Many Musics, Fifth Series
"I believe that the truth of the matter
is far more terrifying. That the real truth
that dare not speak itself is that
no one is in control. Absolutely no one"
—Terence McKenna, "Dream Awake Lecture," 1994.
i. I Was Never Pretty
There was an hour between, maybe less,
but an hour, or at least a between,
when childhood's sense peaked, the apex
of a little truth I return to, that cries
my heart not from sentiment but because
everything that came after, nearly all
of it, was a long, arcing sound of manacles
to the wheel, a choking, a consumption,
a human drive to slave the stars themselves
& make them squeal in capitulant song.
I was never pretty after that. On this cracked
desert floor tonight I confess. I was never
pretty. What I gave hard as any, give hard
tonight & still, is music, many musics.
I wage music against the slavers & hold
the stars will redeem what little truth I still bear.
******
ii. That Mirror Said True
What are the words untold for
other years?
What are the words for all that
floats & fires the night?
What are the words when its joy,
when its hunger, when its fear?
What are the words for the girl
with the stars in her hair?
******
iii. What Remembers Despite
There is the temple.
There is full moonlight.
I choose the temple to look at the moonlight
and listen.
******
iv. Least Prophecy
Burnished in the years are a few faces,
scatter of hours, a bench, a shore,
a night with stars like & unlike tonight's—
this face, how I listened! breathed between
the beats—that one, the path I prayed
in that voice, from word to word to
touch to touch to heart's final blow-up—
further back, before all the chemicals
hit & heated, I yearned more blindly,
undivided hunger for cosmos, new kisses,
what thrills the next day or God or
a new toy might bring—
& tonight, its yellowed knowing of
the many years gone by, its reluctant
kneel toward the mysteries still curled
within, & the great barking brightness
to come when at last they burst upon
some coming hour's calm, expecting air.
******
v. That Idyll
What there is in magic comes to me
when the world is close, very close,
a purring wind, a crying, confessing music,
your kiss at dawn as we lie together,
two smiling, grasping souls, trying to parse
out the pain in men & women which
they push away & revere & call God.
We talked until the dreams came & took us
somewhere half-forgetful, not to where
the pain resolves & is gone, but a middle
place, where the hard things in this world
give a little &, if we can figure up
a tool or trick or utterance, perhaps
we'll bring back a map or plan, tell one
& another, know the magic as it knows us.
******
vi. Pathos (To a son or daughter)
The queer of the joke is on those who say
life's tale is told in the hand dealt you.
Four cards are turned over practically
when you're born, but the hidden fifth presides,
it's where you'll find possibility, not chance.
Take you years to show it to others, but
an hour will come. On that hour, turn it!
******
vii. And the other one—
You won't need the sun to direct you
to best thoughts of light, nor too many
books when there's a rhythm or at least
a tinkering breeze nearby. You'll sniff
the bastards, tend the angels, call it a song
by words you'll make, or someone else will.
I won't doubt you, if we meet in this world,
& if not, that's what the harder dreams are for.
******
viii. Flinch-Bow
I was never pretty, but she was,
young & lithe & probably duller
than dust, but she was pretty &
I believed in pretty, its curves,
its colors, how it had to run,
how I had to chase, how I breathed
hunger in every hour & didn't know
how to turn aside, how I didn't
want to, & if she had turned even
once to me & said, "yes?"—
Then there were no words—
the chimes of manuscripts yet to come—
Then there were only the afternoons
we walked home from school on
opposite sides of the street—
Then there were only the nights
I lay in the shadows of her house,
spat my seed to honor her power,
& walked home riven with youth's special
shame, unknowing the better & worse to come.
******
ix. Night Song
Looking out upon the night & seeing
better than a god's possession, I reck
a mystery, a thrilling fury of lights,
a brilliant assurance that men govern
neither this world nor any other,
that myths from open hands & dreams
behind shut eyes are a little closer,
& still not very close at all. That whatever
this messy coalescence, this seeming
discordance of voices & phenomena,
the story yet to be wholly revealed
will ignore, perhaps explain, nothing.
******
x. 4th & Washington
As I tried to understand that hour,
the sea-water rushed my lungs & the more
I parsed out each word & gesture
the colder it got until I was every limb
stiff to my forehead. Slowed beating & breath
but—still beating, still breathing.
I wanted to know what you were to me,
this question I carry between my selves,
their discontinuous hours. What these
metallic clouds? Why those shabby leaves?
What had passed since, & what would not.
How I'd come to love you from deep inside
my own myth, & how I miss the myth
long after I stopped missing you.
The message I bear in my heart,
now gaining its pace, as is my breath, is not
for you but myself. That myth you made
was of sea-water, in your source, and
in your blood, & for every wild choking
you've taken, it will still renew & bear you home—
Whether the suffering & ecstasies are life's
thin foam, or how is learned in human years
the deeper ways of the waves.
******
xi. 10 to the 16th to the 16th
When he was young, the truth & effect
of light on rain water was easy to explain.
Later, as he noticed the discontinuousness
of emotional phenomena, he hesitated.
And finally there was a night of total
darkness, when what sang the world
assaulted his heart. What mattered
so well had passed, & he opened out to the rest.
******
xii. Elemental Beings
There was laughter, & argument over
which beings were demonic, & which
simply impish. "How you can tell,"
said the Master smoothly, a hand coyly
on the bare leg beside him, "is whether
they desert you when the rent is due."
More laughter, more uneasy. "You are
waiting something prettier perhaps?"
Silence. "Most of us could not fly
our way out of a daydream!"
Whether he devoured them then or later
is probably unimportant.
******
xiii. Thirteen
When they buried your voice, & I was
afar, a stone & a paid patch of earth:
you took what beauty translates worlds
& whether or not you still sing it,
I know your music still plays on.
******
xiv. Prestidigitation
Many girls, many stars, many nights
of hustling among beliefs for a
carnal song, a poem with nice lips, yet
not romance if not music, & so the years
twisted until my eyes were telling my voice
when to sing, & when to yearn on.
So I learned this, & maybe less:
the relief is in the grave but the art
is shaping questions & chaos to beauty
& letting it float high out on the wind.
******
xv. Tall Pine in White Woods
What, then, the myth that renews?
If lucky, if obsessed, a man's ideas
will bite his very blood & carry his miles.
An image of being struck & chasing off.
Once, years ago, I was struck & chased
off, unheeded the voices that called
to return me to safety. Among the pine,
into the woods, I played the song that lured me on.
******
xvi. The Way is Dis-Illusion
And years ago, on a city bench, the man
I sat with was sad, his woman was young
& had finally fucked him over. I wanted
to give him those words, the ones that heal,
even undo. But there aren't any of those.
I've looked. Healing comes as afterward,
from wreckage, with too many memories
crowding into bed, & mornings that
need something & give little back. I sat
with him & told dirty whore jokes because
that's about all there is. Gave him my hand,
pointed to the moon, the healing comes.
It's dirty healing at best. Hungers return,
again need sating. The way is dis-illusion.
There really are no words that undo.
******
xvii. Stage Was a Planet
Truly when nobody was watching, I felt good
at last. Disappearing, body & memories,
noisy foam, a life, & returned now to the sea.
******
xviii. Psychedelic Dream (iv)
I am in bed, holding a sack of sand,
it is a precious thing, I am afraid,
I am holding it, & now I wake up.
I am dreaming that I am awake &
telling my lover about the dream of
holding the precious sack of sand, she listens.
I wake, but do not, & where is the sack?
I panic & seem to feel it again in
my hands but is it leaking? Am I losing it?
Awake this time? Seems so. The sweat,
the bed lamp, your movements to rise.
How do I hold this sack now, now that I know it?
******
xix. String Theory
Strum the cosmos & make something new.
Down among the strings, the arguments for
harmony get deep & many worlds will go.
******
xx. Prison Planet Blues
When the fat man with the blue doll
who looked like him said it, of course
nobody listened. He held his street corner
day after day, & spoke in deep warning,
nothing to it. Then the first ships appeared overhead
in late summer, silently. He tried to explain
but no, there was something else. We expected
something else, we want something else,
we deserve something else! He tried to say,
smoking his cigarettes through their filters,
holding his companion day after day, "what if
you are right? What if the Universe was
created by men? What if they have been
growing you for resources? What if the
doubt slivered into consciousness, & its furious
terror of death, could have been removed
by pulling off your pinkie nail, & bleeding
through to original programming, what life
was before we were marked for cultivation?"
He shakes his head. He looks at his doll.
Looks around his street corner. Nothing yet. No.
******
xxi. Secret
But then you might be me . . . me too?
What of me I do not know, afar, alive,
what are you? You don't look like me,
you don't do what I do. If we connect
by dream, & it holds, there will be more
to say, maybe to sing between us. Sing.
Do you sing? Will you sing to me in dreams?
******
xxii. Things Fall Apart
I remember the hour for each of you,
the one when your face & the moon & the
perfect music I'd been holding til then—-
I turned it all onto the pyre & called stars in
to make sure the night burned & many
watched, that what I felt would remember,
& it did, & I do, & I don't know if each
of you does, but what I wonder after
is where are those hours, are there ashes
of them adrift in the cosmos, with yours,
with all of yours, the hours, the faces, the music?
******
xxiii. Leader of Men
There were songs when you arrived
in the capital, & perhaps there will
be more eventually, but from one
hour to the next, one speech and another,
each wondered how to pull your attention,
persuade you a little more. For years
this jostle, today's cacophony. Another day's song.
******
xxiv. If Not Alone
Could I be walking around tonight
as someone else, too. That is, while I
sit here, I am also someone else
somewhere else? Who would that be?
Who would you be? What is the what
to say to you, to bring you back in dreams?
******
xxv. High Edifice
These bricks run with old blood,
nights when pretty things were consumed
& burned for the pleasure of old gods,
the kind that fade centuries-slow,
for you see, the sweetest elixir prized
by many is to be accepted, told the secret,
& if their piece of it struggles too much,
it's nothing a fist & a manacle won't resolve.
******
xxvi. Hidden Fifth
How to move like the universe moves,
that is, flowing, flowering, evolving,
undulating, & keep moving like the
universe moves, shifting, dancing,
wind on grass, a smiling woman closed
eyes in her passions, & not stop moving
ever again for dreams are not discontinuous,
they resume, & the music never ends,
the universe never ends, dance of
dreaming forever, never ends, never ends
******
xxvii. Two or Three
What if you were two or three,
meeting me in dreams, teaching me
new singing, are there other kinds
of songs sung lone & in concert both?
I would near you, I would learn,
if there was way, an instruction,
& if you were two or three why not more?
******
xxviii. This Is a Business
Other ways to watch a pine wave
in rainy breeze, or a strange girl
in a long hat smiling down a forgotten
autumn's path. Other ways to work it
than fall stumbling sucker to the guitars
again & again & again. Could see the world
as a feedbag & try to build a thousand
foot high golden tit. All possibilities,
& a thousand others for slinging ass
& making way. But maybe there's only
some years & the sound doors make closing.
Doors closing, & the hunger that everything matters.
******
xxix. Medicine for the Past
I cannot stop you from doing that,
or suffering that, or again, or
again in a new way, & how you
are alone tonight & it hurts.
You'll drink hard or years later
you will eat a good high & some
comfort to be found. But I can
say that your pen is still moving
tonight, this poem brother to the one
you are writing like a glowing
motherfucker, to win that one back,
or summon the next, brothers
to you & your poem, & here's our hope
together that other brother poems
will join our praise from many years hence.
******
xxx. Grind
To one day, one night, one hour,
grind this world true, heart open,
my face full in the light, grind it true,
my truth, the world's truth, grinding,
& what might come, & what is coming.
******
xxxi. What's Left of Prayer
The beast within roars his boneless frail.
From his roar a strong song, a cry to trees & moon.
Of his frail the nights crushed, the wet shame.
The lesson that any hour may lift.
The lesson that any hour may suddenly choke.
I sat here & nowhere, & I writhed.
******
xxxii. Angel-Leery
I met you twenty years ago today,
on a mountain path. You were dark-haired
& dark-eyed & smilingly curvaceously
pretty. You gamely threw & caught
a football with our group of hikers.
There was another too, but I chose you.
Our first dawn you slept on my couch,
I kissed you, & lay on the floor below.
You were a teacher in training, new
to the area, I think you liked me
well enough, I think it was better
than being a young woman alone.
Thanksgiving morning you talked of marriage
& I didn't know then how close to it
you'd already been. Such talk ended when
your mother learned I was a grad school
dropout, working at a coffee shop, &
that my family genes were tainted.
By when you brought me to her mansion's
door I should have known: I was no more
bound to last in your life than a temporary
teaching gig in a fallen factory town.
The happy autumn became the sad winter
became the despairing spring. It was over.
Strangely, something lingered. Hearts are not
chess pieces, bodies remember words &
touch, a clumsy laugh, the obsessed gestures
of the forlorn & true. When you moved far
I took planes to see you, share your meals
again, drive around your next home.
The light we shared & made faded as
months passed. Your yearn turned another
way, other eyes, other hands. I moved on,
too, because I was still young & the beast
in me dragged me through the worst hours,
would not let me off the humble way.
Twenty years ago: each of us lonely on
a mountain path. I never climbed it again.
******
xxxiii. Octopus Tree at Cape Meares
This sitka has no central trunk. Branches
root out in all directions, causing some
to have likened it to a candleabra. Tis also said
that the natives would bring their fallen chiefs
in burial boats to this tree, the Council Tree,
set the boat amongst its arms & let the
wind & tides take them onward. Do men
need the mystery or its explanation more?
******
xxxiv. Pink Noise
It was a pink noise I woke with &
heard on the shore today. The piles of kelp
drying, the furious tidal play. The sun consuming
its final hour & pulling down all the lights
with a gasp. A power that stirs, that drives,
that lives as one & by millions. It was
a pink noise that kept me into the dark.
******
xxxv. Ways of Waves
Some waves don't reach the shore, don't get
even close. They rise, roil, roll out their stretch,
then the rest takes them back. In their time of sun
there is something each sees, feels, touch
of wild air, sight of the others, near & far,
that have pushed to surface & tossed into
light. The ones who reach the shore carry the kelp,
the driftwood, the soft & boneless creatures.
Above there are gulls or herons in their ragged
formation & raucous chatter. There's gift in
this twist of a moment, of being something in
this world, giving something to this world, &
feeling its sure recall when the best has been spent.
******
xxxvi. Sometimes, Capitulation
What the night cried back,
in all its colors & conflations,
its calliope of sensations & mysteries,
was: flesh. chemistry. consciousness.
The cage. The playing field.
What tools made for these
were tools made for an old war.
Romance no longer in the song
but by mastery of the singing.
******
xxxvii. And, Defiance
There is always that moment,
that breath, when the flesh's hungers
retreat a moment, chemistry slaves
neither next option, when will floats,
a nod, a shake, what led here,
how the world looks right now,
something in it, this, mine, what? I ask,
& do not know. It will never get easier
than tonight & this hour, make that move,
use your bones, use your mind,
use that breath in you like it invents
the world new every single one.
******
xxxviii. What Left
My prayer of healing in song to you,
from this far, between us the many hours,
still-mysteries of lightless places & tongues
unknown by men. My prayer of healing
because I lose too if you fall, give in,
& if you do not, my reward is nothing
& everything, both.
******
xxxix. More Feedback
There was a movement in the shadow,
a flash of pink, a breath, a quick word,
maybe it was like the gesture that commenced
to create the stars, maybe it was
the men-herd feeding brutal & half-aware,
but you & you & I alike make the choice
what to heed, the masters to their duty,
the slaves to their dance.
******
xl. Screen Burn
Again you arrive to my dreams,
nearly twenty years since I last saw you,
& yet here you are. I squirm &
struggle for your heart, remember
that night we seemed about to—
We didn't, & the hours became years, &
the world of my love for you sunk deeper within.
But here you are again, still 17, still perfect,
& you smile at me. Stricken anew, I nod, & I follow.
******
*** Many Musics, V, i, I Was Never Pretty, a Burning Man poem, looking over my life, looking hard . . .
*** Many Musics, V, ii, That Mirror Said True, a little fantasia . . .
*** Many Musics, V, iii, What Remembers Despite, a reverie . . .
*** Many Musics, V, iv, Least Prophecy, melancholy music . . .
*** Many Musics, V, v, That Idyll, love song to KD . . .
*** Many Musics, V, vi, Pathos (To a son or daughter), a sweet wish . . .
*** Many Musics, V, vii, And the other one--, another kind of wish, still sweet . . .
*** Many Musics, V, viii, Flinch-Bow, her name was Barbara, how I wanted her in my late youth, how much she wasn't worth my want . . .
*** Many Musics, V, ix, Night Song, oh, I love the night . . .
*** Many Musics, V, x, 4th & Washington, her name was Lisa Marie, she was worth my want, but the world didn't let it last . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xi. 10 to the 16th to the 16th - another kind of reverie, a fragment . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xii. Elemental Beings - some kind of spooky horror story . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xiii. Thirteen - a short elegy for my passed father . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xiv. Prestidigitation - always trying to find my hope in the Art-making . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xv. Tall Pine in White Woods - truly Art is often on my mind . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xvi. The Way is Dis-Illusion - here's the wall: "There really are no words that undo."
*** Many Musics, V, xvii. Stage Was a Planet - the sea makes me happy . . . always . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xviii. Psychedelic Dream (iv) - hardcore dream, drug into wake through words . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xix. String Theory - surreal bit . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xx. Prison Planet Blues - I am now working dreams into my poems hardcore . . . taking remembered scraps and building narratives with them . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xxi. Secret - Something strange, some external thing I played with and wondered about . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xxii. Things Fall Apart - another sad remembering . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xxiii. Leader of Men - there was hope when we got O into office . . . there was hope . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xxiv. If Not Alone - still the sense of another, what this means . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xxv. High Edifice - weird dark fantasy . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xxvi. Hidden Fifth - sweet, happy-ish song . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xxvii. Two or Three - multiples of me, just wondering . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xxviii. This Is a Business - "slinging ass and making way" - "doors closing & the hunger that everything matters" - yes . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xxix. Medicine for the Past - looking back and wishing to salve . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xxx. Grind - just a wish . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xxxi, What's Left of Prayer - some strange vision this is . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xxxii, Angel-Leery - A sad remembrance of long ago . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xxxiii, Octopus Tree at Cape Meares - came upon this magic being, and its mythical human tale, and its beauty no man could make or fully reck . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xxxiv, Pink Noise - this one of many poems I wrote this weekend on the Oregon coast . . . the ocean raises the man & his pen to try to respond best he can . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xxxv, Ways of Waves - I just like this poem a lot, I don't write well about nature often, but this one really paints a good scene . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xxxvi, Sometimes, Capitulation - "Romance no longer in the song / but by mastery of the singing." - this feels like my truth told . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xxxvii, And, Defiance - A hopeful song . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xxxviii, What Left - for someone, everyone . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xxxix, More Feedback - A strange alley vision of the possible & worst in things . . .
*** Many Musics, V, xl, Screen Burn - Another old love remembered . . . must be autumn again . . .
Continued here:
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