Thursday, October 20, 2011

Epic Night

read poetry at cafe near frcc. just happened to be during my literature class, so i required the class be there. i read EPIC PORTAL POEM and sang paeon, pumpkin seeds, i feel tractor, bay of poets, wildwood holler and the halloween song.

preceding me, as a surprise, was my prize student from last semester. he told the audience that the poetry he was reading was inspired by my class. It was his first reading ever. He dressed hippie chic, all in white, hippie sheik. he was great.

then afterward offered a job at frcc for real money. yes!

finally listening to great bands at D Note, Antiquia, from S.F. and dancing late night.

finally finally listening to epic halloween practice from night before last while writing this. so good. life is richer than i generally feel comfortable talking about.

poem for 100k poets for change

A Vision For My Daughter

"I have seen it. What? Eternity.
It is the sun matched by the sea."
--Arthur Rimbaud


Somewhere under the rainbow, meant Rimbaud,
the rainbow itself; the spectrum
of color caused by the sun matching
the sea, physics that you can trace.
The mathematics are lost in the lattice work,
in the infinite order upon chaos,
where every opposite is a compliment.

Think of the way the sea water evaporates
in the sun and recycles itself in the atmosphere,
and conversely, the way the heat of the sun
is cooled by the sea and sprouts life,
the endless showdown where the two meet,
here, where life begins, where any two meet,
where all difference becomes one,
the paradoxes never ending, always begun
again where the out breath meets the in.

The sun matched by the sea. I imagine
myself there, where the two meet,
where the cool meets the heat,
the wet and dry coming together,
the feeling of that frisson
starting from a singular point of thought
and then spread instantly out over the wide sea.

It reminds me of the feeling I get
when a cool breeze caresses my skin
on a hot day, that perfect synergy,
except spread out wide
over the massive surface of the sea. All that
push and pull of drying up
and wetting down
is where the magic happens,
the perpetual motion machine out of which life
comes, a factory of life made of nothing but sun
and sea, the life, the living, all desire for living,
comes out of Thee, This, That, comes out of It,
the Mother and Father, this back and forth,
eternally, from external to internal, in to out.

To spin out the metaphor a little further, from despair
to delight and back to despair. Moods swing like sun and water
and find themselves becoming steam in the center
where the two polar endpoints meet. Here.
Between me and you.

2.

Then there's where the sun matches the sea
in the evening, via the moon, the sun reflected
in the moon reflecting on the water, the moon glade,
the shine of day upon night, reflected obliquely,
just as, inversely, the shadow makes a little bit
of night in day, just as, likewise, good always comes from bad,
bad from good, up from down,
etcetera, this and that chasing each other around.

We rolled around and had a ball.

"It's kept together moving all around."

3.

So shoot for the ball of clay,
roam time and space
with your mega-zoom telescope,
until you have known the woman
on the moon, golden,
her mouth
half open
in ecstacy
like Teresa of Avalon,
or Marilyn Monroe,
a moon crater for a mole,
caught halfway between
the sun and shadow,
in the crepusculer joy of union.
(Say it in Spanish and crepuscular sounds
more like herself; crepusculario. No?)
The dusk chasing his sister dawn,
like the two lovers on Keat's Urn.
Then magic hour turns into the witching hour;
the phantom light is caught in a photograph
on a southern Missouri night;
underwater light,
wavery and wet,
flickering like candlelight,
in the glow of which everyone becomes
suddenly themselves, and everything else
becomes a blend of everything else.

The music here is bewitching,
the rhythm takes you with it,
the rhythm is all of you, all of it.

4

Until we arrive at a future star,
a dream, around which all of the planets
dance. The music of the spheres
entrance the occupants there
like the relief of gravity does here,
so that there is no choice but to dance.

Already in language there is music,
but what if language was pure music?
the music of becoming, as if communication
were eradicated except for inside the choir, become
a gem-like flame of communion, on fire.
That is what I want for you, a place where every word
is sung, every step a dance, everyone both with
and alone, until, as a poet once predicted,
you can no longer tell the dancer from the dance,
the singer from the song.


It would sound like this...


5.

What Jonah said,

"Please lift my withered friend."

What Max said,

"Here is you."

What Piper said,

"Don't throw away the good luck of being human."

What Miranda said,

"also a superhero."

What Diane said,

"See to business."

What Kate said,

"I'm moving in spirals to dust off the world."

What Kate said,

"Love is supposed to be something sacred."

What Peter said,

"The true art museum of the hip hop nation" is not true.

The true art museum of the hip hop nation is the side of a train.

But who also said, truly, "For those willing to listen, this one is for you."

What Mary said,

"Never open bottles of love potion with your teeth."

What I didn't say.

Do you reject satan? I wouldn't answer.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

meditation w/ awesome iconography

I died for beauty
a small death--eternally--
until the next breath--
eternal leap across breaths
an abyss-- a string of abysses--
the heart stops-- then leaps across
to the next beat-- echoes
endlessly in the bottomlessness.

f\\\

You've learned to fill the holes
with lead, the pencil rain
did-- with Emily D--
in the grave--
until the grass runs out
and we run out of things
to talk about.

She did too,
died, as in lived--
lived weller--better
for beauty-- which
astounds--as truth--
and abets a life
of carefulness.

Holy Dream

-- 4 am. The holy hour. I just woke from a "Mother Of The Universe" dream. To work backwards, from the end of the dream to the beginning. The wonderful phrase I awoke upon was "You must expoo to expand" or "To expand you must expoo". Expoo was a"made up" verb from my dream which meant "to stretch". This was referring back to these very strange and beautiful black metallic trees that were elongated in beautiful fluidly moving shapes, with pointed cat-like fingernail tips at the end. There were a grove of these trees at the entrance to my step-father's mansion. (In the dream I had a step-father.) One of the elongated tips cleverly pulled away from the door of the ancient mansion as you entered. The interior of the mansion was very modern and sleek. I walked upstairs to the kitchen area and the door to the kitchen was pushed shut from inside just as I reached the top of the stairs. My step-father must be busy I thought and he doesn't want to be disturbed. So I went downstairs. Earlier I had been trying to think of a second part to a lesson that I wanted to "teach" my friends who were devotees of Amma (mother of the universe.) This was downstairs. I was "reaching" for a way to tell it and I stepped into a net-like womb in the closet and began to push against the netting with my hands and feet frantically. I said something to the effect that this was one way to stretch, but that it should be relaxed, on purpose, fun. And I began to do a kind of dance inside the net, an exercise of sorts. I slowed it down to slow-motion so that was easier and then I sped it up again. This is what led to the idea of "expoo to expand" and then the elongated trees. This was the second part of the lesson. I don't remember the first part of the lesson I was trying to "reach", the first part of the dream. But it was the thing you become by "expooing". It feels as if it were a kind of round lake, with the warm water reaching all the contours of its own roundness perfectly, like a womb.