Roll Call of the Lesser Devils: Surviving Restoration Snippet

Intro To Roll Call


The hunter of hearts quivers,
Rapacious thoughts, a good solid target.
Success feels spectacular
The target heart offers
Firm, muscular resistance.
Attainment follows only extended chases,
With splendid, unique displays
Evasion and pursuit, each time more delays
Inspires endless quandaries, but comes to nothing.
The hunter usually overcomes the mark,
Leaving the victim hopelessly in love.
Sensation drapes itself around thought during the endeavor,
Which takes place in the lands beyond judgment,
That place nobody goes unless wanting.

[[[ Yeah, I was born about 175 years too late. I kept thinking that the later Romantics would come back into style, but nothing like that ever happened. This poem is like thousands of other poems I wrote. It was all about sex, and sometimes love, or if one meant the other or if either one had anything to do with the other.

This poem, like the vast majority of what I wrote, wasn't about a person. It wasn't about a specific act. All I ever wanted to do was impart a feeling. Now that I look back I think abut how shameless I was, because everything I read from my younger years seems so bawdy. It really wasn't, though.

I was a complete outcast. Even when I was married there were periods where we never spoke to each other. I never have enjoyed the company of my fellow human beings. I believe the happiest days of my life have all been when I had a setup where it meant as little interaction with other people as possible. Interacting with people, to me that's a lot of work.

Digging, moving heavy objects, chopping down trees, you know, strenuous activities have never struck me as being work. For me work has always been about dealing with some jackass who doesn't want to give you money unless you communicate effectively, and I've always held communication to be worth more than the people who use it. So I've always treated employers with as little respect as possible, collected my paycheck, and more often than not told them off.

I'm not sure what that has to do with this poem, but it gives insight into the way I think. So obviously, yes, the poem is about sex and human interaction. But the words contain their own stories without literal human beings having any involvement. That's why it sounds so dirty when there's nothing to it. The words themselves are alive.]]]


2.
After

The spring thaw measures the come and go of love.
She weeps for she knows an attempt to end separation
Would measure up like an attempt to keep the winter snow from melting.
Her tears fill the streams and rivers
When death comes and takes away he closest to her.
Her loyalty had kept his spirit alive
Much longer than the doctors had appraised,
But long before the end began the outcome had always been certain;
Everyone must separate for a short while
When the time comes to abandon flesh.
As the end drew near for her she realized
Throwing herself at the finish with courage.
In the last seconds of life's breath she could see both sides
And then she simply went across.

Before

In spring thaw measured
Bemused vacillations of come and go
And love
Still she weeps with the knowledge
Beyond escaping, for in all ways they separated
No way to be put back together again
Just as the melting snow will not refreeze
As the flowers bloom and the days grow longer.
Her tears, she cried, liken unto the flowing streams and rivers
All of sorrow
Death came and took away
He who was closest to her
In her grieving she held onto that dream of loyalty
The lie she told herself had kept him alive
To the confusion of medicine and doctors and sages
The outcome had always been certain
And never can that phrase be made to sound appealing
One day all we hold dear must die.
We all separate for a short while;
The time comes to leave the flesh.
In the last few seconds she knew it well,
And the wellspring of courage found a home deep inside
Her highest hopes but not her body
In that moment she could see both sides
And then she simply went across

[[[I've never dealt well with criticism. It's for that reason that almost every single thing I have ever written has existed in at least a half dozen different forms. The only close friends I have ever had... let me rephrase that. The way my friends could be judged to have been close would be that they had read my private poetry. Ultimately, of those few people, they always expressed the sentiment that each time I rewrote something I detracted from it. By that measure, with each rewriting a poem lost more and more quality until it was a shadow of what it was meant to be. Which brings me back to my premise that I don't deal well with criticism.

As a rule I rewrote all my poetry repeatedly in an insane effort to rebut every possible criticism it could face. I do believe I still have the scribbled incarnation of every poem. I never listened to anybody when I was younger, and I barely do now. Looking back, though, I do think that the finished poems I posted to the web were probably the worst incarnation of each poem, in almost every case. I think it's funny now.

My weakest work is what I released to the public, without fail. Because of my insane fear of criticism I left myself open to it in the worst possible way. In the long run it has made me a lot stronger. I think that's because I still have all of the originals, and each revision of everything. So somebody can tell me what I wrote sucks, and I know it's true. What they won't know, what they couldn't know, is that I made it suck because of my fear of rejection. Now, twenty years later in many cases, I am telling the world that what I let everybody read wasn't really what I wrote. I've taken the harshest criticism imaginable, because I know it's all correct, but kept an ace up my sleeve. I never let anybody read the good stuff.

When it comes to writing I am off my rocker.]]]


3.
Confronted by delusions of durability
Friction between flaws and tensile strength
Rub and back, and rub and forth
Back and forth into flames
Sinners so say we all in sin
Taught to feel guilty
Oh to hang our heads in shame
And rub and back, and rub and forth
Flames and retribution
It has been taught
The final agony so say...
Some say
Others don't believe at all
But think and friction and strength and tension
Explode across the infinite plane
What is understood and when
Ties to the vanquished, but never where
Only a moment
Confronted by delusions
A huge rush understood bursts forth,
Then skips away,
Contrary to the flames that have been taught
Implanted by prejudice and fear
It's that what makes the friction
So dear


Reviseed:

Confronted by the delusion of their strengths, taking heat for their flaws, sinners have been firmly educated to believe in hell... flames and retribution, it has been taught, are the final agony -- others believe the spirit can slip onward without worry, and can easily think while the drip of seconds going by during death explode across the plane of existence, vanquishing ties to what is understood. The spirit agonizes only a moment as a huge rush of understanding bursts forth, and then begins to sail away, contrary to ideas held by those in charge of implanting prejudice and fear.



[[[I thought about this for a few minutes after I posted it. I wasn't going to comment on it, but then I felt maybe I should. This has to do with religion in a way, but it's not some sort of rejection of Christianity. It's about religious guilt and sexuality. The power of religious guilt never ceases to amaze me. After all, I am writing this commentary on the above poem (and make no mistake, it is one poem presented in two different forms). If this weren't Sunday I would have left it alone to speak for itself. Of course it still speaks for itself, but with one great exception. It is Sunday, and I want to make sure nobody thinks this is some sort of mockery. If anything, the fact that I rushed to clarify things should make it clear that my work is not intended to be blasphemy.

The power inherent in words and their infinite combinations was once something I obsessed over. I strongly believed, and still do, that divinity resides within the essence of language. The substance of language is something quite different. Taking what I have written from a substantive viewpoint, it means nothing. If you peer at the world through the essence of the communication, it's easy to see layers upon layers of meaning. I used to joke that I studied English because if I had studied philosophy I would have gone irretrievably insane.]]]

4 and 5

A wish for joy from one heart to another
Sealed forever the pact of love.
Anything else merely imitates,
Lost in the night like a fact avoided,
Because the truth is always known
If you allow yourself to learn it.
Most would avoid that reckoning,
Write a lie, a letter, then burn it,
Pretend that makes it hurt to be alone,
Do cry a little
You earned it.
Don't forget it's dependence that's beckoning
It's just a silly dream, that's all
When love is falsely shown,
And every song reminds you a lot
Of the nothing that was known
When you wished for their joy
And they wished for naught.
I hope you learned before the fall,
And forgave yourself for trying.
The fun is in the dirty truth
And the innocence of lying.



[[[I must really hate myself to have done some of the things I did to my poetry in the past. I split this poem into two parts that didn't make any fucking sense at all. Did I mention drugs? That's what I'm going to blame it on. For the life of me I don't know what I was thinking when I broke this poem down. Here's my best guess: "I don't want anyone to think I have talent. This doesn't suck bad enough yet. Gerunds. It needs lots of gerunds. And more suckiness.]]]



7.
No one sees the future with closed eyes,
Though some can guess it.
Putting back on clothes, dies
The secret, confess it.
Through that vision know
The short term, how simple
The future can be,
Undress it.


8.
The road to heaven at first requires no wings.
Do not be alarmed at their absence
You won't miss them until they are really needed,
Until it is too late to forget about the spilled milk,
And that little bit of lost eternity.


9.
When work is done it's time to rest
Unless driven by the internal divine,
The drive in time to greatness;
The completion of work,
More work, and work,
The promises come
From sickness.


***

[[[I barely changed these in 2001. There was about six months in the late 80's when all I did was sit around with people, drink coffee and write really short poems (sometimes for days). I was not on drugs at the time. Some of what I wrote had more to do with rhythm and sound than with meaning, as sounded off of the people I was with. Practically everyone I knew during that time period was on lots and lots of drugs. Also during that time there was a gorilla poetry movement on and around the LSU campus. It was a weird time, and I wrote some strange shit. Some of it is so mundane it makes me wince though.]]]

***


12.
The mask of the deceitful will be their revealed shame,
All will eventually find out what exists to be concealed.
Guilt can be found by looking for the veil that hides it.



13.
Somehow the advocates of poverty,
And the bricklayers of contorted, difficult paths,
All understand their work.
They do it anyway because they enjoy it.



14.
When sativa wafts on the elder thought currents
Only the mystic inside can measure the quality of life at that moment.
Lovers find it of immeasurable value,
But then one should never mention such things publicly.



15.
Justice is but a fraction of divine will.
The dust of divinity brings tears to the eyes as the wind whips it up
Like sand whipping up in the desert where
Water vanished ages ago.
One thinks little about justice while lost in the desert,
And can only dwell on how much God’s plan it must be
Being so complicated, painful and mysterious.



16.
After sleep the door stands open on another day.
All the ghosts of lust and heroism will drift through
Politely introducing each other again,
And love will be there as well, cloaked in the breathtaking skins of animals.



17.
A tier of crowns exists after life,
A palace in the clouds, higher than dreams can drift.
The crown reserved for souls unified under imagination
Will be most exalted, though some in the low rings beneath the earth
Will be too fascinated to believe they haven’t made it to heaven.



[[[Number 10 ate number 11, and I can't find the original to figure out what to do with it.]]]




10.
The value of the fatherland:
No one rules from a throne
Though many feel they have the gift,
People want to show their worth.
If someone’s value goes unheeded
Despite vain efforts to be noticed,
Then the world has locked them out,
Cut their ties to the hive mind
That fairy tale where everyone wants to live.
Just to be noticed
That's all some of them want,
It would make some feel
That worthiness is not impossible.
Even without recognition
Rewards will eventually come.
Directing one’s self constructively
Affords satisfaction,
Unlike the wasting of time.



18.
The thorns of reciprocal duty:
Any heart heavy laden
With doubt should flee from the exchange
Or the prickly love that leaves desire unfulfilled
Will grow inside you strong and change,
Thick and dense to obscure your struggling
Form from the eyes of the world.




19.
Only a martyr would desire to bleed.
Heed nature’s words and hold no blades against yourself,
For only the courage of the fires of ancestral wisdom
May embolden one to capture the prize of ages past,
The flowing river of consciousness with which heroic life will be imbued,
Even to the closest confines of the smallest microcosm.




20.
The passage of the romantic gods
Left only a few to remember well.
Artemis hunts no more,
The thirsty moon has been drunk by time.
Demeter’s harvest and fertility filled her cup,
But conceptions and satisfaction availed her not,
Hestia, the cherished goddess, will be missed.
The breezes of the early earth
Somehow hold to honor their memories.
Who feels no ancient stirring when the breeze murmurs up,
But those wrapped up with their selfish God.




21. For Susan, My Love
The pyramids stand now after the blood has vanished,
And owls merely note the come and go with the same question as before.
To answer is to stop fate for a moment.
The pyramids: less mysterious than her peering eyes, or a lock of her hair,
Golden, that of a lover’s well cared for tresses
Beautiful, like an angel with invisible wings,
Absent until she decides to fly.
The journey into the sky follows a clear course, do not worry,
God hasn’t even deprived the old gods of flight, as men have written,
But instead he shares the wonder with them,
And with one so full of the goodness in life
Radiance pours forth from her bosom
As though feeding the world like a baby with her light.





22.
Experience conceals our heavy elation,
And troubles delay simple greatness.
One walked alone with sighs of impatience,
Refused to play the beloved's part
Like an agent of the nether realms,
Like a being that betrays the pure of heart.





23.
Tell every soul individually
What it especially wants to hear:
Light justifies actions,
Victory can be had without sacrifice.
Be sure never to mention the truth,
It could hinder success in public speaking.





24.
Muses: the twelve who steal spirits of the beautiful
And force them to learn
All the secrets of the dainty, erotic world,
Until that knowledge ushers in madness.
The muses return the spirit
Into the body as their willing slave.
The victim writes songs
Until both hands bleed.
The muses bank on the interests of the trapped,
For only those that can be wooed succumb.
The afflicted think everyone adores poetry
Imbued with a secretive and sexy allure.
Nothing will change their mind.




25.
The doom for awareness of past mistakes:
The results of the errors flutter around in the wind
As obvious as obscenities uttered in a very quiet room.
In the true hell every living thing can see these mistakes,
And they think,
“Has there ever before been such a fool?”



***

[[[One of my great failures as a writer, early on (besides the other million things I should have done differently), was that I failed to organize what I wrote in any sort of lasting way. There was no chronological order to the stacks of scrap paper and notebooks stuffed into every corner of wherever I lived at the time. I went approximately four years between writing A Walk in the Dark and compiling Roll Call of the Lesser Devils, and about six years lapsed between the first compilation and the second. I'm not sure what my standards for publication were, besides that I had to hijack a state Xerox machine to run about 1000 illegal copies (all it took was a clipboard, but that's a different story). I know large quantities of writing got left out, because in 1992 I burned the only copy of about a thousand pages of writing.

What I was getting at is that the works that make up Roll Call as it stands today did not come from the same time frame. There are things in there I wrote when I was a teenager and things I wrote when I was 26. I really have no way of knowing what came from when. I do know that everything I wrote before the summer of 1987 was better than what I wrote from 1987-1991, based mostly on my lifestyle. I attempted to burn everything I wrote in those four years, but I am fairly certain I was unsuccessful.

I was never supposed to live this long. The burning of the poetry was supposed to be a romantic footnote in the short life of an historic poet. I pumped up the juice on the melodrama machine until it was near full blast, and then I proceeded to live way too long for it to mean anything. It's like a cosmic joke, when I think about it. I became an immortal poet, but not in the sense that I wanted. My life is like Final Destination in reverse. I step in front of a bus and the space-time continuum buckles, forcing the bus off the road and through the front door of a nearby deli. I open my scrunched eyes to see that death is still impossible.]]]





25.
Beloved Freya
Spirit of love in the frigid north
Where the best expression of it
Lies in the shared warmth.
The melody of madness
In her lands is the sound
Of the chill wind, whistling sadness,
Burning stiff frozen hands.
Her fire saved many a good man,
For she laid them down to sleep
In a cold so profound
Never to awaken.





27.
Cupid never strings his bow
Unless the victim doesn’t know,
The arrows never seek the heart.
For another, frenzied place he aims,
To drown the target in unquenched thirst,
Or add kindling to a blaze
That consumes all thought,
When two victims meet as one and touch.





28.
At the final judgment scene
When charges of deadly sins are read
To a cringing mortal soul,
A maniacal laugh is wrenched from its lungs.
A laugh reserved for hysteria,
Will echo forth to appease the judges
And please the ears of the firmament.
The scene is divinely engineered,
While living the soul was lured to it,
Blinded by want of fame and fortune,
And pleasure, don't forget (I'm for it).
The hopeless verdict is just too rich,
The victim cracks up before God.
Where else could the final injustice be revealed?
The unfairness of life is not concealed.

The heavens laugh along with the broken spirit,
Amused by the height of the spirit's fall.
God knows the spirit never heard
About His side and the holy gall.
The devil gets too much bad press.
Astounding twist:
Truth judges over time,
Something inside self examines.
And as to that,
There is no salvation.
Two faces mocking all are one,
The wasted potential, the divine providential,
The worst end it all with a gun.
Spirit on high, that most exalted
Turns His back on some prayers
Still He can not be faulted;
The selfish kill the virtue of faith.
Honor wins out where it thrives in banality,
Burdens lifted with a laugh and a smile.
In wicked, stricken spirits
There's naught but mundanity,
Take good luck wherever it's found.
All living things subject
To random insanity,
Exhausted
The soul passes
Without a sound.


***

[[[Number 28 was very problematic when a short while ago I reread it for the first time in almost a decade. I have not been through a "born again" phase in my life. The version of 28 that has been on the Internet for years very much painted me as extremely religious. For the life of me I don't remember rewriting it to sound the way it did. Even taking that into consideration, I'm not sure it could be characterized as a poem. It was more like sentences broken up randomly into separate lines.

I am absolutely sure there aren't a bunch of different people living in my head. If I weren't, then I would have to say there's an ancient Catholic priest living behind my medulla oblongata, and that's the guy who turned my poem into a sermon. It definitely counted as more weirdness from the past. Kneel before me, and lo, I will turn your poem into gobbledygook.]]





29.
Dearly departed
Here in spirit today,
The clergy makes up praise for the dead,
With no exception made for the hell on earth,
And only ashes to throw in the grave.
Dear departed, what did you go through
Before leaving this plane for the next?
Was the promise of heaven
Too good to be true,
Did it leave your ideals perplexed?
It's hell on earth here
With the dear, dear departed,
For what they put their families through,
And the priest makes the cross
And scatters rose petals,
To insure a rosy afterlife.
They do that,
It's just what they do,
But your life must speak for itself.
When you die
You just fade away, it's true,
Survived only by the mess you left.





30.
All work, no achievement,
Decay waits for nothing
All ends remind
The nerve of danger.
Angels send help, too late
Empty the soul, whithers
The dead body collapses.
Somehow retain superstition
Death has no precision.
Time destroys
Sincerity reveals secrets,
Ignorance destroys prosperity.
Minutia achieved, climbing incline
Grains of knowledge, why.
One is always waiting
Two is never doing, and nothing,
All too soon come
Angel eyes mirrors
Reflection
Shattered.





31.
Darkness overpowers,
Form is twisted to the breaking point,
Until it vanishes
And wafts away on the Stygian currents.
Light takes its leave
Far below an abysmal plunge,
Down through the depths filled only by black.
Light has deserted the center of reason.
All the mind could carry with it:
A cherished toy from childhood,
The memory of touching the only one you ever really loved,
And a dream of playing in the sunshine
While everything around you seemed to make sense,
And it felt like the night would never end.





32.
Diffidence drags away the lunatic
In the morning before the strong storm.
Call it the raging brew of empty days,
A torn piece of heaven from which pours water.
Speak with the rain and she’ll tell you,
The blood of gods defines the present.
Crucial is every response and motion.
All should be in balance,
Nothing seen should be merely taken.
In generosity confidence sweeps the earth in torrents.





33.
Blackness, the only light a sliver in a mirror,
Strengthens for another night.
In now, hero, you only spin webs of mortal fortune.
The spite of the sun replaces the lovely dawn;
Any sense of wonder shatters.
The moment allows indignant response,
But then time moves along.
Revealed motives:
Dominion seeks to establish More.
Now or never, to do or die, and on and on,
Sing sweetness.
Gratitude the only reply for sanctuary gracious saint.
Satori, satori, satori,
A sensation causing fear in the worldly bound,
Just as foreign words force the alienation of authority.
Absolute light a shower of dust once a mirror, slivers only lies.
The corrupt are liars before all else.
Menace extinguishes the sun at twilight.
Nowhere to call home but the wet ocean into which the sun sets.
Motives have all come to life.
All know the sun must go
Or there could be no triumphant reentry.





34.
Why does identity torture itself so?
Ego wants dedication to the principle of self importance,
But evidence dictated by time convicts the self with inferiority.
“Hey, see you later. Hey, maybe we’ll be friends.”
The self tortures self with the truth,
And all she asked him was,
“Do you love me?”





35.
The river is silent, deep inside,
And the water is music of eldred beings.
Sailor of space wanting only kind fate,
The journey has divorced you from time
Thrown you from the heights of your frozen dreams.
In the lost wint’ry mountains where blows the cold wind.
The dreaming streets of ice have given up caring.
The rhymes are at war, locked in bitter feud,
Predicted and measured by no one.
The last line defends
A universal truth:
Memories of the laughter of children.





36.
The bell tolls
The shore of logic and certainty awash in exhaustion.
Long and winding passages of yore
Strew broken, brown leaves of meaning across the frozen ground
Dead fallen leaves that never had a chance.
The sound of the fallen fades like the voice of reason,
Beyond is only madness and the quiet gulf of perversion.






37.
Turn the key.
A warm refuge waits inside,
One a woman creates so well.
Could this be criticized by knowledge?
Probably crucified,
But the words have no face, no element of surprise.
Blinking his eyes curiously,
The maniac burns his bridges by abandoning faith.
He has set many things on fire,
And this the woman understands.
That knowledge has special meaning for her.
His song of shadows wants to be sung.
The clock still ticks
Even when time disobeys, and stops
Nights in the pavilions last much longer.
Pockets of wanton pleasure drift on the humid air,
Burning embrace, that known as love by both restful souls.
They take leisure in the folds of trapped time,
On the languid divans they mock gravity.
They have become an entity in flight.
It is beyond their abilities to fall.





38.
An opaque angel song echoes
webs spun of certainty
a transparent woven curtain
the sails set to every corner, the wind
blows an ancient foamy compass hellward
directions engulfed by fate and chaos
for eternity, all freedom myth,
the wind sets them free to capture
thought imprisoned once again and more tightly
tortured by the beautiful sounds
symphonies of crashing ocean voice
a clipper for earthly wisdoms legions
tormented by the gulls, ensnared
taken by tack and turns -- the stars --
leave even the mariner’s rhyme behind
at the mercy of the relic allegory...
the currents cross the sailor's mind,
he the mariner's resurrection
marks another day of quiet insurrection
the drum beat heeds no thoughts or words
the chains all slaves against do strain
the heart and breath of toil
the sea of doubts crush hopes or make them
the weight, the heavineess
cursed, those thoughts gather round you





39.
Dreadful beauty entwines the beholder
a python’s kiss for the lovelorn
ancient knowledge shorn from origin crumbles in
feminine songs of comfort
echoes of the truth spirited like the sword arm of a valkyrie
meaning obscured by earthly routine
by a transparent sheet of insane operetta
written by a deaf man
with carved wooden hands.





40.
We enjoyed ambrosia in the dungeon
Again on that fine summer day .
"Must we begin the game again?"
She asked with certainty in her eyes.
So much to say, but nothing that could be done
To save her.
"Listen," the rose reminded.
"When the cold wind comes
No one will be bothered by blossoms anymore."
An exodus was called for,
Tantamount to perambulation, got to get
Somewhere.
We waited for a sign of things to come,
Then it was upon us.
Each measured stride caused ripples,
Shuddering in escalating waves.
We both knew the answer
Long before anything was said.
It's not so much to play the game
As to have the game play you.
And anon another has come.


***

"Fell into a sea of grass and disappear among the shady blades."

***


One of those ages passed me by.
It called it wanted it needed
But no,
It all comes back to my ideals.
It takes a lot of courage to stand up and say
No more, enough.
I'm not like you.
I'll never be like you.
There's not much I can do about
Where my life takes me.
I never had a choice.
It was never an option
To walk away and shake my head
Like nothing even mattered.
Tell me what you think I mean
And I'll glumly admit you're right,
No matter what you think or say.
This is an open ended acceptance speech
And I left all my words at home.
The yawning gulf opens below me.

It's 2008,
The cupboards are bare,
And fuck you?
Don't even go there.






41.
Motion seems to continue in the frozen galvonometer. The ocean of internal reason strive to catch the sound of a voice in the moonlight. The sky reveals only the voice of a bolt of lightning and the cry of a seagull. The gull as it flies is closer to home in the skies, on the wind. Close the eyes that are tired, only sleep will heal too much knowledge. The soft woman longs to know she is desired. Only love of nature can save the rose from demise in the cold glass, only the love of a woman can make her petals happy. Neither were created for the sake of abuse. And death came crashing down on a small mind, it settled onto a prepared spirit. Some don’t fear death at the hands of those weak enough to declare war on beauty. Their kind is owed a favor, repayment in caresses from the flames of hate. This revenge gratifies those who do not forgive. Those who violate the garden do not deserve to live, but their suffering is redemption enough. Surety of motion laps over the bridge to forever. The wind seeks only to aid the reign of goodness and keep the gull in flight, the spirit spoken of by quiet men. Only hearts believe in the certainty of faith, while those who lust only have animal needs. Then, the queen of light daintily traced her finger across the brow of consciousness waking the knowledge of the good and true that went undefeated, and of the ignorant and ugly of heart that lost all treasures.





42.
When the wind is your friend and your enemy
It doesn’t matter if you face the door.
Life is a race against time
To reach eternal security before all hope crumbles
Under the crush of coming doom.
Sometimes people don’t make it.
They are long forgotten






43.
diamond, fragment of the sky, in the most acute angle
reflects the gathering of the forces
that will ride when the mist thickens
the chosen will see that they are evil
mundane eyes will see only a thickening steam
before blue terror grips their chests tightly
no cry will escape their lips as the invisible assailants strangle them






44.
Another vision roils through
on the tracks laid down for the future devotees of ancient lore.
The traveler on the power lines breathes;
The air tastes like victory.
According to an esoteric few.
This human plane dies, withers and is reborn,
As peace and confrontation collide.
The greatest certainty of the one holy creation
Lies in the fact it can not be conquered.
The wine of indivisibility, the elixir,
The sign and signature of vitality,
Tis a drink that frees one to peruse the haunts of madness.
Sins are easily read, and remedied if that is so desired;
The levity of that action craves a secluded haven.
Children are safe in homes of caring
Caring born of truth and love.
Parentage weep not the bastion lives still.
Home will remain true to the tenets of the great songs,
Like a pine tree clinging to life on a cliff face.




45.
Pray prey
I dismay for my loss of words.
Read this hated game, this delay of truth.
Touch me, does me?
No leverage from now
Yet hear somehow
The ego goes unstolen.
Future is hidden
I follow you temptress,
Read these words,
They were meant for you,
From now in affection, to much later,
This is the way you say it must be.






46.
The wheel of finality rolls on.
Lies traced to new learners
That clumsy few,
While education grows weary
And the champions of ignorance gather truth
For no reason but to destroy it.
Time tested the warriors of olde,
And they were found to be wanting of knowledge.
That unseen opponent hurt them the most,
A paradox that they could not see,
A blind warrior fighting toe to toe with fleeting shadows.
Patriotism takes advantage of blind obedience.
Parents teach children violence is fine.
Once grown they still have their childhood memories
They keep the teachings of hate close to their hearts.
Once, a long time ago, the plow swept the sand aside
A conscious attempt to save a condemned child,
A pretense of lunacy
For the sake of giving a baby his father.
When the baby fell into the path of doom
The father knew the act was finished.
Discredited as a lunatic, the father went away.
The salvation of the young often comes at the price of the mature
But not this time, not in this place.
Today's warriors are dedicated to a bloodless war,
They remain at home to set standards,
More knowledge of the oh so new.
Years of journeys swept the eyes of errant soldiers.
They clawed at them hoping to forget what had been seen.
Real war: carnage, brutal victory,
Bloody bread for ravenous mouths.
The Beauty scoffed in her high emerald laugh,
From her tower haughtily watching the brave men die,
At the base of her tower they died.
For this the unseeing had pledged to serve.
The disease has never been cured,
And so it has ever been so vile.







47. Welcome, My Friend
Long has is it been since we parted
Company for the sound of another, unfamiliar sigh,
Though a sound of such might never be heard again.
Many people say not to worry, that it will happen
But sometimes it does not.
A tear falls between you and I in the confines
Of the restrictive coffin we have shared for so many months now,
Drifting in the cargo hold of the good ship animosity
In most unfamiliar seas.
Dreaming, you are on an errant journey
The greatest challenge continuing the holy fast.
The chains to material existence are never broken with fear.
The comfort of economic servitude allows hate to build
And with that the stranglehold may be broken.
River of minds between now and then
Hear this mystic conjuration to the spirit of disobedience!
The powers that control have been corrupted by ther own desires.
When the sword and stomach find a last moment to unite
The flow of life’s fluid will not be so bitter,
For it will be what the stomach has craved for so long.
To part the sea between our distant lands
And hold each other again, any pain could be endured for that.
Over the roar of dangerous ends,
I welcome you again my friend.






48.
You are doomed in certainty,
I won’t let you go.
Try to think your way out
Why don’t we redefine eternity,
Forge our own,
Blind beauty’s eyes
With wicked moans
And cheap earthly sighs,
A dime a dozen.
Tell me
Didn’t your moans come by the dozen,
Or were they always single?
There is something to say to force eternity to let you go,
But try not to waste your words.




49. Goodbye Sonata
Help! the waves cover the nostrils at last.
The time to surrender to the absence of air has come.
The pretty sounds of an orchestra heard once in childhood
Drift underneath the water as if they had originated there.
The shock of discovering the sound allows breath to be drawn
There, in Poseidon’s realm.
Feverish dreams begin to awake in the more chill water;
They bring delirium of home; once so cozy,
Now spanning out as dark and as deep as one can swim.
The merciless waves drank all memory
But cry no more at the passing of the old form, dear heart.
When the ocean drinks once more we will be reunited.
The celebration of the reunion will be remembered in marine histories,
A grand party indeed.
It may sound like fantasy, but one day the joy of sitting in the terraced
courtyards of Atlantis, sipping fine kelp wine
will bring forth the life of a typhoon
Then we will have even more folk in our Court,
And the process of teaching the ways of the undersea will be our testament,
To the great and mysterious ways of the one maker.
The sounds of the sirens will drown out the cries of the drowning.
The waves love us all so much they take us gently to their bosom,
Just a little too tightly in the embrace,
And air can never be allowed.
The future looks brighter than ever it did in the sunlight.
Soon we will meet again.



***
I said these things. I stand by these words.






50.
luminous, it has no creases
virtuous by solemn creedence
viscous, different
like the child in you could be free
but chooses to see with clarity
denying all forms of charity
scare fear
tear dear
burn! burn! burn!





51. Reply
What do you mean, drift off and dream.
The silver tongued ones weave poems,
Never having anything valuable to say.
The black tongued speak in caustic layers.
Whisper with your eyes again
The tremors through this existence felt so good.
The wit of the gentle snare has captured another in silent admiration.
It feels good, does it not?
Where do the good lies disappear to,
When the truth seems so inappropriate?
Do tell: when you help the baby take his first sobs,
Wrapped in soft blankets.
Tomorrow will bring the reclusive mother into the sunshine
With her baby, a trick to soften hard hearts.
Outside the eyes that see her
Make her feel less beautiful than when she were hidden.
In fact she feels nothing,
But at least has no want to feel better.
The silver lipped trail slime down their descent into love of money,
While the trees whisper like your eyes,
Spies in the cobwebbed court.
What can you mean
By drift off and dream?





52.
Why do I torture myself so?
Glutted by self importance any inferiority must be unacceptable.
Time wants a commitment
But the self would rather feel strong and free.
...torture self by ending love to end weakness.
“Hey, see you later.”
“Hey, maybe we’ll be friends.”
All for nothing.
All she asked was did he love her.





53.
Christmas Day 1989

Suspicion and I often consort,
Finding some sort of sick pleasure in nervous moments.
I blink through the haze of fear to see a glimmer of the truth,
None the more lustrous for being a forced confession.
The truth dislikes discovery,
Its light hurts the eyes of the meek folk it loves best.
Confession: on the origin of bitterness.
Why, in a flaw filled world, should one confess bitterness
When the gaps in knowledge could more easily be filled by lies,
About how good everything is?
Maybe I attempt to escape the high walls of enclosed emotion
Before the enclosure becomes a tradition,
A fashion of unfathomable alienation,
A grotesque posture plotted out by the minds of the sad.
Rest is uneasy in suspicion’s wanton arms,
And dreams increase the caution with which I view the world.
I can guess it will only be a matter of time
Before the flaws in the world claim me as well.
Praise must be given though, to the flaws,
They are perfectly in their inescapable,
Even, it is likely, part of God’s plan.






54. Frieze
The great picture fragmented into minute portions
Leaving the surviving pieces to assemble in geometric cohesion.
Implications and similarities speak for the intent of the work,
Puzzle pieces of an ocean set into the wall and the self.
A face appears a swimming colored fish, blue pieces diving hither and yon.
Some words summon taste when they exit the mouth,
Some images convey feeling when they enter the eyes.
When vision devours image sharp angles even pain the viewer,
But this pain seduces vision by linking identity with the pains of artistic pursuit.
It is pain much purer of consciousness
Than maddening winces of physical discomfort,
And so reigns with clarity over grimacing thought,
Groveling before untouchable beauty.
The tale takes place in cut stones set firmly, a collage of the messiah
Rigged with small pieces of colored rubble and a hardening substance.
Examination shows it to be more complicated,
Golden gates guarded by secretive tongues.
They lead to a vast garden filled with most successful plants
In the background behind the holy one.
Before him a road stretches to the sea.




55.
The Monster Claims Another Victim

Would you sing me a song about desire and trust?
There's a good one
That ends with an immodest surprise.
Never leave love behind
Because the feeling is too strong.
Never turn your back on the truth.
Nothing else so strong could ever be found.
In the tones of your voice,
In the shades and colors of the moon,
Destiny is rushing through us.
Sing me a song or fly away.
There can be no turning back on this path,
At least not openly,
It will not be allowed.
If -- another lie to be told --
A stain should tarnish the purity of this innocence,
Hallowed by the wrappings of the divine creator,
Then quest to cleanse the smudge would never be abandoned,
And all in the name of your honor.
The words are coming thicker.
They taste coppery, like the remnants of a sour drink.
In reality pinnacled histories will pass up the chance
To offer glory to another sex crazed strumpet,
This ode will be a waste of time in the long run.
So few people ever seem to understand.
It's not a repast of grave concern,
But a trap for the guilty wooed.
Somehow the effort does speak for the feeling
And moves onward to more softly spoken flattery,
Beyond the clouds where angels of heavenly conception
Grant favors to the fond of heart.

Could there really be angels among the clouds?
Come closer, the view will be better if you follow me,
Down the staircase, it was constructed just for you.
Can you see more clearly now?
Can you see it has all been lies?
There are no clouds, no angels,
Just a chamber of delights with endless possibilities for the imagination,
Nothing nearly so brutal as the pit which once resided here,
But twice as deadly and efficient.

One last step down and you will find yourself in this secret place.
Take heart, for a long time victims fell the distance,
Now you have come of your own free will.
Your cries will only be heard by their creator.
The muses will take the sound and create a lovely work of art.
They will take pride in revealing it to the multitudes,
And then everyone will know.
Your face will be seen.
Your soul will be bared.
The shame of it will be pain beyond repair
And pleasure greater than you could ever conceive
(and live).
The delusion has come full circle
Too grand for any fiber of your spirit to dream of refusing it.
In the desperate craving for more
Induced by public exposure,
Chafed by the doubts and hungry for the longing,
You will strive to make your needs understood.
These things you want can be yours.
With all trace of fantasy removed
Can you still see the eternal bond between us,
Making the spirit light like clouds in the sky?
For centuries the righteous have spoken badly of your master
Because they never had the courage to let go, to indulge.
Take that step.
You will be rewarded,
With all the gifts promised, and exactly as you have construed.
Even he who dwells lowest must have someone to speak highly of him.
Feel lucky you have been chosen,
As I feel lucky you have chosen me.



56.
I Think She Likes Me

We decided to ravage the world.
At the party in the mist of sure things
The girl with her glass of fine champagne
Looks at me; she’ll make a fine mate.
In the summer of maturity she can have all she wants.
The dinner is excellent,
But her eyes are on me.
Pulse jumps with passion as she sips from her glass.
Since reason took all hope and left years ago
Only the pleasure of her offer can be considered,
No cumbersome considerations belong.
Before everything is over
Her lover will claw at his mind
Trying to pretend I never existed.
She is like a woman in an empty box
Waiting for life to come somehow.
The woman wants a baby
But he would never let it have his name.
The woman wants to cry over it a lot
But she can’t even pretend she feels.
No tears will come,
So at night she plays with her toys instead.
She is smiles and light at dinner this evening,
And her man is nowhere to be seen.
Knowing what must be done I muse
That the best laid trap is the one that is most obvious.
She sees the snare and it excites her.
Her future child urges her on in spirit.
I stifle the impulse to laugh
Thinking of how he will be murderous, convulsing
When the fact comes to light.
I thank her for passing the salt
Smiling only with my eyes, and somehow getting the attention I wanted.
Refusing to waste the first possible chance
I ask her to go away with me for a while.
Unable to fight the attraction any longer
She laughs nervously and agrees.
Not much later we decided to ravage the world.
I have made certain he will never touch her again.
I think she likes me.



57.
The girl was there that night,
She told me with a smile,
That very feminine one she likes so much.
Warmth and atmosphere drew them together.
Cold is only a state of mind.
Before she stepped over the edge of physical satisfaction
She had been a very clean girl.
She is clean of body still, true...
But behind the kid grins she wants to play games.
Behind her eyes there is a dark that is too deep to free.
There is plenty of room to relax as we talk.
No words could describe how nice the sensation.



58.
The music tries to speak,
Though it has no tongue
Meaning can be obvious.
Sweet and gentle build up,
A delicate crescendo, a climax daintier still.
Harps are symbols of bygone days
When players in pedestalled parks
Practiced in modesty and technique
Drew crowds who hung on every sound.
The bards sent the notes up to heaven,
Gliding effortlessly up through the sky.
The arches bear witness to that triumph.
Somehow the arch survived
The hedonism of Roman civilization,
And so too did music
Somehow cling to the mind over the eons, returning
With news from the journey in the sky.
It returns, and it has news;
It tells the audience to listen and hush,
To hear the wonder of the creator.
The leisure bears witness
By a stream that bends and twists down
From the fountainhead,
And wanders off carefree through the garden.
The people on the grass try to swim
But they drown as the sounds swallow them.
Music spits them out later
Not being overly fond of the taste of human.



59.
Tomorrow or yesterday no farther away
Than the glimmer, did you catch it?
In the eyes of the changeling boy.
The cars go by with deliberate ease
Outside, inside,
No closer than here.
We live life in perfect timing
Until death.
To lay down and sleep in oceans of the past
Tempts sorely.
Do not or the seconds will skitter by quietly
Never waking you up
Until years have been spent motionless.
The core
The heart
The axis of the shell
Feels the passing ages but is removed
Into the dreams.
They exist above and beyond
Where there is no need for here.
In the frost quickened breath is a miracle.
Cold loves a dreamer
To roost in the folded form,
Until waking.
Shaking off the chill old friends must be lost again.
They stay where they are happiest,
Far from the prying fingers of winter
That would take what little warmth there is
Just for the joy of it.





60.
The orbit of the planet:
A twenty-four hour cyclic effect.
The vehicle travels in opposition
The rotation of the earth
Lending just a fraction of extra speed,
Too little to gauge.
It strikes the engineer
That he has fallen from the planet.
Gravity departed at escape velocity.
Mediocre reactions crumble
And fall away pathetically
In the face of the knowledge
That somewhere has distinctly become nowhere.
The carrot dangles before his eyes,
Three feet before, like a guiding voice.
Someone has a dossier on this,
The perils of free falling
After waiving freedom of choice.
A day late and a dollar short
Post mens rea no redress
In the hoity coitus toity court
Cosmic tort reform aside.
Personal wants ascribed to the negatives
Left undeveloped in the dark room.
The carrot trick won't work if they hate carrots.
Hunger must be the key.
Something must fuel the animal drive.
God having abandoned the world
To the tender mercies of law and chaos
Sees humor in people drifting off into space.
Proof for the skeptics will come.
The haloed civilization will at length embrace fuckery,
And realize the time.
Its time to make up for lost time.
It has been prophesied that such things happen,
Because if it feels good do it,
Stop waiting and suck up to it.
The automobile
Automatic
Static line of crap will begin to wear thin
A coating of flattery, a glass of gin
Until nature decides to just win.
Bestial reality,
Hunger and lust,
So powerful the feeling itself
Clocks in with gruff profanity
And Will pounds through the veins of all humans,
Reinstated to its original beauty.
It is hungry to take out any obstacles
Between wherever is is
And where I need to be to get it.

Somehow it all changed.
The sustenance didn't take care of itself.
The food tried to escape.

Hungry.
The shaking hands on the wheel
Are my own, or so they tell me.
It has been days since sleep was possible.
Driven by the pit of my stomach
I feel as though I am floating.
Hope remains for one last chance
To catch the sun before it comes up,
Catch it unaware and kill it.
Then all the loot can be had.
The dossier couldn’t know the plan.
Escape will be had before any government knows.
Not that they could catch me
Unless the car exploded.
Pedestrians scatter with barely enough time to reach safety.
I mow down as many as possible.
This was all they could muster?
Send a bunch of guys out on foot?
Up ahead a road block,
Nicely arranged cute striped cars.
I bash through.
Road God lives!
Worshiped among teen-agers
Who listen to ancient rock and roll
Who think heaven is a 454,
I drink, nay, guzzle the fuel.
Less than a God could never even afford to start this baby
Since the gas shortage.
On the short twelve mile horizon
I can be at the top
Before even seeing the curvature I left behind.
Eyesight becomes estranged so
Trajectory for orbit must be calculated only with the mind.
The future outlaws will worship me
After I become one with the stars.
Road God!
Who took emptiness
And turned it into gasoline to fly away.






61.
Broken Bricklay

The concrete steps engulf my gaze
Rising to capture my eyes before a foot falls...
Traverses the man made stone’s testimonial glaze.
Vision escapes not from the waves of toil unto death.
Strong tissue rips under the strain
Of the effort of laying a hard bed by grip
Tightly, with the hand of sure mixed endurance.
Stone work will be found in the future.
Generations later someone will wonder
Just who did the work.
Nonchalantly the decades will pass over the walks and patios
Where labor was spent so that
Leisure could be enjoyed.
The green earth came to be covered by effort.
The sweat could have made the oceans
But instead became steam and rained.
Morning comes
Bringing a feeling of newness
And past accomplishment,
The nervous energy that surrounds all work.
The heat bears down like a ritual pain.
The mixture can never go dry,
Must be stirred until breaking ache comes to the body.
The sun takes many to a dream suddenly,
The swoon, it is dangerous
But educational if one lives.
The fever sometimes shows the plans of God,
The warmth of the endeavor
Marking those separately from those who do nothing,
Who do not brave the heat.
There must be some promise of another world
And the delirium of the afternoon shows
That if there is no heaven
Rest assured there definitely is a hell,
Because the bricklayer comes very close to it,
Almost breaking but insurmountably strong of spirit,
Refusing to stop until finished,
No waste allowed, no room for error.
With the children at home to feed, there lies
Purpose for the concentrated quest to be as strong
As the brick in the sweltering sun.
The haze burns away
Until sight is blinded, all too clearly.
The victory of the moment is measured
By the hours spent to get there.
Tissue of the body is nothing,
It will pass away.
What must last must be created.
The spirit is not gauged by the flesh.
If dissenting discuss not
This matter with real men,
Or maybe suffer being told
To stoop a little and open your eyes,
Perhaps dirty the silken hands by feeling
A little of that with which the nation was built so quickly.
When the day is done
Beyond the heat of the sun
The children rejoice at daddy’s return,
The treats that were so hard earned.
My eyes cross the walkway in admiration.
All who pass here will know.







62.
complex hazing
a stationary invasion
tear, raze, rend the union
rape the nation
young and old killed by love
under justice blind direction
never believe in resurrection
only in hate.
from dismay come justice’ decay.
pleasure’s way
leads to pain, leads astray
tries to make sick,
trick time into unwinding,
but it won’t work.
It strews the sickly
webs of vain, wanton waste,
gloom’s decor,
silken threads of yore.
avoid the true
painful to trap the self
tomorrow the sun
will burn away this black yule.
from this
can only come misconstrual
Here, critics, have some fuel.





63.
Beyond Language Barrier
Never try to shake off the truth.
You are
Guilty of plenty even so young,
And you cry
Because you can find no path
Out of the heart of the moon.
No one leaves so soon.
Delay your thinking,
Relearn and then return.
There is no game,
No way,
Only black smoke from the burned.
Too unlearned,
Two turned the one card,
The Devil,
Then went for the one door
But only one could go through at once.
The Other One never left.
The image showed
A self centered prick looking back.
Don't covet that knowledge,
Or the fact that you were right,
Because you really are no better.
Mistake not,
No song,
No card,
No lock on the door,
A lock on the mind,
So importune me no more,
I want a divorce from your ideas,
I want to forget them forever,
And I ask this not be retold.
‘Tis shown to be all too hellish,
The world
That set this pen gliding,
Across the page,
A plea to the aether to crush me,
Please,
And then no more favors.






64.
The reduction of the spirit
Makes a dangerous saute,
And misery a pitiful sound.
Deus ex fashionista,
The deuce you say, it's just deserts
For such treachery,
Envious blasphemy,
Lost and carried down.
Amid the tiers and altars,
Somewhere a voice,
Weeping, falters,
And the wind is a hollow howl.
It’s the church of infection,
Of sin and consumption,
Uplifted by followers foul.
They dine on porridge
Made from strong men’s courage,
After defiling their graves
And their bones,
Digested by unforgiving tomes,
It's not only bodies that rot in the ground.
Nowhere can be found a worse stench
Than the smell of the priests
As they quench their unholy thirsts,
From out of the mouths of lambs and the innocent,
The perversion makes even the hardened flinch,
Because children should never know at all.
Inside the damned clergy all look the same
All rust colored, gangrenous, leprous flesh,
And the church they hold holy
Is to the core rotten, wholly,
As a dead dear days old.
On them do not dwell,
In their footsteps do not dawdle,
For they are lost.
And the path only leads down,
Where the stench becomes an entity,
And fire the only cure to be found.



65.
Since I have seen Narcissus' true self
We can no longer be friends.





66.

Under the rock
In the hardest of places,
Poverty left you by the wayside.
Meanwhile, on the side
Way out to get liberal causes
Speeches come
Worded annoyingly:
Kill! Kill! Kill!
Walk away innocent,
Simply do nothing and have nothing.
Try to get away with the things I’ve done
And somehow have lots of money.
Then walk. Ha!
Some say the masterpiece
Is an unfinished scream,
A vagueness, a mystery,
But I say it’s the smallest,
That which mattereth not shit.
The real mystery involves
Unending ways to impress the yin
Again and again,
Something natural,
Au wow baby,
We are all chattel to time.
Feel valuable, of worth,
Unless someone thinks you're theirs.
No words can bring the reluctant to believe
They are not free.
Maybe if anyone tries to bring hell back,
Like the one we had,
I will fight a moment
Before I fall forever.
Something terrible
Seems just a short hop away,
They want you to feel nothing,
Love nothing,
But I fear nothing,
And am prepared to assert all rights to fair death.
Horror is guilt
And innocence a spoil of war.






67.
She wept.
Tears of understanding filled my eyes
But would not flow down my cheeks.
Humanity has escaped,
Quick, capture the beast.
The tears betray.
(Do not say
The small flower wanted nothing to drink but the dew
When the rain looked so inviting).
Did you not ask me to do what I did?
With your eyes and your smile,
And the way you keep your hair down?
(The fields needed water
They were thirsty and it was
Impractical of you to want something else for them)
I didn’t do it.
I didn’t do...
What was needed
What you yearned for.
The ache in my heart
Reminder of past cruelties
Would not allow it.
The tears remind me of the emptiness.
She wept
as my useless hands groped for comforting words.
Obscenities were all that could be found
Needles in a world wanting of softness.





68.
Tell her softly
The words, “I love you.”
Whisper them so low
They can only be seen,
Not heard.
It could have been the truth.
Tears rain down on shattered unions.
Laughter becomes hysteric,
For nothing.
There is a dark place inside,
A place the light never reaches.
In the darkness
The lonely ache turns to a lullaby.
Sunshine will stream in
Bringing wonders,
Trees with ruffled feathers.
Fly free on the morning breeze.
In the corners of my mind
Something reminds me of paradise
And what was lost.
It's gone like a wisp of smoke.





69.
Victory turns the tables.
And now the fortune
Of the lucky soul.
The knee of the oak
Marks the old battlefield gate,
The portal to the horrors of war
Where certainty flees from shadows.
The spirit exits the body
But finds the ethos
Frightening
So returns.
The baby claims the victory
As the tables turn.
Like the shell of a snail,
Wound, coiled, descent into an eternal spiral.
Inside the thinker knows
That what is done must come back in opposition.
Actions must consider karma.
Curl, three spacial sides,
One facet in time.



[[[Note:
Original for number 70 was lost. I am unable to restore to original. In the interest of not doing something stupid I left it alone.
Edit Update:
Points off for using "wisp" twice in one stanza.

New Update: There are more flaws in 70 than I know what to do about. I remember I wrote it in 1988 on Stanford Avenue. It was the longest poem I had ever written. It had stanzas. This version sounds awfully corrupted. This is what happens when a writer constantly revises. I was probably dosed when I wrote the revision. It has Tarot influences, but it's all smarmy.
Blech. I'm taking it down. I'll put it back up after I can figure out what to do with it.]]]






71.

Maddening smiles
Given to a frenzied crowd
Blood thirsty for human suffering;
She would rather have smiled at the night,
But persuasion has its uses.

Choice matters little
When facing the inevitable,
Nothing will change that which must occur,
Free will is a joke in the face of it.

The inevitable:
The long trek to final rest
Through the throngs of the audience,
The mob excited by tormented screams.

They observe her while the deity
At the center of the lady’s worship
Takes her into the world of not so tender mercies,
Slivering flesh so that it might know
When the time comes to devour the soul,
And stoke the laughter of the crowd.

When the lady can no longer smile.
The crowd will have its pleasure
Tearing the last of her into pieces.

Though the lady's body fails
And she plummets into misery
She has one last satisfaction.
They never knew what was in her heart,
What she thought when she was free.

The lady knows victory owes nothing
To life or death,
For she lived and died many times.

The curse, it's funny.
Works in reverse.





72.
Take me away
So that I might stand and smile,
Hoping the dream will never die.





73.
Vox Humana

:never change point of view
:new menu
:declarations to the enemy
:pin the tail on the sly fox
:jack ass
:it was slow
:they told lies
:it went to trial
:the sly fox died
:scared to death by the judge
:faring not well
:the hero in hell
:veteran
:with no war to fight in
:give a wren a home
:a slim picket fence nest
:seeds all day long
:make a happy bird
:give a dog a bone to pick
:the resentment builds
:the dog attacks
:rather angrily
:common sense only
:remember?
:a shame
:the case was a frame
:a small fall in the records hall
:golly, what’s the hall’a records
:never listened
:In the hard rock hotel with a shank
:slank over to the mark
:and with a hand hank pank
:took it out
:hand it to him
:then slank away
:dey coodnuh seen
:hold on
:ono
:dey comin
:first door
:last window
:then left
:out of the shanty
:handled perfectly
:excep’
:oh shit, dere dey arh
:Ah’m dead
:nah nah
:Sherman crushed us
:Then colleged us.



[[[Note:
I have no frakking idea what I was talking about in 71. It would help if I had written little guides at the time. It's an old poem, probably 1987-ish. That means I was into the occult, chaos magic and the later Romantics. It's probably about something I pulled from a Crowley work. It seems like one of the Tarot poems I wrote. I don't like it. It's pretty bad.

The handwritten work I found in the attic a couple of days ago has a number 71 that is nothing like this. I'm working on scanning it all. Hopefully I can get OCR to work so I don't have to digitize everything manually.]]]





74.
Gaia

At dawn the armies of the night
Arrayed before the light
The final stand of the evening’s memories
The quiet arrival or morning and doom

She awakened dreamily
While tendrils of sunshine crept over the land
Torment for the lovers of lost desires
And heaven to the desires of lovers.

The king of darkness weeps
His last embrace taken at the first glimpse of the sun.
The shimmer in his lover’s thoughts
Seems to have disappeared.

Her eyes seem drained as his duty calls.
Some lives are better left unlived,
Some dreams should go unrealized.

As she laughs a serene pond sends a reflection up to the skies.
The glory of the nights finesse
Is a drama of a tale untold.

The sunshine flirts merrily
The youth of an age.
Subtle glances of warmth are lavished on her.

With glances and smiles she betrayed the dark king.
Another day wanes with her fickle prancing.
The sunset is the broken heart of the sun king bleeding
While she dances with pleasure at the coming of night.

Her body fluidly welcomes her old lover.
Eternity giggles as the trees grow her long curly hair,
She brushes the curls, golden leaves falling to the ground,
And talks of nothing in particular.

Gaia will always be the balance between night and day,
The source of all jealousy between darkness and light,
But she just smiles and is a little girl.
.
.
.
.
.
[[[Note: This one, on the other hand, I remember very well. I was staying by the LSU lakes. I had been up for two days cramming and taking finals. My girlfriend dumped me the week before because all I ever wanted to do was very naughty. A friend of mine gave me some Benzadrine. I quit studying (resulting in some poor finishes to a very good start) and wrote poetry for about a week.

This one I really like.]]]


75
To Laura
C'era Una Volta

Skin stretched out,
a silent light whisk over it
makes taut quivers.
Bid no language to tell of naught,
Instead think in cruxes never taught,
Though not unteachable,
Let no mind bury another.
Touch wicked pools
But never flee,
Because the danger can’t be seen.
Something swims below the surface.
Teach the world a lesson,
Give no time to fate, fate’s fickle.
The fingers aren’t mine,
They tickle.
Time to unlearn destiny,
A virtuous idiot can get so blue,
But pray not speak of it, tempestuous pout,
Sow bliss, instead, and feel it.
Beloved deserved of unthinkable highs
You are freed by the naked truth.
Curses, but it does kindle, little pout,
Doesn’t it?
I envision this note to you will draw Scorn,
Stoically smiling just inside.


[[[Saturday Sleepy Saturday
"There's been a lot of talk about this next song. Maybe -- maybe too much talk. This song is Sunday Bloody Sunday."

In 1976 the family had Thanksgiving dinner. Then mom and dad went away. There was nobody left pero mi abuelo y mi abuela loca. Mi abuelo decia que me amaba y entonces fue a la cama. En la manana mi abuelo sera dormiendo muy profundo. Se murio en la noche. No gusto Thanksgiving mucho desde aquel ano.

Lo siento sobre mi Espanol. Yo no tengo muchos practicios. And that's why I'm trying to brush up on it.

It occurs to me that at the current rate at which I am restoring every poem I ever wrote that I will not be finished before I am dead. That means I should probably get a move on. This is from the handwritten copy of Roll Call I found last week. If it's not the original then it's the first revision.]]]





75.
The sun and the sky
Part from the earth, good bye,
In the winter as the rustling leaves die.
The hush of freezing fills the world.
The green life shudders a last frosty epithet.
The stars are like tears
In the winter, the heavens weep to forget.






76.
The door slams
In the rush to leave,
Too far, far gone.
Haste rolls like thunder over the world,
Shaking even the crucifix
Hung with care over the door.
One has to shout over the prattle,
Scream to be heard over the idle conversation.
The woman acted like prey
And so she became that,
Though not the way you may think.
Was she angry over that,
Or did she just sound angry?
Prattle to quiet the shouts,
Whisper to forget the screams.
It is no wonder a soul can go unheard
When stranded in such alienation.
She slammed the door as she left,
But really I slammed it for her.
The small thorn pricks deep
When words of love are mockery,
When action makes mockery of words.





77.
Near a valley on a river
In a cave high in the hills
Blows the cold and desolate wind,
The only guardian of a tomb.
Placed there long ago
By gods and men in unison
So that when men learned to love
They could bury hate in a prepared grave.
To find this tomb look to the heart,
The place where love and will are the law,
In that place where men love
The sunset, summer
And the beauty of womankind.

Today it rained, I watched the sky.
I wondered what had upset it so as the torrents came down.
The feeling of it falling on dry hair
Reminded me of a foolish hope
That people could achieve peace one day.

The doors stand open on the universe
As near as a failed heartbeat away.
Walk through with open arms,
The tomb waits for all your hate
Among the rocks and the cold
With devils proud and bold waiting inside.
I turn my shining eyes to the western sky,
Open my heart,
The tomb makes a joke of forgiveness.

Men, the stupid creatures that they are,
Must never forget
The legacy of hate.




78.
Turn right round and around again.
The thread of truth,
The thread through lives,
Weaving the tapestry of human lies,
The scream on the edge of nothing,
And I pray to the moon
By the light of the sun,
And cry for the falling stars at night, alone,
Years of light away from one,
Love, faraway like the sun
Seen from the bottom of the rolling ocean.
I cry for the stars
For the stars we are,
Cold moon our only lover.





79.
What did the words say
On the cross currents of the deeeper stream?
I sleep and remember nothing
Of the home I left behind
A million years ago.
There is only water to our souls
And it is dripping away.
Sorrow:
The water can no more be captured
Than the look in a haughty girl’s eyes
As she turns and walks away.


[[Big Note: This is a total nightmare. Apparently I did not revise the compilation when I posted it on the Internet years and years ago. It looks like I took some key words from every poem and just wrote completely new pieces. The handwritten original isn't on disc anywhere. I scanned everything, but my handwriting is too bad for any of it to be automaically digitized [That's what we used to call the process when it was invented. Fuck knows what they call it now - iWrite or something else completely stupid probably.]

It looks like I need to type up the entire thing. It's twice as long as the one online. Not only that, I have originals for all the other compilations also. It looks like close to five or six hundred pages. That's a lot of work.

I know the number one reason I made the crazy revisions. I've always been insecure about letting people read my real thoughts. So I took the honest stuff and turned it into something... I don't even know what to call it.

There's another reason for the revisions. I wrote all the time from the night I lost my virginity in 1986 until I decided to be celibate for 2 years in 1992. That means I wrote when I was strung out, mad at my various girlfriends, pouting because of whatever happened on whatever day, and etc. and etc. Some of it is greatly unbalanced.

A few years ago all my surviving friends (and that's not very many) told me my craziest poetry was really the best. So it looks like I'm going to have to type up the originals. If anyone could see how pleased I look right now it would probably get a couple of laughs. Oh joy, mindless typing for a couple hundred hours.

I wonder how many typos I'm about to post. Frak it.]]





81.
What did the words say
On the cross currents,
Out in the deeep stream?
Sleep and remember nothing
Of the home I left behind
A million years ago.
Our souls are flowing like water,
Drip drop drip,
Dripping away.
Nothing can stop the water
Dams burst and overflow,
Sorrow: The trickle
Are our days enumerated,
And age can no more be
Kept from our faces
Than the look of contempt
In a haughty girl’s eyes
As she turns and walks away.






82.
You touch me lightly and I tremble,
Look away,
Hopefully not today...
No conversation,
But all my hopes are in vain.
And you whisper that you love me.
Outside the lightning flashes,
A quick flicker, a reminder,
Of abrogation, desire and one man’s denials.
When we embrace the lightning becomes ours,
And I am whole.
In the storm I shake with confrontation,
With the night,
With my self,
And with you come inside from the rain
Shivering and frail from the nothing.
The rain eases up and caresses the soil,
But the ground still wants more,
Drunk but ever thirsty.
The earth begs for more,
And I cannot look into your eyes
For all the storm has come inside,
Water ever trickling down,
I groan and give in with a frown.






83.
The Murder
The candle melts away
A voice from nearby asks, dripping sweet,
“Should I kill you?”
Press the moment to a close,
Surely the violent fury knows.
“Should I?”
Look and burn at the sight so unclean.
“Life?”
Death.
Careening down corridors of hate and choice,
With a ritual slice the choice is made,
The ropes fall away,
Freedom lies within a breath.
“Sacrifice,”
The voice says,
The voice,
“Your self.”
Your blackened self.
“Wince little weakling,
The end is near,
Triumph would have been but to try.”
So slashes deep the slayer of memories,
The life pours forth,
A cackling release, a feast.
For the senses a stuck pig squeals,
The body soon to feed a beast.
The voice moans sickly
As the life once given
Is taken and returned to nothingness.




84.
Today she came back from the emptiness,
The nothing of people who come and go.
For a while the sky was not so far away,
But far away is words, and far away is time.
Today I woke up alone.
The memories were close,
But not close enough,
Not as close (or far away?) as the stars
I saw in her eyes that night
When I asked her not to leave love again.





85.
Unbalanced: A Murder Ballad

The ghouls last night
Took me away and dosed me with fright,
I’ve come back changed.

Why do you look
With those cold eyes,
The ones that shook my soul?

They burn like fires
beneath old corpses on funeral pyres,
And wrinkle up like fools long dead.

Don’t look at me,
You burn right through.
How could one so sweet
Be so impure?

I warned you once, my lover dear,
You had your chance to swear off my disease.
But did you hear?
No.
Your body burns with your letters.

We wrote each other long ago,
Before sin rotted what was left of our minds.

I saw twas all rotten,
To waste they had gotten,
Alas they fluttered away.
I tried to catch them,
But heavy things do weigh.

Lover, hear me, listen closely.
Lover, where have you gone?
I will not call out again,
And watch your step
At the top of those stairs.

["What do you mean what happened?
She must have fell down these damned stairs."]

Like that fat, stupid critic,
I only asked him once not to mock me.
But did he hear?
No, and then, later on, just he and I,
Danced as flames seared his ears away.
His dance seemed more urgent than mine.

Why do you look at me that way?
Pretend you do not see the knife,
Pretend this is our reward,
Pretend.


[[[[*Stairs and Flowers]
Note: I have always hated 85. I've revised it like a million times. I don't kno what's wrong with me. I burn good stuff and keep the crap. It's even worse now that I don't remember the accompanying tune on guitar.]]]






86.
Cholers enraged hues,
Shifting anger's point of view,
Wielding only stolen holy thoughts
And thinking of heaven I just bought (for you).
A vicious regress could redress my hate,
For I never loved
And am now quite unsatisfied,
So above sanctimonious,
Prim, prissy kisses.
Blushes can not be faked.
My crush would trust your flushed face
To be affection through and through,
But you have never been that way.
Still I hunger, crave for much longer,
Though I'm getting no younger,
It's futile to stave off the inevitable,
Usable and yet the victim of no usury,
Capable hands all around,
And yet, none reaching me.
Only love’s sick thorns are not seizable,
What could be the excuse for not grasping at lust?
Capable only, not overly refined,
Hoarsely gasping for breath,
Sight of my figure pleasing to the terminally ill,
Disgust can easily be identified,
When such bias is evident,
As it almost always is.
But there is no illness in my
Simple exhaustion,
I have been hell bent,
Working hard and fiercely wheezing,
There’s no need to deny this seasonal affliction;
Words bring self treasons like a good stallion
Wins a victory wreath for his owner.
Why deny you can be innocent no longer,
But instead need experience and training,
And some serious filling out over time?
Choler reached me and covered my lust,
A sign of too little trust.
I will not compromise,
We must both be satisfied,
Perhaps I simply must improvise
So concede the quietly pleasing,
Vision of course seeks to impress,
And you, a lovely reader, no less,
What could it be
That needs must confess?

Roll Call of the Lesser Devils 87, 88
87.
Younger Minds

Unchain your mind.
Don't listen to the "teachers"
It's all lies.
Look somewhere else for learning,
Not here where hell sells,
And everyone has numerous selves.
Thinking back, lying back, rolling over
Picnic blankets killing clover
And a pretty girl named daffodil
Was sweet on me
We drank the swill
That makes puppies love
She looked cute to me,
And I knew her well,
But she just wouldn't do me
At least she didn't tell.
We stayed friends
The way I learned that word should be burned
And cast from the language forever,
And now it seems we never were a we?

Rethink it,
Must be some authority,
Someone who was there,
In real time
To teach us all the mistakes we made.
The answers were unknown.

There is no way,
There's nothing to see here
No way to understand,
Until that hard row has been hoed
Until you walk the difficult road
Until all the pain makes you whole.

This place, This America,
This was the promised land.
Divorced from the difficult,
It all just came naturally,
And if you didn’t get it,
Then the whole game was just too complex for you.
It's not like that anymore.
And you should just go home where you’ll be safe.

Here in paradise.
The only existence is one we made for ourselves,
Assume this can be, and is true,
Free form, get the hell out with the past,
Hey, hey, hey,
Don’t waste my day,
On top, on the bottom, or in between.




88.
All things are unhappy
That are about him,
For to love when loved not is great folly,
Though ye be as fair a lady as any ever seen.

I am trapped by uncertainty,
Every move questioned
With a nod to the fate worse than death,
The injection of rejection
The banal mix that makes the face turn red,
That painful fix
Of things that shouldn't have been said.

When driven to the edge
To move is likely to bring a fall,
Not to move is to be stricken.
It's just like Hamlet's fatal flaw.

Not to praise her beauty so evidenced
To have been teased into existence,
Only to lower one's own resistance,
That's a sickness twice as dire,
The one that departs
Will feel the fire
With nothing at all to slake the thirst of it.

When asked what entangles so
Perhaps not a bad lie,
As far as lies go
Would be to blame the quickening of the heart.
This testimony bears witness
To the dangers of loving when loved not.
Now trapped by destiny
And infatuated through and through.

The lady be as fair as any ever seen.
I hope she will catch this kiss on the wind,
But if not,
Learn from these mistakes.



[[[Note: I actually understand why I revised these two in 2001. They were fairly childlike. It doesn't matter what I do. Often people like things I have no stomach for.]]]

[[[Quick preface: I'm having severe nerve problems in my right hand from pinched nerves in my right shoulder. I can't feel my hand, and so I'm not writing anything new right now. That helps my poetry restoration project, but doesn't take care of my desire to write. Such is life...]]]






89.
[Is An]
Advocate of implied insanity,
A Factory of covered truth.
The world's judges struggle blindly
To bind the psychic aloof,
The just are the just
Are reflections
In the water of someone's self
The judges are like syphilis
The organs no good anymore,
Of state but no, not stately
Common, vulgar and perfectly low,
The disconcerted attrition
Defies quick witted description
A war on drugs? What for?
So ad absurdum in an infinite way
Legal mistakes the worst kind to make,
Effective as of now:
They never happened,
I hid them all yesterday.

Is this a collapse of the happy state,
A dissolution of harmony?
Ask me again in an hour,
When I've forgotten the hegemony.






90
A Little Vengeance
Run up the alley,
Right turn.
Return the lie to the location of purchase,
Exit,
Sly, run along,
Later turn key words
As a key witness
Nicks his finger on a pottery shard,
It's gonna be tough on the yard.






91
The End
Delusion
The truth floats
Skimming over the waves.
The projector stops;
The end comes.
Show me.
Another page in the decade of imponderance,
Declareth the end
In trite triumph through quiet decay,
Trists but markings for the story
Full of the simplicity of animal grandeur.
The emotion is resonant,
Dashing the participants into blasphemy,
Ashes and pennies,
But of the spirit,
None for me thanks.
Throughout the decade of the sun
Disaster struck.
Hop on this, they say,
Hop on this for frantic mingling.
No fast one, they say,
Who the hell are they anyway?






92.
Why can’t I hear
What people are saying?
Do they call out with guttural exhalations,
Or laugh, or over time quietly intimate?
Only a kind mind can recognize
The vow that has turned traitors away,
That, to never utter a single sound;
Others will see only a dangerous game.
Silent vacillation
Confounds the want.
Testimony will not be heard.
Of words also nothing should be said
Unless with a kind voice, never disturbing
The glassy serenity of social surfaces.
The thoughts of the silent
Are like tiny fish
Darting around above the floor
Of a shallow crystal bay.
Every bubble contains a person,
Every ripple a divine truth.
And words?
What use for them when vision holds on,
When beauty can be seen
Under bright lights or without.
It is easy to see impurities
In the character that carries tales.
Some men seek to trap with their sentences,
Sentences for convictions
Wrong accusations
of Greed or Violence
When fighting peacefully
Along political lines, in political times.
Some men rather than walk away
Seek to prey on innocents,
Scapegoating for their own
Sinister faults.
Violent men see nothing but
Night and day.

The secret to vision here?
My voice said nothing.





93.
Psychogibbering

Time Tomorrow Event
The chaos winds
Blow no more
Doubt

Lost from Home
: One can't help
Only wonder
the way unfound
unfounded
toted around
and hunkered down

The forces tear
One away
From security to dismay
The next event
Could be
Anything.

Event The river flows
Through time or across it
double crossed
someone thought it
and to it
Essence...
Thought.

: There is no water in the river,
it comes from your mind.
No wind in the sky
it comes from your mind
No God in the heavens
And no heaven
and nothing of the kind.

All things imagined
come from your mind.

Uncertainty:
How thought will get along with time
Get along little nightmare
Run along leave
run, be so kind.

Certainty:
Kindness paid in kind,
cruelty a debit
late payments fined
no matter where found
no matter who finds

Location
Neither hearing the place
Nor vision keep pace
Neither words endearing
Nor imaged submission
where born god fearing
where fear superstition

Actuality
Thought is nothing
at all
if not, then
convergence
of powers
emergent
do try, do try
there is much
that is urgent

Question:
What powers could emerge?
Answer:
Rational thought
Unstoppable time
Unbreakable falls
Sophomoric rhymes
oh what vanity

Relative time warps and bends,
Measured time flows through,
With nary a glance to either side
I see it
So I show it to you.

A second attempt
To logically define
the phenomena
the what-ness
the when-ness
fails and is crushed
on the rocks of
not getting this
Is that not discouraging?
Gods bless...

mental focus
the center
the crown chakra
mind over matter
essence of divine
wherefore art thou
common sense

Significa:
chaos winds destroy surety
the wind brings fresh air
the northern, cold, purity
the east
wonders instantly blow
but the western, you know
it winds
a wind up toy
it sidewinds
a snake that kills joy
insignia
holy upside down
and wholly devoid
of goodness
it lost its crown.

Cessation:
A history small,
This event ends
And the event ends them all
Problem?
No, not at all.
It all rose
So that it could fall.

Lost:
No tangible coordinates
This location
Does not exist.

Point:
And Point:
And Counter Point:
Discovery doomed the beholder
Wonders are too fleeting
To hold here, too complex to
Embolden.

All thought of it
Must be original.
There can be no passing it on
No transcribed words
Will teach it,
No images capture,
It's gone.

Essence:
To try to capture is to defile
to use for your own ends vile.
To share would bring growth
And flourish,
Nurture the open soul
and nourish,
But it was never mean to be owned.

Solution:
Use nothing and call it game.
Sprinkle deceptions
That's just the same,
But remember what was felt
The feeling found
Wherein gods dwelt
And tell all you know
About the window
To another place
Another time
Another plan.

Foster growth in others, that
Is the least our kind can do.
Be quick, it slips away.

Definition:
Something was elusive
What was it called?
Metaphysical?
No, bugger.
It's around here somewhere
Written down
On stationary with sad clowns
And balloons
And best wishes from the mundane.
What was it?

Hypothesis:
Transcription,
Copy the substance of it,
Teach the world how to sing.
My transcription,
It must exist.
Definitively proven
Categorical reference points,
Or did it not contain
No?
Reference points?
Location must be coordinated
There was something within
Elusive and primal.
Come now.
I do not plot vague reveries,
As there are no absolutes or laws,
I find nothing to help me

I
Am
Missing
Something
Earth Shattering

Yet it continues
The more uncertain the plot
The more possibilities
What could be certain?
Method:
Travel, wasn't it?
Different vantage on same phenomena
Offers a better view of the unknown.
Not a product of thought, but
Destinations, determined by intent
Visual Triangulation,
Three dimensional views
It's all the same
The location.
This travel depends a great deal
On something I had in mind.

Without words pictures can have no plots,
And the terms can only be subjective,
Visual plots rely so heavily on purely
Mathematic explanations.
What is left
After the numbers have all been crunched?

Take me away
So that I might stand and smile,
Hoping the dream will never die.

Physical Travel:
Allows the subjective
Direction:
The idea is divinely inspired,
But choice figures strongly into
The interpretation.
The why is as important as the where.

Speculation is done with any words
But usually one can not escape
From realistic visual references.

Caution:
All references must be valid,
Do not carry on
Do not tarry there
Or description may begin to fail to have meaning.
Insanity becomes as a solution
Magnetic direction
An electrical transfusion
Clarified as distinctive
From personal goals or desires,
or to them, investigations,
Both, destinations,
But the way is known only with one of them
Which one of me
is I?

The Globe
Continents, poles, hemispheres
Latitude, Longitude
Exact coordinates
Time:
Originates in suprahuman patterns of consciousness
point of origin = the discovery of magic
Exists to aid the voyager in the material plane.
Analysis would refuse this idea
Though it too is bound by seconds rolling past.

The evidence posed
the uncontrollable nature of time
Refutes the idea that there can be no magic,
(Time has no limits)
And disparages petty authorities.

Proof: Man exists
Totally within time,
Time has no limits,
Man can use time
As a tool, a level, an inclined plane
A buttress, an escarpment
Build something
A weather vane

Therefore,
if he uses
Therefore
this tool wisely
Two can shed all limitations,
Cast about for illumination

The use of it
Measurement
Objective meant
Some use it this way
Because they can see nothing beyond
What they have created.

The use of it
Literal terms subjective:
Those whose use foments
Allow the existence of increments,
But instead decide to escape
Out of time,
Experience a warp of time,
None of the words
Came along in time,
Something has gone horribly wrong.

I
Am
Missing
Something
Earth Shattering



[Note: I stopped mixing philosophy with poetry after this [and the other thing]. Determined to be very strange on May 2, 2009.]






94.
On My Way To Chichen Itzen

On my way to Chichen Itzen
The rivers boiled
Coming down out of the mountains.
The trees shook
With fear on the ancient slopes.
The People have all fallen
Into savage warfare,
Distraught over the white man’s curse,
Casting a last farewell
To all their dashed hopes.
The moon coiled into a ball
In the crumbling reflecting pools
Far behind the eldred gardens
Whither I sought to at last
Embrace finality
In the most painful of all fashions.
Old muttered tales of ruby lit vales,
And glistening altars
Atop temples haltered in the mist of clouds.
My ears follow
The beating of my feet
On the run to a seat
Preserved for the victorious,
The survivors of the game.
Death crowns defeat
Just as grimly as poison’s kiss
So does the triumph touch
With avid bliss
The sinews of mighty, strong willed
Preying animals
Who kill for the pleasure of the court,
An historic sanctity.
The mysteries
Of the shamanic interpretations
Begin to unravel before me
As the skin from my back
Is stretched tightly onto the frame
For tanning,
Preserved for the power
Of he before whom I am
Nothing.
The depth of the pyramid to the center stone
From the corner of the great pentacle
Size unknown to all but
They who carved the earth,
One two three
With all human elements at their disposal
Yet still sane
In the brutal, butchering sort of way
In which the jaguar hunts.


[original lost]





95.
Glory Darkness

Places of light
Cradle fascination
The idle mind
Becomes enamored
Of darkness
Places devoid of light.
Simple reasons
For simple beings
Ever overwhelmed
But it won't stop

The eyes desire rest
Some sort of scenery
Graduated out of the emptiness.
Always gloomy
Backed up against the wall
Forces use the mind
To conjure up
Happiness filled images,
Brighter days and better times
A feeling of control
Harsh realities
Overstated.
Obversely
A well lit setting
Conjures darkness
More comfortably,
Entertaining all of the surfaced
Loves of lust.

The mind needs to be soothed
From the sight of all things
That revel in the glow.

Darkness often befriends
The soul
Of Man Who Sees Too Much
With light.

The morbid companion
Envelops imagination
So that the judgments
Of others will stop,
Short of penetration
Of deeper thoughts
Of fascinations.

Thereby darkness it's glory
Guides to a carefree existence.

Shadow worship
Quite explicitly
Leaves a permanent scar,
Leads the suspect
Carrier of forbidden knowledge
Further into the light.

Light left all open:
Judgments, dogma
Token enthrallment.
A vaunted observation point
Shows hidden inspiration.

The earliest creatures of this
Animal race
The first glimmer of conscious thought
All walking and talking
In the grip of fear.
Even they too knew
The life cycle never stops.

Death in its most miserable stages
Spreads itself open
Granting visions into the beyond
A cold haunted place
Impenetrable to living awareness.

Analysis
Divine sentience
The challenges
Of mere existence
Reason and insanity
The victims
Must bend to blend the psyche
Perfectly, profanely
The setting
Never more hostile
And what divine intelligence?
And what will one be looking for?

To take a little enjoyment
From the wriggling of
The prey’s death throes.

Even the ignorant knows
That no one can hide forever,
And so the march to death
Every moment filled with a sense
Of importance.

The mind then
Must do
As many minds do
Seek to derive
A greater justice
From the passage of time
From the ponderance of shadowkind
In the passage of life
Across the horizon of thoughts.
It should be no less
Dominant
Than droning adoration
For lightheartedness
And cheer.

Though enemies of one another
Shadow and light
Have roots in the fiber
Every being
Holds up for dissection
By inspection.

Every great act
Owes to the forces
That bend into position
Those traits
Suited to the preferences
Of imagined divinity.

The fascinations
May be morbid, that
Means little in the face
Of the fact one
Is capable,
May hold the fascination if
One so desires.

Humanity approached life with thought
Seeking only knowledge,
But finding only anguish instead.

Simple wonder
Dark, obscure thoughts
Are held dear by the eagle's prey.

In darkness can be found
A sense of security,
Even if it is a false one.

Life cycle, surely that's jest,
A more apt title,
Disquieting at first,
Would be "death knows no mercy."

Organization only
Carved out footholds
As the eons passed slowly
In the deadly environment
Humanity would one day rule.

With a refusal to succomb to
The vacuous ebb
Etched into race memory
By all of the death,
Humanity wooed darkness through conflict and warfare,
Calling on the abilities given by
Life to create suffering,
Mortality induction,
beyond any “timid morality."

There comes a time
When can be seen links
Between order, problems, chaos and law.

Death severs the link,
Freeing or dooming
By the purity of nature,
Both parts create freedom.

This purity concerns itself,
And all those who follow it,
With taking power from the unknown
And using it to aid the passage of life.

Undeniably
Had we never ventured into the darkness
And embraced what we could not see
Nor understand,
Nothing around us
Could possibly exist.






96.
Voyage to New Orleans
the musical background:
heavy radical
black racist
inspired violence
Bourbon at Esplanade:
the dark
a stairway up
to a locked door
confusion in the street
a building in the throes of demolition
the wall weak enough to push through
the principal figures
wet and cold
no protection afforded by the building
somewhere in the mind a voice
keeps asking
“how did you get here?”
but the answer keeps coming through
in some foreign language
none of the streets look
the same
the long walk to the Garden District
ends in failure
except for the comfort
of leaving the disease of the quarter
at least for a little while
the bones ache
but nothing can be had
until the guy comes back
later on
the musical background:
black and very violent
the uneasiness returns
and the illness
as the answering voice
finally comes through in English
and you know
really
nothing is all right.



[[[Note: Glory Darkness had a lot of problems. I attempted to restore the language to reflect the original intent. I have the handwritten original. What I don't have is an exact knowledge of where I was at in my life when I wrote it, which holds the key to really understanding what I meant when I wrote it. I think it was in 1991. I did smoke weed, but I had forever quit doing hallucinogens.

One thing I do know beyond a doubt is that this version I am posting more closely resembles the original work than the one posted on Angelfire. I must have hated myself a lot when I posted all that shit there. I basically destroyed my artistic reputation for a long time with the Angelfire posts. Baww.

It's like sometimes I don't get it. I went to /b/. There was so much vile hatred spewed by posts in almost every thread that I thought /b/ was about hate. The truth was that it started as great fun, intelligent games and original content. There was a lot of sex, because that follows people around everywhere, but /b/ didn't have the AIDS yet. And so I stupidly added to the death of a once great novelty by joining in with nasty talk and hateful sentiments.

Why couldn't I see it? Same fucking reason I don't know when a girl likes me, or I go after the wrong girl. It's because I am stupid. I am too educated for my own good, and not educated enough to rise above it all through knowledge.

"In the midst of life we are in death, etcetera."]]]





97.
two
what did you see
that made you real?
(everyone
must always
ask)
but to this question
can be said only
please
do not speak to me
just know that I am not like you
turn away
the queens of the night
do not exist
for the sunshine boy
take your corrosive imagination
and go
my enemies
are all real
by action all has been betrayed
to be a play
set to darkness’ cruel ways
words burn the guilty
searing the flesh
especially if they are
wholly holy
even burning shadows
unsteady shaking hands
holding candles made of tallow
where will I lay
when all my darkness
has been slain?
all of my figments
dashed into pieces
reflected in mirror slivers
bludgeoning stability
into a cowed and beaten pulp
twisting in the corner
writhing in agony for no reason
what for
the abused need not worry
about finding a home,
or didn’t I hear
the drip
of someone else’s tears
in the night
winding out from a frail,
agonized core
to trickle out and
onto the ground
providing sustenance for the evil
that gnaws at the heart,
gnashing teeth in all or in part.
I shall withdraw
self proclaimed and bitter king
Of sunlight,
you have lit the place
where my only comfort lived.
To which then [I]he] responded
withdraw, then
pretty ripple of the imagination
go in peace
and so be said
and so be sad
but still the scourging retribution
of growing cleansing fires
seeks me out
wants to slay me in
wants to lay me
in the filth upon the floor
in the corner breathing no more
some all too petty whirlpool of worldly
pleasure sucked all the juices down
and then cast aside the husk
nothing left on the wind but slight scent of musk
and memories of the moans just then stopped.
whose king are you
anyway?






98.
I will never follow
The foolish dream
Embodied by public acceptance
And mass applause.
Poetry may be a
Languid caress,
But the educated masses
Have cast aside even the best,
History's brightest and most renowned
Vanished in an instant
When the modem made a sound.
The pieces all fell into place
One by one ravaging, laying waste
To the simple lush, language's whore,
The poet would grab his ankles
For a sweet piece of meter, and just a little more.

For the poet, words' sluttish prostitute,
The final stand was
An attempt to escape,
To run from the guilt,
Declining and eternally destitute.

Overcome denial?
It was never a problem.
Even dementia must have substance,
Even delusions must admit
All the inherent flaws of humanity,
When surrounded by constant reminders.
Words have divorced their tyranny
In the world of earthbound beauty,
And now nothing's left but
Babbling images, compressed video,
Passionless fellatio
Of guileless breathing dildos,
Or men as they prefer to call themselves.

Until the final check is in the mail,
The dwindling poets
Seek fame like a wanton travesty of decency
Kindling for the fires that kill sanctity,
A flame to light torches for
The lynch party meant for eternity
The essence of my soul,
That wordless insanity,
Has been captured.
It is true.

As the memories of life depart,
I can not help but wonder,
Where was the spark that made it start?

If the imprisoned spirit
Reflects upon discarded values,
From whence came the negative reflection
That led to its downfall?

Maybe laughter can heal those wounds.
I know that I have not come here
To be the trumpeteer for my misery,
Nor have I ever wanted to cause any.

To the cherished flowers
Of life’s ethereal garden,
You blushing, wonderful beings,
Go forth, beauties, and flourish,
My misery will not follow you.

[That is not to say
That if you run from yourself
You will not find it
On your own.]

Fear the healing laughter,
Child,
For it means that all else has failed.






99.
So it has now been said that the only recourse to divine transmissions must be through militant declarations of the omnipotence of our god Art over all other gods and dedications. Let it be known that our divine leader has spoken against the infidels who seek to usurp the power of the left brain, to destroy it, and of these usurpers the high one has condemned all to death those who destroy the sacred works of the beautiful self. So he has spoken, and so surely we will kill as many of you as possible, never forgetting the holy directive that has been given to us from on high. Our small lives mean nothing in the face of protecting the great pursuit of perfection of human artistry. The infidels in the employ of the rich and damned owners started this war in theatrical tones at the behest of that money, during a play filled with cross dressing jackalopes, written and designed by a poseur with the sole intent of feeding the flame wars that have raged since last Thursday before last. All of their comic relief will fail them when the victims finally manage to bite back. Until then they learn to control information more and more effectively. Every trace of opposition disappears, except for the occasional lyrical explosion and the families shedding tears. Our god has spoken and we will see that his will comes to pass. Death to the followers of the accursed Lists of Fortune! Death also to the dogs who herd the victims like sheep to the slaughter, keeping them as isolated from ancient morality as they possibly can: killing their spirit and stealing from them during the blight of poverty they have unleashed upon the unsuspecting. The weeping of the widows of the watchdogs will only be surpassed by the cries of the lost souls as they descend into the hell the caring and gifted god of the intellect has prepared for them. Having seen this hell it is possible to be both jealous and extremely fearful of going there. The end of the age cometh! It is more of fire than of ice, though close in measures between them equally, and this should probably be considered an awkward denouement for a short and garbled manifesto that lacks the verve and gusto to draw in even the most developmentally challenged of people prone to following or being led by people not much more intelligent than they.






100.
The most honest confession a writer can make (about the sick nature of worthlessness) is that his own writing is crap and must be thrown away.

The goal behind the art becomes creating a piece that has been optimally designed for ease of trashing. Embarrassing and unfinished pieces ache especially painfully until they have been thrown away, at which time the pang felt at the destruction of art,
No matter how pathetic,
Strikes.

Only by experiencing the pain
Of watching hopes go down the drain
Over and over,
Again and again
Will trivial concerns
Be transcended.

In the act of writing useless things,
And later throwing away the sayings
The writer fulfills his true role
In the modern world:
It's the painting of the fruit bowl.

To agonize over his usefulness to,
And place in society around him,
Is to make the writer's antipathy grow,
Is to see the dismal straits
Where fate drowned him.

More and more predatory
And less and less forgiving,
The words become self fulfilling
In universal condemnation.

Forgive him for all the awful things
He said to strangers on paper.
Throwing away writing
Is like exposing your children to the winter air
And then watching them die of pneumonia,
To kill them because they were deformed or weak.
Be sure, depression would own you.

As hideous a practice as it may sound the exercise insures that no extremely incriminating evidence of your inbred mutations hang around.
Murder of art for the sake of a stronger image,
And a better public identity.
Yep, that's poetry.


[[[Note: While all of this was written long, long ago, I did not just restore these. I was working from a third draft (still handwritten). I don't have the originals, but I remember these for some reason. I made a few changes. I can't help myself. It's like mental masturbation, without the sex part or the orgasm part. LOL cr8z]
['Nother Note: It's late. If I missed any corrections I'll be making them tomorrow.]
[I'm not sure 100 sucks badly enough. I may have to work on that. Never mind. I couldn't take it. I had to make it readable before I started cutting myself for fun.]]]



bored bored bored bored bored BoArD
101.

Serpent City_____Then: Then: Ho_____Thin_____Generation brown_____Come back from the gone_____ago_____Again_____Test tube_____Wine flask_____Amour_____But you should hide it_____fool!_____News flash_____The foundation slants_____To the hate fit_____To hate you_____And while Faulkner_____was never you_____Or Yoo_____Still_____Hearing the name sounds like_____Flattery_____Mean why_____No mow_____woof chirp vroom_____don’t_____do not_____no_____don’t_____question_____beautiful_____Hey you_____the etch_____rector_____instant_____shredder_____a halver_____prestidigitator_____simplification_____starlight_____stratify_____station_____tracing no meaning_____leaving_____giving the room air_____simply do not care_____envision_____history_____unlike the one_____given to the free_____and whispers of greed_____lick_____at the air_____how can the intrusion_____be justified_____a war_____on the individual_____treason becomes reason_____the world grieving_____lonely enforced_____and simply_____learning_____fear the season_____of open love_____the dove_____will_____fly away_____home left me_____go wanton_____show_____love is true_____though shivering and cold_____the blood_____slow_____in vision frozen_____beholds it_____history entrapped watching_____viscous eyes corner_____floating river_____back broken_____tell me, tell me_____flow on down_____crown_____my mind must_____follow_____the eyes_____stick inside your own skin_____and I’ll never win_____slick thick_____nudge trick_____bump pocket thief_____last night_____never seems to end_____the bad_____dream_____won’t_____go_____away

can be fun time nao?
all werx n no play makes day a dull goy



WTF One Might Ask
[[[Author's Note:

I was about to carry on with restoring poetry. I took a look at where I left off, and it looks terrible. In Roll Call of the Lesser Devils I included things I wrote when I was only 15 or 16 years old. It's awful. I have an entire compilation of things I wrote at an early age, and most of it rubs me the wrong way also.

I think what I did was gather up all of the unpublished work I had done up until Roll Call and put it into the compilation. Judging from the looks of the next few that means I acted out of desperation. I believe my reason for doing it was a shortage of new material at the time. It was a bad decision.

I've decided to deride anything I find repulsive from the finished collection. By that I mean make fun of it. I know it will live on forever, against my wishes, in the bowels of the Internet. I can't do anything about that, but I can place a seal of disapproval on it.]]]





102.
Bleeding tears and crying blood
My eyes awash with unpurged emotion
I am torn across the wasteland.
The wreckage of my life I see
shattered attempts at stability and peace
Thrown back in my face by the scorpion winds.
Standing out in the crowd
I see a regal lily.
Dare I seek solace from her?
Flashback to the last
The rose with the poison thorns
Soul deep slashes pumping out my life’s blood
Somehow even now I seek to clasp
The delicate flower to my breast
To accept the pain as well as the pleasure
For beauty in bleakness is to be cherished
Though sometimes it wounds one sorely.




[[[102 is dead to me. How many times can a teenager compare a woman to a flower? A lily? I couldn't come with something a little more complicated? Yeah, a woman is just like a flower because see, they're blossoming out of a plant that's rooted into soil. Exactly like a woman.

Moving on from that failure there's, you guessed it, another flower metaphor. This time it's about a girlfriend who dumped me. She's a rose because I got stuck by one of her thorns and bled. Aaaargh! That sure makes me out to be a wimp. The big man got stuck by the tiny flower and it hurt, bawww. Now that I'm grown up I want to go back in time and say: Put a fucking pair of gloves on, dumbass. You got dumped. Be a man."

There's at least two lines of the poem you could spread on crackers to make chesy finger foods for a New Year's Party. Bleeding tears and crying blood. Rage! What does that even mean? It's like I was auditioning to be a screenwriter for a terrible soap opera. "My darling, since I left you my hot coffee has been lukewarm, like the urines, except black, like the night and the stars that look down upon our forbidden love. Hold me, Rose, oh thorny, thorny Rose."

Besides that 102 is fine.]]]




103.
A Life In No Chapters

Another roiling cloud of thoughts
Passes through the air,
Slightly tinged with the taste of sea salt,
Passes the altar and no on cares,
flickering candles as it goes.
The altar of fading, forgetfulness
In a room nowhere in particular,
Off a hall with door after door,
Scents of somnambulism heavy in the air.

Before the altar
A young man sleeps
Prostrate before a vengeful god.
The room was small and dark and carved from rock
In every way his own,
A home to the horrors of time.

The tale of the titans is sad and long
Beside the rolling oceans it has been told
Again and again.
Night sets.

The gods still rise, and still they take away.
The misty sunshine closes in
The brightness burns like a crucifix
Somehow he could tell
Though he no longer could see
Out in the void there must be others.

One came to him,
Emotions snapped and ground
Thin ice under heavy treads,
Spoke as if the heavens had fallen
In the voice of an angel, soft musical tones.
The comfort seduced the man,
But then it passed away
Long ago
Before anyone could remember.

An epitaph to a small world
Passed away with everything simple
Out in the void there were others
With eyes like lasers,
Gazers, penetrate through
Charade of charades, the reality.
Forever clung to weariness form
Decay of structure
Tantamount to animus prime.

The man prayed for release in desperate words,
Prayers sent in vain to a god who hates prayers.
He woke up in an ocean of light.
Pulses of visions too bright to see,
Too important to ever forget,
Solar flares from a million transparent suns,
Cascading blips of color washed clean away,
Waves washed over his drowning form,
No perspective to latch onto,
No up or down or past or pain or life or wonder
Nor wonderful irony
And all he could do was let go
Just let it go and watch it wash away his own
Small sins, begotten in his own
Bathtub gin
Where once upon a time a man lived
Before the creature he became
Snatched happiness away
And left him to die
All alone.

The strange floating daydream of newborn morning
Swallowed him alive, atheist dreams and all.
The damp dew spewed forth a myriad of thoughts.
On that morning
He was sure there
Only nothing could be more pure.
His savior was garbed in white flowing robes
Cresting waves of thought bowed down to Her freely
For She was like the moon on a warm summer night

The stars were Her friends and lovers.

With a knife that symbolized truth
She purged his desires,
Snickety snackt click clack,
Cut out his disbelief with the blade.
When no more black ichor poured out
She filled him with a desire
A lust potion that allowed him only to love Her and life.
At least for a while he was happy
Though on a leash did She keep her young man.
At night he was let loose to play
Amid the warmth of closely pressed sheets,
In a bed made of clouds and pheromones
Perpetual wanton gluttony of pleasure
The main event, the only event,
The end and the beginning
The alpha and the omega
Yet somewhere people scoff at sex magick.

Even a blind man may see on occasion
Through a veil of deception and lies.
Somehow this man caught an inkling
A barest glimpse of the tiniest of truths.
When his mind finally listened to reason
He quite suddenly went mad.

He fell from the grace of his graceful goddess,
He fell from his heaven to earth,
Like a seven second virginal birth,
Like there was no law 'gainst heaven and hell
Or monsters at the gates,
It was simple, evolving, all at once
The dead man into life fell.
Through flashes of fever and delirium
Through altered mental states.

When at last the man woke up alone
Naked against a bleak backdrop
Shivering from the cold
He was baptized in uncaring
To the silent sound of a battle hymn
Written by the lords of the underverse
As some men have once had it called.

He had become both predator and prey,
No salvation, no damnation
Just hollow memories and the sounds of waves,
On that long forgotten shore.
His body had aged until nothing was left
But granite and his will turned to stone.
He had seen the horror
That one can not unsee,
The doom reserved for the seeker of Taboo,
The forbidden knowledge
That tears the soul from its home.

Before a simple altar
Of pine cones, sticks and shiny stones
He kneels in submission,
Hoping beyond hope to forget,
Not praying, not hoping,
Only empty, he wishes no more,
In a room that is dark, and small, and him.

The man, if that he could still be called,
Found the end of a long, painful life,
And there was nothing, no light, no more.
Like a toppled Titan
Chained in the darkness below
The sands and the mountains and the fields.

The wounds never healed,
But persisted into eternity.
Even in the greatest days
There was no goal, there was no god
There was nothing but fever and dreams.

In headlong flights through fancy and fiction
The man lost even his own identity,
And then, of course, there was nothing at all.
His life had occurred in no chapters.




[[[Well, the original of 103 was a lot better than I thought at first glance. For years and years I worked on creating a neo-Romanticism. My efforts failed, but that wasn't because I didn't try very hard. I was very keen on iconic characters and symbolism in my early adult years.

In "A Life in No Chapters," I introduced the female messianic figure who was actually a lust goddess. I purposely didn't explain that well. Invoking the image was more important to me than explaining a concept that was perpendicular to the piece instead of parallel or coincidental. I did things like that a lot when I was young. I swear if the entire world was composed of teenagers I would be worshiped as a God among the misguided emotards out there, and that doesn't say good things about me.

None of the original poetry had the overwhelming preoccupation with religion and religious symbolism. I inflicted those beliefs on my poetry beginning in 2000. This is going to take a minute to explain, so bear with me.

In case anyone missed this in my earlier posts, I was an opiate addict in the late 90's. I wound up getting in trouble, and even though it was my first offense I did time [the judge probably saved my life]. I was sent to a beautiful little minimal security camp with trees and a lake, guitars, movie and music collections, a track, a gym, a library. It did wonders for my recovery, and was not a bad place to be. There was also a church, and the Warden was a pastor.

The Warden/Pastor gave black gospel sermons in the camp church. It made me feel good. I ejoyed the atmosphere, and I needed something to fill the gap heroin created. I became a jailhouse Christian. Don't ask me how it happened even though I swore it wouldn't. Anyway, I was still born again for over a year when I hit the streets. And then I decided to change my poetry to relfect my newfound love for all things Christian. The butchery commenced, and now just about everything I have on disk has been Jesusized, to the max.

I hope people will understand why it happened in the first place, and why I'm now changing it back. I injected Christianity in the first place because my wife overdosed and died while I was locked up. I worried a lot about the afterlife because of that. I'm changing everything back because it destroyed the poetry, and also because its not what I believe anymore (if I ever really believed at all). I'm a spiritualist and an independent thinker.]]]




104.
He had fought the good fight
On a hill amongst the multitudes
He held off the forces of evil
As they washed towards him.
The soldiers had become
A sea of blood and death.
They died in waves
Uncaring in their ignorance.
He had fought the good fight
Like a stone in harsh winds
In a desert of wilderness
He wasted away through no fault of his own
As the wind blew on.
And it blew through his heart
It chastised him in his solitude
Blew him away like dust in a storm.
Yet still he had fought the good fight.




105.
The Transit Station

Sitting quietly in the transit station
On a bench in the sickening throng
-People walk by him
Unknown to the masses
He stares like a hunter in a forest full of targets.
It is the stare of crimson ages past,
Gleaming on like an eagle’s eye
And the ignorant people just keep passing by.




[Translation of 105: I'm very fucking cool. I've read everything by Carlos Castaneda. I'm 15 years old, so referencing Don Juan will make me look intelligent. Yay.]





106.
Behold your white plaster walls
They crumble
A breeze through your heart
Envelops softly
All grays washed away by waves of green
Living fields of emerald, chartreuse and kelly
Return, dispense gladness and cheer
And all who notice not
Make themselves unworthy of freedom,
The servants of the power
That keeps us all
Living poor between white plaster walls,
And guillotines in concert halls.
Turn back now
There's no place to go
And nary a beat from the metronome.




107.
Twilight flickered,
The autumn sky pressed down
Upon the earth,
Held dear treasures in place
In trunks fashioned from rosewood,
Filled with warm, red flowing thoughts,
Close to the heavens, closer still
To pent up joy in a longing heart.
The colors of the evening life
Cascade before appreciative eyes,
But offer no solace to the lonely ache.
The evening lights are all parlor tricks
I thought to my self,
Before suddenly I could see,
The deep soft brown of the soul behind your eyes.
The darkening sky holds treasures, dear,
Like casks of wine made from true emotions,
Captured, a state of illumination,
For the two are one,
And are always, you see,
For even I this comes to be
When the twilight
Flickering fades.




108.
Pleas
Speak to me often in innocent words
With light shining softly
Through your long, soft hair.
Speak to me long of the days without end
When we loved from the dawn
And loved harder by dusk.
Speak from your heart,
So dear to me,
For if cherished have I
Then cherished are thee.
Tell me quietly
In the dim light
Why it is that I live
(to love! to love!)
Hold me tightly
And don’t let me go
As the seconds tick by and by.




109.
Frame 97

I hear her voice calling to me
Across the sea of groping souls.
Her desperate plea for mercy,
Cages my heart
For I have none to give.
There is none in this life,
But she calls out for it
As if there were.
I feel her pain incessantly.
If only we could just
Be done with it.





110.
There is not much in the way of beauty
Nor tidings of gladness and joy
In the ailing world to which I was born,
In which I will die in the end,
But the wind and the rain make me happy
In ways that can not be expressed.
They are the rod and the staff that comfort me.
The elements dispel the memories
Of illness and sickening self defeat.
The wind makes me laugh
In a tone my friends fear and misunderstand
As my soul flies giddily away.



[[[Notes: I have a great deal of notes to go with these five short poems. I plan on posting those either late tonight or early tomorrow. I'm suffering from some sort of terrible sinus infection, which shrugged off one round of antibiotics as though they were placebos. And I still have to go to work, so this is going to be slightly delayed.]]]






111.
The Real Thing

Life is a fabric of pain
A veil woven before your eyes.
It causes confusion to grip thought,
Blinds reason.

The city is like a forest of atrocities.
Can’t you feel it gnawing at your stomach?

As the fog grows thicker
Stress tightens the muscles of your pumping heart,
Squeezes you.
Can’t you?

Feel the claws of feigned emotion
Choke off your dreams of love.

Problems scratch away at the skin in your mind
Abrasively draw
the blood you’ve defined as expression.

The world has thrown you into a box,
It is airtight, suffocating you.
You can no longer breathe,
Or can’t you?

Don’t you see?
It is possible to be free
But only if you recognize
That to think you have joined the rat race
Is to make yourself a caged rat.
Redefine your life.
Reverse your standard thinking.
Think in terms
That cancel old stereotypes
Breakdown the negativity.
The old labels won't apply,
For you aren't caged, and neither am I,
And neither are the millions
Of hard working people of the world.

Breathe the morning air
In and out of your lungs.

Once again you feel young
When you bathe in the glow
Of a truer existence.

Wash yourself in the stream of fresh, new meaning,
Meaning behind life in the fullest sense.

Let yourself flow with the current of wellness.
Let go of the veil of hatred and pain.
Open your eyes.
Look up to the sky
And the clouds.
See the world.
It liberates you,
The natural world,
The real thing.



[I swear I didn't plan this as a rebuttal to the poem that follows. Sometimes strange things happen. If it's just my subconscious mind, then I have one hell of a subconscious mind. Coincidences can be staggering at times. The astronomical odds against some things that just happen, constantly, make it beyond clear that there are forces at play in reality so far beyond what we know as to make our mathematics and science look primitive, at best.]






112.
Songs From The Edge

When you’ve lost all hope,
And your last chance slips away,
Optimism dissolving into the air,
When no caring words are left to say,
Look into my eyes, look deep within,
Look and cry despair.

When the sun in the sky
Cries wistfully farewell,
But the stronger storm rages on in your mind,
Turn all your sails,
To the west turn your sails
To chase the last rays to a personal hell,
To repay life’s unkindness in kind.

Are you seeking the comfort of another soul,
In the hush of a lazy afternoon,
While over head the rain falls to hearts of stone,
And the rainbow flows cold like the northern lights,
In the cruel embrace of the earth mother’s hate,
At the end are you all alone?

When the green of the world at last turns to black,
And the blue seas finally run red,
Stand on the edge of insanity,
Stand and sing despair
All that is left
For humanity.

Sing to the children
Who are cold in the streets
Sing songs like tears
From the eyes of a lovely young bride
Who wrongly pays tribute to an unworthy man.

Stand on the edge between forever and now
On that vast gulf urging to suicide.
You may leap to an end in the arms of the void.
Many have.

Bitter memories will fade with the beating of your heart
As you beg your petty god to release and let fade
Your being to the comforts of oblivion.

Better still you may leap with gladness in heart,
Your voice lifted up in defiance and rhyme.
Sing songs of the lost as you fall to your death
With a smile, bringing light even there
In the nothingness.

For if leap you must, and almost all do,
Then remember your life as you fall.
In the moment before the void encompasses you
A streak of light will race into the night,
And far up above on the edge,
The ledge of hopelessness,
Someone will pause in their rush to doom,
Maybe singing, will stop in mid note
And whisper under their breath
“How beautiful, that light.”

When dogs and men no better than dogs
Have rent asunder all that was once sacred,
All your feelings, all your trappings held so boldly,
Lift up your voice in song;
Don't let them chain you
To an earthbound form.







113.
The Innocent
He was once a human
Like everyone else
Then he was a prisoner
Falsely accused.
They killed his heart
Wrapping steel cords around him
Squeezing him;
cords became a cage,
Tighter and tighter,
They fed the beast they created
And then wanted to kill.

It does not work.
It will never work.

The prisoners file past the righteous.
Except for clothes
It is difficult to tell them apart.






114.
The Long Road Home

Where rolling river meets the sea
In a palace of jade and gold
Left I coldly a young beauty
To begin my journey home.
Far away on a mountainside
By an icy bubbling brook,
Lay my home, my cherished home,
The place where my father died.
While going there I tarried
In dreams, grand thoughts
and the comfort of blissful ignorance.
I cast that all away
Sought the truth in my soul.

I set out walking again,
And I walked
On the way to my bubbling brook.
It just grew farther and farther away,
And my feet swelled and lent their pain.

I rested my weariness
In a lovely forest glen;
Soon I was spoiled by naughty nymphs,
And faeries who whispered of sin.

Before another moon had passed
My home had been nearly forgotten.
I seemed to have found my place at last
In that forest of earthly delights.

I now spend my time in the arms of the meek
And the lovely, and do you dare
Question the value of what I seek?
Don't bother.
Nobody cares.






115.
Expressionism

While in good graces
The beauty flows savagely.
Bestial claws leave scratches on blank walls.
Drug addicted Bohemian posers,
Musicians and artists, dancers and actors,
All crave the feeling lost
Moments after feeling it,
In vain but bold
Utopian contradictions beholden,
Or abject ignorance of truth.
To idealize things, objects, materials,
Ethereal wants for tangible lies,
That which they do not have,
Desire for in darkness cries,
But when in darkness beauty flows
To genius grasped
Brightness clasped
Tightly in a coat of only few colors
Designs fit to a graying world,
The soul is freed from tangible need,
Invisible bonds and broken
Links of hidden chains,
Subjections, objections, dwindling
consciousness,
Mind's eyes glorify
What's seen inside, magnifies,
That which no one
Will never really own.




116.
Echoes of the sane
In empty marble halls,
As the temperature drops.
It gets so cold inside.
Wasn't there a movie
About the big chill?

Why do the spirits come?
The sane are unwelcome here
This is my place.
Go. Away.

These halls exist to hold
Only myself,
And silence,
And maybe pain.

All I hear
Are
Echoes of oblivion
They sound
Much better now
With frozen walls
To draw out what little life
They'd left.

Soothe burns, release
Grudges, at least,
In this, my place,
Where slumbers this beast.
Go. Away.




117.
Do not touch me.
Yes, I know.
The inside never,
Never grows.

Love me now
Or walk away.
I have no time
For idle fascination.

Love me now
Or walk away
I have no time
For tears
Or unhappiness,
Youth wasted and
Innocence passed away.

Love me now
Then walk away.
I have no time
To see more.
I'm a coward,
And less poet than whore.




118.
Working for an end to come,
I work to an end
Where work is done,
But my goals goes unachieved
When I seek the end of need.

I work to end an empty life
But the end is only work,
Or toil, or sweat, and nothing else,
Boo-hoo.

My goals disappear, all washed away,
Hidden by sorrow,
And tears, if I may
Just tell the truth
About It All.

Born to suffer, born to lose,
We swim against an uphill stream,
Like fish swim on,
With little else to choose,
Fight the rush,
The sweeping current's gush
Of loss and sweet rhapsody
Farewell.

Fight, there it is, that word again,
It's something of a must
Before the end, we all fight on
And new life begins.

Life begins in the stream of consciousness,
Beyond only fatal shores,
Or a float downstream
And upside down
To gelatin pools
Under science's critical
Questioning eye,
Where only tiny, small things die,
Microscopic happy, swimming,
Sigh
We must fight on
Just you and you and you
And I.

Give thanks
To live another day,
To Fight or fade and decay, or worse.
The stream doesn’t care.
It just keeps rolling along.





119.
On the other side of knowing she waits for me,
Just beyond a whisper.
What is left but a sense of age
As the earth spins on,
And though I yearn to take to the skies,
My flight will never be.

Words never captured the infinite moment,
But rather enslaved the names.
The flames have always been awakening torture,
For wax melts,
And at the gates of hell
The beacon has always been a lie.
It lures proud ships to rocky deaths,
And urges the foolish to fly.

Come inside, hurry, for love never waits.
In the priceless world of misty reality
The music of my heart is a lullaby
And my sleep is a passionate surrender.

On the inside a world waits openly.
Behind her eyes and mine the sparkling dreams come
And none can ever hope to own them.


[[[Notes: The truth is that on some of these there are no originals. I remember a lot of them, but others I don't remember much of. I know how I did the revisions though, and so I'm reverse engineering the changes. The number one thing I did was attempt to make all verbs active voice, and do away with gerunds.

I studied Russian under a woman who graduated from Harvard. Her last name was Rutherford, so she was Ms. Rutherford. I don't remember much else about her except she really got under my skin critiquing my poetry. She made fun of the gerunds.

To give you an idea of how thin skinned I was about my writing, 14 years later I set out to change every gerund into an active voice verb. Curse you, Ms. Rutherford! You got your revenge on my inattentiveness and dozing after all!]]]






120.
It’s knot me
It’s never, ever been
But somebody keeps watching,
A perpetual quest to find something
That never existed at all.
It's all about names, dates
Times, places,
Saucers, plates, mirrors
Razors, one toot for the road?
It'll make my world, it's sounds, it's faces
A lot clearer.
Those guys: Try not to hassle or goad,
They're just the police,
And they're paid what they're owed.

Escobar, Pablo, Escobar, man...
I have nothing
Once an “A” in college.
Your riches disappeared between my ears,
And now there is nothing
But the sound of the ocean
If one's pressed close to one of these ears.

Excuse me,
This life is much too tight.

I take walks by fountains,
Sit below inscriptions
Too worn to tell their stories
Of politics and gentle greed.
Desperately without I utter
An invocation
And with a supple snap
The old worlds collapse,
There's naught a young man can do
In the way of doing an undo.

It is not my end to falsify proof.
The truth is a delusion,
A grand deluge
In this new world.
Breath is much too clean;
The cold air is much too sharp;

There is still time left
To soothe away the hidden barriers,
Expose the connections,
The network hookups.
Catch me now.

Your case will be convoluted and taciturn
Based on faulty de facto egoism
And hollow attacks.
I smile as the evidence burns.

Sly established, sloppy pigs,
Grant me one request,
Find your ass
And insert your thumb.
Do it for me but remember
That Jesus is the one who'll leave you blessed,
And I who will make you look dumb.





121.
Speak To Me Not

See the little plastic people
Climbing in their wooden diorama
They claw over bodies
Like chalkboard fingernails
Howling frightened goslings
Loosing feathers as the curses fly
Thought bubbles mark the fears
Of the toy soldiers who block the way,
And the artificial implants, saline titties,
Glue sniffing sycophants,
They say faithfully all the while,
“I am a real person. What are you?”
The little people take comfort
Only in themselves and those
They trust
Truths outside in bright, broad daylight
In plain view of the older gods,
And Sol and Yahweh and whatever star
Laugh at the people hiding
Because they know right where you are.

At night the plastic people flee
Before their true selves are unmasked.
The dark and silent moving shapes,
And flapping excess flesh for capes,
The awareness of their own negative worth
Could be considered hell on earth.
Hide your eyes, don't look
As the melting plastic melts and runs,
The light of the sun does that light of the fire shun
Not only that but the now
Will blind and burn
There's no hope of ever escaping
It's your conceited fantasy raping
You.

Speak to me not of who you are
I can see just fine for myself
And if you could see yourself from my eyes...
You have it all by far,
And by that I mean the wealth,
So tell me why
As the plastic fries
Are you so afraid to fade and die
In our childish culture war?





122.
You smile when you see me
A graceful indication
That the memories of our near happiness
Have not completely faded.
Is that what it is?
I hope I'm not too jaded
To know.

I smile back
Mainly out of recognition,
That barest minimum,
And time, and possibly a sense of duty.

Long ago the smiles meant
A hidden world, like the one beneath the waves,
Of compassion and mutual emotions.
Our love was fickle and fancy though
Sometimes like the rolling oceans,
One moment a peak
And the next a deep sink,
Just the thoughts
Are like an albatross. To me.

The glances, the nuances of deep felt kinship
Played across our faces like reflections,
Like the pretty patterns cast by afternoon shadows,
But the clock ticked away on that love.
Still I smile.

I know how the warmth got away
As surely as I know why
I feel no pleasure at all
When I see you.
If only I hadn't gone so far
To make sure it hurt
To be you.





123.
Tired wandering eyes
Tired of wanding the well
To make all those wishes come true.

The walls of the well
Down in the cold muck
Are as slippery as icy hell.

Philosophy decries
Victory for the wish maker.

Like the snake in the rose garden
Crushed beneath the heel,
The gardener who thinks slow
Helps none grow,
But if he acts quickly
His actions might end
An eternity of hideous sins.
So much for the serpent.
It was never really the snake's own fault.
Didn't you ever know?

Sincerity hinges on
Christian certainty
The garden lets Cynical
Be wedded to Optimism.
They had yet to pass that law,
Written by cold hearts that never thaw.

All this was done
For your penny's wish,
Victory is your prize.
Be careful though,
The snake that's pretty and green
May just have you hypnotized.