The Way of Flight

Erika flees south. But not for Palm Springs, that oasis of green golf courses where plump Northwestern snowbirds strut and old ladies ferry pomeranians about in baby strollers. It’s too… fake. No, she seeks the authentic California experience; the mythic, redemptive spirit of California. The Kerouac sort of San Fran, the Fante flavour LA. Or perhaps Santa Cruz, where polite, enlightened folk in moccasins stroll forest trails, chatting about the Tao and Kundalini Yoga.

She thinks about this as she sits in stale Seattle traffic. Clouds cling to the sky like dead moss. A few hours earlier, she awoke in the single bed of her old childhood room, dim even with the curtains open. Downstairs, cold porridge sat on the stove.

“Eat before you go,” her mother said. “I’ll warm it up.”

As Erika ate, her mother tried again: “You’ve only been home a month.”

“It was a mistake,” she answered.

“Leaving won’t make you feel better. Maybe if you saw Doctor Karlsson again, you’d --”

“No!” Erika’s voice squeaked like a spoiled child’s.

In Olympia, she leaves I-5 for Highway 101, which runs along the coast, quiet and curvy. She plays peek-a-boo with the ocean. Beneath the hum of wind and distant gull calls, the morning’s conversation beats like a broken record in a far-off room. Leaving won’t make you feel.… Erika flicks on the radio and finds a soft rock station. She isn’t sick -- she knows that much. She’s just been… unhealthy.

At a gas station south of a lazy little town called Lincoln City, she fills up, though her gauge shows half a tank left. Her gaze through the back window falls on a bruised banana lying next to rumpled grocery bags full of her clothes, books, and herbal tea collection. On a brown lawn beside the highway, she unravels the banana from the bottom before biting off and spitting out the black bits. A dense canopy of barren branches obscure any view of the ocean, but there’s a gap farther along. Erika saunters over and, sure enough: Peek-a-boo, Peaceful. Out over the water a cluster of clouds break apart. One thin sunbeam stumbles down to the water.

Hands on Drums

Shamans' hands on drums
thump-thump-thumping rumbling thunder rhythm running
through warm wet ground
to our enshrouding clouds of somber doubt
scattered by the beat, sweated clean
tumbled off in roughness close enough to love to rouse our groins, our groans
building, falling
to a hum that slithers
slips my post-coitus posture
and I'm up to prance the pasture
grooving along our mud-floor room
in motion, inertia shunned, no thought, all sound
unwound in a dance unbound by the roots of youth and spoiled fruit
rotten trauma bonds sluicing like juices
out pores of old wounds in one long
pump of frothing blood from
shamans' hands on drums
before the stumble into
rum-sodden slumber.

Feint

I live in sunny days doomed to fade. I chisel not my name upon the Mountains of History, nor mine their depths for buried brilliance. I paint with water; I craft with sand. I write on recycled paper I one day recycle. Immortality is the breath each word breathes; I need not their mirage. I write to unveil humanity, this fickle play without plot. I write to understand myself, this actor who forgot if there ever were lines to be forgotten. I write hope where worry dwells, compassion where complacency broods, laughter where silence reigns. I write because I need to, and I resent it.

Why can I not drift in silence unanchored? Why destination need I to chart a course? Why purpose need I to chart a life? Why grief suffer I?--and what grief be this but a lingering shadow from an old dream, hidden beneath the cacophony of thought? Can I love what is? Can I love what is not? Have I the courage to emerge from this swarm of self-pity as the chick from the egg? Have I the insight to know this is not me but my challenge?

Yes. I am the eternal I. All else is but the game. I was lost within it, but I did not lose.

The Sadness compresses me, crushing, squeezing from me my air, cheating from me my time, blurring my vision, whipping my thoughts to a flurry to a storm, choking my love. The Sadness enlists, enlivens, provokes my innate fear of the All and of the None, of the Unknown and of the Unveiled. The Sadness is so tangible I can almost taste it, souring my breath, repelling others, sickening my lungs and my stomach.

The Sadness is, of course, not real. It is just another mirage, a feint played well by the opposition, but perhaps too often. So like It to play such a clever ploy: undermining as it plows through, bamboozling, disarming as it stabs, distracting as it steals. So like that wily Death!

And I? you ask. I am Life; I learn, I adapt. Each mirage, as powerful as convincing as it may be, bears the same rankling whiff. While Death seeks to lead me from dream to sordid dream, I now know there is but one of matter; and though still I often stumble, my reactions quicken, my feet grow stable, my eyes sharpen, and my laugh and my silence make love.

For I am Awake. Your move, Death.

Colourful Anorexic Models and Imagined Idealisms of Classiness

The infuriating tediousness of minimum wage jobs has, over the course of 12 and a half months, driven me to a pathetically helpless lunacy. My only sane reaction to the constant drudgery of waltzing the constant brink of poverty is to flee my tottering predicament for either extreme before the narrow daily focus of surviving accruing stress overwhelms me completely and leaves me a sloppy, broken mess. So many Americans--let's say 98% for the sake of prudence and swiftness--are on the brink of embarrassing financial extinction. There are those who own (massively! beyond their needs or even wants) and those who owe. Fuck if I want a 15,000$ car! I'll be behind for years, and pay over twice as much for the damn thing. And before you know it--a house! Mortgage, you know. And then it's the long wait, the dull grind of hours spent doing something you may, at best, give two or three damns for in order to pay off things that provide the illusion of societal flotation--maybe sometimes security as well, I suppose, but a tainted and double-edged security.

The old ladies, heeled up, towing perfumed accessory poodles and terrified chihuahuas, skulking the sunshine streets in shades and hats, humping the poor clothing salespeople into a constant depressive vengefulness, scared out of their wits at the prospect that what they've chased after and admired for so damn long they're slowly losing, desperate for any measure of meaning but too stoned on anti-depressives and estrogen replacement pills to pay attention for long enough to actually search beyond the colourful anorexic models and imagined idealisms of classiness.

The whole damn charade makes no sense to me! I understand why people go along with it, sure, but the basis is mind-bogglingly empty. How many times does it take till people learn one goddamn lesson? Gorging on flashy, succulent, temporary trifles like blind swine does not bring fucking happiness! (That is what people want, right?) The lesson is learned too late, it seems, and by the time one realises it (if one is so lucky), one is too old, too weary, too fucked-over to do anything about it but bitch and of course none of those young and enthusiastic for and confident of some grand Meaning of Life listen to an old bitcher admitting that said bitcher knows nothing.

Seppuku

I leave Mitch the Cat and Noemi for I see the restlessness in the tread of the Cat and the passion in the eye of the Gypsy. I walk home, head held high with aloof contentedness, neither fearing the weight of the world nor appreciating the cacophony of stimulus about me. I think about my future, wistfully and with quiet dread. There is so much to do, it feels overwhelming and I shrug it aside with the help of the THC floating through the veins of my skull (or doing whatever it is THC does that makes me so carefree (or perhaps careless)).

The apartment is dark, as is don Carlos's room. His door is always ajar, his room an organized mess, a labyrinth of objects and information only he can tread with any confidence. I brew tea and sit in lotus on the mat in the middle of the living room, where I meditate for an hour every night. I close my eyes and follow the slow waves of my breath until I don't listen to the noise of the busy street outside or the jabbering monologue of my mind. I am at peace in my ocean of no things, no thoughts, no being. Oddly, I remember everything that happens as I am in a distant meditation land better than I do that which happens after, which I actually take part in. I wonder if it is because I go over it so many thousands of times after don Carlos recounts it to me three days later in the soiled white room of the big grey hospital. Or perhaps I am truly aware of it all as I sit motionless, but so far removed from my senses I don't pay any attention. Anyway, this is what happens:

Cradle

The god about the microphone
exhales the finest octave
of this moment
(all time)
of this place
(all space)
as the crowds they
sway and chant their shared pain.
The god
who is big and black and doe-eyed
summons all the precious music
from his lungs again
and again and again!
as the trumpeteer he
lambasts his feral roar
as the cellist she
strums her sublime shriek.
The god and I
drift in silence
on the skiff built of his passion
seeking his sad siren's song
beautiful beyond description
transcendent beyond recognition
an ethereal beauty not heard
since the days of Mozart or David.
When there is nowhere left to go
I drink of his tears
so that the god does not drown
alone.

the Desecration of my Temple by the Gypsy Noemi

Noemi takes my face into her hands and gazes through the pitiably tragic Character of Leopold Charles into the Soul hidden behind my Self. In response to her calm penetration I attempt the habitual initiation of self-consciousness, but for once that most prized ability of mine lies elusive. How intoxicatingly fresh her eyes are! as brilliantly vibrant a green as a young blade of grass in the spring sun; they radiate light from within, and the Light of her Soul is so piercing, so immense that it could pierce any Self, explore any island. I am so inexplicably lost in her eyes that I know of nothing else: I cannot even recall the contours of my own visage. The urge to be in control has vanished like the smoke of a burnt-through cigarette.

She steps from her boat to the shore of an island named Leo. Without greeting we explore the line where me meets the tide, bathe in the delta of my great river, marvel at the exotic wares of my bustling city: I the childishly excited host, she laughing delightedly at my candid friskiness. I tell her of the eccentric and important travelers with whom I have traded knowledge for wisdom, art for beauty. I describe the mighty parties held in the mansions and in the passing cruise ships. I tell her of the great revelations borne before my hearths: talk of reason, of love, of living. A fascinating existence, she says. Is she making fun of me? She points to the top of my mountain, the heart of my kingdom, the citadel which shelters my Temple, and I tremble.

can't faze Black Stacey

Black Stacey
They called me Black Stacey
I never got to be myself
'cause to myself I always was
Black Stacey
They didn't think it'd faze me
but it did
'cause I was just a kid.

- Saul Williams -

Darwin's Story

"There is so much I want to do but can't," I say.

Mitch the Cat sneers. "Like what?"

"Escape. Take a vow of silence. Run away into the woods. Sail into the middle of the Pacific and just drift like a well-endowed castaway. Say what I want to say to people, say what I believe. Know what I believe."

"Why can't you?"

I throw my arms about a bit and huff in frustration. "I can't afford a sailboat, I'm a goddamn student. If I run off into the woods I will die. If I become silent I will lose my job."

"So?"

"What? What do you mean 'So?'?"

"What about knowing and saying what you believe? Why can't you do that?"

"Because I have no time. That would take so much damn time, to find that. And then to find the courage!"

He says, "The courage comes naturally."

I look away and mutter: "I just can't. Not enough..."

And he says, "Whatever."

I shut up. I was too angry with him and my reasons were valid. Why did he not just listen to me? Why couldn't he understand the incurable not knowing I possessed?

After some time staring out the window onto the street, he turned to me and said:

"You're living a story, Leo. The story of what you cannot allow yourself to do. The story of fear of the world, fear of change, fear of life. It's all very natural, very Darwinian, but you're better than that. I know you are; I believe in you."

the Truly Creative Mind

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive. To them... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death.

Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, their very breath is cut off... They must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency they are not really alive unless they are creating.

- Pearl Buck -

the Burning Bush

I remember it all so well.

He takes my face in his hands and stares into my eyes. I become self-conscious and I begin to envision what he is looking at but in that moment I cannot even remember my own eye color. I cannot imagine what he sees, I am so lost in his gaze. This is love at its purest: not romantic, not sweet; desperate and pathetic and inexcusable. His eyes are an incredibly fresh, intoxicating green, as brilliantly green as a young blade of grass in the sun. They radiate light from within; the light of his soul is greater than any light he could ever take in, and so I drink and I drink of the fountain of his youth long after my stream he has drank dry. I think: he gives so much, he must open himself for even more, his longing must be unquenchable. I shutter at the deep, communal sadness I see in his sight. I study the lines of black and white emanating from the pupil; they are dancing and swirling, a soft spring stream pooling, flowing about an island of infinitely dense blackness that holds the entire emptiness of the universe; in his eyes I find the black hole that created the Big Bang that created Earth from whose bosom sprung man who created God in an effort to explain one's infinite love of oneself.

I wonder if it is the drugs or the pure life of we together there then, or both. I am so lost I cannot remember where I began. I cannot remember who I am: Ari Karmichael, Mitch the Cat, or sad and simple Leo. I don't care.

My face is cradled in his soft hands. He is shorter than I, so I look down. It's like being held by Mother Teresa, or by Ghandi, or by God. I want to melt into his unabashed, unrestricted, careless love. He begins caressing my temples with his forefingers. I wonder if it is the drugs. I wonder if I am imagining all this. I wonder if any of this is real, if I am real. I hope not.

I haven't noticed the tears yet, but I do when he says:

to my Priestess of Black Shrouds II

To my priestess of black shrouds
I owe my lives
the lesser physical
the greater spiritual.

To my priestess of black shrouds
I tell no lies
I speak not in fancy nor fear
I act not for acceptance nor love
since both she gives
freely.

To my priestess of black shrouds
I bear no guise
I am frail and afraid and fractured
she has no inkling how beautiful I
look
she has no idea how ugly I
feel
so we have no pact to continue
such an illusion.

To my priestess of black shrouds
I cannot compromise
and midst the mist of her embrace
I too am blind
for but a moment
like a rose in spring
my heart falls
open.

Within the black silks of my lady's sight
I am stripped bare
naked I am nameless
and though I fall unto my knees facing the almighty
fear of insubstantiality
though I flog myself in the mountainous shadow
of my shameful shame
not she
together we know only bliss
full darkness.

I Want my Poetry to be Recognized.

I want my poetry to be recognized
I want to be vindicated that
all the melancholia I bring about
has some meaning
has some purpose
I want to be loved
--this poor ego of mine--
I am stronger than this
no
I am better than this
no
I am more than this
perhaps
yes, perhaps that is it.

Here I Am

Here.
Here I am.
So strike me!
Come on!
I know you want to
and I know you will.
Strike me
strike me to the ground.
In the beginning
you will accomplish nothing
without Fear
and a little anger, as well.

What is the difference
between humanity
and the rest of the animals?

Perhaps
we realize that survival
is not the purpose
but the means.
But we too often do not
acknowledge this.
And so enters sadness.

the Lonely King

The lonely king sits
on his granite
throne, in
the great country of Anhedonia.
He watches time
pass like a weary pilgrim
on the side of the Nile delta.

Slumber

Quiet tides lap
the shores of my broken life
like children curious
of a dying beast.
In my last temple
the dark priestess shudders and moans
and pleads to gods
who no longer care.
She shouts down curses
upon the gentle streams
and fire upon the fields
just to be noticed.
There is a sickly holiness
to it all.
It all seems so right
and feels so wrong.
But her chants can't reach me
in my deep, deep slumber.

Sometimes

Sometimes I have no armour
I cannot hide form the clamour
Sometimes I have no right
I cannot escape the fight

Sometimes I have no ground
Nothing to help me stand
Sometimes I make no sound
Because I cannot land

There are so many tears left
I just don't know which to shed
There are so many pathways
I just don't know which to tread

You are the only one I see
You are the only one I need
You are the only one who found me
Buried beneath the freeze

My Precious

There is a sadness so great
And so deep within me
Perhaps it is there because
Somehow there is some part of me
A part so ancient that it remembers
a time before the great Lie
the Lie that doomed the world
even before it's realization
So I remember and I know that it's a lie
deep, deep within
When all others have forgotten
and believe it
to be the Truth of Life.
No, it is the Lie.
And this is how it came about:

Silence

Do you ever get that feeling...
That life is simply too big
For you to make any impression at all?
That there is so much more
Than we could ever know
Ever understand?

All I want is to understand

In the (vain?) hope that it will give me peace:

Why? Why all this trouble?

Why all this energy spent?

Creativity for its own sake?

Have you ever had one
Of those dreams where
You had everything that you don't have
When you wake up?
One where you find that hole
In your heart?

Have you ever felt so lonely
That you felt ready to crumble
And too scared to talk:
Not that no one would understand you
But that everyone would?

There is a loneliness
So bone deep
In all of us
It feels as though
If it were shared
If it were acknowledged
The consequences would be dire
The world would not be able to take it
The world would implode upon itself
And leave behind
Only silence.

And because there were no more humans
And therefore there was no more point
Time would stop
But time wouldn't stop
Because it can't stop
So instead it would run backwards
And it would look like this:

Thoughts of Aerys

Taste the shuddering exclamation
See the hovering decimation
Hear the loving dedication
O Lord!
the scarlet Temple desecrated
it is burning!
The sweet priestess Defiled
she is sobbing
the crows, oh!, they be circling
our infected nest

For I have spoken with Truth
and she scared me.

I have seen the light
and it burned so bright
It blinded me
It hurt me
on the inside

I have felt the night
felt the darkness that creeps
As I sleep
It helps me
to dream

I have seen the grey dawn
foreseen it, perchance
it was false
I found
yes, I found it false

I lay back and
I think thoughts of aerys