A Veil of Glass

We drift through the chatter of advertisement.

The images are thicker than the snow and cold.

The fruits of our labor are plucked by others

As we plucked them from others.

We are proudly bursting with shame

And now is never the time to unlock it.

Did our eyes invent the night and the stars?
Some part of our innermost selves erased them.

If one could cease thinking, time would stop.

Conversely, time is the extermination of thought.

When all time was spent, there remained a final thought.

We ride its echo like the crest of a wave.

This poem arrived here against the odds,

Escaping the scrutiny of the mind and the taste

Of others who like to put their hands on things.

I am at a loss to write the next words

And yet they come from an infinite converse

With disembodied spirits we call books.

We babel the dialects of God, whose existence,

Like language, in some sense depends on us while we live,

Yet in another, obscurer way hands us a deathless irony.

These thoughts came to me one evening.

I have no way of knowing if they are true.

So a veil of glass divides

So it is a glass veil that divides

So it is a veil of glass divides

Thus a veil of glass

Thus it is a veil of glass divides

Scissiparity

 division of division of division of division of division of...

one

                  branching

                                            into another

                            we come

                            in

ex-

perience                                                                     of se

                                -paration

                                                                  borne

                     between

                              a branching

(The mystery of the origin of life as it is related in mythology or the beliefs of the world’s major religions may be cast as the following problem:  how can something come from nothing?  Or rather, how can life come from death, or at least nonlife?)

                                                I and this mystery here we stand

                              above,                                                           below

beyond                                                 behind

“no name no tongue has soiled it”

                                                                  the mind / the spirit

                                         leaps!   to hold it, to behold it

HOWEVER,

The animate and the inanimate are not so logically discrete as we might like to think.  
E.g. the virus.

Why should death be the defining experience of humanity?

1. because it is universal?

2. because it causes the ego pain?

                                                                              fuck that

A collision of molecules brought you into being,

                                you in-process you

a process never present to itself as complete

                                            because,

                                            completed, it no longer           is

itself

                                                                    What molecule(s)

                              will you meet

                              that stop

                                                                           the becoming you

that you are?

AND IF (ah, the beauty of “if”)

                                                        you bumped into

other

             molecules?

                                                        (“Hey Mikey!  He likes it!”)

AND YES (good old “yes”)

the bird, the wind, the wave,                       the star, the clock

The mysterious                                   “and”

            the mysterious    “yes”             &            “earth”

                                                       a plural of parts

in

                                -finity

part AND part

                     night AND day

                                            pain AND joy

bbbbbbbbbbbbbb

               empty of unity

                                              AND

                                                            empty of transcendence

                        

                                     Yes!

Not What They're Looking For

Today one is taking out the garbage of judgments.

They stand in noisy steel bins outside the mind.

It was the clutter, the clatter of others,

The self parsed by the self, that had to go.

And yet it is hard to part with what feels

So familiar, like a second skin

The way a chevalier must have felt

Steeled in comfort astride his horse

Staring at the latest, the villainous harquebusier.

Is it a matter of life and death?

The death of something, yes.  Invisible,

Molecular, a spring cleaning in winter,

The smashed and bundled furniture of the spirit

(Gaping at its vacancy) brought to the curb

For the homeless scavengers to pick over

Till the garbage men arrive.

In throwing it out they are what they are,

Free, stinking, and strong,

Whatever Tsarina and her minions think,

Of themselves, and of their own glass Easter eggs.

Brownfield SIte

Drifting into the corner a knot of thread

Not of wire plugged into the dirt of a sofa

In the forest the walls soaked in urine

Like the earth just a portion of which

Can never return here to what was built

Are layers of paint on broken walls still

Layers under choked vines when the core

Of the wall exposed is cracked and laced

With the song of a hospital’s mother

Everything incites us to walk deeper

Into abandon the leaves the pharmacy

The dank tile floor of the woods

Now would be the time for a story

A pang of suspense in the rank brown air

But sometimes the stories are over

Told once and dispersed in aerosol bursts

Signed dark outside the abandoned lair 

Places Where Inner Others

Each day the unsettled camp

grows expansive with ideas

and the tables strung in a line

from house to shore are filled

with whisperings of lace

and daisies, and swaths

of black-eyed susans chatter

on the return from the range.

Evening activities yet to be planned

are on no one’s mind as the

campers are loath to leave

the woods until sunset,

and then only rarely.

The flag once raised echoes

from a distant horn,

the misty mornings muffling

sounds or slowly conveying

wet letters from the clouds.

A Waking Puzzle

We’ve been making love as in a book of hours

Under a blue and white paper sky

The birds won’t stop explaining the universe

If you stop your ears you will hear the spring

This is a mind pretending not to exist

See how it sways in the breeze when you look

Just like the bright, scratchy weeds along the side

Of the house as it slants into the fading light

Now the whole mind has turned a dark burgundy

With a sea of fuchsia at the bottom

One with the purposes of death and dreams

And just about as well understood

Abstract dolphins splashing around in canals of light

A massive sunflower rising out of the sea

The infinite green of your eyes under the sun

The prows of the black ships pointing away toward eternity

The doors of the sea are the sea itself

The days come to us and we traverse them naturally

As the glass of water posed on the nightstand

Ultimately belongs and must ultimately return to water

We’ve got maps to the Hollywood of the mind

But a private sea we enter with a breath, breathlessly

A permanence without substance

That lurks within the most distant solitudes

It is like walking in the darkness

And climbing up into an apartment of sunlight

The wood floors are freshly washed and smell of pine

And now we are waking to the noises of the city

Wilderness

Being befuddled, dust and tumble

Down the road to Valencia

Half a radiance, like a roosted angel,

My pants, my pigeons, my puzzlement!

It is like gazing at a dwarf sun

Beneath the world of ideas

Where I live when I am not here

Checkmated with malice, with intent.

A voice without permanence

In the faculties of light

Naked pinks and naked whites,

That diabolical book of pleasure

Boisterous hypothesis,

A breakfast without signifiers, posed.

Time is a deviant of perfection

And the frail mind slapped

By memory, by everything that is not,

Building a voice without energy,

A permanence without substance,

Past remembrance, a sea of rust,

Always having re-begun.  Bitter

Tabula.  Spitting out.  Petunia.