This is another season of fear.
In this modern era I seek
every electric experience
to the senses to show my mind
the constant wonder of it all.
And for this reason, I soar among the clouds.
Remote from civilization's entanglements,
where certain things have become
misconstrued as wrong they are
not merely pardonable, but wonderful.
There is nothing wicked about
a giant black oak bearing golden apples,
and there is nothing wicked about
ordinary alders bursting into rose blossoms.
Its as innocent as playing blind-man's-bluff.
We associate evil by a mere elitist association,
as you think there is something wicked
about becoming enraptured by the beauty of it all.
You think happiness is reprehensible and disreputable.
You are wrong. If it does not
deprive someone else of their rights
then it is not morally abhorrent.
Conventions may be broken,
but no commandments are violated.
I am not afraid of appearing foolish.
I do not dread the inexhaustible follies of mankind.
And why am I being exposed to so many
false charges; because, in order to not appear
evil themselves (for what they do)
they have to pretend
that their victims are somehow wicked instead,
and if their is no just cause
then they resort to slander.
Anything is preferable
to confronting the naked truth
about what they have become.
IT WAS A
It was a black and blustery November night,
a few forlorn leaves hung trembling on the trees
bordering the children's playground.
In the dead ends of evening
besides baths and bedrooms
young parents prepare
their youngsters for bed.
Sitting in living rooms spouses
rest in easy chairs;
future garage sales of
toys, clothes and memorabilia
are scattered by home entertainment centers.
Outside, a wet wind
storms through lovers lanes.
The ones that still serve as courting places,
and lay dead and grey
dimly illuminated by raw,
ragged beams of street lights.
But the lovers are exhausted
from the day's work
and their kids are trying
to find excuses to stay up late.
Their flesh is starting to sag
and their middles bulge,
as somehow they feel
that they are being left behind.
Its no wonder some become
members of intolerant, bigoted, populist
movements.
HEADING NORTH
Heading North, besides effulgent suburban shadows
and late commuters' small noises
embedded in the enormous evening silences; sweeping
past copses to sparse and non-indiginous to be called a wood,
and past the odd Indian named places
that harbors families in the gloaming; sweeping past
the solitude of stars and empty street corners,
vacant buildings and parked cars,
and the mysterious river's steady presence,
the plush pale blue cloud banks, the geese grazing on fairways;
sweeping into the dull surprise of downtown:
where store fronts, church spires and construction projects
reside beside leaf strewn streets, abandoned water fronts;
and, residents from the outlying districts, drove from
the slumbering neighborhoods by borrowed cars,
shove through invisible devouring doors to their desires-
plastic appliances, entertainment centers, gaudy ties,
shiny shoes, hot pretzels, cheap clothes, steaming coffee-
sale price shoppers, simple in their psuedo-sophistication,
roaming corridors peopled by sales clerks, and strangers
residing in a terminals, smelling the cities stale exhalations,
trolly cars rattling up streets, the art museum, symphony,
theatres, hotels and grim visaged parents and bell swinging Santas;
but, outside the aurora and beyond the leveraged projects
beside the fallow fields, silent as the heavens,
stand clusters of isolated houses, where dislocated lives
signify loneliness. Here silence reigns supreme.
Here shadows congregate, golden leaves lie neglected,
camilias blossom unnoticed, still waters mirror
the dead and dark night,
and along the bumpy road luminously shining in the falling rain,
Cristmas lights softly shine smiling
reminding us of the timeless truth:
its more blessed to love, than to be loved.
IN MY SMALL HOUSE
I lay, an invalid in my small house,
and watch at my window,
as great banks of grey pour into my room.
Its here my wife has placed her stamp
decorating the house according to her taste;
here I have my books, sculptures and paintings;
and here, within these walls, we've lived our lives,
raised our children
and conceived of whole universes
past, present and future.
As I step through the doorway
into the "real" World outside,
it surprises me how much narrower and poorer
the finite World is
than the infinite Universes
that reside inside
our modest little home.
SITTING
That women sitting over there
wrapped in her profound silence,
the shock of green,
a fine Autumn afternoon,
and the recondite happiness
of a cloud of smoke
curling in the air;
my blue sky mind
is in consonance
with all these things,
a mysterious crystal spring
that percolates ideas, moments and places.
Slap! A recoiling bramble
whips across my face,
I am sitting
in a waiting room-
even the smallest chair
can contain infinite space,
if one has the imagination.
LIKE A GREAT CRUSTACEAN
Like a great crustacean waving its claw,
the truck slowly raises the workmen,
through the sticky crepe shadows
and thin Autumn sunlight,
toward the listless black powerlines.
Below, in a row of cars, we patiently wait,
a funeral procession;
where, among the expansive desolation,
everyone is remote,
in their shadowy and precarious existences.
At home the lights flicker on and the rooms swell
with the insect hum of small electric motors.
Suddenly, things are familiar again,
people are reassured by the comfortable reality depicted on T.V..
It helps them keep the truth from themselves.
SHE
Morning and fall's first mist
thread its way through sleepy streets,
where a spec of doubt drives
and encounters the myriad sensations
that form the fabric of reality.
All at once sitting beside me
is a hideous old lady,
whose face is as pock marked as the moon.
Where did she come from? I don't know.
All I know is she's there
shapeless, dirty, wearing a great coat of indeterminate color.
I turn to her and ask,
"Who are you, and what do you want?
Feigning surprise the hag replies,
"Don't you recognize me? I'm your mother."
Suddenly, the Sun appears carrying a great yellow spot light,
everything is bathed in a burnished golden haze,
all the objects on the street become vague and indistinct.
My alarm is obvious and she says,
"Don't be scared, my indifference doesn't kill - usually.
You're alive and that is a big enough disaster.
"Am I,
or have I died?" I wonder aloud.
"Oh yes, you still exist, worm.
You still desperately cling
to your threadbare existence,
of which you are so proud;
you will taste for a few more
fleeting moments the bread of pain
and the wine of misery
that are my sons flesh and blood.
Do you understand my parable?"
No you are an illusion, a figment of my imagination,
something I ate last night that disagreed with me.
Life is good and filled with loving kindness
not some scourge to be endured."
It was then I peered intently at her protean face,
which now seemed eternally fresh and young,
whose features were remoteness itself.
Besides her I felt weak and insignificant.
She broke the heavy stillness and said,
"I am a series of paradoxes, a unification of dualities.
I am both good and bad, life and death.
And, I have in my possession
the most amazing thing of all: hope!
It is simultaneously man's greatest curse,
and man's greatest consolation."
I said, "All I want is my life!"
"Your life is merely a loan,
one that must be paid back with interest.
An instant of desire followed by an eternity of extinction.
All of you are alike, you act as if this carousel ride
of day and night would go on forever.
A never ending round of devouring and being devoured.
That somehow eternity is your private possession
carefully locked away in the narrow confines
of the universe within your skull.
What more do you want?" She ominously thundered.
"All life is self- centered, from the licentious itch
to the altruistic impulse. You live and die
so that I might live forever. If you don't believe me
then drive and I'll show you."
How can I describe what passed before us.
I saw joy and affliction, love causing misery
and misery causing deformity. I encountered voracious greed,
blind hate, drooling envy, vanity, affluence, hunger,
love and depression, all of them woven together
into a chimera of happiness.
The streets looked like an old photograph,
mankind like a deformed idiot
being led along by an edible reinforcer.
"Is this life?"
THE OLD SCHOOL
Have you ever driven by the old school?
I did once many years ago,
a ghost haunting a tomb.
After living in the city and in the country;
and, after visiting the great museums of Europe
and traveling through the Nat'l. Parks of N America;
the echoing corridors and slumbering classrooms
that loomed so large in the telescopic lens of childhood memories,
seemed so remote and insignificant in the harsh light of today.
I'm glad I went, though I wouldn't recommend it for everyone.
I went in quest of further understanding,
not as an empty exercise in maudlin nostalgia.
Our lives are not a series of experiences,
pictures at an exhibition that's rarely visited;
we grow like trees, which grow by extension,
each years growth extending from the past.
A RIFT
Between a rift in the clouds
the Sun blazes gold and the sky is pale blue,
its as though dawn had turned up
at the wrong end of the day.
The trees, shrubs and grass
are coruscating flames alive with color;
the clouds are consumed,
in a great fiery conflagration.
Have you ever noticed,
how things are never what they seem at first;
faces and cities are like that, too:
after you get to know them_ they change.
SPACIOUS MANSIONS
Where the hairs are thick and tall as a forest,
beneath the tail and beside the anus,
a flea took up residence on a dog.
It couldn't help feeling fortunate
living in such a spacious mansion.
Each morning it would rise
and go for a walk for its health
through the ample park
that was adjacent to his house of repose.
After living there a great long while,
the flea married and raised a family.
It was then that the flea
felt he had found a place of profit and was lucky.
Not long afterward the dog
was taken to the pound
and put to sleep- a nice phrase
meaning the dog and all its dependents
were killed, proving the following:
never think anything lucky
until it is dead and buried.
RUMOR HAS IT: TERRORISTS
Rumor Mill claims that the
radical right is responsible for the terrorist
activity around the New Year. First, there is the individual from Canada,
who
was the former room mate to a terrorist bomber form Pakistan.
The radical right
spent $100s of billions during the Reagon- Bush administration and
since then
privately on recruiting, equipping, training and organizing terrorists
in
poverty stricken Pakistan. The purpose was dichotomous.
It was designed to
fight Soviet Union troops in Afghanistan, thus avoiding a direct conflict
with
Russia; and, it was designed to infiltrate and organize terrorists
throughout
the Middle-East, there bye controlling dissent and all potential political
alternatives. Second, there is the two American women, from a
French-Algerian
terrorist organization. Some of the French-Algerian terrorists
leaders have
been publicly identified as having been recruited equipped and trained
in Pakistan, by America's radical right.
Rumor mill goes on to claim
that these events are part of a policy by the
radical right. It is designed to keep the public feeling threatened.
The
public will then more readily agree to the oppressive policy agenda
that
ultimately will strip them of their rights, in the name of safety;
which,
ironically, is the same thing a criminal does. It is also designed
to make
individuals feel more isolated, and that resistance to the radical
right's
coercion is futile. Coercion is then supposed to be acceptable.
These activities are a direct
descendent from the Viet Nam War era, when the C.I.A. and
F.B.I. infiltrated groups and then tried to get its members to commit
illegal
acts for which they would then be arrested- just like in Orwell's 1984.
The
difference now is quite significant. The radical right is doing
this privately
and has no legal and moral restraints applied to it. Further,
they now have the
subliminal technologies to help induce people to commit unlawful acts.
A very
important question develops: WHO THEN IS RESPONSIBLE, the people who
are under
the influence of subliminal technologies, or the people who, functioning
with
their free will intact, plan and execute these events.
RUMOR MILL: RIOTS
Rumor Mill says riots have
come into vogue with the Radical Right. The events
in Seattle at the WTO meeting are but one example- please read the
essay at the
end of the last issue. Two other examples of riots being used
to further their
objectives were the recent riots between so called Christians and Muslims
in
Indonesia and Egypt. The Rumor Mill suggests the following.
Conventional wisdom contends
that regional stability is a good thing. It
promotes smooth economic activity in the production of goods and services
and
the development of markets that is why regional stability constitutes
one of the
two tiers of legitimate foreign policy objectives; because it promotes
our
interests both at home and abroad; however, to the radical right riots
are a
useful thing. Rumor says this is true for a variety of reasons.
In resource
rich Indonesia the advantages gained are obvious, control of resources
and it
promotes one of their favorite issues- safety. They can then
oppress (excuse
the Rumor Mill-protect) in the name of public safety, in a reactionary
response
to the riots. It also provides an opportunity to project their
puppets into a
"perceived" more centrist position politically, while increasing their
influence
with both the Muslim and Christian groups. An antecedent example
of this sort
of behavior was the race riot in Portland, where the radical right
induced the
racist skin heads (who they had infiltrated) into rioting, hoping to
splinter
the black vote and further their "private" law enforcement agenda which
was a
camouflaged attempt at oppression - unfortunately successful.
The net effect was
to increase influence in the middle class and working class, while
increasing
influence in the black community, too. The same game is being
played in
Indonesia and Egypt only this time instead of race its religion.
But why Eygpt? Eygpt
is the most populous country in North Africa. They represent
the largest potential cheap labor market in close proximity to Europe.
And the
radical right has been busy buying up Europe's business interests while
defrauding the United States of its aid to the collapsed Soviet Union,
to the
tune of $100s of billions of dollars per year. They then hope
to exploit
(excuse the Rumor Mill- develop) cheap Egyptian labor, which will help
the
radical right, but, not help European labor markets, Egypt and more
directly the
United States labor, business, and trade deficits. Thus riots
become an
insidious policy tool of the radical right- according to what the Rumor
Mill
says.
P.S. TURKEY
Turkey, strange things have
been happening in the state of Turkey. A concerned
gov't. trying to provide for its people has given in to the radical
right out of
necessity. The reason they were afflicted was simple, they provided
a starkly
contrasting economic model that the radical right wanted to suppress.
A gov't.
bureaucracy that provided middle class jobs to a large segment of society,
fully
funded social services and entitlement programs, and a retirement age
of 55yrs..
The so called austerity measure means worse jobs for worse wages with
less
benefits. This makes them fall into line with the Third World
Eco. Model. A
250% sudden increase in their stock market serves to both bribe business
and
blackmail them; where was a like stock market increase when Brazil,
Germany,
Spain and Italy instituted similar austerity measures: they weren't
confronting
a revolution (kurds), double digit inflation, and two major devastating
Earth
quakes. Finally, Turkey was offered a chance to join the European
Common Market
and billions of dollars worth of development projects. What choice
did Turkey
have? In the short term good, in the long term bad. From
the radical right
perspective it will help force all the Mediterranean countries into
the same
ARCHAIC economic model. A model extremely profitable for them
at everyone
else's expense.