The Ultimate Return

In the early dark before dawn,
I awake with a dreary feeling
of death dripping from my eyelids.
I sit up in bed and listen
to the echoes of oblivion
haunt my room. The emptiness
of 4am streetlights stream into
my dreams. The euphoric caress
of madness. A poignant
premonition of the
inevitable. All my yesterdays
converge into the nothingness
I am at this moment.

You poor sap, where
have the days gone?
What have you done?
Why does it ache so much
to be a finite creature
in an infinite
universe?

So much of our passing lives
are spent drifting along
on the surface
of our everyday consciousness
hiding behind the social
mask, too frightened
to take the necessary
plunge into the abyss of
ourselves.

The banality of the hours
becomes the banality
of life. I’m neither
happy nor sad
because it’s all too
senseless to be either.

Sauntering through this
bureaucratic age of
death and sterility
with a marred mind
and heedful eyes,
I bleed alone
with a half-smile on my aging face
wondering how long I can keep
the wolf of insignificance
at bay.

Gazing into the bathroom mirror
has become too much to bear.

The fierce thirst
I once had
for the
elixir of life
has waned.

I’ve grown weary of the fight against
the ways of the world, the moral
demands, the normalcy of the
façade, the binding ties
of obligations, the tribal feuds,
the pathetic protocols of
the unlived,
the unpoetic masses
with their unpleasant
pettiness, tired of the
endless pursuit
of illusions
in an effort to tongue kiss
the elusive lips of
immortality.

Our pursuits
our actions
our tedious haste
are nothing more than
anxious attempts
to escape the torments of
our finite presence. An escape
from the awareness of
the brevity of life.
We spend our days trying
to get somewhere
but there’s nowhere to get to.
We dilute the experience
of the moment with a false
sense of hope
and a laborious longing
for a resolution that
never comes.

In spite of all the “truth” and
“reason” in this vulgar world,
we know very little. Yet, it’s the
unknowable that holds
the treasure we seek —
the darkness, the seat
of the soul that we’re too
afraid to explore and coalesce
with the light of our
consciousness.

Perhaps it’s a romantic deception, but
I believe in that unattended darkness
within, there’s a mysterious
current guiding our lives.
I’ve felt its presence all my days —
an ethereal force,
an unrest,
a transcendent whisper —
that forbidden fruit
dangling from the primordial tree
of our inner garden.

I don’t know what to make of it.

The Upanishads tell us: The Self,
though hidden in all beings,
does not shine forth but can
be seen by those subtle seers,
through their sharp and
subtle intelligence.

The Greeks called it the daemon,
the genius, the guardian.
We all harbor it in the
obscure regions of
our inner life.

Yet, society and its godlike
institutions
try to snuff it out in our youth,
this hidden power within us,
and they never stop. They try to
school it out of us; they try
to preach and pray it out
of us. They throw the heavy
nets of “social duty” upon us.
They’ll even attempt to subdue
this vital force with
pharmaceuticals and therapy
to help guide you away from
its potent influence.

They need you to become like
the rest; mechanical, obedient,
chained to your social role.

But for some people, this force
is too strong to be tamed
or throttled back. It wants
to be heard and to throw off
the shackles of the life-denying
demands of the status quo. To flip
over the tables of conventionality.
To obey its own laws.

Our bodies are the mere instrument
for this deeper force, and our
clothes disguise the lie
of our physical form.

Through it all, I kept that dark
guardian in there,
tucked back in the shadows,
revealing no signs to the
external world
of its eternal influence.
At times, when I’m alone,
it emerges from the immortal sea
of the unconscious and yanks me
from clutches of the profane
and into an erotic aloofness
where the illusions fade
and the boundaries disintegrate
and the desire for mortal gain
dissolves.

Though I do not know how I got here,
or what it all means, I know that the
same hidden force which has
carried me to this moment
will also guide me to that
imperishable hour we
call fate.

And I will doff the gross garments
of a false existence and
ascend that sanctified mountain,
emancipated at last from the
lifeless stone of reality,
reborn into the eternal realm
of celestial vistas and enchanted
gardens, a place beyond the
illusions of opposites, where the
struggle between life and death,
dark and light, heaven and hell
finally subsides,
and a radical unification
of mind, body, and soul
ensues, and I will dance
that Dionysian dance
on the other side of the veil
where flower-haired nymphs’ bathe
in misty morning ponds,
and the water lilies
are forever in bloom,
and the lush, streamside meadows
rejoice beneath
the infinite blue skies
as the cosmic wind
scatters
what little remains
of my war-torn
flesh.

The ultimate return.

The Artist and his Shadow

Photo: Gabriel Guerrero Caroca

---

He is unfit for this life, this
unduly managed era devoid
of poesy and freedom, a time
of useless haste in honor of
the illusion of progress,
a life starving of life, a life
dripping with chains as dull-witted
bureaucrats and political
imbeciles run amok.

There’s something dark and peculiar in him
that forbids his full participation in
the blatant absurdity of
today’s world.

Even as a child he felt something
fierce was there in him — an unrest, an
unrealized freedom, something
shadowy but knowing,
a deep-seated primordial power
groping endlessly in the
apocalyptical night.

It’s still there, stirring in the
inmost abyss, this esoteric ghost,
this daemon, dwelling
in the shadows of the soul,
convulsing and throbbing like a
diabolical gypsy in the throes
of ecstasy.

He tries, at times, to wash it away
with morality and decency, bowing
down to the sanctified normalcy
of his fellow humans. But still,
it’s there, raging, taunting him,
hounding him, forcing him
out of the prison of SELF
and into the creative realm,
the destructive realm,
into the elemental kingdom
of existence.

It calls forth the spirit
into a higher dominion of being
and yearns for expression, this
enigmatic drive,
even at the cost of reputation
and alliance
and it tempts the body, the vehicle
of the soul, to thrive with
Dionysian defiance,
and it wants to flip over the table
of conventionalities and go to war
with all customary forms and
cultural norms.

It’s this archaic force that burns from
the most profound depths
of his being, an insatiable rapture
that coalesces the dark of the unconscious
with the universal light, arousing
the sheer realization of his
utter nothingness – the
true awakening.

He could hardly put on a mask and
endure the typical occupation, or
partake in the social games
of the ordinary, blindly acting
out his role on the stage of culture,
following the fashions of the
day, living uncritically as a
conditioned child.

Undefinable,
with no creed or title and a
fierce contempt for conceptual
reality, he’s in spiritual exile
from the place and time
he was born into. Terribly
alone among his contemporaries,
misunderstood
by an arid society, an
aimless wanderer, he is, laughed at
by the well-adjusted, their minds
chloroformed with low-grade
entertainment, their meanings
and desires built into them
from the outside.

The more emaciated they are inwardly,
the showier they become outwardly.

But he cares nothing of status
and spectacle or the unimaginative
interests of the bourgeois, so he
ventures onward
towards
an austere existence,
choosing the possibility of
poverty over pointless labor,
autonomy over dependency,
art over it all –

an unconditional renunciation
of a secure existence in
search of the sublime.

He’s in flight from the endless trivialities
that make up the modern world, choosing
instead to live perilously close to
the primal forces within.

His fate, he knows. He is doomed
to suffer alone.

When uninspired, the firm grip of melancholy
takes hold and he becomes the unhappiest
of mortals, endlessly sloshing around in
a cesspool of despair, nourishing
his apathy with whiskey and
mascara-smeared love.

But when enthused, he’s lit up,
galvanized, electrified, and his
heart is filled to the brim
with poetic rapture and the
forces at work within him
become relentless. He is
transformed into a mere
instrument of supremely
powerful forces,
consecrating and sacrificing
every fiber of his BEING to the
supreme task of
CREATION –
quenching the thirst
of a bone-dry
generation.

“O melodies above me in the infinite,
To you, to you, I rise.”

Forever in Exile

Photo by Kevin Cable

---

Disarray rules the day like always
and the people are no longer fun
so I hit the road like Jack Kerouac,
a dharma bum on the run,
never lookin’ back till I etch
my cathartic initials
into the sun.

I’m a man these days
of what they fashionably call
“privilege”, a fabricated villain among
the well-adjusted, eternally marred
by the bile of the self-righteous
who seem to be eternally perched
on the ivory tower pedestal of their
pretend merits.

Yet, here I am, bursting
with divine emptiness, ejaculating
my heretical goo into the filtered
face of a sedated culture, dressed
casually in the raggedy
rags of time,
forever in exile, a dignified
nobody in search of
the sublime.

Half alive, half dead
traversing through the
sugar sand of dread
in this digital wasteland,
contented by a peculiar
peace
as an unperturbed
spectator
to the glorious undoing
of a hypochondriac
civilization.

I see them, I see them gaze
upon the unpacked suitcase
in the corner,
weak in vice,
weak in virtue,
I hear the zealous hum of the
new religion, mortgaged souls
dumping the burden
of their lives into the
polluted river of dead creeds,
desperately retreating
from the answers to the
questions they no longer ask,
hushing the whispers
of their own blood
only to hide behind
the lies of their
required mask.

No doubt,
I’m still here in the
diminishing flesh
as a reluctant participant in
this rigged game, but my
spirit is long gone
like an unseen skylark
hovering somewhere beyond
this Faustian amusement park
chanting in the predawn dark,
no longer harboring the
provincial heart
that bleeds in the alley
of Babylon.

The road is the way.

My tattered rucksack
strapped to my back
and a fresh stogie in my
mouth, I take on the jubilant
journey out of the known,
lingering
here in the desert and
there in the mountains,
alone, nursing the
divine spark with my
own marrow.

Tonight, I find a secluded spot
down by the creek
under the white glow
of the moon where I
take on the earth with all my
body and soul and lie
like a wounded doe
around the warmth
of the fire,
descending
down from the
never ending
three-dimensional fight
onto the shores of midnight
where I watch my shadow
dissolve into the new
born light.

Nowhere to Go

“Permit me voyage, love,
into your hands… ”
― Hart Crane

---

All the friends I once had are no longer near.
My collar up, I lean into the bitter wind,
into the utter sin of a wasted year
and descend into the wilderness
of mirrors to try to catch
a glimpse of the truth
behind the fears.

I wander alone
into the intriguing night
in full defiance of my
deluded appetite, bleeding
in silence, out of sight.

Modern religion has severed
our consciousness
from the shadow, untethered
we are from the unconscious
life of our total BEING. Born
tainted, we live out our days in
compliance with the irrational
and in alliance with the fashionable
trends of the day, a prisoner to the age
in which we are born.

My ambition has been subdued,
there’s nothing left to gain, nothing
left to lose, nothing to yearn for
except to renounce everything
I once had a concern for
and to start anew
among the bleached bones
of history
conceding every accidental
ounce of me to that
seductive little wink
of mystery.

The moment is the only reality
and we plunder it away in its totality
by preparing for the tomorrows
that never come, robbing the NOW
of its vitality.

There’s nowhere to go or nowhere to row
there’s nothing to see or nothing to be
it’s time to unload and get on the road
defy the regime and live out the dream.

Too many books and I know nothing,
Too much talking, I think they’re bluffing.
Everybody is doing what they think
they’re supposed to do,
ending supine in the coffin
with the tearful pleas of what
they had proposed to do.

“The bottom of the sea is cruel,”
once surmised a poet
years before he hurled himself
overboard
into the sea of his
own demise

Is there redemption for the
inauthentic life?
or are we all condemned
to the fate of the
self-inflicted knife?

Peace

As the summer flowers wilt and die
and the ruthless year creeps ever so slowly
to its belated demise; as the cities burn
with fire and rage and the monuments
of yesterday are toppled; as the political
rift derives to murderous blows and a
sea of hate and vitriol flows from
the partisan hearts of humanity
into the streets and
neighborhoods
of our nation —

there’s a little fireplace burning
in a one room cabin deep in the cut
on the outskirts of small town
in Vermont; her and I, alone,
serenaded by the subtle wind
that rattles the almost bare
branches from the legion of
trees
as the fallen golden
leaves
blossom in the late
October mud
where the only commotion–

the flames in the darkness
that flicker off her naked body
as she walks, with
that seductive sway,
towards the bed
in the eerie silence
of a cold cold
world.

Larimer Street Bar

My Red Wing boots are still
dusty from 6 days of sauntering
in the Rocky Mountains
as I walk into a Larimer Street bar
in Denver where hipsters drink craft
beer on weekday afternoons.

I sit amid blurred faces and gaze into
the eyes of the cultured youth. The men
wear flowered shirts with slim jeans
cutoff at the shins and the woman
are young and half-pretty and
and they have dark tattoos on their
skull white skin and their chats
are filled with frivolous drama
that splashes their random
existence with a sense of
significance.

They are at odds now with everything
that they will one day become.

The beers I sip help cope with
the sights and sounds around me.

It’s only been a few hours
since I left behind the mountains
and the meadows
and the stars and moon
and the untainted air that held me
for the last few days, and I already
feel like hell.

I’d rather be on the trail, alone again,
surrounded by wildflowers, instead,
I’m in the city and the city demands
compliance and submission
and I’m not good
at either.

It’s hard to breathe here.

It only takes a short time of sleeping
under the stars, totally enshrouded
in nature to realize how over
civilized we’ve all become.

We live in a man-made world
and suffer man-made ailments
and seek man-made remedies.

The violence we see today is merely
the early rumblings of the eventual
breakdown of an unstable
empire.

Obedience is the crutch for the
weak-kneed. Security is hemlock
to the spirit. The chains we
all carry around are about
to get heavier.

Just around the corner from where I sit
is a row of tents lined on the sidewalks
inhabited by demented vagrants. A man
with no teeth and no shoes gives the
middle finger to a light pole. A whore
strides past the bar window with scarred
heels and smeared lipstick across
her cheek.

The creatures of the night are alive
looking for a small win.

Across the street there’s a business
party going on at an elegant bar
where intoxicated hotshots with
sterile souls conversate on careers
and the shape of the economy
and the upcoming presidential
election.

I look out at the corner and see two policemen
lingering over a double amputee man
who is flailing on the pavement
bellowing incoherent jargon
under the street lights.

It’s all too much.

I want to flee to the mountains
and lie down on the pine-needled
floor of the forest in the sweet
shade of a Douglas Fur like
I did the day before.

I want to sip cold creek water and
reacquaint myself with the
fragmented light of sunrise
coming through the aspens
at dawn.

I want to be serenaded once again by
the warbling of the ancient birds
high up in the Ponderosa Pine.

I want to remain where life is
free and wild
and devoid of the awful stench
of a polluted culture.

My flight leaves in the morning. I down
my last sip of beer and walk out into the
dark night as the sirens close in.

Somewhere the Chrysanthemums are
blooming in the late summer
wind. It’s not here.

Reading Faulkner in the Dark

2am and I heard the front door slam.

She stumbled in and tossed her keys
on the counter, lit a cigarette,
and propped her long leg up
on the chair to unzip her
knee-high boots.

I was sitting in the corner
sipping whiskey
and reading
Faulkner.

The ice in the glass made a sound
as I raised it to my lips. It
stunned her and she
looked over.

“What’s the secret to this fucking life?”
I asked her as I blew smoke rings
in the dark.

She rolled her eyes
and with her hair all tangled
and an ornery smile,
shimmied her silk
panties down from under
her short black dress
and flung them
at me.

They smelt like the answer
to it all.

I fired up my last cigar and
sipped whiskey in the dark
to a Chet Baker record
I had playing lightly
in the background.

With her bare feet on the wood floor
and a drunken sway, she slowly
made her way towards me
as she raised
her middle finger
and told me to
“fuck off.”

Faulkner once asked:
“Who gathers the
withered rose?”

Indeed, that is the question.

She straddled me in a clumsily
sort of cute way and then took the
cigar out of my mouth and
dropped it in my whiskey.

She took one last drag of her
cigarette before dropping
that one in too.

The street lights lit her face.
I heard sirens in the distance.
I grabbed her ass tightly
and looked into her
mascara smeared
eyes.

Faulkner made a thud on the floor
as Chet Baker played on till
dawn.

Weeping In The Dark

I am awakened at 3 am to the silhouette
of trees trembling on the walls. Eyes
opened, haunted in the silence
knowing the stream of blood
flowing in my veins will one day
dry up. And the breaths that I
take for granted each second
will soon lack the capacity
to sustain me.

It’s 3 am. And the dark waters
of memory come flooding in.

Who am I?
Who is this thing
I pretend to be?

I try to die most days
and the days I don’t die
I feel the wrath of
EXISTENCE
teasing my scars,
nipping at
my bones.

What a great burden it is to be alive
and to know the end. What terror it
is to be a self-aware creature
in the modern world where
all the gods are dead
and the soul of Walt
Whitman is long
forgotten.

Unlike the Buddhists, I crave
a bit too much from this war-torn
planet, too much awe, too much wonder
to ever be a satisfied animal.

Born into this,
we all grope in the dark
for a great “beyond”, reaching desperately
for the abstractions that provide
us a remedy to our mortality. It’s
the need to find an object that
allows us to express our WILL
completely — God, Leaders, Lovers,
Culture, Party — which both helps
us live and chains and
enslaves us.

As a great mind once informed us:
“With the truth, one cannot live.
To be able to live one needs illusions,
not only outer illusions such as art,
religion, philosophy, science and
love afford, but inner illusions
which first condition the outer.”

The spiritual bankruptcy of the West
has finally reached full-fledged
disarray — a society divided,
over-medicated and greatly in debt,
manufactured anger, herd-mindedness,
disorientation, anxiety-ridden people
afraid of life, afraid of truth,
ignorant of their own shadow
that they project onto
everything they hate.

People severed from the spirit
as they watch the illusions that
have bolstered their way of life
slowly crumble.

Half-awake children destroying each other,
not because their hearts are wicked,
but because they’ve grown content
with the dimness of their souls.

I walk out into the early dawn
and hurl a brick into the
unsound window of reality,
toiling my way out of the
ruins of yesterday.

“To open the eternal world,
to open the immortal eyes
Of man Inwards, into the
worlds of thought,
into Eternity.”

I sing to the outcasts, to the deprived,
to the tears of hobos in the alley. An
archaic soul in conflict with the times,
a contrarian among the conformed,
a renegade among the compliant,
a spiritual vagrant among
Boobus Americanus.

The timid masses entrust supremacy to men
with eyes of coal, elevating these
monochromatic parasites armed
with the conscience of
street whores
to the pinnacle
of power.

And the armed bureaucrats fear
decency as they hide like
feckless weasels behind
rules and protocols
while ignoring the
laws of the human
heart.

Look at who we are, look at what we’ve
become — creatures who both loathe
and love power which is why we so
easily give our loyalty to those
who dispense it.

And those who speak truth are led to the gallows
and those who ask questions are forced
into desolation.

Our quest for earthly heroism is
the root of all evil. Destruction
is the result of the unlived
life.

And the statues and monuments
are graffitied and toppled
and the old art
is erased
by the fresh youth who harbor,
unknowingly,
the same evil in which they seek
to eradicate. They too
will be judged unfavorably by the
forthcoming morality
of the new “woke” generation
in a century’s time.

As the undoing continues and the cities
burn and the streets fill with blood,
I walk into the wild where the lilacs
sing to the sun and the ancient oaks
drip with quiet dignity.

I watch a big black ant crawl
up a long stem of a dandelion
and now see a speck of the truth
that we all try to deny.

I want less and less from this
nothingness and to meet death
as I was born — a naked,
unblemished creature weeping
in the dark of this
cold cold
world.

Beyond the Pines

Sometimes the world turns dark and the heart
quivers and turns cold and your
zest for life wanes.

When you’re lost and the days drag you down
into the “dark dungeons of demonic despair,”
just know there’s still light
somewhere in you.

No matter how long you’ve lived without it,
it’s there. A spark. It was there before
your miraculous birth. It was there
before all of humanity emerged
from the sea.

There’s a tender flame someplace deep within
quietly waiting to blaze once again.

There’s someone out there that hears your song.
Let it play. Turn it up. Sing it loud.
Through it all, never let it die.

As for me, I seem to be caught between
zestful youth and the grave, freedom
and slave, passion and pain; pinned
between two generations at war
with each other.

When the world burns and civilization
smears ashes on my spirit,
I get out:
Solitude
Nature
Exile
alone, into the luminous night
where the swinging lanterns
flicker in the dark as I
allow the moonlight to sink
into me like an ax blade to
hickory.

There’s a place tucked back away
from the sadistic machine of culture
and the pandemonium of progress,
away from the needless noise
and the crazed crowds, away
from the systematic
brutality of
inequitable laws
and badges
and flags
and institutions,
away from the dreadful stench
of a decaying civilization.

It’s a place far-removed from
the disintegrating systems
of the asphalt world.

A place where you and I meet death
and are reborn in identity with
the whole meaning of the
universe.

A place of harmonious solidarity,
where the people revel
in feverish dance to the primal drums
of the cosmos
and live out their days
inebriated
on the potent potion
of love.

Just beyond the pines lies a handsome
little adobe surrounded by primordial
ferns with a little stream out
back that leads to
well within.

It’s a place where you and I
wake up wide-eyed and alive
to the song of birds, the ruffling
of the sycamore leaves in the
taintless breeze.

A place of peace where dreams,
no longer polluted by the grime
of history, marinate
in the stillness of the
ancient dawn.

A place where daffodils
grow wild in the graveyard
of our yesterdays.

A place of old books
and candlelight.

A place of sweet evening sounds
and night owls harmonizing in
the fruitful darkness.

A place of
artists
sacred wanderers
spiritual vagrants
whose only quest is to
vivify the spirit of man
by loving beyond
the “forbidden.”

It’s a place where you, barefoot
and divine, adorned in that
vintage sundress, sway to
the rhythm of the wind
as the moon carries your
soft skin to my wistful grin
while we make our own
poetic reality
right there tucked away
beyond the pines, cradled
in the immaculate arms
of the sublime.

I’ll meet you there.

Ruination

just a
dead leaf
drifting along
the cold river
away from
the dark country
of its own
making.