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.

Ass-Backwards

Rickety flickety,
Roger McMilligan,
Rode a fat donkey to
Boston, MA.

Destabilizingly,
Facing ass-backwards he
Flummoxed the exit and
Wound up in Maine.


( A double Dactyl written for English 324)

The Illusion of Difference

Go liken your weakness
to a green verdant glen,
rollicking in its shade
and mere temporality.

Deconstruct the spaces
that delineate dear
time, tangible distance,
autonomy and difference.

Fill yourself up, humming
Hi Hay Om, Glory and
Hallelujah to a
Universe that sings with you.

Crave the feeling of each
falling leaf and still rock
exuding oneness and
swelling with God on this Earth.

A Perspective

A rusted shovel head
molded into the gravel ground,
resting just under a stand of elegant old oaks
catches my eye as I pad the trail
through eighty-odd years old
iron ore territory, vast open trenches,
dynamite gashes cut into the crust,
and buried beside it a brown iron spike,
a railroad tie half rotted lying by.
I imagine the same trees in adolescence,
and a bustle of dusty thick-accented men,
passing through unhewn scaffolding
like ants to their tunnels, a steady clank
and buzz of Depression-Era mechanics,
violent blasts and burn-piles of refuse
blazing smoke into the bleeding sky.
I look back, justified,
feeling the incongruity of their business,
the ecological rent and rending,
and despise their callousness.
Under the thin shade
of the oaks and the artifacts
I saw, and was again caught,
by a cigarette butt in the gravel,
just then I felt my own barbs
dig in--seeing it there
resting so recently--
my own indignation
at the roughness of my grandparent's generation
turned back on mine
from the generations that lay ahead,
the naivete of my own time.

Read this in Bed.

Filmic Canterburries
Dance through my head,
Never moralizing like old Chaucer,
But rather pointed
Like Mountain Goats songs about
Meth-heads and lust,
Writerly like docu-voiceovers
and twisted with Tarantino Epigrams.

Someone asked me to carbonize them
or at least lighten them to air, voice,
but their substance
compounds too heavily
in my skull to scrape thoroughly,
stuck the ecstasy and terror
as they flick in my mind's eye.

A canvas could edge them elegantly
(If I were one to paint,
colors confuse me)
but only a crawling one,
flesh incarnate and walking,
running, breathing, singing,
stretched tight across the wood frame
that will rot or burn away,
In time leaving stiff silver images,
screened life-thoughts,
as a memorial to
my own meandering mind.

Take a Book (v 2)

Take a book
soundly,

hear it chime,
feel its wave.

So many antidotes
linger in her pages.

I'll never take them all,
bereft of silence
in this hall.

This is the system:

This is the system:

a trend factory

blasting b-boy beats

tuned down by House/dance

commercial Elites

and the hooks all change

to the pricing savvy

or mundane

hip hop clop trop

misogynistic bullshit

and the rattling speakerbox

is your own counterculture

hollowed out and bumping their

fucking commercial shit

and there's nothing you can do

but spit at it or call it what it is

or just pray it goes away

but it won't--

it's what IS,

this a capitalist-world ethos,

one Utility to all,

all devoured in gross consumption

all engulfed in Buy and Have,

this a corporate-slave Pangea

this a culture built on lust,

built on envy and on greed

goading hoarding and mistrust

where in which

each step is this:

another ad, another sign,

each appeal designed to cloy,

chorus calling to hypnosis

commercials selling soul-

replacement kits and glossy-packaged selves--

now tell me this,

in a world of crass hypocrisy,

and plutocratic myth,

of collared inspiration

and corporate co-opting,

is complicity required,

must our ignorance be bliss?

White, Blue

In intimate axes
of cerulean and white
dead trees foreground
an Everest in ice.

How tall runs that ridge?
Surely to Heaven
as its eye is on the Seine,
droves of magnate ice.

Freshness in an azure breath
blows the crispen wind
green and brown are vestiges
blue is the breeze and ice.

Treatises wonder:
where could the Sun be?
It is like the trees and wind,
blue and buried in ice.

Frankly all the coldness
arrests the warmth in me.
I feel blue and white,
another floe of ice.

Maybe I lie restless
on the bottom of the Seine
blue eyes wide and searching
their whiteness shines like ice.

Contemplating air on water
white in blue
drifting towards the surface
bubbles like depurposed ice.

Finally the colors seem lonely
blue craven for green or yellow
and white is nothing without black
--its hard to be happy, among so much ice.

Claude Monet "The Breakup of the Ice" 1880

Recital in a Frozen Hall

Seldom do the birds call when a sallow blanket falls
down the river fluid airscape of our Earth's most barren halls.
Fie to falling snowflakes chip the egret or the crow,
and the relics of November scoured
in glazen thick of snow,
each the birch's frozen paper
or the spruce's needle locked,
in a lattice water sheath that sparkles,
craven of the glow,
and a wind that whistles bleakly making needles of the snow,
and so now I see a frozen cloud, hanging fore my nose,
as the frigid apparition goes,
I go,
and a new one stands in spruce-birch stands,
listening for birds,
Winter taking breath and being,
leaving just these words.

Recital in a Frozen Hall (prose)

Seldom do the birds call when a sallow blanket falls down the river fluid airscape of our Earth's most barren halls. Fie to falling snowflakes chip the egret or the crow, and the relics of November scoured in glazen thick of snow, each the birch's frozen paper or the spruce's needle locked, in a lattice water sheath that sparkles, craven of the glow, and a wind that whistles bleakly making needles of the snow, and so now I see a frozen cloud, hanging fore my nose, as the frigid apparition goes, I go, and a new one stands in spruce-birch stands, listening for birds, Winter takes my breath and being, leaving just these words.

Lessons from A Plastic Brain

Posit a reduction,
assume a position,
reduce this position,
now you've reached a base
or low level of realism.

Redact the diction,
rearrange the drama,
verge on mental recital,
very soon you can taste
a vice or a syrupy potion.

Suspend your knowledge,
Suspect your seldom
seen but heard wisdom
and eventually a knit garland
will bridge the world and you.

Cut the tie,
mold the opalescent matter,
form your own brain
to your specifications, and let
the regions that digitize experience die.

Let your diet
dictate how your heart
opens and breathes
so it never has to rot inside out
from sweetness perspiring.

Heave a breath
for each moment
you jog your mind
and find a fire you thought
was long burned out and dead.

Very differently
constructed hearts seem
to radiate different auras,
so let yours radiate how it might
and find its own way.

Eat the honey
hand to mouth like
a bear in clear summer
and let the sweetness drip down your throat
into your thoracic cavity.

A list of newest things
is almost past its use
once its been written,
so find an older one
and have it rewritten in Sanskrit.

There It Goes.

Gravel, grit, sand
stacked like reams of

obscene magazines that
yellow when looked at

as the water is flung
down the sandy pit

I see my little canoe
go too

A list of everything that's ever been on fire

All trees have been
or will be on fire.
The wind is on fire
in a blizzard, 30 below.

When my head is on fire
burning grass dissuades it
and fire creeps down
to my throat lungs heart

and fire (finally) is in my blood, my mind.
Fire in South America,
Brazil is burning,
and the gasoline and

blood is on our hands.
Both are on fire.
Tires have always been
on fire, they will continue to burn.

Oil is on fire as it
rockets from a well.
100,000 Iraqis dead,
traded for a plume

and a tar-black flame.
The burning building hammers
down upon our helmets
as we struggle to haul barrels out.

So much for
an exit plan.

seaward glance

Sun and tide lapped the beach as one,
my borrowed sandals fit.
Chips of shell or bottle or bone
ordained the sand around me.
Free angles carry frames in shops
by way of light to my eye.
A seaward glance I chance and meet
a fey and dying boat.
Struck and stoned, I could not move,
its sinking I see still.

I never carry a camera,
my eyes are lens,
the image drawn in
is beholden to itself,
redemptive in the execution
of my memory.