My year of Burning Man
began
with butterfly wings
flapping out on the playa
in a high desert black
moonless sky
speeding up the relentless winds
just enough for me
to hear it call my name
and
make this change
where life
becomes a vast array
of
giant machines
Las Vegas style
in this black rock desert.
I have lived among in my days
of sustained isolation
before the people came
to construct this
city of lights
and community
where we all belong
and participate
in this life art project
free from the rules
that restrict us
as the giant sweat lodge
of the desert
alters our consciousness
frees us.
In my year of Burning Man
the relentless winds
blows the mundane into the insane
and
before entering that last gate
I kiss myself goodbye
knowing
I'll never see myself again.
My time
becomes an art project
and the very nature of reality
heaves and sighs
like Pyramid Lake,
the spiritual center of the Paiute people,
which you pass on by
on your way to Burning Man skies,
my internal waters
turn over,
as does the Lake
as the top goes to the bottom
the bottom to the top
and the creative residue
which had drifted
on down
begins to arise anew.
In my year of the Burning Man
I never have to go to the circus
the circus is me
a universe inside
a universe tall
a universe wide
at Burning Man
nothing is small.
The costumes come alive
behind thousands of eyes
the lights in the desert come alive
while the thumping bass
shakes
rattles you inside.
It's a masked costume party
where the masks don't hide
but reveal all that you are inside,
inside out.
My revolution comes
in a tanker truck
of gasoline
on a Saturday summer-fall
night
and my flames
climb
a thousand feet high
into
the Black Rock
desert sky
in unity
one cosmic cry.
The dust's breath
sticks to everything,
every one
every masked body.
In my days
in my Burning Man year
my eyes are now
perpetually wide and amazed
within this vastness
that for this moment
and all my days
from my birth
to my death
that
I have been alive.
"Burning Man" is an annual festival held out in the Northern Nevada desert. It started with 500 people and now about 50,000 go. A living art project for a week and people construct giant structures of various types, but the scale, big, machines that throw cars.
Easy to look up.
Has quite a philosophy.