October Poem Tome

 

October Poem Tome

 

 

 

 

Ad Astra

 

God sent a self-driving car for me

Its destination was encrypted

I got in I had no choice

I went along for the ride

hazy day no horizon

I whistled a sad air

the limo went past the graveyard

and kept on it didn't stop

I passed by granite cathedrals

outdoor stations-of-the-cross

The vehicle knew where

I did not
 

The sky resembled a frozen lake

Nightfall and the misty stars

The stars said I was headed north

We never stopped--Water

 apricots nuts cheese and flatbread

had been laid in

The landscape at night was white

Mountainous silhouettes rose and fell

 

The limo came to a halt

I got out without stopping

Lastly a vast green bar in space

growing larger enveloping the full moon

throwing tentacles of astral color

to all horizons of a trembling earth

Darkness gave way to utter splendor

irrational astonishment

Mind heading heavenward 

on its journey to the stars

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Black Apples of Tibet

 

I conceived of a new planetary system

that revolved around me

a police car gum machine panache

No one would have to know

I'd exist only to those

in my perceptual spectrum

And walk around undersea cities

and forests ablaze

Still stopping at red lights

wearing clothes and passing

for normative

Comets and mystic moons

mine alone to behold

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10 seagulls at dusk

harass a strange bird roosting

on the dark tower

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

100 crows cross

7th street in Chinatown

flocks of October

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hares go forth after dark

except in mating season

happening naturally in march

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tate in 85

I went deep into Blake's light

quiet few people

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When a broke grifter in a cheap hotel

notices the Gideon's bible

he sees his next career move

 

 

 

 

Sometimes I wonder if there is

anyone pervy enough to really dig

my deformity

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Punk: Not a mode of music or dress but permanent revolution

a dialectic between mindless positivism

and the great negativistic hand

 

 

 

 

 

 

Urban Nighttime Soundscape

 

Sirens at bed time

get so you no longer notice

Trains like old memories

fading as they go

Street sleepers may argue

usually just before dark

Weaponized motorcycles

a moving gun show parade

Some with ultra loud music

hostile militarized radio

All audio phenomena embedded

in the highway's toxic whisper

 

 

 

 

Yacht Club Bench Point

 

barefoot in clover

marine cloud blankets the coast

bridges at high points only

jeep pulls up with bullhorn

boat anchored fishing

in the marina channel

get lost

other side of the breakwater

saltwater expanse like manifest mind

existence in cleavage in the trees

refracted in all ways

congeals bright fungus like

berkeley cops roll by

 the outskirts on the bay

past the edge of town

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In search of the lost papyrus

on which my first poem was read

Nothing to do with Osiris

Nothing to do with the dead

 

 

I saw a ship behind the sun

Coming my way

Couldn't make it out in the brilliance

Then behind it three ships

Then another row of five

then nine an armada

fanning out behind

The lead ship of the sun

 

 

 

 

 

 

Against my will

I started to become a monster

I was in farmland a lot

terrible animal husbandry

The old Onanist

who wore out his balls

Hitler gave anti-Semitism

a bad name

I found the backdoor to Hell

Not to get in but to get out

I wrote a long letter to God

to ask for forgiveness again

His métier after all

Imagine the worst person in the world

having the most military might

Would a guillotine be too much?

Special rendition to a secret prison?

Plea bargain for waterboarding at Gitmo

the Art of the Deal
Fate's inexplicable arrow

 

 

 

 

Haunted by the eccentric

eschatologist

who sleeps in a mummy bag

inside an Egyptic sarcophagus

now afloat in a flooded basement

sand and seawater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 The world to be seen and unseen
so much seen once and not seen again
the finite unspooling of subjective perception
water in a infinite glacial state
all perception exists as one mind
outside of time dreaming in
dreaming the world of time
birth death incidents along the road
mainly monotonous tarmac
some tar pits some mere mirage
Epiphanous amnesties
mild neuronic action out of doors
Tuning forks wind down
Mo more asphalt no more
gas stations no more cows
Wind and weather
scrub the crime scene
sand in the hourglass
cease to add up
the ambiguous incalculable





 

 

 

 

Great Ohlone rock

cresting the sunlit ridge top

alone not for long

Over three clear nights

never saw the Hunter's moon

cold breeze from the Gate





Devil's Wind

Leaves and debris flags and bags
hurdy gurdy in the wild breeze
the first sun seems wan
The lacuna of the universe
the black hole at the galactic center
indeed a worm hole may be
Life comes back fast
after great extinction events
new aggressive spiders

 

 

The Past Thundered Past
 Old Amherst Mass

(memoir of grimoire)

Emily's for Halloween
One more empty haunted edifice
On Pleasant Street was it?
Call it Pleasant Street
The busy little liquor store
The dismal City Hall
restroom open at night
A fountain a church
Sidewalks rolled up and stored
for morning with glad rags strewn
The former Folklore Center
A rustic store for country food in bulk
 a freaked-out peaceful life
Fahey LPs esoteric books
for a conjectural world view
Borderland conjuring
Log's bar eagerly entered
easily forgotten nights
when Sticky Fingers was new
Ramshackle topiary hut out back
Smoke lodge for a fleeting house

The cemetery a stone's throw away
Austere Dickinson plot
Legend hidden by a wrought iron fence
Stars roll upward from burial mounds
The Dickinson estate behind a row of trees
Its garden I spectered alone
on gelatinous nights set in  moonlight
Slept in a drowsy meadow
just down the railroad tracks
Through the Pioneer Valley chilly night
light still on up late
Had a crummy place here one year
How gleeful it was to live
Somewhat poor and young
copious hashish and laughter
Throwing open the bathroom window
in wee wee hours
to watched the train thunder
just below


Mad face paintings a blue guru
white-washed skull mask
Nosferatu skull cap
Bonfire at Erik the Rat's
in feral Belchertown
Sunken eyes and a ruffled shirt
blonde succubus on either arm
New England rocked the cradle
on All Hallow's Eve






Head of the Estuary



1.
Squadron of sea birds
hover high over--shadows
on distant high-rise



2.
The church foyer lit
sunlight on a baptism font
ineffable organ chord



3.
World reassembling
the Cleveland Cascade respite
as the world cascades



4.
So quiet the peace
seven silent geese passed
water turns the page










Three ravens keep
a open eye
waiting for me
to pass by
 

 

 

 

October

2019

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recent Paradox

Recent Paradox

 

 

The threshold of dreams

has been changed

I'm someone from long ago

 

Early one morning

at the St James Infirmary

that was me a while back

 

Gone the certitude

of the storybook ending

knighthood

 

The windows are shut

and stoppered

Processions go past

 

In hazard masks

smoky sunlight

bends incredulity

 

Some sylvan paradise

old couples unable

to open the garage door

 

Their cremains on the wind

particulates that want in

to begin again

 

When all the smoke clears

vast chasms of water well

from the center of the earth

 

Our civilization

our relation to all that lives

passing glance in geological time

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I notice I'm still awake still thinking

I turn on my side facing North

and burrow into the pillows to fall asleep

I commence an adventure story

that takes place in the Great White North

I call this going to Canada

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was the last passenger

no way to make an approach

The put me off in the midst

of nowhere Canada

I started down

an old Indian road

 

There was a calliope

abandoned in the woods

I seemed to know how to play it

once upon a time and I tried now

It percolated right away

into an old robin jingle

before long I taught myself

an old organ fugue by Sweelinck

 

A small green leaf branch

fell on the keys and I fled

walking along a fairy folk berm

sort of a old ha ha

I heard rhythmic hooves

on a heavy aqueduct

Momentarily startled

I looked into the green green

gloom

 

From there emerged

a saddled horse

he walked along with me

until at last I stroked

his velvet mourning coat

The under the watchful

in-flowing horses eyes

I mounted him and rode on

 

 

 

 

 

 

October-November 2018

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Realms of the Unreal, BAM!

High brow culture awaits the common man

on free admission day at the Berkeley Art Museum

Shall we stroll through the mind of Charles Howard

then plunge into the absolute Bardo

Ladies and Gentlemen

hold on to you flip flops

On an earlier visit

I remarked that my impression

of Howard was Surrealism

with the nightmare removed

unconscious drives and anxiety resolved

into decoration

This was to the illustrious Mr Selz

 a founder of the museum

and to a gentlemen who assisted him,

We happened to coalesce in conversation,

But I realized upon closer inspection

that an anguished central portrait

is discernible in several works

He got better when he discovered

Noir

Otherwise one is inclined to view him

as a gifted illustrator

and something of a pasticheur

It's not difficult to identify ideas and motifs

from the European artists whose work

represented one of the more significant

revolutions in art or ant-art

They recall paintings seen as set design

in films of the period

dealing in psychoanalyzed chic,

Dali's dream sequence

for Hitchcock's Spellbound,

In advertising and in book design,

Painters studios in b-movies

and in Video Noir TV

Inescapable

religious suggestion

a Roualt crucifixion

the corpse

removed from the cross

Echoes of Man Ray

and Dali's May West couch

foretells Wessleman

A nice economy to this

a chance meeting of an umbrella

and a sewing machine

on a dissecting table,

illustration for a soigne

affluent ladies magazine

This work suggests

Hieronymus Bosch

familiar surational

figure as landscape

in Garden of Earthly Delight

Sexual symbolism

rears its torso on the left

A pierou cartoon figure

at center

Son of the patriarchal architect

of Berkeley's university

He seemed to have led a charmed life

with study in Paris,

He looks jolly in photos

Early work

Cubist-surrealism

The cigar

if it is only a cigar

was unfortunate

di Chirico would know

Ernst comes to mind

look into the glass onion

Slapstick pareidolia,

I'll add this thrift store find

not to embarrass Howard

but to shame BAM,

That cartoon face might

have evaded detection

in simpler times

Suppose it's his version

of the Giaconda

Few Surrealist artists could pass Andre Breton's

 theoretically rigorous identification process,

Howard surely would not

and perhaps would be

more accurately described

as a fellow traveler

Non-Euclidian

EXIT

sign

The mind's eye

made visible

a terrible vision

 the clear light of

the void

O I dig the skulls

Conch

they have elaborate

life-long rituals

in which step-by-step

they methodically

blow their minds

I twig

I tag along

absorbing by osmosis

Charles Howard

as Bodhidharma

How

I see myself

sometimes

Tibetan ritual items

bell and double dorge

Two-faces have I

7 September 2017