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Mar 2014 · 1.0k
Ripple
Owen Phillips Mar 2014
Come with me into voluptuous darkness
And let your eyes and ears dissolve
Until we're just bodies
Standing and swaying in the warm wet breeze that blows up and out from the depths of the cave
Feel your skin unwind and twist with mine

And beside myself
I scrutinize
My actions until I
Am nearly still, nearly silent
Except in the mind
Where I am perturbed, violent
And I can't find you.

I feel your warm skin pressing against me
But you're kissing through me
Loving the space behind me
And I keep turning back to see who it is
And nothingness stares back into me.
30 January 2014
Mar 2014 · 1.2k
Parking Lot
Owen Phillips Mar 2014
In the parking lot they wear glass masks
And pay authority no respect.
They devour each other and pay dearly for convenience,
They build fires from accumulated Parking Tickets

In the parking lot, the wilderness closes in
And spills over like unconscious thoughts
Into uncontrolled hallucinations,
Glinting fangs and severed heads shift in shadow
6 February 2014
Mar 2014 · 778
electronic dissonance
Owen Phillips Mar 2014
Yeah you facebook friended me and you
Tend to like my posts and I don't mean
You actually like them but when the display tells me you like them,
When I see that red number over above that blue planet in the corner
I feel it in my guts, in my *****,
Like you Like Like me

Yeah but all that stuff's twisted its way into our consciousness like
Jagged metal and I won't stop
Beating my own brains over  the wreckage
Because it feels so good in that
High-fructose, instant ****** kind of way.

But there's my fantasy self, collecting herbs in the garden
He never accomplished anything and he's
Getting thinner and more transparent every day
But from the bathroom window I keep ******* him into cruel, tortured, frightened existence.
5 February 2014
Mar 2014 · 563
Siren Song of Fire
Owen Phillips Mar 2014
The softness of feminine beauty
Shimmers at the ends of long, winding trails,
Back-lighting the swaying ferns and vines
With the siren song of iridescence

There is such darkness that would consume this light.
There are veins of electricity
Corroding Martian canals into your soft flesh

I am here to tend the fire
Which your spark can't help but ignite.
I don't want to throw myself upon these flames and blot them out,
But give them space to reach into the trees
And spread light to everyone

So much wasted potential drains away with your tears of joy.
The hiss of evaporation into these soft flames
Is the song I sing for you
9 February 2014
Jun 2013 · 1.1k
Wetness
Owen Phillips Jun 2013
Endless moments of solitude are the base line for existence
Hiding from the rain in an empty park under a picnic shelter
Watch the clouds move,
Watch the leaves tremble at each other under continuous droplets
The rain surges, pulsing
Heavy fall- light - heavy - light
And spots of sunlight sing vibrant green into the canvas of grey
Two sleek black crows
Iridescently patrol the parking lot
Wetness is a state of being
Wetness is the base line for wild creatures
We fear the rain for we have tamed ourselves
Imprisoned in the illusion that we can or even should keep ourselves dry
Jun 2013 · 861
Fear or Compassion
Owen Phillips Jun 2013
I've seen two
       separate
Shattered turtle shells (and heads and legs and tails)
Within a mile of my house in the past month
And there's a toad in the garage right now
But I didn't tell my mom about it
Because I was unable to catch it
And she has an irrational fear of frogs

My dad has killed at least a dozen snakes, he says,
        since we've lived here in Garner
He usually wields a shovel.
Such an act of violence
Is incomprehensible to me
Do I resist the killing of animals,
Even those that threaten me
Out of Fear or Compassion?
Both,
But they both go away
When the coyote leaps at my throat
10 June 2013
Jun 2013 · 855
A Character
Owen Phillips Jun 2013
I always hoped you were talking about me
And it's so easy to project my own identity onto anything
I saw myself as an emergent phenomenon within your body of work
A character made up of your syntax
You'll write another poem tonight
          And you just started writing it
                   And you're writing it now
Jun 2013 · 761
The Radiance Between Us
Owen Phillips Jun 2013
Are you with me
       or are you
       having trouble
       seeing my purpose?
I can tell you I'm with you there
But of course I am, I'm addressing you
And until you prove me wrong, you're not separate from me.
What are we each doing here,
Experiencing this mutual relationship?
It's meaningless, I'll leave this laying in the rain to wash away
It's unimportant
I remember when I ended the world
And the rain began to fall and I
Crawled on the ground for my scraps of physical communication with you
And for the first time accepted their destruction as inevitable and inconsequential
But the rain eventually cleared
And didn't float our tents away to Valhalla with us inside
And I found my notebook,
Safe and dry
One of God's messengers had taken care of its safety
When the first raindrop fell
So I looked upon your faces in amazement and bliss
Every set of eyes has such radiance
And it seemed to have tendrils growing directly from me
10 June 2013
May 2013 · 619
We Identify with the Water
Owen Phillips May 2013
Summoned by winds of continuous change
We marched half-sleeping through May
Resting on private lands up high in trees we hide ourselves from prying eyes
Beside ourselves, we watch the ways we emulate our idols
And the winds show us paths to our own identities

We identify with the water
You drink us and we become one
"Un-DT*"
Beneath the sun we vibrate faster, further, floating up to see the stars closer, turning down to see the total landscape
Cooling off so we can race back toward the earth and join with her
A union that knows no bounds
She is where we've spent a billion years
And she will die one day
And so will we be water no more
Split into hydrogen and oxygen
We will float through the galaxy
Engulfed in nothingness
In search of new planets
Where we can drink creation anew
*Un-differentiated tissue, from William S. Burroughs' *Naked Lunch*
May 2013 · 2.9k
PM Automatic 3
Owen Phillips May 2013
This trail leads to the animal crossing
It fails to accommodate intrepid adventurers,
Bushy tailed explorers, mountain climbers,
Talkers to squirrels and chewers of pine pitch.
The divine medicine denies us the headspace to believe we're really dead,
The reclined estrogen felt good against twenty million years of insecurity
Golden-layered, factually flawed
It lay exposed for decades
Rusting innards and misfiring sparks
None of the heavy equipment does what it says
Robot arms move with intensity
No programmer yet programs tenderness
The limiting factor has always attracted the acting crowd
Always desperate for theatrical work they magically appear
When it's clear that they're needed
But heed the warnings, they're known to be cheaters; the people who say so could also be wife-beaters
No need to wait for a stereotype
Follow the one you haven't lost touch with
Well I actually wrote it at 1:21 AM but I was in bed about to sleep so it is more appropriately grouped with the other PM poems than the AM ones... Maybe I should come up with another way to designate them, since I'm so often writing after midnight.
May 2013 · 600
"Love's the base line"
Owen Phillips May 2013
Love's the base line
Let us be and what would we lack?
Love's no elixir nor intoxicant
Love's the pure undifferentiated state of joy
Love's where we go when we let go of ourselves
And we let go of our games and our desires
And our pasts and our futures and our fates and destinies
Love is tasting good food and chewing till it's paste and sitting back and smiling feeling it energize every cell
Loves hoping everybody wins the poetry slam
Because what good would it be to be in it for yourself
For one person
Against the universe?
None of us are opposed in love,
We are the unbroken chain
But every link is not connected to just
The link in front and the link behind
It is connected to every link at once
It is connected to every link ever forged with the blacksmith's love
The chain doesn't draw a line between us,
It wraps around us and ties us together
Oh love is all I knew before this poem
And love is the effortlessness of every word
Because only Nothing could be easier than love
And love is to BE nothing
Because who could resist such loving completion?
Nothing is the soul of the universe
And anything at all is Nothing but Love
Love is finishing my speech and sitting down because I'd rather hear yours
May 2013 · 650
Under the Influence
Owen Phillips May 2013
You can obviously see that I'm
Under the influence, writing about my enemies
Trying to find a friend to meet
You can see the joy in me
We can love each other freely
Nothing stands between us
You're on the other side of a mountain
But our mouths are touching,
We are nothing
I'm coming to see you,
eventually I'll be you
Starring in a play you're directing
About me inventing you

We're all scared of dying,
But then we wish we could,
We're all afraid our love won't be enough,
But then it is.
I missed a chance
And I danced on your feet
But we'll always die together when we meet.
May 2013 · 843
Forms and Feedback Loops
Owen Phillips May 2013
Let's give form to a thought at the back of my head
And let it grow, let it drag me away from my body
Let it stretch me out into the past and future
So I lose sight of what IS
Which is here, which has always been
It speaks to itself, playing that it can't know
For we know that all that we can know is but
Difference from Oneness,
And we know that inside ourselves
We are each other, nothing separates us, no,
We haven't yet identified ourselves definitively but we are
Stuck inside the ego while we play the game of time
But we're not going to get rid of it
We'll need it if the Saucers come
Or dead men rise to eat our brains,
But it remains, and as it should
A dormant tool that reawakens
Whenever the need emerges

Why not take these forms that start to rise and amplify themselves in feedback loops
******* them on the page and leave them there,
Outside the body,
Use that action as the symbol of our casting out, not our denial but our separation
From the notions that emerge of perceived
Injuries from outside parties;
All the pain is caused within
And comes from giving shelter to those forms that form their feedback loops
Demanding our attention, and insisting we'll be incomplete
Until we can fulfill their fantasies of pasts and futures
May 2013 · 910
Life Experiments
Owen Phillips May 2013
Where do good ideas come from?
They shrivel away from the hypnotizing light of a virtual socialite
They grow toward the sun out above the clouds
Ever-present from birth to death,
They're the latest permutations of the same explosion that started that
Fusion core up there running
Running without stopping for a billion years
Fueling the experiments of life that consciousness spontaneously manifested
Across the planets
Each a test of a different vibrational frequency
Incompatible with one another but coexistent
Mercury's barren silver mines
And the Venusian valleys
And the regal red sands of Mars
And Jupiter's infinite wisdom and so forth to the edge of the Oort Cloud
And the green and blue ecology of earth, the waterworld
Where the entire drama we've seen so far has been carried out
The audience has grown in appetite
And doesn't always see that it too is the performance
But the unwilling blindness is all part of the sublime suspense of this subcosmic game
The planetary curiosity,
Can we make it? Would it matter?
We'll never truly die when we forget time
Apr 2013 · 791
Kaleidoscopic Porthole
Owen Phillips Apr 2013
There are no bad people and there
Are no bad things and the
Music's always playing, always ringing, always singing
Cos the music that surrounds you, penetrates you, lacerates you
Is no different from the substance of your being,
All vibrations merely differentiated unities
You are gliding through that energy field
And consciously! How strange indeed
You're a kaleidoscopic porthole into
All that can ever be
You keep moving through time,
Accidentally rhyming, caught up in the games of the intellect
And introspectively, you can't believe what your
Mind tells you you are
Because you are and you aren't
There's not one true way to know it
If a word could capture what you are,
Then it wouldn't be true
Because the thought and spoken word
Is skewed so distant from the root
But the word is just a path to understanding what the source could be
A way to help the others see
What's going on at the edges of the galaxy
Apr 2013 · 2.6k
PM Automatic 2
Owen Phillips Apr 2013
It's all gone out of me, the hammer falls and I'm not ready to answer
Trembling, weakness supporting a tub of jelly
The pollen-filled air flies past like the
Pelicans at the edge of the harbor
Taking us gliding for an unpleasant ride
Down the corridors of plastic colors
Through the one word answers that bubble forth from
10,000 years away in hyperspace
Where the mechanisms of language become so convoluted
That they disappear completely out at the vanishing point
Coming up behind you again to drag you into that smoky allure
You remember hating and pinching your nose from
And hiding in the car, but the new fear is of becoming addicted to it
Just like your addiction to ego games and
Intellect, just like your addiction to pleasure and constant validation

The validation's there in the eternal self, they say
But I'm an intellectual
Too impatient for meditation
And lost along the way to enlightenment
That I truly want,
But then I'll never have it if I continue to live this way

It's wilderness calling from a tame fool
Sticking up for you the overgrown horoscope signifies
The shapes of skydives,
He comes in and out of our dull lives
And there's an electric current that solidifies between
Him, Us, and his music
Iron rods jutting up from scorched earth
A broken paradise
Crumbling in a whisky tumbler
Blackened by fiber filters, creations
Unlocked by flowing ontological
Caricatures, open wounds gnashing
At attention-seeking osteopaths
Fortune seekers clamber down
Soccer field bleachers,
Somebody lost his sneakers in the woods
Once there was a set of barbells along the trail
We fell in line and started
Counting each other
One by one it seemed like the green apples would never fall
It was up to us to wait for the shower
It would feed our kin
We'd begin to rise up together
But it could never keep up with our pen
We wanted the ghosts to follow us and overtake our mortal foes
But we couldn't command the armies of the dead
We derive all our pleasures from films and campfire stories
We contrive our adventures but we wait for them to happen to us
We take a passive role in finding love
And it blinks lights at us across suburban streets through windows in the dark
The mind begins to writhe with new memories it composed of old
An idealized time of a child with the perverse mind
Of a hogtied adolescent
Guessing that the course of existence
Isn't determined by the speed of your calculations
Testing the warm water on a naked toe
We could dive in and forget to breathe
And the water could carry us forever
Alleviating gravity
All the obstacles we perceived in past lives
Remain with us like
Chimney swifts on the bottomless April days of a
Klu Klux **** telephone operator
Who believed in the spirit and the holy ghost
And burned a quiet altar to Satan's minions every Sunday night
Drinking nail polish and
Obscure references to the films of the
Ancient Greek philosophers, who
Saw the medium as a means to a message
And patronized the elitest filmmakers to study the ancient Runes
And reveal their findings to a power-hungry public
That would not outright reject it
But that would have to follow it down the rabbit hole
Through the wide mouth of the trumpet around brass fixtures
And into the tight hot moist mouth of the trumpeter
And the elemental warriors would strike oil beneath the whole affair
Ending the time we spent hoping for any entertainment to create itself before our barren psyches
Busying ourselves with incomprehensible tasks and letting our indolence take the reins until we found our heads again out there amid the vapors of
New car chem trails and old railroad bunkers where spruce and cedar grow through cement earth, they force apart the ground with just their roots

We weren't ready to keep watch the following weekend but we
Had no choice when the government bond expired
And we had only technological solutions left to hope for
And wrongly we abandoned our research posts to fight the enemies
With giant weapons and uncreative slogans
Our drummers played so fast we marched along and killed all that remained in record doubletime
Rendering the events of that victorious day immortal in the ingenious accounts of
Philosopher/poet/historian Michael Jackson
Who gave one final performance
To save himself from what must not be
Apr 2013 · 620
Organic Virtual Reality
Owen Phillips Apr 2013
I would lay at night and hope to dream
And visualize what I'd want to see
Because the easy path to what I want to be
Was through organic virtual reality

I wanted to be by the stormy sea
In humble garb on the beach with thee
Then strip to nothing for your eyes to see
The totality of naked me

Well the dream did come and you sat with me
And with your touch drew me close to thee
And I knew to kiss you, becoming We
And in the back seat, remained in unity

But the morning came and the dream was gone
And I saw what a fool I had been to long
For that fleeting moment in a fleeting dream
And not for our union to truly BE
Apr 2013 · 746
The Self-Creating Loop
Owen Phillips Apr 2013
And nobody spoke for you
In the sea of tranquility
Only you were there, you didn't do, you didn't think,
You were
You are still
We are all there is
Everything that is
Shines within, shines without
Shines into you
Shines out from you
Spirits give you gifts when you listen for them
Windows play you music, play alive organic movies when you open them
Language clears your path for you
And language builds the world you live in
AM poems, based on dreams, mutated from the PM thoughts,
Which came from all that came to pass
And came to be that day
And all of that originated in the first ideas put forth in
AM poems, closing the loop,
And keeping us in wonder, how does this reality, all unreality, all hyperreality
Come to be and create itself and undo itself all at once?
Apr 2013 · 845
Robots of the Earth
Owen Phillips Apr 2013
How clear is the sky on a sunlit night
While we dress for the fire
While you and I dissolve away
And we die cell by cell
And our dust drifts away with us
And flows on the breath of the wind
That is keeping the insects aloft.
We can ride on their tiny fragile wings and they'll
Show us a life full of meaning
One of service to God
And we'll give them our energy, unaware,
Never thinking, only knowing
Even as our disembodied ego kicks over mounds and punches holes in nests
To see them swarm and multiply
Coursing fractally across our physical plane in mighty hordes
The birds swoop down and feed on their flesh
And the swarm can afford the loss
because these bugs give life to all the world
So selflessly marching on
Mechanical souls, robots of the earth
Keeping all things running smooth as clockwork
Mar 2013 · 782
or Create
Owen Phillips Mar 2013
Rhythm straightening
The early morning gray looks at me
Overcast, the sky blankets me in bliss
The cool rain chills to the bone
The cool bones rattle to the ground
Skeletal street lamps illuminate dark business
The occluded acts of idleness on a weekday evening
Sitting on paved carpets and waiting for It to happen;
Today we create for ourselves
Because there is no path but our own
Through the sterile darkness of de-electrified night

The dead hyena by the highway
The leering eyes of his surviving kin
Beasts can feel the concrete start to crumble
They're waiting outside the city walls, gleaming fangs, gnashing jaws
Knowing our day has come and gone
Our soft, tender meat will be all that remains
When the tools of our dominance disintegrate
Breathing easy this late in the game
It's safe because all we can do is wait,
Or create
Mar 2013 · 475
AM Automatic 2
Owen Phillips Mar 2013
And on the 23rd attempt she was half-realized
But across the sea she began to see in her dreams
What her eyes on the paper stared out at from the past

She forgets dreams upon waking
She creates schemes with fake actors,
Attractive and confident people
And evil surrounds her
I don't like to be around
Fearing their presence
And she hears on the wind that I won't be returning
But all that this tells her is
Life will go on as it has since the time
When her faces were being
Configured on paper,
Her true form solidifying
With each passing club meeting
And art school submission
And throw down the gutter
And substance test warning
The morning before being
Forced to report on the innocent wives of the kinds
Who prepared what our minds
Would later consume and disintegrated
Reforming 10,000 years later
More open and flexible and appreciative and reverent
And ecstatic and creative and mindful of its functions
Mar 2013 · 960
Co-creating With God
Owen Phillips Mar 2013
Complicit in His schemes
We seal our destiny as we approach it
As we scurry from the light of pure truth like cockroaches into the safe shadows
Where the giants can't see and pretend not to notice
We focus on crumbs and morsels we can see from our little caves
And dig graves to remember the feeble lifetimes we spend waiting for the safe shroud of night
And look not into the eyes of the gargantuan beasts who can destroy us with one stroke of their fist
Or take mercy on us
Feeding us their leavings
We eat the **** of gods
And fleas have smaller fleas to **** their blood
And geese return in flocks, the sheep huddle under shade trees
The gay bumblebees and the wasps in the storm drains
Say hello and we gather for games in the night, Forgetting each other
Mar 2013 · 678
at the undergrad library
Owen Phillips Mar 2013
I am a grid and I'm staying here tonight
I'm a thing, things don't have to do
I'm overdue
This is where I sleep
Till the morning dew
Where I mourn the moon
Till the still runs dry
And I still won't cry if you stay with me
But the path becomes clear
The vines fall from the arbor
The armature is alive
With the muscular strength of a thousand guys

I can't follow you line for line
But I often hear truth in your general gist
I may have missed a connection or two
But I'm not vexed, I can see the direction you took
I'm invested in you
But the best thing I do
Is ignore what the dead
Have all already said
And find paths on my own to the same garden

Don't look away and it won't fade
As the stillness blinds us
The shapes start to burn their way
Into the mind's eye
And we find
That we're staring out at St. Allusion's infinite bliss
Mar 2013 · 1.8k
Jealousy
Owen Phillips Mar 2013
Going crazy in the normalest way
So jealous, so alone
The world doesn't open up to me
Because I press my face against glass doors
The windshields are fogging as I focus in on my disgusting and shameful acts of mutual *******
Waiting till life comes knocking at the window with a flashlight
Asking me to touch my nose,
Walk a straight line

You make me wanna **** myself
But I don't wanna die
I've just run out of ways to make you
Look into my eyes
I'm standing at a crossroads with nothing on all sides
No matter where I walk the future's always past the sunrise

I get up late each morning
Forget what I was dreaming
The memory of my eternal self
Floating through infinite kaleidoscopic
Worlds of pure imagination
Fades as easily as the lurid detail
Of the *** dreams I wake from in paranoid self-delusion

The church marquees say the skies open soon
But they lie
How could the answer to my woes be shining at me on the roadside
Between home and community college?
Everything is everywhere
But thus far NOTHING is here
There's an invisible dome over our heads
And none crane their necks to see beyond
The social order needs tending to
The community garden can wait
We'll always be able to survive on
Just-in-time produce deliveries
To our nearest grocery store
We have more important concerns
Like the meaningless jobs devised
By an unthinking static regime
To grow the economy and keep us from every questioning this way of life
The American way, the baby boomer's dream
Hidden within a shaded alcove
Of the barren wasteland we decided would suit the planet better
Than an unlimited, self-regulating biosphere
Powered by solar energy and God's will

We really did eat the fruit of the tree
But we didn't let it **** our egos
We didn't break on through
Adam and Eve didn't know the machine elves
And if they did the Vatican will have no mention of it
We must no longer be individuated consciousness
But we fail to see that we are ALREADY ONE
With each other
And everything
Even I cannot see it
When I spite my own flesh and blood
For a little bit of sensual grokking
Drinking in green eyes and pink lips

No jealousy!
I am you!
We are me!
Where does this jealousy come from?
The inability to SEE
OPEN YOUR EYES
OPEN MY EYES
Mar 2013 · 1.7k
The Open Doors
Owen Phillips Mar 2013
When you're gone I wonder when you'll start hating me
When you're with me I'm scared I'm not good enough
When I touch you I expect you to tell me to stop
When you kiss me I think you don't
Know what you're doing
When you sigh I know
You're tired of me

My memories of you are of things that surround you
You smell like your car
And the shampoo I watched you apply
In your bathroom sink from your bedroom floor
You say it's not right but the sweat from your armpits
Delights me as much as the scents you apply

You're smooth and unblemished like china
I scraped that perfection away
With vine fingers I scratched you
I am a scar on your perfect identity

You take what you want and give up what you must
You're generous but know when to play close to the chest
You're patient, you can get what you need

If I think too hard I'll do what I always do
Lose you by gripping too tightly
I want to constrict you when you lay beside me
The closer you wriggle,
The further I slip
Into jealous obsession
And lustful possession

We're wasting each other's time,
But we had time to spare
We're better than nothing, it's true
I love you in spite of my doubts but I can't help
Expecting you to leave any minute

We don't even see eye to eye on the things which
Concern me the most,
But I can't say it matters
We've opened the doors and accepted each other
There's no reason for us to turn back

Soon I'll have done what I always do
Driven you away or bored you
"It can't be neverending,"
My fearful mind tells me,
"You'll **** it all up before long"
And my self righteous sense says
You're not worth the effort
You're hopeless and fit to discard
My jealousy wants you to give up your lovers
Surrender your body to me
My loneliness hopes you won't leave and it cries
When you go to your own bed at night
My evil will wants you to drink yourself silly
And bend to my twisted demands
My shy side just hides in the bathroom and dreams
Of your smile, the blue of your eyes
My paranoid whimsy draws lines from your picture
To names dates and far out ideas
I'm sure you could be only my imagination
For you look like my fantasy girls

I magicked you out of the footnotes
And into the body of text
And now you are key to the story
And I don't know what happens next

I see you appear in distant past dreams
I fill in my memories with you
We walked the same earth for two decades
Together we walk from now on
My intuition left me so long ago
And you say it never existed
I hope my heart can be reopened
But I don't really mind if I'm dead when I die

To perish beside you would simply life
To be flattened together as one
We'd wake when our spirits were ready to dance
And we'd create EVERYTHING
To ABC
Feb 2013 · 1.0k
All is Truth
Owen Phillips Feb 2013
Like glorious autumn follows carefree summer
You make me want to love again
At this moment I am on the upward arc of my heavy sine wave,
And all troughs, crests, and in between coexist
To predict would be to build a separate reality
An alternate timeline where logic follows the limited patterns of human rationale
But the sun's fingers on the treetops write minute programs into the corneas
And I watch them roll around my field of vision, shifting back and forth in unease
I smell old times that never were
How could that have been me?
How do I forget everything?

I'll live forever in this instant
For past and future emanate infinitely from now
And every ounce of effort I spend anticipating
Draws me down the arc to suffering
The impermanence of bliss, death's painful degradation
Even now it festers sharply in my right *******
Despite my calm certainty that I'm
Staring out into the infinite synesthetic landscapes of jazz and poetry

But the forces of control over us do not blind us
We ride fleeting waves of glory because in their brief moment they are all
Rising above the moon in the ecstasy mere words grasp impotently after
Mere human me never gets the satisfaction of disintegration for he fears his death
But powerful energy me
Eternal and all pervasive
Shall know for certain the bliss of abyss
Even in the mortal kiss of a few seconds' carnal joy it is death which ties us together

When our dichotomies are satisfied is victory true or do we in fact separate ourselves further from the ultimate reality?
Oneness can never be desired for to wish for it is to destroy it
The implication that there is something there to wish for oneness
Contradicts the very idea
But these differences are mere illusions
Contained within the singular presence of all that which there is nothing without
Nor even existence at all
For it encompasses the totality
It is the mere fact that anything ever existed
And it is the void into which shines no light
Enters no soul
It is the ground on which our entire dramaturgy stands
WHAT IS IT?
Will there ever be an answer?
It can't be God, though it is what is meant by "God"
It can't be defined because it is the substance of definition
It isn't the place we go when we die for it is all places
It is place

I can cast out my net into the whirlwinds of conscience and substance
And feel that I've latched onto it
And it can never slip away for it is all I've ever been
But I stir the ocean of love and the sediments are suspended till I can no longer see it
Like a fish can't see the ocean

In metaphor, in narrative, all is truth
Feb 2013 · 1.0k
You Got It
Owen Phillips Feb 2013
I had to get through to something before there could be any
Thing

There's outside and
            It'll go away today
I had to throw up my hands
Watch the diffusion of light
I had to dust the shelves
And I sneezed on the green paint
I know where dominance goes
Draining out the front door in chunky paste
I know the woes of individuality
Blunted on the kitchen counter
Smashed and cracked and left to dry in whitewashed open window
Waiting for you to admit you didn't have what it takes to make it
Or maybe it's even harder to admit that you do
Feb 2013 · 926
Ego Trapped
Owen Phillips Feb 2013
I've always waited for this moment,
An all-pervasive coming-to-be
It has permeated my existence since infancy,
My illusory life that began when I died
When I fell from my heaven
Into the ego traps of Owen Phillips
The pathetic human shell I've come to inhabit
He is too weak to contain me, to enact my desires
He must be destroyed,
That I may return and be a self-actualizing soul
In the infinite blissful embrace of every imperfect beauty
I ever longed  for in my lowly, cowardly human skull
Owen Phillips Feb 2013
All these roads lead somewhere
Our dismembered beings will never see it all until we're dead
But we can die and make it back alright
And if we died, would we even want to come back inside?
There's something real out there and it'll always be there and all it takes is to pay perfect attention
Chance favors the prepared mind as we can see for ourselves
When we traverse this abyss
Learn to pay attention
Learn to dance with the patterns you perceive
The sonic tapestry is a music piece
It never stops , and it covers everything
Everywhere is always everywhere else
Music never stops
Listen to it beat you away
Is there a difference between me and the music?
I am you, after all, this poem is me
And yet it is you because I'm not the only one
And we'll never be apart until we die, but even then we'll be together, each as nothing
So beautiful, so absurd

Feel that breeze blowing your hair?
You are its breath
It escapes your lungs and you ride around a vibrating
Symbol, your thoughts swimming and crystallizing but never blinding
Swirling around you in coagulating meaning
The grass grows, it is your beard
Lying there in the field
Can you feel it any different?
The grass brought you here to lie down on it
The grass inhales you as you light it,
And fully grokked, your ghost breathes itself out in rings

Snap the rhythm and it ripples with the cymbal
Into love,
The path through remains you, it's full of stars and eternal youth
The gray dawn on the beach is a constant truth
Our dreamtime dreams of being awake

I woke up and thought I could fly
How wrong I was
Spying over the shoulder of God
I told him, "You're a character in my story
I am you,
I am more.
What can you do to me?"
And God looks back, knowing that what I say is true
For I perceive him and even as he marvels me with illusions he can never erase my mind
I don't even capitalize his pronouns

God and his carpenters joined the dancing eternal parade
Like the end of an Animal House knockoff
Where we send off parts of ourselves to new times and places we've never conceived of
Populating the universe
Which gets bigger the more detail we observe
An optical contradiction
For you are the greater resonance of both your
Self and your Opposite
Dec 2012 · 3.6k
Galactic Companionship
Owen Phillips Dec 2012
I provoke the rain of Hell
From Heaven high to earth below
There we'll float on gainful spells
We're ready for this world to go
And off to outer space, we're facing
Endless races to the furthest reaches of our teacher, the speaker, the logos of Cosmos
And beyond to distant Quasars,
No phasers, no lasers, weaponry
We're safe with hearts of purity
And naked with our souls we'll seek
The greatest cosmic mysteries

I've always sought and thought unreal
The spacecraft not of stone or steel but
Opened hearts and focused spirits
Woke by times both strange and fearful
Changing basic notions of
What we all say are mind and love

We're through with consumers, they've doomed us
We've moved on
The proof is the truth that all life will soon be gone
We've built and built, killed billions and still
We march toward gold archways which never were real

I can tell others feel it,
They're real and they heal me
Relations, creations, spontaneous meaning
It's all building up to a climactic moment
Of high expectation that we will all blow it
But we were born just so we'd know when the opening
Ceremonies go on for the New Age of Hope

It's outrageous to think of the hate which created this
Darkness and chaos,
(Our God has betrayed us!)
But that's why our savior said
Look the other way,
To meet hate with more hatred
Speeds up the decay

We love the villains, though they **** us by millions
Because they're truly a part of this cosmic cotillion
They can't see the dance while they're
Crashing and sinning
So they can't imagine they're actually IN IT
There's a part and they fit it,
Catalyst for the equipment
Of Salvation:
The nations of women and men
Beginning again
We'll cancel the debt and we'll all become friends
Dec 2012 · 897
Linear Progress
Owen Phillips Dec 2012
I'm no shaman. I'd follow a plastic flashlight from the astral plane
Time moves fast
And the animal spirits can hear it
Lumbering by, tumbling down from the
Cliff as if it fly,
Destroying the world in its path like a bug in its eye
And I'm part of this Time
Sit on my *** and wait for the visions to come
Letting it pass when I'm wired up to
Vices so quick and so simple to fulfill
Time's faster and stronger than will
I matter no longer, it feels, but still
The shaman life's here in my bones
It's common to all those who know
Perhaps I'm not ready, too green in the head
Or unwilling to part with the trough where I'm led
Or the mechanical fingers from which I am fed
But no, I can see that life surely isn't for me
Though weeks may have passed since I last climbed a tree,
That is ME.
In the cold I don't need artificial heat
I'm strategically weak so I can't beat the system
But listen, the behemoth is plummeting now
It'll drown from its mass, but we shall not go down
For we'll swim with our heads above water,
Summoning fish to swim with us others
These spirits who're tuned in to God's point of view
We can trust them, they love us, they want us to continue
But learn not to follow
The horror and hollow persistence
Of linear progress, in Congress with Satan
That aspect of knowledge which makes evil possible
Sublime in its authority and strength
Designed to be defeated from beneath.
Dec 2012 · 1.7k
First Grade Dream remembered
Owen Phillips Dec 2012
Finding love in odd places
Conventional beauties and non
Voices like molasses,
Faces like home
Memories like first grade dreams
A playspace without windows,
limitless
Running on the floor I see myself,
My first out-of-body experience
Run-crawling naked past
Mrs. Hooper with short gray hair watching kindly
I want to walk into inhuman nature with you
Dust off the polished seashells of past lives
And feel your heartbeat just once
Dec 2012 · 866
Tinnitus
Owen Phillips Dec 2012
Picking up mysterious interference
In supersensory organs
I'm struck with the fear of reality
Magnetic forces unnoticed
Hourly exacting imperceptible influence
Burying truth deeper into the murk of sensation

Micromovements hiding me alive
I'll never know unless I try to see
Which reality I'm knowing
And which I'm living
How many beams am I,
Cast through how many particulate clouds?
How much is happening to me,
And how much occurs within
And how much is shadow
Cast by straw men
Built by ghostly men of paper
Professionally seeking to
Confirm paranoid suspicions
That gurgle up from the darkest dreams
Black Magic cauldrons of Chaos
Manipulating minds
22 October 2012
Dec 2012 · 521
See
Owen Phillips Dec 2012
See
I was making my way into an open market
I almost fell into a basket of limes
I felt my feet slip out from underneath me
Like a trapdoor sliding over
And making me
Hang from a fire escape into a desolate
Alley where filth runs into old rusted fixtures which
Glisten with blood
And the lights outside show their way in
I can see shafts of light now, from people adjusting

There were 15 million of you, my condolences
This is the only time
     we're going to be able to
           make it through
Watch myself
Dissolve away
My mind decay
My gasp delay
And my spirit say
That this is the day
Nov 2012 · 441
That Other World
Owen Phillips Nov 2012
I want them to let me
Into that other world
To live where the sand
Always shifts underfoot
Where lovers can't break with your eyes and your smile
Where walls can contain all
That is or shall be
Where doors can be found
Into mysterious worlds
Where the people aren't growing
Where they have always been
Where nothing is new
And nothing is old
All is eternal
Everything shifts and it
Changes each night, but it
Lasts through the ages
Its timeless for time
Is not real
3 March 2011

Interesting that this was before what I consider some of my most formative poetic experiences, yet it flows so organically with what I've been writing since then. I suppose the difference is that they DID let me into that other world ;)
Nov 2012 · 575
Another Forgotten Dream
Owen Phillips Nov 2012
Listen for prophetic screams
Weighing down the end of yr nose
Greasing up the hydraulics of the eyeballs
Emerging wholesale from a dream
Residue of unseen seas
Still caked in tangled hair
Nov 2012 · 2.3k
Hourglass Novelty
Owen Phillips Nov 2012
With no expectation all's novelty
The new patterns don't astound us
We can stay in the middle of the river with our heads above the water
And safely watch the coastline pass us by
The outside world an ocean of television static
The signals painting pictures of entropic holograms
That interlock and correlate
Until the ghosts of time are churning out
Like geese into a a tiny hole
In an orange plastic fence
Fleeing mischievous youngsters
Who love to watch them funneled in
Like grains of sand in an hourglass.
We too live in an hourglass
And the grains of sand empty out the bottom
Floating aimlessly through an unending void
And the ultimate improbability
Goes through the formality of actually occurring
When the grain of sand finds itself at the beginning
Passing once again through the hourglass
Undivided, indistinguishable
The poem is my own but certain phrases are borrowed from Terence McKenna and a Hopi elder prophecy
Nov 2012 · 1.1k
If We Help Each Other
Owen Phillips Nov 2012
The meek rattle the earth
The battle distracted the clerks
The overseer dipped into his potion
As commotion in the open
Became action and it started gaining traction
And without pause the commanders reacted with factionalism
For a fracture collapses community structures
They rupture with signs of mistrust
Institutions induce us to fear our own neighbor
And keep our eyes forward and fixed on our labor
But me and you, that's the True True
Helping out when I know what I can do
Spreading gratitude will get you bread
And clothed enough to stay alive
Because we'll only survive if we help each other
Nov 2012 · 784
"Fear. Desire. Anger."
Owen Phillips Nov 2012
Fear. Desire. Anger.
These are the roads I ride into Hell
Three titans of indescribable power
To create and destroy and control and subdue.
If channeled correctly these emanations
Flow smoothly and make feedback loops
Amplifying exponentially beyond eternity,
(A fragile thing,
Which shimmers blindness selectively
into individual eyes)
But abused in unawareness
And skeletal ignorance
These torrents of energy maim and destroy
Nov 2012 · 973
Awareness
Owen Phillips Nov 2012
It's too late, I think
    Pouring myself a drink
They can't relate to me
    This ain't my place
I paced myself too much in my day
Now face up to a world where nothing's built for me,
Everything I see's off limits
I get it, I don't dig it.
What's left but to dial those digits,
Or did I forget em?
Best not try it
She won't buy it
She's got guys lined up
And I'm stuck in the last place

   First thing, morning time
Wake and remember I've already forgotten a dream
Light outside, no clock
Could be 9, could be 10
Could be 2 PM
Ain't showered in three days
Ain't shaved in 373
Coffee's warm, not hot,
"I've GOT to start waking up at more reasonable times"
But now it's 9 PM
And I'm trapped on the interdimensional
Adolescent internet tubes
In silence waiting for someone to laugh
And flocking toward what sounds like happiness
For ungodly hours
Finally falling asleep
To a Joseph Campbell lecture
Hoping the awareness of what I'm missing out on
Is a suitable replacement for devouring the ***** of Osiris in earnest each Friday
Nov 2012 · 545
PM Automatic 1
Owen Phillips Nov 2012
So what happens when too strong of a signal is fired
When the synapse is blown and destroyed?
Alignments of stars are deploying themselves into
Physical reality from your own ideas of nature

Give me all that I can use
Let me in
Or do I back away,
Do as the balanced disciplinary
Tactician would do out above the unbeatable city streets?

The skulls of my many deaths pile up
In the memories of my extragalactic cemetery
Back home where I was one with everything

I was following a number of prisms
Into voluntary service
When it came to collision
But it didn't concern me
As I marveled at visions
From the center of existence
To the edge of religions
To the furthest reach of outer space
And other dimensions
Nov 2012 · 2.8k
Shakori Hills
Owen Phillips Nov 2012
I know I've been there,
I've given into death and altered the fabric of reality
Every day we waste away transfixed by flattened images
Of the limitlessness of death
Coupled with elusive, Luciferian harm which will befall us all
Who subsist on the manipulated reality of the hyperspace information field
But one day, enlivened by the festivities of Shakori Hills
And the fungal spirits who awoke beside us
I walked the irreversible pathway through oblivion
Facing cruel destruction and terror
For a horrifying passage across Styx into eternity
And emerged within a crowd of mollusks dancing to the waves of a musical sea
All time suspended in the impossibly drawn-out ****** of the
Archetypal wizardry of rhythm,
The swirling clumps of faces in
Unshakable ecstasy
And seemingly responding to the wild currents of my conscious thought;
A longing for human touch drew the others closer and closer around me
Till they began brushing against me
Bumping into me,
The flow of the crowd saw its axis at my psychic emanation
As once more the last song of all time began with thunderous energy and applause.

I escaped the arresting confines of the crowd
By willing them aside, wearing, as I suddenly became aware, the shoes of Moses
And seeing my muddy feet upon the sands of Egypt
But I yet had no understanding
Of the nature of the garden of earthly delights
Into which I had fallen,
And fear began to envelop me,
Producing law enforcement officials hawklike swooping in to limit my power.
I had but to let go of my acceptance of their power over me to transcend them
But fear tethered me to reality,
Even as I saw about me a Dharmic mandala
Of my past present and future,
Generating inexplicable archetypes around me in a manner profoundly defiant
Of rational logic.

Synchronicity compounded upon me
As the Christos within me
Brought rain down upon us
Forcing us together and leaving me in dumbfounded reverie
Of all that had transpired to bring this moment forth

What had seemed to be the end of history was in fact
The awakening of a new rebirth
The first moment of coming to be
The union of past, present and future
As the reassuring smiles of my trustworthy disciples gently allowed me passage back into a rational existence
I beamed in utter gratitude for the eternal life which Christ afforded us.
Chaos had subsided back into normalcy
But still winked at me
In telepathic coincidence.

My soul has begun to realize that it resides in all things
Soon they are to be reintegrated
Nov 2012 · 742
Butterfly Winds
Owen Phillips Nov 2012
I burned the sentinel at the edge of my kingdom
It drifted to the earth in ash
And mingled with the butterflies
Catching the wind of their migration

Danger loomed on the horizon
And we saddled up to face the storm
For facing us down, descending from a distant future
Was the death of all mankind,
Gray and looming,
A wall of cloud behind which the
Stars no longer shone
Extinguished with the rest of universe
As we willed it to be,
In the fires of our egoism and despair
Nov 2012 · 1.0k
Philosopher's Stoned
Owen Phillips Nov 2012
Swirling colors without names and sounds
What is this madness that we have found?
Feet barely touching the sky and the ground
Looks like I'm Philosopher's ****** all around

See that great saucer up in the sky
Hear how it whirs like an insects sigh
Signal them down so they'll give us a ride
And we can all finally see what's inside

What do you hear by the full moon's light?
The chanting of shamans on the solstice night
Follow the drumming and join in their rite
I'd say it's our destiny, alright

We're now Eleusinian women and men
The greatest adventure's about to begin
The galaxy's huge, and we're off to the ends
But the path isn't up and away, it's within!
Nov 2012 · 890
Animation
Owen Phillips Nov 2012
I bled to be the rainwalker
Talking downwind, stalked by shadows, the night periodically erupts abruptly disrupting peace of mind and leaves behind the ears of corn that would expand with **** to what we now know as the sacred substance, understand this and we'll move on from this station, the hatred that makes us complacent, no directions can bee seen in green painted on the inside of our eyelid
But we did see them, when inner illumination activated the
Glow-in-the-dark properties that so impressed us coming down from the frozen mountain
Into the valley of golden fish worship,
Demons manifest in gargoyles,
Speaking through sages
Becoming animated in the full moon
Loony Toon ecstasy destroying bridges back to the sun worship
Which sees itself reflected in an empty black sky
Nov 2012 · 584
AM Automatic 1
Owen Phillips Nov 2012
essential radiance wilts and fades
In the light and halo of propane tank explosions
Dark cold nights spent rocking back and forth on the edge of a dream
Only knowing in hindsight that the forgotten question
Was what brought us here in the first place

phases come in and out of tune
Their lunar frequencies alive with you, you sit and open up the case all day, we let the cold air tighten up our powdered skin, the holes we've bored into the raincloud stick us in the neck,

Join hands with wisdom
extinguish dominion, combine and refract the remainder, destroy the big time dog-catchers.
hungriest of all was the Cat whose puzzled look of shame diverted your eyes while he disappeared into a higher vibratory frequency, which became color and sound syntesthesia
Blending seamlessly with the broken windows through which were heard vague memories of forgotten  dreams, the shouts and rhythms quite audible but each syllable indistinguishable
Nov 2012 · 616
Even as We Close Our Eyes
Owen Phillips Nov 2012
Unrealities       can
                  now        be                         held true
Because every
               bodyevery
                            day is stuck in one
When one reality is projection screened
Shining straight into the eyes
It's blinding, luciferic
                      Floating up and away
Into void
   Where safety and utter loneliness are assured
While even as we
                    close our eyes
                              disproving boogiemen
They clamber around making changes and destroying lives along with you
    Your unseeing feet
        Crushing the innocents
            Beneath a comforting rug
                 That spares our soles
                     The pain of walking on shattered bone

Following the points of lines firing from the pupils of whiches and witches
Enrichéd and stiffened to stone
Has dragged me down to the bog and I stink like a dog and I live a dog's life too
Circling myself and waiting for the invisible a'ni himu to happen to me without a statement

I don't know Being
I don't know it in itself of itself
Some told me it spoke with the voice of a child, some destroyed them-
Selves dressing up flowers and archways in those orders
And cornering us ants at the intersection which creep crawls
Crazily down from its
Geographic space and happens to face the way yr sitting
Eating meat or drinking tea
And bam he flips and crushes you
And what do you do
How can it be
When do you know it was your destiny?
bursting open your skull on the sharpest brick beside the softest memory
Of a 42nd birthday of the end of a dream
Nov 2012 · 2.0k
Sacred Meeting
Owen Phillips Nov 2012
Even though
The true meaning of these events
Is not the one to which I cling
I will not stop believing
That it may end up that way
I will not stop composing verse
In ode to what I feel
And when the sacred meeting
Comes to pass and isn't fulfilled
I'll be relieved to find that I
Did not act on my will,
For as I know too well, I haven't
Quite the strength
To manifest desires,
But thankfully it's simple
To find some religious rationalization
To limit ourselves
And liberate our experience
Nov 2012 · 3.7k
The Me Between Me
Owen Phillips Nov 2012
Let out my ego and sense of order this comes from beyond this comes from the me between me if I listen I may hear it speaking, it's sleeping but talking and rocking, not still, and perhaps it awakens, perhaps it will open its eye but we mustn't depend on the idea that once he has opened his eye the whole dream of the world will just fade like my dream tomorrow morning which I already know I'll forget, like specific angles and perspectives of specific places in space and time that have slipped away but once in a while break through to consciousness
Like the sliding breakaway walls of Timber Drive elementary school
Or the rippling pond into which I fell and the old smile and laugh of my flesh and blood rescued me and held my body afloat in the air for a moment; and once I was the proud owner of a wind powered hovercraft, another invention spilling out onto the table of attention like the actual pig intestines the popular girl's parents used in her science fair project, the one that dragged on until the last monkey refusing to be locked up with the windows 98s in the archaic computer lab was tranquilized and convulsed on the gym/cafeteria floor in front of the PTA, who'd peed blood all down the front of their sweatpants; he was firing wildly hoping to commit suicide by zookeeper
Not knowing that humanitarian laws would prevent him from achieving his bliss, for the monkey knew as the Gnostics did that to bring a child into this black iron prison is a sin.
Did the Jonestown Kool-aid free them from the prison? Do they now walk among gods within the kingdom of the heavenly spirit? None shall know until the 13 crystal skulls are re-assembled and total gnosis emanates to the people in globe-spanning shockwaves.
Nov 2012 · 766
Hillsborough St
Owen Phillips Nov 2012
This is the first moment that ever was, the crossing metal beams and glass panes,
The blurred reflections of finely polished tabletops
The meticulous tangles of crinkly hair in a variety of unique styles
All murmur to me from a shared experience of eternity
Reminding me that I should
Wake up
All the past is here with me
Unsteady, unwieldy
All the past is waiting for me to open the door and let it be free
And when I do I too will be free
For I am the past even more than the past is me
But I too am the future
As is the past
But I can't let past become future
If I don't WAKE UP
I'll be DEAD soon
Here I am, at WAKE tech*
'Twould be the height of ignorance
Not to see the message
Wake up.
Wake up.
Here I am for the first time in my life
The empty branches never held life, even losing it now
They are not characters of linear narratives
Even the happiness of unions between me and me again
They are born today, none share histories but those they've writ themselves
Wake up.
Remember that time,
So present,
It slipped away
That short synchronous gateway
When I broke through,
When I was nearly awake.
That time is not gone.
Look, look down,
You're wearing a t-shirt from Cup a Joe,
The place where you nearly woke up
Look down, your umbilical cord was cut
And you lived there
On Hillsborough Street,
Just past Cup a Joe
And a beautiful woman right above your head
WORKS there, the mythic place
Where you, where I nearly awoke.
How absurd, to think all would decide to converge there
Independently of each other
It was written
Before all began,
And now begins Time, untime
Now it begins

Remember? Look down, she said
"Be here, Be Here Now"--but remember? HE said Be Here Now
And here I were--
There I was
Impossible, yes, I know
But do you really want to pretend
That it matters
what's
POSSIBLE?
*Wake Technical Community College
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