The FourFold of Poetics

I (One, #1)

I stood on top Everest
and painted heaven amongst
not past, not beyond, and not within
the clouds,
for I knew not many could find my heaven
since the tendency is to seek literal
to cultivate esoteric and ineffable
to convert others in hearing our tongues
it seemed wisest to place heaven therein

Who wants unknown others
or worse yet known and detested others
luxuriating in their personal heaven?

Next, I climbed deeper than Veryovkina Cave
into the earth’s womb
and fetally dreamt hell
into the very molten core
where it would constantly stream and course
and thus in its fiery tomb
would entry to others’ pantheon stave

Would you want to find
some uninvited devil or Satan
or underworld deity presiding over your hell?

After reconsidering my heaven and hell
I thought it best to also construct a place between:
one which hanging upside down on windy trees
will not force me to any personages tell;
one that some would consider pristine
and others ready themselves for expected fees

Would you believe me
if I told you that when opening my eyes next
did I continue to see
exactly where I was
before this construction?

From this place soar I unto others:
paradises and infernos alike
and wild places
unlabeled and untrammeled
where forged hammers
of crippled divine blacksmiths
furrow not the rocky veins of the conceiver’s
and civilized places that beelike
buzz in bustling hives of dissembled
whose awareness of wherein their own myths
they languor and live
is annulled
by pursuits and action,
insidiously boxlike
and wondrous places
with warm mothers
whose arms spread wide,
inviting and branchlike
whose unseen eyes
open wide and seeing,
bejeweled
whose wombs sing songs
that vibrate megaliths
whose supple breasts
all in need have suckled
whose trunk and jutting branches and roots
husbandlike
drip honeyed ambrosia
to the world’s aquifers

Who would want is admonished,
herein such places shall know something
only if in contemplative humility they seek,
yet would you not?

Words,
the soul emitters and transceivers;
images,
the soul transducers and conceivers;
music,
the soul transfusers and transformers;
movement,
the soul freers and conductors;
evermore intermixing and interrelating:
souls expressions perpetually sensating
intellecting, cultivating, fostering and creating:
our perceptions
challenging and forming what is
inducing deep draughts
of soulful wells to fizz

We who would then find our souls
not only forming and reforming,
but also creating and recreating,
in a constancy
that belies notions of static
and solid stances
and instead
resembles the movements
within the metaphors
of the world tree…

II (Two, 2)

Here is now alive and thriving,
moving dance to bleed out pores
My soul sweats
into the cool air
and swims
in hosts of raindrops
to pierce the veil
that others label lifeless ground
and therein to course
in Lethe’s swift currents
that eventually feed
the springs of bluebonnets
and there,
under the cool shade of a bent tree,
you drink deeply
of my soul,
and your drinking
is at once my drinking
for under another summitful tree
I too drink of your soul
and in our mutual drinking
do we know friendship
do we breathe
and move friendship
do we write
and craft friendship
into all spaces
between, out, in

Who would advantages seek
ought look elsewhere
for now have the absent gates
been built and shut
the gates that bar entry
to those unworthy
And who am I
or anyone to label another
to cast judgment
upon one deemed so?
We are the ones
who have cared for the downtrodden
only to be trodden upon
by them
as the door slammed behind
their quick escape
from responsibilities
in the house of friendship
We are the ones
whose seeking for deeper
and increasing meaning
meets with those
whose careless parlays
and occasional forays
are dropped
as soon as vehicles
for acquisition of desired things
approach and make
themselves known
We are the Artists
whose lives demand scrutiny
and reflection
and whose tormentation
none others grasp
and whose thoughts fly
unfettered
in the interiority of imagination
in a feelingness of thinking
and being
that calls forth creation.

Who then would join us
often does so
for brief moments
that soon pale
for encounters long talked about,
laughed about later even
for the ununderstanding,
for the inability to penetrate the veil
smothering their vision,
which often only portrays
allusion

And I am to stand here
convicted by the masses
swallowing their ingratitude,
bad will
and ugly perceptions
so that what is considered law
or societal constructions
becomes only a seething gaggle
of vipers in tall grasses
to my memories
whose fleetingness resembles passages
rapidly taken by the vapidly mistaken
albatrosses!

Still, from within the deepest realms
of my being
surges waves
of harmonious melodies
that form beautiful memories,
scripts and representations
and despite the stunned incidences,
these incredible waves
wash me clean
from within, without and withal
so that presentations
leave nothing
other than a smile
that is my being
in radiance and creativity
abounding
the self
that is of many parts
is continually
actualizing

III (Three, #3)

Tomorrow miracles
fly freely from my suitcase
called skin;
they find flight
from formless feelingsthoughts
moving in my marrow,
where wings grow
in emulation of fairies
and angels dreamt;
they soar celestially,
swimmingly submerge,
pantomime pewter precipitation
and breathe crystals
constructing water, snow,
sunflower and mountain;
whereafter their creating inspires
surreptitious songs sublimated
and then let loose
upon strings, valves and chords,
to scrape bottom dwellers
from their murky laments
and scooping them
thusly to scatter them
not on scraggy spots,
or scramble their psyches,
but, rather to perch
them wherever they’d be
most free and happy

How old is this process
of miracles
emanating from bones?

To answer
is to know
one’s morrow….

The prophetess chews some laurel—
No more than three
I beseech thee!
she silently shrieks
and sputters—
and utters:
It is the oldest phenomenon
known on earth,
miracles within the bones,
and only outdated
by miracles within the bark,
which is only outdated
by miracles within barnacles,
and this, is only outdated
by miracles within basalt crust,
and so forth…

Ah, you contradict yourself!
trumpets the realist
missing more
than criticism yields…

Whose worn mantle warm
composes us?

Everywhere come the metaphors:
step into the deep wild woods
and stop,
still,
very motionless,
until you listen
and stagger;
stags, deer, elk, or moose,
their antlers make the dagger
which will when seen
in its bareness
be the stabber
deep into the heart
of inside
for the changeling
to be born
from the stiffness
of the taut muscle
whose stoppage,
an aching dazed cramp,
chagrining
dances a catharsis
into a crazed comforting carousel;
dive endlessly
into wordless emissions
of soulful memoirs,
ply vicariously
their meanings
unto a cloudy blue
morning dewdrop

When will nothingness
become somethingness
so that everythingness
makes sense?

Cut short fleeting unthought unthoughts
so that they can more rapidly
through sleeping’s gates enter
into eventual thought thoughts.

IV (Four, #4)

At times, especially during
dream-filled sleep
or daydream occupied stupors,
what is fleeting
metamorphoses
into what is granite,
what is pumice,
the hardened production
out of the volcano flows
of rivers
of primal fears.

To see the granite or pumice dagger
knifing through the stifled air
of interminable vacuousness,
slicing through eyelashes
like a Campbellian chunky lid,
increases not acuity of vision,
clarity of perception,
nor intensity of prophecy.

Instead, this movement,
cyclically eternal,
illumines rivalry
as nonexistent shadows
in the fleetingness of the interiority
of volcanic ash,
making of ingenuous interpretations of projections
an ashened cloud
riding the wings of dragons
on high
as large as one wills
that could threaten an entire universe
with choking pompousness.

No shaman can rescue such a soul
from its own induced mortal dangers,
lest said soul find its way
out of the ashy cumulus
via streaking down the fiery bolt
that strikes the axial mountaintop:
that is riding in the saddle
of the rainbowed phoenix
flashing its fiery wings
to deposit this
once forlorn soul
unto the edge
of the spring-fed pool
in the virgin forest.

Here, from whatever angle,
this round pool
is the same,
as a visible Arthurian feast
of plenty appears,
and confers upon one
wisdoms
one will soak in,
if one will.

Gazing lustily upon the nakedness of Nature
in manifest form,
culling from her
her bounty
as if it were
only resources,
without proper deference,
yields the toothy rending
the hunted stag meets
at the behest
of the hunters’ hounds.

To be thus strewn,
one’s psychic skin shredded
to reveal the inside,
the interiority wends its way
 along the rivers of blood
seeping into the pool
to descend
unto the murky-clear
depths
from where the unsullied
newly reformed
might arise
freshly washed clean
of the ash deposits
that surely penetrated
under the skin.

How is it
to experience this?
What some
would mistakenly label as bliss,
those of us panting-still
emptied-shrinking-inside-outside-swelling-filled
know an experience
of Nature as Artemis
seen and reacted to
until
death of self
does indeed part
speak not lightly
of being washed clean
by that heart.

This Artemis parallels
the action of the Uroboros,
the original dragon,
the keeper and bider
of all time and history,
the eater
of all mythology and culture,
the progenitor
of all thoughts and feelings:
rebirth and eternal return
is the fate of the Artist!