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prose poem with lots of unatributed quotes
The Kingdom of heaven is like writing in the margins. For all of the writing in the book there is always room for more words. The kingdom of heaven is within you, heaven and earth will pass away but my words will never pass away, in the beginning was the word and the word was god and was with god and everyone who loves is a child of god because god is love. Solomon says truly there is nothing new under the sun and yet i am a new creation. i sing a new song, i love the truth, i fall short of the glory of god and write obscenities in the book of life, i fall short, but the wind rocks me, i lay each night in the cradle and feel at home, i fall short, i am selfish and self centered but mostly lazy and yet i am rocked by the winds of change. i feel at home on the dusty plains, i feel at home in the snowy mountains, i feel at home in the winter’s rain. god loves a cheerful giver a forthright spirit and an upright heart. Plato says rightly that we are in a cave looking at flickering lights cast upon the darkness of our cave all these things that will Pass away. How many walls that limited Plato’s walks still stand? How many bowls from which he supped his soups or knives that carved his bread? hath not moth & rust destroyed? yet the idea of Knife guides every hand that makes to cut anything anywhere ever. heaven and earth shall pass away but my words will never die. this world is illusion only in the eye of the eternity and for now walls still stand the cave still surrounds us with darkness. but it is only contrast on the page of the limitless light of the now. dare to read your life as a book, your experiences as words on a page in the book of life. store up treasures in heaven, someday all there will be is communication, isn’t that what communion really means? but now there are walls and roads and knives and bowls and soup and bread and the stuff that Stories are made of. tales to be told when the weather just doesn’t matter anymore. heaven and earth shall pass away but my words shall never die. time is a fire that burns away all the things that in the end are dust, but star dust nothing less, “its the cosmos that gave us life its from stardust that we’re made of”. “we are all stars”. “every woman and every man is a star” because of the truth. not the idea of truth but the truth itself, the known and the unknown, the beginning and the end. just as our bodies, molded clay of life stuff, for a time, a temple of finite properties but infinite possibilities. we are born into a world in which we are a part and we live and we die like the birds in the field. but our fallible material shells generate consciousness. a self. an entity capable of knowing and being known. remembering and being remembered. the kingdom of heaven is within you. The kingdom of heaven is at hand, to be grasped. to be known to love and be loved for god is love and what is love but a knowing a being known. [the book of wisdom says the great build up walls of lies, great houses and lands and things that twinkle and gleam, that block out the light of eternity, (an experience of both truth & love) and leave them huddled alone in darkness. a land of dark despair] just as every hand that cuts is guided by the same perfect knife every heart that loves is guided by the same perfect love. God and heaven and all the saints and angels are an “a priori” assumption, a self evident fact by anyone who has ever been lost in the moment of love, the sharing, the knowing of another soul be it our neighbor or the god who made the universe its really all the same eternity, if you do it right. do you want to know if you are going to live forever? are you living forever right now? my home is the planet earth and my family has six billion children and i yearn to know their names and know their stories. i have a name, i have asked to be remembered and promised to remember. i have loved and am loved, i sing songs to the angels, i love everyone i have ever loved and that love lives inside of me. moments of eternity when we shined brighter together, lost in the moment, timeless and so eternal. heavenly treasures, stories to tell when the weather just doesn’t matter anymore because heaven and hell have passed away and there is only the word. the word is truth. the word is love. the word is beauty. the word is.
curriculum vita (a prose poem found in my paint by # calendar Dec. 06)
What is my story, what is the essence of my being? From where does come this hunger to know, to be known? Why mar the blank page? in what hubris it must lay, lie, die.
Oh to be of one and now, but what cost history, even to gain eternity, oh blessed now, the razor’s edge of existence that i can only pretend exists as by the time the light has hit my eyes its history, pure history. And oh, memory, the purest form of imagination. When the brain is eaten through with plaquey-tentacles and the mind from which is sprung is thin and patchy, the mind holds onto childhood. the earliest stories, the purest, the best, the core. oh history i sing your praise and yearn to never forget, even at the cost of the now.
My life a taut quivering string of ambivilance. the cost of a vivid imagination. There’s good reason to believe in everything. any damn thing.
At what cost freedom? At what cost power, even unsought, unutilized, unspent this currency weighs heavy in my pocket. Makes me want to walk all cockeyed, or spend it. or just fucking lay down, rest, forget, dream perhaps, not without struggle but how’s it going to drag you down, when your laying on the bottom?
various and sundry
thank you constant reader, i couldn’t have done it without you. I wrote the first draft of Up North a bit more than 7 years ago and it has languished in its little Mead Memo pad unread by anyone until now. I find re-writing/editing way harder than writing and it probably took about twice as long to re-write as write, and i didn’t even change it that much. I wrote it in the present tense writing most of it on the trip as you can tell in the context of the story. I hope you liked it as a serial. My next plans for it is to give it a third and probably final edit and put it out in Publisher as a novellette.
I have been captivated of my life as a novel since high school. I think i have written here that back then it dawned on me that there were two kinds of great writers. Those who have mastered the craft in the extreme and those who can write adequately but have lived a life that gives them something to say. I have been profoundly changed by taking that second path, even though i choose more to live my life than document it.
This was an experiment in trying to live a novel, really a short story. I was surprised how life accomodated to bring it a theme and leaving the protragonist changed as every short story does.
There is a school of counseling called Narrative Therapy. It teaches that we should think of our life as a novel. The trick is not so much looking back at what the protagonist has learned from the first part of the novel. Any thoughtful person can do thatl. The trick is to flip to the end of the book and see what that character has to teach us. The one that has it all figured out.
I have gotten some good verbal feedback on the story but no one has commented. Lets dialogue. Tell me what you think. What do you want to see more of? less of? again my thanks constant reader. Without you, this story would have only been told to myself. and of course the angels.
going crazy part 5
After a long night of restless wandering I returned to the mind spa. Everyone was up and rolling, cleaning up and packing. The first night we had arrived our host’s partner Rose had told us to “remember what it looks like” which in my then unspun mind was a simple admonition to clean the place up when we were done. Now i saw new implications of needing to remember what was here, what had transpired. I placed an Israel Regardie book on the shelf of metaphysical classics in thanks for the memories. Debbie seemed a little out of sorts as i put the last few of my things in my pack, doublechecked to make sure my ticket was still in my bag. I remember a couple of Aaron’s friends who hadn’t come over with us were there. I thought one of them might want to carry Debbie’s bag as they also only had one. I was remembering the Fishbone CDs left over from the show at the Melkveg. I was remembering Jennifer dipping CD sized sheets of hash into a large pot of boiling wax the night before. I was remembering that i’d brought Debbie’s bag over from the states. I felt very tired, that now i was ready to sleep, and told myself not yet. Its not yet safe. I’ll sleep on the plane when i know i’m safe. We left for the train station. Debbie was disgusted when i mentioned i was broke again. Jennifer asked what happened to the 100 guilders she had given me and i told her i spent it teaching an immigrant what “frivolous” meant. Debbie bought my ticket and we boarded the train to Schippol. I kept thinking about the 300 CDs, the CD sized sheets of hash, this whole extended dangerous practical joke i had fallen into, the vagaries of friendship – and who in fact where my friends? I had no clear plan but i knew i wasn’t rolling that bag through customs. My thoughts ran slowly through my sleep deprived befuddlement. As the train pulled into Shippol I pulled the roll away behind me, last in line, moving towards the door. I felt like i was walking through molasses. The doors closed before i could de-board the train with everyone else. Flooded with relief i waved to my dumbstruck friends as the train pulled away from the station. There was another passenger stuck behind me, seperated from her guy at the airport. She seemed nice and uninvolved in this mess. I thought i would ask her advice. We had decided, of course, to ride up to the next stop, change trains and return to the airport. On the ride I quickly explained i believed that i had fallen in with international drug smugglers and thought the bag i carried was filled with Hash and wondered on the ethics of checking. She considered my dilemma. She said, her guy would be at the airport when she returned however long it took because he loved her and would wait. If my friends were at the station i could trust them and if not then well….
We arrived at the airport and there was her guy, happy to see her and in a hurry to catch the flight. My “friends” were no where in sight. I pulled off my backpack to check the ticket for the time and gate. No ticket. I had seen it that morning, double checking it was in the flap it had rested through this whole ordeal, now it was gone. I checked the flight listings and went to the appropriate gate. We had been cutting it close and the flight was departed, no one was in sight. I was stunned, exhausted, not thinking clearly. I needed some air and went outside and sat on a bench to collect my thoughts. There was this rhythmic pounding of a huge piledriver at a nearby construction site. I felt drawn there. I had been thinking about the hypnotic quality of techno music and the risk involved in opening your mind to hypnotic suggestions enclosed in the “music”. I felt drawn there, i felt like our host would be waiting for some kind of final confrontation. As i walked towards the pounding i realized this was insane. He would not be there, trespassing on a construction site would only draw attention to me with possibly a huge amount of hash in my possession. I sat down more to think. I opened the large duffel and pulled out a cloth shopping bag with some of Debbie’s souveniers contained within. I consciously did not check the CDs. I felt it was safer not to know. I zipped the duffel back up, left it next to the bench and walked away. I saw an exit sign leading to a highway. I thought i would return to the known of hitchhiking. I saw i was on an on-ramp heading east. Home was to the West. Or was it, East would get me there too, it would just take a little longer. I felt ready for the journey. I felt beyond want, beyond fear, beyond even need. I walked as the 4 lanes of traffic, those funny little European cars whizzed by. I found a lighter in my pocket, from the Mind Spa. I wondered if this was how they tracked my movements? My sinuses were clogged, i felt like i could barely breathe, i felt exhausted. I thought if only my sinuses hadn’t been clogged i could have done progressive relaxation and shut off this barrage of thought and rested and i wouldn’t be so damn tired. I thought it would be over by now but here i was a stranger in a strange land still. I thought i didn’t know what was happening to me. Had I been drugged, hypnotized, had my mind blown by mindblowers. Had i touched the face of god? I felt powerful as i breathed air into my lungs. I felt i had to be a powerful magician to have survived or maybe i was an angel? I was uncertain, and i felt there was power in this uncertainty, that if i knew it would all crumble into dust. I realized i loved the unknown and did not fear it. I said quietly, “I whisper when i want to hypnotize and I shout when I want something”. I didn’t know if i was listened to by a microphone planted by mindfuckers or the god who made the universe or if i was being listened to at all but I was angry. Angry at my exhaustion, my clogged sinuses, my fear of pursuit as a drug smuggler though i had done nothing. I shouted, my spirit self grew to scrape the clouds, i found myself ten thousand feet tall and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that at this moment i wielded all the power of the universe. I shouted. “If i don’t get a ride right now! I will destroy Phillip Morris”. Bamn, instantly a van in the far left lane cuts through 4 lanes of heavy traffic. “Would you like a ride?” the driver asked.
going crazy part 3
I had been spending the most time with Aaron. Aaron was in crisis. He had at first turned down Debbie’s invitation to return to Amsterdam as his business was pressing. He was a co-owner of a new marijuana dispensary and had a small grow operation in Marin keeping him busy. After he learned I was going he decided he could go. That fact later became important in my delusional system. Last year Aaron was the newbie this year I was.
Shortly after we arrived Aaron had learned his partner had declared him corrupt and taken control of the business and his grow operation saying they were company assets. His partner also called High Times and told them they were employing a swindler and wanting to avoid controversy they fired him before he started. Aaron was obsessed and went on and on about his troubles back home. As he was largely my guide to the city I was the recipient of his angst and tried my best to listen and provide guidance. I remember we had a long talk about “energy vampires” those who take and take without giving. There is a reason you never invite a vampire into your home.
Aaron and I had purchased some “organic ecstasy” from our host at the mind spa. That night we did a gram, sometime later we did another. Being crazy for me is a lot like being on ecstasy. That same sparkling of perception and words unbidden uncensored easy on the tongue. We stayed up all night mostly talking about Aaron’s situation. That day I worked the door at some Cannabis Cup event and did whatever we did, go to dinner smoke cannabis its all really a blur and truly I have little idea of what happened when or even what really happened and what was delusion. Keep that in mind throughout this narrative have the names have not been changed under the assumption that time and the statute of limitations protect the guilty, if there be any.
That night I was again hanging out with Aaron and he raved on in his obsessions and wanted to do the rest of the ecstasy. I didn’t want to do any because it was late and I hadn’t slept. Aaron said he would do it all (4 grams I believe and it was more intense than any I had ever done) if I didn’t do it with him. One of the bad things about ecstasy is the tripping dose and the fatal dose are just too damn close. So I did a gram and later another and again we stayed up all night talking about Aaron’s obsessions. Taking ecstasy was probably the last rational decision, poor though it was, that I made for months. On night three I did not need to take ecstasy to stay up all night nor did I sleep again in Amsterdam though it must have been another 8 or 9 days before I left.
I can’t really describe what I was feeling through this time. I had this rush of ideas, incredible confidence and energy to the point of laughable grandiosity and I was putting things together at an incredible rate. I was so intensely in the moment that a coherent narrative is impossible. Perhaps insanity at its core is the lack of a coherent personal narrative. Stan Davis my first sociology professor at good old Monroe County Community College called insanity a worldview of one. But that is insufficient as I often could easily explain my charged world view to folks and take them along with me to what I now believed. Because with the delusions of grandeur came an incredible charisma.
I believe I continued to work security for the Cup. At one point I was able to work the CAN table. Part of our deal with High Times was we got a free table at the vendors area. We brought no product, the heart of CAN’s fundraising was selling pot stickers, t-shirts and hemp products but we produced nothing and our vendors and their competitors had tables so we just had literature. We had our glossy flyers for the medical marijuana initiative and we had copies of the initiative. We were a bit of rock stars for just passing the most significant piece of marijuana law in the world. Aaron had been desultorily working the table as he was not allowed to work which left it all to Debbie and myself. At one point I worked the table for 45 minutes. Within minutes there was a crowd around the table as I gave my rap. This is how we passed it this is what we passed. That was the essence of it. We had a basket that people through coins in. I only worked the table for 45 minutes because Debbie felt we were endangering our place by taking business from the other vendors. The ones who had products. As we excitedly counted our take it came to 450 guilders or about $300. I had done 3 fair days of tabling income without any products to sell in 45 minutes. That’s when I realized that money was valueless. I felt I could sing it up out of the aether at will, and perhaps I could.
Later perhaps that same day I took a break from working the door and walked through the exhibition booth where there was an open mic. Rappers were bustin out rhymes and I thought I had important revelations to share. I took the mic and explained that the economy ran on magic and that money meant nothing. I said wild eyed that we could actualize the idea behind “that insight book” that if you see someone doing the right thing than give them money so they can keep doing it and we could be freed from the shackles of shameless commerce. I made the challenge that I had a pocket full of money that I would try to give away and that it could not be done because by doing the right thing it would flood back to me. I of course quickly found it was no problem at all to give away all my money.
I left the stage and an older hippy gentleman took me aside and told me that while he heard the truth and compassion in my speech that there was madness in my eyes and that I needed rest. I almost cried from his gentle hand on my shoulder and the care in his words. A young woman approached me for my money for some feminist cause. We talked and found her organization’s needs exceeded what was in my pocket and I gave her enough for a phone call and my number in Berkeley and promised to work with her to raise that money with an infallible plan that rose in my mind. Debbie approached and told me to cool it I was making a fool of myself. I pointed out the young woman who had been touched by my words and she said she just wanted my money.
Back at the mind spa I was scolded for interrupting a poetry event for speechifying. I announced I could write poetry though I had never been able too before. I knocked out one on the pains of being me on the spot. Jennifer saved it and later sent it to me and it was pretty good. I may still have it somewhere. My friends challenged my growing grandiosity and my challenge of their sacred cows. I had always felt an air of hypocrisy and shameless commerce ran through the drug legalization crowd and with the death of my self-censor I no longer held back.
They challenged my unequaled genius with comparing me to my host who spoke three languages flawlessly. After they slept I broke out the German English dictionary and wrote a haiku. I don’t remember it in German but in English it went:
Sunrise War
Around dying Autumnal fires
Until sleep intervenes
I was having flashes of what I felt was genetic memory. At least one night I walked all night. I felt my body had walked about Europe for millennia. I had vague memories of marching with compatriots a squad of warriors sleeping around campfires in piles like puppies for warmth. I wanted to capture the old warriors sitting about the fire telling horror stories through the night as one by one they drift off to uneasy dreams.
At some point I had picked up a nasty huge swelling bruise and was walking with a heavy limp. My friends wanted me to go to a hospital. I knew enough that I was too crazy to go to a hospital and not risk admission in some foreign system. By then I was afraid my friends were out to get me. To push me into insanity. To force me to wager my soul in an unholy game of Risk with our host. To induct me into an international secret organization of drug dealers. I felt that if I slept someone would be whispering hypnotizing words into my ears and I would be lost, damned or both. I vowed I would not sleep again until I was safely out of this infernal city. The damaged foot was a problem. I laid in a special relaxation chair, leather, like something you would see in a dental office. I breathed into my nose and out of my mouth slowly and evenly concentrating on the air going by my septum. I clenched my fingers and toes and felt all of the incredible tension of my wire taut body. I released all of it and felt the incredible sense of total relaxation. I visualized the swelling leaving my foot and it becoming perfectly whole. Time passed I guess. I looked at my foot and the bruise was gone. I showed my friends my foot whole and restored and they were unimpressed. They still wanted me to go to the hospital as I was clearly mad thinking I could heal my foot. They asked if I had slept and I told them I had. Later I would lay down and close my eyes and pretend to sleep to try to allay their concerns but would also drop hints that I was only pretending.
One night fairly close to when we were supposed to leave I came in from a day of wandering and found Jennifer dipping CD sized sheets of hash into a pot of wax bubbling on the stove. We discussed in a roundabout fashion drug commerce and my possible participation in it. I had always made a very clear distinction that I was comfortable possessing and using drugs but not in their commerce. Sanctions are too great, the rewards too tenuous. Jennifer said at one point: “Act out of love and not fear”, a great line. I responded with: “Love of what and fear of what? Love of money is the root of all evil and fear of God is the beginning of wisdom”. She was unimpressed. She did give me a 100 guilders because I had given all of my money away. She told me not to give it away but to spend it on something “frivolous”.
next: going crazy part 4
first: going crazy part 1
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