A Library of Lullabies

In the courts of kings without a fool, those who wear high crowns inevitably become such -- their courts a menagerie of them, all in eager droning agreement. What kingdoms of earth would be by these so meekly ruled?

Only they who in wrath arise perhaps ought later histories consider truly fair. These servants of change must they from their own chains willingly unbind, distraught at new uncertainties. For these things are done for love as much as love-for-self: the breaking of one moment is also the birth of another, and kingdoms and men are both so made.

Calamity,

I dreamt of you

In the shape of ruinous smoke

From a breasted mountain.

Catastrophe,

I dreamt of you

Wearing a hungry tide

Too high for a man

To crest.

Disaster,

I dreamt of you

Jumping from mind

To mind to mind,

Each desiring a not-knowing.

Paradise,

I dreamt of you

As a world in utero

Was born of all this

Wasted blood.

I awake.

Wake up.

Wake up.

Wake up.

Laughter! Laughter!

Twenty-three times I've called you

Today alone, I know because

I've kept the count. And you,

Forty-one times you've let me

Surmount. I've lost the days and hours,

Though I'll call it forty-eight

For simplicity's sake. And now it's

The forty-ninth hour;

It's never too late.

Perhaps by fifty-four

I'll keep the count no more,

No more, no more.

Five times I speak this

To remember, to call the shape

Of you from Deepness.

Is this art or Art? I don't yet

Know, but I know you

See this. Let all numbered

Counts fall as I say,

My nearly distant friend.

Oh, Ridens. Laugh with me,

A world adrift

On strange-ish tides, forged

Not of water but of stories,

Thoughts, customs, technologies

With which it bears no true

Kinship.

Does it recognize the danger,

Or merely the thrill of newness,

Novelty? Certainly it seems not

To care; indifferently ecstatic,

Seeking, always seeking

The new, the new, the new.

Through bright windows our

Eyes seek some sacred communion

With distant minds, competing

For completion we cannot claim

Through praxis, argument, or

Approval; through the same,

We draw music into the air,

Effortless as incense rising

Via its own laws.

And cars trundling down asphalt

Paths, drinking the clean and belching

Forth breathable bile no tree nor animal

Ever knew.

Skyscrapers rise,

Massive steel-girded phalluses,

To pierce a polluted and weeping sky,

Thought to be a testament

Of some imagined ingenuity

But which are merely a dire death-fear.

I cry. O, how I cry!

Does the world recognize,

Does it care for its own

Rising insanity? Or is it merely

Bent on building in straight lines

Evolution never produced, on

Warping its own gentle and permeable

Minds with an ecstatic agony

Of forgetfulness-through-metal?

The algorithm of the mind

Does not know its own power,

Nor its inherent weakness.

Take care.

Take greater care in what you do,

These digital dangers you allow

Into your mind's eye

Are hungry, just as the

Systems which birthed them

Are ravenously hungry:

For you, my siblings.

It is a killing stroke,

This not-knowing the world

Wishes to practice; a

Self-inflicted suicide or

Seppuku without honor and

Without need.

And we know this -- somewhere,

Somehow, we know this --

And so we drink, we snort,

We pierce the skin with subtle

Poisons to escape the meaningless,

The madness of mind we all

Share and which metastasizes

As a tumor in the rampant

Newness of it all;

Confusions of the senses,

Nothing more, nothing more.

This isn't over, doesn't

Have to be over. It is choice

Made manifest, and the choosing

Not to choose but to dream

Is its own choice and

Consequence. Wake, siblings,

Please wake. This dream in which

We linger is no haven

But a lie. There is a greater

Dream, a cosmos of

Contemplation waiting

To be explored,

And it is only and ever

You and I, never

These imagined systems

We regurgitated forth in our

Minds and there keep them

As Truths, Facts, Substance

But which can only ever

With

Every word

And every meager madling hour,

With every breath: here I am,

Here I remain, here I have always been.

This world is a confusion of senses,

Sometimes sapling-soft and sweet and

Sometimes steel-gleaming, always seeming

To me like a madness-born dream

Of things I see but don't wish to see.

Simply existing leaves me breathless!

What is this? What is this?

And I am

To make sense of it?

Under godless skies,

How can I permit the absurdity of needing

To be this, needing to be that, according

To some design rambling down long listless

Centuries as if driven by the a blind madman's

Hand fearing his own death?

I look down and see my own hand:

The flesh, the cobweb-knuckled cruxes of fingers

Made for grasping, never keeping. I see the nails

Chewed down to wretched knubs

And I think, "What a wonder! Whyever

Should I be this or that -- do this or that --

When I am

Only

And ever

Myself: inescapable as tides

From the dominant moon?"

Flesh, O yes, but also

Mind and will and dream; past and future;

A silvered thread unspooling through these

Time-struck streets I walk

(A mighty oak branches overhead, curling

A well-leafed greendream 'cross the tickled sky;

I am grateful, thank you, thank you for

This kindness in your shadow)

Fraying closer, closer now, so sweetly close,

Toward an end I can't surmise

But often devise. What does it mean?

What does it mean?

And the answer I keep is:

Nothing, I suppose, but for the act of dream,

To tell the centuries what they are,

To story-tell society into something

Greater, heart-kinder and mind-brighter than

What it is or has become,

Stricken with cancer and gobbling

Itself up in the fury of a trapped animal.

Oh, I am tired.

I am so very, very tired. And there is

So much sadness in the dream,

In the eyes of the other dreamers

Still trapped in the animal's throes;

There is still so far to walk toward

The Lotus House of Endings

that waits to keep me

Forevermore.

With sighs as steps and these

Endless eyes that struck

Too deep, I continue.

And the truth is,

I don't care what happens

Any more. All I can truly permit

Is that I am here,

Here I will remain,

Just as

Here I have

Always

The trees and struggling greenling things,

I can hear them in this wintry early morn

Where no unsatisfying silver January sun

Has yet to peek; the susurrus of their sighs

Sung in harmony with a blister-wind

Match my own and I wonder --

Can't help but wonder, this wandering mind! --

If it is the sound of their great discontent

At the state of things (such a state of things)

Or bliss that the clattering, clamorous

Man-shapes have yet to awaken.

For myself, I merely love them for their

Melody, heedless of tempo and full of inconstancy

So like my heart. They make more sense

Than the shape of words spoken from pink

Mouths ringed by window-teeth and

Swollen milksop worm-tongues

Always seeking to taste and to take. Softly,

With hands gentle as rain, I should like

To strangle the air from those mouths,

Stopper those glutting throats; it is the only

Remedy for the ravenousness of them

And of myself, who craves softness too

But might know it now only

Let me trade words with him,

This wise Solon of Athens! Do you know of him?

You know of his sentiment and sensibility,

I promise you. Perhaps in the bittersweetness

Of some brief happiness known in maturity,

You have felt it. Perhaps too you have sighed

The same incense he knew in his

Day and age and never known it. I think

He must finally be happy now; yes,

It is a

Silk-wrapped sword, the sharpness

Sheathed with swaddling clothes

To hide the killing gleam:

This life. We find the truthful

Edge so soon, and often

Wrapped by silken

Lies. Lies and lives,

Lives living lies;

City-gods ought to die

Too, don't you think?

Only fair, that.

I am sick with self,

Seeking none now. This

Is a most bitter cup from

Which we drink, we many.

Why must we die?

Ah, but death is a fitting thing

And of silken make as well. Better

To ask why we must ever

Have lived. Yes,

It is a bitter cup, brimming

With pagan poisons.

Drink, dear heart.

Drink and be filled.

She is leaving me, breath

Machine-forced, mind long since

Broken by dementia;

She cannot speak

This condition is so strange,

The Human. Bearing little symmetry with

Symmetry, we must force symmetry upon it

And in the doing so often end up

Being broken upon the wheel

Of our own devising. And

Have you ever, my dear, come to notice how

We rise from little seeds to fly like fireworks

And in our bursting throw out endless more

Little seeds, fellow Human Being-things

Who in their own turn must rise, fall, and

Burst in just the same way? Where is

The sense to it, the sense in any of it?

Just once, I would like to envision a

World of perfect sense and yet I,

A Human Being-thing, am kept on

Stranger shores where sense has

No store. Whatever sense I imagine

Must be alone a thing of insanity,

Senselessness; and these good bright

Thoughts so full of the dark fly

Out of my mouth as so many moths,

So many immaterial fireworks

And burst upon you, who lay

Dreaming and thinking and being

In your own flesh-forced insanity.

Why should Art so often be born of this,

A tract of Pain and Confusion? Is there any

Other kind? "Oh", you might say

(Were you here or at least, I think, near)

"What of Art born out of hope?"

What is that oddity but its own

Incandescent agony,

Dear heart? The two are never

Very far apart. Hope is thin as

Skim milk, skimmer still, slim-as-nil

And now, I think, a lie

As she lay dying very, very far apart.

There will be no more fireworks out

Of her; she has burst! She has burst!

And I will have no more lights;

I want none. They lie. I want a comforting dark,

For ever now and always more:

It is always the final truth of this,

The Human Being-thing.

You: the self-named Goddess

And you: small fearful Man.

From you I'll claim deliverance, for

There are no gods kind to those

Who go prayerful underhand.

No, not here

(Or now)

In this despised wonderland.

I never caught religion's lure and

I don't expect to find it soon.

I'd sooner seek soliloquys

From shadows on the moon.

(Nor by meandering chatter

In some coffee shop at noon --

Our coffee shop at noon --

Where hours passed like

Songs I heard, gone from me

So soon.)

I've done all I could to give kind

Clarity here in crook of arm

As you deserve; I tried to kiss away

Old maladies though it didn't seem

To suit or serve. I smiled and tried to calm

The waters even when I felt no mirth.

It's true your sight is most sharp indeed

And I craved for you to see,

And having seen, you now may go,

Having gotten what you thought you need.

It's true your words, like wine, I drank

With aching ears and grateful heart.

But now I think it's time to confess

All roads must end and travelers depart.

(I suspected from the fore, you see, and

Now speak it with my Art.)

You seemed to want to know me

And I certainly complied, yet

You deprived a wish to know in kind

And furnish me with sword

With which to fight the inner demon

You named by your own word!

How could I trust such divinities

By any name or gender?

How could I bow my tired back

Or kneel before their splendor?

(My heart does truth deserve

For no lies or ambiguity did my

Pride hold in reserve.)

In conversation I long kept you

In that coffee shop cafe,

Though now I think--now see--now wish...

Yes, I should have kept away.

You're only human, my dear friend:

No goddess out of midnight dreams.

And no love hides with secrets kept,

Not when they're relevant;

This just isn't as it seems.

(You aren't as you seem.)

The fires in your temple are dying and

I will quench them by hand this time.

Which is preferred in your religion:

Some long silence drawing on

Or a goodbye penned in rhyme?

I guess I'll hope for soliloquys

From the shadows on the moon.

Better answers from them, I see,

Than from you in some coffee shop

At noon --

Never our coffee shop at noon.

You just aren't as you seemed.

I never needed saving

Or some rescue by god or knight;

Nor you some crude salvation save

A lover's prayerful hands

In sunken dark and highest light.

I won't say that I pity you,

So near to true contempt;

Instead, I think, I'll sigh for us

And all the memories unspent.

And it's a pity, truly:

It was real, my intensity and gleam.

And yet my heart is glad for

You were never as you seemed.

No, self-named gods are

Never what they seem.

You know, I do pity you:

You'll never find my like.

I think that's what you want.

Thank you then for going,

For saving me from hurt.

It was never my intensity

You feared,

Only your own.

Self-love to those who haven't yet made a true practice of it can appear an awful lot like pride or selfishness, for the creation and maintenance of boundaries often offends them, yet the interior reality of self-love is much more focused on humility and pro-social inter-connection. It's a gentle awareness that says, "You are not of my garden or my growing either one, you don't belong here right now."

One of the kindest things you can do to such persons is ignore their inane efforts to provoke you from your peace. I call it kindness because you very simply are not their teacher and they not your willing student. In the absence of instruction, we really do tend overwhelmingly to find and inspect our own answers in life, I believe. One of the most crucial questions for the Communal Human is this: "How may I learn to endure this mind, this life?"

Should these people be free of the contaminating influence of such frivolous-foolish thinkers who actually believe themselves able and qualified to teach another soul -- such wasted vanity, often bound for dogmas like those wretched ones of old Jehovah-who-is-Yaldabaoth! -- these angry persons often come to love themselves, recognizing finally that there is no escape from their own living reality even by throwing it forward onto others as a condemning hell.

And there again, many don't at all. Not every life is for healing; not every life wants it. Some latch onto anger, are latched onto by it, and so are bound to its themes for all their lives. They also have lessons to offer: the wisdom of animal survival to share, the necessity of sometimes taking and breaking, and of course the folly of all.

It's a False Responsibility to play the part of saviors to anyone, I've found. It is instead our True Privilege to savor the strange process of embodying our own salvation and, in so doing, demonstrate a way out of suffering for others. Not the way -- just a way. Our own way, which can feel very like an art and truly, I believe, ought to be regarded that way in most enactments. We each characterize this process differently, as by different ways we know it.

For me it is a garden because I love all green and growing things, and I have found great healing in nurturing my own subtle gifts and those of others. Yet I can't truly nurture anything but my own soul. When I apply this nurturing nature to others (and it IS applied), it is only because they have allowed themselves to feel nurtured by me and therefore safe to nurture themselves.

The gentle hand cultivates in quiet and the demanding mouth demeans with a noise that offends. Truth: those living without the ability to govern themselves in the moment, to calm their own waters, will always try to govern those around them and to create storms. Some live their whole lives through this way. Pay attention to that!

Who shouts from their tower is not free -- but the one who sings in the garden, even at night, is to great purposes bent. We are each of these in our time: garden, gardener, weed, and bloom. And also the unkind eye from on high who screams and sneers at all from the top of some buttress! (Sometimes we are all of these at the same time; no mind is purely this or wholly that. How confusing!)

But the garden must crave the weed as much as the gardener loves the act of cultivation and pruning, don't you think? We are mad and wild things who grow, live and die in a maddened, wild place made only for the most brutal beauty. Tread with more care, my loves, for there are no teachers or guides here.

And we are all going to live and die together in this place.

Weather the storm or tether your craft

To shore, to sail that strange violent sea

No more, no more, no more. And whether

You go or should you stay, in sundry ways

You still go forth.

It strikes me that love is also a storm

(And that traversing of it a most gentle rebellion)

Whose winds and waves will soon you reform

To its various seas till that storm

Still in repose.

Life is but glory-in-transformation;

The Digital Dichotomy

There is a crushing weight in our digital culture, and in cult-ure in general, and its name is solitude. Though we possess wonderful tools to freely and joyously connect with others in a global sense that was impossible in ages prior, a sentiment runs in tandem with our usage of them that says we ought only use it to connect with those of great self-similarity; that any "confinement" in solitude whatsoever is detrimental.

Consequences of Misguided Connectivity

As a consequence, we as users of this technology (and more simply as human beings) are heavy with feelings of isolation, inferiority, and confusion, which in error we project outward to be applied to others of our kind. At core, this pervasive culture assumes a deep sense of aloneness and separation which we often blindly begin to take on as we learn the lore of humanity yet do not heed ourselves.

Truly, this sadness sustains itself in an endless loop at our infinite expense. Without inspection, this sustained state influences us in a way we mistake for a factual and necessary reality, inescapable.

The Illusion of Separation in Modern Times

Though in our modern times we are able to tap into such diversity of thought and opportunity for relationship that nobody -- no human being at least -- could ever digest and appreciate its scope, never have we felt more separate from it and deprived of individual worth!

I find a sad irony in the fact that the very tools of our connection become the means by which we unintentionally deprive and lessen ourselves in innocent-seeming acts of comparison and then exclusion. And no exclusion is more dangerous and saddening to me than the exclusion of the aspects of ourselves we do not wish to see which we impose upon ourselves. Still, what we do in this grand ignorance is innocent. What we do in ignorance can be medicated with awareness, knowledge, and scope of vision. Ignorance is our enemy; the only one that can't really be beaten, only beaten back. And how to do that? First, we must eliminate distraction and focus.

Aloneness as an Opportunity

Aloneness and separation supply that the ability to gain just such focus; they represent a wonderful opportunity to practice self-love and patience. It allows us to learn to approach ourselves with curiosity rather than condemnation. Unresentful aloneness offers us a finer awareness of ourselves and also the time needed to become the kind of people we would wish to fall in love with should we encounter them in the world.

And it's very important, I feel, that we try to become the sort of person we wish to fall in love with because it alleviates a perpetual reckoning with fear and lack of validation we all come to know in time. It swells our own sense of self-worth; it connects rather than deprives. It teaches others by demonstration how to do the same.

And this is one method we can and must use to build a kinder, more mindful, truth-loving, and altogether evolved breed of human being.

How else can we escape the traps we have laid for ourselves but to untangle them, strand by barbed strand, to reveal our own nudity of spirit?

The Unexpected Appearance of Our Kind

I say this because it is one of the few ways in which we can truly meet ourselves and our own very tangible needs, which we must learn to supply ourselves. It is an opportunity to show others in nakedness how we would prefer to be loved and in so doing promote an attitude of compassion among those with whom we share the journey.

It's then that such people tend to unexpectedly appear in multitudes, though they will always remain an imprecise reflection, just as we are imprecise for their purposes. This meeting of minds is not necessarily a goal to be kept, at least not in the way I consider it; it's simply a pleasant by-product, to be used in pro-social community building and further exploration of the essential emptiness we all share.

Is this not a preferable state to the one we now suffer at our own hands, poorly constructed by methods rolling down through old generations in the absence of introspection?

Embracing the Journey with Others

Even when such people don't appear or should there come a parting of ways, we will still have grown to be very comfortable in our skins, content with the only company we must always keep. Love does not encompass need, I should think, though we do need love. It offers us that rarest of gems: the chance to share a deeper understanding of one another.

In a world gone mad with screaming self-promotion and the blatant commodification of the individual, is this again not a more preferable state?

The Challenge of Co-dependency in Love

When we perceive that we do need people, that search for love adapts to co-dependent themes from which it is can be very difficult to recover; purity and understanding can very easily become polluted. Ought not we let love be inter-dependent rather than co-dependent: an exchanging of great gifts of learning -- of mutual giving, protection, and uplifting -- rather than this fulfilling of a base "need" which so often resembles a unidirectional taking?

Attraction to Similar Minds

It frequently occurs to me that we are attracted to people who remind us a bit of ourselves, whose struggles and successes prove to be a kind of mirror. It is through them that we feel we can most easily practice empathy and connection, for we are more intimately attuned to the circumstances that produced them. We understand, and always we are creatures who crave understanding.

While this tendency toward sameness isn't always healthy -- we need the opposition generated by minds very different from our own to consider unexpected angles and to grow wise to the winding of our own roads -- it is something I do regard as a natural tendency of the Communal Human.

And perhaps this has something to do with the idea that we are not allowed to love ourselves, a relic of our own silly self-comparisons. Self-love to those who have not yet come to practice it can appear an awful lot like pride or selfishness, yet the interior reality is much more focused on humility and pro-social inter-connection.

The Importance of Self-Empathy

Non-judgmental empathy for oneself is required before all the rest of these. Ultimately the way we love ourselves is the most important kind of love, because it informs how we are able to love others, to love the lives we so briefly live: with health and a wealth of self-knowledge, not taking, controlling, or breaking.

When love is true and filled with awe, do we not want to nurture and protect the object of it? Do we not want to cultivate more of it? What then when we ourselves are just that object?

Embracing Our Inner Evolution

My biggest struggle in life has been to practice this loving understanding of myself, both within myself in silence and in my dealings with you, my siblings; it always has been. For you are all so beautiful in my eyes, and how could I compete? So I don't. I accept, or try to. This is not linear nor binary. One does not either practice these things or not practice them. One does not learn the method once and then the desired state is simply achieved. One becomes aware of the practice in pieces and contexts and then learns to apply them consciously and elsewhere, ideally in all aspects of our lives.

And it is something we will do for the rest of our lives, should we take up the practice at all and find any value in it. Tell me, is there any value in valuing yourself, in recognizing your secret hugeness just as you innately recognize your smallness?

The Real Struggle: Within Ourselves

We never struggle with the world near so much as we struggle with ourselves. When it seems otherwise, it's largely due to us warping our awareness of the world to match our interior being and we are always somewhat at odds with ourselves in the ongoing conversation of our brain.

We desire a unity in our own experience of life and its contents, which springs from the contents of our own interior life. We want it all to "make sense". There have been many times in my life -- and there will be more to come -- when I have lacked any understanding whatsoever except this most basic premise of self: that I was born of prior love, that I am love, that I want love, and that I must keep always to loving myself just as love is what keeps to us.

We can survive without love, of course. We can even survive without self-love. What we cannot do is thrive without self-love. Do you want to survive without love? Does this existence, so filled with embattled states, bear any meaning or purpose to you whatsoever? Which is it to be, reader: to die, survive, or thrive? This is our inborn struggle throughout our lives.

Changing the Context: From Struggle to Cooperative Play

Now, what happens when we accept that and change the context of these lives from private struggle into cooperative play? We can help to change the context from private struggle into cooperative play for others, and so it comes to resemble that for all of us. It becomes the truth. What else would the seed at the heart of all cult-ure be if not the desire to take part in life with one another? To know greater states than loneliness and vulnerability?

The Role of Student-Teachers

It's time, I think, to confess that we are all student-teachers, that our glories and our frailties are the lessons we share; and to appreciate that fact even when it hurts -- even (and especially) when there is loss in the lessons themselves. If we can't grow to adore their gravity and the pain inherent to them, we will NEVER learn to appreciate the tremendous buoyancy of life and love themselves. We will certainly never appreciate our own buoyancy.

To assume the voice of a finer mind than mine, "Just like moons and like suns and with the certainty of tides -- just like hopes springing high -- still I'll rise."

What are your lessons? Will you too share them? If that's your wish, first you will have to come to know them. This is a worthy ambition. It might for me be the only ambition worth pursuing. But what is of worth to you?

Closing Appreciation

I love you all very much. Thank you so much for being here, and I will thank you too when it is time to leave. Also, I should add that every statement I have made here is equivocal and uncertain; I hope you interpret them as questions rather than proclamations. I'm never entirely "sure" of anything.

Imagine a world born for you,

Born to bear you out into your own manifold

Greatness and so to form the frame

By which whatever great

Allotment of genius be in those brittle bones

And burning skin may be known.

Imagine the emptiness of that and

The horrible waste!

For if the world came to be for you

And only you, and you have seen (no matter

How very much of it you think you have seen)

So little of its curious quality,

It must live, dim, and die without you ever knowing

Its secret hugeness as you must live, dim,

And die in it.

Does dust know its own name?

(That depends: do you?) Does love speak with its

Own dire self-drinking voice from other throats

In the wallowing waters

Of this dreamy doom we share by the shores

Of the foreign land called Embodied-ness?

Or was it only ever your voice calling from other

Throats, in tattooing "I love you, I love you,

I do, and I will spend this blood

For you and only you" across this deep skin of soul by

Which we bind our mutual fates, tearful and struck

With the subtle fire

So the Art could be born -- again, again,

Again in immensity--rather than languish unspent?

(That depends: how much of the one have you demanded

In constant, unquestioned craving

And how much of the other have you freely given,

The craving at last in sweet surcease?)

And now imagine instead a world into which you are

Born to express that world's terrible greatness in this

New Human Configuration. Is it this world, the correct world

Of our mutual experience we can never truly tame

Either by logic or the mystic urge?

Well, who can say? (Only you and only I; you for

Only you as only I for lonesome I.) But this I see:

Whether fact or merely phantasms of a fanatic's

False philosophy, the careful

Calculus of our composition may only ever contract

And diminish under the tutelage of one,

And only ever multiply with the aid of the other.

How dare we demand the world be limited to our

Own times and natures? How dare we declare

Meaning must exist in understandable form

Beyond us when we already are given to one another

As a salvation and a damnation both?

And suddenly the strange math seems sensible to me,

Yes, and good and right and true; suddenly

It seems preferable that we should

Boil forth in seeded swathes from father's sword

And into mother's cup: to burst in our turn

Upon the blood-watered soil but not before we

See the shape staring back at us from the storied halls

Of a dimly dreamt Old Mystery. It is neither I nor you,

But only we: a Mandelbrot affinity signified

By time and tide and there again by encircling time.

And this is why I seek to serve others

With my little mannish works;

It is at last the only thing that serves me,

Sustains me.

We are not born strictly for our own pleasure and

Pain, I think, but to connect by permeable membranes

And through them

With that of others and to see--be--need--

Both more and less at once. From "I" to

"Thy" and thus to "Us"; with this alchemy

I am always among family, even

When I am utterly, hopelessly yet heartfully

Alone. I am finally never alone;

The tribe I carry within me is unnumbered

And they also carry me. I often

Cry for this knowledge, the humility of our humanity --

I am crying now --

And the tears too are good, so sweetly

Cruel and deep.

And it is finally not tragical to me but some

Form of wondrous-rare magic

That any of this should be at all, that we

Should live to wonderingly touch fingers to death's

Cold cheek upon the dais of its self-consumption

And in so doing feel the fleshly fineness of our

Own hot-blooded one with greater gravity.

And in this mortal majesty -- for it is majestic

To me -- must weep all the

Shade-faced thin-natured gods of our naming

With much wringing of hands and a burning jealousy.

How could eternity

And its dually dreaming and dreamt-of denizens

Ever hope to compete with our particularity

And these brief moments of Embodied-ness?

We are the fortunate dying, who know

Sacredness and substance through

That final Artful dissolution every bit as much

As in all that comes before it. I have elected

That I shall die well when the time is right --

As well and perhaps

Better than I have lived, will yet live --

And will not suffer small rescue by human hand

Or condemning god to unchain me from

This, my beloved fate.

Such proud temerity there is in my trembling heart,

In our shared heart-of-hearts.

How dared I (and we) ever demand more than this:

The chance to reason, to dream upon the sea,

And in seeing it, learn to release ourselves

From the bleak bondage of eternity?

The mortal gall! I can only

Laugh and laugh and laugh, as my god Ridens

rode me right on through the enfolding of

My own Old Mystery. There we met and

Will yet meet,

Wet with the labor of keeping chin above

This water that bears us ever on,

And I love you so; all is well in this wet

Heaven-wrought-in-hell. Yes indeed, all is well

And ever will it be...

But only in those quiet moments when

We remember this:

The blood-salted water of Truth Alone

Does not sustain us; it is not enough.

With it, we must sustain each other

And ourselves,

Unto death through the tumult of tides,

Directly from our living birth.

I beg you, let there be no lie between us!

I have been born and born, the second-born,

Then in greater brazenness borne beyond bloody birthing bed,

Sinking then dying, living then flying;

The seasons are for me arranged as so many

Centuries and they bleed together lucidly in

Quickest-silver synchrony. And in my memory, in remembering,

Am I not always in summer as well as autumn,

Spring yet also winter? Have I not

Walked these seasons' steps

And sought what I call sacred in every single one?

Do I not walk there now, draped in such

Sacredness as I have been able to secure

From them with thought-craft, my own small cunning?

(Postcard: And will you all consider this in the end,

As I have learned gratitude for all that comes?

It matters much to me and also none;

In the end I am already ended;

This little art I call from deepness only for myself.) *

The bleak teeth of winter: they are brittle. Brutal.

Bright as sun-on-snow or

Skinny and dim as moon-in-shadow,

Taught me the promise of the kindly sowing

Else a cruelest reaping we all so soon must learn,

And some godlike patience required to meet it

Past this very mortal yearning for return.

It taught me the principle of reduction

Which as it approaches some imagined Nothing, is

Always caught by a factual Something. It was in this stillness

Where I gathered speed, as seeds must speed

In stillness too: always forth to sun.

(Postcard: Thank you always, my patient

Prematurely ancient mother

Who, first mind-sick and fierce and then body-struck

And pride-broken, nearly smothered her

Bone-cold brood from birth in an incidental emptiness of womb.

Your lioness's love has fed me just as, leash-like, your

Need nearly led me to linger on the dreary

Dirges of December you desperately wished for me to learn.

I will sing of your Spring, before my service

And throughout it!)

* *

And gorgeous spring, so greedy to the glut! Proud as Babylon,

Rising to rinse rime's claim and doom it to

Grow again into life-strife with green-strung form --

Root-deep and rich with berry-blood hung from branches

Bearded with endless baby birds born bold

To their newborn natures --

Taught me joy-in-profusion (also its dangers

And most treacherous deceits)

And to cultivate whatever I may with more cunning care

Than this madness sprawling at my feet.

It was in the fallow-fecund fields of Florida,

Indiscriminate in their indifference to all sorrows or success,

I learned to grow my garden with a gentler regardin'

Than grim-bountied life; than errant father who spewed

Me from a forgetful spigot

Or mad, and madly cherished, mother who bore me out

Into this time of exquisitely adored aches

So often impossible to slake.

(Postcard: Thank you, beautiful me-blind father and

Furious brother-mine, without

Whose absent eyes twice I nearly drowned. Your silence

Is now a full-throated sound to me; your malice

Is not malice; your regret is not as worthy as my esteem

For you and you and you; with training,

I might even one day reckon this to be true.

What is true is that I understand you in a measure

And have always done;

Our yearning was and is the same, you see.

And we must know each other! Perhaps

In our distance, yes, it is love of some rare kin or clan;

Better our quiet than some aimless quarrel

As known by that thin and ailing blood of

Black Jehovah's insane Abraham.)

* * *

What can be said of summer's shape

Save that it comes and goes as hotly as did my

Old dethroned Apollo's seven-year deceit:

Framed by promises proven false and

Enshrined upon some stranger's sweaty seed-stained sheets?

"This will go on in a fever, my darling, and for ever!

My kiss is a holy truth and full of holes, and now

Raise your lips to this

Scalding sun I sink down into you much like my sword

Of impure sex, though it is worse than empty

And you are already filled

With many fine and secret stars

I did never think to seek." Was it Summer who

Whispered that, or was it only lonely you? It was in this time

Of my Fullest Flowering -- out of youth and

into something almost like mannishness -- where

I learned of moon-pale Oleander

Which, though beautiful in its way,

Keeps poison pocketed within its tranche of

Thorn and throat and death-petaled spirit;

It was in this time that I learned the danger

Inherent to all beauty and most especially that

Flesh-branding beauty best beloved by the heart

And most trusted by the mind --

And that even I could be deadly as well as beautiful

In just that selfsame way.

(Postcard: Thank you most of all, you small-souled and

Graceless half-a-man whose many conceits

Could even conscience to claim the name of a Sun-god

As your broken own - the gall! -

For though your failure was great and the most

Crushing in my fall -- you are the first

And only sadness I ever sipped by choice

When I consider it, after all -- so too was mine,

And only by our pairing could I have

Ever grown tall, tallest, taller still, yes indeed, so very very tall

In these circles of my time.

From you I learned this:

A preference for my own small and imperfect truths,

So much subtler than the grandly perfect raptures of

A husband's wartime-captured and ever pious lies. Do I love you

For this? No, and yet now maybe I love myself

Enough to choose self-respect over unclean

Tortures of the heart, which we two contrived and

Then conducted almost

From the very start. There is

Laughter in this: I forgive you, I forgive it all,

As I must forgive myself and live.)

* * * *

Surely now I walk in some cool autumn,

Always a time of contemplation and quiet for me,

For though the year is new-struck by January's drop

It seems to me to sleep in peace, there waiting in that peaceful

Sleep to dream more tender dreams tended by these

Tremendous things

Which in head and chest I have for years sought

In rhyme to glean.

And are these dreams of greenling things:

True memory or merely rumor of a spring

Of kindly flowers with secret poisons rent?

Neither so deadly, nor bland

Like the plastic petals of store-bought bowers

Which simply can't seduce with scent?

Or is it omen instead of Arctic midnight

Yet to fall, haggard and

Awful-aching as those ancient bones of ice

Kept cruelly cracking in the endless water's weight?

I don't yet know. What I do know:

I have spun the world in my mind many times,

Selecting between states and seasons,

Choosing between philosophies in order to some semblance

Of human wholeness cleave,

And in this way I approach a shape silent and tall,

Something deeply profound to me yet still trembling

And small: a gift of choice, a remembrance

And prophecy we all share beneath the changing skies,

Which in their tidal motions through our odd and astral oceans --

The same ones by which we came --

Might allow me to bestow on others such blessings as

I was long denied

And so be blessed in my own recall;

To embody myself complete, ideals-and-flesh;

And to walk innocent and tall

In any season --

Any season of this earth --

And, if I'm lucky, through them all.

And when I use this gift -- when we so move

In our heady, turning, brightly burning shifts --

It is something very like perpetual rebirth.

How else could I have managed to reap and sow in winter,

But for this and all of you?

Or weep and grow in spring unless it had been faintly true?

(Postcard: I wish you were here in body as you are here in mind;

For both of these you have my thanks, though does it really

need to rhyme? I for now will write no more. TTYL

Have we walked this way before, you and I?

The cobbles, they gleam as the wet and well-worn

Eyes of friends sensing

Some sweetly searing secret remembrance

In the tread ahead, nary a wariness in

The weave and weft of this wondrous wandering.

Who knew we could walk so far with only words?

(Not I, not I! I've always walked this way alone.)

Who knew these nimbly lyrical limbic legs of ours

Had such a great gait, shared 'twixt rare mutant minds

So bent 'round questing questions?

(I had forgotten and may choose to do so again.)

I don't recall roaming very far even once

Upon our many random rendezvous though we passed

The liminal lanes of farthest stars hung

In a good, bright dark.

What I remember: dream-gleam of diamond mind,

Silken skin of clever, clever milk

Made only for the tenderest of endless sins

Dancing in my dexterous designs,

Hair of really raw clover honey, as if secret bees

Had wrought

And brought a pale crown just before the rime,

And heart, O such heart! of splendid multiplicity,

Misused perhaps in ignorant innocence.

(Is it a very fine heart, friend? I will grow closer to certitude

In time, I know, if you allow it.)

Never intended for taming were you, nor even

Necessarily in need of naming are you, with those

Old astute eyes of newborn child-by-choice and a

Curious quality of bravery which, when wind of memory

Came down those gentle gray mountains where we were,

Brought with it a fear I admired in sadness, considering it wise.

Why wise, says I? Why, how could you know the caliber

Of this companion you have in me with whose

Many words you walk and, in wandering, might

Eventually weep over? Though we've been friends

For a year now -- more? less? Another thing

I forget! -- we are also meeting each time for

The first time, and always in my mind

I will keep that awareness awake.

I sense in my own forgetfulness

An un-memory I wish to wreak again but for the first

Time, and in that there can be no surety.

(For even this most gentle of hearts

Burning through the bars of my breast

Knows hunger, rage,

Despair, lust, and endless paroxysms of confusion,

You diamond mind:

All the mad blasphemies of love

Who must contend with their kinder twins and

With whom we must all contend, there in that contest

To be decided as beautiful or bleak or some shining

Chimera shaped by the bounties of both.)

And in you there is a memory I sense you wish

To forget but can't or won't, may not ever.

(Is that why for a moment you fled into cynicism?

You need not answer. I will keep to my own counsel on this,

As I have found time and again that

All paths charted by fear and regret are absent of proper

Consideration. And by and by are we not all occasional

Map-makers of this make?)

But I wish to ask you as we walk

If forgetting these memories of yours is really preferable

At all. How frequently I have elected to do that!

And always in the after-ness of that choice have

I grown to wish I had not, for there is something very like

The loss of me in wishing to gain the loss

Of the memories of my me's making.

(I don't ask this, I won't ask this; on this matter

Perhaps you ought to keep

To your own counsel as well. And really,

My choosing now to remember, as once and many

Times I chose to forget, is not at all dissimilar to

Your desire to forget; these battle-borne preferences are

Nothing more or less than our humanity seeking

Expression, once in enhancement and twice in

Reduction.)

Again, the questions rise:

Have we walked this way before, you and I?

Is it even possible

To walk the same way twice? And would the answer

Matter as much as the asking of the question?

Truly, I don't think it would.

And so, with hands soft as spring rain,

I will strangle the answer I have already birthed in secret,

Later perhaps to revive it.

We walk on in a new and infinite nowness,

And it's the first and only time

We ever will;

What is this strange affection for

Human-ness broken down into its constituents,

Wholeness sundered to produce smaller wholenesses

Which we call emotions? And what is their significance

Beyond a few billion-spare molecules catalyzing in timeless and

Tame brainframe chemical cascades I name

The same as this name-framed me? As I experience them or

Their synthesis,

Feeling it as this or a-willin' it that,

Do they not also have an experience of me...?

Of what import then, love?

Of what value, my love, must be lust or trust,

Flighty fright or effulgent might, clarity or confusion,

Any and all? And finally, what of the endless

Unnamed chimeric forms born of their mad mating?

Of what import, to them, might I also be?

For surely there must be some or else

Why this endless cooperative play in which

They engage?

Perhaps these questions are beyond me --

Beyond us all -- for now or for always,

And all human perceptions of value must spring

From the sense that value can exist only in

A paucity of experience sundered into

Distinct parts rather than this terrible

Telemetry drawn out and out -- and out, out, out --

In the untrammeled tapestries

Of time. And then too comes the consideration

That the weightiness of these things may

Rest most crucially not in that I feel them

But in that I work with them at all

For you (always for you,

My distant and darkly dreaming cousin,

But mostly for my own delusion of elucidation)

And only when the content of this life

Is framed by the context of its ending

That such quest-ions can then be called

To account for themselves. I ask these questions

So they may be voiced, thrown forward,

Perhaps incorporated into a greater body

Than mine own, there to be known or shown.

It is in this way, I've come to believe,

That we in seeking self leapfrog through time

(Yes, both yours and mine)

As they (our times, that is)

Seek these, our selves, in order to be translated.

For truly we are builders, you and I,

And these symbols we keep be our brick

And mortar.

It is sacred to me, this sense of wonder --

As you are sacred to me --

And gladly I call my hands to wonderingly wander

And in a blundering

And furious-feebly fumbling sort of way,

Construct this house of substance in which