Some of my free verse poetry is on the nature of the mind. Most of these pieces have been published on DKos before.
It soars up
to the very foot of the
Awful and Glorious Throne
and turns away from
the sunbright Presence
to fly to Andromeda and inspect
the nether regions of its
innermost spiral, dancing
through fields of shattered
potsherds that were once
iron-bottomed worlds.
It descends into the maelstrom
of bare-nerved bloodlust,
cringing at the sight of
trembling innocents
crushed under the
banal weight of grinning
barbarism.
Shivering with dread, it
curls up in airy dreamlands
of mercy, cradling itself
in the arms of warm-breathed
mammals, until it jumps
into the breathless
depths of desire and
lovefierce touch,
careening along the way
to a (distant?) scene
of watching the garden one last
moment, eyes brimming
with the end of a thousand
unwritten stories.
They walk by me
suddenly,
as if they had appeared
out of
the miasma of an
all-obscuring fog,
their features only
sketchy in appearance
but filled with portents
and signs,
sometimes heavy
with meaning
and affect,
sometimes only
fleeting and hurrying
their way out my
bemused attention.
Some of them can still
make my heart race and my
lost fire flare up;
others are carrying
Rwanda machetes,
ready to make me howl
silently once again, and
still others are mere
elements of a crazy pastiche
composed of the detritus
of the mundane.
They are all suspects
in the Great Conspiracy,
and all of them
are to be mistrusted,
as I make room for new
walkers
ready to surprise me
on other rainy mornings.
It stood before him
both invisible
and impervious.
He had bloodied himself
countless times
in mad
rushes up its quietly murderous
slopes.
On every occasion
he had ended up
dazed and shredded
at its indifferent foot,
a spent, dejected knot
of confused, helpless
bewilderment.
The dried remains of his
tiny assaults had begun to
reveal tantalizing hints
about its true dimensions,
but he no longer had the
ability to rouse himself
for another Banzai charge;
it was easier just to make camp
and play dark music in the
waning light, opening
weary scars
once again.
It wends its way
through the labyrinthine forest
and sings of its lost origins deep
in the cool remnants
of hot-blooded sensation.
Ruled by the giddy dictatorship
of sheer caprice, it bursts
through helpless walls of
accumulated yesterdays
like a tank round splintering
a log, waiting for its chance
to take its place
among the strange creatures
that have made their hurried debuts
on the wet stage
of the eternally receding
now.
It goes in and out of focus,
sometimes taking the shape
of a sketch done in a night of
schizophrenic inspiration, its
seemingly errant lines forming
a simulacrum of reality without
actually quite reaching its shores.
At other moments it
shatters into a living mosaic,
each jagged, colored tile just
going along for the ride,
happy to be part
of the picture,
and not giving a damn
whether it makes the sale or not.
Now it seems to be resolving into a
watercolor done with
an amateur’s skill
and in great haste, its overlapping
edges of streaked, ragged color
all that will be left to show
for an exhibition
that didn’t exactly pack ‘em in
and where the best piece
turned out to have been hung
upside down.
It quietly branched out
and linked
and created
a fine-meshed
net, day after day,
until, finally,
like an old television set
fading into view,
from it
emerged
the first,
primordial image,
as remote now as
the caves at Lascaux.
It is an anxious woman
with a soothing voice,
reassuring the sick
little boy
in the
strange setting
of the hospital room.
Is he summoning it
from the recesses
of soft-edged time,
or is it merely a legend
recalled from an early
hearing around the
campfire?
Their sense of being solid
objects is deceptive,
a byproduct of
the rubbery-like blob
they slosh around in.
They are, in fact,
cloud beings,
shape shifting
and billowing
in thrall to unseen
crosswinds,
little universes where tiny
particles
jump and race like
children on the first day
of summer vacation.
Within them is the entire
twisted story,
buried in a quivering cap of
cauliflower-shaped gelatin.
They are walking, breathing
metaphor factories,
and the sum total
of everything
that they are
is merely
a Rube Goldberg device,
only with a more serious
punchline.
It jumps and whirls
from tree to tree,
riding an electrochemical wave
like a crazed surfer on a big board,
zapping a whole forest
into a cerebral firestorm,
blasting open a bank vault
of shuddering introverts, and
ripping off the top of a circus tent,
exposing its weird, energetic denizens
to the shockingly bright sunlight.
Groups link up and shake hands
at a hundred summit meetings,
and suddenly the place looks
livelier than Reno on a hot night.
And with that, she leaps out of bed
and writes them an ending
that'll have 'em
begging for more.
We are the sum
of what we once were,
the product of selves
we never fully knew,
a swirling,
continuously evolving
concatenation of
moments strung
together through
the shadowlands
of experience.
The days elude us,
until we look back
at what we thought
was happiness,
and wonder how it
was
that we didn't
see.
It unfolds around us
in a sinuous way,
washing through our
heads in a wave of
rapidly erupting,
rapidly extinguished
flickers of energy,
its contours glimpsed
for an agonizing moment
and then, with impish
brazenness,
pulled away from our
helpless view,
leaving us bereft
and entranced
in the same
instant.
Its folds and valleys
didn't evolve in order for you
to comprehend the Ultimate Truth.
Its multitudinous, spindly little branches
aren't there so you can contemplate
the whole Universe and embrace it
in your grasp.
Its contentious family doesn't exist to prop up
your philosophy
or your gods.
And most of all, it didn't become what it did
in order for you to figure out
all the tricks it pulls
when you're not looking
and the hocus-pocus it performs when you are.
It's there to help you figure out
how to get enough to eat
and how to find allies to protect yourself
and how to kill anything that threatens you
and how to convey a part of that continuous
river running through your head
to others.
And it does all this
so you can survive long enough
to find someone to screw regularly
so that others like you can come into existence.
It's a jerry-rigged, jumbled up collection of
parts that proved useful, and nothing more.
It's a shack surrounded by a house encased in a mansion,
and you live in all three.
So stop expecting it to make you Happy,
and stop your absurd game of telling yourself
that you've Figured It All Out, and most of all
stop your village idiot proclamations of Certainty.
All the noble aspirations it's given you
are an afterthought,
and the more you try to figure out the gifts it gave you
using the gifts themselves,
the more you will become Alice
falling down the rabbit hole.
She stood up
in the kaleidoscope of color and shape
as alarming sounds pulled her anxiously,
now toward the forest, now toward the field.
An impatient stomach forced her eyes downward.
Suddenly
the noise to her right was a bird call,
and a hyena cringed upon hearing a terrible
death threat,
and the world spoke to her.
They evanesce out of the
darkened screen
and swirl or float in ever changing shapes,
like moving sketches,
their edges ill-defined,
their players transparent and lost in grainy,
dimly perceived light,
snatches of music or dialogue sifting through them.
Jarred loose
or spontaneously brought to life
by the smell of new crayons
or the sound of a distant love song
or a sudden, unbidden glance
or reasons more obscure
than the remotest depths of spacetime,
they insinuate themselves like ashen street people,
or gate crash with vulgar, callous disregard,
and then fade to black,
mere will-o'-the-wisps
that smash in the solar plexus,
resurrect the dead,
stir the embers of ancient passions
played out in fumbling ecstasy,
reduce proud arrogance to
tearful regret,
or show mysteries in the true light of understanding
for the first time.
How startling and fearful
are the days
they have unleashed.