1

What would a sea slug do with a parasol?

                  2

If I were to attempt to show you the contours of the grin of the wind would you make some hasty excuse to leave the premises and throw away my address and phone number?

You might avert you’re gaze when you see me in the park flying my sorrow which I have folded into a soaring kite…. And with its taut string … am flossing the teeth of the grinning wind.

I have already adorned the park with statues carved from the fallen foundation of my failed potential and erected temples from the broken points of pencils.

I have been very busy since I composted the vegetable kingdom of my ambition. I heard: Late in God’s career as an artist he created the eyeball: He was and is very proud of this work and it is much on display:

Though the Eyeball Museums of heaven will mess with you: All that art staring back at you can set your nerves on end.

                    3

 So you went out to capture and cage the heart of midnight and returned redolent with the perfume of shadows. You attempted to pretend the incident never happened but the next day you

were fired from your job as an assistant archivist in the Regrets Division of the Hall of Records. I understand this; it was under similar circumstances that I came to start carving my monuments

 to failure in the park. Don’t you get snide with me: I knew you before you had two shadows to rub together…. And you never answered my question about sea slugs and parasols?

Yes, I know I can be overbearing at times — but I have not been the same since my name was libeled by moonlight and the condescending sky has not let me get a word in edge-wise since.  O.K.,

that’s a slight exaggeration — but it doesn’t have to stare at me like that all day, does it?

                    4

 It was nice of you, for a peace offering, to pack us box lunches for a picnic in the park … in which you lovingly prepared sandwiches made from the ingredients of our deaths: They were a tad

over-salted, and the bread, leavened with dread, was rendered slightly soggy from condiments of self-deception — but those slices of cherry apocalypse pie (with a scoop of lost love’s decay) were perfect. And

it did seem a pie-perfect afternoon until I noticed you were staring right past me into the orgy of shadows. And I knew there was nothing I could do to hold you. So I folded myself into the

evening air and slept awhile … dreaming I was a passenger on a night train traveling toward the distant mountains of my heart, but I lacked the fare to complete the journey and was tossed off the

train into a farmer’s field where they cultivate day dreams, fresh visions, and seasonal hallucinations.

                    5

You see, my love: The sum total of knowledge I have retained regarding the landscape of my heart is what a sea slug knows about the uses of a parasol. I knew there was a perfectly good reason I brought up the subject.

Of course, this is a tired, old show, riddled with shopworn devices, performed by a rotating cast of hacks. Ronald Reagan set the fool’s gold standard of a president playacting the role of populist, matinee hero — Clinton, Bush, and Obama all learned from him — as, all the while, he, in reality, went about the business of protecting and enhancing the holdings of the moneyed elite.

In Reagan’s case, this con game was both an act of inspired career advancement and banal casuistry. Reagan, b-grade actor that he was, was never deep enough to harbor any belief he wasn’t paid to evince. By professional necessity, he convinced himself he believed those bright and shining lies and polished platitudes he pitched to a public of credulous marks; for this is the mode of mind of effective salesmen and good showmen  … having the ability to conflate shallow self interest with the good of all.

Such self-deception — played out as public legerdemain and state stagecraft — is now the modus operandi of media age presidencies. The effect of this transformation, from executive gravitas to virtual playacting, has been somewhat less than salubrious for the health of the republic. When, for example, an American city drowns in floodwater and Americans are drowning in economic woes, US presidents know how to act like a president — but not act as president. The soundbites make the man; not the man makes the soundbites.

(more…)

Denizen of a deathless world — he brought news of you … news that you were settling in nicely, and had discovered that you could create living jewels from the dross of mortal dread.

Here, in this keening dimension of decay — we speak of you often: — about how you had hung in air like a music note, how you had lilted over the landscape of disappointment — weightless as the dreams of humming birds.

It was I … who tried to quantify your presence, tried to track your spoor across vast deserts of empty air … demanding from you that you chronicle for me the living history of drifting lint.

Instead, you turned to me, wordless, and said, “The stars are seedlings; they are only possibilities of what is to be.”

If a person had traveled forward in time, arriving from even the recent past, of say, twenty-five to thirty-years ago, and looked upon the present day United States — he would have thought he had entered some alternative universe inhabited by deranged grotesques. Resembling a dadist reality television program, a sizable portion of the populace of the US (save our ugly, contemporary, sweatshop-assembled clothing) could pass for George Grosz or Max Beckmann caricatures from Weimar Republic Germany.

In the few public spaces remaining, the time traveler would encounter an over-weight, ill-informed citizenry, staring, compulsively, at hand-held electronic appliances, as if the actual world, on the other side of the small, glowing screen, held no interest for them. He would bear witness to an age when mass media imagery has crowded out and colonized almost every area of life, both public and private, and is peopled with caricatures of willful ignorance and brainless self-regard such as Sarah Palin.

As is the case with individuals, every era is endowed with a distinct character, something near a personality, all its own. If that personality could, over time, gain a sense of self-awareness, our own would blush in embarrassment viewing Palin … Preening, sputtering her word salad palaver, resembling an aging prom queen turned infomercial spokesmodel and speaking as though she acquired the english language from shredded scraps of speeches by Ronald Reagan and random bits of Bazooka Joe bubble gum comix, she is possessed of such an extreme degree of incomprehensible self-regard it seems a form of derangement.

In little danger of gaining self-awareness, Palin both characterizes and is a caricature of the era: obsession with power and celebrity, mindless memes, and the endless, contrived drama and meaningless denouement on display in the short attention span theatre of corporate and social media — all its devices and collective derangement — that are reactionary in the shunning of substance and the determination to remain devoid of the deepening implications of human interaction. Ergo, these traits and characteristics are reflected in Palin and vice versa, then back again, ad infinitum, like distortions in carnival funhouse mirrors.

Does one get the feeling that the more powerless we feel, collectively, about the rising levels of economic exploitation exacted upon us and the accelerating rate of ecocide committed on the planet by corporate oligarchs, the more celebrity “news” and other tropes of empty distraction and denial will froth forth from the idiot imaginings of the pop culture douche-scape?

(more…)

This came to be after a cache of baby teeth, vouchsafed in a small jewelry box in 1904, was found in the attic’s crawl space and the stew had simmered throughout the day and the red ants had gathered their dead, drown in the sudden storm, and an after-image from the camera’s flashbulb winked to our retinas from eternity then fluttered on its way. It happen after the ice cream melted and the sea wall crumbled and last night’s left-leftovers were fed to the cat.

And, if memory serves me, it was after the fog had rolled in and the last of the grown children had left home and the emergency exits were pointed out to us by blasé flight attendants and the headlights of cars on the highway had spun shafts of light around our bedroom walls.

I recall it took place right after you cleared your throat and after marigolds had been bestowed with their stink and the musicians left the bandstand and the comet’s near miss nearly drastically altered the tale and after the muscadine grapes had dreamed of fabled hobos and the new carpet was laid and after a millennia-dead apostle had scanned the skies for signs of the second coming then had written in his private diary, “nothing again today.”

Do you remember when I told you that I must have mislaid my salvation and you suggested that I should, “try to think back to where you were the last time you remember having it with you?”

You see: It was after the snow had melted and the far-flung galaxies had cooled– and you had asked me after love-making, “Did that help you in your search?” And I replied, “nothing again today,” and you had left me alone to scan for signs of it here on the bed sheet with the amorphous, orange-tinged stain…

There may well be no second coming, this millennia or any other.

The fraying ligature of the landscape of the United States reveals an inner geography of alienation and anomie. Living on the island of Manhattan, I daily negotiate an urban layout of practical, but identity-decimating grids — a cityscape of harsh, inhuman right angles … a geography that renders street encounters abrupt, curt and intrusive.

After a time, one begins, by reflex, to buffer oneself against such intrusions, withdrawing inward … becoming a self-enclosed, walking fortress, shielding oneself from the degradations of these impersonal affronts (that feel altogether personal) — with I-Pods, Blackberries, and other vestments attendant to the muttered prayers of the self-absorbed.

While above the street — corporate towers — that are steel and concrete kingdoms of blind, willful ascension — blot the skyline … these structures flee upward, as if to escape the implications of life lived at street level and sharing in the consequences of decisions made within their sterile, insular sanctums of power and cupidity.

This is architecture as blind hubris: creations made by the hands of mortal men … yet failing to have any connection to the ground, these buildings crowd out the real estate of the sacred. Moreover, their manic skyward thrust leaves them, and those imprisoned within, bereft of roots that reach down into the renewing loam of the earth, to where mortal vanity is delivered to dust and desperate hopes rot and transubstantiate into the compost that nourishes new life.

And blooms of renewal, I suspect, will not be found online as well. The electronic sheen of social media sites is no substitute for communal fabric. There is no animal musk nor angelic apprehensions to en-soul the flesh and tease wisdom out of obdurate will … No matter how many restless shades want to friend you on FaceBook nor ghostly texts descend upon you in an unholy Pentecost of Tweets, online exchanges will continue to leave you restless, hollow, and yearning for the colors and cacophony of an authentic agora.

The adolescent purgatory of FaceBook — with its castings into the Eternal Now of instant praise, acceptance, and rejection — reflects, magnifies, and acerbates the perpetual adolescence of the contemporary culture of the United States, intensifying its shallow longings and displaced panics, its narcissistic rage and obsession with the superficial. It devours libido, by providing a pixilated facsimile of the primal dance of human endeavor, leaving one’s heart churning in thwarted yearning, locked an evanescent embrace with electronic phantoms, as one, paradoxically, attempts to live out unfulfilled desires by means of hollow communion with the soul-negating source of his alienation.

(more…)

Forgotten … reign of redolence: Expunged from the singing narrative of troubadour air … purged, since the advent of that shivered era when the potentate of provisional remembrance banished all memories of the mercies of rain.

Was it really all that long ago,

when we arrived in that lifeless land where wind-blown granules of your scorching, secret resentments flayed my skin to the bone? Then, you — empty obligation’s nimble seamstress — replaced my flesh’s memory with imprecations of woven thistle … hopes — dried to sloughed snakeskin … and this carapace persona I carry … Beneath: languishes: a convict dreaming of his prison constructed from his own bones.

It happens every time we go anywhere.

Remember that day on the beach in Nice … when we wandered through the detritus of fallen empires of epicurean evenings burnished down to polished beach glass.

Defiantly, opaque as beach glass, we held our smooth, green talisman up to the azure sky, believing this would protect us against the invective of shadowless noon. But, by afternoon, brooding shadows returned, pooling around us, as the sea darkened against our hubris.

Staggered … left bereft … by the storm we seeded: Our circular arguments were whirled into multi-dimensional helixes, connecting querulous dreams to infinite thunder. Even you could say nothing — Even you, High Priestess of the Python of Scorn — you — maker of the charms of eternal resentment — were struck speechless by the sight of the towering nimbus boiling with its casuistry-shattering syntax.

Then in Los Angeles: By the Venice canals, a mid-morning breeze had stippled our clothes with clinging ladybugs as we made promises to each other as empty as the narcissistic sky.

But by late afternoon, without warning, sans seeming causation, the narrative of reassurance ceased and Eternity’s scold returned.

The cold night air arrived like a ghost glazed in frozen rage … At day’s end in LA — that is not the chill of the wind blowing in from the Pacific Ocean — it is the defeated exhalation of a million shallow desires repeatedly thwarted.

But I didn’t contact you to chronicle the banal details of our vainglorious wars waged against entropic rage, nor to recount the folly of our attempts to scale its eternal watchtowers manned by its conscripts of impersonal fury.

Instead, I have come to make amends to unseen things … senselessly annihilated during the din of that dim campaign:

To create an epitaph in lasting air: for friendships lost beneath oceanic contretemps, for dream animals addled into extinction by cataclysmic alarm clocks, for a million moments neglected in the pursuit of petty obsessions and for the folly of my relentless surrendering to tiny, moment-annihilating agendas, for flights of grandeur that were scuttled for the scrupulous acquisitions of piffle and waylaid by my enchantment with things obvious, safe and readily available.

This is my prayer of atonement to seeds not planted, to the Homeric Hymns ignored on every street corner, to the unknown universes bypassed by my carefully mapped, never wavering journeys through the tedious city of my habitual self-reference.

I offer this libation of fermented regret to all the raging ghosts haunting the stillborn air of lost potential.

This morning, as with so many mornings, as of late, I had to undertake an agonizing, intricate procedure to pull myself together, simply to extract myself from bed to face another day.

Television, cell phone, computer glowed before me: The media nimbus boiled: its hypnagogia-like flux of imagery, its counterfeit immediacy and proffered flummery insistent to drowned out auras of extinction rising from veritable nature; the earth’s warnings rising like musical notes …  swelling, reverberating, enveloping us. In the Gulf of Mexico … literally falling to earth as chemical rain.

I stood dazzled before the scintillating doomscape of the Anthropocene Epoch. It has entered me … It has made me and undone me. It tells me who I am; it holds me near, enclosing me in the thrall of the false intimacy of its endless spectacle.

Some mornings, I don’t think I can compose myself to face it.

But, most days, I make a start: Gathering up and patching together this tattered flesh-garment of DNA. Then: I call to order my swarming termite-cathedral mind … take a head count of this aggregate of disparate personage deemed me … attempt to quiet this nattering self nettled by formless dread … console this besieged I who awakens in redemptive bed … torn from reverie with dreaming-ocean cosmos to shuffle to toilet for Newtonian piss, to sink for anti-entropic teeth brushing, then commit to wave-particle duality decision of dressing … in order to meet the manifold machinery of the empire’s manifest death-urge revelry.

Awake, dressed, and partially reconstituted, I left the house:

The age of insistent junk rose to meet me: junk groaned and snarled past me on roadways; junk words — mouthed into junk cell phones; junk pixels — texted and twittered into meaningless air.

So many enchanted by junk incantations, staring at glowing, tinny appliances like idiots entranced by shiny objects … giving over the fleeting hours of finite life in the service of Lord Junk — as sky and sea choke in the miasmic wake of our joyless binge — and the earth’s entropic furies gather.

We stare at our glowing appliances while exquisite things are extinguished, forever … mistaking configurations of pixels for the breath and brilliance of the world.

(more…)

as the earth burns with composting memory, we listen to the wind-pitched speech of rifting rain.

From the mere notion of you, much less your arrival, I wonder: Why did you call me to this place … a world reclaimed by

honey suckle, atavistic grasses, and the last hymns of honey bees? Why did you call this meeting, at this wounded hour,

at the advent of an era that is long past my end but is only the opening salutation of what is to be?

Why — daimon?

You– who hid the jewel box that opens into ancient skies.

You– who arrived late in the Cathedral of Coincidence and caused Time to implode in white flames.

You– stalwart traveler of the vast distances between heartbeats.

You– who caused my wounded heart to bleed starlight.

Once, you told me, “One gnarled oak tree holds up the heavens; all others are pretenders. Beware of those grandiloquent saplings who attempt to woo the untested sky of your fantasy-swooning forebrain.”

Since then, I have seen the sky crack under similar circumstances … the horizon, dawn after dawn, seared with regret.

Not that you were ever around to pick up the pieces; once again, you had given yourself to the morning rain.

What does it matter to you? Neither the Laws of Consequence nor the particulars of location apply to you.

You– who are neither living nor dead.

You– who can never be rattled nor roused from eternal reverie.

You– who, in an instant, grow flowers of infinity from your finger tips.

You– who– with a single raindrop– that dribbles from your shot glass– cause mountains to stagger home drunk, and extinct species to spend eons justifying the folly of their excess to judgmental generations of never-to be-born heirs.

Yet, then again: It was you– who taught me to be amused by the self-referential soliloquies of grandiose motes of coffin dust.

And to listen for the silence held in the womb of thunder.

You tried and failed to teach me to compose music that can only be played by musicians who were drowned in oceanic deliriums.

You made confetti of my convictions then showered them upon wedding processions of ghosts.

Then you cast my complexes in concrete:

Frozen in flesh: Now, I am too slow for you. Most days, you hate me the way a poem hates a poet.

When deracinated on the page, it will never know what it might have become. (more…)

Granted, like you, my prevailing sense of self has been besieged by contretemps and coincidence; even more like you, I am enraptured by the distraction.

Our kind  … are dazzled by broken bits of the approving sun. Amassing solar shards the way bower birds shore glinting baubles, I’ve witnessed you bartering with penurious angels for a glimpse of the totality that caused their fall.

(What we won’t do for the buzz provided by primal grace. Although we carry Eden within us … knowing it is as provisional as paradise.)

Your need for recognition leaves you exhausted: At day’s end, you collapse upon sweat-sodden sheets, dreaming of your shit-dust empire … built from hoarded, moldering triumphs, the ash of incantatory wit, and the atrophied promises you made to your future self.

Your mind — such as it is — is an inhuman reflection cast by daemonic mirrors: You mistake the welter of fragmented drives and desires for the deathless dreams of numinous seeds.

Come morning, you negotiate your existence amid a city of visionary vermin and indifferent right angles; you drag your putrefying hopes down to the banks of the Eternity’s burning river. There, you turn, face east, and mutter your desperate prayer of entitlement to the distracted dawn.

A filthy breeze rises from the river in reply.