I look out the window--an endless sky. The clouds are like nothing else--bold explosions and everywhere in the sky, infinite, above and still in time and space--Madness and Horror are said to have their own faces and names. Can't Beauty? Beauty has its own life--not a distinctive face, not a concrete identity--Beauty is breathing, standing, growing above us--the Clouds. I know that it's a bit foggy, I know what is actual is only actual for the one time and standing moment that it is there--maybe the Clouds move, travel, fade--but they never leave us. They're long, still and colossal enough to be viewed, admired, stricken, crushed beneath. I'm on a bus, travelling through San Francisco--a mystery on its own, mad like a spiral or giant--one with a heart and soul that is difficult to pinpoint and seemingly jolting, constantly moving throughout--down streets, through alleys, intensifying in the dazzling Golden Gate Bridge and boundary-less San Francisco Bay--a testament Olympian and profoundly simple, such a straightforward bridge with so many possibilities and tragedies. It's my destination, too.

I go to the Podesta Baldocchi--a flower shop, quaint, small, almost non-existent in the vertigo of San Francisco, but immortalized in another Vertigo--and inspiring search and enigma on its own--the vision of James Stewart chasing hills, corners, all the trails and paths for Beauty--a Beauty with two feet, a name, experiences--Beauty named Kim Novak. He follows Her, from the shores to the grave--She, praying at a cemetery, a faded figure in grief, He, watching obsessively like a predator--He finds Her on the cold shores, of the endless, alien seas--along the Golden Gate Bridge--on the verge of jumping. He saves Her, a metamorphosis of prey and personal freedom is triggered.

That's one of the many beautiful passages of Vertigo that I remember--passion, memory, disappearance, insanity, aggression. "Here I was born, and here I died", says the woman, named Madeline--a fatal, empowering woman of Beauty and melancholy, complex and deceiving. Chris Marker saw this too--a reservoir of thought from his Sans Soleil--the movie, the moment in time where memory and the Great Enigmas had finally been touched by skin and light. February, 1983.

Memory works that way.

That is one of the things I love most; memory. Memory is fading and escaping from me. I look down at my wrinkled hands--grief and nothing else--losing myself. I step onto the cliff where Madeline, where Grace stood. The sea is a rapture. Endless, everywhere, surrounding me from all corners--dozens of people have taken their life here. They jump from the bridge, they slip into the water and drown. Their entire breakdown and loneliness and humanity is silenced and stated in a small slip into the bay, or a thin, white splash--a miniature, but Greater Fall--beneath the bridge in all its magnificence and profundity, beneath the clouds, a silent act of Tragedy and Horror with a face, surrounded and drowned in Beauty and Rapture--breathtaking and cruel.

I am tired and lifeless. I can't stand it. I remember all the beaches, skies, nights, visions of the sun and daughters I've seen in my life, all the smiles I've faked, breaths I took--I hadn't thought of this until the nineties or so, in my wrinkled, tired years. I was remembering Marie--my only girlfriend and wife one I had met in the 40's--compassionate, dangerous, magnificent she was, like Madeline. Perfection and grace and danger. I had grown, loved, lived, watched everything and took every step with her--before she had died in 1989. She was my only care, my only love. I couldn't grip myself then. I hear my parents speaking, my mum and dad--dead now--my children, beautiful things--I couldn't keep them. I couldn't. I couldn't, their eyes porcelain--I went insane over all of it, a time to foggy to look back on. Time is the same stretch, place is the same and distilled--but memory is everywhere--one thing I love and can't stand.

And now I am here. The beauty is pastoral, distant, glowing and also deadly--like cloudy figures of steel and glass, concrete with fountains and blood in the shape of landscapes and towers--branches, cold, in a lonely place, fading from truth and Truth, identity and Greater Life--a thousand misty passions and poses stretched and scattered. I'm hopeless, I'm lonely, I'm cold. I'm wary, tired, confused with nothing left in me. I'm leaving, Reconciling beneath, below, and everywhere around Beauty.

I understand any doubts. I cannot take my nerves or my senses. They've failed, broken down on me--I've lost myself, very permanently this time.

I fall. I see nothing, feel everything crushing, me lying in the crystal bay--it fades. I can't see. I can't speak--I can't love, embrace, understand--I open my eyes, dizzy and faded, in a house, a rather cluttered, yet homely one. I believe I am small, looking up to my great pale towering mother, breats and lips and glowing limpid eyes... a fireplace, some warmth, some haze and some tears of joy. It is falling apart, where I am, but it is of embracing memory. I'm being looked and smiled at. I don't know where this is.

I close my eyes, I stand and open them seven years later. Cold water at my feet and sand--I look around to see a beach, stretched infinitely--past boundaries or understanding. The sea is dizzying. I look up to see that Beauty--still standing, moving across and thinning--that Beauty is sunless. Nothing but Clouds--an illusion, foggy and slippery of sorts--impossible and unbearable to experience. I stumble.

I look up, and there's now a ceiling--tall, blazing gold, marmalade and kaleidoscope--everything is blurring and melting. I'm in a hallway, with parents--a father and mother, loving, caring and safe; the only thing in front of me is a painting, swirled and swerved shore to thunder and graceful and passionate so distant--Holy, Andalusian girls from a Utamaro madman; thinly, finely lined, velvet in color and delicacy, colliding and cracked in shape, memory or sense. The painting falls, crashes, and the ceiling falls and opens to voices and laughs. I stumble, tremble, get knocked staggering, look down the hallway. It's crashing to black--I stumble to anyone; my father, the mad size of him, I rush and cling still around his arms--a shadow--then his terrible branches rising, fading, and everywhere--complete pitch black--coming for me? Far and off and a way a place cold and a lone in the Fall long and thundering--rippled--moving--then white--then clearly.

My next vision I can comprehend without running terrified is in Japan. It's 1964, I am 25. A television set, murky like playing out my dazed oxygen-starved hallucinatory real-fake mindbursting memories. Headlines, people, looking down at me. I can feel my knees again, and my heart. It's the Year of the Dragon, I'm nervous uncontrollably. Night after night, each one passing by as I blink, walking, everything changing, changing from me, I can feel. Or maybe I can't. I keep my eyes open, and don't lose my breath, hiding in rooms and feeling and apart torn so vast. I look at my surroundings--I don't know where I am--I think in my last passage? passed on through a thousand miles and faces and every conscious and spirit. My last one. I can't hide, though. I'm dying, my last breath and vision being me fading through time--such a quick thing--spinning and burying the Earth As I Have Watched It Through The Years in snow and rain and static and the Dead--I can only stare at the streets. I'm with my girlfriend Marie, it's November 28th, 1975.

She says to me, "What's wrong? You're on the balcony alone. You've been there for hours."

Marie, hold on tight, please. I'm lonely, terrified, frightened--I made a mistake, life is coming and going with all radiance and fleeting and darkness and closing doors. I've witnessed my birthday from another room. I've thought of my life again. I've seen it, distorted, everywhere, in colors and in heaps of broken fragments, images and ruins. I need your help--

"Nothing, just enjoying the city. It's beautiful," I say. It's nightfall, blinding rain, in Paris. That's where we spent our vacation, me and Marie. I love her; she'll be gone the next morning.

Then I go back. Different times, warm times, times like beauty and solid, everything going racing and wayward that I can't see a color and then white then eyes pale and hyacinths all over the place--I see Marie in the distance, oh Yes like poised like drips like canvas all around surround floating laying, kissing me, the Day I'd wrapped gently around her now I can see it like a reflection, and O I can't take it--that very last look, her face vivid--and I can't look back and I can't look down or up--just her face, lovely, wrapping more and Closer and oh Yes all around me and my mouth is going insane so tired and limpid losing words and tract and

And I can see you so lovely so gracefully and yes I will kiss you and gently cradling and your skin like rose and blossoms with the smooth touch from an Eve in flesh shrouded red and raw and when I feel anything else running through my veins like clockwork oh Yes it blazes all lovely like a reflection and the last lonely place left to fade to is only the Clouds and Sea and oh yes with all the magic of the Rite of Spring and the fogs and streaks of August O but then now I see I see O Lord I see the one-thousand-one dead poses and faces like this marie not the one I know but her Beauty erased a lying a loft a living Girl a shape a branch and yet still loving in her stone face-without-a-face so Anonymous so Kiss Me Deadly leave me taking me sprawling around me creeping crouching touching growing up my skin and veins and conscious watching all the artifice leave me and all colors and thought coming up lashing melting seething roiling yes oh yes just like a reverie like genuine insanity haunting and boiling like sweet crazed Narcissus in all the Moorish vines so thorny so lost so complicated and savage rose gardens is all one can see like solid waves--in the distance, the bold-coifed Wooden Duke, the blue Queen, away from the warped, whirling war scape outside and cold and I'm taken back a bit now bundled away from all the rows and thorny laces of buildings among buildings way in the distance out the window like crooked Van Gogh details and the noir jagged edges and tete-a-tete feeling of Life and Hope that the neons floating down streets give you when all seeping and spraying in your eyes and O the tangled webs and thorns and spiders of the panes and glass and shards and sharp'n'smooth curls and spiraling rings of it all and O the strewn of flesh like insect and myth and negative space and city all coated and sprawled I'm going to explode and I look up to see every bit of sand, waves, bold lines and streaks above and beyond me, all those curves and rods very dizzying and all beating and throbbing like mad and my vision went like some frothing beast held and dissected under light and shape oh Yes I say and I tell you while being dragged through all the Andalusian flowers and raindrops beside and above me and the Universe and the Love that could've been it's all above me too like a rose growing and blossoming with all the melting grace of a Holy girl oh Yes I say and state as clear again so rapturously like a living poem and as I leave everyone and leave this illusion I can sigh and pause and oh my goodness it's all spinning and apart and transcendent like the first Clouds and Grace above a monochromatic world--a speck--Nothing in its embrace--I stop, gaze with the recollection of every gesture of love and love's death in my life--I'm somewhere, everywhere, from the cosmos to the sea--and the ****** comes before me--Marie, Marie--and I burst and split like dust--she speaks to me. She listens, she hears, the only thing, milky, porcelain eyes and skin like nothing else--I ask her where I am. She opens her mouth, bestridden and humbled like a shadow or a monument. Glowing like birth, she told me--solemn, silent, fuzzy--she told me that I'm dying. "Life is slipping--all of you, your raw hands, your face, your memory--everything is slipping, gently. You're being erased from the world, experienced, dismaying--you're far from it."

I asked, "Where?"

She stared, bled, disappeared into thin air and continued, "I always get lost, thinking or looking into the sea or sky. Infinite, lovely. It never ends. Never, ever ends. I look at it and cannot help but forget about every bit of land, forget any shore, stone, or war, or the clearest whisper--because it fades away from me, so clearly, and I can't help but stare down the endless waves and curls, because they go on forever. They're everything. They're all mist and unbearable, simple and Everything--I think you're at the end of Everything."

My last Beauty.

...strolling down through the night,
Attacking innocence with a frown,
You've treaded through plastic and savages,
Your face buried beneath a gown,
The odd man in the corner says,
You look so down,
It means,
The forest seems black,
You're packed,
We're all long-gone.

You can kick and scream all you want,
But you'll get lost in the cold,
'Cause the Brave New Pathway is so old.

So you're a Good Man with,
all your Good Looks,
You're a manufacturer of,
Pretty Protest Books,
But your abiding venom is
So full of False Love
You're not a rebel, though you think not,
But you're just too many levels above.

You can kick and scream all you want,
But you'll get lost in the cold,
'Cause the Brave New Pathway is so old.

With your mass thinking codas, oh how you talk,
When you don't fall, there's still the straight bold lines that you walk,
With your gathered myths and conductors, in maths you all speak,
You ask yourself, is everyone so unique?
But by now, you're feeling ill,
You may not understand it,
Those hands of yours are too virginal,
You're not some natural-born bandit.

See, you can kick and scream all you want,
But you'll get lost in the cold,
'Cause the Brave New Pathway is so old.

You've strung some fallen multitude,
Some blind-eyed folks from lost and found,
Don't yet quit all the servitude,
Such groups can't be strung around,
You need respect,
You must check,
That everyone else is bound.
So you've gotten Anarchic Insurance,
Through all these Marxist hooks,
But what an abhorrence,
Your still safe and sound,
Just look at this mess, all of this!

You can kick and scream all you want,
But you'll get lost in the cold,
'Cause the Brave New Pathway is so old.

So you look down,
As you have on your hands,
A few clowns from a circus,
You phony philosopher,
You've let all your new fraud,
Work on us.
There should be some law,
Against having you claw
Your masquerades,
And magic through every one of these sold cities.
And even though you say,
Your imagination's not dead,
You've still read,
And forced every Order of Dictation.

You can kick and scream all you want,
But you'll get lost in the cold,
'Cause the Brave New Pathway is so old.

So you walk along with your pen down,
Past each fancy, carved stone column,
Then a voice says 'don't let your terms down'.
It's a naked fool looking solemn.
But you're still glaring and weeping,
You say 'I simply don't understand'
Then the man says, all out and fleeting,
'It's time for rebirth, When will you give a hand?'

So you're giving up,
You can see, you will stop,
So you can feel something now, if at all.

Now you're wandering past this site,
Of a landscape of metal and rust,
You're in the middle of some walkabout,
Your face coated in dust.
Now, thinking you're some Human Poet,
You go write on how you feel,
When the King Palate comes storming,
And you say 'Is this even real?'

But it's going too fast,
Any truth cannot last,
You're a lie by its own.
But you think you'll still find
Your Glittering Gold.

So you run through into this room,
With this Artist named Rome,
And with his lover, Salo,
They go off and buy you a home,
They have murals of circles,
And Open City souls,
They paint the 120 Days of Flesh,
And all these dead patrols.
They say, as they go about in a thresh,
Only Night has its fantasies,
Before burning your house down.
You won't see any end of dusk comin' around,
You're always a ***,
Your lawyers are decades gone,
Go back to all your Christs and El Dorados.

So when you weave yourself,
Out of that forest,
Don't be paid so attention to,
Don't be bleak,
As every night
Has its unabashed
Intellectual freak.
And before you go,
Between the statues under some sheik,
Remember, this very night
That's when you come...

I look out the golden window to see the grasslands full fleshed and full breasted ripe trees bearing oversaturated fruit O yes and perhaps It is the fruit beholding the shine and plump perfection that looks of Grand artifice O apples so crimson I could barely touch it and the rich roots and Ra hangin'a'bove, it is a delightful Saci's-cap-red and each apple seems to be aligned in various patterns of crisscrossing and interconnection, bordering on random but almost calculated I look down at the breakfast table I am seated in capped with Irish breakfasts for all O It is the bare Nature herself and her youthful manifestation, strong and deep into the ground, it makes me feel no turning back, no regret from the small passionate days of pleasure, feeling that beautiful girl Marie, like Nature herself toned to the rivers and mystifying like from the clouds to the depths and our lips jamming brushing feeling against mine O I felt guilty I felt I was taking all the sound and the fury for myself I was eating ll the fruits in the garden, fearing a mistake, being caught, not giving chances and only wishing to please my immediate soul; as the great Wilde said, "I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom." but yet I feel between us a growing, a yearning that is blessed and twisted; graft of Love, starting roots of naked Love sweet connection, Big Time Sensuality; buds in our hearts--the ****** soil has been sown yes O this new Spring is coming and a rite of passage passing finally we have made it past restriction and now a new Spring has finally come! the foggy marches of April lose track and pace, and my exuberance comes swiftly but my prayers and wishes for a beautiful quiet life come with the best intentions of grace; hopefully, surely, wonderfully. Dieu en aura plus tost de vous mercis.

I pray, kneeled and cornered in on the Collapse
My life fades with the very near answer
Here I lay in bed where the stars rest upon me
Where thy souls and hearts I have met lift me
Thy soul grows, from the roses and plantations
Of murky answers, mem'ries and coerc'd choices and trends
I followed from youth to the Fountain of Wrinkles
In my life, youthful and flawed
Bold and embracing, the power and blossoming
And crossings of many audacious brave hearts
Helped and gathered my strength
When I was weak, where I could not pray
I sing a Song to Love, to a Crown, to this Gathering
We are but our Own Gods and paths
I am but a fountain of thoughts and passions and lost controls
Lost and finding, in and out of tune in a blue dot
One lost in nowhere but yet consumes my space and identity
My jobs and freedom
My spiraling grip of intellect and maturity
Philosophy and geography
I hold a candle
A rose, or scent
An elegant gift to the night that gave me this life
This vessel, strapping to leaking
Keeling at its end
This ship, finally finished its row and path
I am awashed in the music and notes I have grown up on
My silences and times spent alone
Thy Mother and Father, my Sister and Brother
My Light I pass to my kin
My rural pleasure
And my fellow Neighbor
I wish treasure and settled beauty
Nature and swallowing technology
Improvements and brash faith
To those who have given me this very Light to begin with
That I now bring forward

The intellects and baboons I have faced
Looking out the window a million times
The million fragmented visions of the One Sun
The broken pieces, the broken people I have encountered
That I desperately tried to piece together in vain
I have discovered that I cannot order when I have problems of my own
I age, I forget all I used to know
My head gets thinner
The fire, now sleeping in my head
The final word of this world
The final breath to belt this paean
I try frantically to give to others
To listen and take note.

I wear many jewels
Of forgiveness, of the Land I have been brought upon
Of God, whom is now falling from me
Yet I still give him compassion, though my once vivid faith is crashing down on me
The Westerns and Wuxias, the books and cinema
The dancing and fiery personalities I have seen
I will fall and hold and you will cry but yet these thousand blurs and poses you give me fall to light and lovely history
Of composition, yes I remember
I will see you in the underground
Or the temples of the skies O the Temple of Dawn
I will hear you in the symphonies
O how I will listen floating down the muddy rivers and the Sea of Fertility
O sweet White Light O bright white Heat O the Images of Round dances of spring pour orchestre
In the streets and by-ways
I will see your names, written everywhere even in the books I read
In The Making of Amavericks, Ah our sweet home and family and shining recollections of hearty dinner and schoolgrounds
O the Danyesummeri; the beach-littered days with moons without blemish suns without heat
My glimmering brain colliding with words and growths and blood to bash out of me
And now when I break to this gate or this crazed forest of confusing manners and horrible human comedies o when my mind gets split open and falls through the vines where I must live and make my way out how I will remember the times and the prairies and the playgrounds and all that was humble and now I feel I am scared O help O hold me up O how I search with roots rich and deep how I will search ablaze for the pavilion of my preserved sanctity in the Japanese garden of my resting place walking about and out from this limbo I stumble upon Melinoe I am frightened by Saci-Pererê stunned by the artists of Cocteau and his petrified fountains of ideas he so courageously displays I will say it I shout it in hymn in rhythm LISTEN please Listen But Yet I always know, I'll always be with you!

You saints, you teachers of mine
How you fed me all I needed
How you taught me the Birth
The Art of Vision,
The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes
This acknowledgment I give.
This Psalm I wholeheartedly mumble.
This pursuance that I slowly yet surely complete.
This resolution I wish to see the light of.
An Ascension, A Love Supreme.
Do I rise