Whir

a rooster’s crow at midnight

the sullen near sea

the way down muddied by goats

dolphin pods survey the coral

survive passage of cruise 

ship rotors

taunt the skipper

awe the camcorders

a trail arcs toward paradise

sullied by a carpet of kukui nuts

& red, 

red like the rust undersides

of old Dodge vans,

behind, miles ago

volcano loam

frigate birds

mosquitoes perpetuate 

where the stream slows

there

in the sky

thin whir of helicopter

there

at her feet

two hundred meters

and coral

the vastness

is only out

the cliff wall 

chips her back

red

and only green

above

Eyeball Parable

  His eyeballs kept falling from his head

      made popping noises

corneas dangling from stalks

     he tried to shove them

     back into their sockets

    & was alarmed that they wouldn’t fit

      they had grown larger

   to take in the wider world

       unfettered by lashes

  as if the eyeballs

whites & irises & all

were pupils unto themselves

Feedback From a Too-Close Amplifier

I was knotted up inside.  I couldn’t tell her.  I thought of her as a friend, but I thought of her as something else.  She never indicated she was interested in me, but she never suggested she wasn’t.  I waited for her.  I couldn’t wait.  She loved someone else, though she wasn’t in love with him.  He neither loved nor hated her.  They lived together.  They didn’t sleep together.  Yet they were a couple, though they split up from time to time.  They neither fought nor made up. 

            She drank too much.  We all drank too much.  I drove myself home each night, though I shouldn’t have.  The distance was too far to walk, but there were nights that I did.  The alcohol electrified us.  We remained static.  He stayed, I couldn’t leave.  I never ate, but seemed immune to hunger.  I was sustained by the sight of her.  She invoked a thirst in me.  I couldn’t drink without a filter, couldn’t speak without a filter.  The alcohol wetted my lips and thickened my need for hers.  I didn’t react when she leaned close.  I died and died and smiled.

            I sat on the couch and pined.  If  strangers were to walk into the room, they wouldn’t know the two were lovers.  I was friends with him, though I didn’t know him very well.  I neither sought nor avoided his company.  I sought hers.  She didn’t mind.  I was frustrated, though I didn’t mind.  In my mind, she was neither a divine creature nor merely human.  She was a separate kind of entity.  I couldn’t classify her.  She was ideal in her flaws.  I couldn’t sit silently and watch her, though I couldn’t act on my desire.  So we talked.  I didn’t say what I was thinking.  I communicated without words.  She neither indicated she noticed, nor moved away when I sat close.  I appreciated her friendship.  It tore me into tiny pieces.  I both longed to see her and dreaded it.  “A process in the winter of the heart.”

            He was leaving her.  He didn’t know when.  He was ready to move on, but he wouldn’t go.  She wasn’t happy with him, but she didn’t insist he make up his mind.  She tolerated him.  I couldn’t take it after a while.  I was helplessly drawn to her, but the situation repelled me.  I neither hid my attraction nor made it apparent.  It went on like this.  It couldn’t.  Something had to give, but it didn’t.  I couldn’t give her advice or refuse.  So I told her the truth I saw.  Not the deeper truth.  Not the truth about me; the truth about him, about them.  Neither wanted the other; neither wanted to say goodbye.  “That’s where I spend most of my time these days, back in the middle of nowhere.”

            An old friend arrived.  She didn’t recognize the situation.  She slept on the couch, and strands of light came in through the blinds.  There was no distinction between one day and the next.  She neither improved the situation nor degraded it.  Or she improved things by not degrading them.  In this frozen house, stability contented us. 

            “It is disastrous to be a wounded deer,” Corso says.  I wasn’t wounded.  I was caught in the headlights, and couldn’t close my eyes.  I neither dodged my oncoming destruction nor welcomed it.  The traffic dodged me.  The spotlight stayed put.  I couldn’t blink.  Once I started speaking, I couldn’t stop.  “Why regret an everlasting sun, since we’re hell-bent on discovering divine light?”  I said so.  She didn’t notice.

Reflections In Dust

I’m trying to write about a mirror.  It’s a specific, physical mirror, not an abstract concept.  I want to write about this mirror, but it’s difficult to get to, because it’s situated in a specific time and place, and, without an understanding of that time and place, the mirror would just be a mirror, but it’s not.  And a proper discussion of that time and place would take hundreds of pages.  But it’s the mirror I want to get to, so if that time and place make their way into the discussion, I’d like to think of them as reflections in that mirror, interior to it as these memories are to me.  And the important thing about a mirror is the reflections in it, after all.    
        The mirror was in the middle of the desert, hundreds of miles from me.  I drove to it without knowing it was there.  To the desert, to camp naked.  I knew the desert was there.  I came to it from where I was.  A place devoid of all life, of cacti, insects, birds.  Cupped by mountains, flattened by liquid.  It had been a lake, when rivers were still in the process of carving canyons south and east.  A place can dry up.  A time, too, can dry up, though slower.  The dust, alkaline, absorbent of all moisture, reduces a man to a husk of skin.  The least breeze turns the air into a sifted solid object, a vision of opaque white.  Is it possible that through this blindness, this swirl of nearsightedness, a city, a civilization, a land of blue and pink lights could emerge?  Could emerge and dissolve in a specific time frame, a Brigadoon containing a dust-covered mirror, risen from nothing, disintegrated to nothing?
How can a place devoid of life, abandoned by water the dust drank, bloom so suddenly, and vanish?  Sustained by trucks of non-potable water, to make the dust heavy and so keep it stuck, to leaven the air and the ground to maintain them as separate things.  An importation of moths by hitchhiking.  A body is a canteen of sorts, a vessel for the dust to sip.  One would expect to see earth among the stars in the night sky, and distinguish east from south by its location.

This is the Black Rock Desert, but it is not the Black Rock Desert.  It is a reflection.  Except it occupies a larger amount of space than a mirror can contain.  Some concepts, some spaces, are too vast for that.  The mirror can, however, contain me.  The space of me, though not the concept.  I am, perhaps, too vast for that.  This is Burning Man, except it isn’t, or it isn’t what I’m trying to get at.  Even in reflection.  I’m trying to lead you through the crowds of fire spinners and women dressed as glowing green-and-yellow snakes and cars disguised as Cheshire cats and gladiatorial pirates, to a small camp surrounded by other small camps, in the center of it all.  It took me years to find it, to know I was looking for it.  And when I did, at the end of August of 2006, the year of “Hope and Fear” by the Burning Man calendar, I was so inebriated and sleep-deprived that the mirror at this camp made me seem both small and vast all at once.

It was very early Friday morning, or very late Thursday night.  In the 36 hours since I had last slept, I had boarded what had once been a bus and was now a Spanish galleon sailing across the playa1, had danced to house music inside a giant wooden structure known as the “Belgian Waffle”, had watched a friend compete in a contest called “Dance Dance Immolation”, and had tequila shots with a clan of garish oddities who referred to themselves, collectively and individually, as Zardoz.  I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the timeframe here.  I might have only been awake for 32 hours at that point.  I might have visited the Belgian Waffle on Friday night and not Thursday night.  Time can dry up.  The point is that I was delirious, at a place beyond and saturated with exhaustion, and my head was filled with strange and fascinating images. 

Ghosts in the darkness that themselves were exhausted and dragging their footprints, who scattered into dust when I looked at them directly, as if maintaining themselves as solid objects took a force of will greater than they could conjure.  Armored men with fiery whips dancing and pounding drums, a vast plastic orchid garden illuminated in soft white.  A woman with tall red hair, painted half-silver, handed me the King of Coins from a tarot deck, said it would represent me starting at sunrise.  And the deeper into that bright night I wandered, the further from me the sun was.

The point is that I was trying to get to my camp, to sleep a while before the sun came up and made sleep impossible, and I was lost.  I was trying to find my blankets so I could stave off the ice, so I could rest a moment before the furnace.  I wanted to soak my blistered feet, to eat, to find new water, to resuscitate my soul.  And instead, I found the mirror that night or morning, when I was furthest from myself and unsure that I would ever find my way home.  

My home was at 7:00 and Chance, and I had been steering myself in that direction for hours.  The problem was that every time I started walking that way, I became instantly distracted by some strange and wondrous and beautiful thing, some sound or sculpture or woman, and two hours would vanish.  I had already lost my bicycle, and my feet were beginning to blister.  I made full use of the assorted couches and huts that were scattered across the desert to provide comfort and ease for wanderers such as myself.  I stared at the Cubatron for long enough that I didn’t feel any time go by at all.  By the time I reached Center Camp, I was so weary I couldn’t feel my body anymore -- I was a mist or ghost, a thing without legs, hovering an inch above the ground and propelling myself by sheer force of will.  One of those disappearing ghosts I had seen out in the deep empty spaces of night, returning to dust.  Since my will was variable and wan at that point, my traversal of time and space was also variable and wan.

I knew where I was.  I was in Black Rock City.  I was at Center Camp.  I was in a human body, more or less.  I also knew where I was going: 7:00 and Chance, home, bed.  I even knew the route to get there.  And yet I was unable to comprehend the process that would be involved in walking from point A to point B.  So I suppose I had just been hovering a while, somewhere on the exterior of Center Camp, when I saw it.  The mirror.  There, just across from me, maybe 15 feet away from me.  It seemed to be just an ordinary full-length mirror set in a purple-and-gold frame, slightly scratched at the level of my shoulders, yet I was drawn to it as if by a gravitational force.  There was something odd about the reflection it cast, and it took my twenty-percent-functional brain a good while to figure it out.            

The person in the mirror didn’t look like me.  Or, rather, he didn’t look like any me I had ever seen before.  He seemed to be an autonomous being rather than a reflection.    There was something about his movements that was independent of me, and his face reminded me of mine, but wasn’t quite.  It wasn’t my ragged appearance -- my hair white with dust, my purple snakeskin-pattern pants, the blue faux-fur coat, dimly glowing.  My eyes had deep dark circles under them, yet my pupils were keenly alert, almost frantic.  This was all to be expected.  I had spent my time in this desert.  I knew.  But this was not quite right.  After studying the mirror for a while, I realized why this figure was unfamiliar to me, why he deeply unnerved me.  

All my life I had seen myself in mirrors, in still water.  All my life I had seen reflections of myself, reverse images.  If I raised my left hand, my reflection would raise its right.  When I shaved, I transferred the movement of the reflection’s razor, reversed it, to tell my hand how to move and avoid cutting myself.  I had never seen myself unreversed, as any other person who ever met me over the course of my life has seen me.  My whole experience had been based on a distorted image of my physical dimensions, a 180° flip from the way I was experienced by others, by the world.  And this mirror, the image in this mirror, wasn’t reversed.  When I raised my right hand, my reflection raised his right hand.  If I tilted my head left, so did he.  It was as if there were a hologram of myself standing in front of me, or a twin with my exact tics and habits of motion, instead of the distorted projections of myself I had seen since I was a small child.  I could, suddenly and finally, see myself as my friends and family and lovers had always seen me.  

It shook me to my core.  I was frightened in a way that I hadn’t been frightened in years and years.  I lost track of who I was, externalized myself into the image before me.  Of course I couldn’t look away.  In my semi-conscious state, I couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing.  Which is why the time and place is important.  If I had such a mirror in my apartment, if I saw that reflection under ordinary circumstances, I may have been charmed by the oddness of the image and gone about the rest of my day without a second thought.  But since I had arrived at a certain feeling of etherealness over those past 36 or 32 hours, and had witnessed a plethora of vast and astonishing acts of imagination in that time, my reality at that moment was extremely fragile.  In this desert, coated in a fine sheen of playa dust, parched and cold and lost, in the waning of the night, I found myself in a literal way, in a physical way, like running into an old friend on the street, a friend I had never seen face me.  I had to introduce myself, had to examine myself closely, gesture so as to watch myself gesture.  I stood rapt for a long, long time.  Then, with a suddenness that caught me off-guard, I panicked and ran from the mirror, from myself.  The fear focused my mind, and I was able to navigate back to my camp in only a few minutes.  I curled up in my tent, wrapped in my sleeping bag and several blankets, and, once my breathing calmed down, passed out for six hours. I’m still not sure what frightened me so much about the mirror.  I think I must have seen something in myself, something in that image of me, that I couldn’t process.  The eyes had something to do with it.  When you meet a person, your right eye looks into their left and vice versa.  In a mirror, it’s backwards.  So I think that looking into my own eyes as if I were looking at another person’s, looking into them as I never had before, made me question who I was at a fundamental level.  Perhaps I was sure before and couldn’t stand that new uncertainty, the alienness of my own eyes, especially since I was already in a mental state that could be described as “adrift” that night.  I certainly didn’t have any answers to those questions, and still don’t.  But that mirror convinced me to ask.  Remove the distortion and there is truth.  The truth that I can shake hands with myself, right hand to right hand, the way civilized people do.  The important thing about a mirror is the reflections in it, after all.  

A Blind And Simple Mammal

There was a connector
--inside my skull--
a diode, an input
a socket for that UNENDING EXTENSION CORD
that electrocuted me
that charred me
*SHOCKED* my body upright

caught me unawares!
(in dark of day) (in bright of night)
& made ME make WORDS

A hand:
1) from on high
2) held my hand &
3) made me trace*
*as if by stencil
a) odd visions detached from landscape
b) faces, blurs, indentations in the dew

I was powered from the top of my head
by that CORD that CORD
that stretched past the air traffic
a marionette   (?)
made to obey (?)
by the simple finger movements
of a SOMETHING
--a something with fingers--
& that cord
that (invisible) string
dragged me across continents (!?)
knees bleeding
not AGAINST my will nor FOR it

I was a non-participant
-----> a recipient of data <------
a weather vane
a lightning rod
a BLIND and SIMPLE mammal seeking
                                         i) sustenance
ii) warmth
iii) a good fuck
I was (im/com/dis)pelled

PROpelled by
either / or
something above / something subterranean

TO.........................

to?

to WHAT?

Compelled to dispel myself
Impelled to inscribe my dying
--> as if a solution!
--> as if floating in a solution!
AND!
gifted with visions in yellow
seminars from the stars
diamond illusions in ball-point pen
galaxies, womb planets, primordial goings-on
WHICH!
became existent things
by my hand
stenciled by a *something*
BUT!
the *something*...

VANISHED
!!!!!!!!!!!!

I)  Extension cord
II) Hand “from on high”
III) Diamond illusions in ball-point pen
(*****vanished all******)

Vanished!
(where?)
LEAVING!*
a hole in the top of my skull
a corroded input exposed to winter rains
*leaving?!?
SO!
a) does a puppet die?
b) what fuel?

---PROPELLED TO/BY WHAT?---

--to VOID!--
--from VOID!--
--by VOID!--

(and/or)

--to WOMB!--
--from WOMB!--
--by WOMB!--

AND!
not vanished:
                   1) Pulse
                   2) Earth

THUS!
the sun continues with the colors
human faces smile
full of teeth

I will wear a hat
I will not corrode
I will navigate

(atrophy/emaciation/shrinkage/disorientation/anemia/sloth/dwindling
novelties!  novelties!)

I will navigate
learn to feed myself
learn to sleep
find a power source

& the TREES!

INSPIRE = BREATHE IN
INSPIRE = BREATHE IN
INSPIRE = BREATHE IN
INSPIRE = BREATHE IN
INSPIRE = BREATHE IN
INSPIRE = BREATHE IN
INSPIRE = BREATHE IN

Through The Drywall

Father’s mustache always came down to his chin.  It was waterlogged when he dragged me from the pool.  I jumped in and missed the inner tube.  My face filled with water.  I never learned to swim.  There was a Slip n Slide in the yard, water grenades, green plastic squirt guns.  Touch football in the street, kicking soccer balls into puddles so the spray blinds the defender.  Wet snowmen with icy scarves, one day a year to sled down the hill to Safeway.  Straight down to Yellowstone, where the road was blocked by a crossing bison herd.  We stopped and a squirrel climbed up my chest to eat a Fruit Roll-Up.  I fell off my bike in the gravel and a rock split my lip open.  My brother was thrown right through the drywall.

I didn’t know grandma gambled.  I didn’t know grandpa prescribed her morphine.  I only know a ghost floated into the room and out again.  I was in the top bunk.  Translucent.  Filled with water.  There was a blanket, a kiss.  The birthday cake was ruined.  Butterscotch pudding instead.  Garter snakes, a rock thrown into a hornet’s nest, a stinger in my throat.  A 40th Anniversary gold-plated Les Paul guitar, sold to seek Pennsylvania.  Amish on the bus.  Fireworks over the river.  I snuck in the window, hid in the closet, could hear her parents suspecting.  In the darkness I saw a pyramid.  It lit up the midnight.  The man caught fire and toppled.  I got back on the bike.

We snuck wine from his parents’ stash.  Strategy board games, poetry at the Globe Cafe.  Coffee and coffee at an all-night diner.  I walked up the hill, past the S&M shop, down neon Broadway, and into the policeman’s floodlight.  I wore a brown UPS uniform.  I climbed out of the truck, rung by rung down from the uterus.  Through the drywall and into a hallway covered in black-and-white pictures and a metal casting of the Last Supper.  I cursed my knees, was kicked in the shin, broke my right tibia and fibula.  The cast was yellow.  The tapestry was also yellow.  The sunset was purple.  My right leg was half an inch shorter than my left.  An ulcer formed.

It began with Christmas and a kitten foaming at the mouth.  My stocking was green and red.  Pet rats climbed inside my shirt.  They licked my teeth clean.  I made them run mazes and lost my love inside.  I was looking on the wrong continent.  I waved goodbye as the train pulled away.  A Frenchman cornered me in a sleeper car.  A passport, a drunken pornographer, a see-through sea.  I escaped to Santorini and saw the sun set on Atlantis.  Minoan ruins, Theater of Dionysus.  I escaped across the ocean.  I overshot my home and landed in Indonesia.  Malaria swarmed.  Tsunami refugees and dengue fever.  I escaped by ingesting a small white pill and reappeared deep in the heart of the redwoods.  A tree grew on the stump of another tree.  Its roots were taller than a man.  It drank from the river and I drowned again.  When I woke, the ocean had grown.  I slipped in the red dirt and almost fell from the cliff.  But I stayed on the trail and put one foot in front of the other while the policeman watched.  Sirens in the dark.  Helicopters overhead.  Drums of absurd volume.  My head couldn’t hold the sun, so I etched it on my back.  Red skin peeled from overexposure.  I couldn’t think and waited for the synapses to fire.  The road was washed away by a sudden flood.  Bridges burning.  Bridges drowning.  I had to leave it all behind.  I had to leave it on the other side of the drywall, where the gun was hidden.

In Blear Of Night

in blear of night it comes to me

in tobacco ember light

hurled from the palm of some interplanetary god cometlike

& I stand stunned & stunted on the red rooftop

arms extended receiving

beckoning with index fingertips

aiming it here calling it here summoning it here

in blear of night it comes

a need of me

it substantiates me

leaves me kneeling bleeding from my temples

this my temple

it comes in half-formed shapes of timid long-legged women

hair trailing across the late blackness

comet-formed like white fire, endless snow dissolving

the stars shooting at me – the stars are missing, drifting away

in ancient days

all my awe needed was a high place

an access ladder for my skull to climb

& there was input from other orbits

hitchhiking on the light of miniscule stars

there down low where the wind finds horizon

a radiation of information

bombarding me & melting me

making mutations to my cellular structure

addicting me synaptically to a poetry of an alien nature

it fuses me to some hideous archetype perfection

welds me to it through fire of far suns

how hydrogen heals in helium, how infinity expands

how malformed millennia made me thirsty

in ancient days, I say, I saw ghosts of galactic pantheons

right there where the telephone wire wanes

& the low window lamp halo fades

they aimed at me; they blamed me for daylight

cascaded their insignia across my forehead

in blear of night it comes

but lately it deftly leaps by

I see it streaking past me

leaving dust trails like roadrunners bending the rubber concrete

in clearly defined celluloid existences bounded by familiar music

where animals travel like electrons holding comical signs

traveling not by step-by-step progression

but by means of some instantaneous triumphant teleportation

& I a coyote incapable of chasing them

only able to look down and realize

--gravity is a construct of mind—

&, thus instructed, fall flailing forever into canyons of dying dust

doomed only by the conceptualization of that doom

the knowledge that there is no earth, only ether beneath

fragment of an asteroid cathedral

in blear of night it comes to me

I don’t know what it is

it manifests as midnight roosters, as crickets, as faraway traffic, as bookshelves

I am enlarged by loud silence but not naked enough to know

& seeking someone weary to watch with me

& act as interpreter & liaison to the light

I have no other name for it

but Origin, Incomprehensible, the Sunburn

I am faltering in the curvature of this instant

aging by instinct, only slower

training myself to tame time

& make it balance beach balls for me

trying to articulate the cacophony in simple syllables

& manufacture a manuscript

that will present me with detailed instructions

to free me from the need for negotiation or navigation

transport me to the surface of a gaseous planet

& allow me to linger in a levitating stasis

absorbing, absolving, making me translucent

immune to the torrents of the skin

there must be a Something

there must be somewhere to go

the light is slowing down

lattice of nothingness

consolidation of tumultuous pauses

in blear of night it comes to me

it makes me a solid object

void of voids, constellation of remembrances

footfall of Shiva dancing in soft sand

I am created here

thickened & given edges by vibratory violence

when the late light leaves

in blear of night

under mobile skies

clouds dangling from insubstantial space

by insubstantial strings

a string from my skull to the heavens

it is a many-limbed puppeteer

I don’t know what it is

I am jerked & jostled in my sleep

on the red rooftop I stand stunned & stunted

a pair of left-handed scissors aloft

gleaming in the dark

I cut the string

& yet & still I dangle

rotating with limbs contorting, thwarting my will

attached by nothing to nothingness

but attached

a construct of mind

appearing to be a complete being

in tricks of light

in blear of night it comes