DREAMPLATE

Evoking the evocative silence of red balloons billowing across
a blindingly black on white landscape,
Eternity whisps on a tangent down the rough-hewn alley of Apathy,
 boisterous & looking for a riot-
"Shhh! Quiet!" the lazy, creeping haze commands,
for Mona Lisa is nearby, perched atop a Priest's velvet red box,
ready not for a confession but a Kodak moment.

The red light sun resurrects the Ultimate Psychiatrist
from a heaping pile of spent cigar ashes-
he does a perfect three-sixty,
now vomiting Jungian Dream Theory & Nietzsche's anamnesis
all over his ill-fitted suit & three-thousand dollar Moroccan carpet,
which undulates like the North sea, screaming envy at the moon.

I remain transfixed & utterly enthralled by the keen lucidity
of the so-called Absurd, reveling at the countless souls
who instead choose to commit themselves to that
sanctified insanity masquerading as "sanity,"
a diagnosis whose prognosis can surely lead one only into true Madness,
and a systematically debasing de-sanctification.

It now rains fire & brimstone,
igniting within me the revelation of Primordial Percipience,
a seering heat which creeps deep into the dessicated scales
of that creeping old lizard, The Amygdala,
only to discover myself marrowing into the flesh & bones
of the exquisite, Byzantium architecture of Katharis,
a Divine Order, immaculately implicate and explicate.

TEMPUS ET AESTU (TIME & TIDE) - Our Salon

TEMPUS ET AESTU (TIME & TIDE) - Our Salon

STILL I RISE

 

 

 

 

As the vivid splendour of the sun beneath my mortal gaze

Sets,

Its brilliance & grandeur set my mind ablaze

Whets,

My appetance for Life's grand prize-

Glee!

Rattles & torments my Psyche

Effervescence,

I now gloriously perceive within my Essence-

See!

Now I do the luminosity within all & within myself.

My dawning arrives,

And still I rise,

Yes!

Still I rise.







HOMONOIA: THE MIND UNIVERSAL - Our Salon

HOMONOIA: THE MIND UNIVERSAL - Our Salon

BETWEEN THE PRIMORDIAL & THE NEOTERIC - Our Salon

BETWEEN THE PRIMORDIAL & THE NEOTERIC - Our Salon

BETWEEN MIND & HEART - Our Salon

BETWEEN MIND & HEART - Our Salon

THE LAWS OF INTEGRATION - Our Salon

THE LAWS OF INTEGRATION - Our Salon

ORDINARY HEROES - Our Salon

ORDINARY HEROES - Our Salon

REALITY AS MYTH: A NEW PARADIGM - Our Salon

REALITY AS MYTH: A NEW PARADIGM - Our Salon

STALEMATE

The ever-present feat of losing the Soul-
Of becoming beyond our control.
Oh we of little faith,
In others' inept hands we have placed-
Far too much.
For when they run out of Love to give,
And Truth to show,
We will wish we didn't now know what we know.
Will God be soon exiled from the dysphoric halls,
Of this Devil-Mind?
Oh Lord, teach me how to live as One and one.

ON AI (Artificial Intelligence)



     Can the created ever surpass that of its Creator? It seems self-evident to me, from a strictly logistical-and indeed, even from a philosophical/existential standpoint, that AI ever dominating intellectually or even functionally over human beings is perhaps possible, but highly unlikely. And as first posited by Ada Lovelace, who is credited in the realm of Computer Science as being the first computer programmer, human beings are the ideologues over such inventions and thereby must also be the immediately assumed lords over them. Furthermore, much like many believe that humankind was fashioned in the image of a sovereign Deity, computers and the technological accoutrements which both encompass & aid them were fashioned of course in our human likeness. However, the ontological limit & antinomy of the latter statement is this: We may have been fashioned in the image of a transcendent Creator, but we could never fully become this Deity itself lest the very actualization of such a verity of ontological equality completely negate the concept of such a Being in and of itself. Nevertheless, AI will continue to be made in the human image, however I do not believe it rational to assume that they could ever insidiously or maliciously dominate over humankind, as any invention by natural extension must possess the limitations inherent in that of its Creator. And yet the enquiries will persist: Can a human being manufacture or implant a living "soul" into a machine? What is the soul or a soul if it even exists at all? And most of all: What is the essence of that which makes our species human and could an electronic/mechanical entity ever become incarnate with such essence? For if a human being could create a cyborg completely in that of its own image-a perfect facsimile-then wouldn't that automatically change the ontological status of such "electronic-mechanical" being possessed of "artificial intelligence" to that of a "human being" possessing now, authentic & complete human sentience & intelligence? And last but certainly not least, from an epistemological standpoint, is there an inherent demarcation built into the design of things which limits human creative & industrious potential & knowledgeability? And if there is not such an event horizon of human endeavor, perhaps someday, according to Judeo-Christian eschatology, we will be changed "in the twinkling of an eye" into a full incarnation of a Divine Creator? These of course are all very valid, relevant enquiries, which may or may not reach their fruition of edification someday. In the meantime, it is essential that we keep an open-ended discussion & flexible margin for imagination on all of the major issues concerning our human species & condition so that we may continue along the path of our intellectual, industrious & psycho-spiritual evolution & actualization, both individually & collectively.

OH DARKNESS DESCENDING (Penned in my 20's)



Night falls over me again,
Creeping its way into my head,
And past any hope for better days.

Oh darkness descending,
Oh darkness descending,
Why upon me?
Why upon me?

I have known you for long,
This is so true,
Yet no matter how much I hate, loving you,
We still, bedfellows estranged do make.

Oh darkness descending,
Oh darkness descending,
Why over me?
Why over me?

Something won't let me smile,
For when a faint Joy in my heart begins to bloom,
Some abstract Fear steals it away-
Yet even if I knew the Thief,
I would have to let him go,
For as much as I long to feel the sun again:

Oh darkness descending,
Oh darkness descending,
Why not over me?
Why not over me?
Let it be.
Just let it be.

Darkness falls inside my head,
And it begins to storm,
I let it rage in the name of its Cause,
For there is plenty of sunshine where I don't dwell these days-
But this is said as if Sorrow is a choice,
Dwelling within a land where Despair is an autonomic reflex of the Soul
than it is Artifice or Vice.

Oh darkness descending,
Oh darkness descending,
Why upon me?
Why upon me?
When there are so many other places where you could be.

I wretch and I heave,
For in Hope I do believe,
And therefore also grieve, also seethe.
Yet perhaps this is why the darkness is more sought,
For caring hurts too much in a world which could care less-
And it's us against the world,
It's us against ourselves,
And thus we grieve.
It is neverending.

But my affliction is not nearly as deft,
As my line of defense, masterfully erected within the Realm
of Ideas, Thoughts, Emotions and Words:
The Poet's Atonement.

A MIND UNIVERSAL

Overwhelmed by Joy's sanguine mass,
knowing all is well that begins well-
yet the peevish prospect of Joy's inevitable annihilation
time & again, throttles the Mind full-force-forth
unto the cold, void cosmos
of Pessimistic Ponderance,
this rocket-tank always either full-full or full-on-empty,
as the discontinuity yet uniformity of time-space happenings
bids to keep the Universe ever so slightly yet intractably titled
at an adjacent angle to Fate, Infinity,
the centrifuge of Reason holding the innards intact,
Time bidding to keep secret the outcome of Felicity,
whirling within its own realm,
inviting all who care & all who dare,
to embrace its yellow-hole pull
with expansive Soul & Arms,
as its Quantum mass plunders all within its enthrall,
into the divinely deviant depths of Oblivion-
Until the time has come again to bid reverence
to that universal constant Melancholia:
The voyage is complete.
We have landed from infinite light years away,
to kiss the terra firma of Mortality & its lachrymose constancies,
bidding the cycle of Life keep turning,
so that one day, all may be brought, to Eternal Transcendence.

COMMUNION

The choicest wafer of his flesh, crumbles & dissolves
beneath my hands & upon my tongue,
as I revel in the salty, sweet salinity of such earthly divinity.

Such unabashedly sappy & sanguine sensations stirred by this tryst-
very much nigh to Theophany I surmise,
yet those quaintly probing questions still arise-
Is this a communion led by the Spirit or the flesh, or by Spirit and flesh?

I conclude that whatever it may seem to be, according to the dictates
of all legalistic theological debate, the celestial body politic, if you will
the thing-in-itself still sustains, essence always preceding existence,
for what is a human soul without its corporeality anyway?
We are all both psyche and soma, and this is the highest dwelling for us,
here on low, being as it is our truest denomination.

So come, & take communion with thyself.

AWOKEN BY SLUMBER (Published in Dream International Quarterly)

Dreamtime is when
the conscience screams
asserts its need & right to be heard-
our dreams, our ally
keeping us straight,
never sparing our Soul their introspective rod,
bringing us up in the admonition of inner Truth & outer Justice.

I rise, kiss & embrace
the newfound consciousness of this day-
Will I stray?
When again, down I lay
Dreamtime will tell,
as I attend the nightly Mass of sweet Somnolence,
confessing it all to the Subliminal Priest,
who keeps vigilant watch
deep down within the Mind's abysmal well,
where the water is so bitter & cold,
Lucidity grips me time & again,
and I always discover the absurdity
inherent within concepts such as unconsciousness-
and find the so-called fully conscious world
to seem evermore surreal & illusory,
for only when we sleep, are we truly fully awake.

LEPT

Hope & Love are symptoms of the same wellness.
Slowly, we remember our deficiency.
It is very soon felt, not so benign, idiopathic.
Slowly, we begin to feel again-hence, to be, & hence, to live.

We all wish a gentle, gradual coaxing to bloom,
like that of a Rose which knows only of its own splendid Design,
and how it is best nurtured within Sunlight.

Yet we, too, no matter how rough-hewn our Journey may be,
are always a part of that Rose,
which has so patiently slept by the nearness of that endless reservoir
of the tears
the fears
& so many years
no longer wept,
for we had always already, learned to accept. 

WALKING DOWN THE DARK, MISTY ALLEY OF APATHY

Death is light on her feet again tonight, and so is God,
as I am irretrievably seduced & lured down the dark, misty alley of Apathy,
which is littered with teeming possibilities for Illusion-fix.

My senses are wonderfully assaulted with the mingling scent-sations
of fresh, crisp bills, patchouli incense, vinyl shower-liners, lilac fields, fringed suede jackets, Snuggle fabric softener ( Original scent), gasoline (courtesy of Xelco), and the light, musky emmolience which earth & air lovingly emanate after a fresh summer rain.

Yet these olfactory titillations, with melancholic bliss will soon altogether elude me,
for soon enough, the only thing left to intuit will be the seething envy of the Devil as his obsession becomes my bribe.

I am a being likened to sentience & skin, but these roots run much deeper than old money or any anti-enviro-bureaucracy.
I am an anachronism-out of my time, going out of my mind-so much for the dwindling of adolescent Rage & Angst, huh?
For if there is one thing I have learned it is the indisputable fact that there is Angst & Rage, at any age.
Ha! I know-such Outrage! you cry! But what else is Rage supposed to be-Inrage?
For here, is where it becomes something totally estranged from its former purity-and even innocence of incarnation.
Yes, here is where Rage Kafka-esquely transmogrifies into slow & measured, but nevertheless insidious self-annihilation.
And worse yet, it is also reduced to a corny spin-off of its former glory-for Rage is & forevermore will be, a Classic, baby.
And Blake was right on the mark when he realized imitation to be not one of the sincerest forms of flattery, but to be an insult.
For it seems to get to the point in this human existence, where even what we think of as "me" begins to feel contrived, as the inevitability of cognitive sophistication goads us ever nearer the rough-shodden tombs of its Indignities.
For we all may indeed be seekers of Truth, but the part of ourselves we seem to lose grasp of first, feeds most nourishingly upon the manna of Oblivion-of which, by a rather tender age, there is, a famine-legitimate lack.

Yes, I know my consciousness of all of this in a very tangible, real sense is that which condemns me to my own slow but sure demise, but as I cry out to the Fate which mocks me with both Despair & Hope, my voice echoesechoesechoes-Yessss! It echoes! Only to find my ears all-too-eagerly upturned to merely loathe & cringe at what I hear.

And so here I have let myself be led down this Alley of Apathy, over which lurks the air-
"To care or not to care?"

Neither is a piteous state nor is it a question, for there is only one thing:
The Answer there, so tightly ensconced within The Choice.
And, my fellow Melancholic friends, that is all that there is.

KING OF THE THINK TANK

Extreme conservative goldfish faking left-
then looping right,
to feed on stale flakes of stodgy logic
as they swim in a breeding tank
of libertarian piranhas,
now eating the goldfish alive-
soon to excrete the constipated matter of them both
in one volcanic dysentery of shallow sophistry,
as the muddied aquariums of public debate
fill to overflowing with polluted politics
and the bloated, rotting remnants
of toxic rhetoric & staid conviction.

The piranhas open up now once more
to consume their own shit,
a last tank effort at survival,
before those red-mutant-far-right-finned sharks,
smelling the foul air & bleeding hearts of them all,
move in for the love of blue blood-
led by the instinct of pure polemic predation-
blind obedience to the thought-for-food chain.

APERTURE

I remember when I would sit down by Lake Erie,
another photo-op for Father,
who hid behind his metal, plastic & glass face
which shot rays of light towards us, trying to capture our truest essences
with its cold, round, 4-dimensional eye,
as it winked mere pseudo-adulation.
I would often wonder aloud what Father was really seeking to capture,
although he only casually replied- "Negatives."
Father rarely let me touch his face,
which he kept locked away within a metal, silver flip-top case,
where he also sometimes stored away his "recreational smoke."

Sometimes Father would suspend his mechanical face
from a sturdily woven Southwestern-motifed strap, to play upon his chest.
And, after while, I could recognize no other face in relation to Father,
and would find my melancholic little self peering longingly into the eye
of this reliably attentive machine whereever it prevailed,
perhaps never quite receiving the mirroring which I truly sought thereupon its other side,
yet with the keen, inherent Intuition of a Child,
would always find Father's third eye quite revealing of him, nevertheless.

BROTHER OF SLEEP

An alarm screams out a warning, but it is too late.
I am reluctantly stolen from my slumber,
Body & Mind heavy-laden already from the insurmountable weight
of wakeful consciousness, as, brooding, groggy & sullen,
I am hurled back unto the barren, unmerciful landscape
of that world which insidiously creeps, & toxically seeps beneath the thickened skin
and its many dark, hidden crevices, an all-too-deluminant light
of encumbrant expediency & sense-ability.

And who is the keeper of this House?
Neither Mother, Father nor Lover nor any of our earth-woed kin,
but the Brother of Sleep, avaricious & ever-omnipresent,
as we weigh the costs of Survival while Life itself extorts without us.

The work gets neglected & we soon come to see,
that there is no tenable way to stop the accounting without expending all
of the red ink to remind us our debits.
Yet the Overseer has still kept us intact, and we are at least reassured
that as long as there is blood running hot & quick beneath the skin,
the books shall remain in balance, & we, fatally noble & upright in our figurings,
until the costs of Survival reach their final recompense,
and the keeper of the House decides that he can live in indigence with us no longer,
sending the Brother of Sleep to keep us-
that mortal friend, enemy & forbidden lover of the Life we had so carelessly spent,
trying to preserve.