Song of 81 Poems, XXXVII

He bothered to watch the cat,
   demented Death stayed silent.
Our crew managed on Friday,
   and looks to fly again,
   as a mellifluous Hawaiian water bird.

Do you mind an open subject,
   checking the differences,
      painted in empathetic language.
Above him, scratch, or chisel, on canvas.

Dusty Death tries to drink, running free.
Giddy impressions begin
   a sacred inky delight.
Give in your notice, 

Skirt the opportunity - be sure.

All I see are these words,
   Why not question or enervate delight?
      Is this girl smoking hot in manic diversity?
 
The homely Herculean punk's afraid,
   behind bars, did some infant reach him?
Heredity meant an enormous break,
    eased a solution.
An asthmatic boy who saw an aggressive double,
    never cared to paint men.

Balance free, and shriek.
Married, we'll clean our dust there,
   buried over animal music.

Say it, our sound communicates a story,
   Sigh, live, hear strength.
Your helping harmony faithfully captures
      every crazy hymn.
Fill the glorious missive,
   riot though our system.
     Worry, rage's finest day, is sky.

Doing is easy, the smoke in your studio,
   follows behind risky questions.
The cat howls.
   Your wife's raging beauty elucidates
    canvas love a passionate choice.

Brother, take this perfume home.

Song of 81 Poems:

  1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36
37 38 38 40 41 42 43 44 45
46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54
55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63
64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72
73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

Song of 81 Poems - XXXVI

Once we sighed to ourselves . . .
   Healed time with wine,
Improved a black-headed silhouette,
   about the need of which sweet dish
   was dazzled.

I understand she hardened,
   About cunning trouble.
Let's walk, it's better
   we know our morning glory.

To free a society, forms are modeled,
   so we can lick a Grand River!
I'm proof, see I'm sane,
Tell your bird I tripped
     on my other canvas.
Almost makes smoke investigate humidity.

I like representing your calm body as a sculpture
   though, your surface was almost concrete.
So share the new young street.
Run angry beneath empty music.

Are we greening that we should know?
A cruising metaphoric option
   licked clean of bearing.

Throw her torpid form through
Clean sex fast romance feels clever.
God rest in peace,
    Would it be tearful if I made a man
       take milky soft and faithful passion.

Unless astonished by my work and power
   your wasted selves appear many.

I've chosen a straight water ritual.

Song of 81 Poems:

  1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36
37 38 38 40 41 42 43 44 45
46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54
55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63
64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72
73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

Call

this piece
gifted
was the one lost
on your tour of the galaxies
stolen by that woman
who envied you -
you're a bit of jelly in the sea
you glow but have stopped growing
yet you learn
your body will be devoured
or you will be in Orion
before I ring the bell

Will we Progress?

Will we make progress?
Raised by fire
since we were tiny beings,

we relax torn muscles,
then limp into darkness,
to be eaten.
Why won't three lifetimes
as mountain neighbors
call back our youth?
How could foolishness
reincarnate beauty?
Do something!
You'll understand,
and incarcerate everything.
Love is just delivery from time,

Join me there, at least.

Stuart Little

It jabs me, how

the milky swirl of the cosmos
put love where starlight cannot reach.
Believe it all, trust, don't question.

Students, of perfection
with immaculate hair,
feather fans, fluttering curls,
Take your time sport,

your car has scented envelopes
with surprises,
Letters you said
flew from across the stars.

You put on the lightweight suit
and pinstripe blouse.
for the special guest . . .

And I whispered
when you crossed the table.
Introduce yourself!

You rained into my eyes
as I sat at the edge of my saucer,
and drank tea.

I told you I'd return,
lifted you into my hands.
I lied, carried on.
You pressed a wafer
into creases of my palm.
I left it at your feet
alongside a bag of letters.

Dionysus and the Muse

-=({O})=-

The Muse hears inspirations mouthed, vocalized, words insisted upon by the Goddess of language. Drama begins as her language, uttered to you.

Language forms this way . . . we listen to masks!

Voices erupt, echoes layered from a chorus. The rituals, payment, prayer, blessing, are uniform, effects close and personal.

Was it mysterious because it was new? Are we to believe Johnson, and subsequently Borges who implies that every word at one time was a metaphor?

From drug-induced congresses with Demeter at Eleusis in Greece, to temple burnings of the Agnicayana, the intrusions of a Coryphaeus in productions by Dionysus, drunken orgies with maenads, all appeals to numinous demiurges, appeals for the boon of genius. He verbalizes what we think. We move and act, he utters a summation.

Character emerges, weather from masses of air.

Dionysus, a Spartan born of heroic Greece, and wine-god on Olympus, populated millenniums of myth. He was hunted by Spartan patriarchs, his sin: teaching viticulture to women. Some say he was captured and torn to pieces, others say escaped to India. Beheaded perhaps, Dionysus lives on a herm, on a column, or a dramatic mask. His terror, humorous or violent, is ever present.

He interfaced with the Goddess, his wild thiasus of maenads, a procession of crazed women and satyrs with erect penises maintain him as the drug-induced bad-dream rock star we all know. Outside his vehicle he is a purveyor of horror, grotesque acts, crimes, and confusion.

Dionysus is Charles Manson, Puck, also Charlie Rose. Agreeing with everyone but himself, disagreeing with everyone including himself. He or she, for Dionysus is also Kali and female, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Baba Yaga, the evil demoness of the forests.

One imagines the subcontinent prior to acculturation by modern Hinduism. No wonder Kali followers count highest in geographic regions destroyed by floods or earthquake. We're speaking of Gods playing the role of destroyer on the stage of existence.

The Muse was acknowledged by Homer as the creator of the Gods themselves. She was their mother, and was said also to have raised 9 daughters. Human arts, history and culture were divided between them. When Apollo's priesthood took over the Oracle at Delphi, the feminine tradition remained firmly rooted in the tradition of the Muse. The sole difference after the takeover by Apollo? The fees collected were sent to Athens.

So male dominance spread throughout all the Mediterranean oracular sites. That ancient debate, culture, the history, intellect, and language of all forms was ceded along with all treasures, to the female side of the psyche.

Since that male/female division of territory, communication with the Goddess became a complicated ritual for navigating densities of masculine myth. It involves drunken mediums like Dionysus, accompanied by troubling or unreliable liaisons with Hermes as guide. Meetings with Delphic oracles opine on subconscious riddles, layers of inquiry are crafted by the chorus and speakers on the Greek stage. One might trace elements from these theatrical rituals into the heart of Catholic mass, or to the cult of psychics who aid modern police in locating criminals.

Metaphor always returns its calls.

The sullen God of wine resented the Muse's carping presence - he is happier with woman who are nonsensical, screaming or mute. One wonders whether antics by Dionysus pleased or insulted the Goddesses of poetry and history. Dionysus is a foil for talent, Pancho Sanza, Robert Frost's neighbor, Shakespeare's Puck, Coleridge's wedding guest joins the meeting where finer things are made. He's the life of the party, also the one who goes too far and breaks it up.

Might we engineer a metaphor, similar to the way a doctor provokes an involuntary response with his hammer, and dispense with all this ritual? Mightn't words disturb patterns of the collective and produce statements from its center, poems structured about a narrative live with a heavy burden? If the thread appears organized, the Muse scrambles that semblance. Dionysus performs what fragments survive, makes sure no shreds escapes without destruction. The vanity of wholeness is abandoned to the complication of storytelling.

This thought leads a poet to temptation, the one offered by modernism. Perhaps no greater experiment was ever conducted as the abandonment of story, Mystery was incorporated into the metaphor itself which lived naked and alone, man-made not God-made, and in so doing, stripped numinous content from any larger meaning.

Joyce, Klee, American abstract expressionists, Wallace Stevens, all produced works unburdened by the requirements of ritual and narrative.  Tired myth flows past us, blossoms on the water that must have been tossed in upstream. The numinous mystery is lost. A rose was no longer needed. Neither were creatures in the wild.

So we wander a corpus, rotting, but of human creation. Are we writers also in the degenerate stages of language, when poems arise from composting earlier poets?. Is there no new metaphor to come from the source?

We seek stories from the other side, but behind the curtain the question always floats forward, what story is ours? What tales come home?


-=:[()]:=-

Glossy Black

The mad engineer steps aside,
He baits a hook with one of her pearls.
Take note, a photonic illusion
as perfect as a lake in fog.

Missives from dark water
fishes, serpents, eels,
dance across the floor of our house,
They pivot and twist when they are cut.
Each deserves the right, somewhat, to decide its own death.

At some point much will be divulged.
All will be shown.
Only what has been shared
may be saved.

Miriam Dactyls met Sondre Destre,
I read her a rich psalm, thrice to remove
every troll and trill.

If Logos has gone, then Madness shall write its own record.

"The Liberty of Fools."

I doubt we'll see it,
September came and passed and then made time
for the beginning of a new reign. So be it.
Tigers are in the bush,
So are cobras, glossy black.

A Call to the Numinous

-=:[()]:=-

Down the dark arm of a lake in the Adirondacks, I listened in rapture as my father yodeled into the shadowy hulk of a mountain. The forest and still water of the lake rang with his notes. Birds, owls, coyotes took up the call. For me it was magical, I did not reason it was my father's voice I heard.

The poem is the key, the yodel into the blackness of night. It brings back with it a chorus of the unexpected.

To the pre-classical ancients, poetry and metaphor were one, married by a dramatic ritual.

The approach to metaphor was dangerous, propitiously made with offerings. The Muse is capricious, gifted, but treacherous. Dionysus the otherworldly assistant to dramatic performances in a modern world, recruited the sane into his callings and made them mad like him.

Religion institutionalizes the ways and means of madness, integrates a bit of healthy madness for all of us, with our dreams, with what we can't understand.

Approaches to the Gods are fraught with danger, summoning Kali or visiting Baba Yaga in the forest, potentially deadly.  Dionysus's maenads tore the living apart in orgiastic frenzies of horror. Baba Yaga and Kali both drank blood. Vampires all, just as authors are vampires of language.

A writer allows himself to be eaten, but drinks the blood of poetic ancestors. For sound, like light, is vibration and in vibration exists the passage of all that passes from one place to another.

Borrow the ritual from someone else? How long did the source of the Nile evade Western explorers?

A murky understanding may be felt more than understood. It doesn't razor past our pupils in bright light. Darkness covets. The abyss holds secrets.

Sometimes meanings seem clear. For instance with Farsi court poetry, there is so much, too much even. All is there, all readable, all logical. Why do some poems, not others, stir the imagination memory, awaken old DNA? Have Heraclitus and the I Ching become poetry?

I'm not really conscious of what forces me to finish my project on the vampire. At best he may be a metaphor, male logos that has stripped language of numinous content. The vampire has lived rather long don't you think? He's a tired trope. He drains language of meaning. I know things will have to change. Yes, my vampire must die but it hasn't happened yet. Perhaps his death is a shift in subject, perhaps the poem is no longer about him at all.

When speaking of metaphor, think source, as in the sources of rivers. Every salmon in the sea knows where that is. It may be easy to grasp, or nigh impossible. But it is sensed. It may be a riddle, has never solved, but left to confound readers with mystery for centuries to come.

-:)/\(:-

Ode

Some quantity got exceeded,
Mathematicians make sense of it.

After a long time passes
we'll take much to ease our fears,
rattling within us,
when we sail to that foreign land.

Some illness took root,
in a group of us
now so powerful
they make the mistakes
that bring a new demise.

Walt Whitman did you cry?
I'm lost now.
Thomas Jefferson wrote
by light of oil from heads of whales
yet a slave brought him tea.
That which is self-evident, may outlast tyranny
yes, even if those that see it are dead.

No warriors, only terror
the new world, then as now
belongs to a few.

All those papers?
Dust in a mausoleum.

Our peace was illusory,
our monster worse than George
who had a head, two hands, two feet
and a wooden navy.

This black slug
mimics a branch.
A tiny head of bright red
makes you reach for it.
It watches everything you do
and makes you a slave.

The fall will come,
maybe not this life, maybe not the next.
Such orders falter more quickly than most.

They lash out, vulnerable.
Peaceful kingdoms have no history.
No architecture
marble palaces or concrete bunkers

The peaceful heart beats
in a home of mud and sticks.

Encounter

In your many names I see . . .
frank sense . . . demure . . . poetry
where did you go,
I miss your dreams.
 . . . to heaven sent . . .
our grapes . . . our tea . . . our sacrament.

My voice is hoarse . . . feathers black . . .
In my coffin . . . on my back . . . I'm spent.

Come open up, let me out . . .
Release me from this awful drought.

You met me with fields of waving grain . . .
Yet fed me dreaming again
for your brother and lover,
Osiris who came
is it possible . . .
To put him together again.
 . . . You will find each other. . .
 . . . You're his sister, wife and mother.

I saw your dance today two ears of corn . . .
 . . . Isis instead of a microphone . . .
I saw your dance . . .  heard your voice . . .
Felt your trance . . . amidst glances
 . . . of a dozen admiring boys.

I wanted to talk to you . . .
Of wishes and dreams. .
to meditate upon your clues
And compose your light in beams.

Two rivers . . . fresh and blue . . .
joined . . . and talked . . . a mournful tune.
The river road floated north,
No need to drive . . . or walk . . . this you know . . .

Dark? . . . this isn't true. .
light inside . . . the rest just isn't you . . .
You light my back . . .
to prove . . .
take any dimension . . .
 . . . up to you.
Alas you would . . .
come through resurrection . . .
And once risen . . .
would see me differently.

the hurt heart . . .
wanting . . .
the world do its part
If there were no fear else . . .
Fear rolls the wheel
 . . . of Kali's cart.
a body has no time to heal
 . . . spirited away in sixteen parts.

I await again . . .
 . . . where it is dark . . .

Offer

She's the one who called you Sire.
Buzzing around so drop that air.
I see you always, I see higher
I take you a ways from here to there.

The swan spoke to the water,
And the butcher to the ham
I hurt all over,
I’m swimming behind the dam.

A lake wraps the lakeshore
Flag furled around the end
Each galaxy has a perimeter
Every illness brings a mend.

With pleasure comes some pain
A game with rules for playing more
The footman entertains his dame,
From two PM, 'till four.

Put down that pile,
Make poetry awhile.
I’ll amuse you, you amuse me . . .
To the end of time you will see.

Passport

Poetry is just scribbles,
in a mass of words,

Hairs lodged in the throat,
undigested fragments,
that beg to be transcribed.

Lift into light
take off the cloak!

Heavy wool, remove the thick layers,
naked white shoots pushing up.
Whoever thought life existed beneath
     all those rotten leaves?

I keep waiting, for the shakedown
When everything will unravel,
     and become less complicated.

In the center of all, huge bites are taken out,
The body is injured.

Holes in the fabric of time,

Principles

a rush . . .
as if all that was tall straight and stable
were now bending.

twinkling
a sleepy amazement
about all that men built

from the window of a late cab
speeding home
I no longer care enough
of what will or can or might happen.

the tide of events
spins irreverent, a sacrilege
toward a private ending.
my own?
how lonely that would seem.
.
my children are my children,
the die is cast
they need me or not at all
at times my wife is a person I cannot talk to

before her I was unfocused
I had principles I was naive to
in love with strangers
eyes to the heavens.
now I focus on the earth ahead.

yet know I lie buried somewhere
gnawing to find purpose
the source of my drive
what is it?
it wakes each cursed day
setting me on a journey
through a disconnected world
listening to a story I cannot hear.

Humbleness

My son’s clear honest eye 

sees to the heart of me

I am humbled

My daughter’s feet climb my legs and chest

I am humbled

We are all made humble

By our less humble nature

But as nature humbles us

We rebel against humbleness

We strive to be

something else.

Humbled

By my un-humble nature

So my nature

Rails against my humbleness

Were I less humble

I might lift my head

And drop my pride.

How that humbleness burns!

Coming Soon - Song of Raven

“Warble daw Raven"

Wat daw Scribblers Scrabe:

Striped Babbler: “Bee-eating a Veery Nody-tail, Scrabe ‘n Averic wid English, Breton, Gaelic, Cornish, Irish, Latin and American Bird names.”

Popinjay: “Purre Goldfinch. A Yoldring Tail ‘n Birdic Grammaw, fly ao Blakeling Scribbler, daw Tail of doo Lovebirds.”

Nanny Wash-tail: “Knot doo Shabby . . Knot Pheasant . .  May-be Fowl . .  Tithys goldie Tell-tale Triller . . “

Bohemian Chatterer: “As Great Reeds go, a ‘Monarch Moualc'h’ ‘n Bird!”

Gossip Bird: “ Bass Guiss? A Pretty Quick Coot Reed! Great Divers! Knot Fody Bleeding-hearts. A Tail doo Ptarmigan 'n Ptarmigan!"

Daw Haggister: “Fody Gull Chasers . . . and Squeezy Gulls Doo . . . Moor Tits ‘n Assity ‘n Fody Plover Padges!”

Warble Daw Raven:"Io Tam Gled Io Rood '!"

"Yoit Knot Coot Wheary! "

"Alae, daw fannag of Cromadh Bend-daw Ear bird!"

"Cob Rook a Rant!"

Words

All my verse and all my song,
Was given you, and yet you're gone,
Taken away, silence between,
The words that play, and the words that mean.

Medicine

I reached for my cures, my medicine had gone,

Left with a woman who turned them to song.
I wrote down the words, they didn't make sense,
Thought they might hurt, but know what they meant.

Are Raw Words Obsessive?

I

Perform for me this tea art.
Sweet Daughter when you and I are together, we'll live.
So let’s walk.

I am for tantra, fiery pictures above dust,
in a full glorious rainbow.
How many will never understand beauty.
Men gripe, offer unity,
Driven until you're caught, some bird.

Black peace could give us language.
My aesthetics you use, until she stills green passion.
Glass bodies in communication seek Music.

You trust your electric model,
never together under passion.
A traitor with a whipped tongue feels free.
I like this freedom, I believe in the drunk!

The animal I need makes my empty Death.
Clean sex and an electric picture . . .
Models grant no denial. Respect.
Could the old gal win at dice?


II

I see sculptures, manic sculptures after praise.
Only symbols, they are laughter.
When in such a worry, you and I.
Good character destroys what won’t give us night.

Grand Sir, first know. Let her draw her companion’s will.
Here howls a beautiful language.

The Mare above him was caught,
must know laughter, and be all danced.
Suffer to investigate a thought,
Life flies after us, set in a black limpid experiment.

See the two partners,
somehow forget if silhouettes capture a mad thought.
Improved though blue, please may you comfort us.
Praise only simple morphine to scale. Conserve it!
It’s an awful hidden and daunting reserve.

Life knows patience in heaven, as silence.
Free my esteemed fellow. Sleep!
My mate is innocent, how will you go and decide upon her silence?
I’m for tantric teaching.
Bed her to discover animal music.


III


Let's test our will.

Call me.

Model my hard question, through music.
We spoke of her money jungle.
Then she went crazy, have patience, . . . so choose.
Fly with a glass stranger.
Tropical, can we tell about glorious endeavors?

This impulse is soft, and looking spotted,
and that studio experiment in passion,
Brother, all around you sculpts an Angel.
Fill a glorious missive. Anger would have faith.
Share his joy. It will glitter.


IV

Our water is the bed, through my ear she goes.

Could we know blue?

Elves balance, cuddle with color.
I try to empower kids. Fly to me,
“I weld men. Follow behind me.”

She and Zeus chant face to body.
Shimmer about the rain, about the grand river.

Celestum II

What do I hear
when I hear voices?

Are they mine or yours or someone else’s
shells, ghosts, cast off homes,
or mistakes of language?

All the things that were never said or done.

What a pleasure to watch the wind
Catch a fold of the curtain then lift it,
and send a curl running across its breadth.
A crab across a rock before a wave?

A seething mind boils, then cools
Every idea an explosion, sending a thousand sparks showering
Thick crust cracked and bleeding molten rock
Late in the day sky and coral turn the green of limes.

Melts and so moves downwards
Through fire
Purifying itself
Thus reaches heaven

Under attack
Assume the female form.
Prepare to give birth.

Confusion

white hair rages
through cardinal provinces, 

princely states
salmon, natives, 

hybrid acids display
the bright belly of a trout,
now hazy grey
in a world polluted
murder leaves a wake,

of confusion.

Vulcan Vishnu

Vulcan spews smokes, towards a giant bird,
Vishnu gazed into the silent eyes

     of the seven-headed cobra.

The artist rests in territories where ideas live,
     amidst carved giants and mute faces 

     of stone and wood.

A small pot of mercury
the size of the tin of baked beans,
we may eat for dinner,
      is impossible to pick up in one hand.

Ingots may be lifted with great strength
      after a deep breath, held for a second.
Violin space-music plays, the volcano explodes,
      the space ship on the ceiling lights up.

The roar of anti-gravity engines are heard.

Paul, Mark, and Luke - Scoby Notes

I named our first Self-Contained Organism of Bacteria and Yeast, Paul, in memory of the famous octopus  Paul, who lived a short time after predicting the outcomes of eight World Cup Soccer games.

Past feats aside, Paul seemed a good name.

So Paul begat Mark, and Mark begat Luke, and soon kambucha was exploding literally from every vessel at house Potter. I've concocted many superb tasting drinks in this manner, without keeping so much as a pencil scrap of a note about process.

Invention happens spontaneously, when one is not recording results. The recording of results inevitably mire any process in a protracted program of exhausting all possibilities.

One knows this when one follows one's genius around the house, and one's genius in this case is a flat rubbery slimy organism used to ferment tea.

A Kambucha SCOBY represents life, as unique as that of a cow that produces rich cream, or a tomato plant that yields exceptional fruit. This log shall transcribe that life. Here I write everything Paul is fed, everything taken from Paul in the way of harvest, and jot for posterity every note that I can think of to better understand the mysterious brewing process involving bacteria and yeast.

Paul sired a blessed two year lineage in this house, descended from a SCOBY mare supplied by Steven Rodriguez, he has since been divided into three vats.

I'll name his sons Mark or Luke. At times they have all been fed grape, rose liquor, pineapple, blueberry, pomegranate, acai berry, but always the base diet has been a tea and sugar mixture.

The flavors produced by Paul have been so extraordinary that I've reluctantly taken up a blog post to document what I'm doing here, because in reality I have no idea. Steve R. says I'm a mad scientist just mixing stuff together and never creating a record or a label.  We both dally in ceramics. He's very careful about glaze recipe, I'm not.  I contend in my defense that the greatest learning occurs when records have not been created.

So I'm now keeping records but skeptically, knowing myself, not for long.

Imitators will find that duplication of my results is nigh impossible. The SCOBY bacteria and yeast have a memory for everything that was done to them, and they retain genes to digest certain compounds in case they are encountered again. The digestive process then runs as a result of the SCOBY's experience with other fruits and nectars and teas which make up its diet.

It may be possible however to notice that a rose kambucha brewed with Rooibos tea after a diet of blueberry and pomegranate is especially flavorful. That may be the extent of the benefit of this note taking process.

Otherwise, just as I've said, it is a record of Paul's life.

-:-

What is a Mystic?

the lock
  a coat hanger,
    one of the pins from her hair

What is a mystic?

One that uses experience to distill truth from life, that seeks conjugal harmony with all existence? One that seeks to fly with the heart over every plain and hill, to stand with the soul in every stream, to lie in the rushes with every tiny insect that chirps at night, to be at piece with every man and woman in their very own beds, to gallop with the mind across the starry heavens, to fuse in spirit with every wild bird and every great creature that prowls in the forest, to be at one with all creation in one burst, acknowledging all.

I empty my mind when it is full, and when it is half full I also empty it.

Even when it is empty, clearing it out does no harm.

All else must be finished by the day, when all else I dreamed of will be thrown away.

Light by night, and light by day.

burnt sun
 murals

on the
    courtyard walls

Dusk

Let me light candles for you at dusk.
I'll broaden the hours of the night,
Send the sun scurrying beneath our pillow.
We'll ask permission at dawn
If it is safe to come out.

Language, like Food, has Energy

I breathe air, you breathe air. . is the air we breathe the same? . . . The consciousness/identity issue is something like that . . . we have a 'lease' so to speak on consciousness, a lease granted when we took occupancy of our bodies, of our lives.

Wait, so that implies something that inhabits us, lives within us, is on sometimes, off at other times. It varies, with sleep, wakefulness, how much we're paying attention.

Or does it?  If consciousness is always 'on' what vacillates our subjective perception of it? We've hit some kind of circular argument, consciousness relying upon itself to know it is there. Like attributions to a divinity, could early concepts of "God' simply have been the projections of an elevated form of self-awareness in early man?

Yet consciousness exists. But where? The question asks if there's materiality to something that doesn't possess a material dimension.

Egyptians regarded the heart as the organ responsible for consciousness. The brain, a reservoir of mucus, was removed and discarded before the rest of the body was embalmed for a journey to the stars.

We're looking for where consciousness lives! If consciousness resides somewhere, does it have a locus? A focus?

In an early anatomical drawing by Leonardo of a dissected brain, his note in cryptic Italian reads "Is this where the soul resides?". There's a small arrow pointing to a spot just above the pineal gland.

'Soul' doesn't mean 'consciousness' in the same way to modern psychologists seeking solutions to the hard problem, the subjective "I". Soul doesn't carry an ego-driven 'conscious' label with it; the soul isn't about itself.

Carl Jung and followers tried to caution against Western science's stampede into the conscious sphere claiming that the soul, or subconscious was being overlooked, misunderstood, and frankly ignored at the peril of our very left-brained society. Modern cognitive psychologists for the most part haven't even listened to the Jungian dialogue, representing it as 'artsy', based on myths, and not accessible to the neurologist's probing electrodes. Jung, Hillman and others countered that the greatest hazards posed to the modern world were almost entirely of man's conscious creation, resulting perhaps from his biggest tragedy, failing to know himself.

But whose soul is it? Should we take clues from Jung who introduced us to the collective unconscious? Heightened states of being attained by yogis and Buddhists practice at emptying the mind, clearing it of conscious thought. Doesn't this imply freedom is found away from the subjective conscious experience? Isn't the most powerful 'consciousness' one that is unencumbered, and doesn't require the serial tool of subjective identity?

As always, science has arrived late to a definition of the problem, and even more poignantly, has missed the solution entirely. The West chases a phantom machine, an apparatus lost somewhere in the body of matter.

It may be the soul is everywhere, but that 'consciousness' is fugitive, never setting up shop for more than a few microseconds in one place, characteristic of most illusions.

If we are speaking of a greater consciousness not centered on the ego, where does it disappear to after we die? Is it even ours to begin with? Can it be be possessed, or owned by some other being? These hands that are typing are 'my' hands, attached to me. Without the rest of me they can't work. Man has found ways to transplant body organs, eyes, hearts, kidneys, but not consciousness, not the soul, nor the contents of memory.

If this greater consciousness is fugitive does it elude attempts to locate or entrap it? A. Is the deer in the forest alive without the forest?

The natural root of language indeed produces something useful. Consciousness is language, and one byproduct of that language may be science itself. Science verifies the subjective conscious experience that created it, producing technology, enabling our economy of rising populations, that has made our civilization possible. The Gods are with us, or rather, the myth of science seems with us. For now.

Yet we are in neglect of a greater consciousness, that which we share with all nature. Is our subconscious, our soul, simply a victim of repression by a new sort of self-flattering parasite that has taken over the wheel? We're enamored of the subjective experience, the language using, category creating, diary writing effacer of the earth. Yet what we are, that is a question we do not like to ponder. Is western consciousness, if we dare call it such, a belief based mythos, an illusion, not a truth?

Think of This

Having come to the conclusion that all matter is to a degree conscious, we might ask isn’t all matter ultimately unconscious of its consciousness? If so, then a materialist dichotomy is preserved. Matter and consciousness are separate. If matter is the unconscious mother of consciousness, then can consciousness survive without matter?

Such an argument may at once seem tautological. Matter a vehicle for consciousness, if so, any bit of matter can aid in that process, all of it does or none of it does . . . or . . .  is matter itself conscious? Our notions about matter, and consciousness are completely primitive, limited as it were by the materialist thinkers of centuries ago.

Instead I argue matter without consciousness is the impossibility. All of it may be alive, and the conscious part preeminent, for a thing to exist the knowing of it must be there too.

Is our conscious mind the fisherman, who brings the fish from the deep?

Western philosophical investigations of human thought haven’t established anything. Philosophy at best has imagined a tour of the architecture, neurologists with their probes have poked around, taken voltage readings, mapped neural activity, without encountering any inhabitants. Consciousness remains as elusive as the unicorn.

What cognitive psychologists call ‘consciousness’ may only be a recently evolved and tiny subset of a much greater conscious awareness. In fact the stream of consciousness in language driven humans today may in reality be a distraction from a higher form of consciousness that is repressed.

To accept consciousness on a universal level, one must abandon the ego, the “I”, the self-referencing component to this entire dialogue. Consciousness is not about ‘me’. The notion that a self-divining root of language flits about the mind and pretends that ‘it’ is conscious, while the rest is ‘unaware’, ‘unknowing’ and obscured in darkness does more to persuade the enlightened that the busy mind may really be the least conscious mind of all.

Why do we assume the whole of the world around us, from weather patterns to flocks of communicating birds, to entire galaxies of massive energetic stars, is separate and inert. Only in recent years have we admitted that animals may possess forms of higher thought and might be ‘conscious’. Yet our view is that aside from animal life, consciousness is nowhere else to be found. Our civilization is locked in an infantile fantasy that it exists at the center. Having discovered our own self-awareness, and developed a language to document it, we believe in our own domination of conscious thought.

Such a fantasy may indeed be part of a necessary stage of development in the transition to a higher level of consciousness. When the ego is abandoned and a kind of universal consciousness is finally accepted as a universal property, when Western science has come to realize what the Vedanta has known for millennia, then perhaps our we can recognize consciousness as a universal phenomena, and not something belonging to the ‘I’.

As for sub-conscious intelligence let’s call sub-ego so that we don’t confuse ourselves. For how often have we heard from someone working on a difficult problem, “let me sleep on it”? Indeed solutions to complex problems without language are not the work of the most self-aware state of the mind. ‘Eureka’ moments seem to materialize out of thin air, indeed it is our ‘consciousness’ which has only become aware that the problem has been solved?  Let’s refer to that sub-conscious intelligence sub-ego so that we don’t confuse ourselves.  If you prefer another metaphor, consciousness resembles the mysterious cleverness of nature, the weather, birds, or the mind of a pet, which we can attempt to fathom but cannot necessarily read.

Yet I posit that this subconsciousness, the sub-ego, the sub-self-aware faculty, is the true consciousness that pervades the universe. Our self-aware thinking processes function more as an executive diary, the dashboard of instruments, the servo-mechanism, for executive action, and and the fulfilling of set goals. It believes that it is in control of a much vaster system, but as mankind may shortly learn, that executive in a Tolstoy-ish reversal, works for the greater consciousness without an ego, without the ‘I’. Self-awareness may not be such an advance as we imagine.

This essay has brought the topic of consciousness to a bifurcation, into a self-aware faculty, “I am thinking’, and the part that thinks, arrives with solutions, but hides its methods from the upstart.

What the Western ego has named its conscious faculties, on the other hand, may only be an illusion, an illustration as it were, posted and pictured by a much larger sub-ego operating system below it. What a perfect conclusion to a infantile illustration, a nascent self-conscious mind, operating with a tool called science, believes it has discovered something unique and precious when it becomes self aware.

In my House

In my house there's pastry sweet,
Take my honey as your nightly treat.
All I want is ears to hear,
The songs you sing when I'm not near.

All your honey is oh so sweet,
The treat I give, is poetry.
Come at night, with songs to sing,
Try my poems, wear my bling.

Dreams might speak it plain to you,
Night means play, I bring to you,
Try this day, as you cling to me,    
Sing my blings of poetry.

Tom Tom

Tom the piper's son,
check your messages . . .
And so provide us with a puff of smoke,
To the dragon who thought just one thing
It rose up and averted its eyes  . . .
    then snuck back to its cave.

But no, she of the hawk-faced ministry cried "No."
And called forth the frogs, who in unison chanted, "No-oo!"
Who called the judge, who came out and neatly said . . . .
    "Permission denied. The accused shall be returned to the jails."

The girl who moved into the flat above mine smiled at me in the hall.
She has blonde hair and a lovely streak of blue through it.

Coming, shooting from muddy waters,
 . . . numbing beauties, Luddite daughters.
Jupiter moons on a glassy night,
 . . . feathered specks on a glossy snipe,
Hatted jazz-men eat free corn,
 . . . How my girlfriend likes her porn.
Watch me feed her crocodile,
 . . . as we bleed, our love's on trial.
Now the beetle crawls on granite,
 . . . . down the needle, towards our planet.

History Fragment

An inch on a standard ruler is 'created' by the tiny mark engraved 'one inch away' from another like it.

Measurement is a conceptual process.

The mapping, of time, indeed history, incorporates void. A measurement refers to itself, omits detail. History must be imagined. An effort. Re-creation.

The flesh of history, involves all its viewpoints, consciousnesses, colors and molecules, thoughts and physical beings. These 'facts' themselves are dead, but may be brought back to life by a creative act.

What of soul-time? What of unanswered yearnings?

As soul-creators, inventors of fantasies so we are responsible for our present position. Doesn’t this give us the power to re-write history, and set ourselves in a different places and times?

History devours its own tail, or depending how you look at it, is forever shedding its skin. The past, that self renewing myth we carry with us, has but one use, and that is to supply useful context for actions in the present.

Wax sculptures melt, release their energy. Animal entrails give off an aura. There is such power in rotting guts.

Mexico City Notes

Mexico City Tuesday February 23, 1993

Lodgings: the cheapest without risking life. Each morning an ancient woman enters my room without knocking, empties my trash basket, beats the floor with a wicker spanker, pulls covers up on my bed, and leaves four bars of soap behind on the pillow as compensation for all she leaves undone.

I'm alone on the fifth floor of a hulking wreck of a building. The structure was shattered by the earthquake, and most of the property is taped off with barely legible signs "Peligrosa".

A block away in Plaza de la Constitution, the capitol of Tenochtitlan, indigena protesters wave painted signs and shout. Police in plainclothes watch behind sunglasses, murmur into radios, take notes, inform the generals of their actions. Troops wait on the side streets, cordoned in dark green buses, rifles and tear gas ready. 

Mexico knows the bread of paganism embalmed by a yeasty spirit. Corporate industrialism, Catholicism, and native gods vie for control, amidst pretenses of free enterprise, and a myth of democracy.

The clay earth took Spanish seed. Jesus, Mary, the Father and his saints, a receptacle for myths of the vanquished to quench the thirst of conquerors.

Cultural artifacts are exhibited with miniscule captions, stripped of context. Why haven't they been destroyed also? Perhaps one day one relic will answer the question "Who were we?"

Morning sun glints at Rivera murals on the courtyard walls. Officers in dark gateways disappear into a matrix of ancient stones. Order is catechism to a pagan mind. Vanquished by teachers will the pupils one day take over?

The Spanish created castes, crillio, mestizo, and indigena, but these boundaries cemented the people together, but isolated Mexico herself from the world. The conquerors would not ignore the the natives since they were fearful.

Torn temples, carvings stolen, glyphs battered, manuscripts burned. Mexico, a violent assimilation of a European fragment into a native American perfect storm of myth. Europe was trapped as if by quicksand. The army and priests were swallowed by a dark native force. Militant Catholicism, hip deep in a Mexican swamp, was destined to die very slowly.

This does not assuage anger on either side. In Mexico, rooted in the being and history of blood, anger becomes the progenitor of a new myth cycle. Expect riots, expect massacres, expect executions, and more revolutions, but also expect a powerful continuance of native American culture.

Is Mexico really one battle? Does Mexico mean 'battleground'?

Whitlock

My grandfather, as a young man rode a horse each September one hundred miles to his school in Watertown Connecticut, spending the night at two inns along the way. After a long life, he died the year men walked on the moon.

I remember with crystal clarity, him telling me that there was no greater joy than daydreaming, and letting the mind wander while sitting back and listening to the sound of of his horse's hooves on the dirt road.

Mason Whitlock, himself younger than my grandfather, was approaching a hundred when I took my little Olivetti in for a tune-up and new ribbon. The irony was that during my years at college, I never once needed a new typewriter. I changed ribbons myself, and cleaned the type with an old stiff brush.

When I returned Elm City to live, caught in that confused space brought on by the digital age, I found myself longing for the music and dance of typewriter keys.

Yes I miss the sentences that come to my brain when working on a typewriter. A percussive beats out one's commitment to a sentence. There's a jazzy rhythm, a machine beat, a machine gun beat. There's the slow clop clop, of an old work horse.

The typewriter was a percussive instrument, the melody and base instruments are the swim of ideas at the tip of one's brain. There's a beat for every mood, and feeling, every bit of description or dint of discipline. The beat kept thoughts in train, since it was not easy to drop back in and restructure one's ideas. The first draft required discipline and focus.

The mind raced, pounding on the dendritic telegraph keys of cerebral neurons, surveying the terrain of the rail-bed ahead, laying ties, driving spikes, keeping clear sight of the benchmark period in the distance, open to a diversion in root phrase or clause. When a line end was reached, the locomotive let out a release of steam, and brought the train to terminus with a 'bang' to the period key. The trill moment was the end of a musical phrase. The traveller, with scheduled music in mind for all connecting trains, got soon clattering away across the sonorous landscape with nary a care in the world.

It was a form of acrobatics. Yes it was writing, but also a workout. Posture mattered. At some point a particular piece of paper stayed behind as a fossil track, a recording. A skull. First drafts were akin to fresh rushes of a film. Modifications seemed beautiful, ugly, or impossible.

Language leapt into the air as a drumbeat accompaniment to the writer's deepest love. The ear became attuned to the truth of the rhythm. Sounding good? Or did it lack commitment?

Mr. Whitlock kept hours, in a second floor shop overlooking York Street, across from the Hall of Graduate Studies. Here are my notes from the day I visited him, in early 1993.

-:-

Why bother repairing the old? What sort of allegiance is owed to a non-functioning hunk of steel?

Of what significance is my stepping out of time to track this down old man, who repairs machines for a generation caught in their ways, bound to clunky precursors of another age? What bother, what cost? Why hold myself back against progress? I felt a tug of regret. Was I wasting time, indulging in flattery?

Whitlock rambled on. 'Classic little thing. No different than pen or pencil. Taken a lot of pounding. Hasn’t got the weight of say that Royal over there.' He gestured toward a heart sinking heap of ancient machines, elegant, but forgotten.

'What else is broken besides the shaft?'

'Margin release needs a clean. Some tender loving care. I’ll take it apart, clean it. Your carriage lock is broken. Can’t let you strip the escapement gears."


-:-

You Cut my Eyes

Te cortaste mis ojos, los arrebató.
Yo ya no veo.
Mi corazón se queda mirando a su trabajo,
Un amor que se ve.

He hablado con usted acerca de un lugar,
Siempre mantuve, para usted.
Está en mi corazón y llena de arte,
Atormentado por fantasmas, de usted.

En la cima de la gracia, caminé con la fe,
Tiempo demasiado corto a la atención.
Nuestro tiempo como torres cayó,
Moler cada minuto.

No puedo dar lo que haces para vivir,
Lo que no puede ser no puede comenzar.
Así que nuestras vidas sacó un cuchillo,
Y cortar nuestros corazones separados.

Ker-Ching Song

Sing to me that bling song, that kissing song,
The song you sing, when we bling, . . . my love.

Please don't cling me, just sing to me  . . . with that ker-ching song.

Write a song, as a dove alone.
Thus to win me, please don't string me,
Better bling me, . . . with that ker-ching song.

Keep ker-chinging  . . . with that kissing song.

Write some poetry, sung for me,
The bling you bring, numbs me,
Your poems sting me,  . . . with that ker-ching song.

Now my love, with bling for free,
Such coquetry will bring poetry.
Sing to me, that ker-ching song,   . . . . . . my love.