Passive Alice.

I make parcels of the sentence handed down -

one point of reference - triangulated,

and cordon off the land

to ship for processing, the jungle

as they'd see it.

There a box, a black hole,

a continuum,

flanked by the Emperor Norton

where veritas stripped

of its symbolic emblems;

Naked a reduction of vantage.

It needed freeing

but he'd seen the memo on the labels.

It's hard to hear, they insist

I intake twenty more.

Marred fiscal, a relentless game of chicken,

With candor a matter of depth perception

So I'm the tourist with forged papers

Dressed to the nines.

You only have to look the part.

ii.

It's five and Lysistrata

dives off the bell curve, Squirrel!

Retakes a refrain

but its been too long

And she's already written a song

on prophetic self fulfilling

A function cosigned kyrie eleison

Did walking me here

Fill the narrow corners

Or piece meal a bridge

From the Seychelles to

Down pour out by the Ganges?

Elsewhere Monday's reparations

Knew it

Knew it well, granted.

No one ever told her

You only have to play the part.

Little doll lashes flash back

as rowing mends us recalcitrant

Merrily, merrily, living a dream

Don't stand so,

Close you in an oubliette.

iii.

It was Tuesday but Mars doesn't

Play nice with lightning

"Do you think there's rain today, dear?

We'll write dawn for dinner

in greater interest of caution,"

she said like a child

Wouldn't lovelocke

I wouldn't make proper eye contact

Or settle both heels on down.

In the way we used to like.

Defenders wouldn't want to look that way

Like seeing your history teacher

at the grocery store

So it went two half rounds

and sputtered

No harm, no foul about it

Except the little green and white elle's.

Congruent, I write words like a manger had always

stiffed Sylvia Plath,

endlessly narcoleptic,

except for the die I'd drawn

Came close upon it.

No one wants to hear of soft hearts

and bonnets, light bridges and unicorns

so like the shooting script says,

I sip succotash and

and eat them like air.

when the gods have no reason

Here the ridges are words

And on the last day

Night became

Like water in the stillness

We searched for meaning where

There was none and sufficed in the

Flesh form as only promise

I sunk my covet

In the ground of an apparition

Modeled on a man

Wealthy as a teacher

Or treacherous arbitrator, my

Healthy ambition restless

And needing of an answer

Which would not save

We control nothing and

In nothing we bring anchor

Against torpid reason

But now is my kingdom

I revisit my half travelled regret

Availed of nothing.

What is enough?

Grand ambition,

architect, an irony

Composed as our life

Would become of truth

Instead I slip inland

Looking for your mother

Or mine, or my father

In hollow halls

In the wood paneled rooms

Emblazoned with owls

and Luke and John slept in the

Abandoned quarter

A crow bar to my destruction

Now I guard against the pursuit of the

Things of earth

Erstwhile magnified in the

Material of bodies

And closet the hearth,

A barren witness

To the heart troubled

When the gods have no reason.

post modern soul coughing

In our hearts we know the futility and the fundamental fear of our vanities. We make well intended promises and hold ideals, false, above all else, longing for something outside ourselves in which to believe that can surpass the diligence of the passing of time. Never before has there been such truth, wrapped as we are in our inner worlds, in myth. Mind manifested in form.

Our time, unillustrious, mocks the wonder and wisdom held within our bodies, the miraculous body mind harangued by the vagrant strike of the clock, and the insidiousness of the culture. However, free from the confines of the temporal, free from our prescribed roles and duties, lives the light of our ethereal formless Self. It is accessed in quiet moments, the twilight of the dream state, and the ecstasies of the creative process in its many forms. I am you are me are we here forever now never always in eternity world without end. Suspended in the guiles of the ever present now, shape shifting, timeless, beyond the grasp of any threat, save those we allow to trespass into our reticulated presence.

Even then, the phantasms we allow are allegories, insights into the depths of our collective and personal psyches. Our deepest fear: that we will be found out as illusionists, perpetrators of an elaborate amassed treatise of smoke and mirrors. Wanting for substance. Worse still, the thought that no one remains to remark or comment in our absence because, horror realized, all is one and all is vanity, and nothing vivifies that which is without, but that which is reflected within, and we are all (un)regarded in the vacuity of the uninhabited.

Yet somewhere along the way, in spite of ourselves, we stumbled into the light life. As children we awakened and wondered at the complexity of our human-ness. Perplexed, we awed in the realization of our divinity, struck down by the audacity and verisimilitude of the Creator. Now that quiet gift, so uncertainly come by and so fruitlessly clung to, is worn like a shrift. Once sacred, now tattered, the blessing realized is curse, it both saves and damns. In our self realization we can equally create heaven in each moment, knowing the kingdom is within us, or, forgetting our benevolence, plunge into the constant torment of a twisted karma of legality.

To evade the responsibility of choice we retreat to the safe confines of a conformity attributed to schedule and regularity. We are comforted in the once resisted entrapments of minutiae and false reassurances of the expected. No longer bolstered by naivete, we are caught in the crux of the unknown - the promise of uncertainty certain before the credulity of chaos. Unable to embrace the depth of the formless, we make due with the reality of our daily diligence, captives to the cadence of the circadian. A quiet care is tended in reverence of the commonplace. Salvation in the world of form. A crisp apple. Water from the faucet. The predictable and fleeting rush of chemistry experienced in a new love.

A well worn lesson is finally assimilated: completion is never secreted within the cocoon of another. Disparaged at first, then content in the realization of the grand illusion. Contact with each fragmented luminescence of personality a jogging reflection, or echo, of our own creation. Like Narcissus we are drawn back time and again to gaze into the waters of our subconscious made manifest in the intricacy of another sentient. If we can only hold in dialectical tandem, for more than a moment, our own ego fragility and the fragility of another in balance and hallowed care, All would be preserved. The lyrics of Idol's "Dancing with Myself" bounce round the corridor: "Nothing to lose, nothing to prove"- Self relating to Self. Too often, however, the All is lost and we fall from grace back to the unjust world of the criticizing and commonplace. Fear, not hope, reigns supreme.

Creation in the Word was first error as the Many in One, divided into form. In labels - not considered outside the immanence of a verbal cognitive structure - we judge and are judged in each syllable. Was man entreated to name each object and thought form in Christendom as a gift? Or was he awarded the knowledge of good and evil to be damned in the process of differentiating the forms? Now consciousness is no longer self but Other. With all the world a stage, and each player an emanation of the One, we wonder at the relevance of performing. So in our essence, sublimely righting this, we commit the greatest crime and forget that all that is external Other is Self also. Thus continues the dance.

Confounded, reluctant, calmly, we move beyond the grandiosity and are sated in knowing our best dwells in our least. In our non-doing we are released from the desire to need to be, instead succumbing to the beauty and the brilliance found in what is. More and more we are satisfied with less and less and conservation is a cultivated vestment of budding character. So as the self, unseeking, loses itself, it is preserved. In time and in correspondence, this is reflected in the transpersonal, in the communal, in the global, so where there was once disharmony and division, there will be a balance and a sovereignty in each entwined breath and step. We are kept in the care of our humility, not knowing if it is fate or faith, or both, with which we contend and is that which keeps us. The dregs of the rest settle to the bottom as the light matter raises and awakens to the wonderment of itself, undefined, uncrowned, servant, self-less. Sentience an echo of the formless

zephyr in three parts

I.

I was lying

on the floor

in your room,

your bed a loft,

colored in muted

blues and greens,

and naturalist prints

from restoration hardware

except this is a dream

and the text on the paint can

read like a manifesto,

as if everyone who

bought into

restoration hardware

were in on

the secret.

You can never sleep, so your room

had become a shrine

and I pressed myself

to the floor below, to blend in,

pressed myself down,

into walnut the color of my hair,

to evade notice.

you came in, found

ten black hairpins

in the dust, which were bubbles

and said, "Oh, these are for Joy!"

and slink, I unblended from

my camouflage and chirped,

"Here I am!"

But I couldn't tell

if you were happy to see me

or offended that your sacred space

had been violated,

just like I can't tell

if you really

believe all the crap

you said about me being

out of your league,

projecting one day

i'd get bored and leave.

it's devastating, and maybe

at the same time,

i'm spared in the truth,

whatever that is.

in waking life I eat toast

with cinnamon

and brown sugar

to sweeten the send off.

you are such a chicken

But then I wonder,

what is it you think I need,

where is my league,

and what kinds of games are played there

I want a match in spirit convinced of mad devotion.

And maybe I'm a douche to admit it,

but I want some tranquil

blues and greens

from restoration hardware:

loden, sage, sea foam

and sex like a manifesto.

It doesn't matter, the dream

turned,

and I was in a jewelry store

but the persian son of the mom who owned it

had a party and trashed the place

and I tried to save everything

in little boxes

that weren't mine.

II.

Disappointed by our abstractions

I get to the point of your reaction

Satisfied in your enjoyment

Of the lies in my comportment

You're not the one for me

You're not the one for me

At least that's what you tell me

And that's what I believe

And that's what I believe

I believe

The lies you speak

From a hopeless heart

I realize the future never warrants

A guarantee of glory and fortune

But stopping before we get legs torments

A life only lived with what you afford it

Take your time

And get it right

Justify your need

Justify your need

But don't appease the fear

But don't appease the fear

Of a hopeless heart

Oh our hopeless hearts

Conversations, our doubt devices

Give rational lies and likewise minded

Litany of reasons, a love departed

Before we get wings, before it's started

You're not the one for me

At least that's what you tell me

And that's what I believe

And that's what I believe

But you forget your righteousness

But you forget your righteousness

And it tears me apart

My hopeless heart

III.

The sign on the wall says

It's your call

The sign on the wall says stop

Stop stagger

Wait no go. Go now

The sign says no go. Go on.

Now. Go on. You are my

Sunshine starry eyed

Surprise me girl with your

Wicked ways. It's been days

And we would leave like

The rest before. I Implore

You now. Stop. Go. Stop go.

See me with you. I see me with

You. I see us. See through

You to the rest of us. Once

Was a time. A time upon it

Front to back my sassafras

Your no named figure standing

At the door. I'd say please.

You'd take leave. Like before.

The message and the method

And Or But Isn't Ipswich

Come with it. Come away.

Get with it. Coalesce. Undress

You know the rest. What isn't.

Flip it. Mind the mess.

Resist it.