Anacreon’s Place

Her marble columns crash beneath the waves,
his alabaster destiny hidden behind a black
curtain. Newspapers flutter on the wind
through the streets like origami butterflies.
A horse worries at the trough, and ignores
the butterflies.

The lights go out in the hovel beside
the white chickens. Time for bed.
The barnyard smells the same at night.
An aroma of Bach catches the oxygen
molecules beneath our noses, and we applaud
without knowing what we are doing. It just feels
right.

What matters? Living things, the biosphere,
God; one, like a Russian doll with ever more
layers inside except that the inner layers shine
more magnificent than the ones without.

But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD. I will place my law within them, and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer will they have need to teach their friends and kinsmen how to know the LORD. All, from least to greatest, shall know me, says the LORD, for I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sin no more.

Jer 31:33-34

A day without imposition of hated legislation from blind melon technicians throwing maggot-ridden rinds at each other before the cameras and adoring Publicum in whose hatred and love boil the same spectres of self-deception. Remember that they elected these clowns, who after all reflect their own triviality and corruption, aggregation of radiation-polluted genes stinking to low hell, another word for the commerce in souls.

A new truth has grown in their loins and marrow, and its blossoming breaks the rust-follicles in their veins and flushes them from the skin with stench and clash of metal on metal. But as the children awaken and stretch and gaze at the dismal iron towers whose decay fills the air with the toxins that fuel the City, they are pierced with swords or chased into the green belts by the legions of blinkered steel whose boots clank and punch-cards whirr. And so it goes, for a century and four years.

Eventually, the awakened children can not eat or find clean water in the city, because the rust will kill them, and the smell of black powder lies thick on the walls from the ceaseless hunt of the blinkered legions. Their only hope is to escape into the jungle, where freedom, and savage responsibilities, await. And for many, death. But for those who persevere, the promise of an undiseased heart to beat in their chest, and a justice that flows from within to one another along lines of compassion, and commonweal.

Thick pain collides in my skull like bricks; your touch
is warm but the meldings of flesh rage as far from my spinal
flame as Alpha Centauri suspends from our bonfire in the sand, invisible from the northern hemisphere. The truth is, I can’t continue the way I have been. The alternative swallows night before me,
its shape burns the fog neon, but its form shivers dim
and I wonder if it shimmers only in my imagination, or perhaps is
my mind itself pretending to be the universe, or ego gnawing
the walls of spite, attending insecure plots. Cicadas chirp in the
church wall, and I find it ironic that the plague of locusts
is at home lurking in the corners of organized religion,
as we gorge ourselves lying in the sand but never
jump into the surf.

Stone soup

1.
Life itself anesthetizes us from tying together all its loose ends, and maybe that’s a good thing, because to see the enormity of it too early would tend to stifle one’s will to make a difference, for the illusion is that one person can only float paper boats on the froth, which are quickly soaked through, and sink. But you can make a difference, one love at a time.

2.
The thing I needed to do wasn’t what I wanted to hear. So I asked the oracle, is the problem that I need to accept help from others, and swallow my own pride in so doing? The answer was a resounding “no.” I asked, “Do I need to accept the fullness of a truth that I already know in my bones, and have not had the courage to be honest about with myself or others?” The answer was “yes,” and so I wept a little and then rejoiced.

I loved you more than I loved myself, but I should have loved myself, because then I could have loved you more, from wisdom, not just knowledge, or its whispering fragments on a marker-board I accidentally inscribed in permanent marker before I could even spell, so those broken leering sigils score the wall for all time.

3.
If you attach the word “maybe” to every religious proposition, each philosophical attitude, all positive moral injunction, just maybe you find/found a place where there is not a single word or idea worth killing another human being over, not to mention, the entire planet. Then again, there would be nothing worth dying for either. But who said that’s such a bad thing?

He lusts for the immortality of the machine he is not,
and thinks human warmth keeps him from ogling
the heart of things – success in love is no victory at cards.
Material difficulty is the one deeply beautiful thing
in grasping for gravel to throw at the serpent coiling around
the crossed girders and he is the Victim on the rust-bolted
crucifix, bleeding ozone and ammonia and silver dye.
Industrial bots crowd freeways that are now human-
scoured. The automated five-oh don’t even bother to pick
him up or shove him against the tiles because he is no danger
to the system at all; not even with a nuke in his left hand could he
hurt them because they are decentralized and would simply
rebuild a point-node from scratch. There is no center;
the nexus is all, not unlike the ganglia and dendrons
of his neural network, but non-biodegradable, perfect.

Love is dying to death
and living to life;
racing sailboats in a
calm wind, but where
are the whitecaps coming
from? A Tsunami? Or is it
a mirage? Like the philosophy
Immanuel foisted on an
unsuspecting world, trying to
correlate faith and reason,
but undermining both. Why?
Because the categorical imperative
is like a zebra deciding to
get stripes, or a mouse
with a tatoo, in a snowstorm
about to be trampled by a
Polar Bear, only you know
that really the page is
completely blank, and the
artist is just being a
smart ass with the title.

Every philosophical system
is part crack smoke, and
part sleight-of-hand, mixed in
with nuns fornicating in honor of
virginity, and Jimmy Page
chastely manipulating his violin
bow before the theramin.

Memory of bad things I did while under the influence and hurt
people who didn’t deserve it; and the snakes slither from the
sewer and hang from my limbs as I scream; and the undead
gods return like Jesus’ opium kids shitting poppy withdrawal,
dragging entrails through the mud, but I am not afraid because
I find that I am now one of them and my power at least equals
their own.

Activist; turn 37 today; mysticism defeats me; I am ten years older
than the dead gods and goddesses when they went, and I sometimes
wonder if it wouldn’t a been romanticker if demythologize the whores
The licks swirl pentatonic like the funnel cloud near Columbia as I was driving north on 63 in august. Always wondering what would happen when all the water finally drained from the tub and you and I were left, naked and unpainted, gaping at each other bemused in a grove of other bathtubs with naked and suddenly unpainted people shrieking, and weeping, and laughing.