Psychonautics IV

Don't dream like a quiet-eyed mule
Swatting flies with a flicking tail,
Dream like a Rooster with its
Dim, dumb eyes cast skyward,
Dream like a Javelina hoping for that
Handful of poultry hearts,
Dream like the ravenous Wolf rousing
Sleeping geese in hopes one falls scared,
Dream like a feckless hare,
Daring to pass under the garden fence.
Do dream like a quiet-eyed mule
All jejune and swatting flies--
But only if you do it relentlessly,
If you do it desperately, never feigning sleep
Or waiting for a shepherd.
Do it, dammit, as if you'll die
If you don't.

Psychonautics III

Why blast off into adulthood
Just like your parents did?
Try a new fuel mixture
Or a fuselage design that
More resembles your own head.
The Moon is over--
Even Mars is unremarkable.
Perhaps Mercury or Jupiter
Would suit your vocation--
But for me
It's straight into the Sun
Smiling facefirst as the star
Consumes me whole.

Psychonautics II: Sebastian Seung on Mapping the Connectone

Mental experiences--
That's a funny way of saying
Everything I've ever felt or
Smelled or
Thought or
Considered or
Remembered or
Wondered or
Imagined or
Pined for or
Cried over or
Recalled briefly from a dream or
Had seared deeply into my memory or
Prayed to or
Memorized or
Loved,
But, I suppose,
He is
the Neuroscientist.
-----------------------
He can consider the
Creekbed of consciousness--
I'll have my head in the stream.

Psychonautics I

Your brain is just in this weak little bubble
That it's floated in since you could talk,
Refracting and distorting what's really
Going on Out There, amongst the bosons
And waves and strings of matter.
A baffled funhouse-mirror is how you see.
That is your world through
The curvature of your bubble.
Let's pop it.

For Frigates Intercepted by Icebergs

A simple salute, a word to wit,
don't steer North, stay the course,
go down like a Legend in ice.
I'll tell all your wives you were wayward knights,
and your children that you carried the cargo
of a relentless God.

Waiting Room Blues

Take a number, then wait in your head.

In it creeps as she calls your name.

The slow haunt.
The way you achingly stand

And lay out each word said,
A breath held and twisted inside.
Your eyes leap down
Her vaunted figure.
Grasping for straws

Or bushes
Or roots
Or anything that will keep you

From falling into those eyes,
And now her lips and thighs--
You're cruelly craven now,

Awed and self-despised,

Shrinking now to your seat,

Unable even to speak

As her heels click by.

Please check all that apply.

The Rite Of Spring (draft 2)

When finally the terrible ash falls,

And soot-dark hooves pound our crystalline, moon-splintered streets,

As drifting tin asterisks plummet like blinking stars
Puffing mushrooms on the horizon;

Let the Fount of Knowledge live, and its darker children pass.

I will not mourn.
When the rhythms of the New World break apart,
And the rhythms of the deep Earth crack and start,
When the Sun is

watch, compass, match,
And the dogs of older days all devolve to feral hounds,
And the highways grow like deserts, and the shrubs reclaim the roads,
Letting lichen stumble freely onto project and penthouse alike,
She lashes out in equitable totality, Earth,
And wills her skin grown back,
Where we once peeled it away.
Then all the people will be scattered
And each minute like a leaf that falls, uncounted,

while dirt coats our tongues like smoke the world.
And all of our bleak treachery, our base treason
That has scarred and eviscerated,

will dissolve without a flourish.

Spring may be near enough, but our Winter will be rough,
and our diet one of rawness: roots and wild meat.
Our eyes will hone and sharpen, and our feet will weather black,
Our bones will weaken, our limbs will lose muscle and gain sinew—
Human bodies grown hard, stolid and leanly crafted to the soil.

Salvaged chests of books and relic scraps of art,
Our children might hear stories of Modernity,

but just as a dream, a tale.
Golden are the mornings I'll wake,
cool and light, dewy and bright
with hard tasks at hand,
but without guilt,
and pure-driven easiness livening my feet,
tides of grass and wildflowers that ebbed will be in resplendence,
precious floorboards of a new and wider home.