BEFORE AND EVER AFTER

Is it possible
To Think
American History
Without America?

America
Is a Toxic Brand
That makes cogent Thought
Impossible.

Can we wake up
From the Nightmare
And resume Living
In the Before Times?

America did not begin
With George Washington
Or Jamestown
Or the Vikings. 

It did not begin
With European Conquest
Slavery, Wars of Empire
Or Henry Ford. 

Our Continent
Was Peopled long, long ago
With Travelers from the East
Not the West.

They are still Here.
Their History
Is Ours:
Before And Ever After. 

CHRISTMAS EVE

Do Jews Believe in Jesus?
No, they Believe in an older God
Who will engender Universal
Peace and Brotherhood
At some Future time.

The lights have dimmed
In Bethlehem.
The Glory of His Birth
Damned in each moment
Of a Barbarous War.

The Messianic Age is not Now.
The Irredentists
Pursue their claim to
Holy Lands
Stained by Martyrs blood. 

The Romans saw the Power
Of the Jesus Myth -
The Conflation of God and Man
And out of it Built the Progenitor
Of all Western Empires.

The West remains Ensorcelled 
By this Presumption
Of Mortal Hegemony.
God’s Kingdom Ours
To Rule. 

Is its Final Act
To be Complicit
In the Deadly Sins
Of a People
Awaiting Their Messiah?

TUNES OF GLORY

The Twentieth Century
Was America’s.
The Twenty First
We can Presume
Belongs to Others.

America came of Age
In the Seventeenth
When its World 
Was New and
Freshly dressed in Blood.

In the Eighteenth
Dragooned from its Isolation
America was Swept
Into the Tide
Of Europe’s History. 

Riven
By Civil War
In the Nineteenth
America then Flexed Sinews
Of Iron and Steam.

The story written
In our Minds
Is of Progress
Through the Ages
Triumphant over All.

It’s Dénouement
Now demands
A Quietude Unbecoming
To Imaginations
Still inflamed by Glory.

BREATH

At every moment
I connect to
Divine Consciousness
Through my Breath.

This little piece
Of Truth is something
That I might tell 
My younger Self.

Across the Quotidien
Breathing
Inspires
Heavenly Confluence.

I will not count 
The unheeded breaths.
My continued Existence
Is their Redemption.

Each inhalation now
Understood as Essential
To Animation, Relationship
And Spirit.

THE HEART'S HOMECOMING

Ever and anon a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of Eternity.

It is a call that emanates
From the inner sanctuary
Of personal being:
In the Fragment that remains
Of Humankind’s
Originating Consciousness.

It is a call to kindle
That Divine Spark
Into a Flame Of Love
And embrace the Depths
Foreshadowed by
The Mystics.
 
It is a call that
Echoes within
Our humble Reveries
Or emerges
From the placid Pools 
Of Contemplation. 

It is a call only Heard
When Deaf
To the prideful demands
Of Ego:
It is a call to
The Heart’s Homecoming.

WU WEI

Chuang Tzu says:

To achieve Happiness

It is necessary to stop

Doing all Things 

Directed at Being Happy.

Contentment and Well-being

Become possible only

When you cease to strive

For their achievement:

Practice wu wei or non-doing.

Easier said than not-done. 

Heaven does Nothing

He tells us,

Its non-doing is its

Serenity. 

Earth does Nothing

He avers,

It’s non-doing is its Rest.

From the Union of this Inaction

All Things are made. 

Including:

Whatever Happiness

Exists in this Perfect World 

Where all Things come

From Nowhere.

THE VEIL OF ISIS

Dionysius divided Angels
Into Seraphs who are aflame
With Perfect Love,
And Cherubs who are filled
With Perfect Knowledge.

Conation is the acting out of Impulse,
Cognition is a passive Knowing.
Both are elements of passion.
A part of Love’s Quest:
To know and to Adore.

‘The intellect by itself,
Moves nothing’, quoth Aristotle.
‘Feeling is the tentacle we stretch out
To the World of Things’.
Quoth Evelyn Underhill.

And,
‘At the touch of passion
Doors fly open
Which Logic has battered
On in vain.’

What little hope have
We poor Cherubs,
Who seek to Know,
But disdain to Feel,
To lift the Veil of Isis?

BLAKE'S GRAMMAR

Sometimes Philosophers
Invent words
Or turn Nouns into Gerunds
Like ‘Worlding’.

A word with which
Heidegger Established
The ongoing Process
Of his Thinging world.

In which Time allows
For a coming to Presence
Of the Thing
Called Being.

With such Things
Resounding in his Brain
William Blake made Art
Of an Absolute Ablative.

In Fiendish line and script
He made a Gerundive Leap
Of  those Things to be Divined
Within his Visionary mind.

Untethered from Place
In the Beneficence of Time
He thus bequeathed
His Worlding to the World.

TRUE BLUE

Aqueous and Azure
A Blue Horizon
Of Ocean and Sky
Limns the World’s Soul.

I’ve spent time
At these fringes
Messing about
Surfing waves.

Enchantment ignored
I demanded energy:
Off-shore Wind
Waves and rising tide.

For thirty years
I practiced my ineptitude.
Now the ineffable Ocean
Offers another Prospect.

My Life lived
For half a century
At the Pacific’s
East or Western Gate -

The Design of All
These many days Apparent.
The Aqueous and Azure
Holds my gaze.

Enthralled in Presence:
I await the parting
Of this cerulean veil
To reveal an Eternity.

FOUR WALLS

As a young man
Thomas Merton climbed
Dante’s seven stories
Of Limbo, Lust, Gluttony
Greed, Anger, Heresy and Violence.

His Birthright of Divine Consciousness
Obscured by Coarse appetites
Ambition
Self-Obsession
And his Will to Power

Called to Christianity
After Cambridge and Columbia
He Awakened to a Vocation
Framed by the Renunciation
Of a Bellicose and Vapid Civilization.

He sought
A Cloistered Life:
To Banish
The Superfluous
In Search of Radiance.

This was not an act
Of supreme selfishness
But a selfless melding
Of his Individual Consciousness
Within the Divine.

Sustained by a Cistercian
Community
Immured for the rest of his days
In ‘The Four Walls of his Freedom’
He wrote, and prayed.

His Life Committed
To the Substantiation
Of the Supreme Truth:
Consumed in Love
We Abide Forever in Radiance.

I LIKE IT HERE

Non-native plants

Erase the indigenous;

They Deny the Good, True 

And Beautiful Spirit Of a Place.

Weeds: Themselves Colonizers 

Are Weaponized

By Human Colonizers 

As Disrupters of Native Soils.

Tourists: Human Weeds.

Ephemeral Colonizers

With Permanent Impacts.

They Inevitably corrupt 

The places they visit.

Cruise Ships and Jet planes

Are the primary Vectors 

Of a Corruption

That Transmits the Pathogen

Of Homogenization. 

Tourism is 

The Irruption of Alien 

Appetites and Values 

Into Foreign Milieux.

These Predations

Vitiate the Intellectual

Moral, Aesthetic

Psychic, Morphological

Botanical, Biological

Geological and Organic

Elements 

That are Intrinsic to Place.

That are Essential

To its Genius Loci. 

Tourism is 

Colonization writ small

The Erasure of the Unique

The Proliferation of the Predatory.

It is the Incipient Invocation

Of Kali

Destroyer of Indigeneity

Destroyer of Worlds.

LONG STORY SHORT

In a disappointed Life
And an unhappy marriage
My father found Fulfillment
In my Tutelage.

Fated
To be a Student
At his feet, I Learnt
Forgotten Rules of Propriety.

In Rebellion
I cast aside his Affection
Determined to deny
His Societal Education.

Yet his Love
And Teaching remain
Etched Deep within
The dapples of my Brain.

But from Head to Heart
That Love is shifting
The lessons fading
My Soul uplifting.

Tales of Worldly Ambition
No longer Resonate
In a life now Revealing
Its Heavenward Fate.

TRACERY

Writing:
Breaking lines
Of Thought.
Shuffling words
To elucidate.

Runes:
Glyphs long devoid
Of precise signification
But embalmed in
A mysterious Essence.

Seven Chakras:
Earth, Water, Fire
And Air.
Ether, Light
And Thought.

Ideas insinuate themselves
Cloaked in Latinate words
Amongst these Pillars
Of Meaning.
Essaying Interpretation.

Between West and East
Civilization and Barbarism
The Exotic and the Indigenous.
In the Tension Of Alternates
A through line Exists.

It is Here:
In the Interstitial
That I attempt Sketches
Of the Tracery
That branches Between.

CA. PRIMEVAL

California’s First Peoples
Arrived From Beringia
In boats of skin, reeds or logs
Along Ocean rivers of Kelp.

Settling, long, long ago
Amidst relict Megafauna
In Desert, Mountain and Meadow
In Forests of Oak and Fir.

Adapting, long, long ago
To their new home:
To the Land as it warmed
To the Sea as it rose.

Over this wide Sea
Europeans first came to Look.
Then they returned Across the Land
To Displace a Settled People.

Establishing, all at once,
Missions, Roads and Fortifications.
Growing irrigated crops
Raising pigs, sheep, cattle and hens.

More Arrived
Damming rivers, cutting forests
Digging in dirt for gold and oil
Ever Building, Ever Forgetting.

Oblivious:
In Ages of Drought and Flood
To the Land as it warmed
To the Sea as it rose.

2024

In the Age of Myth
Fabulists, Fools
Poets, Shamans
Goddesses and Tricksters
Ruled in Merry Synchronicity.

Oft’ times in such
Estates of Feral Anarchy
A polity was established
That served the many
And favored but a few.

Poetry and Song enshrined
The Rites that did decree
A Seasonal Withering
Of its oak wreathed Kings
In Sweetness and Decay.

For to Rule was to invite
A Reckoning with Death
In Summer’s offering
Of Ceremony and Sacrifice
To Arcady’s White Goddess.

Thus a Joyous Chaos Reigned
As Above so Below
And such Poetry and Song
Became the Essential Mark
Of its Unfolding and of its Futurity.

Whilst we, in Quadrennial Farce
Reconfirm one Usurpation of note:
All Rites of Nature and of Myth
Banished, in soulless celebration
Of a Trinket - our worthless Vote.

BURDEN

Is Charisma
The Power
To project Love?
To Connect?

Our Hearts mostly
Remain cocooned.
If we are lucky
They emerge Once or twice.

To Compel us
To say, ‘I Love You’.
A connection made
Straight from The Heart.

But there are some
Amongst us
Who Radiate
Heartfelt Empathy.

From whom
Consciousness
Extends to engage
Us and Everything.

It is a natural part
Of their Being.
External evidence
Of their Soul. 

They are exemplars
Perhaps, of what we
Might all Be:
Radiant and effusive.

Too much for the
World to bear
You say?
The Burden of Connection.

THE TRUTH

The Truth
Will always hover there
Just beyond the reach
Of our Comprehension
Because it exists on the Horizon
Of the Absolute.

But we try
I try
To understand the Past
And Parse the Present:
To sift through the consequential
Minutiae of Space, Time, and Agency.

For there is a feeling of
Great Satisfaction
When the Truth is approached
A proximity is established
That settles
The Mind.

Perhaps it is the Absolute
Nature of Truth
That gives comfort -
It echoes the Foundational
Substance
Of Our Lives.

IN THE LAND OF SMOKES

When the Tongva lived
‘Neath bent willow and tule
Their wood fires smudging
The wide Blue Skies.

Where Coastal sage scrub
Edged Marshy wetlands
Springs flushed
And creeks meandered.

When Oaks stood
For food and shade
And on-shore winds
Whipped across the Dunes.

Where the Ocean
Was Raddled with schools
Of fish and mollusks
Crowded on the beach…

This is the swell of an Ancient
Yet Abiding Consciousness that
Still stirs within the deep pools
Of our Pride and Pretension.

THINKS:

Hollywood screen writers
Won a skirmish
Against A.I.
In the spirit of Ned Ludd.

The young lad
From Nottingham
Who smashed the
Stocking Frame.

The Impulsive Destruction
Of machines
Employed
To Marginalize our Skills.

Laying waste
To dubious Devices
That Diminish
Our Humanity.

JUST LIKE: The Urge
To Deconstruct the Persona
We Erect
To Smother Our True Selves.

THE BIRTH OF A STATE

In 1846, Genocidal Pale-Faces
Founded
The Republic of California -
A Rebel State within
The Spanish Empire.

Their Sanguinary Lust
Was eagerly co-opted
By America
And Safely Harbored
Within its Rapacious Union.

Then all Races Heard
The cry of ‘Gold!’
Resound from Sutter’s Creek
A call to Populate and Predate
The Foothills of the Sierras.

In Rough Camps
Soon was Established
A Hierarchy that privileged
The White American
As God’s own Plunderers.

Their Souls Eviscerated
As Killers of the Red-man
Enslavers of the Chinese
Destroyers of the Land:
These Men made California Modern.