Cabin Lights

In the few moments I could recollect before falling asleep, I saw the boardwalk at night with all the cabins lit up. It was the summer of 2001 and I was fifteen years old. I envisioned sitting on porches while listening into the night the voices from other porches that could be heard over the chirping crickets and loon calls amidst the silence of nature. Nights were dark in the woods and so made the cabin lights all the brighter, all the more meaningful, as if to say, ‘indeed, life is in here.’ Those reverential days I would sometimes walk the boardwalk at night, eavesdropping on the very same porch conversations that soothed a quiet night. I would hear talks of who should marry whom and who wore what ghastly clothes to dinner that evening. As I would walk past, those on the porches would wave fondly to me, gossip halting for a temporary indulgence in community. I would smile and wave back, maybe say, “Goodnight.” The stars hung like moaning diamonds, trapped in sticky molasses. The loons called sporadically, lonely, earnestly. Crickets chirping. Frogs wailed. Murmurs. The sudden, unnatural outburst of laughter and then all’s quiet once more. The strange peace of it, I found enthralling. There was something in it - some expansive memory that reaches into the farness of time and now transcends my experience and becomes happiness, though I did not know it was happiness then. The simplicity of nuanced habitation in the greatness of nature. Freedom with a measure of comfort. That is happiness. Cabin lights piercing through the darkness. Voices lasting into the stars. And so shall we remain forever. That is happiness.

American Sidestep (The Things We Did Not Become)

I feel close to something different.
The ribbons have left my eyes
And fatigue is a new blanket left open to inspiration.
Am I not spiraling?
No, thank heavens no.
Where the watermelon blasts come like rain
And the candles manufacture the daylight
Is now A land I will call habitable .

There are no new crops, the harvest fails,
My children will have nuclear small pox
And yet I can rest; sleep soundly at night.
I no longer cook in the boiling turmoil
Of speculative intellectualist farces.
All things are free, Israelites and the slaves,
From Egypt to America, all things are free
And I can rest, I can rest,
And know what I do is good, towards an end -
Not the sad snake moan of a broken Bible
Or broken families, dreams, trees, or earth

For so long I have been bankrupt,
Stranded in the viscid muck of a vapid ocean,
Trash among the seas,
But now I feel contentiously good,
Like a solemn prayer flying higher
Than it thought it could
And still rising.

The joy bells ring from cumulus clouds someday,
The sun shines luminous to grandstanding greedy dreams,
And sleep is its own reward, pure sleep, rest,
In the wake of a day too fast gone bye, sleep,
The ellipsis of living, sleep comes justly.

Remorse and trumpets arouse all spectrum of feeling
While I am you, American side step,
Going introverted and knowing the road.
Call off my landlord and make me a rich man,
Or send me to Haiti to atone my life through labor,
My life could be better but so it goes.

All the rudolph stories could be fated speeches
Prone to the all powerful propaganda machine religion,
Thrown to the underbelly of the Cosmic Atom
In search of truth where none exists.
To the black holes I have not become, I raise my glass.
Everyone is undertakers but that doesn't mean I must be too.
And so the cash drips out of my bank
Like a leakng faucet in a day dream
And the piles of mud and fog prophesy
That I shall be down and out again soon,
But for now there is soda, for now there is cake,
Some vast indifference is on the wane,
A family reunion is around the bend,
With cannon fire and love to amount to,
And so shall it be forever with these beat days (which are all days)
And so shall it be that I must not be undertakers.

Christendom is coming, but not too fast,
So we can ignore it all righteously
And hope to get caught in the fountain of youth
But never be found in the whirlpool of youth
Which has drowned so many unsuspecting souls.
Ah, for we do everything to try to participate
And make participants in history
And we look for the right side to land on.
Never fear my future babies,
You'll have your place too.
We'll all muddle through the sciences and seasons
Till bells jingle for you, as they jingle now for me,
From the all the clouds and space
And the things we did not become.

E=MC^2 (or: Einstein Was There)

Sail on pale oceans to the starry deeps
And I remember the start of creation,
From darkest light in windswept space -
A trillion miles just a trifle -
To the foggy divine, interspersed God
Within the gelled tome of the cell
And all composited in one measurement,
The unit that is a universe,
As arbitrary as the inch,
As important as the mind,
It has existed forever unchanging,
An island of being in naught.

No change ever graces the unit
Nothing enters or ever leaves,
And so too have we ever always been,
Our mass existing before light
Our energy existing before mass,
And so too will we ever exist,
Our mass extending into light
Our energy extending into mass
Past all death, time, and self
Into star children, becoming becomers
The stuff of God, the fabric upheld.

In lubricious flesh we will waste our days
Trapped still inside our eyes
Disfigured by time, unhinged by laws,
While always we have always been
The Universe and more than;
We are forever for we are mass:
Einstein is crucified upon the Hubble,
Drifting deeper into ancient light
And we are beautiful forever.

Somerville Ave.

Like the damned streets off of Somerville Ave,
Transcendence seems to forget that it fades.
It burns out like a light bulb, disappears like electricity,
Forges new paths in the sands of the sieve.
Go off in the waves. Go off in the waves -
Drown the cruel titan that smells of all night,
Born from the trenches, released by the knife.
with all the sounds stolen from the windmill of time,
The absence of her words keep me locked in the rain
With only a candle, a vigil of remains.
And I run down the alleys of no-where
And hide in the crevices of the immortal
And kill the cruel joker who laughs at God
And knight the sad God who jokes
And heal the sick
And cure the poor
And write the next letter of the holy page
And knock down all doors
And crash down all gates
And cry to the broken space of knowledge
And believe again
So as not to forget that transcendence fades
And salvation is a street off of Somerville Ave.

Friendship

You and I, we use the same soap
To wash the same sins
That we don't believe are sins,
To keep our flesh clean and make our minds secure.
In the twenty some years that link our times
We removed our experiences for statistical logs;
Our lives grow remote, isolated, perpetual;
We become less as more becomes now.

To Us All

To run the frolicking skyclock down,
To stroke the cow's struggling grace,
To mow the last grasses of star spangled earth,
To deny all the fruits of her sad song,
Could be to strike at no fraction
Or percentage too mighty
The sweetest melody spoken so plain
In the highest valley of ever being
All along the libertine skyline
Of every pillow man's dreams.

O ye seaserpents of yellow scaled horror,
Take back thy movie theater, scum for us all.
Grant me to imply its all in the garbage
We eat that births the foul islands atop
Past trash compressed
That betrays us to the vortex boredom and regalia
Of tepid remorse.

To us all. To us all.

Blinding rat soups can will us to vote
But we're not the type for democracy's key.
O poison, fair poison, knot my stomach thrice.
Dice the nothing into small nothings,
Kid not the laughing at such great heights.
Rome shall fall,
Not one brick unturned.
All is but skylab and a joystick.
Know thy God and his face.
He's already revealed in the militias of the future.

It Is Good To Think Upon the Multiverse

How quick things change -
In the dusk, the picture is graying
And I still find my stock in you.
How the old waves of tempered feeling return
Like an angelic meteor crashing,
How the emerald labyrinth still has my heart!
The parade across the orient has been halted
While the elephants give birth and die
Amdist the winged dreams of tsunami salvation
And I am alone, thinking of you.
The air is so hot on this journey
To think straight is sin.

I never thought much about you
Until the islands moved, rearranging everything,
When the eclipse became permanent and all things in purple light.
How is it now without the temple?
Has your center maintained a forward march?
Has grace smiled upon the holy body
That breaks to reform the wine of your soul?

I've missed you these days; the quiet resounds
As the pulse of the universe I so desperately want
Conflicts with the one that I own.
But its good to think upon the multiverse
Where somewhere, in some age we thrive,
Aloft in the barn, asleep in the fields,
Stars as blankets and skies so warm,
Free to be millionaires and hidden in our bodies,
Soaking in the vast freedom of lovers' multitudes,
Alive on the cusp of the fountainhead fate
With visions and dreams ubiquitous with God
And the very instance we're in as the only treasure of it all.

To proselytize such things is folly
But to consider them is holy;
Our capacity to wonder and dream
Is the heartbeat of all creation's meaning.