To write,
it once kissed my lips and held hot beverages
that weaved steamy whisps into a white wavering web,
whose shadows flickered like a thousand tongues,
ignores the recalcitrant brilliance where, shattered on the floor,
the delicate cup lies that seemed to radiate the sun's warmth,
its ossified shining glaze, its blaze of flowers faded,
all smashed, its brittle integrity gone.
From fragment to broken fragment
a shining fledgling reflection struggles to bloom.
Slivers glint, becoming a semiological system,
imperfection's misshapen pearl's signs
whose rays reflect a reality in disarray
at afternoon glinting in a organization
that is the denouement of reason,
which blares through the room
and sways in mock sympathy, a razor sharp scythe.
No lucid, useful article self-possessed,
but broken pieces revealing a World at totalitarian risk.
What impudent dealer comes up to an elderly Mom and confesses,
"Hi, I'm your son's neighborhood crack dealer?"
No one would be so stupid, unless,
they were "acting" with impunity from some mighty fanatical help!?!
What dealer is so stupid as to come up to an elderly Mom and say,
"Your son owes me," when she supplies him, his
debtor, with free rent and a place for him to run
his auto detailing business - which enables him
to pay the dealer back?
What dealer is so stupid as to run a business
with junkies on credit, with such poor credit risks:
someone that stupid would soon be broke;
someone that stupid would soon be busted;
someone acting like that has to have
some very high level help. He disappeared.
The results of this comic farce were tragic,
the elderly Mom was killed, "they" say by the son.
What another, of the right's seemingly countless generated
unnatural acts? And details are provided,
by so called friends and the delear that are incredible,
the number of rocks smoked (5) where, with whom, and when.
What the accused son did and said-
how much more contrived does it get?
What can redeem the shattered cup
and create harmony from dissonance,
and from the fractured nacreous remains rebuild
another, complete:
THE TRUTH!
Inside us, we feel outrage or sorrow,
but we must learn to protect ourselves and our precious freedoms.
Knowledge allows us to learn, to penetrate fallen night
and refract our ruin into rainbows
that prisms of tyranny can not yolk
eternal and radiant, a spotlight
to whose elevated plain we grow
filled with hope and love
not overwhelmed by their malice fed hate,
leaving each figure intact,
instead of shattering them,
trying to force the broken pieces
back into their one single narrow little mold!
Our response to these escalating contrived "incidents",
for their Herr Goebell's propaganda machine,
is love, a flower among the garden,
whose blossoms form monuments or memorials to "our" lives.
There is a moment, lost in green torrents, that frightens me,
a hole in pleasant memories, my brother, impassive
brutal event. It frightens me!
The house that made me feel fear, fear
now I don't know where you are.
Would that we never went in. I am afraid of this virtual thing
that seethed, alien in me; oh, to fly for hours between the bridges,
I will go no further, dear brother,
bitter-sweet memory, sad
singing skull.
What's left inside? He in this haunted house
implacable death of exploding lead, faster than quicksilver,
his pistons to flee cruel reality
with four wheels.
This terrible torrent that doesn't know what its doing
frightens me, drives me in a panic.
Bitter-sweet memories, stopped in traffic, I go no further.
Sing, sad skull, sing- chase away those thoughts that drove me on.
The Christmas tree lights are enough.
Its soft lights are appropriate,
it will be gentler, in the diffuse shades
when rainbows come, rainbows of Love.
The Christmas tree lights are enough.
Tonight the room must be steeped
in muted tones of color. Immersed entirely
in dreams and in innuendo, and in shadows.
Untrussed deep in dreams,
I will mystically merge myself into a vission
so pure and beautiful
that rainbows will fall, rainbows of Love.
They have placed the toy
into the hands that play
the game of terror.
Orbiting
around their own law of fire,
a law unto themselves,
red is their fertility
is their coagulating light.
Distant
stand their flat to mountains,
gold too has the power
but only to reflect,
before shadowy furrows
filled with crowded loneliness.
They arrive
black bloodletting,
and paint green Spring sprays
on their bloodstained crosses,
and place the child's smooth face
as an omen
in the cross-sights of the century.
Here a compulsory Amen
sanctifies words,
which can not be said,
kept discretely hidden
sealing all unrest
with coin shut eyelids-
your heavenly reward of darkness:
Your most blasphemous of all births.
What am I doing here, in the sleet and rain
in the Park Blocks, lined with
so many different kinds of churches,
on this cold Winter night?
What thoughts scud across my mind here,
where the winds from the Willamette
herd the remains of this years leaves
into sullen soggy masses lying in gutters clogging up drains?
I never aspired
to write eulogies for the dead.
I never aspired to deeply probe
into the abscess of now,
so as to cauterize it
with the holy water of words,
severing sanctified shadows
of hypocritical holiness that runs echoing
two by two after decedents through dark eternity.
But the pain of this Greek Tragedy
is to much to bear. And my chrysalis
heart is buried beneath a stone gisant,
where the great love
I bear for my country
forebodingly broods.
I never meant to experience such love.
That was not my intent.
I did not mean to bear such sorrow,
such anguish, such pity.
That was not my intent.
My pen writes colorful glissandos
lighter than a dragon fly's
iridescent gossamer wing.
My body falls apart, its to much to bear.
When I see my country's corpse,
pointing to a cold death
and a naked grave; when I trip
over the crushed skulls of kin,
how can I live in this place?
I see tight smiles, and wary voices.
But the parchment
is as bare as bones;
who are these people
that would have me
distil their lives.
This is not the destiny
I had in mind, the one
that fate cheated me of.
I always wanted to sing
bacchanal love songs,
to chase beautiful butterflies
past taunt strung rainbows.
Or, perhaps study economics
and serve as a minister, a Mazzarin,
a Talleyrand, even a Keynse.
Leave me something
perhaps only a moments peace.
If not then the World will disintegrate
beneath a totalitarian maul.
Life void of felicity is crazy,
it makes no sense. And,
to echo to the dead
what they already know
about their part
in what was and should be a fete
all I can manage is a hoarse whisper;
"What ever happened to..."
The night is a velvet bowel of evil. A shrill police siren
cuts through it, as sharp as a stiletto.
Listen my doe eyed women, when you've gone,
setting me free and captive,
why does this wave of darkness set me on fire?
In incubus darkness, this city has the corners of a grave.
Please, my small doe eyed woman, hurry back!
My flesh swims in the heart of it,
as in the fecund soul of woman.
Black diamonds
I have seen insect swarms skim
over the smooth black mirror
racing their reflections,
I have seen others suspended motionless half immersed
in the water's cool embrace where
the translucent Lotus floats.
A building explodes, a new planet is discovered.
Corpusculent copulation of
woman's flesh, pradigmatic partner
the eternal instinct; the World
slipping away like car lights sliding around corners,
clouds racing across the moon,
and silver dewed grass running up to houses.
Black bowel, it is for this my throat chokes
with fine settling soot when you go;
and, my flesh burns for your return.
Fair evening star, I never dreamed
I would gaze longingly at you
radiant above my own gardens, as when
yesteryear saw you herding a flock
of fair stars, where now you stand alone,
just as I passed my childhood,
and where I witnessed my youth's happiness begin.
What a crowd of you there where
young and foolish that comprised my thoughts.
I would wonder past large pieces of the night
watching sky, and listening to the
distant bullfrogs below over fields from
an unseen pond a black mirror
reflecting glistening stars in the dark,
the jets would slit through the sky,
while the fragrant yards and cedars
in woods would whisper with the breeze.
In my parent's house were heard successive sounds
osteperous voices, doors slamming,
complaining cars rapidly receding,
and in the evening the mindless T.V.'s endless droning.
But what a wealth of ideas,
what pleasant dreams inspired me
by the books read and the distant azure mountains
with their saw toothed tops
that seemed so far then and
who I hoped one day to cross,
creating secret Worlds, and secret existences
for my pupae life that one day
would unfold its butterfly wings and fly away.
Never suspecting after intoxicating youth's blazing happiness
what fate had in store,
nor how often I would be bled by other people's delusions,
turning my life into a vast and sorrowful sea.
Nor was it possible for my green heart to know
that the town where I was born
would be blighted by a brutal and corrupted race
for whom knowledge and learning
(beyond technocrats valued for their utility)
were held in ill repute that it was
even made the target of sport and laughter;
a race that hates and tries to hurt me,
not from its fear, or because I discern
their awkwardly blatant attempts at tyranny,
but because I speak the truth about them,
while living my life in my own quiet way.
Here, harassed and obscure, I pass the years
among a malicious crowd. I am divorced
from mendacity and hypocrisy,
and here become a hopeful spectator to mankind,
as these vicious sheep have shown me; meanwhile,
the years have come and gone, youth has entirely left me;
dearer than fame or fortune, than the rarefied
translucent light at twilight or breath itself:
I love you, without regret, futilely,
in agony, in this barren place: you who are
a beacon in the nothing that is here
among the nothing that is not.
I know a hymn the youths will be mad about,
which evoke the dream in dreams in our lousy
no nonsense country; and, these refrains
are part of that hymn with gilded lyrics
about love that soars in flight,
as the massive shadows press down against them.
I would write it, of synonymous smiles and sighs-
and maybe they would inevitably discover
how it all ends, when youth's starry eyed illusions,
filled with taught nipples and creamy thighs
and night's glinting black diamond eyes, are repressed
by lousy guards that cut through it like knives.
But its impossible: these things only make misery.
Why wake them to its presence? Misery is everywhere,
and, while it may deceive it never pretends.
The truth is, misery has already encircled
their thin waists and wrapped its icy fingers
around their bare throats.
All our pleasures amount to, is one gigantic unhappiness.
And all our desires can land us in jail.
So to hell with the hymn. I sadly watch it coming,
trying my very best to interfere.
Son, I have something to say
to you, as you know I have never been reticent.
New Amsterdam is dead, and New York
is buried in dirt, I watch its militant-religious wrecking crews.
That's all that's left of the great love
of our native cities greatest creative center.
You and your brother's laughter
come to me from your rooms. And mournful Autumn's
scent of decay comes
to me from across lawns littered with wet leaves.
I see the bulbs resurrecting foolish Spring,
they come to me who does not believe in saving powers
and persists in this crippled shell.
You don't know what its like to wake at night
and, laying their unaware of the passage
of who knows how many hours,
suddenly realize- You've aged.
But what more could you possibly want,
eternal Spring?
Birds pinwheel across the sky.
Children call to each other in the squinched grey morning.
Blood red buds sprout on the filberts.
I am young again and noncorporate rock and roll is in the air,
as when New York was filled with street people
and artists painted ephemeral chalk pictures on the sidewalks.
To repudiate, to repudiate the Lord Jesus, the World's
first hippie - I won't do it. I will neither
reject my father, yesterday, nor return to it.
Sleep Quasimodo and the gypsie queen, in your inexplicable
communal grave.
Time not I will rise your arms from dusts embrace.
Let the dogs desecrate your dirty cathedrals
with their senile excrement, salivating
like wax dripping from tapiers burning in mourning.
Let the night hawks roam for their next prey.
In the shadowless noon among new ruins, let the
serpent warm itself on the crumbling rock of ages
and in the silence accentuated by the cities monotonous noise
let its silver scales circle around its green currency
I am immersed in the eternity of now,
where taking my legacy with me
after ruddy cheeks and ruby lips
and warm, magnificent starry nights have left me.
After the Solar eclipse
with the blackened sun blindly staring behind
storm driven gulls glistening white
against skies endlessly grey.
What will be saved, what sacred kernels of grain
will remain after nights of shattered glass, and flaming
two edged swords.
Son, believe me, precious little remains.
Only wage slaves and
the furrows of fate across one's brow.
Only work and the right to agree that and nothing else-
unless you retain your feelings of bliss,
a sense of wonder and our precious GOD given liberties.