

Meanwhile a dog with a crooked lung is manufacturing a vivid sense of
Totality with the garden
Tongue out
Unaware of the Sun

Forest phantom imagery
haunting stereophonic instrumentals
from Murals
whispering     on in nights    fine tent
wrapt up in my sleeping bag and only hearing dynamite as clouds
pass into the afterlife and
the moon has blossomed
the ocean!
Whole Blue Cliff Record lit in here on a bright canvas,
trees can see me saving paper,
Asian telltales, poetics,
and Buddhist Zen philosophy
swirls in my Mystic/Sombrio harp-brain
vivid by lucid shrillness
(achey wakey!!)
Turn the pillow
snap a mental image of that modern monk,
imaginary in his waterfront Salvation Army and his
Glass Temple and his
blasted literature.
His tearful dreams, logical processes... so that it's okay (zzz) always (zzzzz) what's that up there, Shiva?
I am atom, you are ATOMIC
There's a difference here I promise (ASTRONOMICAL)

The waves demand their presence to be known by periodic lion-like clamor, my lips are dry from fireside cider and absolute darkness fills up this space like water, oh cosmic libertine! Snap their starless net to catch the sea and a luminous fish which I may be presented with like inky flashes of thought courtesy of the streetlight moon who's pale properties signal GO
to those willing to decipher it's surface from this far away..
All the quiet beat down trees murmur muffled truth.

This truth is only available to dogs and Christ,
but not me, not any normal soul who's mortal vision is too blurred to make anything out of yet..this Springtime tapestry just a fragment
to an ETERNAL NOISE
which may be faintly audible past the waves
who try their best to stamp it out of perception.
But I am feeling particularly meditative tonight!
I'll at the very least stroke the thin top layer of absolute knowledge
and do so with heightened, trained consciousness..
when the moment is right
which may not be now
(definitely not now)
quelled by flesh and sleepy daze,
onyx silk covering us in warmth..but I will get there!
An Everest for any to see but exclusive to those who can.
Climbing higher in years
emotional trials
loves and fears
or passing seasons where I signify the apparent shift with
a name
(Parade)
or
(Pendulum)
Out from under
But not yet completely unwrapped from
The Mosaic
to see it all stretched open,
beautiful and tragic.

You were there
underneath strange elevators and
London's tragedy made the news
I don't know what to say                    but

I guess it doesn't matter now does it
(Hillcrest Park's ethereal flow catches the blue room
and makes my cheeks warm)

We cleared the air,
we didn't but we did.

"What have you been up to?"

"Ah, just keeping around"

"Yeah?"
"Yeah"

The voices across the hall a blur behind the door
I
barefoot
             walked down the steps/
                    into the bathroom/
      looked into the mirror/
                     told myself that I was myself/
I still need that reassurance.

Melody melody melody
melody melody
                                               in the skull
it's a calm sound and a violent feeling
I've been kinda sad about it all day now.

(Laying there
the room has vanished)

mute the flower screaming from the television
and love's been paused again
for Summer months.

Dry and weary is the sun

without it’s jovial color, but a bright void.

It’s all poor tricks, thick masks that shield the

pain and sorrow of being so

beautiful but

alone.

They were spectacular!
Visions unlike any you would believe!
and one day I may write about them.

And so the Universe looks on
with sad eyes as it expands
between nowhere and nothing,
creating and destroying,
spinning fiercely through darkness,
much like ourselves.

Triumphantly raised colorful flagpole insignia dynasties
of this country and that country and other country
destroying each other territorial
like rabid animals and house pets.  
Atomic bomb cat food will feed us full
in fallout by the end!
Meeeee-oww!

Wounded
Sterile sidewalk
bent black wood bench
fetch DOG fetch!
the sky is clear today
trees are trying out modelling again, for the painters.
I'm at the public park where Big Satanic Paul used to live in a tent
too small for his heart
I'm drinking another free coffee.
O potential Buddhas all about the place
Loved, loved by all
loved by nobody
Solipsism in tired affections
we've all experienced a similar doorknock on the heart
who's earth settles uncomfortably after feeling like that.
I'm drinking another free day
in my F R E E country
(as we're so obliged to believe. We didn't choose to be born here, but we certainly choose to die here)
Writing on a bathroom wall says something too rude for me to copy in this poem.
I'm drinking another hour
the weather is nice today,
I never met Big Satanic Paul, but according to my friend who shared tent space with him some six years ago, he wasn't the type to get better.
Anyways, I hope he died as gently as he lived.
I'm drinking another Spring.

I follow poppy flowers down avenues gray and pestilent.
I pass the radiant windows of Avalon while crows perch the ticket stands.
Sidewalk lifeless as frowning clowns droop on their way to another wake.
Fluorescent signs hang from concord wires.
I tire of the tired,
I drain from the drained.
I am the modern death.

School children are made from the same cosmic juice blend as me.
They are the modern death.
Politicians wear my infamous black garb.
The modern death is them, just as well.
Senegal actresses patter on their patchwork paste texture makeup and rose circles, hiding tears illuminated with the truth of tragedy.
There is no doubt they are the modern death.
Faerie potpourri in desolate East Hastings and clairvoyant row enticed by false visions of hallucinated men crouched beneath rotten cement canopies while locusts click and clatter midst their sorrow.
They are buzzing incantations of the modern death.
Tibet is falling hold to corruption while the boyish monks calm in their meditations, are interrupted by agony wept Bhikkus bent in ****** transgressions, even Buddha is the modern death!
China is a communist factory housing too many chimneys clogged with silent sufferings.
Communities hiding in thin dust masks bearing the insignia of the modern death, only seen underneath ultraviolet light.
My role has been diminished in recent generations, I'm growing old and flogged with decay,
same as you, modern death.

We're here for a final round of drinks
cool on our chasm lungs breathing big bang radiation for many years
while the batteries in our clocks begin to fail us and the Hospital calls occur in succession once we get too sick to see the harsh planet we'll all have the privilege of dying in.
I'm the modern death watching pale static reruns of the nature channel in a finely decorated room in some death camp retirement home
waiting on the last day, inevitable.
There's no place here for the modern death,
not anymore.

This is what the poets were talking about!
all the bodies are already skeletons.

Cut, *******.

Scar, Australia form

on lower thigh.

Dent, puncture

in thumb.

Bruise

on

leg.

Where did you come from?

My body remembers

more than my mind.

Easel pink brandish-
markings of bold
Panther shadow/transfigure
to Mariposa sweetly

Sunset sleeper, Mediterranean
heath, silver sailboat idol
chanting in wind/undulating mica-recast

(your teeth unravel
  like hazardous
decorations as you approach
with sand in your pockets, shoes beaten together,
you shut the door behind you)

I've done with
stagnating, a freedom
figure replaces the routinely/becoming

(May)

a joyful repose,
                        now sojourned to
                           subtropics, a wanderer-
detaching himself from misconception

I am the Devourer of
my own time

(freckled freckled freckled eyes/

dew/pattern smile/you are eager/the

humidity dims the shadow/relapse/

enticement/the beachhead is creating

splash colors again/the tide applauds

gratefully/hair beam and glow of green/

scent of exotic oils now coalesce/

meditative lovers/idol obsidian, great

brass bird n neckline harp/quartzstone

tendon/consume me into the ardent maw/

dear,

valley for waxen bones/decay, sweet

altogether now/O half moon descent/

reconstituted daisy/you there, resembling

yourself, familiar of a fleshseer/cleansed

in white tended theatrics/become/

beseech/diluted symphony, Egyptian

security/It is time to leave behind your

midnight)

Oh ferocious angels,
lionesque children of Eden
on narrow streets and polluted alleyways
whispering cruel things to each other,
you're radiant in your belligerence
and as my enemies you are virtuous.
Beside me in this carpeted rectangle room
a faint glow exhales
from the tall alpine ivory lamp illuminating
firefly wings of blossoms
alluringly exuberant in the afternoon sun-ray
diamond shine and shimmer.
Dusty tin roofs billow
firewood smoke in the thick violet shade fog over-top cabin potted
mountains and hills sprouting firs and rose bushes abounding.
Spectrum cast chandeliers echo staircases which
jot up and up arduous ruby landings,
hardwood floor cracked
and stacks of novels ballast the senescent hallways
of bookshops where poets works and journals diaries and memoirs blur
the serpentine walls with memories.
Angelic the soul which is too often contaminated with
avarice rebellious to concord living
harmonious midst dew grass and calm waters in residential lakes
empathy equanimity, far from Bodhisattva.
Few kinds of darkness transcendental
subduing other darkness to a weak shadow.
There's an importance to admiring the delirium of metropolitan roads on roads
this intricate unspoken connection to those who
rest by stoplights and crawling traffic metallic molten aura of
cars in July heat.
Paying attention to the open window of adjacent apartments
where Mr. Norris waters his tulips and shares this moment
modern meditations practiced
finding a balance in such an anxious
volatile world like this.
Oh ferocious angels, impetuous
forlorn seraphs,
sing! sing and soar!
Boundless is our ardor
and our passion.
Unenclosed is the lion
in it's bloom.

I

top of the valley
))) showerhead & birdsong,
the womanlike apparition
of previous nights,
  confession buries its warmth within fervent tangerine sheets (where the day is hot and the future is formless)

I approach the dawn
in naked repose/horns repeating/soft a hares tail is
spotted with freckled water from Lands End,
youth & ideal kiss-image lost in bedsheets/
  eyes are painted with creekwater
  
to impermanence, guarding the stones we left there
  drying away/I miss you already
  
  (the island which reconciled my heart to that of a lambs infant noise)
  
  all worry and expenses vanished at the throw of an axe
  
     haze/fire/italian wine/the stirrings of March brought forth for inspection
     in the dim glow of our ashes/butterfly asleep/carved dragon
     draped with the fury in your kiss/

I stand naked before the valley, an initial warmth fills its features. A smile stems in the garden loosely protected by wire, I am temporarily innocent of day/
my restless behavior now soaked into a wooden platform

     Clothes placed on a nearby log, I now cloak an inevitability to my skin, one of a whisper, mute in the heart as yet,
     heavy (molten lead) to the rest of me

(questions starve in my mouth,
  for the sake of any dire simplicity/animal truth in tongue/awakened from its hibernation)
  I am gripping the mothmask
  helpless & drawn instinctually
  toward the fire which
  hurts me
(the witch unafraid of being burned)

  stumbling in black of later-spoken confusion/divided tones/two worshippers of the same trickster idol-

-only promising the subdued rising day,
where you monastically
prepare (with such grace) the next meal of bananas & hot tea, cupped with mint leaves, meanwhile,
Ethiopian rhythm fills the trees with a land who's taste they'll never know

      (& suddenly I am the forest)

II

(out of sight)

-hitchhiked home & let out here, a brown ivory-trimmed wood church hardly the size of a house a little ways down the road, myriad
insect conversation & the dry, eclipsing valley, carrying with me a simple liberation of spirit, one I can't let go of by necessity-

-my shoes are scuffed with loose dirt at the sole, I must pantomime the Sea, now more than ever

(without intervention)

-my clothes clean all things considered-

(darling time acts in accordance to nothing but its own divine & careless will)

-as if ingrained to me by the Summer heat, & the earned sweat on my back.

"Life needs to be lived, not to be solved" - Osho

I have found myself enamoured
With that slow kind of dying,
   the kind that allows a stone to mold over with
Stern fungi
Or
that which is observed in
one shop being closed down and removed from time
for another that plays better music and has nicer staff

& there is the final confrontation
coming
one evening
I will be held by accidental virtue
and my breath will be weak & accordion failure
Swelling from the heart
out thru the mouth in dry release
& some queer observer watching the whole scene play on
will claim my last words were some
comically insightful romantic notion
*******
I was simply trying to feel a full Northern breath,
As in life.

Flashing Monet garden blur,
central eye signals up to the core of the brain
until entire body shudders silently beneath the brightness
of banana visions and white blood cells
circling a small dot which fires
down a shorter path in this large bleeding space.

Pupils rolled into sockets,
losing sense of body and of self/
just a floating consciousness/
vivid rainbow lacework pattern into
a vibrating eye
staring back at me fluctuated
in flashes of
flower and
numb fingers
asleep
with absence of mind.

Soft mechanical shapes
swirl about the washing machine,
my head no longer attached to the body/split down
de/
capitat/ed/
consciousness wanders, circles back ethereally
to the room behind me
sees clearly
and expands out thru the window into the grey light of the morning
to see nobody awake
and the vagrant eidolon
can feel me staring back at it for once,
a presence not felt before..
..and the hum in my body rushes up to my head,
intense vague visions,
the weight of my feather-sensation
increases to point of fear,
disorientated upon opening eyes
and centralizing myself
to the room
and universal position.
                                                       ­ Breathing deeply.

I see dying people on dying sidewalks.
Dying gulls hover by an ambulance full of dying heroes which save you from sooner dying. The ambulance goes past a funeral home where the dying attend to the dead.
I've passed through this sidewalk before, when I and the world were a little less rotten. I've seen the familiar parked mail truck which has a woman inside usually playing scrabble. She's solved more puzzles, and earned less time.

Did you know it costs money to die? Suicide is illegal, the government has decreed you need to earn your own right to die. You need to die in some accident or from disease or ailment or getting too old. You're serving in a conquest against dying yet either way you'll lose!

I realize as I pass a law firm beside a curiosity shop that my soul is losing its light to power our electricity. My eyes are losing their ability just to watch violence on the news,
My hair will soon be snow.
Im getting sleepier earlier, I'm getting older quicker.
The last thing I wanna do is sleep!
I don't want to weep,
I don't want to be reaped.
My faith is lazy,
My heart is crazy,
Padded up in loveless institutions.
Going to the city makes me feel lonely.
There's one wrinkling man I see here every day, he's wearing a big white sweater, bald spot haloes his skull.
Will I be him one day?
Is he an angel of prophecy?
He writes illegible notes on lined paper from an organized folder in his satchel. I have a satchel, it looks just like his. He is my outcome and my shadow. He is my prayer and my nightmare. He is wise and he is lost, I can tell by his face, his frown, his scowl.

He is dying, more than me.
Maybe thats what his notes are about.
I know mine are.
Despite all these years his weight
Remains the same.
I suppose mine will too.

! A frantic
venus-vision,
rising pink impressions/
potent operatic amen/halo snaking
Ouroboros
light-dream

I've been resting in the silver lodge/
I adore you and your
slumber,
it's causing mandalas to spill out of your
ears and into my mouth
like candy
birthed in the sun                 eyes/lapse of ocean island rain
                                                            ­           (ocean island rain)
starfish gaze, in sky, over city, over the banks,
into the kitchen, settling presence
(water) becalmed, sprigmask lip-
leaf smile, wide autumn orange                     (afterlife shade)

heavy breathing, hot, in Wallachian fabrics beneath the moon temple,
"Zahrada"
forgetting the living kitchen
which scurries off into my night, the holy architecture of a dream,

(to NIGHTMARE/silhouettes, wax-teeth
carrying a girl/unconscious, doll dress/brunette with blushing cheeks,
they forge a labryinth out of air, Persepolis
wide spread chalky
limbs thin like Cypress/
praying with a certain discordance, sword in hand
I tread with a careful
fire-heart
palm tattooed with a phrase from Matsuo Basho to guide me
thru a schoolyard, cement prism, myriad violins and lucid
eternal wheatfields, abandoned rosary/
chased by Quetzales, crowned explosive heads/
bells/wrath/bells
girl now devoured by the bedframe maze, darkness enfolding,
I'm alone, a cavern, smoke
thickens I taste its poison, fall-over
trampled by black horses/Nocturne/
out of NIGHTMARE)



       everyone has a different image of the Isle of The Dead....



                                        (na shledanou)

...wakened to green tea, pattern rug spread on sand,
unworldly passage
in distance, I've been out on high, travelling blind.
Someone laughing about my nakedness
I don't know when I lost my clothes (in my pursuit?)

There's a song, a no-song, Nada, two men
are writing on large papyrus

“At first, the sounds are like those proceeding from the ocean, clouds, kettle-drum and cataracts; in the middle (stage) those proceeding from Mardala (a musical instrument), bell and horn.”

when I ask what they're scribing I'm
hushed by my own inner voice

“The mind exists so long as there is sound, but with its (mind cessation)
there is a state called Unmani or Manas (viz., the state of being above the mind).”

Each word erases the previous as it is written down, until all that remains is the last word,
a final impression,
my internal voice hushes itself
now there is no

inner voice
to be quieted


II

Intoxicated & raised by the spice of
summer yarrow,

attention drawn to
a place beyond the fence, The Farther.

I sit cross-legged
on a stack of logs, it's June,
I scan the florid heat for
a birthplace I may never return to

"Le Foret Enchantee"

Love is the dissent of all logic,
fueling chaos so microscopic its
only as chemical as the atom bomb.

The hysteria of doubtful intoxication
Three times I love you
The crooked man howls from the chamber of sleep

Mouthing the sharade of footsteps
Wicked in a large flannel crib and Autumn thyme pavement you look like a golden dream/
and I'm slowly drying up with sorrow
Because you do not see me like I do you
I'm screaming for your heart to listen to me !

Darling sways her legs on some brittle branch,
A barbaric stag whistles the end of time
To you in a vision his eyes say something terrible
And you're convinced of the violent October wind I promise it isnt true!

Some glasswork magic
Persona of a modern man
i cannot sympathise!
Rocks do fall onto the sidewalk and I ignore them as they cut my ankles like an insomnia or dentist

Looking up with wild alert at the headlights reminding one of
Death and that you're not paying attention to anything other than your poetry eating you alive

The occasional raindrop like the sweat coalescing under ur pillow/ A damp nightmare

As you **** that cross eyed stranger I lay in the grass
Feeling empathetic with my lamp as it welcomes me from the rain more than your hungry heart ever could!

I become shielded here
And sorry for myself
Ashamed of myself
And the lonesome mattress of years
Dictated by you and your lavender skin
As it exists in the idealism of the wardrobe of conciousness I suppose it doesn't mean anything real anyways pfft

Do not armor yourself against my arms
They envelope themselves desperate against the fog of a witching hour
You do not see a
Single figure arrowed with your alpine eyes

(run you cloud creature)

And a sudden mother who's sobbing into my shoulder regarding her inadequacy I told her be the best example of good for her CHILDREN and she continued crying and ran towards the pornographic hotel that stole her car keys
(she may have been murdered then I will never know and that thought deeply unsettles me)

We are all a little sad & could be doing better
And more than 65 made beds are in love

I - In the active perspiring of
Manhattan dirt

& now I tell ya
The monkeys lost his surpreme gavel
& intimacy finds a false place
Within the youthful realm of transience
(the wide grove of
Grass slowly growing into golden cherries
To be picked apart and criticized by ones who'd gladly describe themselves as Angelic)

A ladder topples over a nightly bistro causing its windows
To ever /so //slight/ly crack
The owner & his two daughters take themselves

(along with his displeasement)
to the basement to conjure up a lawyer made of wax

Meanwhile Queens experiences rain as a cataclysmic shower occuring everywhere
Even the barred 1st floor apartments /

Nearby stabbings\

(74 people watching
  and the screams for help were audible nobody did a ******' thing. We call this the 'bystander effect')

I am long-awaited and less stressed in comparison to the last time I broke the barrier of clouds,
Which decieve America into thinking its
Worth only greyness
& worrying about bathroom Mirrors//srorriM//

(sorry!)

The cinema will show you otherwise!

Minnesota causeway glittering with
Luggage carriers
Alike we are and have been
Bundled together
To read poetics or the sad paper
About elephants in an empty zoo
or the flammatory lawns of Washington

WRAP YOUR TROUBLES
IN DREAMS
(audible from a brunette protected by last year's scarf, the cabin pressure decreasing
my ears feel full of eagerness)

Trunk of the elephant I read earlier
Lets us thru to Airport
The hollowed organics of this passage
Cause my spine to crawl
There are flies bespeckled like
The jewelry of decay

      But soon we are clean again
Yet still without a forest to
         Confess in
               Comforted by shrill wind echoing 'round the wood
              
(as one would say patience is a virtue)

II -   I have missed the first
Haze of every mornings gentle mouth

Strawberries press themselves harshly to lobes
Like oriental jazz
& a collective yawn
As the ground becomes
        nobody
        Wait! Look down there!
        It's my friend welcomed to wifehood!
              Ballads of a long time ago,
                   Humid run-ins with the twinkler
                   Performing a theatrical
                 Tearduct expression

Valleys of varying shades/
Orchards & the Apple of my eye
      Nectar and beggar
      Some Disney story Swiss town
      Operated by
      Language,
       I am tired which causes me to write
       I am writing which causes me to tire
       I am which writing causes to tire
       I which am writing tired causes to
       (the shoreline of a dream where
       Socialists wearing straw hats created a whole scene involving a loud child
       Unaware of what movement he was being indoctrinated into
       And a pocket full of change which was later tossed to the sea
       The image of which caused My Mother to
       Wake from her fainting)

Seance in voluptuous turmoil
Only confronted by
       A vision of the sky transitioned to earth
       & shadow dancing
       Accompanied with the sun,
        its last inkling of lemondrops
        Spread in buttery fashion to my personal
        Horizon
      __________

Fr­ee from(in the) the properties of
Textbooks and
Inflated intellectualism(vast pastoral landscapes)
One can
    Allow themselves to truly sleep in
    Peace
       (of the air)

In the fountain revelry of a
simple moment

My face is ignited with sparklers
there are crowds shouting joyously

the Omikoshi emerges from my hidden theatre of shut eyes

I still haven't seen you carve out a home within the hilltop

I have never heard your voice cry into the deserted afternoon

where everyone has abandoned their post for sour milk,

(it was just as Shiva commanded)

in a purist's wisdom that we shall sew together

A dramatic sepulchre of landscapes &

Balanced shrines which release

pinkish children to the Spring

I

Flowers already,
sputtering bicycles and the mad drums of foreshadowed
Springtime,
Massage therapist of the universe!
The extracted final note in a bird's outcry and my ears are full of sound
and sleep.
A cities undeterred heartbeat welcomes me to the continuous span of events only separated by the lambent verve,
windowless eyes watching each other
a signal-light blue ocean winding around a wicked mattress
seductively spinning a cowl into the night for her lover
(who's thoughts have been paused!  he's 100% clocked in and spun out, a hanging aluminum)
DAZZLING!
toothpaste spit outside into January's soft grass from a second story dorm room that's curtains reminds me of The Glenshiel..
(or maybe I'm suddenly feeling sublime death slowly knotting itself into my lungs, always been there but kinda like noticing your nose resting on your face for the first time)
On the bus home I thought of new years eve, 2015.
After the countdown, emerged from the underground
James Joyce pool hall,
rushing out to the streets
an asphalt madhouse
lunacy, absolute, and stabbings nearby tortured parkades.
Here's the new year made real,
a tangible calendar
an authoritative sentiment
while I listened to Donovan's "To Sing for You"
My new friends laughed, arms together,
I felt like I was standing on the edge of an undiscovered sun,
replaced by Vietnamese clouds
(Which I'll sail by come September)

II**

A crow waits on a balcony, wet and lonely from the rain.
Radios buzzing an electric tuba.
Smoke is the father and
dew is the mother
I am the son cold and clothed, while others soak beneath
canopies, cement gaps, they pray, I pray for them although I
wouldn't consider myself religious,
"Agnostic spiritualism"
yeah, the has a nice flow to it
but that's just my opinion..
Waking up before the sun has breathed
the first western factory.
Yellow hats
****** fists
a faint star is singing
I'm listening
ears are ringing
a static drone collapses
consciousness reaches a peak before subsiding to sunlight
(sequel to the last day, prequel to the days to come)
I'll fall in love again, I know it
I have it marked on my calendar you'll see!
Water a few hours still/room temperature/is shaking because my foot
beats against the carpet/
this music isn't exactly conventional or pure as the morning
more a glass shatter
or a psychotic scream in distant queer Victoria nightclubs.
Passing Christmas,
Oak Bay,
Spanish holiday (potentially)
and ** Chi Minh City market walks
(future events ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
A university lecture from Vandana Shiva,
watching my dad's cat for four months
(Where my room was destroyed in a forty-five minute
terrified chase thru the house to lock him in a carrier for an urgent vet appointment due to kidney stones, or what we thought was urinary crystals at the time. He howled the entire car ride there)
I think back to childhood, 1996 Apartment light and the December blizzard which buried parking lots, blocked entrances/exits n forced people to be patient for once, sit and talk, make love without setting an alarm for the morning after
(before I was even 5, or 10, long before I wrote poems, and lost those I would come to care about..)
Hopefully all those elementary school friends turned out okay.
Since moving, I've frequently passed great corner store curtains,
green and grey dusty
by the rusting tills
an empty town
where the soccer fields became overgrown and ice cubes melt slow on
people's fingers (As they wait for time to roll by like it always has)
a forgivable loss of community.
Even so, there's that consistent disappointment in lost years,
a waiting room, and I'm choking on oriental carpet threads lodged one by one into my throat and here I thought I'd eventually taste the Chinese
but it appears that they have instead swallowed me, downed me with tequila (label torn from passing months and birthdays not celebrated)
The holy temperate wind expands down and through bare branches,
argumentative hours
desperate hands
a loudspeaker CALLING!
and the WILD MACHINE cuckoo cuckoo past the insulation.
Silvery sweet, undreamed kisses, misunderstandings,
the cool reflection of a kettle while two wait for midnight and for the butterfly to creep up on their shoulders.
(cradled by cosmic lobotomy, hours where not one person can sleep,
and Sadhus give spiritual advice for those that need it, India, while I need their voices here on Vancouver Island, far from the Ghats)
When can I go for that intercontinental voyage??
to escape the warehouse cathedrals,
capital Christs,
nettled lipstick,
weariness in the age of wireless consciousness
and a spectrum of commonplace goddesses who wake with no lucidity.
My breathing getting heavier every day, with the weight of wanderlust,
an asthma designed for those who's material position is dictated by a secluded room
(slowly catching fire)
I'm only months away from the prophesied airplane..
all been leading to this
here, now
soon.

The only known alleviation
on this unrest for experience
resides in poetry.