Night of Endless Radiance
(beat poetry)
Night stares in at nature's abhorrent vacuum
and engulfs you again in your own absence
as you read your signature on each little cloud
and the world is drifting drifting drifting
across the face of the moon, a former lover,
vaguely remembering another ruined century
when Zen Buddhism was the wave of the future
as magic was the wave of the past, and soon
you'll be walking around town with your genitalia
exposed, for originality is nature's zipper and those
exposed are subject to rapid evolutionary change ----
each image with it's own little force field, invisible
until it strikes the fields of other images
like rays of light from stars viewed
by people on a train heading into the northern Night
and the endless rain forest shudders with its own reality ---
thought charged with unassuming power to enter and alter
the genetic code until you begin to resemble the thinker
whose thought you most admire ----- hence the notorious
Japanese reticence to show poetry to non-poets.
And one is often moved to think with emptiness,
not knowing what he or she is going to think,
for the Night moves on familiar horseback
through the hoof beats of ordinary life
stopping only to comfort the afflicted
and justify the ways of wealth to the rich
as if the heart which knows such fullness
couldn't bear to bare itself, and must hide
under fresh clouds of naked words unable to cope
with the nature of their unassuming power, and must protest
such fullness in a blinding flash of flesh, and must
refuse
a moment's intimacy for fear of being overwhelmed
for there can be no ambition, no argument
in the face of a thinker thinking a thought.
And you can only hope God will dress up
and become visible like a bird or a snake with long
eyelashes and tell you how wonderful you really are
but this is what you feel about The Night,
a mystical mansion afloat in a sea of blood,
a mind that bursts with loveliness when it thinks,
a mind aspiring to Nighthood, a mind
that can, at will, vanish and reappear
thousands of miles away a moment later, so that one
can choose a mind at random and declare:
"This is what it must be to be The Night!"
for the light of illumination is not an earthly light,
is not a light that anyone can chart,
no sea of light, no gravity-bent sky of light,
no light that spills over mountains like pails of milk,
no light that grows like flowers on the sea,
no light that points at buried pots of gold,
no light that one can detect and track like wild beasts
or enemy ships in the radarless North Atlantic,
no ancient pots of light on ocean floors,
no lonely little light lost in a forest of light
and hoping to be discovered and made a star,
not even a spark that makes a turbine turn.
There is nothing abstract about this light, it is neither
electrical nor solar but can only be called
a radiant blackness, the radiance
of the mountains in the interior ignored
by the smug inhabitants of the coast,
a sudden turning up of diamonds
in the darkened cardgame of the inmined mind.
This is Night's eternal radiance
which, in a moment's penetration, heals
forever the cancers of the modern soul
and plunges it into its own millennial adoration.
And there is only one test for true minds:
if they were to jump into the sea en masse
would dolphins save them
and with them on their Quasimodo shoulders
disappear in the moonless Night
bound for Ancient Isles of Splendor ?
II
The Night, the Night, the milky Night,
where does it end ?
It spills over its own borders
until there is no trace of those borders
and not even the milky Night itself silently
drunk with its own silent illumination
can remember where those borders were.
The stars are the Night's stigmata.
Only the stars themselves in ordinary space
and the occasionally mysterious conflagration
shimmering briefly on illusory horizons
remind the Night that it is the Night.
The Night rides the earth like a knight
who has found a thousand holy grails
and stabs the heart of each pregnant sleeping
woman at the very moment she awakens.
The Night is mad with its own desire
to continue being the Night
for the Night is so profoundly radiant
that there is nothing else worth being
though there is always the danger of becoming,
or being mistaken for, the day.
The Night does not know what day it is
nor has it any notion of its self-illumination.
The deaf shall inherit the Night
Miscellaneous crowds of apes swarm
in an out of the Night like schools of dolphins
crossing imaginary equators, like disappointed saints
disowning their sainthood at the end of their lives,
and the Night is a spider who has built a flawless web
in the fork of a branch about to be pruned, a Night
where demons orchestrate their dire straits,
where pies are opened and birds fly out,
and darkness is another kind of light.
The Night is all depth and no surface.
The Night is a medicinal herb.
III
The advantages and disadvantages of existence,
the development of the capacity to perceive
consciousness at first hand or even second,
whether to return groceries you've picked up
at the market by mistake and haven't paid for ---
these aspects of the "argument with the self"
form the basis for the cellular hum that slips
in and out of consciousness like a mirage,
a metallic encrustation slipping in and out
of the Dewdney radar field and creating
a ghostly wind that has probably canceled
by now your memory of having found this poem
under a carpet of moss and pine needles,
the ink running, the pages curling and discolored,
the visual music speaking of a magnetic reality
where nothing exists that is not seen, where music
and obscure tactile sensations drift along
peripheral halls and through doors of deja vu
and overwhelm you with their antique forms
and you open yourself to further dissolution
for you are a hunting animal and must find
each throbbing moment and destroy it
as in your sleep you sacrifice each dream
on the sacred altar of your tongue.
IV
The advantages and disadvantages of having
a flower garden: how many rose petals would it take
to fill a mattress or smother a tiresome accordion player
who has been babbling on too long about your beloved
as if she were merely a part of the dull murmur
bleeding under the world's fat linguistic veneer,
each cell in ceaseless argument with its neighbor,
each cell imprisoned in its own cell ? Warden, treat
your cells well and you won't get cancer. And the Night bandits, instead of being captivated
by the beauty of your naked mind,
will be unable to resist your cellular cries of woe
and with their passkeys will infiltrate the cellblocks.
For your death is a breakdown of all that is dull and even slightly predictable, another mysterious reality where nothing exists that has not been set in wondrous rhyme.
And by now you are burning with enormous passion
and have forgiven the imperfections of this world,
your generosity causing electromagnetic waves of ecstasy
to break on the heavy hearts of unknown dreamers burdened
with the creation, preservation and destruction
of tiny intricate models of the universe. But art
isn't the sort of thing one speaks of in private.
V
An absence of music, not made
by blowing into brass tubes or hollow reeds,
an unforced absence, a vacuum strayed
from the myriad influence of surrounding music,
storming from the radiance
that separates each clod of earth
from a quietude of the heart, producing a music
too slippery to cling to or even to apprehend,
moves slowly along the Perdernales river valley
and awakens the deer with amorous touches
and causes men and women to become wobbly with desire,
the a Night radiant mosaic of soft glories, the cities
of the eastern hemisphere all in flames.
Somewhere a wounded man is getting to his feet
randomly from a limited number of possibilities
and every dream he has ever dreamt is suddenly in his head
like a fire-line packed away in a fireproof box
at the end of a wooden wharf on a small lake surrounded
by endless forest two hundred miles east of Austin,
a dash of red pepper pie in the sensational sky, dear reader.
And that man was you, Eric Johnson. Look at this, a map
of Texas in the shape of a heart, the Chisos little dimples
full of tears and earnest restraint, a country
of the open heart where serenity is composed
line by total-lack-of-ambiguity line, perfect, perfect.
"This perfection has become overly elliptical,"
sang I one time on a mountain during a west-Texas sunset
"and you'll never succeed in your search for someone
who will understand your naked mind
almost as well as you understand it yourself
on days when you almost understand it.
Everyone knows it's not easy for you
the way butter drips through the palm fronds,
gangs of midget bandits ignore you along the length
of Night's passionate beach, Sappho decides to return
bearing streams of non-specific rainbow energies
and no one wants to hurt your pride by telling you
your dreams sound as if they were all invented."
You try to explain how so much depends on the
way Miles Davis was playing in 1950 but no one listens,
not even the whispering crowds of time travelers
masquerading as rosy velvet puffs of consciousness
in the middle of Service Station Nightmare.
"Only midgets have the intelligence to understand
this terrible public behavior," they taunted,
and one velvet puff stepped forward, smiled, and asked
that his name, a famous one indeed, not be mentioned,
yet as he spoke it was obvious he was anticipating
the simplicity of his own unfettered ego, and when he said
he wanted to everyone to know he'd be available
whenever needed and would do whatever was required,
one could sense a certain frivolity was mixed
with his desire to do battle with those who ignore
the soul-filled cries of the purest soul of any age.
VI
"These are the things they said to one another
under the rim of earth where Death is lord."
These are spells designed to enlighten the author
and these are messages written while on the road
and left behind to help him find the road again
when Night has fallen and friends are few
and there is no room at the metaphor, nothing
but what you see in your everyday life.
And these are dreams seen in times of darkness,
private dreams becoming public and at play
with one's private views of public dreams,
dreams struggling to be free of convention
then abandoning the silly struggle to be perfect
and thereby becoming perfect as the sky is perfect
or as the world would be in the absence of those dreams,
the public mind struggling to create a private dream
and struggling to create the conditions of freedom
that would allow private dreams to find their own
perfection, for there is a turning point when the struggle
ends forever, a Night of endless radiance.
But the Night will always be haunted by a notion
that the morning will bring a return to an age
when everything elaborate dreamt was as elegant
as the elaborate warnings Odysseus gave the suitors,
Odysseus he dreamer returned at last to find his heart's
desire being pulled to pieces by the modern age.
And what dreamer could you name who wouldn't be shocked
and reminded of a maddeningly purer existence
experienced in some ridiculous prenatal eternity
by the sight of a golden Thracian drinking vessel
bearing a daring pattern of black heads,
goat-headed snakes, acorns and armored knights
appearing in his or her early afternoon mail?
And the tide goes in and out, civilizations
fall into the sea, and entire generations
are born grossly deformed, alienated forever
not from beauty and proportion but from a way
of being in which one can never be alienated
from beauty and proportion, and whatever action
the individual human being performs is full of
dreams and flawless unpremeditated grace.
Yet these are but the arts of peace, peace that
has so much in common with war, Night
that has so much in common with radiant day,
for in either there is nothing more to do
than observe dreams with modest but mindless
respect, a respect that moves through a world impossible
to understand, a moment impossible to understand,
yet filled with the power to create in the mind
the purity of the pre-dawn when the songs
of the forest birds and the cries of the sea birds
touch the soul like the lips of a beloved saint
and spasms convulse the floating heart
until it cannot hold back, it simply must
explode and fill the Night with endless radiance
and even the Prince of Darkness is enlightened
and remains silent, unbreathing, overwhelmed
with grievous remorse, shocked at the cruel
stupidity of his life, his bones white hot
and radiant in the pockets of intelligent flesh,
his inner organs softly moaning with the joy
of enlightened existence: "All is forgiven."
VII
---- The old millpond reflected the flowering
horse chestnuts on a blue spring day
like an eye, a watery, slightly scum-covered eye.
And at Night , after the fall of Night,
when the eye blinked shut, the flowering
horse chestnuts could be seen playing chess.
At midnight the earth glowed with fabulous color
and a pulse passed through the soft forest
as if the air had just become conscious
of the sadness of unknown gods and goddesses
at having to bar humanity from paradise.
It's for your own good, they cry.
Try to see things from our perspective or,
if you can't, from the perspective
of the glowing plasmic sadness
at the center of the soul of the earth,
for the Incas of South America, it is said,
were massacred because they seemed so weird.
Yet it is time for instant coffee, and through
the window tiny green leaves of spring
are vibrating like furry rabbits mating in the wind.
She mentioned the Inca massacre in her suicide note.
She'd never developed the habit of closing her eyes
when she laughed, and as she laughed you'd have
the pleasure of seeing her staring at you
like a wild flower, for when the heart is opened
each beat is the charge of a velveteen bull
and what instinct will be left when the instinct
for beauty is finally extinct? The instinct of tyrants
trying to persuade you they have something worth hearing
when all they have to do is open their hearts
and in their speech you'll find snake-like figures
at the great doorway of heaven bidding you enter!
And so you enter! And suddenly you are back on earth
at midnight, the countryside glowing with fabulous color.
You've been over this terrain a thousand times
and suddenly the road signs mean nothing
and just as you decide never to return from heaven
you find you've returned, your heart as impossible
to ignore as a flowering horse chestnut tree.
What would the world look like without the eye,
the watery and slightly scum-covered eye, the glowworm
preening on the end of a long green stalk
after millennia of blindness? The eye does not
snap open, it opens with the slow emotion
of a brain that has not yet been born, a sacred
organ that knows its existence depends upon
a billion years of devotion to the vague idea of
light, congregations of apes worshipping the moon
and stars all born in the dawn of the eye.
The eye pops open like a pair of lips
and an egg pops out. The pupil is an earnest
pupil and quickly learns the facts of light.
And if you look quickly you will see
new-hatched ospreys fluttering from the
distant orb. And this is what the thin
king was thinking: the mind is a diamond
the size and shape of the holy grail.
VIII
Your heart is the source of Night's radiance
and music enters your heart like blood,
the heart a perpetual motion machine
pumping in great relentless troughs and crests
and the view of the stars is blocked by a giant
pine. The Florida manatee weighs a thousand pounds
and it giant heart is continually melting.
And the seagulls of Galveston bay can astonish you
with the lazy turning of their awful cries,
the cries the heart would make if it were beaked.
For this is the country of the open heart
where to draw a breath is infinitely strange
and where at times you'll forget that you don't know
who you are and what you're here for
like a long line of monosyllabic footprints
tracking across the beach and into the sea.
But the music will enter your heart like blood
and rainbows will explode inside your clothes!
And the sea will tell you of your lost instincts
and you will enjoy standing on your heart
as the Night stands on the knight's heart
and sudden flares illuminate comfortable horizons
which suddenly take to the air and land on the other
side of rows of pyramid-shaped fast food outlets.
For your most unforgettable dream evolved from a universe
that is rapidly contacting, an intelligence
with a sword in its heart, dying, a universe
in which everything is also a garden the
center of which is a giant eye that never
closes and never heals.
And what is most delicious is the loneliness,
most painful the persistent knowledge
that you have not suffered enough,
that you have enjoyed the sweetest realizations
while entire cities have been burnt alive,
schools of dolphins sobbing with uncontrollable
sorrow, and you with your pockets overflowing
with plastic lips, each with a diamond the size
of a tongue-tip at the end of it's tongue.
But the Night goes on forever, its dark
reptilian attention burning diamond-shaped
patches in the garden of cardinal sin
while intelligent smoke pours into the sky,
and some day you'll return from your sojourn
among the golden isles of mythic romance
and with empty eyes you'll approach your birthplace
and will refuse to tell of what you've seen
and in retaliation your childhood friends will
become godlike again. But you'll be able
to draw a face on the wall and no one will bother
trying to understand, for you have returned
in the divine Night of endless radiance
which surrounds you and is closing in
like new flesh around a bloody wound,
and your mind slithers like smoke in the crack
between an object and its field of space
and a little mercury figure as bright as the sun
holds the world aloft from its hollow center
in brilliant flame, with pride, as if it were
a giant globe weighing but an ounce,
and like two virgins on an elephant's back
Night and the brokenhearted universe
experiment with each other's nerve ends
and dream of an ancient world aching to be born
along the length of the passionate beach.
IX
The Night is afloat in the mind of the dreamer,
an unusual sort of Night, in its way as unusual
as the Night of the living dead, and it contains
a billion years of evolutionary light from the stars
and the soft light bathing her features has oozed
out of the pores of her poor skin like mist
swirling in the early morning hills. Her arm
hangs like a falling star. And with each beat
of her heart the earth cools and a spaceship
shoots off into interstellar seas, and somewhere
within that single pulse you see yourself
being born and dying, nothing to be excited about,
and you might see a man dreaming of mermaids
and keeping a Florida manatee in his bathtub,
for radiance gleams on Night's imaginary surface
as phosphorescent chemicals glow in the sea
and the Night's imaginary surface lies along
the length of the passionate beach of banditry
where your loves and your hates are incestuous screens
on which you project your life. Here, in Night's
magical radiance where you can have anything you
dream of, women everywhere were
laughing themselves to death and men were leaving
meaningless messages for future generations.
The Night is afloat in the mind of the dreamer
and the one-eyed light of an approaching train
becomes an illuminating flower from heaven
and the world is a station where such glorious light
shines through occasional chinks to illuminate
the halls of hell. The radiant flower was warm,
with a passion that plunged forth courageously
into further dimensions of awe (the sound
the heart makes as it opens a little further).
Every day you age two days
and every Night you become one day younger
for time stops when the sun goes down
and the dreamer's life falls apart
for there are too many patterns to smash
and the one pattern she wants can never be found
and the quiet path through the quiet woods
keeps branching and before the branches
reconverge her life will be all but over,
and as soon as one path is chosen it too branches
until she becomes trapped in her own originality,
lost in a grain of sand inexhaustible as a star.
For the mind works better when completely naked,
solemnly flashing in the middle of the Night
like a beacon of incredible flesh, a wild blossom
blinking music into deepest space.
And the dreamer is afloat in the radiant Night
Even her phone is off the hook. And the occasional
chinks were tiny windows in the endless halls
of hell where fear and dull convention served
as the cruelest tools of torture eternity
could devise. And the dreamer, mindless, strangely
afloat, drifted up to one of these random cracks
in the character armor of hell, a slot
awash with heaven's intelligent light,
and she placed her blissful eye up against the slit
as if it were a voyeur's keyhole or the entrance
to her mother's womb and the world beyond,
and after the sensitive orb adjusted to the light
she sighed and saw in perfect focus and 3-D form
screaming children with their flesh falling off
leaping into the sewers of Hiroshima
X
Sunset is a time of consolation, sunrise one of
experience, and between the velvet rays
of Night dissolve the mind-carved blocks
that damn the noblest spiritual aspirations
and create a prison for the most light-hearted
dreams, a tomb for youth, bottomless quicksand
for all that is quick. The blocks dissolve
in tremendous foam and mist and the human race
is once again united amid sacrificial feasts
and that which animates one animates all until
the origin of consciousness is finally understood
and everyone sleeps in one another's heart
dreaming they're reliving past lives,
arms and legs entwined like lazy musical theories
unable to differentiate their own identities.
And they are so happy happiness loses its meaning
and evil is waxed corpse in a glass case
with thousands of angels waiting in sublime lines
to gaze briefly at such embalmed splendor
amid sudden visions of copulating snakes
and images of Miss Universe contests.
Night is a planet blocking its own light
and the furious joy of angels in heat
enters the world like perfumed rain.
Old men on their deathbeds finally regret
having spent their lives at war with their senses.
Watermelons left lying in the moonlight
suddenly pop like popcorn.
The Night has fourteen rigid principles.
The Night is constantly brushing its teeth.
The Night is afraid of the dark.
The Night blinded Homer on a bet.
XI
The personality goes down like a raw egg,
like a young kid with new skates who goes out
and scores two goals to win the Stanley Cup.
And there is a certain randomness in infinity
as if you could reach out to the North Star
and grab hold of any kind of magic you desire.
As when you were a child beginning to read
there were mysterious curtains and screens of myth
receding into the brilliance of the past.
As when you were middle-aged, face to face
with indescribable fate, you felt like a
flipped coin poised in the air:
heads your future, tails your past.
As when you were old, the Night moving over you
like the blunt instruments of amorous flesh,
and you regretted the patterns of your lies,
lies reflecting a life of dull convention,
a life predicting widespread nuclear warfare
by next Christmas and the Florida manatee
eats thirty pounds of vegetation every day.
This is the Night of endless radiance when
all legends and myths will be placed on instant replay:
Columbus spots a Florida manatee and thinks
he's discovered a mermaid, her scales gleaming
and all is well, it's a pleasant world, as if
you're about to remember where you buried a stash
of diamonds in a previous life and it's all there
waiting for your recovery. For the beautiful dreamer
who used to live across from the Armadillo World
on concert Nights was transported by the roar of the
crowd when the band came on-stage and that is how she became interested in levitation and, naturally,]the
band played far beyond human knowledge as much
as the intensity of their individual radiance would
allow and there is always the danger of levitation
in such moments, guitarists suddenly floating
high above the stage with Night closing in and
falling into the heart of the beautiful dreamer.
And the movement of the planets, comets and asteroids
raises and lowers the hair of your flesh
and each star has a billion stories to tell
and the tongue of a poet to tell them with.
XII
You are examining a leaf on a tree in the vast
northern forests, a grain of lust, a raw oyster
and the sensation as it slithers down a single throat
out of which blossoms a subterranean voice,
yet the throat tries to maintain with its voice
the same kind of intimacy that exists between
a couple through years of careless love
or the kind of identity existing between
a farmer and his fields and the kind
of interfusion existing between cloud and sky.
And the mind expands like a bloating corpse.
The mind reaches out until it touches another mind.
The mind's shape is dictated by the shape of the
minds surrounding it. The mind is touched on all
sides by other minds. The mind is an eye at the
keyhole of all the minds surrounding it. The mind
is a transparent brick, a membrane enclosing hogs
and pyramids and covered with heavenly secretions.
The mind has qualities seldom considered
and can provide comfort in times of stress.
Indeed it possesses the ability to emit
spontaneous waves of sympathy and to predict
general weather patterns. It has an ability
to disappear, a love of appearing and disappearing
here and there, an ability to ejaculate on demand,
an ability to attract razor blades, iron filings,
and like minds. It has an ability to feel at any
given time what has never been felt before and to suffer
sorrow for dying soldiers in ancient wars.
An ability to entertain the Night as a trained bear
entertains a crowd. An ability to train invisible ponies.
An ability to love itself with an absence of passion
more intense than passion itself. An ability to
love itself without thought. An ability to know and remember nothing but that which is absolutely necessary
for survival. An ability to destroy itself. An ability to
destroy its ability to destroy itself. An ability to record,
erase, play back and fast forward.
An ability to see itself wherever it looks.
The mind has never been mined! At the moment the mind's
love for itself disappears the mind disappears
and mythological creatures come tumbling over the horizon.
Columbus mistakes a Florida manatee for Miss Key West.
My grandfather sprinkles salt and pepper in a pine
forest west of Lake Superior. A bouquet of blue irises bursts
into flame. But before it vanishes the mind finds itself
unable to ignore the proliferation of coincidences all the more
touching because of their triviality and persistence.
The hog's ears appeared in the tall grass.
Enormous pyramids appeared across the lake.
XIII
Night thoughts are bandits unable to resist
the beauty of the naked mind for the find the
mind most beautiful when completely naked.
This diamond the size of the holy grail
reflecting everything all at once
becomes a voluptuous magnet attracting
exotic Night thoughts from distant planets
and again these bandits have kidnapped the naked
mind in spite of the great risks involved
for a band of radiation surrounds such nakedness
and as the band of bandits approaches the band
they must devise waves of passing through
without being dissolved instantaneously
into radiant particles of quickly dispersing
static and each new bandit must be more and more
cunning and this is how philosophy is born.
The bandits were weary. They'd traveled from another
hemisphere and were wandering down the passionate
beach, sighing, cursing, wishing they'd never heard
of enchantment. And the waves rolled in
at their feet, wave after wave of natural radiance.
And the bandits sighed again and listened
to the collision of trillions of particles of sand
and the sudden subsiding of the curious crests.
And teams of celestial apes with high-powered
jeeps and rifles roam the countryside:
the apes of wrath, each ape with a diamond
the size and shape of the holy grail
on the end of his neck. And how they love to
kill one another! They hang each other
on ropes and tie each other to stakes
and then set fires. The moans, the screams.
The stars start staring and become startled.
And the pencil casts a long shadow
as civilization disintegrates again and even
saints love to cancel one another out.
But the mind is never naked, the mind
can never be aware of its nakedness
for the concept of a naked mind implies
the stripping of the mind's ability
to know its own nakedness, a condition
of innocence so profound the first thing to go
is the notion of innocence.
And the bandits no longer felt weary.
They looked at each other and saw nothing
but the waves splashing on the grainy sand,
phosphorescent waves in blackest Night,
waves insisting on being seen by human eyes
as if their glorious music wasn't enough
with its moaning tear-filled climaxes causing
a tremendous shudder to fill the equinox
every ten or fifteen seconds along the length
of the passionate, jam-packed beach.
For it is not the mind that proclaims its own
nakedness and perfect innocence
but rather that which surrounds the mind,
the new romance that moves around it
as water moves around each school of fish,
the waves that splash on the sand-witched beach
and witness the sudden absence of the bandits
for the face that stares out of the mirror
is at least as alive as your own. The innocence
of a bubble that has burst! And the bandits sat down
and sadly listened to celestial eastern music
and as they listened they simply vanished, ceased
to exist and only the waves and the bewitched sand
seemed to be left. Like the story of Ramakrishna
who saw two boatmen angrily exchanging blows
in the middle of the Ganges and marks from the blows
immediately appeared on his body, and then
a truck went by and everybody on the street
screamed but Ramakrishna merely smiled
because it was still the nineteenth century
and motor vehicles had yet to be invented.
XIV
Spring came early last year and produced
incredible dimensions of beautiful banditry
much of it frankly excessive
and produced unusually radiant Nights
with the sunset's afterglow hanging in the sky
till the fourth false dawn started telling the truth
and everyone slept thinking all was well,
never dreaming an ugliness terrifying in its banality
was spreading over the world with dozens
of dead and dying dolphins lying along
the length of the compassionate beach. And a ferocious
longing for lost beauty was being attacked in the ring
like a bull while the crowds cried and the bull died
and the spirits of saints hovered in the skies
and a butterfly vomited on John Keats' notebook
and fluttered away like a tiny Pegasus
bearing a wagon heaped with the corpses of tiny dreams
and the hog's ears appeared in the tall grass
and a pyramid appeared in one of the ears.
But only two per cent of the civilian population
saw anything, the remainder blinded by their continual
lust for personal glory and an arrogance that will never
melt into the ordinary radiance of the heart.
And people you have never met
but who could have been your dearest friends
are disappearing in the monocles Night
while the forest labors to understand
the sound of passing motor vehicles.
And people you have never met
appear crazily in your memories, hungering
for acceptance, ridiculing you for your lost
emotions, the quickly fading pages
of a splendid lack of horror ----
And someone you have never met
smiles as he stands there reading your mail,
preparing a modest meal with his one free hand ---
for the horror is a relic of a radiant mind
and at your heart's core lies the flesh made word
in a tiny pocket of tears where that which can happen
nowhere else can happen, a mathematics of existence
that is heading blindly into outer Night
where a world is being transformed again and again.
And at this moment, entering your body,
is a spirit the size of a baseball stadium
as if the sewers of Hiroshima were flooded with dreams,
with stacks of creamcheese sandwiches on small rafts,
and here and there a ladder leading down to a place
where long-lost friends have snowball fights
in summer meadows and peaceful gardens of no desire
where in pools of warm mud fresh constellations
of human eyes stare up at a starry sky,
and the moon like an ancient bard sings of Night
while the stars, lesser medieval rhymesters
sparkling like rare pop bottles from the forties,
whisper magic formulae into the ears of aged
astronomers gazing into knobby telescopes.
And people you have never met
are living their lives in remote Tibetan villages
waiting for you to pass through and be transformed
by their overwhelming beauty, a beauty
only you can see, so that your life becomes
bent like light passing through a black star,
a warp that will ache and ache forever
and you can watch movies every day
and scan crowd scenes in slow motion
and you will never find yourself
or anyone else you could possibly be
for you are trapped in the trap you set for others
like someone trying to swim Lake Superior
with Lakes Michigan and Erie strapped to his back, poetry
a process for stabbing the heart with heart-felt lines
of icy darkness, poetry the art of darkness,
and tiny people swim for the furthest shore
in the red glow of a Texas sunset,
each frantic swimmer and entire universe
hoping not to die and laughing playfully
as his or her lungs fill with real blood
along the length of passion's peach-strewn beach.
And on this spot three thousand years ago stood a
beautiful naked boy, a string of fish in each hand.
my friend also read it and has some thoughts,