"Living": Today and As It Always Has Been

"The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fall-out.
There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices - to be found only in the minds of men.
For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy.
And a thoughtless, frightened search for a scape-goat has a fall-out all of its own, for the children and the children yet unborn.
And the pity of it is, that these things can not be confined to the Twilight Zone..........."

- - Rod Serling

Titled

I miss the ocean deep green and blue
I lived in her once, a time or two
I saw her charms,
Felt her calms and swells
I floated in her love, I sunk down into her kingdom.


Her natural expansion is of my soul.
Her current; my veins.
Her fierceness I only know of....
It is there as in any natural thing.
She has not had reason to be so.

Feel Knowledge

Many things have happened - many corners turned, feelings anchored, thoughts discarded, mind expanded, clues used, puzzles completed, realities revised, and a heart has grown. This is what I may write....

The clouds loom low overhead like realizations in my mind
Ready to scatter and move onto new regions, of knowledge-to-flight
Ready to reveal a sky, blue, clear of fright.

The water expands like the depth of my sight
I remember that rock in Cuba and the love I have for Her. She nears narrow but is forever wide, eyed, she breathes back the tide.

The headlights, in front, are minute and one-word defined. Dwellings sit dimly,
Lining Her boundaries but daring no further.
And I feel past them as tho they're an image-eye-nation.
But,
They are there, just as I am everywhere. I know them in me, for I've lived them freely.

The waves roll with reason un-fathomed. Wind-weary wandering is why I know. They come to me, not controllingly but openly; a comfort-sea.

The Circle speaks of small things that are powerful.
If you must ask, then you already know.
Let the small stuff grow.

And I still flow....

write to me of your lives, loves

Think of them all, brothers in arms, spread over the world like rogue missionaries: one roaming urban waste, strut making waves amid the up and in and down and out alike; one scaring flocks of invisible birds from high branches he's created; one all good intent making peace with bare hands and sideways smiles; one bringing romance to the modern world, hair in the wind, eyes to the bow. Women dancing in and out like northern lights reminding them of home--requiring too much to touch, the brothers soldier on paths of lonely enlightenment. 

Think of them all, dazzling spectacle demanding court reporter, asking favours of their old lady. Think of them all, mapping dusty dreams, and wonder which turn next brings them my way. 

delicious and nutritious

Sirs, the obvious muse of this beloved blog is absent, and so is the beauty and life that he carries around with him. At the very least, this, a quote about art, and the chasing after of it, and the never being full of it, and the hunger for life and beauty and truth that we'll feeling in our bellies, forever, or until the acid rains wash it away.

'"I could never find the nourishment I liked. Had I found it, believe me, I would never have caused any stir, and would have eaten my fill just like you and everyone else." Those were his last words.' - from Kafka's story, "A Fasting-Artist"

(a reminder ramble)

Pen and paper parody within pennymaking pyromania
Help me heal the upper level low level loneliness
A contraption continued without 'why'
All completely conspicuous

Can you cope?
Can you conceive consumption in a container?
Scotia Bank sucks your assets to daring depths
its danger downs all dig dance doings,
Always allow alloyed allegiances!

Feel forgetfullness in and out,
A book can bane borefulness,
borefulness being 'big' and 'bountyful'

Me n' you gotta meander, meaningful-madness,
most militantly and majestically

Soon, say 'sigh',
Will be the way as a sneeze-breeze swaying to the sun,
sinless soaring -
carona-calling -
counting coolness -
cooperative competitiveness.

edward's guitar

you can't tune this guitar,
the necks broken,
the spines broken
and all you've got is
spineless tuning,
tuneless spineing
barely held together
and you can't fret,
don't fret too hard
at least,
you've got spineless fretting
scared the whole things
gonna break
the strings, they will break
comin off one
by one
till all you've got's a g-string and a giggle
(but pluck that spineless G string--
open)

the heart's triptych

I lost my way, I forgot to call on your name. The raw heart beat against the world, and the tears were for my lost victory. But you are here. You have always been here. The world is all forgetting, and the heart is a rage of directions, but your name unifies the heart, and the world is lifted into its place. Blessed is the one who waits in the traveller's heart for his turning.
--Leonard Cohen, Poem 50

Lay down your money and you play your part
Everybody's got a hungry heart
I met her in a Kingston bar
We fell in love I knew it had to end
We took what we had and we ripped it apart
Now here I am down in Kingston again
--Bruce Springsteen, Hungry Heart

I know I was a cripple.
Of course, I'd known it from the start.
My father took the crowbar

and broke the wringer's heart.

--Anne Sexton, Cripples and Other Stories

poetry

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I am in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialized from a cloud or risen out of the ground. There is a glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows. Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply keeps growing. The impressions most useful to my purpose seem always those I was unaware of and so made no note of at the time when taken, and the conclusion is come to that like giants we are always hurling experience ahead of us to pave the future with against the day when we may want to strike a line of purpose across it for somewhere. The line will have the more charm for not being mechanically straight. We enjoy the straight crookedness of a good walking stick. Modern instruments of precision are being used to make things crooked as if by eye and hand in the old days.

I Sing The Body Electric, Verse 4

I have perceiv'd that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?
I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea.

There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well,
All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.

" Our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe
And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight."

- T.S. Elliot

my mind lives in a Parisian cafe,
where it sits
and smokes and mulls
over the thoughts
of an after life,
useless hands work useful levers
and I grow vain
working class

calluses

at night I plant
the seeds of rebellion
of anarchy
and revolution!

we soak them,
we nurture them,
in the breasts of wild women,

in whiskey and pills
in the midnight hours
in political rants of what could be
all the while knowing

what is
and what will be

we're so big, we've already got a spin-off

"That's a rubber boot, not an ashtray."

eightfold

Found ourselves
in the gutter not going
but I knew you understood
--thought I saw you nod.
We jammed and chattered
bout things we might do:
'get off this sinking ship,'
'no way to live.'
We tried and try,
offering our bodies and minds
to nothing but togetherfulness,
paying attention
with whatever's in our pockets.

sheldonxaviermacneil

smile,
frown,
up --
down,
laugh,
cry,
evrntually --
die

tangent thought

The Church (Of Yore Choice)

dig that church man, dig it.
dig it in all its minute reality - bubbled
capture its authenticity and don't look back
dig it because it's there
dig its distinctness in a sea of fakeness
even if you don't believe
you can see it still
see its essence and its majesty
wrap your mind's window curtains around it there
dig it in its solitude
for few notice such things (and dig that too!)
dig its depth and despair
dig it as much as you don't dig the business towers, new,
surrounding and higher
as man grows nature shrinks
dig why the church remains
dig life or dig a grave
remember the ones who go each day
know they're not all the same
but that church man, that there is everywhere in one place
you don't have to look up or feel deep
just know its there because it is even when you pass it by
dig it if it crumbles, a piece of you is gone
dig a piece of us all.

Me and the Cisco Kid

Bold neon lights shine
Bouncing curves off a urinal
Known to Cisco on 46th and Vine

While you shake the sanctum of my ears with a better word
With causal sensations that should be written down
For recitals by coke swiggin' swine
Of how BUddha was a manipulative fuck
And I piss out the HOly
The good only thing of Worth
That is and is of ME

Shootin' it up
Goya's spine

Words in the spaces sprawling off news paper sheets
Bought and sold yesterday
By pinstriped fish fried mongerers
Swinging to a 2/4 beat
If nothing else

You still ain't got not shirt
Cause you got no shoes neither
And 2/outta/3 beats
2/4 beats
If you wanna dig a well
For Goya on 46th and Vine

ringo knows

making and unmaking

One is all Japhy Rider and his shirt is off and he's on one of the kitchen chairs while I cut his hair, and the other reads from some book he found on the floor, which he keeps saying he was reading on the chair while I was quietly tidyin or maybe he was quiet, and it's about realism and realists and the ways they get it wrong, the ways they make and unmake, and meanwhile

I've got hair between my fingers and they're wet and I'm ridin the high and mumbling along with Dylan and thinking about how I'm making and unmaking right there, cutting hair in my living room and I look across the room and say "This is so Carolyn Cassady," and he looks across at me and smiles cause he sees it, and then frowns with his eyes and says

"Stop stop stop you're makinim look like a chick," and I spin around out front and brush his bangs out of his eyes and I'm patting his cheeks and saying "No, no, you are just so adorable." And I keep going and the one in the other chair says "Stop stop, look at it man," and

the shirtless one is just smiling and happy to be alive with hair to cut, cause it's slowly going away in a way more obvious than the rest of it, and he doesn't care, doesn't give a damn about his hair, he just wants to get to know some tree in the park, and use this high for good things, and make a life that lets him have a hidden away cabin somewhere in a compound of cement or something, so that he can keep on this journey without having to worry about the kids or whoever, so that he'll be the same in 25 years as he is today in the middle of March, cause

today, in the middle of March, this haircut doesn't give a damn, and won't bother making up its mind either way, making or unmaking.

imaginable, foreseeable, attainable

"And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn't in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realized it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment. But I didn't die, and walked four miles and picked up ten long butts and took them back to Marylou's hotel room and poured their tobacco in my old pipe and lit up. I was too young to know what had happened."