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Crazy Man Dancing With Fireflies

Crazy man dancing with fireflies.
Another one trying to shoot out the stars.
I hear the woman next door weeping again tonight.
I don't know what for.
Desire's a phoenix in love with water
if that's what it is.
The torch is plunged into the wound
to stop the bleeding
and the ashes get carried away.
I've loved nine women for years
and they've all buried me in a different place.
Or saved my skull to consult the dead
about a future that wasn't living up to the moment.
The white poppy of the moon
bats her eyelashs through the pines.
I've never been as innocent as a cynic
nor quite as susceptible
but I remember the pain of separation
like the mirror of the lake remembers lightning
as the most brutal of all its revelations.

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poem by Patrick White
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A Creed For The Desperate

Don't let your bones be softened by fear.
By the time you hear it the lightning has already struck.
Don't listen for the echoes of things you haven't said.
And stop breaking your fortune-cookie skull open
like an old prophetic head
that claims it's been to the dark side
without being dead.
Don't let disaster define you.
You're not the bouquet
of a second class vinegar
hovering over a first class wine.
No crisis ever comes with its own identity
until you give it yours.
Move calmly over your own waters
like clouds in the eye of a puddle.
Walk as if you were already
following your own funeral
and lost your way to the grave.
People make much of being
but seeing is enough

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poem by Patrick White
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Imagine Me

Imagine me being here now this very moment just as I am slipping through my own disembodied awareness like a silver dolphin alone in a sea of shadows on the moon on the eyeless side of the mirror. And you. Just as you are. Doing the very same thing because it's in everybody's nature to swim through themselves as if they were shoreless, looking for islands in the mindstream among the stars. To be free. To delight in the mystery of exploring themselves like a new medium they discover they have an unknown talent for beathing life into. Beyond reality, beyond delusion, beyond enlightenment and ignorance the knowable human divinity of pure sentience omnipresently at home with itself like the homeless everywhere. Everywhere within yourself even at midnight can't you see the aura of the gold in the ore that dreams of being dug up? Or how the fireflies are always trying to get your attention like tiny lighthouses off the coast of continents that have already run aground like mountains? Or gone down with Mu and Atlantis? How many lost civilizations are waiting in the overgrown jungles of yourself for you to let the dead use your voice to decipher their ghosts at a seance of whispering hieroglyphs? If the one word the wise never use is complete then you're a fool to think there's an end of you in sight. But that shouldn't discourage you from looking.
And isn't that what we were born for? To see and be happy. To attain a transformative insight into the tragic innocence of seeing itself that let's the witness go free to delight in its eyes without accounting for anything? Even if you're trying to wash your reflection off your face like a deathmask in a mirage in a desert of stars. Even if you're scooping up the moon to drink from your hands like a lifeboat in the rain. Even if you've crawled into one of the wormholes of space like a prophet in the belly of a snake whispering in Eve's ear things that weren't meant to be heard by anyone other than yourself. Even if you're the most fucked-up, twisted, mutated, incontravertible perversion of yourself, a black dwarf that ate its own children after it had starved them to death by keeping its light to itself. Even if you're dropping breadcrumbs like asteroids everywhere you go or threading the eye in the needle like a spider in a labyrinth to figure a way out of yourself like genetically inherited dice. You're still not a victim of gravity. Whatever excruciating transformations you must undergo like the sea enduring its own weather. Nothing can get you down. Nothing can bring you up. Because the whole universe in all ten directions is wired to surround-sound listening to itself like an old recording of what it had to say at the beginning of things before it discovered its voice. But it's not a Big Bang when nothing's come into existence yet to compare it to. It's not the sound of one hand clapping or the crash of a tree in a forest when there's no one there to hear it. And even if you're holding on to your religion like a superstitious grudge against the world. And it may be hard at first to discover the universe God the Zeitgeist the Cosmic Id whatever you want to call it never had a motive from the very first that wasn't invasively human. But that's just you being godlessly unconvinced of your own existence. That's just you trying to believe in your own inconceivability like an established fact. That's just you trying to spread your angel wings over the earthly turbulence of learning to fly on your own.
So what if you're a dead civilization before you're seventeen? That doesn't make you any less intriguing than the living ones. It's the tragic heroes we remember the most not the ghosts of the bookends who lived to the end of their long and boring biographies wholesome as twelve grain bread. So what if you're gnawing on yourself like a bitter black crust of starwheat? You're still shining. You're still breaking yourself into loaves and fishes. Some people are bright and light with stars in their eyes and smiles that can only be measured in lightyears. And some are dark and deep as Solomon's mines hiding their wealth from the graverobbers in gnostic caves of black matter no one's thief enough to enter. Here's a Zen koan I just made up specifically for you. If a thief stole the moon from your window would your window miss it? If you ever find an answer that doesn't let you in on the know as immediately as your mind. Let it go. It wasn't meant for you.
You get up every morning and you open your eyes like storefronts and informers and for all that appeared and disappeared in plain view before and through them have you ever heard them complain that anything was ever missing from the seeing? Whatever you're looking at. Awake or dreaming. Whose light is cast over everything and then withdrawn like day and night? When it's gone. Stars. When it's here. Flowers. When you fail at finding happiness you discover peace as a way of consoling yourself. When you fall a god or two shy of perfection you master an earthly excellence that's out of reach of the angels. Cornerstones and quicksand. Everything here stands solidly on the unsubstantiated reality of everything else. The defeated don't stand like shadows in the victor's light. An eclipse isn't midnight on the sun when the clock strikes Cinderella with a pendulum like an executioner's ax. You can call it praying if you like but from here it looks like swanning on the block for betraying yourself.
Or is it Chicken Little when the sky's falling in all around her like Leonid meteor showers? Did you raise a false alarm? Did you let the world down? Have your zeniths caught up to their nadirs like snakes with their tails in their mouths? Zero. Forever. Did it become inconceivably unholy to tempt yourself with the earth's believable fruits because they fall back on their dark roots like pregnant rain to climb up the waterslide again like clear fountains everyone can drink from like clouds and birds that pass without a trace? Is that blood or lipstick on the mirror? Was your last loveletter a suicide note full of agitated compassion for what you'd done to everyone else by killing them into life with your absence or were you just kidding when you said life was too hard for the living and what's the point of swimming when the lifeboats are full of the dead?
It's too late for the Mayan calendar to do the Mayans any good. And Nostradamus' worst guess on a bad seeing day is just another unenlightened truism at the wrong end of a telescope looking for signs of intelligent life. And maybe we'll destroy ourselves out of hate and ignorance long before we get any answers that might have prevented the onslaught of doom like a prophetic skull that had spoken. Everything is broken. Fractious. Raptors in rapture they've made a comeback at last like Nazis in the Black Forest. Like Dante in a dark wood. Like children all over the planet tonight turning into young men and women who remember war like the scar of a childhood Caesarian that marked them for life like that which has been rent asunder. Like an olive tree by lightning without thunder. Or the Israeli airforce. A flash of insight without wondering what they've seen that makes them want to kill themselves in a holy war of mirrors vying for perfection of the reflection of a God that escapes detection like a cosmic Houdini whatever chains straightjackets or suicide vests or religions you want to dress him up in.
So why are you crying like a broken teacup you couldn't pour the ocean into? Is your mind too big for your skull? Look at how the trees bag all the stars in the sky into the tiniest dropp of water and throw a hobo branch over their shoulders like a jolly swagman down under and walk away with the spoils of the victors like a windfall at their feet. You say you've lost your purpose for living. But here's one that's as purposeful as evolution. Begin. Anywhere. Now. Like a crowning achievement that returns to transcendence by getting over itself.
When misdirection comes to its senses where are you that isn't always here and now? Because there is no other place to be. If you make goodness the standard of life then you'll end up practising an occult alchemy looking for a philosopher's stone to turn maggots into butterflies with the wormy afterlives of people obscenely out of touch with themselves. Knowledge feeds on ignorance and true wisdom doesn't acknowledge the difference. Great enlightenment doesn't maintain a teacher. You want to be a star. You want to rise and shine. As well you should. But remember this. The darkness is a star's best feature. And beauty and meaning and art don't mean anything to anyone with a heart if they haven't lived through their own passionate annihilation. You won't find a phoenix in an urn on a mantle. You want to burn? You've got to learn to eat your own ashes sometimes.

poem by Patrick White
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Skull Tattoo

Lord you know what makes a lonely man
All it takes is to be
Racing down where you never be found
Oh dont let me fall that low again
When youre gone that far
Only one things going to get you up
Chorus (2x):
She is the woman with the skull tattoo
Her skin is black and eyes are blue
Takes me to heaven when I think of you
She picked me up in a gutter downtown
Lord know I lost me faith in you
So it goes when you are
Racing down where youll never be found
Your dark angel spread her wing again
When youve gone that far
Only one thing is going to pick you up
Chorus
She is the woman with the skull tattoo
Her skin is black and her eyes are blue

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song performed by Eagle Eye Cherry
Added by Lucian Velea
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Dune Buggy

Take it out, take it out, take it out, take it out,
Take it out.
Dog god bites my face.
Rip it out by the roots, rip it out by the roots
From my skull.
Goddamn toilet washes me away.
I am the chocolate cow, chocolate cow
Ask forgiveness and I'll show you how.
Trippin this, trippin this, trippin this, trippin this,
Trippin that.
Smile like a Cheshire cat.
Get it out, get it out, get it out, get it out
Of your skull.
You're just a doll I make sometimes to play.
Take me down now, hole in the ground.
The little girls think that I'm so sweet.
Mocked up and down, heart like a ghost town.
Spirits of the world cower at my feet.
I am the chocolate cow, chocolate cow
Ask forgiveness and I'll show you how.

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song performed by Marilyn Manson
Added by Lucian Velea
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The Swan Flies Over The Lace Corals Of The Trees

The swan flies over the lace corals of the trees.
Albireo in Cygnus homing west.
The boa of the moon unfeathered
by the brittle eclipse of broken shale
that shatters its vase upon the waters
like a high note cracks an hour glass
or a snapping turtle rises
from the bottom of a lake
to pull the full moon down by the leg.
My path is strewn
by lunar peony petals,
by the twilight of a blue rose,
by the silk parachutes of the milkweed pods
by the ghosts of the medicine men
among the wild poppies
shaking their dry rattles at the moon
long after the fire's gone out
at a ghost dance for rain.
And I'm sad like smoke
for reasons I can't discern.

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poem by Patrick White
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The Skull Beneath The Skin

Mean and infectious
The evil prophets rise
Dance of the macabre
As witches streak the sky
Decadent worship of
Black magic sorcery
In the womb of the devils dungeon
Trapped without a plea
Solo-mustaine
See thing in agony
Necrosis is the fate
Pins sticking through the skin
The venom now sedates
Locked in a pillory
Nowhere to be found
Screaming for your life
But no one hears a sound
Hellpp mmmeeeeee
Prepare the patients scalp
To peel away

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song performed by Megadeth
Added by Lucian Velea
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Kaddish, Part I

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on
the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking,
talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues
shout blind on the phonograph
the rhythm the rhythm--and your memory in my head three years after--
And read Adonais' last triumphant stanzas aloud--wept, realizing
how we suffer--
And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember,
prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of An-
swers--and my own imagination of a withered leaf--at dawn--
Dreaming back thru life, Your time--and mine accelerating toward Apoca-
lypse,
the final moment--the flower burning in the Day--and what comes after,
looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city
a flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you and a phantom
Russia, or a crumpled bed that never existed--
like a poem in the dark--escaped back to Oblivion--
No more to say, and nothing to weep for but the Beings in the Dream,
trapped in its disappearance,

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poem by Allen Ginsberg
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Paper Thin

Rich and wealthy canvas
Clustered up in jewels
Finding all your heavyweights
Are featherweights and fools
Broken all your promises
Broken all your paper plates
Clustered in gold
Crusted in gold
Heavy and hollow
Look at the shape were in
Find us here
Paper thin
Heavy and humble
Look at the shape were in
Find us here
Paper thin
In origami cities
In nations build on sand
Love got bend right outta shape
Things got outta hand

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song performed by Abc
Added by Lucian Velea
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Fragments Pts 1, 11, 111

These broken lines for pardon crave;
I cannot end the song with art:
My grief is gray and old—her grave
Is dug so deep within my heart.

I.—Her Last Day
IT was a day of sombre heat:
The still, dense air was void of sound
And life; no wing of bird did beat
A little breeze through it—the ground
Was like live ashes to the feet.
From the black hills that loomed around
The valley many a sudden spire
Of flame shot up, and writhed, and curled,
And sank again for heaviness:
And heavy seemed to men that day
The burden of the weary world.
For evermore the sky did press
Closer upon the earth that lay
Fainting beneath, as one in dire

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poem by Victor James Daley
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