Never Tire of The Road
Never Tire of The Road
1
Happenstance, phase-wise,
need not proposition Melee.
Neither need Garden,
whose chemistry flirts with her,
sleep in Deep Storage.
That's as far as I go.
No road goes
as far a Black Lake.
You hop off your humvee and trudge.
Portage canoe.
Whatever the bi-way to slumber,
Melee rattles the hinges
of the Keeper of the Door.
African Rattle reports
an august personage.
Deep Storage reaps in a trice
the carnage of sacrifice.
While Melee sleeps,
so does the door-keep.
Wrench Boy hitch-hikes with Violet.
[]
Exuberance leaps up
like the fumes from the rite.
Wrench Boy officiates.
There's a fork
in Melee's offices
and a gorge
before you get
to Black Lake -- a fork
in Melee's
humors.
[]
The spirit
that Wrench Boy
keeps in his crystal
returns to Black Lake
as Happenstance
agitates.
[]
Deep Storage
changes
for the sacrifice
Wrench Boy
arranges.
[]
Long River
modulates
the strangeness
which Opal
qualifies.
[]
Long River approves
her own fork which
exaggerates
what Deep Storage
generates.
[]
No active zealot
but has its
Nemesis
except for Wrench Boy
who modulates inversions
with silence
and passes to Melee
his fork
with a wink and a smile.
[]
Hammerhead
has his way with
Obliquity.
Wrench Boy
looks the other way.
Why?
Inside his crystal
the silence
is just like crystal.
[]
While coming to terms
with the principle of sacrifice,
does Melee
have a nemesis?
Black snakes
return
to black lakes.
[]
If there is a fork
among Deep Storage's
boulevards,
and you only
see it
in slumber,
fly over water.
[]
Jaguar's avatars
focus
all along Long River
trafficking in body parts.
Why not?
Wrench Boy obligates Obliquity.
The Debits of Nonentity
accrue from Black Lake
to Deep Storage,
though Black Lake
actually has none. No debits.
[]
Melee has no avatars,
but her ten-thousand pseudo-pods
are better than forks,
so then when she manages
The Old Hotel
Wrench Boy's freed up.
He peers in his opal
and skries up what melee he can.
[]
Sleep serves Wrench Boy
and keeps his secrets
promiscuously, for dreams are
locked up
in Deep Storage.
There's plenty of room,
and Melee's ritual
forks and daggers
bring courage.
[]
Wrench Boy's obliquity
itself is a fork,
at least late at night
while Deep Storage shuffles its bins.
Never Tire of The Road
2
The Nemesis is mine.
I seek consultation with Jacinth.
Together we attend Long River
whose effluence happens inside her.
Jacinth enhances my focus
lest it fork in The Rite.
Focus is her provenance
whatever the happenstance.
No time for a melee;
no space for a fork in my opal.
Violet petals are strewn about Jacinth's cauldron.
The point is to focus
Happenstance itself
and bring courage to the crispness of crystal.
[]
I've been asleep.
Jacinth's violets
twine about my ghost.
Am I Hammerhead
or just Blockhead?!
My focus is so--bemused.
Is happenstance itself
configured as my nemesis?
I want to say, "enough of this."
Enough of this.
[]
Jacinth produces the sacrifice called
"The Garden of Nemesis."
It takes some courage to perform this:
a focal system
of finely adjusted crystals
to float above Black Lake.
Will it lead to victory
or is it oneiric distraction merely?
Am I Hammerhead
enthused by a rite?
Eagles and snakes.
Nemesis herself
riven by forks.
The Crone blandishes her opal
while the cauldron settles and seethes
and Hammerhead's miniature avatars, attending,
dance on the rim.
What they see
comes out of Deep Storage.
Their focus is victorious.
Boiling bubbles
solidify
into African Rattles.
Jacinth is Mistress of Obliquity.
When she sits
at The Old Hotel
if I am Hammerhead I do well
to hold my focus.
I cannot control
the identity of
The Old Hotel.
The dreams it harbors
pass into the sleep
of its borders.
How can I keep this from stabbing a fork in my courage?
[]
Stop stalling.
Silence keeps the door here.
Jacinth sits at her pot
holding a fork.
Victory as such is established aforethought.
You can't escape.
Silence is alive through your slumber.
Are you Wrench Boy?
Then violets wreathe round your wrench.
Sleep comes straight to a fork
and effects a drastic
intensification of your focus.
"Shall I speak?" says Wrench Boy.
[]
"In my dream, I'm broke.
I do magic on spec.
If the working works
all is well.
If it's a bust
I go back to sleep
and Master Fork will deliver me
into another ontology.
But my anxiety is such that I wish
to have the Collective consider
abrogation of the Market entire.
Is not Debt collective delusion?
Not quite.
How old am I?
It is a matter of undoing the focus
empowering the shape-shifter, Violet
to violate her garden
and unsnake Nemesis with its eagle.
Jacinth is a gorge.
Let Hammerhead hammer back his avatars
into Deep Storage.
Can you do that?
We are sleep
but whose sleep-state are we?
Jacinth never slumbers.
Rather she passes
in and out of apparency.
Let us join our mind stream to hers
and thereby master mere happenstance."
Thus spoke Wrench Boy.
[]
Silence fell over The Rite.
The working proceeded.
Exuberance exuded, released from Deep Storage.
[]
In this sacrifice,
the fork itself
loses its bite.
The Old Hotel
returns from Obliquity.
Victory is vanquished.
Jaguar and the rest of us as well
change mind states with Jacinth.
Interval
Just keep going.
Not Alabama, Alambana:
the mind stream assumes an identity
but belongs to no one.
In certain quarters
this is quotidian certainty;
but if Long River forks
or wraps about
Tornado Island
like an ox-bow
or terminates entirely
in a golden cloud
or a black one,
or its tributaries dessicate
or Hammerhead
big as a god
but run by his bank
diverts them;
and the streaming ceases--
does this spell release
or the end of one ontology?
The Counsel of Seventy
is still out on this inquiry.
Never Tire of The Road
3
Obliquitous perenniality
obviates crystal's deep storage,
but Crystal comes out
from under her cloud
with what exuberance!
Sleep is an opal
such that the exuberance Crystal inspires
supplants that "nemesis" business
for now at least.
(I never did indicate
whether the grim goddess
tested me,
or I beset another
as it. No matter.)
Jacinth sleeps
to African Rattle's
dreamy white susurrus.
[]
Will Crystal remain
in these precincts
a timeless promise?
Exubeance itself
is nemesis to Jaguar.
And Hammerhead hammers his crystal
in a garden workshop
until his mind path forks
and he thinks he's hammering out
his own crystal of victory.
He triumphs in exuberance.
He jumps and prances,
but nobody knows over what--
a truly zany performance for an archetype
whose quality is, in general,
grim sobriety.
Jaguar watches
from an oblique quarter of the labyrinth,
and Wrench boy hears
his weird, triumphant howls.
The sky was low, that afternoon,
like a crystal ceiling.
It wasn't happenstance,
but a complex position in
situational phasing
influencing the fatal acts
of anyone beneath it
by instigating
characterological opposites or inversions.
[]
Labyrinths don't work on silence,
even ones skried up in an opal.
Focus is too general.
It pervades the whole of it from without
and rings out like crystal,
unless the labyrinth
is an element
in a grim ritual
and Jaguar creeps along
its enigmatic corridors,
or mind-ravening Melee lurks
around its corners
and at its forks.
Jaguar is exuberant
before the feast.
Long River waits to rush in
and run along the labyrinthine boulevards.
African Rattles,
shaken in hidden cabinets,
startle the victim
trapped in the maze
as its noises
change
with the tricky acoustics.
[]
What is the inversion of an opal?
A system of situational phasing.
They put you to sleep,
then pretend to wake you,
and you are there,
you think in quotidian life,
but it's still the labyrinth.
[]
Crystal is a warrior of happenstance.
The crystallinity of her exuberance,
even her crystalline obliquity,
is the obliquity and ecstasy of a being
that arise
in whatever occurs;
not just as an opalescent phantom
but as real--
as if a jaguar spirit
appeared in an opal--
the whole cosmos its materium--
the dispensation of Being itself,
not just the quotidian somnolence of any of us,
but a Vision
sourced in The Gorge.
[]
"Don't get me started,"
said The Old Hotel.
"When that crazy jaguar
entered an oblique phase,
the whole gorge lit up
from his ferocious elan.
I had to sit down old Jacinth
in front of her black pot
just to contain the nemesis
that took form as his exuberance.
To do that I hussled
Black Lake into focus,
and the doorkeep went ballistic
because our set of chambers and corridors
bifurcate again an again
all the way to the infinite
if you let it. And now there were
feat-happy Jaguar avatars
everywhere, you guessed it,
menacing the guests.
Fortunately, that afternoon,
the guests were volatile spirits,
no flesh to be gotten-at at all,
so The Crone was able to establish an opal
and put the whole cosmos to sleep
inside an invisible gorge.
Well, it is her world."
Interval
It is Wrench Boy's itinerary that concerns me--
simply the thought that he has one.
Avatars, syzygies, spiders, specters--
which is it that conceived such a notion?
Does Being itself
sit in a chamber--
a tower loft, a distant, if visible, star?
A maiden--Crystal or Melee--
though no maiden, surely,
but double-wombed
like Chaldean Hekate.
I mean "tire of the road" to what?
Perhaps that's the point.
My point, to unpack it.
A pairing down
of time-ways
to the naked stream itself.
Then Black Lake opens
where the Doorkeep bows to your token
and time is not.
Did I say "perhaps"?
Image, concept, fable--
absorbed, each through its token,
Crystal the distant quiddity
to which, in their last distillation
(did I say "metonymy"?)
they point
when they are not.
Never Tire of The Road
4
My silence
might
be your Hammerhead.
He forks, old Hammerhead,
when he comes to the Keeper
of The Black Door--
can't hold his focus.
He can't tell how the sounds
that fill the place
come from African Rattles--
small ones--
stuck in the corners
under wooden racks
and antique corigendas.
Tiny jaguars shake them.
It's amazing
you can hear them
at all. Hammerhead
is keen
to pick up missives from obliquity. A capacity
that will serve him in good stead
when his mind state crystallizes finally.
[]
We should make a study
of auditory focus
among a melee of sonorities.
Hammerhead heard
the subtle temblor
but the doorkeep didn't.
It enabled him to enter
from obliquity
during a phase of The Old hotel
not meant for him.
There was Wrench Boy
disarmed,
unwarned.
The Old Hotel
was full of ghosts
as if it had been invaded
from out of The Gorge.
The African Rattles
weren't little
now.
"The was no silence
they could not decapitate."
[]
The violets from irascible racemes
strewn about to celebrate victory
prematurely, possibly,
distracted the Keeper of the Grand Doors
so the lounges flew open on the gardens.
[]
Exuberance arises
from its own kind of focus--
let's study that too.
Let's make The Old hotel
an ontological laboratory--
as if it weren't already--
fresh supplies arrive from Black Lake
on a daily basis.
Black Lake, in this,
is both object and source.
What do supplies deliver?
African Rattles
grown as gourds
in The Gorge.
[]
Hammerhead, astonished,
had enough.
He excluded himself
from all this exuberance.
He'd aligned so exactly on obliquity.
This situational phasing business
was generally not for him.
He just wanted to understand:
how many avatars of Jaguar were there?
As if somebody'd emptied out Black Lake
and went running through corridors and lounges
rattling gourds
from African localities.
[]
I remind myself
at every moment:
find Happenstance.
Abandon sleep.
Thus Africa perennially
rattles my focus.
[]
Out in The Garden
several Wrench Boys
were wantonly rattling
everyone else's Africas
if they could find them.
Their energies were other than
self-arising exuberance.
The phase of The Old Hotel
and the discomfiture of the Doorkeep
had allowed several ghosts
to tweak the nose of Hammerhead
and manifest as Wrench Boys.
This was a phase
of ontological slippage--
a sleep-like license
without silence,
but where the sluices from Deep Storage
leaked into the Old Hotel
imposing silence
but only on the Doorkeep,
who by now had become
an avatar of Hammerhead.
[]
"It is time," thought Wrench Boy,
"to un-manumit my avatars."
And that thought itself
was a sign
the phase was changing,
so he sucked his avatars
up into his opal
and now The Old Hotel
was hospitable
to the old crone, Jacinth.
[]
Are you ready for sleep?
I am.
We have an upgraded suite
in The Old Hotel.
The Doorkeep's an old cronie,
name of Jaguar.
I met him at Black Lake
when time was not.
The Old Hotel
's been here forever.
They've rooms for everything
or can produce one
out of nothing at all--
rooms to celebrate victory
or orchestrate magic rites.
They have Hammerheads to serve you--
they don't even know they are serving--
or for you to serve them
when the oblivion's yours.
Whatever Long River delivers--
take courage!
Black Lake is far better than slumber.
They have that too.
The real one.
if you're up for it--
otherwise, otherwise,
whatever your phase is.
Wrench Boy can offer compensation,
even if you're Hammerhead;
even if you're Wrench Boy.
[]
It takes courage to inhabit obliquity
or take it as your road.
To the world, you are a ghost--Nemesis
a furious demoness;
you are haunted by Hammerheads,
your illegible silences
mask your exuberance.
But The Old Hotel will accommodate you too.
You can focus your African Rattles
from an oblique stance
and bless with silence.
Never Tire of The Road
5
His form might be ghostlike
but Wrench Boy's varieties
work what is most concrete.
Sleep on it.
Shadow or spider.
Elixir.
Specter.
Even Wrench Boy's (momentary) syzygy
compromises Happenstance. Where is she?
As nows
go by.
Exuberant festivities
at the limit point
is Melee.
Yet Happenstance has long standing
concordat with Wrench Boy.
They're there
in the same
instance.
They join
at the limit of each other
across distance
across reticence
and interpenetrate
in silence.
[]
Hammerhead, contrariwise,
estranged from Exuberance
(where is she?)
is equally familiar
as Energy's supplement.
Abstractions pile up in each Now.
Hammerhead exchanges civilities with Jacinth
as if she too were a part of him,
and, after the decimation of The Bank,
will not keep company with Wrench Boy.
Yet convergence with Happenstance for him
is coherent conceptually. What comes of that?
His silence has no magic in it.
His magic comes out of the gorge
tinctured with angst.
He is the one of us
most woefully "on the road"
and surprisingly most courageous.
What can one open for the Doorkeep
if The Door is the Door to Long River?
Access to everywhere.
A berth in The Garden.
Long River's allocation of crystal.
[]
Meanwhile, we pedal
the immaterial bicycle
along Long River's quai.
Wrench Boy's autonomous shadow--
scraps and wrappings
up-wheeling
in our wake or on the wind
down alleyways too narrow for trolleys
too bleak for the sun
nocturnal to the point of hyperbole--
He took out rooms
in Deep Storage.
Owls, enticed
from the grounds of the hospital
by raw scraps of beef,
focused their parallel eyes from couch backs.
No paintings in the galleries are strange enough.
How could they be?
Nor music, though intricately wrought,
sufficiently stimulating regarding
ontological attitude. What is the being
of what sound portends?
Better stay in The Old Hotel
than cruise the current ghetto of venues in this manner.
"Read books," said the shadow of Wrench Boy.
"Dig back down into happenstance.
Such an exercise cannot turn tawdry
for the Gorge is The Mother of Reversals
rife with spirits and jaguars."
A pile of stones
behind the toiling workmen--
an anarchist baracade.
"Now that's an image," said Wrench Boy
shaking his African Rattle
to suck back his shadow.
He gazed into The Gorge
and next to him stood Jaguar.
He sucked in his avatars.
Melee hung on his elbow.
The spirits swirled round them
expressing exuberant expectation
whether their existence
in the present tableau
were to be terminated
or exacerbated.
It would depend on Jacinth
and her ability to extract herself from the now;
that is, what attitude she'd take
toward a shadowless Wrench Boy.
Would she present as Nemesis
or mind her business
and focus on The Gorge
whose temporality was far too complex
for ordinary agonic relations.
She called to Scandinavian fastnesses--
"distant fjords and new truths"
to trump the world.
Her Rite would sacrifice
ghostly apparencies
and deepen towards Long River--
corpses and rubbish
sublimed in The Rite.
[]
Attendance at the performance was a melee.
How can we pay back our subscribers
when they are the gods themselves? They rush
to the website
to catch the latest posts,
both here,
and in illo tempore.
To be mentioned
is to be.
The halls are filled with surveillance drones
and paid provocateurs;
no one knew what attire
would constitute proper disguises,
so actually, anything would do.
Inquiry improved misdirection.
All this provided cover for Black Lake.
Cognitive melee, after all, is
consummate distraction. "Look at that!
His writing is so small!"
"What exuberant obliquity!
Old tradition! Strange events! Inexplicable facts!"
Silence equivalent to melee.
A cohort of ghosts
released in the theater.
Exuberance blackens.
Waves of Furies break at the footlights.
I think I'll go back
to The Old Hotel
and take a snooze.
In the gorge behind such desperation
my spirit shall find respite in its opal.
Thank god there's a fork in the venue.
Jacinth has essential
concordat with Wrench Boy.
"We get along fine
with or without youth's exuberance."
Just violet and Wrench Boy in syzygy
biding happenstance.
Then take the show on the road.
Never Tire of The Road
6
Even at this
critical moment:
Black Lake.
Is Victory our focus
or the courage of the road?
For the figure of Victory
summons its nemesis.
The Door Keep bows
and bids us enter.
What is to come
is coming
now.
Jacinth at her cauldron.
Nemesis her intimate.
The figure of Victory
assailed by ghosts.
Wrench Boy's avatars dissolve
into distinct singularities.
The keepers of the thresholds
resign their posts.
Crystal hides in a black cloud.
She's incommensurate with the Dagda.
He has his own universe.
His enormous penis, wielded like a rake,
his bloated maw--
but his magic is incomparable.
Nemesis operates drones and paid operatives,
informants and civil armies
eager to express new technologies.
Art works proliferate to the infinite
realizing continuum.
Mammoth puppets and masks.
Vivid ghosts for the Oligarch's Garden.
Twenty avatars of Jaguar
--youths in jaguar masks
with wrench, rake, and hammer for headgear--
manifest out of the multitude
to energize the street mass.
Presence is distributed,
unanticipatable,
ubiquitous.
Cyber wars proceed apace--
no sides--just hubs
and networks interpenetrating networks--
the mathematics whereof
grows in heads
and the sad rain falls
on dilapidated suburbs
the coastal cities submerged
underground industries
rattle the surfaces
microbes and crocodiles
civilization
is a gorge
but its opals appear
in street corner kiosks
currencies spring up and dissipate
mints prolific as gardens.
The Old Hotel runs the banks
like temporary autonomous currency depots.
Rats eat African Rattles.
[]
Advice to both singulars and multiples:
Make your opals invisible;
seal up your gorge;
silence your African Rattle
till the right time comes.
Courage must grow octopus tentacles.
The Old Hotels on the march
scramble or vanish
into their own "disappearances chambers"
each the form of its own ghost,
each exuberance
its own nemesis.
There's no such thing as a garden
but that it is linked onto spiders'
surveillance outreach:
"If you see something,
say something"
to the nearest operative,
every sentient entity
an information depot
"the people defeated
cannot be united"
Hammerhead
has two heads--
one of courage,
one of deceit.
Everything reverts
to its own special obliquity.
Even victory.
Everything has two heads.
Even a garden.
[]
Some people turn into grackles
and eat opals.
Jacinth beckons Long River.
Her violets flourish
on waters from Black Lake.
Universal sacrifice
reverses the broken garden, certainly,
but this method is not preferable
to incubation's slumber.
Reverse the rite.
Jacinth performs this;
extracts the fork from our courage.
When plan A terminates, plan B;
if B fails, C. And so on through the alphabecedarian.
Nemesis itself is a spirit.
Anyone can fortify on silence.
Even courage divides; you go down this street,
I'll go back up the other.
Nemesis hunts and haunts
the revivified garden
but we don't want your garden.
The Gate Keeper's paid off by the Dagda.
Jacinth celebrates intelligential focus.
Victory comes with Right Thought and Higher Happenstance.
Is Now The Time?
[]
Together we intone this:
"Ancient Jacinth, maintain your focus.
May Victory permeate your happenstance.
Do you have happenstance?
Ageless exuberance validates The Gorge.
Violets fall from your tresses.
Great Mistress of Obliquity, exuberant Jacinth, old lady:
will you let us pass through The Door?
We put our ghosts in a bottle,
squeeze exuberance out of our happenstance.
But the armies are razing our cities
and sowing salt in our fields.
Where shall we live?
What will we eat?
They have broken our theurgical umbrellas
and put spiders in our shoes.
What shall we wear?
We focus on fading violets--
credit tokens redeemable
at the shops in The Old Hotel.
There are rooms and suites without limit--
available if you are an avatar,
but pawns and peons like us
can't get passed the doorkeep.
We are ghosts to haunt the Nemesis--
are you The Nemesis?
retire to Deep Storage when the dearth grows frightful.
At last we made a melee
out in the Oligarch's Garden,
scrambled the records of The Old Hotel,
ate fistfuls of violets and arrived at Black Lake.
No doorkeep there! but Crystal
and Wrench Boy in syzygy,
violet fields on the margins,
The Higher Hammerhead was with us,
exuberant.
No Nemesis anywhere.
No Victory."
Never Tire of The Road
7
I pondered:
"Shall The Rite comprise us
as ten thousand voices--
jaguars at the hubs
changing places
with Exuberance,
every jaguar another mind
in The People's Cauldron--
obliquity obsolete,
happenstance the materium,
Crystal herself
subject to the Assembly's validation,
yet never recast in the forge
if approbation be denied.
I think I might get used to this
if I myself am multiple,
farewell to obliquity,
Jaguar reborn
as himself
just as he is
in The Old Hotel.
Why there?
Who can speak for us all
and why should he?
Courage is openness,
the capability of the negative.
How broad
is happenstance!
Hammerhead has no
easy time of this--
he never had.
There's a jaguar
in each of us,
and uses remain
for tactics of obliquity.
Black Lake
shivers
maturity.
[]
The Great Gorge appears and recedes.
Black Lake exceeds its apparency.
Rejected, any of us repairs to her opal
in spirit, self-collected, a stone
without issuance but issuing,
appearance in obliquity, pure crystal
without respect to nemesis qua impurity
exceeding apparency. No two avatars
of Jaguar
raise the same quality.
Each of us
repairs
in slumber
passing The Gate Keeper Guardian
of The Veil--
we are together
in The Garden
passed where the curtain falls.
Jaguar, the archetype,
dwells in obliquity.
[]
Long River, at this juncture,
is truly unanticipatable--
where it rushes, where it turns,
ox-bow or slow rocky trickle.
Here does the cauldron bubble,
here its surface is corrupted
by a filmy scum.
These events exceed their own ritual
and proliferate out of The Gorge,
a mere glance at which renders it
infinite and
invisible,
jaguars leaping
from rippling folds in the sediment
through ten-thousand urban settlements.
Invisible, a ceremony of Jacinths,
each the being of her nexus
at her juncture along Long River--
Wrench Boy and Wrench Girl in syzygy.
Even the Door-Keeps participate.
There are no barriers, no baffles;
the conflagration increases--
Long River, tumultuous
out of obliquity,
not into it.
The thought of Black Lake
quite possible
for the zealot
or the child, rather, indeed, for any of us.
It irrigates the People's Garden.
We issue African Rattles to everyone.
We issue animate crystals.
The Door Keep raises a crystal
which flashes in the facets of all of us.
Happenstance bifurcates daily
and rejoins itself at night.
Victory is the flux of Long River,
whether it rushes on ahead
or flows in obliquity.
Jaguar never loses his focus
when Jaguar holds in his paw
a man-sized African Rattle--
a Rattle that scatters seeds out of Africa
across the People's Garden;
that is, across Being's apparency--
African Rattles whose sounds
are like a long river.
[]
Where'd everybody go?
Back into the Gorge to get Melee.
Asleep in The Gorge?
No.
She was gathering her jaguars
just ahead up Long River,
an African Rattle igniting her flaming freckles
while Black Lake forever
settles and whispers
under Happenstance
where people come into
their own minds.
Never Tire Of The Road
8
What can my opal show me?
What shall I find
in The Old Hotel?
Even as I get passed the Doorkeep
and The Old Hotel itself
maintains a strenuous silence--
my own knowledge is my nemesis.
My Hammerhead cannot be silent.
His occupancy of this old hotel
works its cognitive rituals
till a brainstorm of jaguars
configures my intelligence
in such a manner
that I must call it nemesis.
My Wrench Boy works things otherwise.
His Old Hotel is a hall of generative silences,
his rituals modulate Deep Storage
and resonate The Gorge.
But what does all of this show me?
And where is the root and impetus
for this perpetual inquiry?
[]
No news
from the tree tops.
No news
from the camps.
The hidden inventions, for the moment,
stored in their sheaths.
Hammerhead at large
in his spurious opal;
the ghostly avatars
preparing their next move.
Happenstance, silent.
Sleep occupies Jacinth.
The opal clears
preparing conditions
for The Rite.
Tamp down exuberance.
Staunch Melee.
The Old Hotel as The World
at least is subject
to fierce transformations.
The geothermal activities of The Gorge
foster courage.
Even if The Old Hotel
sustains its obliquity,
what I think
is "The World"
is my nemesis.
Let silence fascinate The Old Hotel
and nothing at all
appear in my opal.
Let happenstance saturate
the present phase of The Rite.
Let me look.
Let me listen
through the strange ministrations
of my own quiescent
African Rattles
into the cabinets and data banks
arrayed in Deep Storage
with the very zenith
of acuity.
Let Hammerhead have his opal:
my nemesis remains what I make of this.
[]
Each archetype invoked from Deep Storage
might as well have arrived
in Hammerhead's opal.
It is not its obliquity that harasses me,
nor does Long River's
serenity adequately soothe.
Do you discern the course of this inquiry?
Your silence will activate Deep Storage.
You can always think something up.
Anyone, including
all varieties of myself,
might just as well be Hammerhead
off on one of his quests--
so little does any of this
finally deliver
the adequate opal.
All the symbols
convene upon one
sacrificial garden--
The Garden of Happenstance--
offered to Black Lake--
Deep Storage in its entirety--
on the end of so many stalks
so many glowing opals--
that is the Garden of Slumbers.
And the gardener is Princess Crystal.
She pulls herself out of Deep Storage,
and with the image of herself all shiny,
declares herself Victory.
[]
Happenstance renews
when Deep Storage is silent.
[]
One paragraph cannot
be changed for another,
but perhaps succession counts.
Now we are here,
not in some cognitive otherwhere
that is Black Lake.
And The Old Hotel
allows silence
to resonate Black Lake.
And in The Old Hotel
it is possible that Nemesis
completes herself in Happenstance--
she herself an idea
out of some data file
lodged in Deep Storage
Melee dissolves.
[]
I cannot read in my opal
what cannot occur
in The Old Hotel.
Change focus
and change it again.
The cognitive impossibilities
are not relieved
by archaic attribution as Nemesis.
Ontology forks.
The Old Hotel
gives rise to fresh opals.
My Hammerhead may be his own nemesis
whose name is Wrench Boy.
Never Tire of the Road
9
You might say that African Rattle
came out of The Gorge or was born there.
This would have nothing at all
to do with actual happenstance.
The Gorge was, in one sense, in Africa;
in another it abided in a universe
inhabited only by ghosts.
Choose your obliquity.
Wrench Boy, contrariwise,
produced his own ghosts.
For him to countenance The Gorge
was to gaze in his opal.
He was born in The Old Hotel
(or it from him--your choice).
Obliquity is no victory
but a gorge full of ghosts.
Charge up your opal
until there's a fork in the garden.
[]
Formally, you are our nemesis.
If you have an African Rattle,
how can I be Wrench Boy?
I admit it.
But Happenstance so occasions the rhetoric
that for the most part I can ignore you,
though not here, not today.
Today we meet in The Gorge.
There is a ghost in your silence, a huge one.
And The Gorge in which we share a berth
is not an old hotel, I can tell you that.
But I have an opal,
whereas you have me.
We share a ghostly ontology.
This need not seed cognitive melee,
but it might.
It requires some practice to ward off
limitless bifurcation
or else to let it build.
[]
Violet is Jacinth.
Try to stay focused on that one.
I cannot recommend methodology
for your managing Jaguar,
assuming you want one.
On the other hand, all business we conduct here
comprises instruction
in how to access your opal.
Perhaps, now that I think of it,
you'll find your spirit jaguar
by returning to our gorge.
[]
Who are you?
I leave that to you
to discern or decide.
Have courage.
Countenance bifurcation.
Your sacrifice gains you entrance to our Rite
and The Rite is All.
[]
The Gorge imparts its darkness
to the white susurrus of African Rattle.
Together their silence
renders Obliquity sacred.
There is, and here I declare it,
a fork in the African Rattle
such that it shares affinity
(that is an intimacy)
with the Secrets of Time. Why?
Because sound does.
[]
Jaguar's fork
turns sleep towards The Gorge
passed the Doorkeep
till the opal itself
has use for its nemesis
and Jacinth
at her black pot
appears to darken the garden.
Look around you.
Do you see The Old Hotel?
[]
No?
You have yet to identify your opal.
Consider me a spirit,
a kind of intelligential crystal
of such complexity
that the quiet smoke of the opal
falls out from it
in sweet simplicity
as a gift from Deep Storage.
Surely you have found that.
Let Jacinth carry your shadow.
Soon the Wrench Boy
peculiar to you will conduct you
straight to Black Lake,
and I will not be your nemesis, but I warn you.
and do put my words in your heart,
Wrench Boy can switch in minute
to A Trickster's obliquity.
Keep your focus and be him.
I know I am.
[]
As for Hammerhead,
he carries a fork
among his other accouterments,
and you cannot integrate his attitudes
with Long River merely.
It is not Time
that heals his wounds.
Contumely keeps him at a distance from your Wrench Boy.
[]
When not in use,
keep your African Rattle wrapped in fabric,
preferably silk or wool.
The point is to constrain its obliquity
lest the indomitable courage contained
in both sound and silence
manipulate Long River
without your intent,
that is to say, warp time.
Never lose sight of your opal
as means of keeping intent
this side of melee.
You must study to discover
in just what sense
The Rite is All.
[]
Jacinth sits
at the lip of The Gorge--
that's her pot.
Exuberance flows like a current through Wrench Boy.
Obliquity itself is no issue
if you manage your focus.
Never Tire of The Road
10
You cannot begin with a melee or with a garden.
Nemesis must wait
for your garden to flourish.
Black Lake waits upon silence.
Victory dissolves in Black Lake.
Garden zombies zoom away
in a flourish of African Rattles.
Enter: The Gorge.
Impossible to anticipate
what might come out of it,
what you might find there:
eternal silence
or a forest of jaguars.
What arranges Order?
A garden.
What sources beings and dreams?
Black Lake.
African Rattles will do for mediation.
A good night's sleep
down along Long River
will bring a world.
Focus on the fabulous:
an African Rattle as big as an oak.
Such was the African Rattle conjured by Jacinth.
What mediation
mediated that?
The Old Hotel.
She went to sleep
in mediation's chamber
and then in a trice
she was there at Black Lake.
[]
You cannot misarrange Long River
or turn a garden to stone.
Why not?
There is a limit to inquiry
beyond which even order is melee.
Then let's put a fork in procedure
and stipulate five pointy tines.
One points a path through to crystal.
This is the way of awakeness.
All of the others
bring various species of sleep.
[]
Deep Storage suddenly manifested
an army of Hammerheads.
I don't mean produced one,
but that every address in central memory
was signed by one of his avatars.
Obliquity skewed the entire arrangement.
No one could find
the particular opal she was looking for.
There was an extraordinary uproar
as if the susurrus of ten-thousand rattles
culled from the whole continent of Africa
contributed their sonorities
to a mighty melee.
Long River was disarranged--
the individual molecules of time
broke from their chains.
No summoning of courage,
no cohort of spirits or ghosts
could bring those African Rattles
back to their assemblies
of crystalline sounds.
Nemesis had found its garden--
no arrangement or order at all
but transcendence down
to an essence of happenstance merely.
[]
An African Rattle on a cosmic scale.
How big is that?
As big as an oak tree, surely.
But Black Lake renders all scales
either at once or severally
an n-dimensional crystal of hypersound--
molecules of time
n-dimensionally distributed
so that Long River
comes together again
in some fabulous configuration
to no one's delight except Wrench Boy's;
and it doesn't happen when he sleeps
and it doesn't come out of Deep Storage
but his better half and his courage
is flaming-freckled Melee
and when they're together
their silence is their jaguar
and Happenstance itself
transcendent metier.
[]
Jaguar begins in exuberance
and proceeds on the prowl through Victory
and everybody else's melee
to energize The Rite, that sober totality.
He comes round the bend
in the great stand of oak trees,
an ominous presence from obliquity.
It takes courage simply to be
when you think he's around.
Don't think. That's the first thing.
Let Black Lake
absorb and then stow your exuberance.
Let quiet cover your garden.
This establishes the ambience.
Perhaps it is best
that you yourself be the Doorkeep.
Keep silence.
[]
If the guests arrive from Black Lake
somnambulist bright-eyed or zombie,
hand each one an African Rattle
the interior of whose gourd bulb
is a space that is like Black Lake.
Long River dissipates
their somnolent, spurious victory.
Melee will master their sleep.
But because they come from Black lake,
the transcendent tenor of its neutralized exuberance
as the performance proceeds
beyond all denouement
will find us all
in a phase of awakening.
Interval
Tongs said:
"They are not molecules
if Long River diffragilates
but loops or knots
or nine-dimensional manifolds
encompassing the points
at the very bottom of the small.
Is there a god of the miniscule?--
an avatar of Hammerhead, naturally.
And Time is made out of his essential machinations--
Long River's, as you say, "molecules"--
they flash in radical explosion
creating conditions imagination itself
can happily build on."
It was impossible to follow his thought
for the tongs he manipulated in his fingers as he talked
were themselves diffragilating rapidly
and in so interesting a fashion
that Dr. Tongs' pedantry had no power
to trump his imagery.
Everything he touched
became infinitely smooth.
No resistance anywhere. No counterforce
to stop inertial intransigence.
No bumps or cracks or crevices
to offer vital niches in The Gorge--
all promulgations rescinded,
all entities resolved.
"Enough of this," cried Hammerhead,
and the blue tongs Dr. Tongs wielded
snapped shut,
and the roughnesses of everything
reclaimed their surfaces,
and the avatars of Hammerhead
captured Dr. Tongs
and put him in a barrow
and hauled him off.
When Tongs was out of sight
Wrench Boy popped up on his box,
for it was he that had manifested
as Dr. Tongs. He said:
"'Tongs' is actually 'sTong' as in 'sTong-pa'
and an emptiness
that is never smooth
opened over The Collective.
Never Tire of The Road
11
Jacinth sat by Long River
erecting a Canopy of Obliquity
to manipulate Long River, or coax her
into the General Rite.
She would require participation
from a cohort of ghosts and a jaguar.
The Rite was her whole world.
If you see her,
you are in her.
Long River could flow as a melee
as it tumbled down chasms
and washed away at last The Oligarch's Garden,
but what tenacity does it take to sustain
the spirit that carries a world?--
as if an old hotel
on a hill above Long River
were the site of The Rite
and its manifold transformations
and variously accoutered chambers
simulated what cannot change.
The world would never die,
no matter the melee.
She would sustain her power
to manage her focus
and keep Deep Storage for conjuring all things needful
and to serve as a conduit and cache
when she needed to hold zombies at bay.
[]
There is a fork beyond
the melee managed by focus--
The Higher Happenstance truly
that never interferes with The Rite
directly,
but Long River, however
diverted or broken
into its granular dispersions
cannot be misdirected.
It cannot be coaxed--
no more than the Absolute Opal,
however smoky or crazed,
can be teased from the realms of her silence.
But we know about Jaguar.
He circumambulates the Rite site
as if he were Long River
running in circles to sustain it.
Circularity brings courage to a focus.
And is this not
a secret of The Gorge--
that it has a circular rim,
and the darkness of its silence
focuses The Rite?
But the danger comes from Deep Storage
that will not be circumscribed.
There are secrets in its silence,
enscripted with strange characters
and hidden away
in crystal vaults --
African Rattles with powers yet to be reckoned with,
gardens with pharmacologies
both deleterious and benign.
And there are certain
Avatars of Hammerhead
imprisoned in a darkness
before the foundations of the world
unknown even to him -- Oh yes!
Avatars preceding their archetypes--
unholy melee of ontogeny--
nemesis to all cognitive order
as a fork in Being itself,
impossible ontology.
The place is called "Tornado Island"
because it runs all circles awry
and beggars your focus if its phase
in your time
comes over you.
Such a phase would come over Jaguar
and her name and soul
henceforth be called Melee.
[]
Meanwhile the African Rattles
were doled out by doorkeeps
and the vibes of The Gorge
lent character to The Old Hotel.
Melee retired to Black Lake,
and Black Lake's cohorts of spirits,
though always on call,
were gathered in deep
supernal slumber.
[]
Hammerhead is the Guardian of Focus
or can be -- should be --
when perennial bifurcation
all but unmans Wrench Boy,
and the zombies of exuberance
threaten even Melee.
Crystal has, form the beginning,
mastered her slumber.
That is both her nature and her style.
And Jaguar drags Long River
in an oxbow about
Tornado Island--
this world's Tornado Island--
on commission from Black Lake.
Never Tire of The Road
12
The Philosophers' Zombies
live on Tornado Island
trapped in cages of crystal
as if in Deep Storage.
Their absence of sentience
is deeper than silence.
Their repertoire of behaviors
Deep Storage maintains.
What of the Zombie's Opal?
He has none.
What of Black Lake?
The Zombie's drama unfolds in The Old Hotel.
Each archetype realizes one Zombie,
or so we stipulate.
We consult with high solemnity
our Opal.
[]
As long as she manages Deep Storage,
Jacinth maintains her estate.
Long River runs round her and through her.
Black Lake animates her gorge.
The discrepancies in Deep Storage
that, were she cognizant of them,
might agitate her opal,
Jacinth mistakes for a stimulus to eccentric exuberance
and quells them,
and this in itself
is cause for a fork in her fate.
No doorkeep steps
in Jacinth's doorway.
Not even Hammerhead.
Not even Sleep.
What if The Old Hotel
as in her fantasy
were The World? :
Civilization "as we know it";
Deep Storage its history;
sacrifice its cover story;
melee perennially its predicament.
The Great Gorge is a monstrance,
a pit of non-forgivingness,
margins and hollows
forever diminishing--
better be a zombie than a citizen or other inhabitant.
But that world
is no
old hotel.
[]
Wrench Boy's enlightened
perfect dispossession
is perfectly zomboid in this:
its essence betrays no evidence.
Not even Jacinth is like this.
Her attachment to the world as a rite
perfectly occupies Jacinth,
though only Melee can see this.
To the rest of the collective
her proximity to The Gorge
is as dark as Deep Storage.
When she peers in her opal
in a ceremony -- a sacrifice
to elevate cognizance --
when she performs
with elegant hand-passes and a cackle,
it appears that the somber office of her ritual
consumes existence itself
and possesses the absolute dignity
(including the harmonic of darkness)
that manifests only for a being
intimate with Black Lake,
as, indeed, when Jacinth
peers in her opal
her dignified exuberance
shows that she is.
[]
Tornado Island
is an archetypal garden.
It can happen pretty much anywhere.
Its pattern is kept in Deep Storage,
not at all under lock and key.
Jaguars, as we know, trot round it
with feline exuberance;
that is, as if chasing their prey,
which, depending upon focus,
might be flesh or intellect --
the Philosophers' Object
under current discussion
at some think tank or general assembly
in The Old Hotel --
quite ferocious.
[]
At the eye of the tornado
is a crystal.
Its waters sucked up from Black Lake
are churned till they smell of The Gorge --
particles of concepts and mythemes from anywhere.
African Rattle himself
is at home there--
home away from home.
His spirit has passed through Deep Storage
and come out strangely refreshed,
so his susurrus is changed and charged
with a peculiarly intelligent sonority.
[]
Wrench Boy's dispossession
is strangely without an object, without a quality.
Wrench Boy himself would prefer
to treat it as
some sort of rite, but what rite?
It is not identical
to perfection of focus,
though his opal is pure
and his fate indistinct
from the higher regions of Happenstance.
And exactly that
which is extracted
from the Zombie,
he is essentially.
No rite effects that.
Black Lake returns
to its perfect containment
because of him.
Even exuberance
is superfluous
and needs
neither to be suppressed
nor assumed.
Wrench Boy finds Deep Storage
as a structure interior to an instant;
that is to say,
no more anything at all
than any other effulgence or contrivance.
Nemesis
is everything
and nothing.
All thoughts
are ghosts. Beyond sleep,
beyond nature,
beyond Deep Storage and its Opal,
the exuberance is ours to be close to him.
Crystal is not only his syzygy;
her focus is his act
that empties Deep Storage.
The whole complexus
of these
elite propositions
reconstitute his obliquity.
With that comes The Gorge
and its dark
exuberance--
all perfectly
serviceable.
Black Lake
is the sleep of Wrench Boy
with or without
exuberance or focus.
Being's victory,
if you insist on it,
is always anterior
to the foundations
of any
world.
Never Tire of The Road
13
The philosophical zombies
with few exceptions
were the philosophers themselves.
How many anywhere
prepared themselves in scrying?
Precious few, I tell you.
[]
Hammerhead himself
repaired to Tornado Island.
His journey came at a fork
in his philosophical itinerary.
He had become curious about ghosts
following the advent of his embryo, you remember.
To counteract or compensate
any errancy associated to this journey,
he supplied himself with a five-tined fork
and a hefty African Rattle.
He performed a somewhat perfunctory sacrifice
of one of his less versatile mallet-like hammers--
it was merely an ornament
made of soft wood
and he heaved it
or made a show of heaving it,
though it weighed scarcely enough to sink it
against the fetid wind
as it fell into the gorge.
The African Rattle and fork, he thought,
would prove necessary instruments
as events at Tornado Island
began to unfold.
There was a brilliant crystal in the black cloud
directly above
the perpetual tornado that marked the place.
Beneath the surface
safe from the weather
a vault for deep storage.
The zombies perpetually performed
a certain intellectual ritual:
They sat themselves in a garden
and discoursed with each other on the matter
of whether consciousness
were possible or impossible
or did it exist off somewhere
far away from Tornado Island
or were they themselves
somehow possessed of it unbeknownst.
Nuances of the discussion
branched
in many bifurcations,
some zombies asserting
the conscious mind
would make a sound
just like an African Rattle,
others averring
it needs must take
visual form
like the radiant crystal
that hovered so mysteriously above
their native island.
There was a gate to the garden,
and no one knew if its keeper
in fact were conscious or not.
He was no philosophical zombie,
but kept an uncanny focus in his eye
and almost never moved
except to open the gate
or keep some intruder
forcibly away.
[]
Hammerhead, of course,
was conscious enough,
but he had his doubts.
That's why he carried a fork.
Perhaps he was asleep.
The fork might puncture his dream.
The fact that he wore an opal on a chain
and that the opal itself
betokened his consciousness -- well,
he had not yet
been initiate
to that.
Meanwhile he saw that the gate keeper
was standing perfectly still,
an African Rattle poised at his side like a scepter.
No doubt this fellow
would prove to be his nemesis
conscious or no.
[]
Thank God for Happenstance.
As if the coming war
were defeated
before retaliatory ambuscades
were set within the crystals.
[]
Wrench Boy's consciousness
though supernal
and manifest truly
in his illimitable exuberance
was
as such
perfectly imperceptible.
He was there
fully awake
at the rim of The Gorge,
but none of the philosophers
saw or heard
or in any other manner
took cognizance of him.
The fork of dialectics
could not stab the opal,
for the fork itself
misses obliquity
in the very gesture
that necessitates it.
[]
On Tornado Island
even sleep
forked. Jacinth
cannily
would never go there.
Her rite
excised
every simulacrum of consciousness
beforehand
burning the zombies off
in the vigorous crystal gorges of her cauldron.
She had tried to speak to Hammerhead
about all this,
and it was she who had blessed him
with his ornamental opal
but to little avail.
His attention was fixed
on that celestial crystal
above the immoveable super-cell
visible from everywhere.
At the very thought of Tornado Island
his rather stupid exuberance,
his fool-hardy, moody courage
took birth from his gorge
and soon would produce
a melee in his mind.
This phase was with him
habitual.
[]
Black Lake covers Being itself
and shines in its blackness
with a consciousness perfectly
pure and perfectly empty.
To the Zombies, that lake is but a word,
and their philosophers superciliously
dismiss it from existence
into the Philosophers' Gorge
along with archaic rites
that they treat with contempt
and do not even accord
the dignity of nemesis,
unaware that these rites themselves
both prepared them
and were prepared to undo them.
[]
The Zombies show exuberance
but there really is something
peculiar and stale about it.
Not that the rest of us
might not show such staleness as well,
but still -- if you know they are Zombies . . .
[]
The Doorkeep is another case.
Is he actually asleep?
Does his stare
signify a modicum of sentience
acquired by consummate effort?
Or is he Zombie too?
Just an odd specimen.
[]
Jaguar is an ordinary, well-endowed,
intelligent human,
with a big cat's head
and an over-plus of energy --
enough to equip
The Old Hotel
with a different sort of doorkeep.
And Long River --
give it but a proper context
and it comes alive, surely,
but consciousness?
Nymphs, possibly. A god
to direct or divert it.
But the fluent thing itself?
[]
Black Lake requires no doorkeep.
African Rattles ring its shores
with appropriate sonorities,
but truly its qualities reflect
only those who approach it,
and like the deepest sense of Deep Storage itself
all forks submit before it
and its sentient mind
is most itself
in Silence.
Never Tire of The Road
14
Wench Boy's Zombies
were out of focus,
confused among his avatars.
They pervaded The Rite
as gurus, pundits,
politicos, and magnates
in every worldly
and other-worldly endeavor.
They were not distinguished
by absence of focus,
but if you looked in your opal
you found they were not there.
Zombies only rarely
instigated Melee --
she herself, of course,
was adorned with a radiant opal.
But the garden on
Tornado Island
where the Zombies held assembly
was a place that Melee
visited frequently
to exercise and put to work
her focus.
[]
Hammerhead's self-doubt
generates a bifurcation among his avatars.
Some possess opals, some not,
with the consequences one might read about in Red Book.
[]
Deep-streamed and essentially lazy,
Long River is its own Zombie.
Its avatars, if tributaries,
are like itself.
They are rivers of Living Time.
They can flow in a torrent of watery focus,
dry out down to a bed of rocks,
or rush in a melee;
but as water, rock, and melee,
they may in time prove sentient --
well, just so.
[]
Melee wishes to awaken Hammerhead,
and in as much as she can engineer Happenstance,
she can, from time to time,
interfere with his slumber.
But the nemesis of Hammerhead
is neither lassitude nor lack
of courage. It is doubt
that stands a doorkeep
before the garden of his consciousness.
[]
Focus is a curious case.
It can organize your African Rattle,
set your exuberance to good account.
But if, say, Hammerhead
sets his mind on Wrench Boy,
all his African Rattles
shake up a rumpus,
and if there is too sharp a focus,
consciousness itself grows deleterious.
[]
Jacinth at her Rite
has excellent focus,
approaching that of Wrench Boy's.
But neither his focus nor his exuberance
is essential to the final
dispossession of his consciousness.
If African Rattle, in his case,
betokens an intentional effect,
it is no bifurcation in our depiction of his nature
to say that its music is absolute and uncaused.
There is no chain of command
between will and event.
[]
Jaguar thinks about Zombies,
not because of "doubt" like Hammerhead,
but to explore with his intelligence
the ontology of spirit.
His focus glows in silence.
His focus can countenance melee.
His exuberance is food for his garden.
When the Zombies toy with their Rattles out of Africa,
he tries to focus on the spirit
with which they carry on
such activity.
And here he errs,
perhaps as much as Hammerhead.
Cognitive melee intervenes--
because with Zombies it is impossible
to positively form
an image of their lack.
[]
Jaguar is also enthralled with Tornado Island.
He sees it in his sleep,
for Jaguar's obliquity
is a ferocious spirit,
when he sleeps.
Not melee merely, but for him
Tornado Island is like an old hotel--
its ambient gorge and sacrificial severity,
its rage of African Rattles,
ceremonial drums,
drums of tornado-like fury--
he sees all this in his opal
with crystalline clarity
and associates it
to the Zombies locked in their rings.
[]
Sacrifice is not
in the repertoire of Wrench Boy.
When it occurs, its account,
cannot, it seems to him,
be properly balanced,
because Being itself
is not on account.
The world is asleep and its garden
might was well be attended
by philosophical Zombies
as contemplate African Rattles,
in or out of focus.
[]
Wrench Boy attends his Zombies
like a mind intent
upon errant possibilities
in a world where errancy itself
were not possible.
But Deep Storage
is beyond
The Possible--
hence the depths depictable
in the figure of The Garden.
Thus does Wrench Boy
manage his focus
and his focus consorts with his Melee.
Interval
Double Tornado.
As if in phyllotaxis--
pine-cone or sunflower--
two funnels
spiraling
against each other
around an immobile
"conical meristem"--
impossible
in nature
but in the mind
of Hammerhead--
insanity itself.
Or the magic of contrary forces--
neutralization
in meteorological analogy
when the cosmos
falls into itself
and the rigid ontologies
of everyone
return to the single crystal
(say)
above the double
funnel--
Hammerhead drove himself crazy
thinking this
while Wrench Boy (or was it Jaguar?) saw
the system of possible morphologies
as algorithm with parameters--
he stood on the porch
of The Old Hotel--
overlooking the enormous chasm
across to Tornado Island--
double funnel and cloud black canopy
with radiant crystal
above it
and Jaguars running around it
both ways at the base
as if it were no tornado
but its inversion as a fountain
and Zombies sitting thinking thinking thinking
without an opal
to hold their thinking
in . . .
Never Tire of the Road
15
(Occupy Poughkeepsie 12-1-11, 1: AM, waiting for the police to arrive)
Victory
sleeps
in sacrifice.
The energies
align
on the wrong
sides.
Whose sleep
are you in?
If you hold
a fist full of violets
while African Rattles
tighten their tinnitus,
your quiet trip down Long River
may almost be at an end.
Jacinth sleeps
to instigate Wrench Boy's focus.
What's on her mind?
Long River narrows
then takes a plunge. Deep
where memories of sudden denouement
come out of storage.
But the event?
Sleep does not
predictably terminate.
Jacinth bides her Wrench Boy.
Is Nemesis imminent or not?
We make a patch-work
of exuberance.
Sacrifice is not generally
the work of Long River
unless its moments
give, each, over
to its fellow
in the flow.
But a cohort of doorkeeps
with their African Rattles?
[]
Wrench Boy cultivates
his violets in silence,
for he cannot
even if he wills it
absent him from Black Lake.
Ominously
the chassis bucks
as if the parked sedan
wants to be up and moving. "But no,"
thinks Jacinth.
"We'll keep biding our Wrench Boy
as the night wanes,
take courage
in how the fork hovers.
Crystal,
though she makes herself scare,
is never irrelevant.
See how here, in this opal,
the time of Long River
is an impertinent sleep.
The rattles may start up at any moment
and all Africa break loose--
no more reticence or slumber.
The spirit is certain and committed,
but does its vehicle truly
understand its charge?
We all await the event,
I attending my opal.
For the purpose of our vigil,
Happenstance is All.
This sleep paints violets as Nemesis, Victory
is not
on the agenda
of the imaginable--
but a regimen of beings
formally doorkeeps
sleepy no more
but like jaguars--
the lost sleep of jaguars--
to get a rise out of Wrench Boy.
If I am Jacinth
it is to keep
Long River in play
through however intricate
our collective slumber,
do we wake?
Can we saturate the melee
that almost in every moment
threatens to pronounce itself?
Melee, do you think it sufficient
to zoom through The Old Hotel
agitating the random night guests from their slumber
as you well have power to do,
but then to let them
sleep again
having put an inter-
pretation on
that agitation
such that nothing
of final pertinence
will seem to them
ever to come of it?
Hammerhead himself
makes a cameo appearance
and Melee makes a nod
to Black Lake."
"I don't expect this to end prematurely,"
says Wrench Boy.
"Jacinth's preternaturally
full of the juice
of The Gorge.
And whose garden is it, anyway?
That our Nemesis seems wont to have it,
to have us out of it so peremptorily,
that the Doorkeep
has to be subverted,
Long River diverted,
our own courage
vehemently tested?
But do we really want to say
the world is OURS?
We are well-prepared now,
some of us having looked long and deep in Deep Storage
and plucked Obliquity out from its maw like a pearl.
Let Discussion proceed apace
as the night wanes."
Thus spoke Wrench Boy.
And Wrench Boy found Jaguar
filing his teeth with a big rake.
Never Tire of the Road
16
Jaguar Exuberance
might well be lethal.
It fills one's opal
(such exuberance does)
with shooting hot crystal spicules,
a melee of furious forces and interesting figures
out of abstract Deep Storage.
You can collect these crystal spicules
later, if you survive them,
if your exuberance
wants them,
or if your courage
to document ferocious phenomena
gets the better of your will.
It can happen while you sleep.
Melee puts a fork in your own exuberance;
Crystal infects your courage
with her own imperative obliquities
and knocks down your personal doorkeep
so that a long river of cognitive obliquity
skews your focus
and you listen to African Rattles to get the news.
Not that the obliquity of Crystal
is her aberration
or errant exuberance merely,
or the fruit of your particular errancy.
You might be skewed
jump from your being sprung
out of Black Lake, how do I know?
Damn, it is difficult
to find a crack in this singular music.
African Rattle might as well be my nemesis.
I have no enthusiasm at all
for spicules of crystal
shooting from obliquity,
and Jaguar himself
has purified Happenstance
of my exogenous exuberance.
Jacinth! Do come here.
I need your Wrench Boy.
I need his vigilance
vis a vis Deep Storage
and your deep bubbling cauldron.
My issue is this:
That the intimate exodus
from thought and its presentations
does not land one plump in the midst
of exogenous Happenstance purely.
One cannot just dive
with zest or with cunning lassitude
into a sonorous forest of African Rattles
or into a gorge
to dissuade oneself
in a virulent gesture
of whatever presentational exuberance, O Jacinth,
happenstance or habitude
inflicts upon the culture of your thought
so that the Ideality of your crystal
switches its mode and comes Real.
The Spirit that regulates this business,
if it is spirit or business, Old Jacinth,
is a veritable melee of obliquity.
My point is not at all
that I find it problematic, not at all.
I use The Gorge.
I do The Rite.
I find Exuberance foaming
out of the Gorge of my Mentor.
Her Gorge is my very Garden, and so forth.
Jaguar is my Victory, and so forth.
There is no breach
twixt Happenstance and Garden . . .
[]
Jacinth was breathing
in deep and stertorous
in- and exhalations
as if she were sucking some force
out of Deep Storage
to charge each chamber
of The Old Hotel
with its own spectacular Wrench Boy,
to switch the modality of exuberance
into the taut regime of bright Crystal;
obliquity to compensate melee,
communion with Deep Storage
to obviate the distress
that obviously possessed me
whether I confessed it or no.
She issued to me
an African Rattle
to shake out what spurious,
non-adaptive exuberance
in fact I had not owned up to.
The night broke in two.
Where did I go?
The courage of one of my Others
transmuted my Nemesis.
I became aware of The Gorge
in a new way--
neither Representation
of the Depths
nor Access-Key
to the contents of Deep Storage.
For an instant I was Hammerhead.
In an instant I was not.
Rather than grab onto
so transient an identity,
I kept shaking that African Rattle with its
innumerable cowrie mouths, all a-chatter.
What they said--
no matter if the text of it
were prepared in Deep Storage,
or whether Deep Storage itself,
formless, non-coercive, without message,
confusing or clear: One Thought
sprang out like a violet,
imbued with a Tree of Silence--
leaf, flower, nut,
branch, trunk, root--
all of equal exuberance, O Jacinth,
like a melee's tremulous song . . .
Never Tire of the Road
17
The Old Hotel
hired a new Doorkeep.
This one eschewed deployment
of any African Rattle,
whether cowrie-mouthed
or plain brown charred gourd skin
for the rattle's surface.
No magic.
Inexperienced as he was,
the freshman Doorkeep formed
a liaison with Hammerhead.
Jacinth, seated at her cauldron
construing the whole world,
was definitely out.
There had been complaints.
Not everyone liked
her world
or their position in it.
A fork in the time line was called for.
Hammerhead, for all the checkered
variety of his avatars,
had never manifested as Doorkeep.
Jaguar, in general, kept him at a distance
so that the exuberance of each
never compromised either.
Jacinth's world was shunted
into just one chamber.
She could keep her focus at her cauldron
to amuse the guests.
The Doorkeep would see to it
that the more exotic features of her ontology
would remain--
exotic. Snakes and eagles.
Hammerhead was happy
to play the enforcer,
while Jaguar was free
to prowl about in silence
or otherwise explore
Happenstance
as he saw fit.
How would the new Doorkeep
orient Crystal?
Natural Nemesis
or instrument of focus?
Would the Doorkeep make use of his opal?
A sentinel, after all,
responds to Happenstance.
Happenstance addresses the Doorkeep
without reference to forethought or courage.
If there's good order
in the garden,
if the Jaguar and his avatars
remain in colloquy with Black Lake;
if the fumes of The Gorge keep inside it;
the Doorkeep
at the big black door
of The Old Hotel
could busy himself
watering the violets,
if the Gorge is silent
and the world at large
advertises no amazement
and behaves
just as if
it were asleep.
[]
Forks in general were his nemesis.
You would find none at all in the closets
and hefty wooden cabinets
of The Old Hotel.
The Doorkeep's personal ritual
and the extent of his personal courage
was to keep things perfectly linear,
if not exactly lineal.
It was not always possible.
If the sentinel acquired the form
of an avatar of Hammerhead,
"Forking" was one process
by which avatars
became proliferate.
And the Doorkeep himself
would generate avatars.
When The Old Hotel
multiplied
entrances or chambers
or unaccountably welcomed
avatars of its own nemesis,
the sentinels would have to invent
tactics to manage such Happenstance,
and Happenstance itself
from time to time
manifest jaguars--
avatars or multiple jaguars--
and how would one tell?
Call on Hammerhead--
the Archetype Himself--
if you can attract Him,
because you had equipped yourself
with his form.
But that would be Magic, wouldn't it!
[]
It seemed this job
might prove to be a long river.
The Doorkeep
might even
need a Doorkeep.
Even have to pluck up
a Doorkeep's courage, perform a Doorkeep's
magic
lest Melee come out of Obliquity,
ratchet up in one's habitude
The Doorkeep's Revenge
and open the door
to unmanageable Hammerheads.
[]
And there are many kinds of silence
that at times pervade
The Old Hotel,
not all of them restful.
One is The Nemesis of The Doorkeep,
for Deep Storage under the floorboards
collects a tariff
of silence,
and payment is not voluntary.
He who is remiss
and tries to keep
all his tranquil commodities
suffers sleep that is a melee.
Its silence is broken by
ten-thousand Hammerheads,
every one a purveyor of obliquity.
And Jaguars lurk in the garden
and the garden is hospitable to jaguars.
You had best work out
an arrangement with Wrench Boy,
for he has an arrangement with Melee.
And then there is Black Lake,
whose silence echoes through The Gorge.
And a silence
that is pure and spiritual,
and as Doorkeep
you must know how to seek it--
even from The Gorge--
a true, if unlikely
source for it.
And remember
for a Doorkeep
of The Old Hotel
superficial dignity
is your bulwark,
your refuge,
. . . that
and a fist full of violets . . .
Interval
My opal goes Kantian.
No sooner had Objective Numinon
taken possession of my opal,
than Subjective Numinon
projected itself upon it.
A Dark Excess of Happenstance
obsesses us
and all the members of The Collective
examine each other
to find the Absent Ineffable.
Meanwhile Instrumentality
performs an act
and Action discovers itself
to be irreducible
and infinitely simple
simply.
Never Tire of the Road
18
The Gorge subtending Happenstance
elevates Melee,
for Happenstance rightly
is Wrench Boy's mount. (Giddyup.)
Crystal lends focus to Wrench Boy
whatever the happenstance,
and The Old Hotel,
no matter who's the Doorkeep,
proves hospitable to Crystal.
Even Sleep is never
impervious to Happenstance.
One Wrench Boy to each chamber
in The Old Hotel--a spirit countervening
anyone's nemesis.
So we're free.
Even Hammerhead
free to conspire
with amenable confederates
and convene a world.
We all are.
Jacinth comes back from her absence--
she did time in triviality but survived.
Even Silence survived her absence.
Crystal recovers her influence,
never mind her dominance.
But it is not
any such
mutually confederated world
that is at stake here.
Happenstance has a remainder
that will not be configured away.
The Gorge portends that too.
Nemesis, too, survives--
no symbolic snake and eagle merely,
though what beyond your world
these figures indicate
are truly worthy of your focus.
Analysis neither subjugates
that matter of The Gorge
nor exhausts it through exuberance.
We need a more universal focus
for it is not this garden
that is subject to some threat
but what that locus
of sweet delight
invisibly rests upon.
Jaguar does not deny it.
He sees it.
He stands on that endogenous aspect of Happenstance
that does become in our world.
Wrench Boy does not deny it.
His secret sorrow
provokes what it can.
Neither affect nor demeanor
rings the whole truth of it.
Melee waits in the wings
but this matter obviates
all theatricality.
Truly no human focus
is sufficient unto this.
What then?
In The Old Hotel
Jacinth, at long last,
goes eye-to-eye with Hammerhead.
Hammerhead sees Jacinth
as calamitous silence--
there's nothing there--
no gat-toothed crone maw, no cauldron.
Just a fork
in what ought to be ontology. Two paths:
Is and Is Not. And Jacinth is
Is Not.
She sees him as exuberance
where a vast ghost vaults
ready to dismantle
the topology requisite
any world.
Crystal minds the gap
between their fraught adjacency.
Happenstance in Excess.
Nemesis.
[]
African Rattle is, for the most part,
instrument and medium only.
It doesn't act.
And yet when even The Old Hotel
takes thought,
instrumentality might well
initiate the terms, the conditions,
and provide adjoint matériel
wherewith even a nation of Wrench Boys
might not steer clear of commerce.
[]
Unqualified Action
without mediation
seems the provenance of Crystal.
Sleep has nothing to do with it.
Neither does the scope
of The Rite.
But how Happenstance--its worldless excess and remainder--
intersects with such Action--
I doubt that a glance in my opal
will be sufficient to specify. So I
study Obliquity.
The smallest Act.
The most intimate region of Happenstance.
Can Hammerhead exist with this?
Can Hammerhead intensify or penetrate
events without Complexity?
[]
In a way, we have waited
all these pages
to see that
exactly Jaguar
inhabits the essentials of all this:
He leaps and prowls,
he haunts and he devours.
He inhabits without remainder
the very center of his own Act.
Golden energies
flash from his fir
punctuate by black dots.
In this manner Wrench Boy
bears fair witness.
He puts his wrenches by
and bows to behold it.
The Old Hotel is the site for it.
Melee provides an ambient setting of breezes.
But does this resolve the matter
of Dark Excess?
The Old Hotel must surely partake of it.
Into what does she dissolve
in the interspace between her transformations?
From what does she withdraw
her infinite catalogue of chambers?
Deep Storage digs down
into the substance of Happenstance.
Hammerhead is made out of hammers
prior to Act--nothing immediate,
little direct.
Long River is entirely without Act
and yet no part of it
wreaks of a world.
When Old Hotel
demonstrates Obliquity,
what's left
gets offered to Jacinth,
who is
one part Demiurge,
one part invisible
to Hammerhead,
for Jacinth belongs to The Gorge,
thus the courage of Jacinth is ghostlike
and does not diminish
because she foments her world.
Why does she do it?
Long River is part of it.
It makes a Demiurge of us all.
Our focus
neutralizes
Doorkeep,
for Focus extracts Happenstance
from Nemesis.
Then Silence.
[]
Wrench Boy
eases off
from Happenstance.
Happenstance
resumes
Black Lake--
remedy for every excess--even Happenstance.
Otherwise--
Hammerhead.
Never Tire of The Road
19
Your garden wall
may very well
be my nemesis--
that you have one
while
my violets
wither
rather
I suppose
than the withering itself.
Nemesis, I guess
comes in many guises.
My courage
may be
your Hammerhead.
Or you
fall asleep
and stay there
straight through victory.
Your nemesis
might be
a gorge
that happenstance
opened
in your path
and there was Hammerhead
putting his hammer
night after night
to your pretty attempts at exuberance.
What is this?
Words themselves--
Nemesis. No victory
for you
but a gorge
where Black Lake
ought to be.
Black Revelation.
Exposé.
Existence
flattened by obliquity.
The wrong foot.
Moral psychology
a blear gorge.
The spirit of muck
and a sort of
Deep Storage
soaked through.
Leaky cabinets.
Foul weather.
troubled sleep.
Shall I go on
or let our Jaguar
mutate the mood?
Let him call on Crystal
to penetrate gray sleep
with her luminous spicules--
though spectacularly dangerous,
you can see
they're of some
use--to chase off these Hammerheads,
for instance,
when black resin
once again
degrades the opal.
No rain gear.
[]
Well, blame it on the doorkeep.
He was supposed to keep out
everyone but Crystal
but fell asleep.
The idea that some sort of thaumaturgy, some ritual
could exorcise this nemesis
was the kind of thinking
that thorough scoundrel
Wrench Boy's always
trying to get us going on.
You can't banish Nemesis
by shaking an African Rattle . . .
can you?
Yes, if you pluck one
from the gorge.
I'll try it!
Huh!
VICTORY!
Now silence.
Now sleep.
Wrench Boy has no nemesis.
Not even me.
Who am I?
A pretty question.
He alone
courts Melee.
Victory
would be
his nemesis.
That's why he's so solicitous
never to have one.
His garden
might seem
like silence,
but exuberance of spirit
transforms The Gorge.
His inexhaustible luminosity
just cleared our opal.
[]
Refocus everything.
Her comes Crystal--
not spiculate but bristling
with clarity,
Wrench Boy transfigured,
Hammerhead happy
to see Wrench Boy,
even The Gorge
aglow
as Long River floods
everybody's nemesis,
Wrench Boy and Wrench Wench,
like two festive bumpkins,
crack open their kegs
out of storage, not deep, but easy,
Nemesis
its own nemesis,
old hotels
so full of joy
they open fifty branches,
one at every bend
along Long River,
Absurdity, Ecstasy, Morbidity, solemnity--
a pack of cards
comprising all
psychology-- Crystal
instinct
with vast silence--
Eternity
at The Sign
of The Fork.
u
Never Tire of The Road
20
Long River guarantees compensation
for its own obliquity. How much?
Crystal's obliquity
opens the Jaguar Road
around Tornado Island.
Who knows
what happens
now?
Wrench Boy
harasses
the weather.
The exuberance of his mind stream
merges with Jaguar's.
An ever-growing wave-field
powers up for obliquity:
VAROOM! And the garden
stands up to Nemesis.
The Mayor can't stand
his ground. Peculiar,
absurd, transparently mendacious
stipulations of the Fire Chief,
devised to freeze us out
with cold regulation. . .
When sweet morning comes
Wrench Boy's still there
in the straw-
bestrewn bed tents,
wise-assing the municipal doorkeep,
Jaguar, dancing an oblique, jig-like, dance . . .
Personality recedes,
then returns, refreshed.
[]
This is a list.
Knots in the garden,
to get things started,
won't.
Because of this, sacrifice
silence.
We're young.
We'll outlast
the fire chief.
Happenstance
is a standing wave
called
in The Great Rite.
Street leeches
pester Hammerhead
in his grand white cloak.
Jaguar slinks
behind a red tree.
He sacrifices his tea break
and thinks to have a look down along Long River.
It will take some work by Wrench Boy
to tease the plot
back on track.
So much obliquity
spoils the pot.
Obliquity nevertheless
brings its own sort of victory.
[]
What's really happening?
I understand why one
would ask that question.
Still, it is the wrong one.
The point is we are sitting
in a garden
though the weather is atrocious.
Rainy night.
Featherbed Lane
and the cars drive by.
Another flavor
of Black Lake. A fork
once again--
this time not only in the time line
but in the way exuberance
plays itself out.
[]
To be young
and swept away
by people
that actually make sense
after a childhood
of public absurdities--
To be old
and swept away
by the young
who actually make sense,
after a lifetime
of universal absurdities--
one hundred fire chiefs
in the night rain
one hundred Wrench Boys, Wrench Girls
with signs
in front of the beer halls
in front of the bank
and now
an old hotel
without creature-comforts, certainly,
with no incentives
for pointless heroics
when the fire chiefs
ride over the rooftops
on their nosey red engines
leading a cadre
of Hammerheads
in various phases
of potentially lethal exuberance
.
I understand very well
how you all would form a chain
of magnetic wrenches,
form congo lines
and shake those African Rattles--
only absurdity
answers absurdity,
that's a certainty.
Existence itself
can seem one's nemesis.
You want to find out
just who has a jaguar,
who not. But
unheroic difficulties
take place obliquely
to their imageries.
You can't just chase them back.
Obliquity once engaged
even in an opal
remains obliquity.
What tricky business
that solicits your allegiance
if any
do you follow?
Sign here.
You cogitate and dance
and plan a path
strewn with petals
of violets.
Little likelihood they lead
to a garden. Jaguar
comes into focus . . .
[]
3:00 A.M.
Red Engines head toward the battlements.
Mechanical crocodiles
loom and swoop.
The plot resumes.
The pot boils.
Bubbling fluids or freezing
scour the parks.
The Great Wave trembles.
The chain of magnetic wrenches
holds for a moment.
Ten-thousand spirits
occupy the garden then in a flash disperse.
Deep Storage empties.
Nemesis
is an army
of mechanical crocodiles;
Nemesis
is the spooks of the fire chief
devouring the tents in the garden.
The people scatter to their caves
and elevators;
their lacoliths and basoliths
inside Broken Mountain.
Jaguar and Wrench Girl
in the van guard.
Nemesis is not
that Melee
abandons Wrench Boy
or Jaguar
demands
great sacrifice
or that ghosts exhaust
the attitudes of Wrench Boy.
We'll sleep,
then do the Rite
of public assembly
at whatever locus
remains possible,
let Happenstance
and the wrong side
of Hammerhead
turn Process
into Sacrifice
as it may.
Jaguars
cogitate
and Jaguars
circulate
the gorge
and watch the quincunx of tornadoes
at Tornado Island
as if it were
as it were
a garden
of violets
and Nemesis
meets
its Jaguar
and the Country of Courage
never tires of the road
Never Tire of The Road
21
Deep Storage
in the Night Room.
Silence
uncontaminated
by Hammerhead.
Silence
tops
activities
sponsored
in old hotel rooms.
Just to go in there
takes courage.
The Doorkeep
of The Old Hotel
is sworn to silence.
He cannot tell
what he hears
or what he sees.
Long River
need not
be besworn: Obliquity
befits him.
If he is an old man,
he holds his tongue
and never thinks
about victory.
Happenstance
is inured
to silence: What is there to say
but what occurs
already? If The Old Hotel
is The World--our world--
then (but who are we?)
Long River
is the Time in it--
each world has one
conjured
in an opal--
the machinations
of some spirit . . .
[]
Black Lake:
relief.
You don't have to float
away. Long River
isn't something you check out against
a catalogue of entities
registered in Deep Storage.
The exuberance
of Wrench Boy
isn't logged in
as a qualification
of some room
in The Old Hotel.
Silence
has a ghost in it.
One by one
let us evacuate
the spontaneous posits
of the ontology
that suggests itself, shall we?
Even The Gorge
devours its own growths.
Wrench Boy
exceeds
his "person."
You can't catch
an opal
on the fly.
Focus
is not useless,
but the task at hand gets passed
the Doorkeep of your consciousness.
It doesn't matter
if you're young or old
in this work
there is no anticipation
of victory,
no exaggeration
in the advent
of Melee.
I'm trying to tell everything,
tell myself
everything--Silence
is corrosive sublimate;
you don't just keep it,
you apply it.
Violet
might be the goddess
Venus. What of it?
She undrapes
Nature
in your opal--
an old conceit --
anybody's nemesis.
Nemesis
is anybody's
silence. It keeps
The Old Hotel
from revealing
some species
of Everything
in your inviolate
opal.
[]
Shall we declare
victory
or not?
Even if we have one?
Even if the Doorkeep --
the whole genus of watchmen,
of sentinels
absorbs the complementary misery
of our loss for us?
Even if long River
flows Deep Storage
away?
The enemy
attacks
from the north
from the east
in a squadron
of zeppelins;
from the barracks
inhabited
only by fire chiefs--
what world is this?
WHAM! VAROOM!
[]
The evacuation of ontology
is no sacrifice
though it might be.
An opal
is no entity.
The Old Hotel
takes out rooms
in an old hotel.
Is there only one opal?
Possibly.
But why?
Because Black Lake
and Sleep
are one Jaguar
and Africa
has not exhausted
its germination
of rattles . . .
[]
This silence
is a pause . . .
so that a garden
where Tornado Island
at that oxbow Zombie locus
of Long River
puts
a hesitation
in our focus
and a world
gets by
the doorkeep
and the five tornadoes
of our Consciousness
and Deep Storage
puts up
another Jaguar . . .
Never Tire of The Road
22
A fork
in the general
spirit.
Wrench Boy
on the fence.
Not
just a ghost
from The Gorge.
Not this time.
Jaguar
preternaturally quiet.
Happenstance
without a clue.
A rift--unfathomable.
When we gaze
in The Gorge,
a dark spirit flashes,
then nothing.
Deep Storage
evacuated. Eviscerated.
[I shot up to the top of the sky
then zoomed down
and looked at my shoes.
Rubber galoshes
in the stairwell,
basement
fixed up with wooden panels.
Rain clothes, snow clothes,
hanging on hooks. A green woolen
overjacket. Little bowling pins.
What did it smell like?
Shoe polish?
The convertible couch. The smell
of its rough brown cover.
What Hortense smelled like.
And they say I had weak olfactories.
Deep Storage crowded, dense, one time
laid out on another. No space.
No totality.
Printer's ink.
Dektol.]
What is the sense
of this silence?
Jaguar thinks
at last he understands.
We've been asking
"all the wrong questions."
Nemesis
imposed upon
intelligence.
The spirit of The Gorge
has not exhausted
Deep Storage.
It's still there
gestating
what The Old Ones
euphemistically refer to even now as
their "African Rattles."
All
is in question,
but not the right
question.
What's happened
to Black Lake?
Not a ripple.
Undone by futile
inquisition.
What if it weren't courage
that impelled the inquiry?
Bifurcation
even in silence.
Look the other way.
African Rattles
over the hill.
Jaguar collects a lexicon
and intends to submit the entries
to a jury of cognitive incendiaries.
The idea is to cozen one's nemesis.
Take tea
in Inquiry's Garden.
[]
Suddenly it seems there are lawyers everywhere--
forensic technicians,
laboratory specialists,
personnel from the institute
whose business it is to elaborate questions
with professional efficiency
and an astringent lack of courtesy, not
gardens of private inquiry
but agribusiness --
thousands of acres dedicated to exhausting
the industrial field. The product:
inquiry itself
brought to a terrible focus.
Is this the right question?
Can one, alone, correct this
in a night
with that single
African Rattle
essential to one's self
as if it were an opal
planted
in sleep,
holy incubation,
a temple equipped
with precisely that question
from the very beginning
formulated just for you, there was a committee
among Authority; they planted
a ghost in a crystal,
the nemesis in it
suppressed,
a time set aside
for you to sit in your lair
alone with your African Rattle
prepared for a private victory:
you rented a chamber
in The Old Hotel;
you conjured your personal jaguar;
you balanced his perspicacity, his intensity
with your prescient obliquity;
you deployed your African Rattle
and its propensity for Melee
to hold her spirit at bay--
you hired an adequate doorkeep;
you could smell the proximity of victory.
[]
The Old Hotel was rife
with precisely the wrong questions,
your jaguar poised to ask them,
African Rattles
set to stun
with interrogatives;
The Old Hotel,
the whole ancient edifice,
the Old Ones who orchestrate its schedule,
all in the interrogative mood,
exuberance for inquiry
permeates happenstance.
[]
There is a fork
in obliquity,
a victory garden
to commemorate
the inquiry.
[]
Density
is superceded
by Continuum,
whose points
are all the questions
you bring to The Old Hotel --
all the right and the wrong ones.
Jaguar, dislodged from happenstance,
bestirs himself to think this:
It's a trick!
I don't believe it!
He sits in the Temple of Continuity
that was never built out of Points--
neither is it a garden.
A fork in the being of inquiry.
What possessed me?
I am the grim incendiary.
I bring conflagration to consciousness.
I take out rooms
in The Old Hotel
just as you do.
I am He-Who-Has Mastered all the ghosts.
I come to eviscerate courage,
exhaust the life of the road.
Long River is your nemesis
for it delivers all the wrong propositions
and what is a ghost
but a question,
an absence brought to a focus?
Happenstance can never correct this,
even if The Old Hotel
were, every room of it, full of jaguars,
come to make a sacrifice to happenstance,
get straight to the point,
no questions.
[]
African Rattles came over the hill.
You are sleeping The Sleep of Violets
entwined around the handsome handles of Hammerhead--
African Rattles come over the hill
to purge The Old Hotel.
Interval
The army of Hammerheads
organized the thought of Wrench Boy,
securing just such universal
concepts, metaphors, and values
as were capable of institutional development
into means of general control.
Thought is power; ontology is magic.
Being itself has turned into a hammer--
love into fiduciary instruments,
commity into The Bank.
This was a once and future narrative; narratology
once cognized, become instrument
to curtail critique.
Wrench Boy turned against his own thought. . .
he built Tornado Island
out of human bewilderment;
he broke the Holy Mountain;
he caused Black Lake
to cease to ripple
it vanished
into a dispersement of opals --
human beings
with internal consciousness
almost inaccessible
to themselves --
awakening only possible
in slumber --
thought its own surcease.
By 511 there were decrees
condemning monks
for diverting grain
that was supposed to be used
for charitable purposes
to high-interest loans . . .
major campaigns of
government repression
845 A.D. 4600 monasteries
razed
along with their shops and mills
260,000 monks and nuns
forcibly defrocked
and returned to their families . . .
150,000 temple serfs
released from bondage . . .
well possibly.
Official reason:
the need to restore the money supply.
China
was running out of metal.
Wrench Boy said
let's build our own bank,
throw out the Hammerheads --
change the very attitude
towards the institution of reality . . .
Never Tire of The Road
23
Plotinus
exacerbates
focus
so that
out of Black Lake
all beauty takes a berth.
("Berth" with an "e".)
Beauty thus must receive
a fire storm from beyond
all adamantine hierarchy.
Take courage.
Pace Plotinus,
Black Lake is ubiquitous.
And yet we must have a garden
on the side of the road
that Beauty's Rose
might bring us peace
in our feckless wanderings even --
evenings
at the old hotel,
cocktails
in the lounges --
you don't have to conform to the dress code
but you want to
after a swim in the clear lagoon
then a shower
in the trendy bath
to scrub the salt off.
You don't have to conform to the dress code.
Nemesis: The Black Hand of Obstruction
chokes off the green fuse in the garden
where Black Lake might have provisioned
restorative waters.
If I am a fork in the spirit,
let Old Hotel provide invariant medicine
in cream colored tins for a nickel
at the pharmacy
to rigorize obliquity--to make it stick. Everyone talking
out of the side of their mouths.
And they HAVE
Black Lake
compressed into Jellies
in cream colored tins.
The garden is huge.
It has forking paths and labyrinths
to lead us
through fascination's melee
into the heart of The Rite.
Steel drums and naked dancers.
Black Lake between the pulse crests
at the troughs
of rhythm's conjuring
where Hammerhead's anxiety
reads only dangerous melee --
Beauty's opal's
lustre from Black Lake --
the garden of African Rattles' secret melee --
white fire in a rush of sonority--dangerous
to perpetual celebration
at the old hotel --
festival mahem
100 days per year or more
all the doors open
at the Old Hotel
to sustain the appetite --
beauty tuneful yet timeless,
time-shape and time-beat sustained
from there where time is not --
impossible possible because Black Lake
vanishes
into its own menagerie
which is a gorge where jaguars cogitate
so handsome! and they prowl--
prowl then charge,
then sit down
weighed down suddenly
by eternal lassitude--yes eternal--
the shadow of lassitude is a place
and they pass into it
and sit down
and there is the sound
of African Rattles.
[]
Nemesis stops Long River.
Do you like my confessional poetry?
Jaguar is astonished.
Which side of Nemesis are you on?
The Old Hotel is a dottering old god.
It poses no question worth pondering.
So we pulled up and flew off
away to Tornado Island, risks to be taken
at each twist of the trip.
Your worth is marked
by the risk you've taken,
or should be.
I carried a fork made of five special woods plus ivory.
Won't tell where I acquired that ivory.
But I know a man among the Newburgh Druids
who fashions magnificent pool cues
out of five woods plus ivory
balanced preternaturally for billiards.
Incongruous Druids.
[]
Jaguars pour over the gorge. Said Jaguar:
"I wish I could stay put with my opal,
take obliquity for man-goad and fork.
How can one fix an attitude out of Deep Storage?
One cannot remain at Black Lake.
I am either aflame or inert
or both in some algorithm
that controls their alternation.
The Gorge surrounds us with intolerable silences,
neat little gardens where the crones pretend
senility and innocence
while stabbing their forks in the sod.
Has Wrench Boy abandoned The Old Hotel --
taken his stance in obliquity out of Deep Storage
deep under some decorative garden?
[]
Actually, I like forks.
They look like courage to me.
I am anybody's nemesis.
It takes sacrifice
and consultations
with crone Jacinth
and access to Black Lake
to master my obliquity.
Even I must muster
extravagant focus.
And I like The Gorge.
I let my Jaguar avatars
escape from my opal.
My obliquity jazzes
The Old Hotel.
It is a matter of aesthetics.
The point is to obviate narcolepsy
and gain access to Black Lake
for all beneath whom
Black Lake works
a natural fatality.
Happenstances serves Black Lake
according to me.
Whom do I serve?
Exuberance.
Exuberance itself, my sparkling diadem, my crystal."
Never Tire of The Road
24
Narcolepsy
has ritual properties,
but Jaguar charge The Rite
by loosing Long River
from its bound-up dragon gorge.
Henceforth obliquity'twists the river
in elegant rhythmic pulses
around Tornado Island.
All our rituals reflect this.
We focus properly
and touch Black Lake
quite naturally.
The Gorge remains there,
its dragon roiling --
the quality of life itself
according, that is, to The Living;
but The Dead need silence too
and in the new dispensation,
the lion-dragon gleams from The Dead.
The Rites of Long River are majestic:
all beings bestow their focus on their Druids.
They can do this,
being instructed,
each affined to her Jacinth and assigned
her perfect opal.
I say narcolepsy
tips the aesthetic
and jostles Jacinth
and rushes Long river
and stimulates the African Rattles
that tand as sentinels
in a ring on Tornado Island.
Focus in that place
is non-ordinary.
Even the doorkeeps are startled.
[]
There is a sort of sacrifice
at the fork
where Being splits
into its missing garden
and the propagation of Hammerheads:
white sharks and bald bankers.
Deep Storage lies
beneath Tornado Island
in the form of an Old hotel
buried long ago
and consigned
to obliquity's gorges,
so that The Rite alone
of torqued weather
marks reference to it.
All things are loosed in a mind
whose winds are formed like twisters
organized and savage.
But the Collective has lost its focus, predictably. Long River
fluctuates back and forth
from its work with ghosts.
Jacinth stirs in her slumber's perennial obliquity.
We set Crystal
into the Rite,
get back to our opals
to ascertain whether spring
will be our nemesis,
assuming we get there.
Non-ordinary focus
works in Inquiry's Garden --
questions pop up everywhere
in recalcitrant earth.
The Gorge hath no doorkeep.
And it is not requisite
to sacrifice at Black Lake.
You can ignore the little Druids
and the demands of that doorkeep:
just drink and dive in.
[]
In The Old Hotel
Wrench Boy sat
performing a sort of sacrifice
to Inquiry's Garden.
Everything was questionable.
There was an edge beneath each certainty --
quick light flickering
till you looked at it,
then the kind of stillness
that feels like it ought not
be stillness.
Melee had bribed the doorkeep
and snuck in Jacinth
to The Great Red Lounge.
African Rattle waited upon happenstance.
[]
Victory was itself
a kind of rite --
a great light
above Black Lake.
As far as you could see
the Druids were lined up
along the stable embankment stones
containing
The Roots of Exuberance.
Interval
Gem-freak Jacinth
lived in a jumble
of kazoos
and strung-together beach detritus
but kept her opals
in columns and rows
primed for The Rite.
Night was more than Night.
It was Black Lake
in which her mind entire
emitted fine luminous fibers
to stretch across its own blackness.
And if spirits were to manifest anywhere,
it would be in a mind so accoutered
and blackened with silence.
Perfect obliquity permitted this.
She wielded her own nemesis
as other practitioners
consumed each other's happenstance.
She stood as righteous sentinel
before each excitement and enticement.
No lethargy jaded her focus.
A ring of forks
handle-ends stabbing the sod.
And night-creek moon-lit cold rill light
tickled the garden
and tumbled huge stones in the gorge.
The Old Hotel
was on blue alert:
jaguars parked in a row
before the great oak doors.
Infinite courage charged Wrench Boy.
Hammerhead was nervous and primed.
Never Tire of The Road
25
"I'm excited about your opals," said the fence.
He'd set himself up in the guise
of a squint-eyed bursar
in the narrow lobby of The Old Hotel,
and he posted a small notice
above the bars at the burse
to the effect
that anyone's treasures, particularly opals,
might be placed in safe-keeping
in a locked closet,
no danger of their slipping
into some trough of Deep Storage.
His mind was a garden
of quirky devices.
He knew well how to poison your silence.
[]
"You don't put things in Deep Storage,"
I volunteered irritably. "The thing puts you
in its lists
or sometimes on notice.
If you possess impertinent opals,
they become separated from your arrangements.
You go to sleep,
and that itself
is a rite
that simply takes you
into its
arrangements
based no doubt on situations
the noonday garden
of your noonday life
specify in their noonday spirit.
One good opal
arranges Deep Storage entire.
Sleep is cleansed thereby,
pure again, like crystal.
No situation
dreams this.
But a clamoring of beach-strewn kazoos
jazzed up by a troop of
terrifying, goofy musicians
rides in on the dawn
of a dream
that cannot end.
Black Lake sinks into The Gorge
where silence is polluted by hammerheads.
That's why his opal is clouded
and his focus seems incompetent
to extend through his slumber.
How do you purify silence?
You ride Long River as long as you must
in sleep or in states of innocent exuberance
as Happenstance or strenuous practice stimulates.
No one knows what sleep is --
you don't do it; it does you.
In the middle of the melee of your noonday
it is your nemesis.
In its proper allotment,
your opal.
[]
I rode my African Rattle
right up to the fork
where the Gorge
made opalescent dreams
grow out of the ground from Deep Storage.
A dream can be your nemesis."
Wrench Boy was talking right out of his opal.
"Victory! The Gorge is blooming with violets!"
"Why?"
"Why not?"
There was no necessity
to obviate the muse in his opal.
He could conjure whatever he wished
right out of the depths
never apart from his Crystal.
[]
Tornado Island is no stranger to exuberance.
Its gardens in obliquity
twist as tornadoes touch down --
two or five like the tines of our instrument --
how many tornadoes locked in to your perfect crystal?
[]
Hammerhead remembered his Higher Hammerhead--
idiocy redeemed by idiocy filtered by opals
and the sound of African Rattles
rushing through
his own extravagance.
His mind was glutted with ghosts --
a peculiar sensation, but he liked it --
better than ordinary slumber, anyway.
Jaguar stood as the door keep of silence --
to keep it out --
until exuberance was quite exhausted
and they all hung their African Rattles
up on their hooks.
Never Tire of The Road
26
At the end of the road --
a doorkeep. Gracious
and relieved.
No rigorous stipulations.
No mean exclusions.
Just open the door and allow
whomever approaches go through.
On the other side of the door
an enormous forest
of African Rattles
or else a great gorge
surrounded by African Rattles
whose handles
terminate
in a five-tined fork.
On the other side of the door
a path to Long River
and a ghost of a child
offers his ghastly fingers
as a hand to guide you to the Rock
Behind the Broken Mountain
where the path bifurcates.
One way wends through a forest
of African Rattles
and all residual exuberance
is sapped.
At the end of the other
they give you at long last
your opal.
The road has been along
Long River all along.
At the end of the river -- Black Lake.
With solemnity you agitate
your African Rattle
no matter which tine of the fork
you happen to choose, whioch chooses you.
an action prepared to drain off
your last modicum of exuberance.
On the other side of the door
your avatar of Hammerhead
terminates all tendency in your nature
to stimulate material
or cognitive melee.
[]
Shake your African Rattle
and put this question:
Is the end of the road
a good thing?
Open that door
and a jaguar
with a fist full of violets in his fore-paw
may or may not be your nemesis.
One thing is certain:
this is no ordinary garden
here on Tornado Island
and Deep Storage has liberally opened
its city of ghosts
who traffic in a cold sort of exuberance.
Nobody owns language,
but all possess and deploy it
as it were their own.
And there remains a ghastly doorkeep
and the door creaks
as he pushes it.
It gets heavier and harder to open
onto such language
as at the end of the road
you wish to deploy.
You slide through with difficulty
if your mind is too portly,
but the downward passage is dark
and Deep Storage is empty.
[]
That is a good thing.
Each lexical slot is replaced by a crystal.
It's a good thing too
you've come equipped with a fork
and quiet exuberance survives
on account of your studied obliquity
and an African Rattle is a versatile instrument,
no matter the character
or mood and office of the doorkeep.
[]
Over time I've accumulated
and impressive cache
of African Rattles.
I use them to intensify my focus
and catherize the qualities of my garden,
keep those ghosts at bay,
sleeping mostly.
Yet I know no anodyne against narcolepsy
more natural
than an African Rattle
unless it be an afternoon or evening
well-spent with red-haired melee.
[]
I've kept my exuberance as a sublimate
once I learned the working of crystal.
She herself may be your nemesis
with her silicon riokan
full of motionless ghosts
and her exemplary focus,
but I've found a garden
to which there is no path
and the spirits that attend it
know ell to compel Long River
and exhibit consummate courage.
Never tire of the road that starts nowhere,
and you cannot cognize while on it
if it ever ends.
[]
Jacinth hath no need
to dissipate her exuberance
for her rite itself acts as a doorkeep
and she shares her own nature with her ghosts
and Wrench Boy is her syzygy
(that's a secret)
and African Rattle has its uses
at well-defined ceremonial junctures.
[]
The road itself
is like an old hotel -- its spirit
is composed of many by-ways.
Deep Storage is an index to everything
but resolves over night to Black Lake.
.