Mule

I am Karma's mule
and she is leading me forward on a rickety cart,
cackling,
dangling the carrot of romance
just beyond my hungry muzzle.

My lust is tenacious as the Nile in June.
But all my romantic pursuits are stillborn
Filling fresh water with rotting flesh.

I must have been Humbert Humbert in my last life.
Or Heinrich Himmler.
Lolita, you must forgive me.
Six million Jews you must forgive me.

The Space in Between

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My Easy Yoke

Wet boulders on the tops of hills and logic chopping chopping chopping
threaten to bury me with super-colossal gravity.
Day dreams of office jobs and ties tied tight around my windpipe,
researching endless pages of madness only to regurgitate in
brain-damaged facsimile threaten to crush crush crush me
with prodigious efficacy.

My easy yoke is tugging at me lightly
as if some five-inch sprite is pulling
a length of fishing line attached.

She whispers in my ear and I will follow.
I will by owing owe not.

Locked Eyes

Our eyes lock on each other
and you don't know me
and there are no walls.

You turn some rusty cog
within me,
sparking a revelation:
a striking stream
of echoes and negatives.

It's an ecstatic assault.
And I know your life
because I've been here before,
looking out from your eyes.

Tired

Like a pile of pillows
soaked in gasoline,
I fantasize of easy
transmutation:
heat and smoke,
climbing lightly to heaven.

Rebirth

Thunk and Crunch and silence.
the wheels of time stick for an instant...
it's like deep under warm water.

After a blink like eternity,
The earth cracks skull like a sledge hammer.
Blue and red wailing.
World is waning,
erasing,
erased.

Fade in to the most glorious light
beloved dead are angels
and they're singing in rapturous choir.
Praise God!
Lead the way to his holy chamber
the doors open wide,
and the light gets brighter
brighter,
brighter till it
blinds
...and burns.

Angels are burning
Heaven is burning
God is burning
Soul is burning

Pain is a billion razor blades
ripping through the fabric of being.
Pain is the angel song turning into screaming.
Pain is the face of God breaking into pixels.
Pain is the self burning into nothing
like the human body dissolving in acid.
For eternity.
For eternity.
For an eternity of eternities,
stretching out like a light beam cutting new space at the edge of the void.

Fade out to black.
Fade out past black.

And all is one.

Death's Heavy Glare

All the millenia of chanting,
dancing around fires;
sacrificing livestock, and raising palms to the sky
as blood pours thick down pyramid steps;
copying lines like sand grains under candle-light in fine, tight script
until blindness takes hold;

All relentless expressions, made in desperation
are building traditions to carry the burden
the crushing burden
of death's heavy glare.

Shade

The house is clean and it's only me.
Somehow it's more lonely when I put music on,
and it washes over the delicate hum of the computer's fan.

In vain, in vain, always in vain! I try to pin-point the crucial moments;
I break open the encyclopedia of past indiscretions,
that letter-perfect Rolodex that records Brady's moronic
fumbling for emancipation
from this
vast, gray expanse of being; this yawning purgatory; this polite oh well; this
heavy-hearted sigh and throwing up of arms.

I fought.
Smashed my knuckles in.
Teeth chipped on fists.

Now, age is creeping on, and now even ego is leaving.

Ideas

Imprisoned in an invisible jail
I hang to the wall with chains of Milton,
Wilhelm's imbecilic histrionics,
The formal system of L
and Reza Shah Pahlavi.

I take my rest in the morning;
Mind is clear, colors crisp,
and the air is palatable.

I don't sleep anymore.
I roll around, and struggle with the sheets, my growing belly,
and the automatic working out of proofs in my mind.
Thousands of ideas are struggling to reconcile
like anarchistic limbs of some avant-garde sculpture
made from sheet metal, lengths of wire and various junk-yard apparatti.

Suprise

Millions of dead monks knew it.
We only found it so hard to believe
because we were raised on promises of flashing cameras
high octane sport cars, and looking down on the vastness of Earth
from outer space. And when it all ends,
heaven, forever.

Consider ancient China, and the northern border raids
so terrible, they built a wall in the mountains.
Thousands of corpses lie even in that wall.

Here I am.
Alive.
I have no to do lists
and every day carries a surprise.

Flea

The automatic life of a flea
is dull and fantastic.
He will never feel the thrill of love
or worry about decay.

Survival is instinctual
but he thinks not of self.

How wonderful and senseless it must be.

Zeal

Zeal!
It's a clenched fist
and the spittle that flies out from the mouth.

Zeal!
It's the gleaming of the steel,
when the swords are raised to the sun.
Today we sack Jerusalem!

Zeal!
With all its
laughing in the face of death,
because the time for discussion is over, damn it.

Zeal is not soft or warm.
It's freezing cold, or burns
like lightning.
It is rooted like mountain,
and relentless as a crushing tsunami.

"Right" and "wrong"
are just empty sounds
when the will is focused to a point
with Zeal!

Mad Ramble

Morning burned through the dreamscape
and I woke in seamless transition (again).
I found myself repeating a curious mantra
that echoed through my skull;

"You are the observed
and the observer.

You are the observed
and the observer.

You are the observed
and the observer..."

For so long it seemed the days would stay the same
and I would be stuck,
miserable forever, trapped inside a walking corpse
only to wink out
and be robbed of dreams forever.
Now my whole universe begins to bend.

Let me explain.

I have karma. You probably have it too.
Listen,
my hair isn't dread-locked, and there are no essential oils in it.
I don't have a single pair of hemp pants,
and I wear socks almost all of the time.
I am not religious. I am student, and a realist.
I swallow the proof when I taste it in the pudding.

So believe me when I tell you
I have karma (and you probably have it too).

The strength of my desires was an unstoppable force,
(and this, it seems redundant to prove)
and my karma an immovable object.

So, what does happen, anyway?
I'll tell you, but you're not going to like it:

Nothing!

Energy Tracers

People look at me like I'm nuts
for saying such normal things,
like,

"Strange that the moon is so visible, even though it's day."

Is the moon always so bright
even before the night?

Is everyone
part of some "secret" club,
that meets every second Sunday?
Why has no one told me?
Is this a practical joke?

"I motion that ANY talk about the moon,
ESPECIALLY during the day, be henceforth taboo."

"Seconded."

"All in favor?"

"Passed unanimously!"

Maybe there is no club,
maybe I'm an android.
There must be a a few of us,
otherwise people would be surprised to see me,
as if I were a celebrity.

We're programmed to think we're human,
to see skin and hair and eyeballs,
where there is only really
steel, rubber, and cameras.

Or

maybe everyone is waiting for me at the end of time,
where the universe is cracking.
They are standing at the top of a massive waterfall,
looking out into the cosmic portal,
where we will reunite into one mega-soul,
and re-birth,
in a universe with slightly higher vibrations.

Maybe they are all waiting for me,
and I've ran back
into a memory dimension
where I can re-live a past life.
and all the people here are specters;
they are not here
these are their shadows--energy tracers.

Lifted

Such a strange magic
has enchanted me
all of these years,
that made me blind
to how unique
and worthy I am.

But I must have muttered some magic words,
because the spell has been lifted.

I still desire love; that was no trick, after all
but I don't need it to fill a hole
I need it build a palace.

The only standards I weight myself against
now are my own

and I have none,
because I'm not earning my reason to be
by doing stupid pet tricks.

A Definition of Love

Love is not some magic recipe,
of actions, shapes, or sounds.

It's not the redness of her lipstick
or the curve of her hips.
It's not careful way she pronounces syllables,
and how they are soft on the ends.
It's not how she lifts her chin,
while you run your fingers through her hair,
or the gentleness of her kisses.

It's not her careful gait
that makes it seem like she's floating.
It's not even the way that your heart gets filled up
when you see the plaque on her teeth
and the dandruff in her hair,
that tells you a million things about how she's been feeling.

Love is all of this
and none of it;
love is
what happens when you see the light and color
of her soul
and know that part of her
that has no words
to describe it.

Music in a Dream

She floats in and out of shifting dreams cells,
swims in through fractal thoughts that summon energies and memories
that dance like the invisible waves that push ocean currents,
following on the coattails of a deep-consciousness mash-up
of
high school gym, a rock concert, an old boss and peer
who is trying to catch me but I'm hiding in my hood and sweating.
I sneaked in to hear the songs and
He's scanning the crowd, looking for me and he is going to
but just before he does,
the whole band

moves the music!
The crowd breaks free like a flood and the show
spills out into the outside;
an it's some twilight garden of Eden.
We run like children trying to find the band
desperate, fascinated, enraptured
we strain to follow our ears.

I wake up and I'm still trying to find the music.
Will I see her today?
Her instrument is the very air, the ether.
Will it still stir my heart like Stravinsky?

Clones

Here and there
there is a skinny teenager (or young adult)
with ultra tight jeans,
ear-stretching ear-rings,
long hair hair-sprayed stiff,
tattoos running up his arms
slouched over slightly
with an air of quiet confidence
as if to say,
"I can out-apathy anyone."

Sometimes when I see these people
I wonder if the world is really real
or if it's all built around me
and the programmers are getting lazy.
Or maybe they are avatars of some minor God
or human soul that got a little too big
for just one body.

The Gift

You have no place in my wandering thoughts
but mutual acquaintances
sometimes raise your name
or I'll you will appear
like a rat
at places I go to relax,
infesting the airspace
with your boorish
HUHUHUHUHUH
What ever it is you're laughing at,
it's not that fucking funny.

Every time I see your arrogant
smirk
I want to slam my fist into your mouth
and turn your teeth into shrapnel,
reform your conniving smile
and make it more honest.

I don't
because I don't want to feel like a witless animal,
because everyone thinks it's okay that you
cheat
lie
deceive
betray
connive
mislead
and manipulate,
but physical violence is for some reason less acceptable.
But most of all
because you would call the cops.

It's almost tragic
you'll never receive my gift;
you'll never have the world go black so fast it seems like you moved backwards in time.
You'll never get to say to yourself,
in a strange moment of clarity
holy shit, I'm actually seeing stars.
You'll never smell the sick and heavy aroma
of celery and battery acid
and taste it on the roof of your mouth.
But most importantly,
I wont be able to show you truth
by delivering you
for
a
precious
moment
from your amazing pretension.

The Magic Yam Roll

My brother and I decided to go for sushi
at an all you can eat place
we used to go to all time.

As we approached, the place had been displaced.
wasn't it several meters west?
Surely I must have made a mistake.

But when we walked in it was a totally different place,
with an all new golden good-luck kitty.
They moved the motherfucker after all.

We stuffed ourselves on all you can eat
and I dutifully consumed the last yam roll.
But I looked at the plate and there is was again,
staring back at me in all its fat, pale-yellow glory.

Surely I must have made a mistake.

I closed my eyes as I stuffed it in my mouth,
and imagined that when I opened them
I would wake up in a different place.

Fate

I tried to break away
from my fate
because
not always getting what you want
is the price you have to pay
for having fate at all.

No matter how hard I want it,
I'm never going to be an astronaut
I'll never get that blow job from Paris Hilton
and I'll probably never have that golden Porsche.

I'm like a cripple trying to scale K-2
not willing to accept that my wheels have frozen at the base,
I crawl the next kilometer and freeze.

There is only so many times I can run into the same wall,
getting the same bloody nose,
hoping the next time
the next time
the next time
I'll run right through it.

because that's insanity, man.

Pearly Gates

It's a relief
to be floating in a warm pool
of certainty of eternity.
Eternity...it looks all fluffy and baby pink and blue
like translucent cotton candy.

Letting go of the self-expectations of becoming the uberman,
or even a glorious rocker
Melts the jacks of self into a pool of mercury.

There will be time for
love, fame, art, invention, brilliance;
the ever illusive blowjob...

and the severity of
drinking too much and falling down the stairs,
or getting my arm cut off at the elbow,
or having a stroke and becoming locked-in.

That mysterious gateway that comes at the end of life
will be there forever.
and when the time comes to step through it,
I will be annihilated.