Smoky in that head of yours —
can’t see to think, right? Can’t think
about what you see?
Right. You can smell it
through all that haze.
All that fragrance
of roasted cells and spent fuel
with the weight of
a wildfire out of control, the kind
they give names to;
the Canyon Burn,
the Summit Fire,
the Gully Blaze.
You’re waiting for
the name of this one
to manifest while choking
on its smoke. You need to
adjust your expectations.
Might just miss it if
you stay in there.
Might suffocate
if you don’t break out,
dummy up, admit defeat
at least for now,
smokyhead,
burnt bauble, ore without
value, trinket
on the blackened floor,
dead man from the neck up
with nothing and no one
to Lazarus you back
to bright.
Tag Archives: meditations
Smokyhead
Polytheist’s Lament
Originally posted 6/8/2013.
67,000 perfectly lovely
gods out there,
67,000 facets to the diamond
of God-Being,
yet here is one facet that insists the light’s
coming out of One and only One.
Care to guess which one he claims
is the only true source of all light?
Try to be serious!
That one must be
the God Of Cosmic Jokes,
or of the Ego.
67,000 perfect little gods
out there,
and those are just the ones
we can see. Probably
another 67,000 at least,
invisible to the poor
human eye, that we could call on
if we knew of them,
yet one god
in that crowded field of stars
demands we believe
in Just One, claims there is only
One God, a God of
Umbrella and Blanket
covering every possible
need for Deity.
Listen to this world screaming from its roots
to its crown canopies, abyssal waters
to rock peaks; listen the old way,
the way we listened
before we stopped listening to 67,000 gods
and started listening to that One
with the blanket and the umbrella
and the sword and the plow.
67,000 gods: at least that,
perhaps twice that
or even more than that.
They remind us that
before we ever heard
that insistent One,
they were talking directly to us
all the time. Remember how that sounded?
Like whales, like crickets, like wind, like water,
like fire: the 67,000 voices of the Gods
of our particular patches of Earth. A chorus of Divinity.
Every one singing along. Every last one a harmonic of Light.
Need
Need to cross
a crazy, busy highway,
twist an ankle getting
to the other side.
Need to break a window, cut myself,
enter a forbidden place. I miss
that kind of pain — that adventure pain,
that how’d I get here pain –anything but
this salty wounded routine
I live now. I know how this happened.
I know what put me achingly
here. I know what keeps me
cowering here: the calendar, the clock,
the skull-grin ahead of me I could always see
but far off, far off…Need to invite
that boneface valet
to come closer. Need to let it
brush me when I reach for ripe fruit
on the farthest, thinnest branch
I can get to. Need once again
to blow that smiling mistake a kiss
as the bough breaks
and I fall.
Big Joe Turner
Originally posted 6/13/2012.
Big Joe Turner
could palm a jump blues
like an egg,
handle it rough,
never break it.
“Shake Rattle And Roll.”
Big Joe Long Dead smiting us
with the soft club
of his voice.
Big Joe I Wish To Have Seen You Just Once,
how it must have been
back then: discovery
followed by imitation
till the fakers squeaked out loud that
they think they sound as good as you did.
The shell fragments
and the sticky yolk on their hands
say no.
Big Joe Founder,
they are starting
to forget you
and all your kiss curled
imitators too.
Big Joe Turner,
thank you for
the musical ache in our bones,
the unbroken eggs
still hatching.
That Bowl Of Smoke
Go at once to wherever you keep
your coffee cups and take one down.
It needn’t be your favorite cup; perhaps a gift cup
with a chip in the lip that you can’t toss
because of who gave it but won’t use
because of the hazards involved; maybe
something left by the previous renter,
long in need of a purpose,
a cup never used because you don’t trust
a particular stain inside
but it’s hung around the shelf
“just in case.” (You’re poor. You don’t toss
things you get for free — at least,
not until now.)
Take that cup and go somewhere
far away from the usual people.
Pray over it, or do whatever you do
that’s a prayer for you;
pour whiskey into it, burn a bill in it,
it’s yours to do with as you wish;
when done, hurl it into the distance
and listen to it break.
The next time you have a coffee
first thing in the morning — gray-lit, still tired
and dim headed
as you sip the weak automatic brew —
remember that sound.
You put it into the world,
that prayer, that bowl of smoke.
You filled it and broke it open.
You made sacred
what had been profanely useless.
Whenever you recall that sound
you will know what you’re capable of.
Rambling Bob Dylan Discovery Blues
“Positively 4th Street” is on the radio —
not the original but a damn good cover. I wonder
if anyone’s hearing this version as the first time
they’ve ever heard the song at all — thinking,
“what perfect spite I’ve discovered here in the voice
of the writer of this song.”
It could happen. I thought
Jimi Hendrix wrote “All Along The Watchtower”
for a while after I first heard it until an older friend
smugly played me the original. There’s a version
by Dave Mason out there, too, but I heard that later
on and it paled and faded and ghosted away
in comparison to the others I knew…
Dylan’s covering the Great American Songbook
these days. No one thinks he wrote those songs
because people who listen to Dylan now
and buy his albums as they come out know well enough
what his voice is like and what he writes and has written,
and any discovery they find there is in how it’s done,
not in what was done. It’s not my cup of tea
but it works for some. I suppose it works for Bob Dylan
since he’s on his second album of those songs. It must be
a relief at 75 not to worry about such things as legacy and
authorship and authority. He must say to himself,
“Positively 4th Street, Blowin’ In The Wind, Masters Of War,
Tangled Up in Blue…yeah, I’m good. Let’s do that Gershwin tune.
Let’s do something. Might discover something we don’t already know.”
Plastic Shaman
when you talk that way
of vision quest
and spirit animal
you lie
that’s not your shit to talk
stolen shit
that shit grew in
dirt that grew from
blood that
nourished
wherever you steal crystals from
and whoever you steal wisdom from
they mostly didn’t speak of it
as living it was plenty
it was side by side dirty and clean
it was a life not an add-on
nowadays they live it hard
you don’t
you lie
I can tell because
when you talk about it
so bloodlessly
you smell like funeral flowers
on a soft bed
for your weakly lucid dreaming
for an afterlife
to follow a barely lived now-life
how gently you wield
the stolen property
how little the source
resembled what you call it
how little what you have
resembles what was taken
how little it seems
when you use it
when once it was a communion with All
and as such
even the smallest stone of it
held a cosmos
Heavy
the plates themselves were so light
so easily
airborne
but heavy indeed
was that subsequent
broken china
heavy
was the arguing before
and heavy
was the anger after
wrangling over the ruins
the debate running on
the air sludgy
with it
can’t think in air
this heavy
a heavy
ripened on rage
sullen success
and secret glee at scorched earth
a smothering heavy
a pillow on your face
while you sleep
a lie alone
for the rest of your life
kind of heavy
a kind
you can’t lift alone
The Silver Lining
If our house had more of a roof on it
then we wouldn’t get wet
and we’d also see less of the sky.
If there was more heat we’d shiver less
and we’d also miss out on the deliciousness
of warming up.
If we had a comfortable home
then we wouldn’t die of discomfort
and we would be less satisfied with crumbs.
Look up at the mansions on the hill.
Look up at the penthouses, look out
at the beach houses.
Look at the people who own them.
Look at them. Look
at Them.
Think of how much
it takes to make
them,Them.
Think of what it has taken
to make us, Us.
Think of what
was taken from Us to make Them.
Think of how little we would likely have to do
to make Them shiver. Think
of a fire we could light, a roof burning,
what sky we’d see behind the flames.
Think: we’ve always taken our happiness
where we find it.
Looser Than Lucifer
Originally posted 4/16/2016.
Radio preacher, how you talk —
lips looser than Lucifer’s,
spitting hate from a so-called
Christian face. Your God forgot
to put a muzzle on your judgment
when He laid His manly paw
upon you. Are you insisting
He was perfect at the craft
and this is — YOU are —
are as good as it can get?
Are you really your God’s
best selling point, making claims
for your own humility before Him
even as you aggrandize yourself?
Get gone, sticky fingered priest,
knife tongue pastor, pope
of nighttime rope, saint
of burning necklace, deacon
of past prejudice and future petrified heart,
congregant in the church of bending love
into daggers and handcuffs, bishop of murder
under the high altar; your game is
looser than Lucifer’s,
who did not hide his dark hatreds
behind a Cross, who at least owned his pride
at not being in the slightest way
anything like God.
The Animals Are Off The Grid
Originally posted 9/20 /2013.
The animals are off the grid.
Think about it: they have no jobs, so no need to keep time.
What’s the point of Monday or Tuesday? Friday? Pointless.
There are no weekends, people, and no Sabbath!
This is intolerable.
Give the animals jobs.
These will of course have to be tedious —
how else to depress a deer or make a clockwatcher out of an owl?
Soon enough, they’ll develop calendars and then start crossing off
the days to vacation.
Then, we just kill them at random.
Nothing structures time like the justified fear of sudden death.
We’ll have to think about an afterlife for animals.
Will deer get their own, and owls get another?
Will they be close to our own?
This new world is coming:
forest cubicles. Rows of antlers visible, the deer bent to their tasks.
Owls calculating in the trees, softly hooting their dismay at the results.
Now and then, a shot will ring out and a corpse shall be dragged away.
That’ll show them what Humpday means.
No more slacking.
No more full sensory awareness as a result of living always in the Now.
They’ll soon enough begin to line up to get a good pew on Sundays.
They will learn to tremble and to pray for benevolence.
They will learn not to expect it.
An Actor Prepares
Originally posted 12/16/2009; revised, 8/28/2014.
No one photographs him
more than once
once they realize
that the only pictures
that show him as himself
show him
onstage.
What’s his motivation?
He gave up everything to gain a spotlight.
That smile you see up there is genuine,
so if you want to try,
use no flash. Catch him standing there
in his natural setting:
darkness all around him
as he pretends like mad
that light is the Sun.
Shoot him anywhere else,
all you’ll capture
is a pillar of salt.
This Is The Morning
Early breakfast for one:
oatmeal, frozen blueberries,
a drop of agave nectar,
a ton of cinnamon,
lowfat milk; ready
in two and one-half minutes.
You shake the last blueberry
from the bag into the dry oats,
the stubborn berry that won’t fall,
the one carrying the mutated bacterium
that survived all the countermeasures,
that will survive the microwave,
that will enter your body,
that will come to life,
that will divide into a swift million,
that will damage cells within you
before dying off unnoticed
except for a mild rumble within you
at two fifteen the next afternoon;
those damaged cells left behind will,
one day three years from now,
slide from wounded mad into feral spread,
become cancerous,
mystify the doctors,
and painfully kill you.
It’s not meant to be funny
that this is the morning
that will eventually kill you.
This bright eyed morning
full of your own justified pride
at taking a positive step
is the morning you begin to die.
It’s not meant to be funny,
but of course,
it is.
You should go
for a brisk walk
after breakfast.
Be sure
to look both ways
before crossing the street.
Hard Music
hard music broke
upon us
as a wave breaks
as a breeze
breaks through a screen door
whispering “outside…”
except this breaking
tore us loose, tore us free
no gentle rocking
until released —
instead a thrust
and arch into clean air
as if we were being
lifted above a crowd
we couldn’t join
but with hard music
we are lifted
above a crowd
of our own kind and
when we sink back
it is into their arms
to wait our turn to reach up
and carry another
on the wave
hard music
raising hell out of us
releasing it
hard music
screaming
“this way out”
Petty
Petty is as petty does,
and petty rules the land and sea.
Petty is as petty does,
does it all in little mincing bites.
Petty can’t be bothered to go full vampire —
prefers to play mosquito, yearns to be a gnat.
Petty can’t be bothered to search its soul —
prefers to read its own Cliff Notes.
Petty opens its heart
to the side eye, the shade, the snicker.
Petty feels OK
in single broken heartbeat intervals,
then leaves a trail of mild destruction
behind it, like kid footsteps in the cement
of a national monument, discovered
only upon the occasion of ribbon cutting,
too late to smooth it out and make it
feel OK again.
Petty is as petty does.
Petty does quite well;
one mansion in the hills, one on the beach,
a penthouse in the city,
a foothold in your mouth,
a homestead in your attitude.
Dark Matter 