Fermenting the Milk From a Prophet’s Tongue

The soft dawn resonated

Clumsily

Across the painted heather tombstone hillside

Outside the remnants

Of the village

Just west of Arles

There had been an apocalypse

Within the tunnels of the mines

Where all the wasted people had been holed up

Awaiting the end of the First World War

 

The mine shaft had caved in

Beneath the marching feet of Italian soldiers

Making their way across the coastline

Of provincial France

On their return to the peninsula

 

There had been a clamoring of birds

Circling in a crescendo of wings

Above the entrance to the cave

Just outside the falling walls of the town

 

The echoes of meandering feet

Remaining steadfast in their task

As each day opened up and then closed

Without so much as a ceremony

Of fingertips across the pages of a book

Above a bowl of oatmeal gruel

That had been presented as the treasure of the rising sun

 

The ardent laborers

Who had made their way

Back and forth

In unestimable tides

Of legs and feet and arms

And helmeted heads

Between the mineshaft and the town

Had come to rest uneasily

Beneath the crumbling rock and soil

Of the abandoned coal mine

Having spent methodical years at the labor

Only to die within the confines

Of their daily coffin

Long after the mine had closed

When its shafts had been emptied

Years before the war even began

 

Tethered to the cold embrace

Of the manufactured earth

Only to fall victim

To the trampling feet

Of Italian soldiers

Finally making the mineshaft into a prison

 

It always was but only temporary

Now shifting into permanence

Was an irony that beguiled

The methodically dancing fingers of Hemingway

As he pondered how best to evaporate the words

Across the nose of a glass

Of unaged rum

In the courtyard

Of his villa in Havana

 

Having focused all his attention

On the tribulations of the Spanish resistance

He had glossed over the metaphoric template

Drawn out by the trampling feet

Of the Italian regiment

That had left the only theatre

Of unexecuted violence

 

Where the trench warfare had been only

A delicately crafted monologue

Between the French commander

And his Italian counterpart

Who had known each other

Intimately before the war

And had accordingly scheduled

The dance of the militias

To correspond only with the falling tide

Of the war

 

Leaving every Italian soldier intact

To return their march to the peninsula

With the weight of guns, ammunition and boots

Heavy enough

To weigh down the wooden plank edificed mineshaft

And crush all the villagers that hid in its veins

Drawn out into the countryside

By the bellows of his soul

Longing for the tenement interaction

That solemnly brought joy into his heart

He began to move away from watercolors

From thinly painted recreations

Of realistic buildings

Of drawn lines of architecture

Of any sort of representation of reality

To draw out the demons inside

And replicate them on the canvas

With thickly gouged palettes of paint

Into the peasant faces

That he unearthed

Beneath the hovels

Inside the mine shafts

Into saltpeter factories

Of the peat moss plateaus

North of Antwerp

East of The Hague

In the late nineteenth century

 

Before the verbiage of Nietzsche

Caused the inner catastrophe

Of the conscious

Of the interactions with the grounded vessel

That surrounded the internal edifice

Of every light footed European

That grew disconsolate with the dawn

Before the meanderings of Freud

Long before the exposition of Einstein

He found a soft place

In his decrepit soul

For the peasants of the Frisian lowlands

 

He would begin to paint them each

With momentary methodological inspiration

Drawing out the chiaroscuro

From the edges of the darkened room

Where the gnarled-knuckled peasants

Sat around the table

Eating potatoes

 

He had been nebulous

In his quest

For inert moments of solace

Within the embrace of any

Untethered woman

That he had stumbled across

As he made his way

Ploddingly

Through the mud-crusted

Footsteps

Of his late adolescence

Into the granular maturations

Of epically infirm

Adulthood

 

There was a soft subtle moment

When he recognized

That he was brought forth

Reared

From the disentrenched unity

Of Dutch foot soldiers

Trapped inside the epistle

Of Protestant reform

 

He would angle his existence

Towards combative isolation

Away from the sardonic gaze

Of the minister’s son

Who had failed at everything

But the caustic epiphany

Of a disconsolate soul

Who would have been left

Stranded

On the rocky shoreline

Even with the imprint of motherly love

Why does the Western mind focus so unremittingly on the perceived inadequacies of the Self, on the painted apparition of incompleteness?  Why is it that we can look so inward, but only to observe and remark on what isn’t there, instead of focusing on the glory of what is?

 

All of us are born different in so many ways, but the differences are never intended to be analyzed and compared against each other to show weakness.  The intention of the universe is to display uniqueness, but not for any other reason than to create understanding within us, that each of us, each individual one, is simply part of the greater whole.

 

A puzzle is meant to broken apart into its individual pieces, then reformed into a whole.  But each of the pieces that complete the puzzle are individual and unique on their own.  Each have different edges, a different shape, some with flat sides that form a border, corner pieces with two flat sides, some with more insertion arms while others have more openings for insertions, all have a slightly different frame of the image of the face of the puzzle.  But all of these different, individual pieces, unique in their own way, come together to form a complete picture, a complete frame, the completed puzzle.  Maybe some pieces are easier to match and fit than others, but all are unique and essential to the whole.  The puzzle cannot be completed unless every individual piece is incorporated.  The individual pieces need their adjoining pieces, also unique and different, to coalesce into the whole.

 

Why does the Western mind not understand this essential truth of universal completeness?  We are all unique and different, but each one of us possesses qualities of uniqueness and differentness that are essential to comprising the whole.  None of us has a unique or different quality that is anyway inadequate to the others that surround us, all of these qualities are necessary to complete unification with the surrounding world.  And to complete this unification, we must accept our own unique qualities, recognize them as not inadequate, and not create some desire in the mind to possess the qualities of someone around us that we feel are somehow superior.  If we abandon our own uniqueness to take on the coveted qualities of someone around us, we will deform our own unique piece of the puzzle, and never be able to complete the unified whole.  We would not only disable our own ability to complete the unified whole, we would disable all those around us from being able to be part of the unified whole, to come together, to coalesce, to be as one, to descend and to ascend, to soar together, in the cherished unity of the universal womb.

 

We must not denigrate ourselves within.  We must not try to alter the true Self within.  There is no inadequacy in difference, in uniqueness, there is no benefit to trying to alter who we are to match up our coveted, aggrandized ideal of who we should be, who around us we want to be like or to become, or who others around us would want us to become.  We can and should only be ourselves.

 

Because if the core of the Self is altered, the puzzle piece of us will be deformed, and the puzzle of this life will never be completed. And by emanating the trueness, the uniqueness of the Self, the energy we release will aid in preventing the deformation of the unique puzzle pieces that surround us. And we will come to collectively bathe in the coalescence of the completed puzzle.

There was at the beginning

A silent eruption.  Across the sky there were

Exotic plumb colored fist thick cumuloid

Giants that had crested the horizon.

They were no longer hovering

Exclusively on the shores of Jakarta.

 

Joseph Turner was walking his dog

A lithe, gangly limbed deer hound who

Had shrunken with the passage of days.

As he ever had, he was noticing the way

The light from the ebbing day’s fire

Recreated the shape of flower petals

That remained headstrong into the rising dusk.

 

But the patterns without any pre-conceived

warning or alert

Had shifted almost imperceptibly at an

Unexpected angle to the

Measured prism that cloaked the stem

And pistol of the drooping lillies

At the edge of the field.

It was then that he turned his head

To reconfigure and reassess the impact of the timing

Of the light cast downward in the evening.

 

The eruption had been cataclysmic.

The death toll in the chain of islands, on the

Peninsula, in the palaces and homes of

Dutch merchants, in the squalid set-to’s

Of the jodhpur-breached denizens

Of the subcontinent had been overwhelming

And compelling.

The undersea cables had been upset,

Severed and turned over preventing

The news from reaching the British Isles in

Time to preeminate the advance of

The amorphous manifestation in the clouds,

In the radiant glow of the sun as it

Travelled across floating ash in the atmosphere

To create the surreal canvas at dusk.

 

Joseph Turner spent

immeasurable moments in silent fascination

And contemplation.  His dog had long since

Sat down on the ground, then rolled

Over on its side, and had slowed its

Panting to match the heartbeat of its owner.

Shaking his head back and forth, rolling his shoulders

Into his neck, and shaking the stiffness from

His fingers and feet,

Joseph Turner beckoned his dog to rise to its feet.

 

He and his dog slowly returned

To his house on the shoreline, staring

With measuring eyes at the color wheel

In the sky.  Arriving at his front door,

Joseph Turner entered his home, walked

To the window that

stared out over the water and

The slowly cresting waves that washed

Up over the rocks, and began to paint.

         Jerry Garcia’s reclamation of fingertips in the face of physical frailty

The strings of the guitar
Ringing throughout the sensibilities 
Resonating throughout the plethora of
The soul’s beginnings
Meandering slowly, melodically 
Throughout the shifting sands 
Of textured hyperbole
Of everything that arises and falls 
With the dimly lit sun
At the aperture of the dawn
At the declination of the dusk

He would sit at the window
Hovering above the stains of corpuscle
Brain stem disintegration 
And wonder
How it was that every day
Would be a forlorn territory 
A subtle, sanctimonious tensile slim fissure stamen rush
Onto the needle-whipped robotic plateau of non-awareness 

These words were lessons from the ingratiated prophet’s tongue:
We must cultivate the garden 
We must rest in the rapture of the divine 
If these moments ever arise 
To lift us out of desperation
Of kettle fire finger to lip prismatic eyes
Of drawing our heads above the 
Innate sands of non-deliverance

The confusion would settle in
When the eyes flutter out into space 
Between consciousness and 
The infertile serendipity of the misdirected mind
Lost in the atrophy of unbegotten cancer rot

There are satellite fixtures
That reframe the mind 
Reassessing the centralized core 
Hovering, ever hovering 
To provide notification of the damned 
To provide a heraldic trumpet announcement 
Of the slothful perambulated arrival 
Of the dead and dreaming

Where would all these prophet fingers
Draw me into?
He would say to himself, softly 
With amorous intention
How can I breach new life 
When there is no new day
That does not despoil me in lost admiration 
For who I am, who I never was
Who I never will be?

The summoner’s place 
The deadening tourniquet millstone of darkened illusion 
Tethering me to the ground
He would surmise
Each time he would open his eyes
After despotic episodes
Of the reckoning
Of the flood
Of dripping the cosmotic rust into his veins
Slowly without the sensation of caustic degeneration
Of the washing over without cleansing

This is sweetness.  This is convoluted

Sweetness.

An amoristic embrace into

The somnambulistic saturation of life

This is how our feet move together 

Relentlessly in separateness

In despotic eternal quest 

For artificial coalescence 

When we two meet

We two part

Such is the magnetism of attachment

Drawn together by connective energy

The approach will shock the vibrancy of the metal 

To thrust us apart 

I know within.  Deep within.

That I could never thread the needle 

That I could never 

Immeasurably intertwine

Without pugnation 

Without internal resistance 

To keep the landscape 

From being sullied by the expression of your primal fear

Immersed in despotic prevarication

In a desperate grasp for a connection 

You would only try to turn me around 

To re-assert me 

Into abstract dis-indifferentiation 

To make me swallow glumly 

The thrust of your desire and affection 

You would seek out depths 

That we could never reach 

You would tie yourself and me

So that we would plummet and fall 

Together 

Arms flailing

Mechanistically

Like turtle fingers 

Releasing in and out

Through this moribund shell 

There is no sense of looseness 

When you would seek

To eternally abide 

There is no eternal integration 

We are only sadly drawn out

Patterns in the sand 

We cannot eternally abide 

Our patterns would be washed away 

With the incoming erasure of the tide 

Do not choose to hover aimlessly

Outside the tortured circumference of my soul

To play daily games

With dice and cards 

Creating a mismatch 

Tented warrior encapsulation 

Where patriarchs would attend 

With admiration 

Just to watch the pretentious unraveling 

Of this one-of-a-kind

Overwrought theatrical show

It is playing out just for you

Because you would seek out

Perpetual attendance 

Of this finger puppet display

Pretended patterns of time 

Calling out time

With inglorious temptation 

You for me, I for you

Us for nothing

Vacancy for everything

Call and response

Only because you would linger

Aimlessly, restlessly 

Attempting to accord some universal hibernation 

To what you thought you could become 

Because you have placed iconically 

Structured mirrors 

In patterns around 

The stage exit

All of that is just disguised 

Because it is the truth of this 

Fantastic plethora 

Of imagined lovers 

Of Tristan and Isolde

Labeled as miscreants 

Societal assassins

Seeking refuge on the jutted 

Isle of Anglesey

To shelter their 

Pretentious, sequestered love

From the gavel of the knight sword 

Their imagined love would not survive 

This torture of the present 

Floating life

This is sweetness.  This is convoluted 

Sweetness.

It would not survive 

The oppression of attachment 

Do not choose to denigrate it

By the confused direction

Of what you thought would be 

Ordered life

There is no ordered life

There are only meandering patterns 

Of this haphazard love

Do not dilute it with expectation 

And you and I 

We may yet soar 

There may not be tethers 

To gird us down

To erect conundrum obstacles 

That we would never see our way

Around or through 

This is a connection.  This is not an attachment.

Do not choose to bind us down

And we will never have anything

To escape from

No convoluted sweetness

Only the rapture of this cleansing air

If you would choose to breath it with me

We would roar like lions

And there will never be the tethering time

Serendipity awaits those who would choose 

To live without bonds

Less, less, less.  Its all overcoming.  All I need is less.  Removal of it all is such a cognizable blessing.  To have less is to have more.  To have space and freedom.  Empty space where there use to be unsettling terror weapon fingers pulling at the spine, drawing it down and out of the back, to lead me to recoil in slobbering self-admonition.  

Less is more.  I would not whine and crouch and cry absent all of these lost resolutions.  I am resolute.  But I have resolved nothing.  Because there is nothing to resolve.  There is only the kindness and admiration of acceptance of the moment.  And it will resolve itself.  Over time, it will deliberate on the threshold of reasoning, withdrawing all these words of placation for the soul when they are no longer needed.   When there is a resolution.  When there is a resolve.  When there is a solution.  When I have dropped down, dove into this trampoline finger arm muscle aggregation of kindness absolution.   This is where and when there will be a solution.

Its is not unsolvable.  It is not insoluble.  It can consume all the greed, all the lust, the escalated admonitions that would jettison from the truncated coagulations of the soul trapped in mysterious restraint from acceptance.

Less is more. Acceptance leads to resolution.  Acceptance claws back the ego, reconfines it in its monastic hole where it would devolve in ascetic deliberation, pawning over facts and circumstances that are no longer me.  Perhaps the ego would arrive at a solution?  But what would it matter, because there is nothing to resolve.  There is only the artfully unreserved acceptance of the moment.  Where we would play on a tympanic symphony, simple moving fingers pounded together to create the universal resonance of truth through acceptance.

Less is more.  When there is nothing to resolve, no clandestine secret pathway warrior adrenaline jockey super collider rockets being thrust through the underground tunnels at the footsteps of the Alps, I would have nothing with which to disagree.  I would see nothing, be nothing.  

Less is more.  Acceptance is everything.  That is the solution to the mathematical formaldehyde equation I would never endeavor to resolve.  But I have found it.  Here at my fingertips.  A tiny little ball of truth that I can toss in the air, catch and release, or just allow to tumble to the ground.  Where it would amplify and increase everything, so that there would no longer be anything to resolve.

Less, less, less.  Less is more.   I am patient in this posture in silence and admiration with no goal for any desired outcome.  Unadulterated realignment.  Less is more.  This is the dream of calm solace.  It has risen through the advent of the dawn to convert into this flesh-awakened moment.  Where I will observe nothing.  Nothing to solve.  Nothing to resolve.  Less is more.

These are all fortifications 

Set up in a spiraling distance 

From the abstract fractals of the mind 

Joy in unison 

Joy in dissonance 

Clear thoughts, admonitions 

Expositions of wanton necessity 

Emanations of aggressive, internalized desires 

Cathedral at the footholds of the 

Mountain ranges 

All to abide and wait for the time

The responsive arrows were drawing near

Did I paint it?

I knew that I had to paint it

They were lingering impressions 

Of some replication of a despotic, desparate 

Wilderness 

Where I was drawn to coffins 

And made to unravel within the kindness 

Of the moment 

Before it was all torn away

Before the proflagarations of the mind

And the dividation of the soul

Both spent knife-wielding at night 

Slowly carving out the space

Where I would find some new direction 

Some new pace for footfalls

At the unveiling penumbra 

Of the holistic mountain range 

What were all the immersed disfigurations?

Why had I ever been allowed 

To draw myself away from the place

Where I could and should have rested

In commonplace comfort 

At the foot of the seer

Being allowed to articulate 

All of my meaningless meanderings 

That would somehow coalesce 

Into a tiny measure 

Of universal serendipity 

These were words I had been

Trying to pronounce for decades

To engender and release 

The lisp of the prophet’s tongue 

Why had I always been hidden from 

The corner-eyed vessels 

Where it was more simple for me

To just breath, to commune myself 

With the goddess of nothingness

And no longer just playing with the words

To breathe and become the words

To become the passageway into incarnate light

Where I would be a turning point 

For the skies to lose the insincerity of

Their darkness

And flood out the exterior 

With the prism of light 

All the years I had spent turning 

Away from the splendid, evacuated wilderness

That was always my space to abide in

To thrive in

I was to be brought here, to encircle myself 

And then expand out in waves of circumference 

To establish and show the joy, the passion, the love

This is where I was always meant to be

Conjoined, but separated 

Able to become a residue of vacancy 

That could be flooded over with the earth 

I would not stand in the way of this justice

Although I may flit along with the despotic indiscretions 

Of desire 

I could use them to build a bridge 

To erect an altar over a tenement hovel

And allow even the insipid man to breath

There is a target within.  I would allow it to find itself 

To cherish itself. To filter out into the dawn

Where the warriors would await

To lift me up to my horse

And guide me into the lingering realm of suchness 

Where I could abide without duality 

With immersion into the core

To provide the guidance, unconscious, that I was delivered

From the words that merely sing 

To the words that always dream

In depth, in sincerity, in the ultimate union of division