A Californian Vote

In a world swollen with issues to take up and make one’s own, I wonder and wait, as many writers do, to see which injustices, which insults upon humanity will scale the walls of deafening popular media and make themselves known. November 4th offered gads of reasons for press, many being hopeful while at least a few, it turns out, startlingly backwards. Barack Obama’s move into President-Elect reflected a promise, for many millions around the world, that the rebirth of equality and the pursuit of discrimination’s extinction had once again come to the forefront of American intention – a beautiful promise indeed. But for couples in one of Barack’s most supportive states, anticipating the legal and familial expression of their love through marriage, November 4th was a giant backwards bound toward emphatic primitivity. Gay couples across the United States watched as “Proposition 8” – California’s constitutional amendment which declares the State definition of marriage as between one man and one woman – passed with a 52% majority and removed one of few legislative allies the gay and lesbian communities own in the United States. In early October, the then Vice Presidential hopefuls took a St. Louis stage and elucidated for the rest of us every imperfection of one another. In a rare moment of relative peace, they agreed on Darfur – thank god. They also agreed that marriage cannot happen between a man and another man, nor a woman and another woman – also thanks to god. But in their temporary camaraderie, they did manage to say that this civil union thing, this separate but still equal institution, sure is swell. Almost one month later, three days before these candidates would be awarded their future place in American politics, resident theists of San Diego and southern California flocked to Qualcomm stadium. Tossing themselves on the astroturf, they beseeched their god, an avid sports fan, that the institution of marriage be kept from the hands of unenlightened lovers. With the clarity of time’s forgiveness, and the genius of empathy in retrospect, one era’s target of hate and slanderous exclusion accepts the Presidency of the most powerful nation on earth. And on the opposite coast, the decidedly inferior of the 21st century begin to understand that they have yet to mature to the honor of marriage. Any thinker, regardless of creed or lack thereof, should look at such a morally dichotomous nation with some scathing incredulity. The freedom of religion authored in our constitution was as much a demand for the freedom to religion, as it was a promise for freedom from religion. In a sad manipulation of a holy book written to liberate and radically inspire, Christianity’s sacred scripture has become the wand of damnation for those homosexuals still caught in the grips of the Great Deceiver, and a baton which conducts the masses. An empty bubble filled by hundreds of thousands of hands in Californian polling booths has spoken the will of a nation, and perpetuated a dark history it so laboriously clings to.

True Democracy Our Thirst


Night’s black is broken open,
with a gun blast,
death’s decree is spoken, and an officer dies in the street.

Its an august night in the American south,
Ms. McPhail lies weeping on the floor of her house.

Two marshals and a reverend leave a widow in their wake,
who can explain to this wife what hot steel did to her lover today?

Her husband lost to reckless violence,
his blood skirts on concrete, it’s Mother Earth’s defiance.

Why do we pull triggers in the direction of our own,
not our family and not our friends but simply the humanity that is home.

This night, the shooter has many faces,
and the darkness shrowds his guilt,
yet if a white man is shot,
then the courts can’t hold still.

So justice is lost in pursuit of revenge,
and the life of a suspect becomes the means to an end.

The people adopt a melody for the welfare of a man,
who’s to be strapped to a leather table and sent to converse with God in eden’s hand.

But their song’s unrecognizable against the persuasions of tradition,
that dismiss suggestions of a racist process as a black man’s ammunition.

So reminiscent of a time, when his life was worth three fifths of mine,
Troy Davis is killed by an incomplete process.

And America is ill.

A sickness we claim not to contract,
for we fortify our borders with the audacity of a pact.

We’ve handed that promise to the hands of a running wind,
which bears our rhetoric over oceans and invites diversity in.

That truly is the native tongue,
of the world’s wise both old and young

But we’ve forgotten what’s been written in Earth’s volumes of holy texts,
that you should love your brother in this world so you might better know the next.

But foremost in our disease is the day we concede to blindness,
and in looking at the world forget-the-humanity that binds us.

It simply is our choice when we torture and make excuse,
suspending freedom for precious sovereignty it’s the innocent that lose.

So where, I ask, are the letters to our enemies saying, “for the sake of both are children..”
“can we find something but war and resentment and division with which to fill them?”

In what form will the proverbs of this day be recorded,
in which men rise above their nations and say, “blood and ruin on my family, I can no longer afford this”?

What is that rumor that tiptoes in our streets,
that evades the eyes of the hopeless yet comes to the aid of the weak?

When kids scribble name tags they should read svetlana or raul or roger,
we can't let kids grow up thinking their name's pronounced "impoverished".

Darfur, Guantanamo, the School of the Americas,
we’re not evil people, but we can’t let evil bury us.

In my country, despite its flaws we make beautiful music,
the kind where babies sleep, women smile and men weep ‘cause it’s finally the hate that loses.

If you listen, you can hear the voices tremble as they murmur,
the song of a movement built on the pulse of rebel fervor.

“Come all you weary, to the place where we speak,
of democracy and dignity and the liberties of the free,
rest your broken spirits in the promises of hope,
close your eyes ‘cause change is coming, in our hands we hold the vote”.


23 October, 2008

Thoughts Worse Than Violence

I have thoughts worse than violence.

I asked myself today how the girl in front of me could ever be loved. In not so many words, I refuted the unspoken claim that this girl could be intimate, that she would ever be kissed, that she would ever make love. My thoughts are ugly like violence. To question a person's beauty, any person, taking the judges gown upon oneself, makes the insult of violence infantile in my mind. To exist violently degrades the soul and perpetuates the unconscious inhumanity that rage so passionately begets. But it is exactly that, unconscious, mindless, impersonal. A more virulent shadow of assault befalls a woman or a man when instead of receiving careles fists or generic bullets about their body, their person is picked from its anchors in the flesh and hung on society's rafters for the crowds to weigh and grade. Their jeers are for no one else; their attempts at repression toward the spirit of their target were formed and folded to fit exactly the imperfections so sophisticatedly detected there. You could not be loved. Could there be uttered a more detestable affront? Your lips, your hands, your body could not kiss and embrace and respond the way mine can, the way the rest of ours can. I fantasize and gather up and solicit the affections of the worthy but yours are to be spat out as disgust takes me back. Violence is the child's dagger; to know love and to understand its nature and its tendency to so profoundly move its holders, and then to say, "you can never know it as I do", is to morph the immaturity of a fighting adolescent into the scathing recklessness of adulthood. And for it I should author your praises on the parchments of my world, scribbling apologies in words that sound more like love letters. You are and will be loved, despite my ignorance, and my fruitless apologies abound silently now.

VA

Hard plastic stocks sizzle and smoke, bullets spin, killers grin and then cry. Guns recoil, blood boils, moms want for their babies and the babies can muster no heroics for their fallen friends. Stupid death lies upon rural America.

Hunts ensue, justice stalking captures. Past bloody brick and faces weathered and sick a nation further numbed to its atrophy. It's what we never dream of and a concentrated form of what we ignore.

A mother's hands grips, like hell's gates, the shoulders of her son. Mascara's like the runny soot of the fire that burns behind her eyes. Her release leaves creases in his sweatshirt, and small shadows are cast across him in the low morning sun. Fear and paranoid relief will haunt her the rest of her days. A form of sorrow lies, collapsed, convusling in her sobs like no one is there; her insides are desolate, lonelier than she'd been this morning, a broken mother begs to be so lcuky as fear and paranoia. But her womb has been insulted, her livelihood ignored and shit upon by elements of arrogant power and evil. Mortality invited her here and she was given no option to decline.

Unbelieving fathers stand motionless, staring at and refusing to be moved by story tellers that must be lying. The most horrible lies. Lies about death and pain and terror. They degrade to silence and solitude; they hear only the most pitiful voices of motivation echo inside. Their pummeled hearts promise vengeance but their mind can neither reconcile desie to action nor stay the heart's cries enough to speak sense. How empty, and yet so congested, their lives have now become.

Our insides are reduced to personal chaos. Our inhibitions and aspirations mutually decay. We move to a place we feel necessary - a field where its only us, an expanse of tranquil independence that requires no outward focus and seems the only refuge from horror. Our spirit can't afford to care, the costs are too much.

And so parts of nearby worlds hurt more but we're hanging on to silent fields of peaceful grasses - bolt the doors, close the gates, shut the windows, no one enters our refuge. We are no longer wild but we are forever sheltered. Grandmas and grandpas and little sisters and nephews and uncles, cousins, moms, dads, and brothers thrash at our door with their tears and their questions and we wince and cry back and apologize so profusely while we fight to bolt and rebolt and bolt again the doors we've constructed. The world must not get in; it will bring its guns and its horror and its stupid death into our field. Our fileds would burn. So lets walk off these sidewalks. Leave the motionless form in the grass to cry for herself and her baby, forget the images now singed into hundreds of young minds. Retire to our fields to look at our synthetic sunsets, skies birds and vices.

The Trees are My Home

Close your eyes with me and enter my home.
The night is black soil smeared across the sky,
Our huts house the infant and old, fires burn throughout our village small.
And for the hundreds of missing children at dusk, there is no 'come home' call.

My young sister sleeps, her mouth propped open still,
Collapsed into my mother's breast,
My momther sways back and forth how I imagine an ocean's tides,
Content I lie across the dirt, feeling deepening dusk's persuasion appealing to tired eyes.

This is the bush, the land we call our home,
This hut belongs to us, my mother built it and smiled.
My sister sleeps soundly but my brother's become a ghost,
his stories live in me, he sleeps miles away, abandon buildings are his host.

Four fingers curl and lock around my arm, there is shouting,
A gun in my face, and my sister screams in young confusion.
Mother shrieks and hits the men, they raise their machetes high,
Her arms split as they bring them down, and they command me to rise.

Shoving against my back they spike me with their guns,
They lead me into chilly night air, where my mother's screams are ehcoed.
The neighbor woman is on her back and beating a man atop her,
She cries and curses and spits on him, she's calling him, a "robber".

Anger almost hides her tears and yet, the woman looks embarrassed,
Her face is writhing with pain and shame and I want to return to my home.
But these are the rebels, the armies in the trees, the legends that we fear,
They are the myths of lost sons and crazy men, and they're upon us now, they're here.

For hours I march and screams chase our backs from the village in which I belong,
Over roots of the jungle by the beasts we walk, I sulk and shiver and pray.
Memories of mother's stories of these men that worhip gore,
Are trumped by her sentence I nightmare about, "a devil commands this war."

I fear I'll meet him in the shadow of the bush,
And there no one will hear me cry.
No one but him as he whispers my sin upon which he'll make his judgment,
He'll steal my voice - never again will I hear - I'll be the example of his covenant.

Across my lips his many hands will bear their blades, and then they'll move to my ears.
His hands trace invisible crosses, his face is covered in solemnity.
"It's not me that executes atrocities," he spews, as my face begins to bleed,
And with a maniacal indoctrination, they tell me, I am 'at home amongst the trees'.

Armored Out of Will

Waking from a troubled sleep my eyes twitch open, and peer through two small holes. A smell like a damp cave floats into my nostrils, for a moment I forget where I am. A seize of panic, and as quickly as I awoke, I remember and relax. Many nightmares come to me and leave me convulsing and sweating frantically in my sleep, only, to finally wake me in a peak of duress and return me to a world devoid of contact; these senses atrophy and a slice of life is forsaken. It is not often that one's waking begets a desire to return to one's nightmare. My mouth is covered from the ecstasies of food, my lips crack like drought has set upon them, my nose only encounters my stale breath and my eyes have grown veined and bloody - over stressed as the single pair of ambassadors to the world that continues so elegantly outside my bitter cage. I wear a mask of stone. It is the armor I never asked for, the defense I wish, so badly, would fail. That it is upon me is all that matters, not the who nor the whey nor the when. But against delicacies like food and water, or the smells of my home, I weigh an obstinate desire to be kissed. I watch my lover float across our floor. Past the end of the bed she busies herself - aware that her fidelity emanates from her distraction; the former only possible through the latter. I call to her and in ideal and principle she is mine, but between us stretches an expanse of unknown - a grisly desert, filled with gruesome pictures of incomplete communication and forgotten passion. A land of decay has inherited every word I kept to myself - where there should have been embraces of confirmation lie mangled bones shaped to say, 'you missed your chance'. And with every opportunity I sent to its end, a piece of my mask was added. Quickly my mouth was taken - guarded in stone, barred and gated - never would I kiss her, or speak without a maddening echo. But soon the dirt and dust of the thieving stone accumulated on my cheeks and forehead. And just as quikcly as I came to know what it meant to rest my face against another's, I realized the toruture in taking that touch away. She would approach me, I'd follow her with my eyes. Onto the bed she let herself sit, nervously rubbing her fingers together at her side. In tattered confidence she placed her hand on my chest and leaned passed my face to brush her lips against my forehead in what many call, simply, "a kiss". Still, I followed her with my eyes but my mask broke my vision before she reached my face, she was nowhere that I could see and so I waited to feel her mouth upon me. but, nothing. Nothing became my motif. Her lips pursed against rock. Even as her tears fell toward my body and searched for the weclome of warm skin they crashed upon my stone fence; they slid and followed the molded outline of where my cheek should have been and finally ended, defeated, dissolving forgettably into the sheets. For a dangerous handful of seconds I let myself smell her - I let myelf breathe fully of what she offered by her presence. I intoxicated myself on the individualtiy that permeated her hair and skin. She smelt of praries of tall, green grass, stretched to their own infinities in a night time of summer frgrance. All the inhales of freedom that accompany humid nights under her starry skies were draped around her neck. And then, my cowardice began to harden it. Falling finally to the robber, my nose smelt nothing more of the summer that danced in and around her clothes. Upon entering a room or quickly passing by, her scent would masquerade about desperate dreamers like myself, flirting with opportunity - the time when I should have inhaled deeply and tasted her details - but I said little more than what writers of acquaintance would have me say, and finally, a smooth, hard masonry competed itself above my mouth and between my eyes. My mask had been built and now I only look. For that's all I have left myself to do. Into the mind this viral stone submerges to end forever a desire to be kissed. It seeks a place for disastrous, numbing architecture but, of course, walls to enclose an imagination do not so easily stay intact. And so I spend my days seeing, in want, the world which I cannot have, and wishing for walls that would seclude the part of me that wants it.

Nothing, Provocative

Perpetuate it. Provoke it. Bright computer lights, heavy high pitched screams, headaches, heartaches, little sleep. Pounding keys with fingers that hurl and stretching a brain to unhealthy lenghts. Cracked windows, a winter almost defeated by spring, entire moons smushed flat onto a puddle, dark grass, lonely breeze. Empty rooms, wurring fans, no music, no dialogue, no spotlight, no audience, I sit on an empty stage and even with me, it's still empty. Doors closing, distant men yelling, more men sleeping, sleep betrays the mind to untidy thoughts and dreams that scare us awake. A window wide open, a desire to road trip, smelly socks worn one more time cause laundry seemed too much. Fake white brick, enclosing me and now you. Lamps unalbe to perform their only function, speakers not allowed to do thers. Empty wallts, at-capacity back packs, cracked scratched cell phones, footsteps on pavement outside. The sound of wet, the smell of silence, sidewalks housing refugee worms. Disposable cups, disposable plates, disposable thoughts, disposable lives. Recycle. Reduce. Reuse. Brown bottles with little white capsules, synapsed cells awaiting white friends from brown bottles, blue cups proud of their potential to organize the reunion. Pictures worth crying over, memories trying to scale the blue cups, throwing ice cubes overboard to make room for friends, don't cry, don't remember. Little sleep, heartaches, headaches, heavy high pitched screams, bright computer lights. Provoke it. Perpetuate it.

Like Snowflakes for Hire

I look at you and you're talking, telling me you love me and this is why I should do this. But I'm tracing the lines that shadow your face, it's the fence of the football field, outside dancing with the street lights. I think the field must get lonely, it's hired the snow to lock us in tonight, and now these tiny powder mercenaries recklessly hurl themselves at our car, building walls of determination that, with my apologies, I'll crush without even knowing it. But that's not the point. You're talking. Telling me you love and that is why I should do this. But I can't, I can't abandon the brotherhood. Our first argument. Its snowing still Steph. Is this worth the argument? Probably not, we'd both agree on that, but neither of us would budge either. Kind of like snowflakes for hire. Ha, that's crazy, I know. We are white. But you tell me that so many people care, that it's a waste not to do something so simple. Logical, good work. But sometimes you have to just not care, and damn, that's dangerous. I'm a poet and I have no idea how I'm connected to the night, it just seems that a strap would get in the way. But you love me and that is why I should do this, you tell me. I love you too. But I love him, and he doesn't do it. We're like foolish brothers, idiotic really. Agreeing to a reason that doesn't exist. But look outside, I care too much sometimes. And then I have to make room for severe foolery. I am your fool, not your jester, but your idiot. You look good in the dark but I'm told that's a bad compiment. "Don't I look good in the light?" Touche. Ok, I'll give you the long and the short. On every part of your face touched by tthe path of a pasing shadow, I have found a bit of freedom. Shadows that crisscross your face and muster what little exitence they have to dilute the shine in your eyes, and though they fail, and oh how they fail, they compliment you in your seat next to me, unafraid of passing shadows and looking to embrace a message from the melodrama. Who knows what the snow and fences and shadows are thinking, surely they're holding the same conspiratory script, and their emotional montage is a display of divine presence. A condition of cars in the night, parked in random lots, where the human soul becomes an object of worship, or at least, great attention, and for once the cosmic comes to exonerate. Where the ideas of giants are glued like little rocking hula girls to the dashboard of our lives and while we sit and search for masquerading snowflakes, trying to hide the inevitably obvious fact that we're biting our lips fighting off questions that pry and beg for justification of such desperate measure, those monumental ideas become our audience, and sooner than later, turn undoubtedly, to nothing. Sometimes, the only humane thing to do is not care. Its like writing an entire piece with your eyes closed. Its like throwing yourself down a gravel road at sixty, eighty, a hundred miles an hour, with no belt, illogical and irresponsible. Its still snowing Steph. You're talking and you tell me you love and that is why I should do this. But I care too much, hold on, I need to pee. Yep, pee. I lean against the fence, peeing through the link, and I can feel clouds swirl above me. Man I love that. I'm peeing in front of a car, in public, onto a private lot, and I don't care. But its not enough, I still care too much Steph. So here, here's my shirt, and my shoes. My socks gotta stay too, I'm working on my belt, hold my pants, I'll be right back. These ideas equate to air, starve me of either and I suffocate. Hop the fence. Run down the hill. Fall in the mud. Laugh. Smile. Get dirty. "I don't get you". I don't get me. But you say you love me and that is why I should do this. I'm free again. Do you get it? I'm free again.

A Man, Today

In a square, in a city, in a country I'd never known, a man approached me from the ground saying he'd made the dirt and gutter his home. His introduction quick, void of inhibition, no name no title his place with the untouchables was beyond prayer or superstition. A dirty earth had made him tan, birth had stolen his legs, his arms rippled with another days work, he reached for gifts with manic hands. The man had become a rapid beneath a city's stampede, he drug himself through the ignorant river waiting for that fallen tree branch to grasp and climb and be freed. He was king of a castle noone took time to see, an invisible kingdom of the waste and shit that drips from you and me. We rejected his resignation and returned him to his throne and masked our shame and robbed his potential and made improvements upon our homes. Off one road of broken brick and curbs and on to explore another, enslaved a coffee can as his crutch, he asked for help in screams, then pleas, then mutters. He had dropped his trident, his staff of sovereign shambles, so I fetched it from the dust and returned it to him with the blessings of a thousand priests that ramble. With no regard for the Man of the revolution, I elevated my eyes from this fleshly manifest of human pollution; to make my speech and reveal how I'm righteous, I needed to not see the piss upon this excrement so I could feel like I could fight this. I made my fists and I clenched my jaw and stood with teary eyes, and the masses wept a touching poem-of-promises called, "the abolishment of demise". And all the while a starving man, with whom we'd all since lost touch, watched a thousand armies march in a movement amounting to not much. All he needed was a meal, he told me from the level of my shoe lace, but our ears were deaf to reality beyond the ceremonies of saving face. That night, his majesty died in the cold of his potato sack suit, crimped and mangled by the failure of social ideas the struck advocates as "too new". His carcass decreed the ally, bartering with the walls to tell his final tales to the ears of his absent family. His hand gripped discarded wrappers where only scents remained, the aroma of grease boasted others' peace which his desperation had borne into fame. The eyes of the fallen king refused to close completely, his head leaned back, he lay on his side; his muscles still clenched from shivering in the night, loneliness and hunger forever his loyal brides.

A Preacher at His Podium

A preacher at his podium, his hands stretched to the world,
the congregation's up in arms, his eyes begin to tear, as their hands begin to curl.

but his chin raises to level and he says, "I'll never preach to deceive...
...the truth I've told you today is not just a truth about me..."

"your love's not real", an accusation from the back,
as the sheep surround the shepherd and hatred scripts an attack.

Pictures of signs with "god hates fags" emblazoned in proud bigot fashion,
parade for this preacher's demise, while a minute back he preached compassion.

A quarrel over love seems the oddest of all,
where humanity stops running, takes its knees and crawls,

where 'A' group hates 'B' group and 'C' group just watches,
till 'B' group's extinct cause 'C's sentiment is toxic,

in that town I have a vision [of] a little girl that's on the edge,
she's taken up the outskirts she knows the downtown means death,

the masses gather at city hall to decide what will go through,
where they assemble in all things arrogant, where white cloaks are tried and true,

she's tasted the bitterness of a sick decaying soul,
a life of lies based on the worth elitists hold.

the clicks have deemed her 'outcast', and the leaders just lead to lead,
so there is no change when she cries at night, a reason, a want to be freed.

she's imprisoned by the freedom of those allowed to judge,
shackled by the impotence that names tolerance 'too much',

and her little head hangs as the crowds refuse acceptance,
and her little heart tears more cause her hope remains relentless,

her face screams a need for change,
her insides writhe but her outsides can't complain.

they say this preacher's different, and they've been right before,
they give her food, they give her shelter, who is she to ask for more?,

but the problem's no longer when the lynching begins,
the problem's at the pulpit when love becomes sin,

hatred is the bastard lover
of stoic prejudice in affluent cover

so who dares hope for change,
the hands of Iraq raised in fists for better days.

nonviolence yields this, the crumbled corruption of an institution,
from voices versed in silent protest the ancient tongue of revolution,

who will charge the gates of Hatred Estate,
and dethrone the powers that steal and rape,

where vocals float and bodies dance,
where people want change to change there's a chance,

that preacher, that day, didn't know the world was at his palms,
a world bred to be indifferent to the way complacency scalds,

from shanty town to senate house, from kenya to illinois,
from Tommy to Johnny to Sudan's lost boys,

one message, one hope, persists to bitter ends,
we are one race, we are one people, it is on us to make amends.

To Sell Your Christ in Heresy

Ignorance is bliss based on a ludicrous premise, that what I don't know won't hurt me,
Unless I know I don't know, and in knowing see I'm not the least bit deserving.

See the fact of the matter is there are no facts cause those truths are written as follows,
tonight we'll lace the headlines with lies which will read to our convenience tomorrow.

And on billboards that border what's known as White America happy little decrees will decry,
the little girl who wants neither hemp nor jewels as her necklace.

Unacceptable that she plays in the yard with her imaginary friends,
and that those friends have problems like her.

And the neighbors wander over and ask her who she talks to, she says Ahkmed, Katrine, and Raul,
they ask, "Why would you invent someone who's imperfect and in pain?", she says, "I don't know, how does God answer you?"

But blue eyes and blonde hair will earn her the lesson that her race has never cared and the curriculum will achieve its antithesis,
Soujourner Truth smiles in expired outh as we examine a past bleeding flaws,
but diverts her eyes from years unchanged for we've failed to pair faults with a cause.

History's not philosophy so we don't discuss more than what we're not to be,
but I thought Civics, Civics was about duty,
that every person, first a civilian, can vote and work and pursuit prosperity,
but that banks on you being civil and to assume so you must sell your Christ in heresy.

Civilization is defined by those who call themselves civil and so the argument is a bit circular,
regardless, by those standards it seems gentlemen can forget their brother's burden and ladies, their soul's entablature.

What testament is it that says "thou shall not buy your house across from trailer park"?,
the same one that says "don't breath too deep tasting life might stop your heart."

Please, allow me to avoid hypocrisy, leave your feet and stop with me,
lets adopt a purpose together,
if nothing else this, each night we pause and observe the weather,
we'll name the clouds out loud and understand that whether its war, starvation, or shame,
only those who opt for their mind's paralysis can claim they've got it made.

and we'll never curse the rain 'cause whether it ends someone's famine or brings someone's flood its not falling drops on trial,
its me and you as our tongues catch the sky's elixir,
it's whether we'll wed the world our bride and in doing so redefine a gentlemen's style.

One Seat Tables

There is an inherent danger in seeking the genius of the past, the truly in touch with the world and its unseen mystery. Next to the goddesses of kowledge, hidden in the romantic forests of truth and wisdom, sit the guardians of that knowledge - the beasts named insanity. And their bite delivers a venom for which there is no remedy: the poison of solitude, the toxicity of uninterrupted introspection. It seems though the woods welcome many - indeed, this goddess sings to all the masses - most just turn away. And the few who enter the forest they smell the wind, and watch the brooks do their babbling but come sunset, night in those woods and the songs of a muse like this one, are too much to bear. And so again, most of those few will dabble in the forests only as part time residents. Yet a select couple, a few in every generation will wander to where its darkest. To where there are no distractions to comfort the eye away from the mind's questioning. There is no music, there are no ipods, no family, no friends. Just a continuous monologue, which reads from invisible walls the scribbling of history's hermits - individuals of the past whose obsession with that goddess brought them to an existence of darkness and deafening silence, where they test the teeth of the beasts which guard the goddess - and play their chances against the insanity that may or may not accomany knowledge. Some of these people wrote books about their lives, some of them ended up talking to trees or invisible friends. Tragedy is, perhaps, best exemplified in that place where a person finds the truths they've sought after for so long, only to realize that the wisdom that allows them to look at a night sky and drink of its profundity, is the very thing that distances them from the person next to them.

Camping

I'm living by myself but I'm not alone. An individual, alien to this whole scenario, might gaze upon my south-eastern Oregon camp ground and assume they'd chanced upon the inhabitants of an apartment building recently having spewed its residents onto high desert, only to then perish into remnantless nothingness. But i guess we are the remnant - a mass so traumatized by the day's catastrophe that a silly looking man wearing a forest service badge, whose threads-in-hues-of-green are shaded by his exaggerated brim, conned us all into paying to live outside and reside in a slightly less comfortable state than normal. How else, aside from the coercion of a traumatized body of homeless groups, could money be persuaded from its pockets in order that I might have my walls replaced with porous canopies and dirt carpet?

The rock face I scampered up today surely housed a thousand cougars. They, of course, would have taken up residence there in anticipation of my coming - the family across the frigid DeSchuttes, through which I had just swam, meant nothing and would most certainly not see it when the mass of teeth and tails emerged as a cooperative feline battalion in order to scare me off their cliff - initiating the chase that would grant them so much joy, while killing me so thoroughly. Funny what one experience with three cats will do to a man. But I'm happy for the sun.

I hope the great star doesn't mind my spectatorship (it shouldn't, its up in my business all the time) but I watched it chase its mistress again tonight. I'm jealous of the sun in fact, this night more than most, because its gone to lay with its lover. The slow crawl that the sun, in its waking, employs to leave its bed and abandon a night's passion so it can perfrom its eternal duty infects the populations of its rocky recipient and they too, at least the one's who've done it right, resist the rising and the leaving like moths drug to darkness. But noon approaches and the first flirtations emerge from Horizon's sheets and whisper charms inappropriate and sublimely sensual past the billion-head audience below to their blazing target aloft. The noon Sun pauses.

Like a school girl has murmrued secrets in her palms and thrown them to the Sun before disappearing around brick corners, the great star halts in dazed attraction, and the world beneath burns until Sun recovers its stop. But now it won't wait, it can't wait, it rages against he duties that hold it. The afternoon's weather is violent; thunderstorms descend upon the planet, plains dry and crack and explode in flame; the singing of the muse drives the sun to madness' gulf and on that edge the world waits. Finally though, the woman who so tightly holds Sun's leash shows herself. Her fingers are cirrus - crisp, fragile, and they reach out offering to take the sun's frustration as soon as Sky agrees to allow him into bed. Lady Horizon splashes perfume upon herself and the tides turn and run, noses in the occean air, that they might receive seduction as it wafts. Dusk which sits always aloft befalls Earth's watching eyes again and finally Sun's wrath is foregone. Instead of storm and flame, he drapes lavendar where the blue of his sorrow has sat the day's length, and he smears peach into his masterpiece with the sliding, weaving motion only a composer of the skiy's shining and a stellar lover's fingers can achieve. A painting he presents his beloved. The rage of morning red has left and the cool calm of a deepend violet and entrenching charcoal allows the world to simmer to its slumber. Like a radiant drip from a faucet poised just above the world's edge, the sun take his mistress to his lips and delivers the first kiss in a night of countless others, insisting in its passing that onlookers do the same. The couple falls into Horizon's bed, and so the last drop drips.

I suppose we the homeless mass do not pay in a moment of incoherent misjudgement, but only offer recompense for lessons we steal from peeping at such affairs as this one.

Scotch and Granola

Dance, seduce, entrance, and use,
and fuck and cum and find the groove,
to mate the needle with that lusting vein,
amplifty your climax saving nothing in restraint.
What have you got to lose,
conquer seven men a week,
the fetus inside you's bullet proof ,
and aleady native to the street.
The only thing that packs more punch than your fury of maternal fists,
is the seclusion your baby inherits when you freebase that shit.
Its stronger than genetics,
pulse one, let the syrum circulate,
pulse two, destruction is endemic.
Your lesson's crimson leaks to her from a seatbelt's twist and a needle's stick,
and you think because she's two she can't understand it.
But she crawls in rooms confettied with condom wrappers and mom's friends become too friendly.
The torrent of men warrants installing revolving doors,
and her four year old fingers fortify further the castles in the corner over which she reigns "queen".
And thus the counterstrike has begun.
She molds her moat to construct a defense
and to distance herself from the wills of men.
And she orders her archers to the guard towers above,
and says 'shoot anything that moves me, even if its love'.
And in the present setting I can't blame her for this,
where what she sees suggests that lips are for kisses and fists.
'Cause that image will carry to the face of her first crush,
and she'll have never learned that lovers don't have to swing to touch.
Its not the pinch of the needle's push that sells this toddler her tears,
its how her mother gives her body away to all the other pricks in here.
And our four year old Highness says to her court, 'to what do I owe the occasion..."
"...that you all would be so adamantly ensuring my future's mutilation?"
But from these subjects her address tendors no heed,
this home houses five other castles, five other queens.
In life its assumed we learn that certain things don't mix,
like little girls and their granola, against your scotch and a morning fix.