Surrender.

Surrender.

It's reckless, you know.

The darkness of the sea.
The soil beneath melting snow.
The unyielding, ancient stone.
And the sky, home to moon and star,
who keeps nothing
secret or forever, but simply
covers one and all.

Tonight I let the dusk hold me;
pale blue and pink wash of
heaven, and I'd gladly puncture
my breast, open wide my heart
upon the alter of the world,
under the canopy's soft
glow.

Some things are more easily learned than others.

For instance, I don't know why the wind blows,
or what it is about sunset that draws tears
from the spring of my ambering eyes.
I believe there are many lives to live,
and if not, if we walk but once
these fields, these hills,
all the more lovely,
for there is nothing we can do about any of it.

And do you ever take the
time to marvel, to dream, to love,
to let yourself be?

Some things are more easily learned than others.

When I look up towards the stars,
gently blinking this new night,
I am unafraid of the immensity of life,
and I believe in everything.
Proof is not necessary;
heaven's eternity illuminates
a shared earth, rendering
all things possible,
even likely.

Ascending the crest of these hills, my home,
riding day's final swells of light,
I sit beneath a tree,
feeling how good and right it is
to rest. I confess of not knowing
the names of all the trees, nor every bird
perched among the branches.
But here I sit just the same,
quietly, humbly, receiving
some kind of mystery,
the flocks singing in my ears.

It's reckless, you know.
This life.

Christian Smith
March 16, 2010
Boone
Collective/ASU

(This one feels really good to let go of.)

Spring.

Spring.

When the day comes and the sun finally rises,
lifting the blue fleece of winter's clandestine
nights, as dreamscapes of red
mysteries seep from my eyes down into
fertile soil, there I will find you
like a child;
a child seeing and tasting its first notion of
air in the world.
Flocks of birds will hover
around my body, raising me up
from the grass; a Lazarus
who never died, but slept
undisturbed through impenetrable
dark.

When the day comes and the sun finally rises,
all of the land,
all of the water,
all of the air will bathe in light,
and I'll watch you ascend, ever gently
from the porous dirt,
from earth's skin,
and the snow will no longer blind,
and the past won't hold us,
and you'll whisper in my ear
the secret of a coming summer
rain rolling from the sky, and
Autumn will be but a far off memory
rendered in our elder's eyes.

When the day comes and the sun finally rises,
over the hills where we make our homes,
I'll go out into the forest searching for signs,
glimpsing the tatters of your purple dress
hooked ragged on spindly branches;
prayer flags dancing in the wind.
I'll follow the cut of trees to the creek's
rocky lip, where your voice drapes above
the torrent's din, drawing me deeper
into the supple wood.

When the day comes and the sun finally rises,
we'll seek god together in the birth of
the world. When we find Her,
She'll gather and share with us
the majesty of winter dreaming, and send
us out, children overland,
to make the good news manifest,
and hold the All close.

Christian Smith
Boone
Collective/ ASU Library
March 3, 2010

Dedicated to everyone in Boone-and anywhere-who WILL survive this winter.

Eyes-mouth-feet-hands-heart

Eyes-mouth-feet-hands-heart.

and i wanted to marvel/ so i wondered/
i closed my eyes and stared ahead
crossed my legs and sat up straight
(like an arrow, like a tree shielded from wind)

and i thought of my eyes, and all they have seen:
they have seen winter's first snow and my mother's tears
they have seen mountains rising and picture shows and mysterious
women and men; they have even seen you.
all that i've witnessed has past through them
all that i'll ever witness will pass through them.
they are wonders/

and i thought of my mouth, and all i've said:
all the words of kindness, every intention spoken out/ open
and all the hatred and anger, intolerance and impatience
false prayers and true notions like specters i wouldn't even recognize
if words could turn into monuments of stone and stand forever
eternally
reminding me of
everything i've ever said (word-prayer-songs-signs-names)
it has all come through there.
these lips/ it is a wonder/

and i thought of my feet, and how they root me to earth:
how they've felt sand in the sandbox
and the water of the great ancient sea
how they've carried me across continents
towards and away from______________________________
(and i don't know) they carry me everyday
and i love to lace up my boots because i know i will walk
somewhere
and be somewhere else when i take them off
and my feet softly touch earth
unfettered/ it is
a wonder/

and i thought of my hands, and how they are my humanity:
their tips callused and the way they feel sliding across
strings making sounds from some other/ place
and i thought about the shapes we trace when we talk to each other
and how those shapes are a million paintings that never dance
past a moment
and i remember fragments of what it was like to feel you and i dream what it might be
like to feel you and i think
about my hands now writing this poem and how without
them i'd be muted but (for now) i'm not
and we speak with them
and i have my hands/
it is a wonder/

and i thought of my heart, and the rhythm of life:
how it pumps and pumps and pumps
until it will pump no more (one day, maybe today)
it gives me life (blood flowing in circles i think even the universe works this way looks this way)
this heart pounding resonance all over and across my body feel it
in yours feel it/ in/
so (YES) there are these things the heart actually does
and then there are these things that we liken a heart to
and i thought about that
about pounding anxiety
about dropping down into my bowels upon hearing the myth of death across the wind
about the wind's music lifting my heart
about floating joy (when i've known a body to fly)
about feeling love
about hoping that it'll never hurt again but i know it will
because
it is a wonder/

it seems that everything that is inside is out
and i want everything/ in to be out and out to be in
and for it all to hold itself close (though there is really nothing to guard against)
we all talk about god i think this is what god is
(what holds close)
i wanted to marvel/ so first i wondered about bodies/ and i
found the same things in every place(s)
i could sit but we could walk and that is
and it's which is everything and when i breathe and while i and all live
we see
Beautiful.

Christian Smith
February 24, 2010
Boone
Mother Fuckin' Library

the deepest secret nobody knows

I read this poem today on Jeanette Winterson's website (see link somewhere on this page...). ee cummings, you have the best lines around! Oh my lord! I really enjoy the simplicity of the language and imagery here. I say "simple," but that's certainly misleading. Lines about the sun and the moon, about trees growing up to the sky; all of these great archetypes. I love using these sorts of metaphors (very naturalistic, certainly everyday, but somehow inexhaustibly mysterious, sensual, and cosmic), because when you liken something to the moon, what are you really trying to imply? In what way, exactly, is life like a tree? One could probably explain something about these sentiments, but they often work, I believe, because you have something of a gut, or emotional response to such images. The loss conveyed here is so total, and all the while so tender; the mysterious blanket of night, so indefinable in it's own darkness, and life of the sun in the day. The soul hoping? The mind hiding? Oh, and the line breaks! Read this aloud, and listen to the rhymes...Anyways, this poem freakin' rules!

i carry your heart with me-ee cummings

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

Accounts.

Accounts.

In making an account of ourselves, we must struggle to articulate the unspeakable, stripping layer after layer of muscle and tendon from our flesh, searching for the solitary bone, dry and lifeless, the seat of our marrow, the ark of our individual prophesies. The journey of "finding out," of making accounts of the persons each of us is in the vast milieu of the world is a quest for some kind of recognition, of truth. The vessel of our embarkation may be words, the signs and signifiers of an artistic medium, fashion, the way we flaunt our bodily self-conceptions, the food we prepare, the stories we tell; in short, all our forms of articulation, the modes by which we engage the world. At this point (RIGHT NOW), I engage with keyboard, with its peculiar distribution of letters, links to the typewriter, with the conflation and unwinding of particular moments in history, their respective ideas about words and the distribution thereof, and finally, with the computer, spinning webs around all facets of time.

On this machine, the one upon which I write my poems, songs, to some degree, my Other, I will try to write something about myself. "The wreck, and not the story of the wreck," as Adrienne Rich wrote. I am unsure of the plausibility of such a pursuit, at least this afternoon, as I listen to the wind howl circles out the window, bringing dust around and around, settling and unsettling, defining: redefining.

The wreck, and not the story. Every nail that once bound that ship has a story, an axis mundi of its own. Every foot that stood heavy or swept lightly over it, scuffing, splintering, wearing down; just the same. These are intersections. If we look and listen closely, we will discern places where light falls. In accounting for myself, I must look after light. I must follow it with faith and hope into dark places. I must commit no violence, against myself nor anyone else, though I may be forced to witness it. One thing I believe I've learned: if one walks with earnest, with a balance of voice and silence, if one walks mindfully, then every site traversed is a quarry of knowledge.

Knowledge. Emotion. Feeling. Experience. In making an account, one must become an archeologist of such things.

An account.

Last night I attended a certain meeting. Who are you? I could not answer. I could not speak. I felt ill-prepared to label myself. No one wished to make me their other. Open arms and laughter followed the meeting. Call me anytime. Open arms. Laughter. If you made a list of all the things in life you've fucked up because of alcohol, what would be at the top? I walked outside, to where the smokers stood huddled under an awning, beneath the cold and bitter rain. I hadn't smoked in one week and two days. But your still my people.

I listened to the testimonies of all who spoke, mostly on topics of seemingly mundane things. Waking up. Not missing work. Not going to jail. When there was laughter, it was soft; soft like water, yet bearing water's ability to carve out the earth. Each person's words were a site for knowledge, which actually means a site for life lived, discerned, experienced, (enjoyed...). And perhaps it is that alcohol is the place where those forms can intersect, and then branch off into gender, into other drugs abused and discarded, into meditation; whatever. For myself, I was silent. In that silence, for that hour, I sentenced myself to otherness.

Is there a difference between the silence of thought, of reason, meditation, and the silence upon which the world writes itself? If we are silent, does the world speak for us, and if so, what justice could there possibly be in that? What is the relationship between silence and account?

An account.

My roommate and I are standing in the kitchen, smelling and stirring and quizzically contemplating the multiple jars in which we are fermenting and pickling garlic, beets, cabbage, and making kampuchea. We have just finished a Tarot reading. Tonight, I read her cards, and during the hour or so we devoted to this mysterious and joyous practice of looking, where intersections and definitions and secrets are laid bare in images, we filled the void between sight and card with words about our lives, our fears, our choices, that marrow and sinew of who and what we are, or, might hope to be.

So there we are, standing in the kitchen, our bodies a bit shaken, as if in rapture of the openness and honesty shared. There, in the kitchen, beneath warm stove lights. Melissa is moving to Washington D.C. in a few weeks. She is telling me about a queer collective that welcomes heterosexuals among its members. We are both grinning from ear to ear. I want to find something like that! Me too! We make words about the gender line, draw it in the air with our hands, turn a quarter circle, indicating at what point we place ourselves on it. Off of it. It is more a curlicue than a line. We, neither of us, none of us, belong to those fashionable clubs of which, anatomically speaking, we are supposed to unwaveringly identify. We speak of that which is "male" and "female" about us, and the many things that "aren't," and, moreover, the innumerable characteristics we've no desire to categorize, the questions we feel no need to answer to anyone, save ourselves and our communities.

Where are those communities? We feel queer, but maybe we're not so much. Christian, your my best girlfriend. I love you too, although I'm not quite sure what to do with that. Laughter. It punctuates where there might have been silence (it always seems to). We are some kind of sexual. We have these bodies, these parts. We wear our clothes as we like them, shear or grow our hair as we like it, and our hearts are as they are each day. We struggle, sometimes with success, often times in vain, to say what we mean. Who are you? Who can we be? If we were Tarot cards, we might be cups, waiting to be filled. We are human beings. I hope we are open sites of becoming. On this night, I think we are.

An account.

Mathieu and I had crossed over the High Tatras into Poland. We took a bus through the winding hills, then passed the border patrol on foot. Another bus ride and me, soaked by the rain which poured through an open escape hatch centered on the ceiling above my seat. Exhausted, I hadn't even woken up.

We arrived in Krakow. A park, and people were bathing in fountains outside the old city walls, shaded from the sun's scorching heat, a heat that would kill thousands across Europe that summer.

We're gonna love this place!, Mathieu whispered. I remember.

That evening we ate dinner in some cavernous, vaulted chamber of a place. All loud, boastful, and full of good cheer, the two of us. After all, we were on vacation from our jobs back in Austria, with even less than a care in the world. Later on, we passed the time in a wine bar, drinking out on the patio. It was then that we noticed a small group of men emerge from an underground club next door, all of their heads shaved to the skin, almost to the bone. One had a swastika tattooed on his upper arm.

Holy shit.

The night wore gently on; we, warmed by camaraderie, by heat, by wine, sat in the main square of old town, watching people stroll by, listening to buscars and fairly pleased with ourselves. Some Polish girls, university students, came and sat with us. We talked about music.

You don't look like you listen to punk. You've got long hair.

What the fuck does that matter?

Generally uninterested in any place that any of this might be going, I gave my regards and headed back to the hostel, a mere two blocks down a cobblestone side street. Just as well, as Mathieu and I were to visit Auschwitz the next morning, and the last thing I wanted was to be hung- over there.

In making my way down the street, I noticed before me the same skinheads from earlier, loitering outside a door, situated just before my own. I began to panic, and contemplated crossing to the other side. Reason took hold; showing fear would be unwise. I held back my shoulders, pointed my gaze straight into the future, and walked on, expecting the worst. As I approached, the group fell silent, turned towards me, watched.

I stepped through the circle of their bodies, locking eyes with the tattooed one. His eyes seemed blank and white, full of hate. Rearing back his head, he spit in my face. I kept walking, turned, and entered through my door. I remember climbing the stairs to the second floor. I remember what I felt. I remember...

Can one look Polish? Can one appear un-Polish? Can one actually look like a Jew, a foreigner, an American? I'm not sure, but the saliva in my face, saliva that, some days, I still feel as though I'm wiping off, and others, feel like we may all be spitting on the world, seems to indicate that, depending on the road, the intersection, the site of any number of not-so-random things, the answer can be yes.

***

Who am I? Who are you? Let's get together and talk about it. That might shed some light on things. Who am I? Who are you? I don't want you to say, I want you to tell me a story, one that will light up something in my mind, in my memory, in my wreck. I'll tell you one as well. That might help. Who am I? Who are you? Let's take a walk for years, down all sorts of roads. We'll get lost, but gather up answers like wildflowers. We'll keep them, press them, remember them, put them in books, make them into signs, act them out, drop them, lock them away in steamer chests or compost buckets. I suppose that, for now, I can make accounts of myself, and they shall be as dots a child connects in newspaper games, eventually fashioning some sort of jagged whole.

The wreck. The site. The grave. The body, with and without organs. Whatever you want to call it. We cannot command past, present, or future to stop coursing through the veins of time. An account of oneself must breathe at least this recognition. Who are you? To answer is death. To decline to answer is ignorance. Open the site, again and again and again. Follow light into darkness; darkness into light. I suppose I want my life to be like an open sore on the corpse of history. I know a few things that can be found there. I am aware of how some of them found the place. Others, most, are lost in the milieu, but I and we still might meet up with them somewhere. Sometimes, I even feel I get it, in the blink of a maddening moment, this: a becoming that never stops.

Boone
Collective/Home
December 9, 2009/ January 30, 2010

I am learning with the waves...

Lately, during the course of moments of frustration, relaxation, or (and this is the most likely scenario) procrastination in the studio, I've been reading a pretty amazing anthology, "New European Poets." In particular, some of the Portuguese poets have been a big source of influence as of late; as with some of them, I feel drawn towards images of the sea, of driftwood, of birds circling in the sky. A sort of longing and melancholy, though always (hopefully) grounded. I thought I'd reproduce a couple of them here, as I've really enjoyed them, and am trying, desperately, to push them on other people. I like to do this with poetry (mine and yours and yours and hers and his as well...), if you've not found this out yet.

Between Yesterday and Your Mouth

I will spend the night with those days.
With the smile you left in the sheets.
I still burn with the remains of your name
and see with your eyes the things that you touched.
I am here between the bread and table, in the glass
you lift to your mouth. In the mouth that holds me.
And I don't know what I am between yesterday and what will come.
Yesterday I was the river at evening, the gaze that caressed the light.
My son writes on pebbles on the beach and I invent
steps for deciphering them. They all roll far away.
That's how the sea is. I am learning with the waves
to melt away to foam. There is always a seagull
that cries out when I come near, there is always a wing
between the sky and my floor. But nothing belongs to me,
not even the words with which I cement the hours.
Perhaps love is just a small difference in time zones
or a linguistic accord that only exists
deep in the flesh. But here where I am not
what grounds me is the certainty that you exist.

Rosa Alice Branco
trans. by Alexis Levitin

Calle Principe, 25

Without warning we lose
the vastness of the fields
singular enigmas
the clarity we swear
we'll preserve

but it takes us years
to forget someone
who merely looked at us

Jose Tolentino Mendonca
trans. by Richard Zenith

Lost Friends

Friends carried off by life
are the most difficult to appease, the most
tyrannical. Barbarians of an unknown land,
they sip the poison of silence and they grow
beyond all limits in the distance, a blind eye
to our loneliness. And to think that we were
brothers in arms, that we dug up buried treasure
from the same islands, from the most
barren of books. How things turn out.
Could all have been in vain? It seemed
that we were destined for the same
songs, for a more certain kind of love.
Well, well. And we cannot even understand
what happened.

Rui Pires Cabral
trans. by Alexis Levitin

I love those! They are the kinds of poems that make me feel as though I am emerging from some sort of near drowning experience, caught in a crashing torrent jetting down a mountainside. I think that's how poems should make you feel: breathless. Overwhelmed by the fragments of being that are always, pervasively, right in front of your face.

I've been learning that to write poems one must read, voraciously. I've also been learning that to write poems one must live, voraciously. It may be that conversations are the point, the intersections, where those two aspects meet. I am very grateful for all of the wonderful conversations I've been lucky enough to have with an amazing diversity of people over the past week. Those places of meeting are where I try to pull poems from, where they are already there, floating around in the room or the leaves or the sparks of the fire or the sky or the bottle or whatever. I'm just a person who tries to grab at them, bring them into this world. But they are here already, if you look closely.

At any rate, read poems, see what other people are longing for. I am learning with the waves.

Pools.

Pools.

Here, I lie awake.
Receive me as darkness
pooling around your driftwood eyes,
lulled by the sea through torrents of dreams.

Dreams;
shells we gathered
along the shoreline, scattered amongst
reeds and branches, tangled and matted:
our coarse, burlap hair.

*

In the absence of love eternity is lost.
Constellations become obscured.
The moon rises, but nobody notices.
In absence, we cry out for presence.

*

The wreck of my soul in the flesh
of my skin, blood and saliva
mixed inexhaustibly. Bones
covered and recovered. My poems,
translations of marrow, intuitions,
promises I wish to make.
Air I long to draw in and push out.
I would turn your ocean to words
your dreams to words
your body to words.
I would understand through signs.
But the world can’t be made over in words.

*

There is so much distance.
I do not know where you are.
Distance as the dusk,
a great shawl of pink and aquamarine
draped gently over the tired earth.
I cling at acceptance.
I allow a surface for every drop of rain,
for every shaft of light,
this luminous solitude passing through.
Yet my heart pounds for want of your voice,
a strange music of prayer in the dark:
receive me.

*

Where could you be that I
cannot find you?
Where could you dwell that I
may not go?

No one can answer, because no one knows.

Christian Smith
Boone
Collective
November 17, 2009

Assemblages.

Assemblages.

You say, “Maybe we could be
the apple’s seed,
a dream latent
in that supple flesh,
red fruit waiting
to drop,
to rot,
to form new roots and trunks
like bodies twisting up
through soil,
arms limbering towards
the light of the sun.”

I say, “Maybe we could be
stones awake on the river’s
bed, smoothed by years
of patience and tranquility,
softly polished in the incessant current,
to lie still,
to wait for nothing,
to remain gentle at the confluence,
in the belly of a great snake
seeking to lower sky
to the sea, carry sea
to the abyss of sky.”

You say, “Maybe we could be
the evergreen’s sap,
our amber blood
palpitating, rhythm caged in breasts,
dripping down the tree of our spines,
to bind vitality,
to preserve us,
to cloak our skin in golden fibers,
embroidering flesh with fragments
floating upon the four winds,
sweat infused, irremovable,
the ointment of our coalescence.”

I say, “Maybe we could be
the stars by night,
and the dreams we see
reflected so high, so far away
in the endlessness of what might be,
to shine in the dark,
to burn, later
to die, across atmospheres of blackness,
some calligraphy of points
traced in visions by desirous fingertips,
the contours of our bodies
beneath which we rest.”

We are in love with gardens.
We are in love with the promise of untilled soil.
We are in love with water, with stone, with sky.
We are in love with the bed where we sleep,
drifting serenely through forms
perfected by children of the womb,
and the dead of this good earth.

Christian Smith
Boone
Collective
November 2, 2009

This poem came out of somewhere and was birthed in the Collective over the past two nights (about 10-12 hours). In regards to my own work, and to being surrounded by other artists honing crafts of myriad sorts in the studio, who can say where this stuff comes from? It's a total mystery. You end up writing about things that you thought you had no intention to write about, and still, they just flow. Well, whatever, I am grateful indeed! Uijin was a big motivator behind this piece, and a big help with a few tough word choices. Collaboration=always surprising and amazing...

Well, at any rate, a few things about this: In many of my poems I deal with fragmented and/or isolated moments in time. This one is kind of different, in that I am working with a concept of "no time," or perhaps "infinite, unbound, transcendent time." Hopefully, it exists outside of any definable moment. Framed this way, I was kind of going for a Rumi type thing; it can be a discourse between two people, two lovers, or a discourse between one and the eternal. Maybe it works?

Well, if anyone is reading, and has suggestions, feel free to let me know. This is the second draft, so who knows where, or if, it'll go any further.

Dear Diary

I need to try/ I need to severe the cock with words/ I feel an unrepressed sexuality/ my sexuality ejaculated onto the world cannot achieve the death/ the suicide/ of which necessity and fate and the very end of history demand that I partake/ wailing guitars are no longer enough/ the phallic poem is wilted like a dead rose/ and all that has ever been dead has resurrected/ and I cannot even bear that word/ who is the ritual prostitute/ what is her gift/ what is contained in such an act of grace/ of empathy/ of love/ who would be the vessel of this world?/ I cannot penetrate/ nor be penetrated/ until this suicide is complete/ though I need for my flesh to become/ one/ with/ some/ other flesh/ the moon is now my mother/ the sun is now my father/ for it was written that s/he who does not kill/ deny/ forget/ purge/ mother and father cannot rise with the sun (son)/ menstrual blood of the new covenant/ menstrual blood of the new covenant/ menstrual blood of the new covenant/ how does one forget/ language/ and reveal the mystery of forgetting/ which is the mystery of memory/ with language?/ how can emergence be understood/ when we cannot know what we do not know?/ I am grossly unprepared to descend into the death of what has been myself/ I have no helper/ no gifts for the gatekeepers/ I know no rituals to see me through wave after wave of deathly orgasmic masturbatory birth/ and the old ways/ the one(s) we call history/ are supremely/ holy of holiness/ world without end/ inadequate/

Creativity/ the act of sex/ between medium and hands/ hands and minds/ minds and spirits/ and back to the earth/ over and over and over again/ like waves/ like vibrations/ the act of sex/ can there be more to desire than projection?/ tell me I’m wrong/ we need to be wrong/ where does the earth come from?/ the physical thing/ the idea of the thing/ what is the thing???/ Creativity/ the act of sex/ multiples of flesh meeting under these settings/ with these expectations/ acting/ always acting out these roles/ and all the while there is a moment/ and you are in that moment/ and everything you’ve ever had/ ever felt/ ever consigned to varying degrees of constipated bloating corpses named Love or Hate or Self or Other or bones or muscle or blood or bodies/ is there over your shoulder like a phantom named history/ a disease of riddles riddling our bodies rotten with disease/ emaciated/ de-masculated/ sticky and crawling out the tunnel of love/ some angels rolling away the stone which hides death/ like it was something to avoid/ I want to tear the façade of a face from the hanged man’s head/ if I was to roll away that stone I think I’d find a smile/ a body moved immobile through the medium of explored darkness/ and there these two things would live in the void of pink and green left behind in the maelstrom/ in the chaos of knowledge: a smile and a hard cock/

Its as easy/ its not that easy/ its as easy/ its not that easy/ Creativity/ the act of sex/ how can we become better men/ what do we say to one another/???/ the act of sex/ between medium and hands/ hands and minds/ minds and spirits/ and back to the earth/ over and over and over again/ like waves/ vibrations/ the act of sex/ can there be more to desire than projection?/ the space of dreams weaves fragments of words/ but is peopled with images/ such visions speak by brushing our hair/ moving so subtly and eloquently/ by us that we forget to remember them as soon as they vanish/ roll away the stone of those who wish to be awake/ with the ambitions of all that is vile and insane in this world/ once I dreamed I was in a canoe/ flowing down a white-capped river/ with my father/ the canoe shattered and he disappeared/ not so much dead as gone/ which are different places to exist and envelope/ and I crawled atop rocks/ which rose steadily/ perceptibly/ higher and higher and higher/ above the WATER/ and two men appeared below/ sitting on thrones of rock/ one looked like a hobo/ and the other like something some part of me will not remember/ (why)/ and they told me I would fall/ and I climbed and climbed and craned my head/ and looked over my shoulder/ into the distance/ on the precipice of this rising canyon/ and saw a painted man/ carrying over his shoulder a golden fish/ a painted man/ a golden fish/ its easy/ its not that easy/ Creativity/ the act of sex/ how can we become better men?/ what will a man or a woman look like/ act like/ walk like/ sex like/ when history finally dies/ and the severed cock/ in rapport with the Mother Moon/ fulfills the metaphor of the Great Harvest for all of us/ human being ape walking talking fucking defecating dying living dreaming swallowing opening creatures/ creativity/ creatures/ creativity/ things-not-things/?

Suicide like a revolution/ when you come face to face with your barriers/ many and myriad as they are/ you should kiss them and push into them/ and kill yourself/ and then walk by/ but I don’t know how to prepare for such a fully human and humanizing act of/ faith/

Will we find an oracle in the wound of castration?

I think so/ I think the oracle is swirling around in the dark light within all of us/ like the seed held in the love of the womb/ in the apple on the tree of life/ which tells us that to be naked and aware and in love with the world leads only to death;/ to death and death and death for all the generations/ to toil and toil and toil for all the hands/ for wailing and gnashing of teeth and all that visceral shit that we all do/ because the jealous god who walked in the garden/ who created the garden but could not be part of it/ says so/ and speaking of Him;/ how much like a MAN he is!/ father of his own creation/ a wanderer among the generations/ but a stranger to the glory of circles and cycles/ whose kingdom is all the pleasure in the universe/ that he tried to deny us/ but was stolen by a snake/ a father so uncomprehending of the serpent’s simple act of renewal/ that she was so kind as to give to Eve/ who was so kind as to give it to us/ through Christ man became god/ through Christ HISTORY was born/ and now I’m ready go back to the tomb/ to run away from an everlasting life which is no life at all/ and fuck the wild beasts by the side of Lilith/ and those wild beasts will graciously devour me/ and shit me out/ to become the ground beneath something else’s feet/ something besides and different than a pathetic ego/ who feels control slipping away/ and wants it/ and fears it/ and will be/

The hanged man is concealing his laughter at my hypocrisy/ I laugh along with him/ but it is not accomplished/ on earth or in heaven/ and we are all going to spell this out for each other/ out of our differences and not because any god or book/ or fuck that/ even an apple/ is telling us we should/

I fear the world is being destroyed/ I fear that my hands are soaked with the blood of the world/ I don’t know how to make sense of this/ but if light is real and no point is fixed/ and if Inanna can go to the east/ and if the sun can rise there like she does/ then maybe…/Creativity/ the act of sex/ the way we fill and receive one another/ this is beautiful/ and alive/ and not afraid to die/ because death must be some kind of lie/ that some kind of god/ resting and not participating/ no longer creating/ on his gilded thrown in his gilded kingdom/ con-cock-ted/ out of the desire for power/ and creativity is beyond control/ and if human beings are any thing/ we are creative/ in all our capacities/// that god brought fire and the sword and destroyed the world/ and that god’s fingers are clinging and trembling with one-sided nervous murdering masturbatory dark and deep seeded what one can only call by a name so vile as to be unpronounceable/ but I think we label and labor it patriarchy/ and to come around and around its throbbing tip to back to point of points/ that is one of many beginnings/ and will surely have one of many ends/ I fear the world is being destroyed/ I fear that my fingertips are soaked with the blood of the world/

God our father wanted to keep his greatest achievement to himself/ but the serpent came upon the man asleep/ and stole it from under his oversized head of heads/ and that gift is called birth/ and alchemy is its materialization/ its creativity/ and buried in the seven stages of death and birth in all of us is the power to turn shit into gold/

I don’t understand what this means/ but so many women and men try to teach me about it in the smallest/ slightest/ moments of each and every small/ slight/ day/ Do they understand it either?/ is understanding even a point/ perceptible across these ever expanding plains?/

My mother is the moon/ my father is the sun/ my mother is the moon/ my father is the sun/ and in passing/ in their eternal embrace/ they graze against one another/ and their sexes fuck/ and their sexes escape even them/ and create the day/ over and over and over and over and over again/

This is the beginning of my declaration of suicide/ and as I learn to smile and feel and love and create and be born for infinity/ I hope/ I wish/ I think/ i………………/no. This heart is a piece of the drum pounding out the footsteps of a forever.