WAYS OF THINKING
the voice and its predecessors
when there was no worrying
about spelling through ages
just violent marks
that’s when I heard voices
oh that would never happen
to me unless it does
when writing in time
ah it can’t be decoded
the spy game of self
overwhelmed by Whitman’s
long odes muttered to self
in the bathtub at my
Grandmother’s house
in Florida ’81 blue jays
squawking in the orange tree
(In the night God...)
There is no truth so much as gravity
towards the molten center of Earth.
Scientists don’t understand it,
the blank page is addictive,
so we went to the store
with all the sweaty, bloody money
we could find and
grabbed things that might fit.
Pulling on three hats I turned
to look at her and she
said “I prefer her today.”
So I said only “hello”.
Hello to the check out person.
Hello to the bald sun
outside.
Hello to the tree
and to the house.
The house said nothing.
Mother here there everywhere.
Instantly before that I tried
to escape on a bicycle
and went 550 miles in 5 & 1/2 days
to school but they had no
answers so I left school
and did not look back.
Here there everywhere.
I should have become a teacher
then. So 50 years later
I see the truth:
Mother and nothing.
Father and everywhere.
Brother sister moon.
So hungry but I don’t eat.
(In the night God…)
It depends on the size of the page
because the moon is so far away.
But no one is screaming now
so far away I fell
without shoes.
Dawn
Who is holding whom?
I can’t tell, only the teacher
knows, the last one to be
there without tradition.
And what did they learn?
Holding on so tightly?
Attacked for it?
Forgotten by the children…
Between the words, it’s
always between the three
words: Be Here Now.
Sanity’s napkin.
There aren’t any straight lines
that I can find.
And only folds hold.
…First of all it’s dark.
Then everything emerges equally (from greyishness).
Then the sky gets brighter (a light blue)
and the builldings, trees, and earth
are dark with faint details.
Then more details and
more details. The light
wanders in here and there.
Colors begin to attach more so.
And now the darkness
is in the corners or
behind glass.
The most divisive battle
in the world
is between parents!
The mind can’t go
without itself so
it starts in the middle
and tires without a road.
The end is never in sight
just exhausted light. Mix
up the sentences and never stop,
for breathing is so noisy
without words. Without plastic,
in the age of wallpaper and cold water,
bathtubs in the kitchen,
cockroaches in the clock.
No distractions now!
No steps, escalators in the hallways,
but no complaining. Its easier
than ever to fall in line.
And I forgot about the ones
I could not hear,
let’s spend some time again
in the same room.
No one ever really said anything
that I can remember,
but a side glance says it all.
From afar, glinting.
Revenge won’t happen
in this lifetime I think,
unless I drink more coffee.
The Ford trucks are so large
and menacing, my wolfman
knows the score. Just
don’t read the news everyday
now that armegeddon bores.
Outside the screen everyone
is always blurry even three feet
away and falling. I wish
and pray for a new way
to pray for a new day.
The colors are soft and bleeding
into each other, joining hands.
I’d rather just be in nature.
(Strarting over again at 2 and a half.)
So I’m stuck between being able to speak in poetry or in digitalize. I want to go back to a resounding, before the age of plastic. Having read somewhere that before 1950 (or so) 90 odd percent of all materials people touched were of 6 main types: wood, glass, metal, food, ceramics and clothes, it’s clear we live suspended now in complex ingredients electrified by information. And it’s materially crazy, if you catch my drift, whereby sanity is clarity and for humans we have none available, once you’ve been sucked up into this sphere of beyond-plastic, could we call it the informatized-plasticized-electrified-earth-material reality? IPEEM. There is no clarity there and thus no sanity. And yet since it comes from the earth, in itself it’s confusing. Perhaps the best name for it is Moloch after all. As first mentioned by Rexroth and then triumphantly named and echoed into the stratosphere, alongside the cosmonauts and astronauts, by Ginsberg.
But I’m surprised it wasn’t mentioned by Diane DiPrima in ‘The Only War That Matters is the War Against the Imagination’. However I do see a tendency towards equality between the genders in that poem of course, and maybe ‘Moloch’, the word itself, is too testosterone filled, of course, and she didn’t even consider it, seeing as how it might be better to not even engage with that energy. You know, non-violence and all, which had it’s moment with Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi -the freedom of millions being won daily, in those heady days. So, no mention of Moloch and I’m proposing it’s a continuing line of energy worship, witness the continuing strength of punk rock, and metal, and cookie monster vocalizing.
I myself, have been vocalizing in my free form jam sessions with Fundrazers more like a chorus, towards that. With a little cookie monster and some ad lib almost gibberish. I once heard at my small Quaker boarding school, when I was around 15, a man get down on his knees at Meeting for Worship and do a whole speaking-in-tongues sing songy message to all of us youngster filling that light glazed meeting house, with the tall ceiling and the empty wooden benches up in the balconies. And it sounded fabulous and enlightening.
But I’m listening to Arvo Part, a contemporary Estonian composer, who evidently is mystically Catholic. And I’m understanding that if you want to have fifty or so people singing together, with clarity, its going to be clear notes sung by each and long tones are tending. Yea, sure it might be chanting or intertwining like Phillip Glass but it also might be long clear tones. And strange harmonies. If you want to ‘transcend’, fly out of, and soar above the fray of the war of Moloch. To look down and see the chaos, the pulse within there matching up to drums of the monotheistic and pagan apocalypse. Ah, the face of Moloch, the eyes flashing will freeze your bones, no doubt. Make them lighter I suppose, so you can fly higher.
PS I've just learned when searching for the above image that Moloch liked to sacrifice children. How f----g appropriate! Completes the story, during this phase of human existence where we see 'Childhood's End'. An interesting sci-fi story by Arther C. Clark published in 1953.
fuck all there never was a chance
bullets flying under and over
but still when and when
things bring it down but hugs bring it up
money a case logic castles a last chance
the jaws drop full of teeth
don’t don’t they’re screaming
through lips grasping
Architecture and who do you want
to kiss?
Where is your hat, and where
can I say anything I want,
in order to
get it right? Not
a love poem but it is.
The Continent was slowly saturated
with the ancient wisdom
of the Greek’s anxieties,
Plato’s cave,
whilst Amerka listened backward
to the Iroquios
and stole a Constitution.
…It always seeps through
a little at least:
the Grandmothers’ whispers and
the Grandfathers’ songs.
Didn’t the Beats and Frank O’Hara
find their friends and yet
I’ve lost most of mine by now.
All those secrets untold.
The kiss and who
wants it and why.
That’s where my mind
is at.
Birthday. 65. Unknown blahs. Blow it out like a 5 year old. The hope of an older man. Wanting my parents to feel ok. At peace. My siblings. Not torn up like only an unsatisfied writer could be. I know the unconsummated love of writing. Looking inside for a horizon, I find not one. Looking inside for an outline, I find so many, they merge into the shadows. Shapes move at night now for me, as if a wind blows from many angles. But I know, this isn’t possible. A big wind only comes from one corner. At a time.
A good writer believes nothing of what they see. The essence of goodness lives not on surfaces, or smooth appearances. I should be writing the book my Grandfather Willard wanted to write, or its opposite. Since I live in another era, I’ll choose the opposite, the version that has flowed through the looking glass of the twentieth century.
Though Willard Wattles died nine years before I was born I was fascinated with him, or some essence of him when I was a youth. Just the name: Willard, was a reverie for some reason. And the reason hovered near me, above me and I considered it and wanted to be in it. I was distinctly driven to learn to type, I remember realizing, go slow. Return each finger to their base key, as if there was energy flowing there, knowledge there in each finger. And soon enough each finger knows what to do, all of its own, as I think. It brings to mind some kids movie about magic where the wizards fight and words, magic spells, are in their minds and mouths and the energy flows from their fingers like lightning bolts. Zapping at each other across the stormy air.
And this is how we learned to write in kindergarten anyways, so typing is a recapitulation of that, but two handed. If writing by hand is a cyclops, then typing is seeing the world in three dimensions with two eyes. A bimodal vision. And perhaps its even harder to let go of a three dimensional world than the world of a cyclops.
Around the same time, my younger brother wore an eye patch. He wasn’t ever the baby of our family unit though he was the last of four. He never complained or whined for more or had temper tantrums on the floor. Though now, I wish that he had, because I never did learn to see the shape of his need or desire til I looked back, into the four dimensions of my past and he spoke to me. And saved me from myself.
This is what Grandfather Willard would have wanted, me to listen to my brother.
