Sunday, October 28, 2012

Finished Poem read at Ugly Mug's Madhouse Poety Series last month...


I go through so many feelings in a minute…
Thoughtfulness, sleepiness, beatitude… having to shit

I am sick with clever words-
Life is the leading cause of death
Death is a pathway to dissipating energy
Down the food chain swirly slide
To the lowliest, most indispensable beings
Beyond humanity
To life anew & anew

Who and what I THINK I am is so unimportant to the universe
But you can’t really LOOK to the universe for your importance -
Hell, I can’t even pin down my existence!
Being is the queerest of loitering, jowled cats, I gather
But becoming, WOH!
Be careful the serrated teeth - living on a slippery slope ‘n’ all-
Becoming is inevitable, as thee most pro-Bono human sings,
“WITH OR WITH OUT YOOOOOOOU”

Closer to a lunar verse, I chronicle my cycles - I see
Overlapping fields of vibration, each at it’s own frequency,
Wash o’er me and singularities encourage me
To the angelic savagery of spontaneity

There is always the fear of systems breakdown
Between the differing communication codes & commands…
May the good Lord have mercy on the fuzzy logic
(The bad Lord is on time-out in his bedroom on this night of the ball,
& just for nobly breaking his own commandments -
JUST for filling out the dark side of the princess’ slipper -
The vanity of schizophrenia)

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Ever notice…
A question mark looks a bit like a hook for a period?
Does the declarative hang under the question?
Do questions stand on the declarative?
Look how spacious the big, little questions we have are!
I will live in these enormous rooms
Till the walls fall down like shells from my eyes
In time, in time

Answers are dead things - bury them in the garden
Questions, duly, spring from those rotting answers
On a sure-train migration back to death’s hibernation

The fibrous, nutritional value of questions
Is necessary for yr mental digestion
As everyone knows, don’t answer where you question
Answers poison the well
With a blind ear to the power of suggestion

It’s all enlighteningly stupefying
The open door has been there my whole life
Until it became wallpaper & I forgot all about it…
The soul hungers not because it’s full of lacking
The soul hungers from an empty abundance

I hope, like me, you all have an inkling of what a soul is -
I see it as that solitary part of me that touches everything
Communes in pure sound
Pure music
Pure color
Pure form
Confused in vibrations between the will & the sub-will,
Those Siamese twins separated at a very early age
(& that’s just MY abstraction of it,
Transmitted BY abstract languages
Filtered through YOUR squishy, grey abstracting unit
& even that is an assumption
& even you are an assumption)
Yet…
That is no good reason to be sad
I still can see you dancing like a rolling wave
Affronting Salvationists in front of a spinning sky

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This is not an iPod for an iPod
Blue-Tooth for a Blue-Tooth
Snoop Dogg eat Snoop Dogg kind of world-
This is a world where the sly get ahead
& the simple-minded are easily led
Where’s the justice in a child unfed?
Justice is revenge dressed in absolution dressed in cold-blood red

As I put the words together, the thoughts fall apart
Like light through a prism
Like innocence in prison (innocence is destroyed by it’s proof thereof)
As I put thoughts together, words crawl into art
& sleep
& dream
Seeping through that nocturnal seam
In which the dreams reciprocally assert

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My dreaming’s breath - baited lakes
Guitars play electronic butterfly songs
A lone cutter cried long snakes
Into & out of jazz connotations, elated
Looking like an early belated birthday present
A query in a mask of demands, not meant
A tumble of words - falling snatches of snow
The sound, the patter
Grey matter turned inside-out into patches of soul
The ground, the laughter,
The shark-tooth noogie boogie
The acoustic two-stroke brain trust
A name thrust into a role
A lyrical tryst between the absurd & it’s opposite pole
Painting new pictures of rust
Pictures of a smile, undressed & under duress
Sounding off, like an alarm, the loudest soft caress
Pressing an outgoing nose to the imaginary pane
To the clear and clearly insane
Or framed, we play the same sane games
To see who laughs first
To see who laughs last
Pour wax in your ears & tie me to the mast
I want it all & I want all the rest
If it’s all the same, I’ll fly the nest
& expand outwardly in concentric circles
Sweeping time-space for glow-worm holes
Looking for truth and whatever it doles
Knee-deep in heady honeycombs
All ready to rock ‘n’ roll
This life is rhythm & blues
No, you can’t multi-track
& you can’t get a back catalogue
This poem’s just a ruse
An amusingly confusing attempt at suffusing musing
Into an ugly worldview, coolly cruising for a bruising
Ripe with prison walls
Ripe for a rising fall
Wrought from music & noise
Wrought from abstraction & voice
I stand self-accused
As the gavel falls, already abused
The jury unloads
“NOT GUILTY,” the cries
I wipe sleep dust
Like a teardrop
From my ravenous eyes
I stand self-amused
Myself, I’m beside

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Whatever it means, we’re still alive
Wildflowers blooming in a field of knives

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