Substance Without Form

My God I've found the Alchemist's Stone,
Sunlight on my windowsill turns marble into gold,
And yes, I know a trick of the eye,
It was always in that trick of the eye.

All tangled limbs and panicked thrashing in the sticky film of sticky time,
With swollen clumps of language gumming up gasping passages,
Some kind of disease and breeding festers in the murky waters of the eye,
It binds. It blinds. It multiplies. Cell windows crack and crystallize.

Secret knowledge, secret light, secret handshakes in hidden doorways.
Secret whisperings out of secret lips that ask secret questions like "Do you want gold?"
Yes there are secret codes and secret controls,
And they've always had secret operations manuals in vaults under Rome.
But what could these do for their fear of the unknown,
"We need more soldiers, more land, more control,"
A new kind of drug, an addiction was born.

Aged white knuckles grip the stone,
The structure cannot hold.


Piscean talismans adorn the Millennial Priesthood in their hallowed halls,
While outside, their sparkling jewels splash bluish light off their raised scepters,
Measured and calculating, declared by turning compasses within the precision of lines,
It's a beautiful day for a blood sacrifice.

Opposite reaction.

What slouches now toward Bethlehem,
The spiraled clock hands turning back,
Lost gospels rise up from the sands,
Released by Time as if by plan.
Hey Judas, Thomas, Magdalene!
Come out, don't hide your faces another day,
You're just in time for the Information Age.
Return, rejoin, with voice and visions.
Rejoice! Rejoice in new perspectives.
Did Jesus tell you something else?
The shattering of ice and bells,
Angelic songs and trumpets sound
Nerves numbed stiff twitch to awaken,
The rooster stabs through your dreams.

See the starry eyed man on the road with his clothes?
Pray that you might become like him.
You don't know the wealth that he carries and owns
Let him stop you a second, let him tell you some jokes.

Pray that you might be like the traveling man,
Electrocuted, shocked and senseless.
Forgetting always what you were doing,
With eyes like the moon in the afternoon.
Let your temples center star processions
Mother and Father's orbiting arms.
The center is where the center is,
Where is it that gravity's tugging you now?
That round shape in your mouth is pulling everything down,
Give birth with it, say "now", "now", "now".


But no? Such terror of the void and formless,
Do we always need someone to speak and fill the emptiness,
Our chosen: our Priests, Kings, Philosophies.
Speak, please speak, we beg of you, please.

On second thought, be silent.
You've been talking too long and you've said enough in your time,
There is a sound that was before you and a sound that will be after,
A sound we were always hearing behind you.

Young woman, young man,
The heavy heap of culture you carry keeps pulling you forward and backward,
It's so rare that you just let yourself be where you are,
You know it and and you drug it and sometimes you try to find a way to escape,
And so you run to the library to try and read your way out.

Look up at the sun and stop!
That blinding light is you.

Finger the scales that bind your perception,
There's no knowledge of trees if there's no one to listen
There is no up or down in outer space.
And the planets do not know their names.
The seasons and stars do not know the shapes that we have given them
Why are the animals pulling away?

Make love and remember, sing songs and recall
The rhythm in your dancing has been telling you all along.

Pray

I'm whispering prayers to a nameless god,
Because I know that all the names are wrong,
It's like a lightning bolt etched into the sand,
It's like the voice of thunder trapped inside of a glass
Can you hear it cracking?

When useful names begin to lose your trust,
And written words are fading from their parchments into dust
I will sit beneath the stars and speak in tongues
I will raise my arms to heaven in the way that a child
Asks its mother to be lifted up again.

You are my only hope.

I'm whispering prayers to the names of God,
Because I know how all the names are wrong,
Just like the love that's spoken breathes flame into the fire
If ever a spell be broken, what language is required?
I can hear it cracking.

My only hope.
You are my only hope.

May helpful laughter now collapse you into gratitude.
There's nothing softer than the touch that gives and gives and gives,
By its surrendering water flows through everything,
Carved canyons,rocks and stones they cry aloud.

Highway

The highway is a tired metaphor.
That I cannot bring my car to crash,
To sleep in a hospital bed
As storm clouds roll over each other in my gut,
Like morbid children scrambling up shoulders
To witness some sick event over the neighbor's fence
Fills me with a feeling of helplessness
Like I'm not really at the wheel
Like I mistakenly thought I had anything to do with
The person who steadily holds to the line.

An Other

There is an entity in your voice,
A cold frequency I can't recognize
Like nighttime air fastened to your breath,
A bad new static that slowly ascends.

Covert in these strained, hollow pauses,
A stanger's shadow extends,
Filling in the empty spaces,
Where love or trust have failed to tread.

Suddenly,
In a battle.
Home sweet home.
Subtly losing ground.

The wind
Inside a bottle,
Ghosts of ghosts
A sound is still a sound.

A thought becomes a thing once it is conceived.

Cloudbusting

When you told me about it I laughed,
But then I sat on the grass,
In the sun on the hill,
With my feet in the fountain,
Guitars and chatter bending in the breeze,
Swirling over my skin,
And I tried it.

Then everything was a little different,
Like after a protestant baptism,
When the riverwater dries,
And you actually feel like something died,
And was left in that river,
But it's good and you're lighter,
Like a freshly pruned tree,
That just realized it had been touching the sky all along.

"The Artist is the Brush"

Circumstance creates art.

The artist as a conduit, 
For the outlet of materializations,
Brief solifications,
Of the culmination of events, time and places,
Or a piece of that brief culmination.

The artist as a recorder,
Capturing the sound of a moment,
So in that moment they are that moment,
Embedded in the context,
So they and their works are a piece of that moment,
A tangible explosion,
A Pompeian shadow frozen on stone,
Sculpted in stone, carved in stone,
On canvas, paper, poem.

Look at that moment, the sound,
The color, the feeling.
The artist opened the gate and it came through.
Now that moment's frozen,
This moment touching that moment,
Time bending as moment touches moment,

Something clicks like the echo of wholeness
As the many, by the smallest degree, becomes a little more one.
A little less separation, touching in more places.