Cultural
Conversation Over Creamed Coffee
A
close friend, we often had conversations
in the
office, sipping milky Greek coffee flavoured
with
honey. The two of us, like minds
searching
for the philosophers stone, the
modern
grail in clouded coffee, ambient
sounds
from Grooveshark that would
synthesize
the fragmented historical shards
severing
any semblance of rationality that
had
nothing left to turn to except the
irrational
walking the city streets, suburbs,
even
the tree breathing country now infected
with
pixelated pimples strangling every pore.
What is there left to turn to? I
asked. The death
of god, Freud's terror, Darwin's dark descent,
the loss of the soul. There is no exit, nothing
to believe in, empty bottles filled with all the
vapours ever imagined.
We are all alone he said. Left with nothing but
our imagination, we must imagine our way
back to meaning, the meaning now only
personal, subjective, for there is no object. May
as well worship Ken and Barbie, the blackjack
table for all we can do is make our own odds.
Even then the game is rigged like the stock market.
How so unlike you I said. The one always searching
for the troubadour's love, for fireflies filling a
June night, tails like flashbulbs stitching neon text
that you read.
Divorce will choke the sublime from you he replied.
Discovering that your wife slept with her brother in law,
screwed him in the barn on the family compound for
months and I never knew. The only truths which remain
are the personal, and those are just a fool's dream,
shadows chasing shadows on a child's merry go round.
What
is left are fragments among fragments, the death
of
history proclaimed by every dime store pundit preaching
the
latest agenda: sex as electronic power, incompetence the
new
virtue, oppression a big stick wielded by a bigoted bully.
We
must learn to speak anew in old tongues. We must write
novel
chapters with our voice as a sacrament unsoiled.
Salvation
lies only in a past renewal, the drinking of old
wine
sipped from goat skins that will reinvigor this somnolent
moment.
May
you live in interesting times. Take the pieces of your life
and
all those in your line that came before, and knit them
together
as a Frankenstein monster—lame, blind, deaf, mute—go
on Percival’s
quest for the sublime, for the lady on the pedestal
awaits.
The flotsam from the wreckage can still be salvaged,
meaning
wrested from the chatterings of a shattered past.
Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so, he
said.
All the Doubles Never Known
Doubles are never thought about much.
A primary mode of existence, they shape
Minds like water inflated balloons.
They float about, particles in space, exist
As three dimensional twins, patterns
Projecting outward shaping myth.
Doublemint twins so wholesome,
Encapsulating an America still possessed
Of a moral and ethical center not out of
Plumb.
Double down in poker, marriage, lovers.
Staring down a double barrelled shotgun.
Loitering over twin bra cups loosened by
The wrong person. Sliding into the second
Relationship off a long double—out.
Biblical doublettes that are not just
Binary bedfellows boasting reality.
Double servings of just about anything—
Double martinis, double rum and coke—after
2 a.m. double trouble. Double jeopardy lying
Like perfume on both shoulders.
50s televised twin beds, Puritan single
Twining introduced by the Mayflower and
The Arabella. Double meanings for double
Lives. Binary stars pulsating with double drum
beats doubling over in double time. Tennis doubles
playing a different game off the court.
Double lanes leading to nowhere. At the end the
Doppelganger dancing in double time.
Sand Painting a Promise
The magician who did street
tricks for a living told me
that if the first painting didn’t
do the job, a second was a
necessity.
No bones or river rock—
a true earth artist fingering
my spirit through sifted
coloured sands to take my sick
soul like a broken yardstick,
measure out the worth of a
wrecked promise.
A Navajo medicine man who would
heal me in a Hogan outside Boulder,
peaks snow covered in a dead-white
shroud that mocked the secrecy once
held like cupping the heart of a terrified
bird in one marked hand.
Show me a picture of her
that he studied
like clouds
like rain
like geese gone home for autumn.
This one has stealth of
weasel
leopard’s mind
intent of fox
heart of snake
rat bearing disease
Medicine must be strong.
The sand painting was her
gone to Oz—brunette grains
for hair, eyes made of myth.
I sat in the center, naked.
He made the medicine,
incensed the moment
brought language from a bear’s
cave before the last ice age.
Conjured walking shadow women
on the walls strolling west, a
Mayan priest holding a dripping,
sacrificial heart, charcoal and ocher
rock womb paintings of Paleolithic
bison, mammoth, horse, a
frozen moment, a lost time.
He made the hunting medicine,
ancient anodyne for vanished women,
made of me at the head of V-flying
geese hunting the sun.
Pulled me by the hand from the coloured
sands, dissolved the image with antler
horns.
All I could hear was the sound of
cracking glaciers, fissured rock,
air-preaching sermon, the moon’s dark
side composing a promised eulogy.
An Appalachian Moon
There, walking on the trail
closed in on all sides by the
deep width of hemlocks
brooding like Socrates over
some philosophical puzzle,
there in the tear of sky,
clouds ripped like the lid of an
opening eye,
an old moon burnished like a
shaman’s tossed knuckle bone
rose like a spring leaf, drank
light from a retreating sun.
A visioned face emerged from the
moon’s pockmarked craters,
whether mother, friend, some
forgotten lover, the mind’s
creation could not distinguish.
The wind fallen, pregnant sky
belly swollen full gave birth
to one form, then another disposition
where I felt a kind of command not to
touch them.
Yet, they were there, wavering forms
dug from the mind’s deep earth,
synaptic fossils washed clean by
electrical impulses.
Outliving time by telling a story,
riding a cold moon bringing this
latest incarnation.
They told that we walk about but are
all inward, internal boreal whiteness,
stilled in the still forest, in communion
with ourselves,
taught by reflected light that stabs the
subconscious and dispels the industrial
world,
we find something scattered across the
sky that we did not know we loved,
almost like undiagnosed pains
not understood for which there is no
antibiotic.
Love as a Cosmic Quandary
The guys who live their lives in the
air poised on the interface between
Earth and heaven where cloud tops
Move beyond Olympus, these sky
Jockeys with one eye fixed on
Stars beyond the sky, Gemini air,
Below the planted earth, beneath their
Feet steel and aluminum fire powered—
Do they see with some great transparent
Eye the cosmic quandary of love written
In the heavens that entangles those below?
Such as we, two lovers star kissed before the
Womb, met now in time, in space, intertwining
Through feverish waves of possibility.
We dance together.
Sing together.
Vibrate together like human tuning
Forks struck so that we resonate as
One living force
Where she thought that I show
Love to her with my hands in two
Different ways. Through
Fingertip caresses gliding along the
Top of your thighs clothed in a silk
Dress, hear your soft moans as longing
Takes hold of your throat, your breasts,
The wet, woman dew flowing between
Your legs like buttery, wildflower honey
And you glow with deep light radiated
Out like a prophetess on a desert hilltop.
Can those sky flyers see these things in
Heaven and earth? Do they long for
Such perfect pressure within a pressurized
Cabin. Do they know, do they know….
The
second way with words strung
Together where I wrote let me caress you
With my lips, my hands, my mind.
Let me taste you as a woman until you
Swoon, rebirth in the dark, and know
That you are living flesh and spirit who will
Only be complete when you merge with my
Flesh and spirit, and bloom as living woman
Fulfilled to your essence.
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