dysfunctional harmonics at 3 a.m.

the rest of you chomp at me/& i cared
about you then/& then i didn't, or tried not to,
localizing my responsiblity in a series of
women/that didn't help~to fight the god complex
I decided to go to war with god/this was self-defeating
even in an objective reality so
the figures slipped the voice changed—
god was that woman I felt guilty about
true god was her father trying to right her madness
this too misses the point
grief is the melody we need to hear
that's the channel we forever tune in
all the accepted wisdom is all true

"time itself the magic length of god"
you know I could be writing letters here
if I could just figure out where to go next

is god the hidden camera in the commercial of life?
I honestly wish I could be funnier
too many polaroids in this mind of mine
including some I don't want to see just yet

There for awhile I was obsessed by Phil Dick's version of the theological universe. In a short version it goes like this: God was twins, but one of them was born too soon and she created this universe, but it turned out she was mad and thus this universe is "insane". The other half of god, the male, sane, half is busy trying to heal the female half. Thus god sends "microforms" of himself into this fucked up reality to lead us to mental health. See Jesus here, and other versions of this idea, including Buddha and Asklepios. Very winning, really. But then you know that Phil Dick was a twin and his twin sister, Jane, died at the age of one month. So he was haunted by the loss of the woman, of the girl, and this informs his theology at every stage. I don't believe it is the creator god who is crazy. I believe that consciousness is a responsibility and that avoiding the truth makes people insane. Including Phil, who for many years, couldn't even admit that he was himself. He had at least one secondary personality that all of his friends were familiar with and that he actually wrote about several times (most notably in Valis, where his other self, Horselover Fat, is the primary character). This idea of the insane god is ancient; the sumerians had a version. Phils' idea comes from the gnostics. He was fairly obsessed with the gnostic gospels which he had become conversant with through his deep friendship with the apostate episcopal bishop, Jim Pike, who disappeared in the Sinai Desert in 1969. Pike was on a quest to discover the actual process of transferring one living conscious personality into a new body; physical reincarnation. He was convinced it was spoken of in the Qumran materials. During this period of my life, 1981-1991, I read the dead sea scrolls and the nag hammadi materials and Elaine Pagels great book on the gnostics. For a long time I thought that they might have some sort of handle on the truth. It took quite awhile for me to work through the problems with the cosmology, but eventually I came to understand that everything from the Book, as the bible is known, is essentially tainted. That the jews screwed up the Egyptians cosmic knowledge. They got it wrong, but Constantine made the western world xtian and there isn't really much we can do about it now. Avoid it, maybe. Ask the Lady for Her mercy. Live in nature. So much of the Book is essentially anti-nature. That is the source of denying female sexuality, and in turn male sexuality. These are "animal" things, from the natural world. woudln't want that, would we? The Jews were always scared of the woman's orgasm.

resistance

there is a moon tonight an accounting a shadowing on this heart
it is you leaving you walking away the steady unhurried natural pace
the moon changes
we dwell in the universe accepting the cycle as inevitable
the engine purrs
I listen too closely
the noise in the darkness: choirs of cicadas the fan beating air out
too many losses
it suggests that loss is the defining characteristic of this existence
why do I kid myself that I can resist this tide?
you're not here
the dark is a vast ovation to the blind god
no happy fortune just breath drawn alone
no twin heartbeat


I will say that this poem is not about any specific romantic attachment, though it did come from a date I had in the mid-90s before I met the woman Kimberly. It is also in the period where I was slipping into the gnostic materials on and off. Any examination of the god of the old testament finds a rotten hideous bastard who gives not a crap about us except insofar as we feed his hideous ego. The gnostics characterized this god as Samael, the blind god. The god who had gone made and created this universe, the one we inhabit. He is, as Phil Dick put it, insane, and therefore this universe is insane. Dick believed that because of this we need "medical attention" and that the avatars, Jesus, Buddha, Asklepios, were all microforms of the true god sent in to bring us back to sanity. It's a lovely theory, really. I spent quite awhile reading the texts and thinking in these terms. But it just didn't really work for me.

And then I truly found the Lady in my heart and in the night sky. On Bryn Mawr Street, after Becky Bradway left me, I started sleeping in the sun room at the back of the house. At night I would open all the blinds, except those on John and Gael's side because they had a little porch light back there. On full moon nights I could see plainly across my backyard and over the fence to tenth street. And I would open myself up to the natural world, the fir trees, the holly tree, the wind through the many windows. In the room in a planter I had this ficus tree I had grown from a tiny plant bought at the grocery store. By this time it had grown to be about eight feet tall. I recommend living with a tree.

In that room I found the Lady for real. And I asked Her the chance to love again. I met Kimb the next January. She changed everything for me. The Lady's mercy is real. There may be a blind god, but he is sad figure if he exists. I feel so bad for all the xtians and jews and muslims. I know what god really is, and She is merciful and beautiful and always on our side. Just look at the leaves and the stones, the waters of the oceans and the rivers, the breath of wind. This world has its own internal reasoning; that is the Lady's mercy.

This poem was also one of many attempts at writing the longer line. I think it works passably well. So much of contemporary voice poetry works on the short line/statement. I love a lot of rock and roll lyrics because of how well they balance their content with their rhythmic needs, and that is primarily short line statements. But, I also truly love both Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, particularly for their long lines.

potter's wheel

the year goes cycling on this tour of my life
I mix my bone's ash with seminal fluid
and follow now the woman who won't be captured
in this spinning yin and yang we make this vase
a bottle of Einstein's space, and time
she fills it with roses, I fill it with rhyme

the frescoes of friends glazing my self-described brochures
dark & light daguerrotype, marked in silver the singers
chasten this clay, knead the dough to its consistency,
fasten the chainwheel on the day, follow the girl,
her song vowels in siren, taking shape on the potter's wheel

Phil Dick uses the image of a thrown pot as a hiding place for the deity in his remarkable book, Valis. The idea of the universe as some sort of art studio is interesting to me. The distance between the potter's wheel and the great centrifuge at CERN is just not that great, really. I have to say that my old friend Greg Lakebrink's long term relationship to bicycles and cycling gave me the idea of life as a "tour" and the chainwheel as a tool that we all have in a symbolic way. Perhaps, for me, poetry is like a chainwheel, giving regularity to my imagistic reasoning. Maybe this is useful. Maybe it isn't.

foolish hyperbole

dear one who leaves me alone:
it's appropriate, the waste that
surrounds you & me
the ephemera of my words
the shadows of your lovers
your bastille stands intact
in southern Illinois
night passes with its
signature of deception
but we are all a version
of that villain
myself with my many words
my explanations that translate
into foolish hyperbole there is
no distinguishable difference
between this one and that one
just the death of children
in your poems, this then an
example of your real fear:
growing old is only a form of dying
but your words never go clear
they are just added, and added,
and added, purchasing a patina
of cool, burying panic's knife
in your unused belly


I think, to this day, that Alison had a special relationship to the children she was destined not to have. Interestingly enough, she did reproduce, though late in her life. In 1993 she had a son. She was 42 that year. In October. The Sixth actually. Today.

Going "clear" is a scientology term that essentially means recovering all your memory. Phil Dick would've loved it, but of course we know the scientologists don't actually do that. Too bad, too.

griddlecakes

Sometimes she is the mirror, bright!
But oh what might lie behind her silvered
laughter? only the dissolution of the
mission, only the one chance to run
from the final dismembering of who
we were originally. Smells like buttered
toast here today. I yearn for sausages
bursting with fat, surrounded by the
pickled cabbage, a strange bread
the manger for this sacrifice. I see
clearly the way I hid this entire time
with smoke and bourbon and too
much vodka, too many years. Nothing
remains of that once possible cartographer;
he threw his compass away and watched
the woman's graceless destruction.
Which one you ask, the mirror bright?
No that version of myself became
someone valuable in her own game
and so divined her place outside
of time and space. Lucky bitch. Or
worse now, living with a child but not
the one that was to be the gate, does
she know the memory of her plan
detailed in dream song the redhaired
woman below the tree and me still
screaming as I bleed and burn,
the harvest king returned to her
in the night, where she can still
feel my face and know the minutes
passing? Or, rather, past? And is
that howling the blank recognition
of our banal and ordinary pain?

This piece, as turgid and obtuse as it is, is still one of my favorite poems. And it does talk about a sort of romanticised longterm vision of being. There is a concept at work here that certain people in my life have been in it before, over long periods of time. An old idea, but one that seems truer and truer to me as I go on, sorting out the universe and discarding most of Phil Dick's ideas for my own. Certainly the "woman's graceless destruction" is meant to refer to Alison Gaughan's destruction of me, romantically. The cartographer reference also means me, by way of the Keye Luke on Mars poems written twenty years before. The child that was meant to be the gate means the child I thought I was meant to have with Alison Gaughan. She did eventually have a child, quite late in her life (43).

Doorway

spring nights the child appears her crib the doorway
fibonacci constant the golden rectangle in pkd's delirium
but this girl lives the joy that comes from passing through
one leaf is but another version and blessed is Our Lady
the Version among versions the faint trace of new
growth in the air a Marriage in the wings the warmth
awakening us the music of the natural sensuous like
the lines of violin and saxophone uttered by the wild folk
gathering at the edge of this sight: the little girl is there
taking her first steps into the Lady's garden,
leaf and stone, brook and grasshopper, fire and wind,
the earth our bed and the water our blood through
this doorway we pass, again and again, ageless in our hope

5/2004


PKD refers to the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. The fibonacci constant is a mathematical relationship, 1:1.6, that appears over and over again in nature. Dick believed in things like doorways from one reality to another and envisioned them in the correct proportion. The child in this poem is Piper. I was thinking here of where she had been before she came to be with us. I believe in at least some form of reincarnation, although I don't necessarily believe that one's existence in any way presupposes what one's next existence will be. I do believe in kharma, in a certain fashion, but it has more to do with being faced with the un-truths we use to manipulate ourselves and others in this world.

The egyptians had it right, being weighed against the feather of truth.