the banished immortal

endlessly wandering
from east to west
the banished immortal
fills a bag with regrets
and throws it over shoulder
well behind
the mind
far behind
whence he left

(T'ang Dynasty poet Li Po, also known as " the banished immortal")

haiku (a newfound form)

(recently borrowed Jack Kerouac's Book of Haikus from my local library; I found in the plaintive wording and imagery of his purely Americanized haiku something grand and elating, just like his prose possesses for me; thus spawned a new endeavor, though I see that I've been writing in this way for a long time, just now finding a new guiding force for a new discipline that the haiku form requires; here are some samples of recent attempts)


wind is nothing
but moving air-
think about it

*

the last oak and maple leaves
race each other in the streets
one final gasp of colorful breath

*

studying maps-
life in
two dimensions

*

shaking branch-
the bird
flew away

*

so many shooting stars-
where they going off to
in such a hurry?

*

starlings on the wire
sing in myriad voices-
little black songbooks

*

a lonesome sparrow
fighting the wind
lands on a powerline

*

famously distrustful of
scientists and historians-
the dreamy poet

*

Joshua tree sings
a hollow song
in November coldfront

*

first snowfall in the Sierra
looks like heaven
from the desert floor

*

trees in the backyard
gone to seed-
sparrows feed on the ground

*

everything in a
haze, a swampy
forest of dreams

*

mountains in clouds,
mountains of clouds-
what's the difference?

*

autumn in the desert
watching ravens dive
in a stripmall parking lot

*

seagulls in the Valley,
so far
from the sea

*

every single
Van Gogh brushstroke
is a haiku

*

on the museum balcony
staring at the sea-
God's artwork


*

frail and submissive
like a child
in another's arms

*

the great tideless
ocean of time-
desert dust on my car

*

show no pity
for the dying
deer, fox, or sparrow

*

heat grows faint
in the long
shadows of dusk

*

cold birds in the mountains
flying west
don't care that it's Christmas

*

sifting the fine sand
with your fingers,
feeling ages slip through

*

compassionate and ascetic,
each Catholic saint
a lightskinned Buddha

*

each in his
own holy place
under the moon

*

three jets' vapor trails
made a crease
in the morning sky

*

we are all
existentialists, because
we all exist

october desert journals

I.

seen the sun rise a few too many times.
when the anticipation, the apprehension, of a new day becomes so great that you feel you must beat its arrival by getting up well before it comes around, to triumph in a human yet inhumane fashion over the forces of the cosmos to prove some kind of superiority through an exercise in absolute inferiority, standing directly beneath the middle stud of Orion's belt and attempting to feel as if with eyes that you can take it all in and own it with a name. the sunrise is owned by the canyons and mountains and the turning globe, not a singular human psyche scratching away for posterity and love, 'cause the sun's risen somewhere else just the same as the sun has set for millions and at the exact same time, somewhere a single tear is shed into the sea by someone staring westward to watch the sun disappear. up before the sun like one person could possess the totality of the cause of life as we know it.

II.

a whisper became a scream; the buzzing sawing sounds of crickets are many in number in the scrubby dry brush, and commingle to sing a deafening roar, one unbreakable hum across the night that is synonymous with sleep, that is harmonious with dreams. a single tear fell in the sea, a signal for the deluge that is always to come; one concentric ring rang out and then retreated inward like a frightened child, before the ocean became a canvas so abstract. one man was born of a single cell, metastasized into a conglomerate, became one million times the size and grew appendages of bone, flesh, cartilage, and blood, spread the seed out among the grasses, forests, swamps, and mountains, and created something unstoppable, a whisper turned into a deafening roar. a pebble dropped from a mountain top dislodged a rock of comparable size and set into motion the drifting of the continents, the collision of borderlines, abolishing the idea of separate, disparate, of differing entities we so often ascribe.

III.

forces combine and conspire to create, to destroy; a world created is another destroyed, and destruction is an ultimate agent of rebirth. in the heart of a dying animal there no longer flows the cascading fluid of the lifeforce, but the decomposition and feeding power of the freshly lain skin is a creation in itself.

IV.

an awe-inspiring mountain was not created in a roar and set in place, more like in a series of infinite whispers undetectable to all but the most minute seers. and what is a roar but 10,000,000 whispers combined and conspiring?

V.

distant voices, heard from afar, may well be the whispers of conscience, consciousness, demons or angels of the mind. you don't know what they are saying, whether they are speaking to one another or to you or to themselves, your inner ear tuned to a far-flung frequency to try to sense the voices that come from afar or within. just as to hear an owl singing at dawn and attempt to get a sense of what the world is trying to convey, something about darkness, somberness, stillness, inhumanity, the absolute reality that goes on without us. a distant voice from across a sandy plain diffused in dry wind and as spread apart and scattered as the grains of sand that carry on the wind, shattered like windswept rock, and just the same the meaning has been slightly skewed to our minds, we don't know what to call it once it has been one thing and disassembled into another form, hence the uselessness of distinctions. a voice may just be the soft music of the wind bent to a familiar tone or tune, but we can call it a voice, perhaps because we've sought the song the wind seemed to be singing to us. a voice in the wind or hidden in a rocky stream: to hear you must not listen to but through the surface facade and find the words hidden not beneath or above but within.

longevity

how much do we really know?

*

5 billion years of mountain building
and we marvel at skyscrapers
mountains scrape the sky too, ya know

*

"first level your own mind
then the earth will be level
even unto Mount Sumeru"

*

there is no beginning, no end
only a flash of lightning
or a drop of dew

*

how much do we really know?

in bosch's garden

an eschatology

no less complex

than the stratigraphy of Pompeii

yet as readable

as teen romance

deeply embedded in our cryptobiology

lunar dust

and all the detritus

beneath us

six billion bodies

writhing

in Bosch's garden

in various states of disconnect

each a tectonic converging

on the verge

of volcanism or subduction

seduced

by no less

than life's alchemical devotion

to ending

smoking

on the corner of sepulveda and rayen
taking in the amnesia of that which is artificial
snubbed out a cigarette on the side of a painted brick building and flicked the butt end into the street, at that place where the blacktop meets the curb, so when the rains come the little fiberglass boat will be able to take that journey down the l.a. river, swim with the contaminated fishes, be released at sea somewhere down by long beach and go on to ride the currents all the way to the phillipines, my dna all over the end of that filter, so a living part of me will be along for the ride. what do people think about leaving their saliva all over the streets of life, every flicked burned out stick of nicotene on all the avenues, boulevards, freeways, interstates, parking lots, parkways, driveways of life, leaving little love notes out of an infatuation with mortality, always flirting with the end of things, our own flame so aromatic and divine, snubbed out at some indefinable future point, leaving behind the great golden state of dust and smoke and too many people.
snubbed out and rotten, the landscape smolders and molds over, leftover from heartier feasts, a glowing orange flame so aromatic and alive, now rubbed out and suffocated, all's left is tarry and dead, smelling something awful. the landscape begs and whimpers like an untrained dog up on its hind legs scratching for a scrap of the good stuff. all of it is begging, begging for release, for relief, for refuge from the heat of the blacktop that sparkles with broken glass that melts back into sand in a post-desert sun.
nighttime, broken bottles - remnants of a sordid evening alive at one time, the emerald and chestnut glinting shards beckon with the headlights of each passing car. all's silent, until a jet rips the sound barrier or a siren breaks from its sleep like a bat into flight. dread the sounds of this Goya scene, because at some point you will come to rely on them for solace. despise the shards of glass; at the same time the texture underfoot is like that of a stony beach, you will come to love it. dogs' barking into the post-midnight inky soup will come to be as the birds of the forest, so much so that you will know each yowl by name and face. each baby crying across the stucco and brick corridors will come like that wind that blows off the ocean and across your skin, chilling and comforting at the same time. you'll go to sleep one early autumn night and sleep the sleep of restful things, wake up to see the mountains on fire, go about your day as if the rapture were not rolling down from the north. amazing how the fires of fall can roar across the horizon and blot out the sun, cover entire neighborhoods in a blanket of soot (continuing the cycle of transformation of all things) and not invoke so much as a collective turn of the head in recognition of a very tangible something, the only real thing most people will ever witness in their urbane lives. and the mountains will smolder like a snubbed out 7,000,000 ton cigarette, as a reminder: we are merely wingless insects in trackless deserts beneath a huge magnifying glass

smoking

sundays

sunday has its own character, unique among the other days. if a man were to fall asleep for a year or a decade, and if he awoke, bearded and bedraggled, on a monday, he'd think nothing of it. but if he happened to wake on a sunday, surely his first thoughts upon recollecting his senses would be the confirmation, by sight and feeling, that it was the holy day, and not mourn the time lost but rejoice in the special sunlight and otherwordly choir of the sabbath.
i do not know if it is a human thing or a natural thing, whether man just decided upon the 7th day to consecrate, or if something about the angle and quality and consistency of the light just made the 7th day something inherently special. to put it another way: was a sunday chosen by man for the diffuse and perfectly angular solar glow? or did the atmosphere of the day change its character to meet the demands of the pious mass? which came first, or which was subsequently changed as a result?