We sit on our souls and suffer.

We sit on our souls and suffer.
The slings and arrows
of spring's lingering dreams
perturb our placid faces.
Through eyes blood red
from mourning tears forever
lost to the enveloping void.
The passing time that steals all meaning.
That drives man to vain attempts;
Facsimiles of all that we are,
or were, once, when still living.
Before reducing our infinite all down
to some damnable shorthand.
Our intimate Rosetta,
never truly to be deciphered.
Our all become mere mirror
while mute truth lies rotting, hollowly
echoing in the empty tomb within.

He was born the son of a sharecropper.
Heard the Devil's Dream played by blind fiddler Alf Kunkel at age 9.
His brother died bombing Tokyo.
He joined up to be a pilot like his brother, but they didn't take virgins, so he became a navigator.
Shot down over Germany.
Almost died from dysentery, his life was a gift from his German prison guard, "Popeye", who kept his prisoners alive despite the deaths of his family in allied bombings.
So his 6 children's lives were gifts of the German sergeant Popeye.
So his 3 grandchildren were likewise gifts.
Including myself.
Ran a convenience store, paying his way through college.
Became an engineer.
Invented a new kind of sprinkler.
Retired and divorced.
Travelled and seduced the world he loved.
He was a flame that lit all around him
with brilliant curiosity
and the generosity of his love.
A force of nature-a titan.
Now dead.

Time Entangled In My Beard

As a youth, I shaved sporadically and without significance at rough yearly intervals. The act I viewed as a kind of rebirth, a new beginning. A momentarily glimpse at the face I'd hidden beneath my homegrown mask. I saw it as a recurring point on a wheel outside of time. At a certain age I began the shave each day, and time became for me entangled in my beard, as if by my ever-thinner slicing of the time-like strands I might delay, or in fact defer forever, the inevitable end of hair/time.

I have long resisted one particular aspect of Buddhist thought; that love is a form of attachment as dangerous as any other.

Couldn't love be excepted, I thought?

A desire, no doubt, but a desire to do good, to provide a balm; if necessary to sacrifice all, selflessly to that love. What, in fact, would the world be, without such things as these?

And so this, for me, cast all renunciation into doubt, and my frame of consciousness shifted for many years.

And then, today, I saw it clearly. I had loved so long, so desperately; a hopeless love for many reasons doomed. For all it had not lessened, it was sure one day to end, and I to suffer. And yet, against all reason, this prescient sense of doom did not dissuade me, and in fact as fate's inevitability began inexorably to erode the ground beneath my feet, I could only grab tighter at the object of my love, and slowly to crush her, as we both stumbled down the slope of the growing abyss.

San Francisco: North Beach and the Sutro Baths

Childhood grinds the funhouse lens
through which we view the world.
Our time remaining spent in vain attempt
constructing a vessel for that lens,
an identity solid enough
to set the world at ease.

Monterey Bay

Monterey Bay Aquarium

Artificial outlets
Replacing human emotions,
The relationships of people
Lost inside yourself,
Releasing your energy
To everyone, no one
Not someone.

Cowardice,
Compromise.
The unwillingness
To change a situation.
Expressing a situation
To everyone, no one
Not someone.

Courage,
To engage,
To give of your heart,
Regardless of consequence
Removes the necessity for art.

Art as artifice,
A replacement of human emotion
Artist as passive-aggressive
Lonely is the artist,
Because there’s no need for art
Unless you’re lonely.

People crave the community of the tribe. They revel in ritual. Eventually, though, the music must end, reality descend, and the community of the tribe decay into the modern, dislocated society. In some few, isolated areas, it can be maintained a bit longer. Perhaps so far as the present. Another hundred years maybe, and it will be no more than what for the most part it is, even now. A performance.

Terrors flow like seasons,
Migrate like birds,
Grow as they’re fed,
By a cruel twist of culture,
Terror is abhorred,
Which creates terror
At the thought of being terrified.
In the hearts of the meek,
Who inherit the terrors
of their fathers,
And so are they kept meek.
The strong are those who mask their terrors,
Behind calluses.
Meekness covered by such tough hides,
They succeed
In losing that
Which they were.
Truth is meek
And firm
But hidden
By callus
Of fear
Of fear.

Grasping for things desired,
Heard but misunderstood.
Touching at the edge of the world
Lying prone at your feet.
You dream, forgetting to sleep.

People get beat down, over time, when the hardships are hard enough, when things seem so far out of your control that even wishing for more strikes you as masochism. You begin to put out of your thoughts what you can’t control, and this becomes habit, until you do your best not to face any problem at all.

Rain,
Blows upon an aching body,
Predisposed to defeat.
Pain,
Shows the world it’s embodied
In scenes of bloodied meat.
Sane,
Though not sure of the reason,
For the hail or the sleet.
Reign,
Over my own aching body,
Dominion of my feet.

Wild cascades of hope,
In sleep, dreams,
Awakened, alone,
The holeness, it blares,
Screaming.

There are times when I lie
Upon the cold, hard floor,
Feeling my reason slipping,
Listening to music doesn’t help,
TV only makes it worse.
I sip on wine
Red, remember Paris.
Days spent in lost memorization
Of its foreignness
Without attempts at proximity.
Now,
Sitting alone,
In the city of loneliness,
With only my wine,
Thinking about the ease,
Relaxing the muscles
Which hold my sanity in place.
Doing the things
Lying beneath my net
Of endurance.
I’ve thrown my body
Ypon it, but it struggles.
A single laugh, maybe,
It will be gone.
Trouble,
Time spent searching
Inches into yards.
Deeds, happiness,
Realization, contempt.
Loss, harm, return.
Too late.
Can’t speak
True thoughts, true thoughts, thoughts.

Allowing the truth.

Alone without ideals

Alone, come to face

Real, pragmatic strength

Offering, pushing a hole

Through the stomache,

Encircling the heart,

Trying the soul.

Not allowing my one phone call,

Sweating,

Not from heat,

Energized with flaked passing

Passions

Unfilled,

Despite all attempts,

Incomplete.

The Decadent Athletic Ascete’s Aesthetic,

Or,

The Decadent Ascetic Athlete’s Aesthetic

Or,

The Decadent Ascete’s Athletic Aesthetic

It’d be dangerous for me if you showed up now, Joey. I’d be liable to follow you anywhere, into any kind of trouble you could conceive. And it’s true you could always conceive of trouble. I was always scared, reticent, in the vain perception of my own greatness, protecting my future; afraid to lose what lay before me. But now, in fact, it is lost, to time or to a shift in my own perception, I know not, but gone, regardless. I no longer face life as the guardian of a crystal chalice of potential. Perhaps, now I am ready, simply, to live. To livre.

The moon sits cloaked in murky clouds, entangling
wisps of dark obscuring rocky shoulders.
Glows large, glows, glows,
Orange and grey,
Sad and troubled with
Blotches of some disease,
No healthy glow this,
Caked and dying,
Bloated from bad air
Like a man drowning.

I had an epiphany about this with Reuben one night, months ago, at a jazz club in the village. These three guys, two horn players and a drummer…they were playing very fast, abstract, free jazz. And they allowed themselves to get deep, really deep, down to that personal inner self others hardly ever glimpse in the mundane world. Yet, in fact, they simply opened up and let it rush into the void, the world, where such a thing is so rare as to need to be told.

And so what came to me in a flash was, hey, maybe that’s where they lived, there at the core of their selves, striving to comprehend what they found there, and to release it into existence as sound. This striving to create one’s own personal expression of the qualities of beauty in the world, and of ugliness as well, well, perhaps that’s enough. The fact that they did it, not alone, but as part of a three-headed convergence of free inner expression, that’s something more.

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A Prophecy

A post-climate change, oil-drained, world dominated by competing Theocracies, maintaining a tenuous, pathetic, and surreal link to science and technology. Their thinking will be circular, like a Rube Goldberg machine, and specious. Their architectures and aesthetics will be similarly distorted, misshapen, and just somehow jarringly illogical. It will be as if the world were in the midst of an anti-Enlightenment, reacting radically against the values of our age, which led to all their suffering. People will be filled with regrets for a world they’ve never seen, except on fuzzy, illpowered, little lcd screens.

I think, somehow, that we are too alike, perhaps redundant in each others company, though I know this is not true and just a whim to get me by. And I know I make the truth with every breath, in and out, the truth of inhalation in constant dialogue with that other truth, breathe out. And the traffic cop who's passing, looking lost and vulnerable underneath her fur-lined badged hat, as the blustery wind licks around her edges with a whir. Where does she fit within this mess of social complication? My logic tells me nowhere, but at times I disobey. And I think back to my mother and her father, and her mother, though more distant in my memory. And the long and windy, winding road of our progenerators, creating us in their imagination of themselves. Rushing to capture the ever-moving image of their future, soon their past, which scrambles like a chicken forever just outside their reach.
So I sit here, in this melting plastic shelter from the cold, in this city at the center of the world, and I wonder at the meaning of myself, the culmination of all this rushing and confusion, disillusion, pain and suffering of before. And I wonder how they did it, why I'm different, how I can be at the same time more aware, yet unable to belong.

p.s. I'm sorry to live these insomniac's hours,
sitting struggling vainly with the troubles we share.
At times I believe you'd be better off without me,
and I, relegated to that modern world of fantasy,
where all that one fancies can in an instant be found..
there I could spin webs of deceptively complex,
abstruse strings of words to which none could relate..
And not feel an aching twist in my gut at
the thought of you out there, yet hidden from me.

I will awake presently, my darling, I assure you,
And see you with eyes more equipped for the task,
And all will be well if you'll only be patient,
Though deceptively simple, it's all that I ask.
I will, yes, awake, and with help from my companion,
but you must help me to select one, you see...

Is the fox indeed the best fit for me?

I slept upon the feathers of hypocrisy;

The word itself lies heavy on

My long-atrophied tongue.

Reveling in the self-deluding dream

Of god and country,

I joined amongst the waves that set the sun.

But now I see before me merely blackness,

Save glimpsed through booms of lightning,

Fields littered, fairly strewn.

The sight of broken bodies, bloated corpses

Slowly rotting

Is etched upon my retina in this night without a moon.

The dreadful murk directly re-descends.

Is darkness all that’s real?

I start to wonder when a blow,

A forceful shoving hand upon my shoulder

Sets me marching,

Though toward what end I swear I do not know.

Excelsior, excelsior,

All around me, men are shouting.

Cursing soft, on each breath,

This fearsome darkness, never-ending

Save those flashes;

That illumination dark as boundless death.

Once again, this damned strike of lightning.

Though the sound seems somehow different,

When a wave of nausea hits.

Now I smell the stench of newly opened horror; Bodies dead and

Not yet dying,

Blood and sweat and bile, vomit, piss and shit.

So I sink unthinking, retching, to my knees.

Rough hands emerge to pull me to my feet.

I can see now, start to see,

My very eyelids caused the darkness, all the fear has

Just now lifted,

And nothing now can stop me as I struggle forth a scream.

Good intentions, I have heard, are
Tense and nervous in expansion
Of their silence, which keeps secrets
From the angels in my head.

Irregardless, please believe me.
If you wish to. Pretty, please? Don’t
Ever listen, never said I’d
Bring you visions but of stone.

Territories in our heads, they
Shrink before us, in a way, like
Pools of water lapping softly
At our ankles in the snow.

But, hey, listen…Ever hear the
One about the barracuda
Who went swimming with the mullah,
And the rabbi, and the priest?

They all thought they knew the answer,
So they feared not any water,
And they waded awfully quickly
To the deep end of the pool.

As they sank they wondered, quietly
Filled with dread, in their last instant,
Very quietly, in their minds, if
Maybe they could think again.

Perhaps next life, mused the guru,
Sitting grinning, very comfy,
They’ll be eating, in the way the
Barracuda eats the fool.

At that moment fell the fruit of
Greater wisdom from the tree of
Worldly knowledge to strike firmly
On his head, and made him cry.

Up above, he heard quite softly,
Though he might have just imagined,
Gentle laughter, as he lost what-
Ever sense he may have had.

Up there Newton shared a giggle
With that Bohr, and Charles Darwin
Oh they rigoled, like Pagliacci
When he found his love impure.

But they made so much a racket
That the branch gave way beneath them,
And they got to see up close that
Very Earth they knew so well.

Well the sight was awful pretty
Though there was no one to see it.
So, in truth, you have to wonder
If there really was a fall.

My Friend Joe

At his best, a living marionette,
All tangled strings,
Head lolling.
Guffawing,
He could make me laugh at nothing more
Than the pure anarchic silliness
Of his movements.

An eye for truth in others,
rather blinded looking inward.
I at one time called him, "wisest man I knew."
In the end though, all was blindness,
And in truth I'd only harmed him,
Proving to myself the wisest wasn’t I.

Angry, even violent,
An awkward, drunken master.
His rage seemed comic, then, theatrical.
Tender age in bloom.

Underneath though,
Hiding in an abyss
Of unspoken anguish,
A demon in the night,
That came to stay.
A black unending cloud.

And when the sun fails to rise,
For you, as it does for others,
When your tide goes out,
Not to return.
When you peer through the darkness,
Searching for those who once you called friend.
When all that peers back
Is that same dark.

The creative act proceeds in parallel,
or reverse parallel,
to the mundane social needs
of beasts like men,
who plot and plod,
scurrying, scaling,
to fashion,
in their mind at least,
an order, some sense,
to themselves and so the world.

Some nights I sit around and,
In my cockeyed stupor,
I think about the last of nights,
And what I put it off for.
I contemplate the vast in height,
Not that it’s what I ask for.
I wonder on the sweet goodbyes,
The souls a soulless one as I,
Though I might suffer else to try,
Could only ever really sigh
And give my mind to.

Ripped too soon from mama’s teat,
Eliminated, endless meat,
Organic, interstellar peat,
To grow between your barefoot feet,
We, those beneath, consent no more.
Please open up this pearly door,
You can keep your heaven,
We want more!
Release us.

93 degrees

Pink Sunset in New York

It was some evening.

I had to head over to the Hudson.

It was damn well worth it.

Newsstand

5th Avenue, Midnight

Union Square Station, Midnight

Wretched Refuse?

Walking down the lonely late night street, I stopped to photograph an old, abandoned air conditioner. Moving around it looking for the best angle, I did a double take as I noticed a man asleep in the background.

It was hot today! And then there were ... bubbles!

The New Lighting

ng Place Pete's Tavern

serialized breathing

serialized breathing
comforting in the minds of fools
examining the moon
in a breath betraying
an ultimate faith
in good and evil alone
able to justify itself
trying endlessly
to array against
the crimes of sorrow
and waste of life
crumbling together as we fall
afraid unhoping trust
cords around the arms
of valor accepting
the crust of dreams
uncivilized horror
trembling

New York Burns/LES Sunday Afternoon

There's No Place LIke Mars

Why We Fight

He went outside, determined not to let the rain make a hermit of him. The streets were all urgent motion, a mass of organisms pushing, coursing, at times appearing to become something collective, yet each carrying a life’s full of memories and dreams which, inexpressible, sulked unseen beneath opaque faces.
A soft rain fell. Rain was the normal state of things here, it appeared. If the sun peeked out, it was like a spotlight, burning fiery red, then quickly, gratefully?, disappearing behind the clouds once more. Earth was more a foreign world to him now than Mars.
He sat gazing out the café window, trying to maintain some of the sanity of the stranger. Outside, a woman pulled down her pants and pissed in the middle of the sidewalk before calmly reseating herself. No one seemed particularly to notice. Was this how it was here now? He finished his coffee in a strange mood, melancholy and amused. The wind picked up, umbrellas pushed to their limits. Trees switched around as if engaged in some sort of tropical dance with the gusting breeze. Yet, somehow he remained untouched by it all. A young girl struggled by in the rain, the ass of her powder blue sweat pants emblazoned with the word pink, written in green. (Had Surrealism won? Or was this just more evidence that Earth was too absurd to make sense of its own absurdity.)

Youth Gone Rotten?

When once youth becomes lost, it remains so forever.
Truth comes too late, and wisdom is for the dogs.
It sings out to you, youth, yet always stays beyond
Your straining grasp.
It is laughter and memory, and a moment out of time.
It tempts but will not suffer
The failings of age.
And why in hell would it, after all.
It holds in its hand, its pretty little hand,
All that you regret.
Youth renders all that useless wisdom into foolishness,
With a sweep of its hair and a smile.

Invocation

All that’s real is what lies in the space between us
The flowing interaction of our feelings for each other
Whether transient or eternal
Invisible yet tangible
We know ourselves by our relationships with those who’ve touched us.

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