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 copyright © 2005 Down 'n Out Press All rights reserved |
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copyright © 2005 Down 'n Out Press All rights reserved |
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Openings
So what's to say? . . . this dreary spring day oh drizzle ! . . . , it clouds and grays the entire valley as far as the eyes can feel, this mood . . . riding back to front the high speed line slamming forward, jolting out from under the cavernous decaying city, up and over Ben Franklin across the once pristine Delaware high above William Penn's landing a Quaker's safe haven, and now a harbor for mothballed ships of war . . . falling away below, as we rise and rush over the bridge into Walt Witman's Camden soup RCA land . . . home of the Victrola bought out, lock, stock, and Victorian heritage a curiously spotted dog with floppy ears, betrayed along with the homeless, his master's voice in disarray taken over by the Electric General clearly a sign of our times with insiders turned in and trading, out of prison belly up, like a fish in our chemical dumps, our soupy rivers like this cesspool below . . . the Delaware |
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. . . . . A clear sign of the times
where progress is business, and like fresh air our bodies \ our minds, becoming merely commodities bringing good things to life, with a vengeance (leider) and I too, as well as you, well on our way . . . . . to comfortably disgruntled resignation Ah, what the hell, so what do ya think can be done? it is all so very cost efficient, this bottom line lobotomy these institutional prostrate minds, busily generating revenues Addicted to their greed and quarterly profit reviews they're afraid to love, and full of chicken-soup in america's corporate paradigm Cambell's chicken noodle Camden, New Jersey. So who do we see ? gazing through these eyes, into each other's hesitant, your love and mine momentarily embraced . . . our kinship's unfolding, long dormant dimensions bonding a knowing, a recognition, an inclusion . . . . . Immaterial, yes, Yet in every aspect affecting our being's continued appreciation and hope |
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The Screw's Turning
the screw turns, and we return, back where we began just a bit older, apparently no wiser reliving anew the churlish summer days of rage and hate days of frustration and bitterly harvested fruits of past generations burnt in a frost of benign neglect stalked in the ghettos' sticky cage and tamed in sour cream, suburban surrender our landscapes, stoked and smoldering coals of bilateral racial hate now more than ever, a two way street rushing into a collective cul-de-sac this catastrophe, a rolly coaster carousel the social suicide of a herd, an outrageously clumsy metaphor of bucking broncos, blinded and strapped under our children, this captive generation maimed and mauled, thrown from their saddles at best wounded, crippled and bleeding gnashing their teeth . . . with cracked up heads and clubbed feet they trudge through our city streets resentful hearts, reflected in their angry faces the entire pack, on both sides of the redlined walls, miming my generation's errors and mendacity our complacency comes back to haunt us back around echoing voices silenced Still resonating, voices of Martin and Malcolm and Che, voices of Abbey Hoffman, Phil Ochs, Lew Welch Richard Brautigan and Jack Kerouac turning back on time's axis echoing throughout our recursive social circuitry |
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our tom-foolery, as well,
amplified to distortion ricochets throughout life's spiraling particle accelerator cyclotronic neglect fed into biofeedback networks our children, this captive generation as captive as the electrons in a cathode-ray tube . . . tubed and emulating the TV, Video Games and the theater of our city streets . . . mimicking the Cinemas' titillating death wish slasher flicks, dirty Harry, Swartschennegger, counterfeit karate clowns, clones . . . breakin' bones like twigs or sticks kickin' ass, an' takin' names . . . an' jus' like on the tube, our kids are killing themselves out on country roads, and our fast lane freeways down on inner city streets . . . giving up their vision and dying
The screw's slow turning Burns cold, flares up starburst White, and rips across the night sky There on the dimly lit clouded horizons At every point on the compass, an ominous stillness The soothing contradictions of slow rolling thunder Orchestrates tracers of life's questions, unanswered In an outburst of brilliant yellow orange, solar-flares Spinning off across the distance, fading into space-time Continuums sparkle a suggestion, merging dark in light A solution ripples slowly, rampant on a field of water lilies Blue lightning strikes, turning back upon an axis Reaping assorted doughnuts, a baker's dozen gone bad A torus of figurative vocalizations stuffed in a sack Entwined, entangled, twisted spirals Our tepid collective fate, more than just a trope An angry bag of hostile snakes, vipers Turning back in galactic rap around and kharmic cycles of praxis |
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Sunday Morning Jazz For Free At The Historische Museum For those of us who see what could be breaking through against what has been and remains that which pours forth from the torn and opened wounds of our shrinking, beleaguered world is such a bloody waste! We offer these words not in despair to the one what holds our world together; to whom every person who labors for peace and selfless society offers their work. May we all yet hear if not see, and through your grace, or whatever, may we find our way to harmony. | |
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At Twilight, Near The Old Green House in the dead of august winter, we wander a murder of crows to our left vacating the ripened, yellow corn rows a murder of crows, small wonder awash in this sweltering summer in the heat of flight their leader detached himself from the rest the crow spirit, screech / cawing perched upon my left shoulder proclaiming our collective epitaph . . . we must flee this vessel, this state of mind he cried, or can you not foresee their folly nor divine this tragedy, as well as that which is approaching? leave off! and find yourselves. be gone! and on the high-grounds . . . well before the flooding before the rising tides the firestorms, and sterile farmlands decimate your kind and plunder your society. | |
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Cast Adrift in these dark times does the muse elude your senses? do you yearn for an open highway or the quick fix of your video? can you still nurture mindfulness or calmly let go? and, in flowing can you halt the constant chatter the canned laughter of the construction cranes those insistent cultural voices their constraints calling in the night like a dream from your childhood reawakening without the protection and security of a guiding light | |
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Termite's Tribal March A Work Still In Progress in which direction is this world really turning? with the missing feet of the murdered running in the billions and agent orange, supposedly tamed renamed Round Up, commonly available every garden a green house of death . . . in water tables, ozone layers acid rain, and crack if our species is somehow able to survive what will our progeny say? as we leave them a heritage of orange county Disney style fantasylands, become a major growth . . . a cancer a construction, cum service industry . . . carved out of the ruined map of myth and natural process, scraped and pushed into antiseptic parks of amusement exquisitely childish escape in the realm of the homeless what's left of the wild, the natural and free . . . must each generation mold it all to mirror their collective dreams of greed an' thereby invite, indeed, guaranteeing these disasters like the downtrodden, brokenhearted souls wharehoused in our broken inner cities? | |
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Old Ragger Woman We met an old ragger woman and I, my demons, on the U-Bahn, underground . . . . . her hair done up tightly in a red silken bandanna. her ragged, chiseled witch's face the hag of knowledge over-amping . . . . . eyes wide open, as if with toothpicks, or speed
she's just crazy said Tina's anguished voice. a bit dotty, thought I . . . . . with pages, typed single space full, on both sides! collected all tattered and yellow, preserved in clear plastic; notebook pages stuffed-shoved into her bag and falling all about. . . . |
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against the windows, now . . . . . she's pressing these yellowed pages (a narration, or what literary form?) she holds them now two, pages three pages four, and she's got more . . . and she wants to show us all . . . . . up against the Subway windows, pressurized sliding glass doors rushing towards Mainz with my demons, my wife and this street hero exhibiting her life's work, typewritten words filling up blank pages which she feels as well compelled to show the world | |
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Street Heroes Broken souls these women and men who've given up their hearts as whores or tarts of the night, and can no more see they've been forgiven. With their tote bags and tattered clothing their rags, probably once so fine as yours (or mine). Their mis-shapen faces mirror the ravaged inner city, ashen and discolored. No, not a pretty sight. no wonder we can't look them in the eye. Broken and vagrant what have they lost or gained? They awaken in a morning damp and cold on back streets or under bridges, shake the dust off their clothes, scratch for chiggers and start off into the sun rising to drink another day of darkness . . . These heroes of our cities are survivors we call 'em losers outsiders, we'd rather ignore them, but they keep the city soul alive! | |
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Father Time that dreary frigid spring day his fragile hand shaky with age smooth as soapstone slender fingers extended tapping my right wrist . . . asking, "do you know . . . what time is it?" 9:38 or :40, I replied how many seconds? he immediately queried back how many ! seconds? how many eternities? left (asks our impending death) until my impeccably certain end? | |
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Death's Dream I had this dream, ya see it was a nightmarish vision, starring the Field Marshall, who looked across the battlefield menacing and lean, like death warmed over . . . with a patch over one eye, and yes his pirate, brigand's face, full but blankly confident fills the screen, a grimaced leering, in living pallid color and real flesh, a grinning death head . . . his skin, leathery and drawn, puffy splotches, wrinkled and sagging around the one good eye a dark socket, with one fiery coal of an eye the jolly roger, skull and bones come to life with an eye patch, and yet another mission . . . Above the noise and confusion of a battle about to begin he cries out, exhorting his followers in every tongue known, well are ya with me, men!? . . . (well are ya?) |
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Up he scrambles up onto the back of a flatbed truck over the roar of his tanks, half-tracks and APCs he calls out to his commanders, his light artillery and infantry, all together now moving up over a bank . . . When five large armor piercing slugs, 44 caliber automatic fire, cut through the truck's cab flying fragments of flesh 'n blood rip out the back of Field Marshall's chest as he crumples, a marionette without strings a rag doll in a pile, oozing life . . . All so graphically depicted in modern cinema as I struggle to awaken, on the horizon a horde emerges, crashing through the lines rushing at me, a bullet passes through the lens of a camera, shattered glass and the screen fills up with blood | |
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Ode Of The Refugee Mother Kabul is on fire and we are all refugees I have given two sons as martyrs one of them was hit by a rocket and blown to bits he was only twenty his brother was eighteen My niece, a little girl of 3 lost her hands and one eye to a land mind, it looks like a plastic toy What can I say? I've had enough of these people and their holy war | |
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A Christmas Prayer For Peace (Find your own punctuation) out of history's looking glass through a distant house of mirrors they are marching with death their only intent neatly ordered densely packed and lawless starvation their only harvest higher taxes and ruin their only successes marching through the centuries they return these bloody brigands in the guise of our ownly defenses ferocious maggots and terrible worms wielding "Mattel" it's swell toy weapons wrapped warmly in cold steel titanium cocoons under the tannenbaum incubating tanks and missiles multiplying with frightful confusion only too real father yuletide sorry santa, if it sounds too surrealistisch . . . but you can hear the children whimpering this year, I want for christmas . . .
yet, the baby Jesus knows all we want
this year and forever is the quiet total extinction of the warrior classes or at least their bloody profession at every point on the compass | |
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Prisoners And we would be birds of the universe using metallic gliders, frisbee like to fling ourselves hurtling across unimagined lifetimes riding the jet streams of the stars inter-galactic winds far into non-euclidean realms inside ourselves While in fact our servants of death build dark atomic whales of destruction (just think of the jobs they've created) they strive to carve new empires in the hopeless mind, fragmented world bound by interlocking defensive networks leviathan systemic madness infecting us all . . . So long as these kings still hold their armies we are all prisoners of war | |
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Skating Figure Eights . . .  This first death came in spring to prove to real, that life beyond and after a sort, must forever continuing be . . . undone and oozing pain out of every crack and ruptured soft of gray, still smashed against the popcycle brittle neurons of one's own delusions packed in dry ice These small casualties . . . striking out in a sense, freeze you in your tracks and stiffen your back for months on end but you will continue to function Then their words (of encouragement or not) will resound hollow, as your cries for help from within . . . the meat packers cold storage box . . . and you know that you are really out to lunch On the second mourning, you say you come to it, this tomb, to find the stone rolled back, and the damage was gone? Well, for Christ sake . . . don't be surprised, for here be we all, but nailed to the cross roads of the universe . . . with no end in sight. | |
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Pluperfect Here that we are here manifest . . . that in itself . . . that which gentle binds with message smiling surges, warmth of spring that warmth of snuggled in your arms that luminous and glowing accessible, flows even at its lowest ebb, rains triumphant returning . . . that unnamed silent plotting that with laughing eyes beholding only to that all . . . (this and more)
Before The Rapture before the disappearing four plagues, clothed in bleak newsprint return with deadly aim . . . their horsemen raid in titanium chariots or iron pigs, there, unmuffled idling ceramic hardened, off in the distance, many buried up to their turrets, like desolated castles in the sand in the deserts of time buried, beneath an open sky burning campfires, mark the distant standoff, two armies encamped in the desert preparing to burn in hell. | |
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their horseman thrive on radiation hawking the continued production of plutonium and other fissionable materials beside the pristine dawning brook, this alarming diversification of high tech weapons and destruction guaranteed to drive into extinction countless species of birds, insects, microbes, and amphibian friends disappearing: lost in space, lost to the seeping tenacity of radioactive, chemical wastes, contaminants suppressing all life, beside a flourishing proliferation of the nuclear club . . . . there horsemen ride in hydrocarbons . . . chemi-suits, rubber boots and masks, all are standard issue. cloaked in techno-science slogans, green revolutions buying precious time, spewing newer gasses, sewing death, sterilizing the soils, flooded in suicidal mists of chemical intervention. warning, as if you don't already know, PCB's and other such substances act negatively on children, pets, and every friendly ecosystem . . . shrinks away, cursing . . . . so forebodes the rapture the unexplained disappearance of countless sacred orders these angels – these messengers of God reaching out in dismay – confidently groping for an end to these plagues | |
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but these horsemen ride on half-truth lies . . . beneath the sheets concealing their true identity in halftone images, public relations scams and ploys, pooled correspondents, need to know ethics, poisoning intrigue, violence and high finance . . . dumping their creativity on the dawning meadow's brook, endangered life forms. calmly alert, warming her brood, confident in her song a mother's complex nesting shrill, proposes the hatchling's insistent chirp, perched at the center of their world, sways in outstretched arms a sapling's stark branches arched stubbornly open receptive, asserting | ||
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beholden only to that all . . . all this and more . . |
that we are here manifest . . .
that in itself . . . that which gentle binds with message smiling surges, warmth of spring that warmth of snuggled in your arms that luminous and glowing accessible, flows even at its lowest ebb, rains triumphant returning . . . that unnamed silent plotting that with laughing eyes beholding only to that all . . . (this and more) |
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Too Insane! (Sadam Husein and All The Rest) On this, the eve of the oil crusades and the apparent dawning of a global pax americana unless we step outside their frame looking beyond these geopolitical fagins and their street gang bulls . . . our eyes cannot see, nor our senses reason that at every point on the compass we are starving: running dogs, in tattered clothing, lumbering bears, in disarray, red yellow dragons, beaten into submission, over-sensitive frogs, croaking in alarming numbers, arrogantly rotund roast beef and besotted teutonic adlers, belligerent yankee eagles, as well, . . . we all together now, dwell in a hideously grotesque landscape something painted by Hieronymus Bosch . . . we all share complicity in a hellish Orwellian nightmare dreamt by global brokers of the apocalypse acquiescing, in an outrageously vacuous collusion with this psycho-pathology of the fertile crescent He is, after all, merely a mutant clone a power junky, emulating the games of the upper classes . . . a shadowy imitation of these first class buffoons our rulers, who stockpile tools of massive destruction, and terribly unnatural death whose thirst for power, a monstrous illusion surpasses only their hunger for money yet another unnatural, insatiable abstraction filthy lucre, the boon for these merchants of death locked in symbiotic alliance with these patriotic parasites | |
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and these, our pathogenic power brokers well pardon me, but they are blood-sucking leaches . . . like coke dealers, who've dipped into their own merchandise and find themselves surprised with a heavy habit; in league with their arms merchant cronies together linked like pushers and users carving up their regional turf like squabbling school yard children these adolescent mind racketeers enslaved in their own games . . . our rulers are users who deal. pandering their wares, their nightmares in the marketplace flexing their muscles extorting exorbitant fees for our ownly national defenses protecting their precious sovereignty . . . these neighborhood bullies looking out for their own kind preserve their privileged status by intimidating their victims their constituency and that means you and me . . . and aren't you as sick as I am of using war for the solution to the world's problems? | |
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The Messenger out of this windy gray icebox through rain and clouded skies through the Ides of March the equinox awakens her brood emerging, with no apologies her message reels and turns and jigs across the heavens an astronomical hard fact, unfolding . . . racing toward Andromeda steadily marching up the hemisphere reflected in every bit of light from every candelabra and every candle stick in all the forms of life cradling the negentropic fires in this known region of the cosmos | |
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An Oracle in Ancient Runes if you would be included among today's remembered sages, work with Merlin's alchemy . . . master the alphabet of trees and refine the druid's trick of aging skating backwards through time growing younger, exercising epistemic soma body-being-mind embodied and attuned to etching eternity's icecapade in progressive figure eights scratch your karmic visions peaceful anarchist wishes upon the illustrious ever-present now . | |
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Stochasticisms The Message is Neither Lost nor Hidden Only on Occasion Grasped but briefly like quicksilver frozen Briefly the fires of life that light in our gut Perceived but just outside the spheres of sense and vision | |
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The Earth Never Sleeps Smile at the new born day And praise the rain that falls For the earth never sleeps . . . Her swirl of sustaining Constitutive elements Cradle us within the celestial crib Woven of breathtaking complex Rushes gathered by the river bank Tarred and set loose in back water Marshes of the universe where The deity and her daughters Bathe in nourishing elegance Without rest . . . Rather than worship barbarous electricity Power and mere light bulb energy Manifest in centralized network grids I cherish our relationship With prepositions to The eco-sphere and us In Eco-mind embodied Our deity's fleshing, systemic grace And often terrible judgment Balancing paternal Evolving epistemic steady state . . . Smile at the new born day! And praise the rain that falls! | |
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At the Hearth and there, I suppose behind closed doors gentle but imposing giants sit and chat, in quiet repose and respectable contemplation . . . at times meditating, or perhaps chanting ancient ritual prayers and mantras . . . conversing in oblique but strangely familiar tones of eloquent imagination debating and deciding important matters of principle thoughtfully envisioned and composed in friendly arguments, augmented and expressed as grand orchestrations woven in an unspoken key of wisdom with every string left unthread, yet singing everything important, left unsaid yet expressed in these patterns redundant themes and levels of sensuously algorythmic abstraction . . . which we perceive, and live and behold! in all its resplendent glory life's multidimensional matrix spherical loom self healing tautology embroidering rich musical tapestries woven differing grains and textures of rhythm, tone, and time . . . the ecomind | |
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Epigenetic Mitosis Creation Myth the Ecomind At the edge, of our unrecorded time they meet in sweet salt earth and air within her lair of sod and supplication princess gamete and a single chosen suitor And there, they come together embracing a sublimely dialectic implosion . . . And there they pause, chromatically entwined for a day and a half, in eternity's grasp, preparing plotting their joint offering, to yet another new days dawn . . . As earth's own zygote, in calm, certain hesitation, they rest comparing their share of life's mysterious modulations unraveling previously encoded epistemic duets singing their ancient ballads of epic proportion. Once united when their melodies indeed truly fit these two come as one intricate unfettered mitosis releasing algorythmic networks of gnosis metaphoric syllogisms now melded in exquisite harmony unfolding prochronisms polishing their quicksilver mirrors echoing glorious memories meticulously detailed diaries built upon past successes and preparing for who knows what . | |
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Ecomind Starlight darts across your forehead With light-years streaming from your eyes We sit together, through an afternoon Sparkling, and melding together That kind of perfect spring day Through which timelessness glides Over trade-wind breezes, even in the city A more relaxed mood prevails, or was it Simply your presence? So tell us Oh cursed, impenetrable Distances of this universe Where, outside of mind Is your location? And why, your vast expanse So seldom traversed? Oh, how I long To close that gap Even in a memory How very far its seems This brief space Across the seas of mars Across this picnic table . . . Are these subatomic realms Between us, Locked in our eternal embrace? | |
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How very far it seems The milliseconds in between us Even in memories icecapade These fleeting connections With eternity, a rare gift (indeed), even a blessing. . . . God, I could just gaze Into your eyes Forever. | |
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Biosphere At the thresholds of our knowing Fleeting impressions of life's elegant orchestration In ascending and descending, spiral staircases Organic imprints In a formal minuet of recognition Dancing tracers, convergent, colliding Merging abstracts . . . Information, compared and combined Unleashing and preserving life's morphogenesis . . . Concurrently held with-in natural history's uncanny wisdom And knowing, always within time A slide-rule screw coiling up on its side A sidewinder biting its tail Contracting, expanding Shedding its skin In the nick of time, turning in upon itself Spinning Ball of smoke Sphere of earth and water Our planetary household the ecomind | |
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July 25, 1980 by city street lamp the lawn sprinklers' damp spray waters our night, cascading saxophones and delights in my thirsting senses. a blue moon and full she smiles and lulls the dreams of truth and light, the pale blue and wintry white of pearlessence. in the silence the white goddess sings, bright guitar solos without strings and dancing a slow dance, rains velvet her beams of crisp illusion.
such a moon that by my rights it rains a dew like misty light and summer softly speak | |
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Along The River Road (This Table Sat Drinking Coffee Strangers) driving the road along the river remembers two who at a bus stop cold in midtown met, then at this table sat, drinking coffee, strangers deciding yes to cast their nets upon each others' waters Alicia's Cowherd and after . . . you lay weary beside me, your skin soft as the underside of a leaf. earlier we had watched the patterns of waves. then, walking back through the park; you said the moon, so round and yellow, seemed to be perched on that roof; and I remembered it was the night the cowherd, stepping on sparrows, crossed the heavenly river to meet his princess. II. I watch the freeway moving under: the lines of headlights on the left. my fingertips stiffen on the steering wheel and I think of you alone, in the laundromat at midnight | |
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Miracles With A Human Face . . . . . at the end of November, ten peaceful days And the roses, just now blooming, light the frozen night! Ten days in November, and at long last the Spring returns To Prague . . . at long last, in the ancient city Resurrected, the people of infinite thought Have brought a blizzard, a freezing wind of freedom Blowing through an ice blue frozen jewel, the Spring, An Urquell, emerging in the faces of Bohemia. Each one A snowflake, an arch light, a speck of frozen white Liberating the cobblestone alleys, with candles and flowers Smothering the boulevards of night Bringing back the light of Spring, bringing back the dead and their roses, and dreaming Whence we have never dared to dream, redemption . . . Where what's true one day Is not true the next . . Changing hour to hour The aging actors, people's poets, artists, students And the playwrights waiting (no longer) in the wings Through the long night to Spring, against all hope The true folk heroes, re-emerging, refusing to die The people of Tschechoslowakei, a striking phoenix Sculpted in ice . . . and in their lead, just as in a fairy tale, Vaslav Havel, alive and well, with our hopes At the Urquell of Central Europe | |
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Bringen Zurück Die Toten Bringing back the dead. Bringing back their hopes well dreamed, as well as their wishes, for life and love prosperity and wisdom, eternal And can we not recognize this sense unfolding, within the dawn of a new life, within our sure and certain hope in the resurrection? Bringing back those sweet hopes prayers and mantras countless, our father's, nembutsu, hail marys mother of grace, king milanda's questions blessed saints, diamond discourses self-lessness, giving ethics this day our daily bread . . . | |
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Bringing back our best intentions (so often run amok) Approximating love and justice, missing the mark Forgiving grace, refining our aim; that clarity of a new order, of countless transformations The scales falling away from our eyes The scales jolted, tumbling into chaos . . . Returning on balance in sublime homeostasis Lamentations, Supplications Steady state Rejoicing Righteousness Tempered with humility The workers, in these fields of endeavor Remain . . . However, unattached To the fruits Of their labor, they are Awaiting our presence In the garden • | |
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Knowing, Knowing, Known Print a chrome steal piston ring under strobe-lights, on an axis spinning . . . a ball emerges, suspended, unillumined depths as multi-layered thresholds, our point of entry defines the planes of bilateral symmetry in two hands held, sensation, surges relative to the speed of light. Wise and fractured images, focus as harmonic's multi-patterns dance transparent twine-ing spheres of diamonds, glowing sparkle wraparound within space and time convergent . . . eccentric smoke-ring globes merging organic wholes, osmotic membranes evolving an epistemic fusion. Inclusive mental systems all locate mind outside, and within the skin . . . cooking fogs of mossy soups . . blending perceptor conceptions . . . released upon pre-encoded signal circuitries networking beings, societies, and larger systems home, . . . . . together all within incommensurably differing grains of time. | |
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Self-referent group-recursive habitual assumptions validated or superseded from within the web and net of differentiated societies of "individuals," classes of such, and classes of classes of this search and sorting through forms for harmony, . . . . . together forever disclosing emergent morphogenesis. Dolphins leaping forward in liquid space diving through a sapphire only they can see, a habit, enfolding progressions in a story . . . an infinite regression of relevant contexts maturation and concrescence, coral calcifications, building cities . . . and the reef appears at who's pace, on who's timecard, to what end? | |
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With the Almighty + Nothing is Caused Everything is + Not Because Of But within + the Lord Is it not, he thought . . . A process of mind; primarily a shared knowing The sum total of all, these seemingly random events Bonded by selective chance, within proscribed parameters. Then our possibilities, in time, (sein oder gar nichts sein) Need only be imagined in this, our mental/material world system I believe so . . . And, is it not that, which we do not know Having seen through and beyond the didactic Lectures' pretentiousness, which is about All we really do know . . . . . Is it not indeed the vast gaps In our knowing, to which we refer With awe and reverence With that three letter word Or any other designations of the sacred? (you know, GOD is a four letter word in German) Then what we affirm through life, and Christ Jesus, faith, is something like . . . The working of the random in history And evolution is an attempt on the part Of the entire mind system to create Love in a steady state. | |
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Who Decides Upon what ethereal wings with which stochastic trajectory did we soar to this global island? Through what extended dance of elocution did we discover our flight redundant . . . and finding our ability to soar the solar winds of imagination squandered, are we now marooned here in some cul de sac after our own fashion overspecialized in self deception, and destined like some mammalian dodo, to play out the certainty of our own extinction Is that why we envy in our metaphors and totems the eagle and the humming bird? | |
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Consciousness Sketched consciousness stretched enfolding flexible partaking in combined interaction cognitive constructs necessarily autonomic autopoietic unconsciously processing logical types unfolding wrap-around in dialectic calibrations shared mutual causality our collective environs plotting and projecting simultaneously sculpting knowing—tasting—feeling being . . . each of us cartographers painting our colorfully collective images of this world | |
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Untitled: Homeostasis untitled, balanced but wobbling on the scales of elation and disinterest teetering in matrix of cognitive accessible reference marks, not quite random in harmonics and dissonance progressively localizing reeling clusters of perceptive activity gathered in transcription digested shunted around and through increasingly abstract levels of spherical logic and difference all, globally localized inter-nets of health and collective pathology • | |
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Anchored in Grief How to untie this senseless knot it aches like blazing dry ice double bound and lodged in my solar plexus head in my hands, unable to cry with cast down quiet eyes bowed in cascading rage and disbelief At the evening news I moved down slowly to the street pushed my back against the aging silver maple squeezed between the sidewalk and the curb limbs out stretched, defiantly arched reaching for the constellations in the pitch dark emptiness of the night's unending horizon How do I mourn your passing How shall I mourn this savage murder? Plant flowers in new turned soil Recall the chickadee, golden finch and titmouse their beauty, their exuberant songs keep the memory of your fiery eyes your enthusiasm and your goodness burning brightly | |
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The Epistemic Screw Can we be much more than planetary sleuths Probing life's own investigation Itself, a vision quest through knowing/being Apprehending in random historical drift Delimited and proscribed Within limited sensory options In this search for a reasonable quest (with our private eyes and communal ties) for a fitting object of our affections . . . Doesn't this screw of knowledge Turn on a horizontal axis A rolly coaster ride From chicken to egg Through countless generations . . . Our exploration parties grope Through progressively abstract Levels of logical type Through ageless labyrinths Of contradiction and paradox Nested in hierarchies of context Perceived difference, domains of distinction And the incessantly shifting sands Of linguistically determined Communal agreement | |
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Casting Nets Into the Ocean i'd like to leave the solar system for a four month's holiday . . . . . a cruise, or a cure for just one night, to sail a pioneer explorer's craft through the atmospheric threshold surfing the edge of the sun's expanding rays into the black unchartered abyss between the galaxies beyond where daemons lie wandering the milky way . . . . . . . . . . encountering starsystems, every million years or so; heliospheres breathing rippling tides in these round, celestial blowfish pulsating in and out, stretched taut by shock waves moving throughout the membrane from year-long stormsystems raging upon, and across the solar face of life tossed into the cosmic sea i'd do breast strokes side to side catch the rays on white sand beaches and float on my back . . . | |
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Expectáté (the state of being eternally expectant?) We grope through gray skies and nocturnal expectations guided, in parameters proscribed in sense and season Through wondrous realms of cartography analogies of pattern Morphogenetic beyond our understanding or control | |
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Coffee at Day's End Seated on the front steps a cup of black coffee greets the day's end Above and to the west that white crescent rising on a field of topaz an astronomical hard fact A setting so clear its transition from aquamarine to darkness passes unnoticed In the night sky the Hale Bob comet lumbers along its earth-year trajectory plotted in fourteen thousand recursive units Re-appearing at regular intervals humbly re-seeding this quadrant home of a seemingly inconsequential galaxy | |
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Minimal Holisms We know this world too often, in fits and hazy fogs through our own failures and overcompensation We know this world too often focused in parallax, bifurcated visions myopically cramped into a living cell marooned on this third orbit from the sun Imagine, our vast solar system adrift in the milky way the planets, asteroids and satellites visited intermittently by comets all spawned of cosmic dust In full view of the cosmos from dust created from ethereal thin air from fiery earth, and mud and water From which we can just barely venture escaping to the moon or mars Nor are we able to plot and steer the course of this our mother earth adrift in the milky way . . . Of all this, I know not the ultimate levels of regularity and abstraction Only that we must evoke a heart/mind of wisdom and humility, enough to contrive a humbly more viable elastic and sustainable response Garnered, not chiseled in stone from within our limited understanding a flexible ethos of co-evolution | |
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For Ma Bale, For Valentine's Day For the mother who gave us California poppies The redwoods in spring Weekends at Seacliff State Beach in October And in the August might, Mt. Diablo Contra Costa "Paradise in a Nut Shell," Walnut Creek Summer heat Excursions to Golden Gate Park Fisherman's Wharf Chinatown and Seal's Point Salt water taffy "Ripley's Believe It or Not" Life with a California Poppy Love and Fond Remembrance For the mother who gave us Life . . . | |
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Wanderlust Give us an aging car an open road, a map and a navigator And we'll fly the whites lines in odd and even numbers Across the concrete ribbons toward the widening horizon we'll fly As far as the eye can see . . . I'll sing you cowboy songs and ballads of my youth we'll play the alphabet game Rock slide down oak creek canyon we'll cross the great divide Explore the parched badlands and the painted desert We'll visit the garden of the gods read verse on the run by the side of the road Burma Shave And marvel At the wedding of the waters | |
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Dearest Ma A velvet lupine, among golden poppies Lavender, your favorite color Surrounded, encompassed Thriving, In California Gold . . . The Costal Wonders along Rt. 1, winding North to Fort Ross or South to Nepenthe The giants of Big Basin A delicate monarch hugging the clouds of coastal mist At Pebble Beach and on along the cliff's edge To San Luis Obispo, rolling hills and beyond to Santa Barbara Beside the giant banyan – where it all began With the seeds of wild flowers the majesty of Sequoia and the flight of Butterflies We've crisscrossed the state and half the country . . . May these images return Some of the joy and beauty You've shared along the Highway on this your birthday | |
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Ma's Birthday, A Reminiscence I remember, not so long ago, after a week in Oregon With Steve and Pam, Barry Roy, Brett and the Boys We sailed your clackity diesel Old's back through my childhood where it had snowed on Easter Sunday . . . Back through the logging country — Through clear June skies Past oceans of evergreen — redwood, spruce, ceder and pine Through Medford and Ashland, Southeast Over Grant's Pass On cruise control, we drifted into the moonscape and Barren shadows of Mt. Shasta and Lassen, like old times Together, talking about everything we rushed through Redding went around Red Bluff Stopped for gas, some coke and refreshment And floated into the sweltering heat of the Sacramento rice crop . . . At the capitol city our path veered left East northeast Up the Sierra Nevada to Truckee And beyond, to Northshore Lake Tahoe! Remember the goofy floor show? A topless chorus line of hapless dancers and two Spectacularly bronzed acrobats Refigees from muscle beach . . . Remember the three dollar slots Our passion! And our glee! Our hands gun metal grey, as the day passed and water turned to wine We beat the one armed bandits! Sixty loaves became six hundred and financed my first semester at Theological School | |
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Annabelle Jean Elisabeth Extra ordinary that solar flare That set alight the northern skies With particle dancing waves What you might call the night rainbow It's shimmering vermilion Like rare brush strokes Exalting the heavens . . . Drapes of sheer energy Sway mysteriously across Ptolemy's crystal spheres Weaving ghostly cloud like Transparent curtains in the heavens They embrace the stars And bless the night It was that same solar flare that Broke your water and brought you to our door That set flowing this pattern of love, no less Mysterious, from which two weeks before Untimely ripped from her mother's womb Our daughter, Annabelle Jean Elisabeth Both particle and wave embodied Danced into this continuum In an algorithm of life glorified And who can truly comprehend the Northern Lights Or discern the messages of Aurora Borealis | |
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Jeremiah Lawrence Sweet and sour daydreams, all our hopes and fears in another sunrise, an infant uncertain . . . ambiguous as the ripening mangos skin and flesh bones and teeth soft as a baby's bottom mu shu puzzled dawning awakens frazzled, and wrenched Joyful, as we celebrate a new life and simultaneously face this shit that it inevitably hurls in our face . . . | |
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Mid-Summer Night Maneuvers There, at the threshold of order and chaos He stood transfixed, not thinking . . . Just beyond the cover of old growth Maple and Elm Beyond the internal dialogue, he stood Encompassed in the silver gray mantel Of this morning's damp stillness . . . Bathed in subtle hues of Whistler's delight A procession of fireflies Floating on the high breeze Just above the tree tops Sparkling chartreuse diamond blue . . . Translucent lightning bugs, arching electric white Twinkling organic aircraft, their running lights Displaying ostensibly an arbitrary component With integral strobe light precision Flashing hypnotic messages The ageless exuberance of winged courtship Married to the mysterious symmetry of their dance Defining random sequence | |
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Morphogenic Resonance This concept, itself Comes back as an echo On a noisy loop Through distorted echoes Coiling back on recursive nets Where hierarchies and holons join Nested in the spiraling Double coiled messages of life . . . Stories in a book Recording the limitations of growth Preparing the way . . . Cultivating and nurturing memories Remembered In the petals of the rose In the bounty of the lotus | |
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Ours Is the Living We were not here to know The assuredness of infinity Nor to predict and record The fall of this house of cards And isn't every millisecond The whole of abstract distinction Of genesis, revelation, and apocalypse Of mind? And what does Andromeda Or for that matter Venus Know of space and time? What sphere outside of life Knows? And are we, all of the living The world soul Are we not predisposed To ferret out and re-cognize Amidst the random chaos Order and redundancy? | |
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Everyday Mundane In the rapture of nature's hermeneutic In that balancing act circle Of chicken and egg corresponding Adaptations of consistency In DNA spiraling Multifaceted Messages Inter– Linked in crystal ball Regularities, supposition And liquid certainty In the swirl of the earth's Elated rotation | |
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Shy Titmouse Bird calls ricochet through the crescendo Of cicadas, crickets and barking squirrels Old friends compose this summer's tone Familiar sounds embellishing Vivaldi's cellos Or, Horowitz at his piano in the background Shy titmouse Silver gray at the wind Delicately clutches our feeder Displays her burnt orange patch of anterior fluff And turns to straight Look me in the eye Two steely jet pinheads Deep as the cosmos . . . Sweet suet in her beak She releases her grip and full of grace Glides back to her red maple Security | |
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Proto Post Modern Blues: (Kay Why Zee Why El) I. Tell ya what we're gonna do . . guitar lick We're gonna get down, with Richard Feynman Yeah! goin' down to Touva In Central Asia, goin' down Like the Statesboro Blues . . . a little harmonica please Slide, bottleneck steal whine Down to Tanu Touva In the middle of Asia Somewhere, just outside of outer Mongolia With Richard Philip Feynman . . . Pulsed and mingling, his wild congas blend With throat singers, intoning chromatic Pop melodies, cryptic jazz of the steppes, obscure Archetypes of a proto post modern blues II. Just consider, he says, as observed from the earth Venus returns . . . to that same spot in the sky In multiples of five hundred and eighty four Days; and the moon . . . the moon eclipses With the regularity of a law, An astronomical hard fact, Relative to space and time As we are able to understand it . . . | |
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It is, he says, those "things" that do not neatly fit Which are, pausing to think, most interesting For then, you see, we must investigate These . . . shall we say . . . anomalies Hopefully to discover a new dimension . . . A new level of explanatory simplicity Integrating, Unifying and Producing A more comprehensive and reliable map III. Tanu Touva, in the mid dle of Asia Somewhere . . . mixing it up With wild Congas, yearning . . . Just outside of Outer Mongolia In central Asia with Richard Philip Feynman Dancing, crazy, under a bright blue moon And when, because of the time warp Between your home And Stockholm The Nobel committee call comes at 3 A.M. Waking you up, as it were, From the dead . . . And you took it all as a joke, hanging up On the Nobel prize for mathematics or was it physics? | |
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IV. Laughing out loud, anyplace With a capital city named Kyzyl (Kay Why, Zee Why, El) Has got to be interesting . . . Against insurmountable odds The whole idea is to have an adventure, or bust a gut Chasing those spores of exploration . . . For as we should know, you cannot fool With mother nature Proto post Feynman. Modern man blues. Two beats, in moiré rhythm creates three Our world An adventure . . . Oboes and Cellos Still, we live with death . . . Oh death, Our life, Our world is flush With uncountable opportunities | |
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Didacticisms would my words be truer . . . written on ancient parchment hidden through the centuries in aging earthen jars, in some forgotten Syriac or Coptic script would my words be truer . . . written on quicksilver, or mirrors, the readers peering back at themselves, between, as if from behind the lines of communication attempted . . . or in a black bold face type written on transparent sheets; glass, hung in a modern museum of freaks . . . or plastic, bound with 10lb. fish line would my words be truer . . . written in sand or granite, esoteric secrets of the heart and mind combined as truly as a tear is much more than the mechanical pumping . . . | |
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would my words be truer . . . much more than an intellectual thing so easily misunderstood, lost or soon forgotten rediscovered in every girl or boy who laughs out loud, shrieks and shouts of joy . . . who's made to feel uncomfortably different discovers at last in words of past and present, while we suppose a future, truth in words (when there be) is wed to actions, contexts inter-relationships each being differs being their own song an' dance practiced, refined and edited their own poetry written on the solar winds in time re-if-I-ed | |
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Untangling Organic Koans Crickets and cicadas sound August with open windows Squirrels barking Summer's end Adrift, as we are, in this sea of chaos At the boundaries of each specific frame We can taste and consume the messages Recycle their colors as sound And fashion the harmonics of love At the boundaries of each fractal Nothing appears to be moving Yet we share with each other These discrete items of infinite variety Increased complexity, elegance and ordered simplicity Within this specific frame At the boundaries of our six senses Love and compassion forge life And we hold with all the living this sense of awe In the shared recognition of order, emergent pattern Ratio and degree Crickets and cicadas sound Winter's silence with open arms Embracing Christmas pheasant With all the fixings | |
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Restoring the Gordian Knot silent mind a quiet lake . . . . . . . a mirror, reflecting the seasons' full moon . . . moon light! in all its moods a reflection, fading, disappearing over the tree tops — reflecting life's passage, returning tomorrow, and tomorrow, forever fulfilling the cycles, in silence noise, . . the thinking pebble drops into the mirror lake mind waves (silence stops) self . . . concentric circles without any center . . . Silence silence is but a word depicting a time when there should be no words not even in your mind . . . . . only awareness the only trouble with silence (and for that matter, awareness) is that you cannot read it out loud . . . | |
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Remembering Gregory . . . But epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing? I surrender to the belief that my knowing is but a small part of a wider integrated knowing that knits the entire biosphere or creation. So the conch shell carries the snail's prochronism – its record of how, in its own past, it successively solved a formal problem in pattern formation. Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity | |
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Lawren Bale lives in Narberth, Pennsylvania with his wife Martina and
their daughter Annabelle Jean Elisabeth (born 11/11/2001). The
youngest of three brothers, Bale was raised in rural California and
attended the University of Hawaii. He has worked in the potato
fields, apricot sheds, super markets, and wilderness forests of
Southern California. After completing his BA in Religious Studies (Asian), Lawren was a carpenter for a year. After he broke his leg at work, he used his workman's compensation to finance a journey to Bangkok, where he practiced meditation as a bhikkhu during 1974-75, under the guidance of Pra Thepsiddhimuni – head of Vipassana Meditation at Wat Mahadhatu, a university of the Mahanikai sect of Theravada Buddhism in Thailand. In 1976, Bale traveled to Japan, and practiced meditation with Ten Dai Buddhists on Mt. Hiei. He then moved to Kyoto, taught English, and sold hand made leather goods of his own design (jackets, trousers & sandals), while studying Japanese culture. In 1980, Bale returned to graduate studies at Marquette University in Milwaukee. He was invited to study with the Jesuit faculty at the Philosophisch-Theologische Hochschule Sankt Georgen in Frankfurt, Germany in 1981. While living in Germany he learned to appreciate Guinness Stout and Irish pipes, and he met his wife. Upon his return to America, Bale completed his MA at Marquette and transferred to Temple University in Philadelphia. He taught at Temple and Rutgers University, while writing his Ph.D. dissertation (Ecology of Mind in Interreligious Dialogue), which he completed in May 1994. In his classes, his aim was to fuse academic rigor and poetic imagination, while raising questions about war and peace, poverty, pollution, overpopulation, human sexuality, love and the environmental crisis. Bale began writing poetry while attending the University of Hawaii, during the Vietnam War. Down 'n Out Press has printed four volumes of his verse: Prochronisms; Proto Post Modern Blues; Ecomind; and Termites Tribal March & Midtown Charity Ball. His poetry has also been published in several anthologies; the journal, "Cybernetics & Human Knowing;" and on the Internet. |
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copyright © 2005 Down 'n Out Press All rights reserved |
lsb – 05/05/2012