Tightrope Walking

I make a rushed appointment with the Ghost.
These scheduled haunts: dispassionate, absurd,
But still I daren’t renege upon my word,
And break our strange engagement at the coast.
He whispers promises of sweet repose;
Baptismal seas, black waters yet to be explored
I run, no longer resolutely bored,
To Land’s Demise, the beach where He plays host.
Once there, I rush to greet my spectral guide
And much to my dismay I find Him gone!
But: “Further in! Still further in!” He cries.
I dive to where I heard His murmur rise,
And chase it till, exhausted, I sink down
And there I find the sleep for which I’d pined.

Hampshire Acid Trip (Pt. 1, Euphoria Morning)

AN IMPORTANT NOTE BEFORE WE BEGIN:
Words,
As inadequate as they are in expressing
Our frail human condition
Become wild abstractions
When our abstractions become concrete.
And right now
I feel like Moses
When he had to translate fire
Into a code of ethics.
Each crease and crevice of your brain
Is another book of scripture
And if you want the truth
It’s best to go straight to the source.

Just thought you should know.

My spiritual survival kit:
2 tabs Lysergic Acid Diethylamide-25
Acetaminophen
Ibuprofen
Notebook
Pencil
CD Player equipped with Lateralus

2:20:
I drop out
I turn on
I tune in
The sky is calm and cold
As I lay beneath the shade
Of that great New England oak.
My restlessness is amplified,
Mocked by the stale beauty that surrounds me;
By the stock-still sun
In the blue-screen sky.
Impatient and indifferent,
I wait.

2:50:
I dodge cornstalks
I pluck apples
I weave in and out and in
And out I come the other side
And still I can’t shake myself
Wake myself
From this ever present daydream,
Forgetting that the paper is writing my story now.
Faulty paper, or
Faulty story?
Still nothing.

3:30:
It was the tree that caused an uproar
All knots and eyes
And aren’t I just
Creating fanciful lies?
Sinking thoughts such as these
I must strive to overcome
If I wish to become
Weightless
Selfless
Transcendent.

4:00:
“It’s a learning experience.”
I feel anything but enlightened,
Bombarded with sights and sounds,
Clowns in claustrophobic cars;
A noise pollution contribution
That places polished chrome bars
Between me and my liberation.
I give up,
Go home
To feed my head.

4:30
I am plagued with doubt

But music
Is my anodyne.

4:40
The world comes alive
Before my kaleidoscopic eyes!
And suddenly I understand
Why the Moslems decorate God’s house
With patterned tiles,
Channeling the raw beauty
That lies behind
Whatever lies behind
Cheap Catholic iconography.
And – Oh! – the colors
Black and White
Red and Yellow
Red and Green
A holiday delight!
I am reborn
Or rather
The world
Is born anew
Behind closed eyes.

4:45:
I sever the tether to my brain.

5:11:
Allow myself to forget my pain.

5:16:
(Euphoria Morning)

Eternal

I am eternal I am eternal I am eternal and sometimes I have to repeat it three times or maybe four times or more times because most days I feel so irreducibly human that I forget it and I pine for things that kill me and I want it, I want to just hasten the process and get it over with and sleep forever and leap onward to the next great adventure and then I remember...there is a next great adventure and this life is just another sick-sad moment even when it seems to stretch on forever and ever and I'm too small to see beyond it except when I take god for a piggy-back ride and I stand on the shoulder of the giant of giants and I like the view so much that I want to make a home there in the sky and build a tower, a tree-fort perhaps, in a redwood and be one of those hippie envirofreaks who chain themselves to the highest branches in protest of "the man", whatever man, attacking whatever man that comes by and defies me, throwing my Birkenstocks in fury at the destruction workers, (not worrying too much about my pacifist ideals because they're wearing those big yellow hard hats and they're sitting behind the thick-paned glass of their bulldozers) not caring about any cause in particular except myself, proud of myself for having a cause and isn't Cause all that really matters because we're all going to die anyway and we might as well delude ourselves into believing that we're doing more than just soiling our way through this lemming march towards Death, as I'm sure the Lemming-in-Chief does when he leads his troops into battle against the mighty Ocean, because they are Many and He is just One after all, I can take him, he looks pretty old anyway in all those paintings, old Greybeard, let him hurl his lightning bolts from the sky and I will be one step ahead of him laughing always, he's gotten slower with age (that arthritic elbow of his) but the funny thing is that he keeps stubbornly chucking those bolts and they come thundering down all around me, with a redundant near-miss inaccuracy that lends me to believe for an instant that perhaps there's something at work here beyond my own superhuman bolt-dodging skills (if you can dodge lightning you can dodge a ball) because he keeps missing me by fucking inches, well less than inches really but to delve into smaller increments I'd have to use the metric system which I don't really understand and I'm sure god doesn't either because my god is American of course, bleeding Red and White, Black and Blue, because he is forever true to the covenant he made with his Chosen People around 200 years back when we decided to slap his name down on the dollar and make it sacred and I suppose he bleeds a little Green too, I know I do, shackled to this fucking tree with moss growing out my ears and I am earthbound once again and I've lost my entire perspective and I'm wondering what I'm doing here because it's now late November and it's really cold and I start to rue the fact that in this dream sequence I am a vegan (it seems to fit with the persona) and I can't even dream about having my Thanksgiving turkey and the least those hard hat men could is step down from their bulldozer thrones for two seconds and dip something, maybe one my handkerchiefs (I do get to wear really sweet bandanas in this dream sequence, on the plus side) into some of that leftover gravy that my mom makes so well and touch it to my lips but then I realize that would be the death of me because I sure as hell don't have the strength to forego Thanksgiving dinner for the sake of some stupid tree and so I let myself down off those chains and I let the whole world down as the hard hat men bulldoze my tree on national television and now I'm left standing there, alone, without a Cause, all because I couldn't say no to my big fat appetite and I'm angry at god because those shoulders just don't seem quite so broad anymore, because my god is not sufficient for my insatiable desires and I realize that perhaps God is not the problem but only my narrow conception of Him and so I run back into His arms in need of a Savior and realize that as big and clunky and unmanagable as my heart seems sometimes I need a God who's even bigger, so big in fact that if I ever actually beheld His Bigness I'd run around screaming at the top of my lungs like a frightened child, like when I saw Jaws for the first time, awestruck in horror, witnessing his Great White power, mechanical, effortless, until I went hoarse and lost my voice forever but I wouldn't even know because I'd have already gone deaf from the persistence of my own screaming, losing all of my senses, my entire sense of self, truly coming to terms with the notion that I am eternal. Blissfully.