a lucid interval

woke up to the sound of gunfire, thought the world around was at war. I shuddered in my sheets while strange visions flashed before my eyes: mothers birthing children, vultures descending on carrion, an icicle melting from an overhanging roof, trees falling in the forest in the face of gale winds, and I could even see the trees decompose, I could actually watch the energy transfer from the decaying wood to the soil. I was hallucinating, envisioning the cycle of life and death, maybe the proverbial "life flashing before one's eyes." but these visions were not of my own life, were they? the visions were of all of life, one interflowing watercourse, and my mind instinctively recognized that I am a part of all of life, it is all a part of me. my reverie was shattered by more gunfire, much the same pattern and rhythm as the first. I closed my eyes to shut out the horror, and flashed back to a moment in my childhood. I was at my grandmother's house in New Jersey's farming country. in fact most of my extended family was there, one of those impromptu gatherings my Italian-American family was known for. there was a terrible thunderstorm, and we all sat on the long stone porch to watch it over the fields. the lightning traced evil spindly fingers in the sky. by the time the storm had gone on for a few hours your eyes were so trained on the flashes of light you could follow each bolt from inception to nerve ending. my grandmother was nowhere to be found. i went into the house, which was darkened in the power outage, and stumbled by candelight through each room not making a sound, knowing even in my youth the holiness of a dark and silent house. my grandmother emerged from the darkness into the hallway to face me, shocking me a little bit. she came close and knelt before me. I could smell the red wine on her clothes and her fingers. in the clouded darkness she looked almost blue. she seemed to have something dire to tell me. she spoke slowly and carefully, because of the wine: "a lightning bolt is the tree of heaven rerooting on unbelieving earth, illuminating the darkness we all walk in, but only for long enough to see what we miss with our eyes closed. keep your eyes open, my son."
I came back to the present and shivered a little, though it was almost summer in the Valley. shivered at the thoughts going through my head, shivering at the thought of the gunfire right outside my door and how all these thoughts, these words, would soon amount to nothing but dust if the gunfire came any closer. another smattering of gun shots rang out, in the exact same pattern and rhythm as the first two outbreaks. my mind this time went blank. all was silent as a cathedral in between the shots. I was searching the silence and the blankness for meaning. another spat of gunfire, and immediately another, hardly a silence in between. I swore I heard a baby crying in the next apartment, and along the corridors children and mothers screamed at one another. I shivered again and waited for my benediction. like a snapping bone, my mind cleared in an instant, as did all other sound. 'was I dead?' I wondered. because I was in the same room and felt exactly the same as when I went to sleep. I felt and looked around. everything in its proper place. in the street, a car rolled over scattered gravel and the stones made loud popping sounds in the friction between tires and pavement. this was my gunfire, gravel under tires. I could have sworn I was awake for the first time.

Van Gogh's ghost

clouds hang grey and heavy like bad memories, and the sunshine of perfect clarity burns strong and yellow straight through to the unbelieving ground. rain is the stuff of hungry desire, when memories become too great to contain and they collect in a weight too great to be held by the mind, come flowing forth, flowering like a California field in April. the shards of memory fall to the lowest possible point and flow down to the streams of consciousness, overflowing the banks of comprehension in dreams. the ground is like the canvas our mind chooses upon which to splash the gaudy floodwaters of the dream state, and as the artist knows, any canvas can only hold so much color. Van Gogh already tested those limits, and his own canvas was one severely overburdened with dark clouds and skewed visions. when, in his or any case, the palette no longer has an outlet in the dream world, colors begin to spill over into the waking life, a flood of image with no discernible boundary between creation and creator, life imitating art imitating life imitating art.

dreams and feelings settle upon the base of our brain stems like rocks on the ocean floor, and accumulate over time, filled in between them are unrecognizable fragments of other dreams and feelings, the dreams and feelings of others, spoken, told, remembered from stories, an unrecognizable slurry of minute memories that serve as a supporting cast to the larger and more immediate memories. this conglomerate shifts with time and tide, bearing with the ages the incomprehendable weight of the ocean of life, and form one solid sedimentary block of a life lived, dreamt, and felt. it stays under the sea, unseen for millenia, until the inner workings of the Earth configure to make the sea rise and make the ground the masses walk upon one day, the solid and unquestionable foundation of all of life that comes subsequently. Van Gogh (or Van Gogh's ghost) knew this phenomena all too well. he collected sediment and great polished and jagged stones for years, while his life probably felt like it bore the weight of all of the oceans combined, and eventually succumbed to drowning or intracranial pressure of aeons. now the images created during that time adorn walls of museums worldwide, walls of humble homesteads, books on the beauty of life and nature, and postcards bolting from coast to coast, continent to continent; a foundation upon which to stand and not question the creation of, though during the time of creation it all went by unnoticed like the cementing of pretty stones within the ocean floor, like must be happening right now somewhere, everywhere, on Earth. the tortured artist and the churning sea bed going unnoticed, until one day hence to be held as magnanimous displays of life, as the only prototype we have to judge all subsequent works of beauty.

12/26/2010

saw the Panamints
covered with snow
and smiled

a hollywood story (longevity pt. II)

i was sent to hollywood
by god
to give a dollar
to the poor elderly lady on fairfax

in front of canter's jewish deli
which has been around
since 1931

and my uncle said
"now that's longevity"

a hollywood story, prose version

the childless wanderers meander down morning sidewalks in the impossibly polished city. a hint of urban renewal hangs in the air on this end of fairfax, once the jewish district, as in all cities a tumble down low rent district inhabited by hipsters looking to strike gold where only bronze has been lain underfoot by the gods. an unbelievably young and beautiful girl walks by at a glacier's pace, her arm providing support for an elderly man, a cane providing support on the opposite side of his body. i am almost moved to tears by this touching display, trembling beauty, a sharp contrast in generations that I somehow feel directly in the middle of, figuratively and in reality. the girl wears the uniform of the modern day urban upstart, complete with colors erratically splotched about that are only found in nature deep within tropical jungles. the garb and her sexually able figure suggest one-night stands, mixed drinks, and dj'ed 80s-themed dance parties. a vivacious urban flower saddled with a slow and staggering moth. i cannot help but to smile once they stumble past, this sweetheart of life's rodeo doing for her grandfather what he must've done for his grandmother back in poland or wherever. and i notice her legs and ass and how they imply "fuck me now." my mind immediately recognizes the contradiction and recoils.

(bollocks. these women walk around in floral aromas and colors evoking the sexuality of life and pollenation. one of my favorite creatures of the wild is the hummingbird: sprightly, non-earthbound, territorial, ritualistically aggressive in mating. in some skewed way the hummingbird is nature's symbol of unbridles sexuality, a phallic beak that penetrates every soft and yielding flower to spread life. i'll be the hummingbird, you be the flower, let us make life, take life, create life, and spread life.)

an elderly vagrant pushes her metal cart south down fairfax. probably a leftover from doing movie extra work or daytime television. hell, for all i know she was one of Johnny Mathis' backup singers in her halcyon days. being a bit scruffed-up looking myself, maybe with a hint of urban Buddhadom, she seems comfortable seeking my help. Henry Miller said if you are ever in a pinch go to the poor for help because the wealthy will not even look in your direction. this may be the impulse she acts upon, especially since her facade suggests many a year pushing her metal cart along cracked streets, and she has adapted the faculties necessary for survival. i have no change, but i do have the feeling we are of the same order: the seeker; unfortunately no one got to her in her youth and convinced her to flee to the mountains or desert and she's spent most of her life sleeping on pavement with flourescence burning her cerebrum all through the night, every night. i find a dollar, hand it to her, she says in response "god bless." "god bless." a favorite phrase of mine, a universal code of appreciation, one not an atheist or agnostic could dare to take away because even the daringest nonbeliever knows it is the most touching sign of thanks and goodwill known to man.

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