(You’d Have to Let Me In)
The Lines on Crete
I had a dream
I was travelin’ in Auroville,
the cultural exchange
a long stem.
That was the guitar.
We motivated.
You were out behind the buildings.
Did you see me?
We have such an interesting house.
Now I’m skinny dippin’.
I mean runnin’ naked through the streets.
Can I show you my narrative nonfiction?
If you touch it it will grow.
You hear me sweetheart?
I’ve choked up on words.
I’m just tryin’ to get you to see reality.
And that’s a potato.
Forgiveness on deck.
Can we study its sweetheart?
I’m miles from campus.
Could that be Crete?
I’ve got a Rembrandt to show yah,
something bigger than words.
Can we go there?
That’s the next step.
What’s wrong with being gaslit?
How functional is your insanity?
And you think you are who you are?
Is that reality you see or a social construct?
I’m all over the paper with mine.
I show you reality.
Are we just alive on dead paper?
Let’s see your configuration.
Will it change the social construct?
And here we go.
There’s a hotel
of clarity.
I’m pinchin’ for that today.
(today’s muse)
I disembarked from the ferry in Heraklion, Crete’s largest city but one I never explored or even went into very deeply, for reasons of feeling and not thought, not that it felt a bad city; the feelings were just into a country Crete. Getting off the ferry was one of the worst landings of my travels. I had enough money for one meal and that’s it. I gathered English would not be so spoken here. Sri Aurobindo’s picture of his living eyes was far from my mind; the excitement of the cash register ring and its exchange had worn off; the adventure the crashing of the waves against the ferry had promised had vanished with their splash; and I was alone with my discontent, a common state with me and would be even in paradise I imagine, if there were not also some fundamental change in consciousness and therefore character.
The Jewett woods of my later childhood I’ve introduced, briefly, a secondary growth forest, but there were old trees from the first forest standing around dream-feeling all the change. Still, it was a wonderland for a kid, with all the mystery a forest presses on the senses. The last bear had been seen, with a cub trailing behind, about ten years earlier, according to the local grapevine, and by an old woman of the so and so’s (like I say, names escape memoir writing for me), a respected family, and so the story was believed. It wasn’t old woman Conard, who stood often on her front porch cussing out the winds that drove by at the top of her lungs and waving her Bible. All the local gossip said the same thing: she should read that Bible. Funny I remember her name, and ain’t it like that? I’m just adding some local color. We were poor people you know.
To get back to the backstory, the little boy wandered those woods on foot and on his horse, a Welsh pony named Dolly, a center of discontent. I wanted to live with my mom and get my life back, the one I had in Houston, what was the dominate thought, the overriding feeling, composed of all these life colors: sitting in my mom’s lap, where I sat every moment she let me, not understanding the resentment that brewed in my sister Gwen, being alone with myself in my own room playing with my imagination, playing the moment of fun with the kids on my street, going to work with my mom at The Western Steak House and its Far East Room on Telephone Road, where she was a waitress, going home after mom’s work and listening to my go to bed song I would not go to bed without, “A Man Without Love” by Engelbert Humperdinck (“It’s true; kids have no taste. Do you know what I’m talking about? Obviously he’s a good singer” my muse), being babysat by the legal immigrants from Mexico the Marino family, who lived across the street and who my sister and I practically lived with half the time, since they could deal with me, and no other sitter could (more than one had left in tears), who took Gwen and I to Mexico when I was seven, my first trip out of the country, and not as a tourist mind you, as a small child of a Mexican family, and I can continue. The wonders of that forest, every bit as sensuous and life-populated as that city life, more so if you count the silence, weren’t appreciated until I thought and felt in its absence, and ain’t that just how it is? So you see now how I established my pattern of discontent in the middle of the world bending down and kissing me on the cheek—so art human.
There was (still is in moments), though, that world specter false reality behind all this, why discontent was my default mode. There was always this fear the world would eat me alive, what I was afraid of stepping flat broke off that ferry. “Alright you helped me out world, but only to fatten me up so to eat me up.” It’s the usual fairy tale you know. The inevitable happy ending escapes you if you’re staring at a wolf wearing your grandmother’s clothes, all those big teeth glistening hurt. I wandered those woods because I had a wicked step-mother, and two ‘yeah momma hurt that boy’ step-sisters (sound familiar?), and anytime I was in earshot of her, she would spew forth a continual tirade of emotional abuse, “I know you like a book you little son of a bitch. You’re no good, and your father’s no good…” #Me Too needs to come here too, where a woman lords it over a little boy, in homes and classrooms all over the Earth, but not as a moral crusade pointing fingers out for blood but wanting to sit in the lap of women who do that and sing “A Man Without Love” that little boy’s feeling now, sing it in the rush of the little boy’s tears. You want them to stop, not be hurt by everyone, to feel that little boy’s pain, not the pain we give them by punishing them. You think the two go together do you?
A recent boy that.
It’s protocol.
Is that paid TV?
Is that all we’re lookin’ at?
I can only guess at the conscious intent involved.
He didn’t do anything,
my little grandson Nitish.
You know what hit ‘im?
About four or five women’s blues.
He was the target their scapegoat.
Got slapped in the head,
punched in the back,
hair pulled,
humiliated in front of his class.
They said he went under the table to hide,
when telling me about his acting ability.
I told them trauma does that.
They looked at me like a foreign interference.
The extent of the breach was only known later:
unable to talk anytime he got corrected,
unable to listen to his superiors,
unable to do anything but hit when mad.
They said it was bad handwriting.
Stupid teachers,
the specter they thought was me.
I’m Tamil he’s American,
and I’ve traded places with him
to show the fault lines.
Covid saved his life.
He never had to go back there.
They think I’m the culprit,
the ashram school I tried to get him in.
Terrible inroads to China
(the party line you know)
to get a wrong picture of Earth:
only women bleed.
Structural society,
is that where the blueprints go?
(today’s muse)
Getting off the ferry, I went to the Nicolas Kazantzakis Museum, 15 kilometers from Heraklion, to try and find a place to write for the winter, hoping my emulation of him would get me in. The place I hitched to, as I remember it, was not in a town square as it is on the net but in the country, a small place that had bigger plans. I spent an hour or so looking at the few exhibits, reading what I didn’t know about the man. I told the woman who ran the place how much Kazantzakis had influenced me, and I’d traveled some in his pilgrim steps, going to St. Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai and writing there (for a couple of hours only), and now I needed a place to live and write. In the story on this blog called “A Journey of a Thousand Tongues”, which is about taping my poetry on walls, doorways and boulders and such in Israel and Egypt, I include excerpts of my own report I wrote of my poetic adventure, influenced by his Report to Greco. It’s his autobiography. I bought it at the aforementioned Half Price Books in Houston. Amazing it hadn’t been referenced to in my literature studies at the university. In it he recounts his frequent pilgrimages to the Holy Land and Mt. Athos, particularly pained by the battle between the Spirit and the flesh, a common motif of his fiction, which is further accentuated by his reluctant, noncommittal love affair with communism, an atheistic deity, if I may call it that, because, to hear him recount it, he would stand and sing with hundreds of people and thrill with tears of bhakti in front of the image of the god Hammer and Sickle.
The first time machine he’ll play Bill access.
Wonderful for your toy.
Does it feel good
Zorba the Greek?
Excuse me,
I’m a riddle.
Let’s do his overhead material.
Oh no, it’s not there.
I don’t even see an inner life
deeper than mounting TV.
I can stomach him
because his dick got in the way,
and he was all over town.
In the writing class
he got to Mt. Athos,
really invested with the game.
Monasteries appeased him.
He didn’t live there long.
He turned around The Last Temptation of Christ,
made it Hollywood,
an explosive movie.
We hear him breathe.
Christ was a character in his novels,
so taken out of room:
we go to church,
and he’s not our national anthem.
He’s explored Christ
with a beer bottle,
fleshy concerns.
You know I was disciple of Christ
and Kazantzakis.
We’ve explored terms.
Excellent reading by the way.
Now let’s get back to that alphabet,
explosive material I write.
That was the time machine.
(today’s muse)
The very kind lady at the museum said they were planning to build a room for writers in the future but could not help me now. Well, it was a long shot. I don’t remember any of the getting there, but I went next to the tourist bureau that was on the highway running parallel to the ocean not far out of Heraklion. I went there to ask about free camping, where one could do that. Did they tell me I could do that anywhere or nowhere, or only at these certain spots? I don’t remember. Whatever I was told, it must’ve been discouraging, because I just left and walked up a side road that went off up to the right of the highway and found an alone place in the olive grove that was there and sat down and felt sorry for myself. Oh poor me! that sort of thing. You see, there hadn’t been a minor miracle in the last couple of hours, and so I’d lost faith. Or you could say that, despite the blessings, I felt that underlying curse, and I was trapped in the labyrinth of the world, and the Minotaur was just around the next corner. Either way, the whole episode is embarrassing. My notebook from that day describes it thusly:
No picture of him in prevailing Athens is correct.
How many places like this are there?
What I’m going through.
A hurt of well overlooks like.
So he plunged into the dark abyss.
He knew himself keen to his central aim.
I seize out of my lover’s passionate embrace.
Next came the Palace of Knossos to go to, and I wasn’t going site seeing. I was feeling down and out on Crete and simply eating comfort food. One of my favorite Greek myths as a child was Theseus and the Minotaur, a story rich with imaginings. I’d play it out in my mind: that monster roaming the labyrinth looking for Greek youth to eat, who’d been sent to be a sacrifice for the city of Athens, their mounting terror as they were chosen, their sailing there to be eaten (what they must’ve felt), their trying to find a way out of the labyrinth, and finally, their doom coming upon them, encountering the Minotaur and being eaten alive. I would thrill with the Athenian hero Theseus as he hunted down and killed the thing.
The early adolescent Donny wanted to be an archeologist, with the same passion I would soon give to Jesus, reading account after account of the findings and excavations of lost cities and civilizations—Troy was real! Odysseus then?—, so lost in it I asked my mom to put the three pyramids of Giza and Happy Birthday Archeologist on my 12th birthday cake (the pyramids were there but not the epitaph—ridiculous my mom had said), would imagine Arthur Evans, the adventurer archeologist, coming upon that ‘virgin’ hill on Crete that had held so many secrets for so long and discovering the palace, the labyrinth, the whole Minoan civilization (what that must’ve felt like). So to Knossos I would go. I could not, however, shake the feeling that I’ve described of being some vaguely intended sacrifice, on the part of a half conscious world that let its unconscious part reign, or so it seemed to me, in the same shoes basically as those seven young Athenian men and seven young women sent to the island each year and I was disembarking from the ferry to be eaten alive (although they were wearing concrete sacrificial shoes). “Yeah you wonder when the axe is going to fall” (my muse today).
Knossos is not far from Heraklion. I managed to get there by thumb, but it wasn’t easy, despite the heavy traffic on the highway. I had to hump some. It was early evening by the time I got there, what with all the traveling I’d done that day from Athens, by boat, thumb, and feet. I decided to wait until the next morning to visit the palace, and I didn’t know how I was going to do that because I didn’t have any money. Did they have an entrance fee? I found an empty piece of property a few ‘doors’ down from the entrance to the site, went to the end of it, the property boundary, where it met a large field in which the palace sat about a football field off in the distance to the right, no buildings or anything in between, and set up my tent, what I did just to feel better, for comfort, and not the physical kind. A backpacker’s tent is such a wondrous thing. A minute or two, and viola, you have a home. It was a two-person Sierra Designs three seasons tent, as durable as your teeth, as intimate as your bedroom. I cooked something I don’t remember I got I don’t remember how and retired for the evening, hoping the morning would bring better, brighter things. It brought the palace. “Whatever site reckoned in my head the beauty to be there” (my muse today).
During my dawn meditation the next morning, I heard these lines of muse and saw these visions:
Putting windows in, fresh, fresh windows.
Putting windows in, eight, eight windows.
Was chosen Don. [vision of a large arrow coming in a long arc from the palace and landing right where my ankles were crossed in meditation. Just as the arrow landed I heard, “Was chosen!,” and at the same time I saw written on the bottom of the scene, like a subtitle, “Was chosen Don.” Then in another vision I saw the Minotaur walking towards me in the labyrinth, completely in shadow. It advanced towards me a ways, not to scare me but simply to be seen]
What about to prove?
Just to brag to people no.
I couldn’t make out any features of the Minotaur, but I could see its outline, and instead of horns it had antenna on its head a bit horn-like, and not only two. It still suggested, vaguely, a man-bull form though. “An alien!” I thought, but your guess is as good as mine. For me, the vision was showing it was real, whatever it was, and that the old story had some basis in fact. Now, as smart as I think I am or may seem, I have a case of the dumbass often enough and in important enough moments that my intelligence can be questioned, and here was a prime example. No, that’s not believing in the Minotaur for you skeptical folks. I did not realize Crete was giving me a place to stay for the winter. In my ego I am, that is, that I am important, I thought it had to do with being chosen for some great work. Here we’d say “Goddamn son,” as LBJ said to Forrest Gump, embarrassed for him and in disbelief, when he showed the president his butt.
Will the world know the business of other?
Can the world know the business of other?
It’s not up for sale.
This is Process Oriented Psychology.
And you think you’ve found a name for it.
It’s not that at all.
It won’t fit into a schoolbook.
This is so much bigger world out there
than Shakespeare let in with his pen,
than the philosophers have spoken,
than the scientists have reckoned,
than even the religions gamble.
You are not prepared for it.
You wouldn’t even know it exists.
You don’t have time for the unknown.
Do you?
World ends
where we experience reality.
Is that right?
Encounter a larger world
and think we’re just makin’ it up—
like you’re the measure of reality.
Is that often shown
a larger world?
You see it?
Alright, alright,
I’m puttin’ smoke up your ass.
I just wanted you to read my paper.
The trouble with autobiographical writing.
I’ve asked for a report card.
Have you ever
met God?
In question.
God is somebody
no one
can be showing this to you.
Look out that window.
It’s gets bigger
than anything you can see.
I don’t really want something.
I don’t really want somebody here.
And God is there.
You are scared of Him,
and you’re jealous.
Let’s find Him, shall we?
Ever increasing you.
Oh my God He’s not hungry.
That means He bruises no one.
Do you know how safe that is?
Your own identity sees itself,
and existence is its room.
That’s the model today.
Tomorrow I’ll get bigger.
A secondary source.
But you’ve spoken in primary terms.
It’s the primary that is God.
You’re a window keeper.
I’ll tell you what,
I can be a better window looker.
You’ve got clear eyes,
just what we need.
(today’s muse)
However I interpreted that “was chosen” bit, I was elated. We are funny creatures that way. Somebody praises us, and we get happy. That means also that when someone puts us down, we get depressed, or mad as hell. You know the saying: the people singing your praises today will be the people spitting on you tomorrow. or vice versa. It’s not a saying; I just made it up, but the idea comes from the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Let’s keep going. They say, and they’re not the only ones, that your happiness needn’t depend on outer circumstances, or on tongues. Now that’s a trick. Anyway, I jumped up and packed up after the meditation, and walked to Knossos. Although there were people there that early, it didn’t open until later, and so I waited. They let me in for free, and all I had to do was ask. It was my joy that did it, my genuine smile. It’s hard to say no to the morning sun. I went in and went to every inch the public was allowed, wanting to see what we all come to ruins to see but never can: the place itself, the people themselves. You’re just left with a longing you can’t fulfill, a taste that is just enough to make you come back one day. Leaving there, I got on the road and put my thumb out, doing the hitch and walk backwards thing, quite awkward with a backpack, and a city bus stopped and opened its door. I just kept walking, not even considering the bus had stopped for me. I heard a honk and looked behind me to a smiling bus driver motioning me to come. I couldn’t believe it. I got on the bus, the driver having me put my pack right at the door at the top of the steps and me stand next to him. Riding shotgun on that bus down to Heraklion, I was walking on sunshine.
Vision of looking for a pacifier I lost while picking up the Minoans. [vision of walking around the palace ruins looking for it. I had carried a sacred object among a group of Minoans I was walking with, which was like carrying the group, and I had to put my pacifier down to do so, it suddenly having appeared in my hands]
There is a closer way I didn’t know,
through the Matrimandir. [vision of walking to a tower a long ways off]
Om carried me home.
[vision of seeing a man outside the Paris bookstore (Shakespeare and Company, where I lived awhile) reading a copy of The Atlantic Monthly, which I wanted to read, and then he was reading it upside down]
Survival travel,
do you know what survival travel is?
The Edens of the remnants of the life of the Gods,
they’re allowed to be a mother.
(muse that came a few days after the visit to the ruins)
I love you Michael,
more than anything.
Uh uh Annabelle,
don’t judge be hero.
The Palace of Knossos,
a rainbow on his feet and hurl on,
a husband for your Jan.
What more could you want?
(today’s muse)
For reasons I don’t remember but probably had to do with a strong feeling to go there, and I really paid attention to strong feelings, heeded them (don’t you?), I went back to the tourist bureau and sat down on the concrete bench nearby that was on the sidewalk that ran alongside the highway there. After some moments of looking at the world but seeing only my thoughts, I heard, directed at me, “Are you Irish?” Uh, err, what? I looked up, and there was a rather animated, middle-aged man on a scooter, who’d pulled off the road, talking to me. “No, I’m not Irish.” “You look Irish.” I took it he was Irish. His grin was irresistible. I grinned back and told him I was American Heinz 57, and there could be some Irish in me for all I knew. He said I just didn’t know my Irish roots asked what I was doing there. I explained I was looking for free camping, needing a place to stay for the winter. He told me that he’d just come from a long stay in Matala, and there were caves there you could live in. He explained more about the place, how you had to go to the caves up on the mountain and not the famous ones near the beach, and that the scene now was dominated by drinkers, and I should steer clear of them. It didn‘t escape my notice he was probably one. He told me to get on, and I did, without even thinking about it, and away we went, to the bus station, where he bought me a ticket to Matala and gave me five euro to eat lunch, as it was around noon. He left, giving me a heartfelt blessing, and I ate and got on the bus to Matala. Thank God for the Irish. If you know English poetry, the Irish strain is particularly good, as if an Irish poet is more open to inspiration from the muse of poetry, having to do with the mysteries of being Irish I’d imagine, and here, this Irish individual was answering the beck and call of Crete in helping me get to where she wanted me to go, open to that I’d guess just being Irish.
Throw it upon the fire
and let the governments melt unto me.
Have you ever heard an island speak?
It’s got some inventions of its own,
a spirit unto itself.
I tasted its clover.
Do you see the embarrassing situation?
It’s been made into a European Union tributary,
and the whole place of its land,
it’s an economic olive grove.
It still got some secrets to share.
It’s got its sweet back.
I’m at its confessional today.
It’s got its island back today.
There’s a poet in the house,
writing down of ears of old.
Did anyone just hear that?
I tell you this island speaks.
I tell you this lawyer speaks.
Now I’ll show you.
Lazarus
shaped the boat outside.
Fellowship day
with the entire clock,
I’m runnin’ guns for Crete.
Power point,
you need not get this.
I’d like to teach the world to sing. [heard sung by the voices of the 70’s Coke commercial]
Playing at a theater near you,
so many beings you can shake a smoke at,
all stacked on top of each other,
all waitin’ for you to meet ‘em.
(today’s muse)
Matala is mentioned in ancient history and in Greek myth (Zeus, disguised as a white bull, took Europa to the beach there first when he kidnapped her), but what gives the place its individuality today are its manmade, Neolithic caves that hippies lived in in the 60’s and 70’s, until they got kicked out by the church and military, something I didn’t know had happened, didn’t know any of the history of the place. I didn’t even know about the annual hippie festival held there every June to celebrate the fish were starting to stink hippies, to the local authorities that is, not to the world’s eye. Now they make money off of them, and wouldn’t you know it. I always wondered why no one even looked at me funny the whole time I was there, walking daily to the village from the caves up on top of the mountain and back again, looking every bit like a dirty hippie. They were acclimated. The drinkers the Irishman had told me about were not in the places I expected them; down and out and hanging around. The one I had the most intimate dealings with, who drank like a fish, was a retired East German spy living off her pension there on the island, but I’m getting ahead of myself. I need to first come to Matala. I rolled into town, spent some minutes looking around, and then I went up onto the mountain to find my cave for the winter; rather early manish isn’t it?
Matala cave drink after first experience.
You think you’ve got it. [heard sung]
You don’t have a diamond.
You have the equivalent of your shoes.
They just put you in Tennyson ice.
It was all warmed up,
ready to reload.
There on that mountain
I really enjoyed it.
Oh wonderful people, [heard sung]
it wasn’t
everything you’d hoped for.
Put that down.
It was Monday.
Whatever,
the word is not lost.
What does that mean?
Okay man,
I get things from the heavens.
Now let’s start out the week.
The letter will talk to you about tomorrow.
U.S. send them.
They just ignored you.
You’d think your dad
would help:
overhead,
overhead march.
I’m not complainin’,
but Matala is not the festival of the Gods.
Let’s meet it in its rouge reports
a few pippers down.
I had the ability to travel the world,
and here I was on an island in the Mediterranean
taking my lamp out of my heart and looking at it.
No, no dissatisfaction,
the island held me.
You got me everything I grinned.
How did dog get that again Lassie?
That dog ate that,
my connection
between the dog, hay,
and all the beautiful skin rubbin’.
Ole puppy dog belly was here.
Jan was my friend.
She was the perfect dog
for a nomad,
for a writer:
she changed positions all the time.
Wonderful dog,
a street dog and smart.
She got the good hand.
This is where
I’m gonna quit.
Consciousness,
some are mastering their own.
You’re exemplary.
Stay Luna
in her big puppy dog ears,
if you can see it.
She will shake them at you
to make you pay attention to her,
to show you she showed up.
It’s Catamaran Island.
I was going to…
He does rainbow. [last word heard sung, from one of my songs, “Like a Rainbow”]
(today’s muse)
I’d heard when I was living there that a Roman garrison was once stationed the top of the mountain, but it was a Roman cemetery according to the net, or I guess that’s where they’re talking about, hence the ‘caves’, which were mostly beneath the ground and served as tombs I imagine now, but they didn’t make me say tombs to myself when I was there. The way you could see the sun go to sleep every night, sink right into the ocean right before your very eyes, though, sometimes had Hades swallowing the sun written all over it. There was only one inhabitant up there at that time, someone the Irishman had told me about, a hermit who didn’t want to speak to anyone. I did try to speak to him as I walked around looking for my cave, but it wouldn’t be until later that he’d actually be friendly. The biggest and most promising cave, where the trail dipped below ground, and you could see into it, had some old furniture in it and looked like it had just recently been abandoned, but I stirred clear of it because you could see into it when you walked by. I didn’t know on that first day that no one ever came up there, just walked by on the side trail on their way to Red Beach, a nudist beach, but they didn’t wander around the mountaintop.
I chose a small cave that was in the side of the mountain, not underground, and not for the cave, which was not inhabitable, but there was a Tibetan meditating Buddha painted on the rock-face outside and an area large enough to camp in protected by walls of stacked stones, just perfect I thought, and it was. I put my gear in the cave and set my tent up, and now what? You always have so much time to kill sleeping outside of society.
That mountain, not much to look at, except at the sunset from there, but to sleep on it was another story. My notebook from my time on the mountain tells often of hidden doors and secret passages, which wasn’t telling me to find those, like most might be prone to take it—just look on the Internet—but telling of the inner of the mountain, not actually the physical inside, and what it was helping to facilitate in me, inner change, like the secret passage I found on top Mt. Sinai in a lucid dream and stumbled upon a spiritual class down there in the heart of the mountain. Here’s a section (one period of hearing/seeing) from my notebook from that first night, and I’ve left out material that would be too much to introduce at this time, but at the end of the section I include it, to give a picture of that material so I can finally talk about it outright.
Out of this place of shifting silences came a drifting myth, [vision of a hidden passage, a magical looking one, beside or among normal looking doorways in a stone mountain]
a place where one couldn’t stop beauty,
a beauty that could come out of a child.
To find the name of the place. [vision of writing this down]
[vision of being in the possession of many small but very thick volumes I was removing from a small pit for safe keeping. The last one had a wooden cover and chains holding it together, a very old book]
Do you write short stories?
Yes.
I’ve over excited their tea.
What he drinks. [vision of a spike being driven in the top of my head]
Out of the creation of his hands, his feet.
To look at these books,
no one knew how you hardly have any room at all [vision of a woman crammed into the corner of my tent near my head. I was going to let another friend in, a man, when the line came, and the vision ended]
It’s too much.
So much of magic.
It had a lot of lines.
Soul touch.
And take you to die where the formulas are exposed.
I found out where the books are.
I pulled in some heavy artillery, a nice artillery.
[vision of washing out my left eye and the feeling of the need to do so]
Tales of Darkness [vision of going through a stack of books and finding one I really needed, but then the last one had this for a title, and I lost the one I needed]
Go, wouldn’t you? [vision of the bar in town called Kreta and help coming from there]
[vision of pushing a little kid on his bike, that had training wheels, around the town square]
Class clown.
I am familiar with your axing project. [vision of clearing the doorway of a heretofore hidden cave]
And not yell at my boss or anybody about bleeding parts.
There’s Bucky. [vision of being in my mom’s living room and watching TV with Bucky, my step-dad. There was a young man on TV that looked just like him. I might mention, for understanding’s sake, that he didn’t like the vagabond/hippie me one little bit]
A radiant change in reality.
My muse was also heading to a destination like my vagabonding, what keeps it grounded in reality. It’s not to make me a good poet, not to make me a spiritual teacher, not to give me “a splendid name” (from Savitri). It’s to do something that would make many if not most spit on my name, as we construe reality today that is. It’s for the future, and if it doesn’t get out, then someone else’s along the same lines will, inevitably, because it’s the way reality works, not the way we desire it works and try and make it work. As I read the mainstream thought of this day and age, and that’s what I read on the net almost exclusively, so to know what you’re reading and thinking, when we see ourselves in the future we see changes in technology, in law and order, not in the fabric of humanity. And so of course we see coming destruction, not understanding it’s not technology that will save us; it’s us. A social holism is the future of humanity, resulting from something I’ve written about at length, a revolution that occurs when enough of humanity opens the inner consciousness, where we see holism as the fabric of reality.
In practical terms, that would mean we wouldn’t veil women to keep from having sex with them, if we are men that is, how, if you really look at it, we try and stop most any wrongdoing: by removing it from our view or making it inaccessible. It’s that attitude that’s destroying us more than wrongdoing itself if you understand the ramifications of denying the workings of reality. So how do you change a bad reality? By reality changing itself when you reach down into the bowels of reality seeking change. And it’s a visceral change. My muse aimed to keep me from having sex with a prepubescent boy in any set of conditions and under any circumstances, and having sex with a boy was as natural to me as rain.
Although I’d heard it every night as an older child in a deep stage of falling asleep, what I called ‘reading the book’, and I started hearing isolated lines that I could record isolated one winter in a cabin near Ashland, Oregon, in 1997, which became a little more pronounced living for nine months in Cuzco, Peru, in 2000, it became a flood in Brazil in that little healing community off the grid called Kahil Gibran, like I told you earlier, but I didn’t tell you it was on the September 11th 2001, on 9/11.
That was the day I moved into the community and the day the muse turned on like who would’ve thought it: “Silence Indio, Introductory Chapter,” (my muse then). That’s a loaded title because the community had an elementary school for the children of the local village, Indio children not too terribly far from out of the jungle. It was an open school (no roof) and very free. Every day the kids took all their clothes off and went for a long walk, which I took them on when I was there, their English teacher, alone, basking in their brown, beautiful, naked bodies, but at a distance. And my muse was right there making sure it was at a distance, a surprise flood on the inside wetting me not with desire but with the divine word. Some of those children were having sex with an adult in their lives, or more than one, and I know that because I was propositioned, not the innocent way a kid does it if they don’t really know what they’re doing; the way a kid does it if they are having adult/child sex. It would not have been possible to refuse without the muse. But I must tell you without telling you the details, for obvious reasons, a half a year after my year of being 41 ended so did my abstinence, and all this Crete just went temporarily out the window, when a boy old enough to know what he was doing (12) propositioned me, one who had had adult/child sex and had picked up on my attraction and wanted a conquest, I kid you not, not really into having sex. Boys will be boys, and sometimes that is bad. Can we see this?
I was in the last country I vagabonded in before returning to India, and I’d seen the fall coming in my muse and had even temporarily left the living situation I was in being a handyman for a family and gone to camp alone in a forest for a few days to gird up my loins. Doing that they just go more wet. Taking it totally from view just made it more desirable, and a retreat doesn’t work if you’re running from something. I fell after I returned. The muse went into damage control, and I went downhill from there all the way to India, which was my next stop, like I said, back to Ithaca and Penelope, and it’s just like that ain’t it; you get right near the goal and wham! you fall flat on your face. You can tell me there’s no excuse all day long, but I’ll tell you our freewill isn’t absolute, and everybody has a set of circumstance in which their will is not free, and you can tell me there is not, but you lose control somewhere, if nowhere else then right here in your reaction towards me or that terrorist, white supremacist, shooter, or some wrongdoer or another. My muse was working to give me that freewill in the place my will wasn’t free, mastery over my sexual desire anytime, anywhere, and if you think it took me too long, or my muse too long to teach me that, then how long will it take you to even realize the ill will you feel towards us only adds to our own to do more wrong, and so it’s wrong, much less learn to not act upon it when it rises up from your subconscious taking over; we’re talking ages aren’t we? The muse has acted like nature when it establishes something new upon the earth, first giving a taste of what’s coming, in this case self-mastery over my sexual impulse, and then a long period of the absence of it, where, if you could see it, the foundation is being laid for it, and then the full monty.
The beauty that could sometimes come out of a child.
I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition.
I’m that child and here’s that beauty.
Crucify me will yah?
Take me on the long run.
Of course you could destroy my work forever.
I’ll keep croppin’ up
in the consciousness of other people,
the openings of consciousness they make.
You can’t stop me,
and I’m Franklin 41.
A question these Americans hope is
bridge
the obstintiscity.
To know I’m for real.
This is not a magician’s trick.
Okay Covid, hear me?
When the gun is right there.
That’s the ability to single you out:
the battle
for where we configure reality,
in reality as it is to itself
or in the social construct we believe in,
the battle for consensus reality.
Look at this:
they’re all grown up.
Looked in the eyes of the mind’s control,
and these were the lines on Crete.
He just ended up in Africa on a suitcase.
Look, you’re gonna have to whistle.
I would tell them you’re sexually attracted to children.
That’s what your whole muse is about.
We want to find where that stuff belongs to me.
A very deep state there was no desire there really.
The integration of desire,
I’m painting a picture of reality.
I’m not puttin’ a system on it.
How do you do that
and not harm someone?
Listen.
For a lot of their footfall found advice. [a line on Crete that came again here]
Now compare that to your schedule:
put reality out of your desire.
You’ve made reality conform to your limits.
Is reality there
or the pains you take
to construe reality?
Rewriting a paradigm.
In the Earth wrongdoing,
where does Earth go when you remove it?
It stays just where you are:
on your own, get set, go.
How could you handle desire?
Only the harm causing agent remains
unheeded,
unacted upon.
I don’t know where to begin/put. [words spoken simultaneously]
Even I myself listen marks ace a good time.
You’re comin’ in a new world honey,
for I had your hand.
I had your hand.
My mom got lucky it got the whole grocery store.
I think the air on his favor.
What’s that number there?
I got a version two,
a puppy dog version. [vision of Luna on the bed looking at me a mixture of puppy love and puppy mischief in her eyes]
(today’s muse)
This integration of boys and me in a harmony, the harm removed, goes hand in hand with many other themes my muse speaks about, the chief being at that time Islamic terrorism, as it began on 9/11 for a reason. Out of my country, I was right there with it when the shit hit the fan, the planes the towers. I am, after all, an Ex-Green Beret. But anyway, my muse back then speaks about where Islamic terrorism comes from and how to actually stop it, not just fight it, it coming from the misinterpretation of Mohammed’s muse:
I keep my hands clean to show my intentions.
For the sake of the divine being,
when I look at the Black Stone,
I had better focus.
God’s going to use just one of us to tell His culture?
Couldn’t succeed where no one else had tried.
There is always the work which goes before.
By the advent of one person,
one heavenly word?
On the surface people are not the same,
everybody’s different.
If you want to be free for a religious aim,
if you want to free people for a religious aim,
free Islam.
It can only be done one step at a time,
quickening to that which is in the Book,
in the song, in the name, in the, name.
Moved by the right set of ideas:
me and God.
Alright,
you and God.
We need to ever let go we’re strangers.
It was something we used to do when we were small,
jump over fences.
Our fences were made for us to cross.
To meet something of their stuff with our value.
Raise your hand:
everyone’s as important as everyone else.
Stand the existence each in all.
The acceptance of you is the acceptance of myself.
And what is the real reason your faith includes me?
A world soul.
You one with genuine all the creatures in the world.
By a swift, luminous point that gathers in the whole,
by a swift disinterested patience,
we were learning how to swim.
Now all of us can learn a little bit of mercy.
Moslems were on the verge.
The closer you are to stopping the more you manifest,
the more acute your problem becomes.
As it started to manifest it became more acute.
What goes into a family starts to manifest,
and that includes religious intolerism.
The soul sense is self-righteous.
The ego sense is unselfish.
This cunning belief.
I has to do with the ideas promoted during early childhood.
Take a soul,
receive him at the door:
I am one believe in me.
Memory of Mohammed saying this.
He incited beliefs.
It’s only belief that excites you.
You’re just giving them the truth,
that Moslem invented.
Ode of thus becoming a belief.
In order to build a map.
A map of what?
A map of a big black wall through the word:
my hands are clean.
Their hands are dirty.
God destroy my enemies.
They’re sin. They’re bad,
hate, hate, hate.
I mean look at us,
everyone is blind but ourselves.
You can’t use ignorance to describe us;
it’s too high a state.
I can know.
I don’t have to hate.
Peace and love know why they are.
Hatred and violence don’t know who they are.
I fly through the ripples he calls destruction.
I slay death.
I’m past revenge.
It’s better to enter paradise with a fixed hand,
the language-wide circle of one’s whole hand.
He found in products purely simple can the Extreme fill.
This is how one man Christ-like can live.
There was another group called Pantheism,
and we were going to get rid of their parallel,
but what is the hatred of corn?
If I’m not surrounded por the statues.
If I don’t have to go around them three times.
Letting a form come to see what the real eye images,
reveal the face of all the Gods.
They’re all relevant to each other, benevolent.
These are the hams of the universal wordplay.
Now I know what the alphabet belongs to.
(from a manuscript I started on that mountain above Matala)
And Islamic terrorism comes from his muse, or how he construed his muse at any rate, but it also comes from his own actions and his misconstrued interpretation of the image of God:
He’s taken the Quran to the grave with him,
and he know he dead,
but did he take a pen and write it?
I think God’s bark is an ego’s person.
In that fashion an ego’s bark is a hungry person. [a line today added]
Can you tell the lemon tree from the orange?
Very pretty.
Sour the building error’s the judge.
Dire’s love with these big religions.
The hatred has its way and comes as the crumbling faith of all our religions.
Burn with the hair of common things.
A mere self-denial and concentration in the being is not enough.
Put spiritual trip on the glory of its own path.
The mold of it will be its own.
We are each at a different development.
Most of the teaching is self-teaching.
What goes in doesn’t cause a flowering.
What will the Spirit say to him when finally he is a man?
Go on up to adult spirituality.
Higher teaching witnesses that faith.
A time for learning and a time for mastery.
You have commanded me.
Then You instruct.
Then You touch.
You hear the Godhead’s touch
where faith works out a spiral hum.
If the gates were suddenly flung open,
Heaven’s openness would confuse the Earth.
There there are no rules.
Don’t stop religion.
Don’t let it die either.
I do think we have particular faith.
It doesn’t matter if you’re for somebody.
If you’re religious you’re somewhat so.
As long as it stays just an integral movement
and doesn’t go into fascism.
We take a living image,
as most often these images are,
and enshrine it to the One.
In the end all is a sheep but God.
And speaking of sheep.
To know God is to see that knowledge as a king.
God is a knowledge and love the house.
You walk your heart to love what it glorify means.
It just so happens that that’s what we’re working on today,
the love of God.
I’m as big as God.
I’m as big as God.
I can have all power.
From her wounded task.
From his wounded innocent childhood.
The gist is right,
a half-animal.
By the half-truth of symbol us
in a half-beast saw the face of God.
To be an actual face to face deity,
of soul daylight she must take his screened divinity;
his own position,
steps out of it as it were and makes room for God,
and sat down on the right side of the world.
God looking at the world through your eyes,
then you reflect the light of His face.
Discovering what truth meant had to contour her face.
Almost like the word is luminous equipment.
Neither the Lord nor the Devil fica em palavaras.
Devil fica in words.
To teach the manifold nature of the Self
poems from the evasive answers of the Light.
On the middle room floor
I obey God.
That’s what you do in a mosque.
This is the fifth floor,
the farthest you can go
by the Quran.
Why are you reading the Quran?
A.E.R.A., for an almost overland view.
And there in that inner room of middle self
expose a body of books long adapted:
holy conscious into views,
but not that Consciousness itself.
Through the eyes of the screen,
screen of thought.
It comes in through your love of ceiling.
We can’t live in the boundless truth,
just live.
The question can the truth be changed
or cares for or develops only on its own.
The truth ever wears a mask,
windows that open the doorway to other truths.
God changes too.
A small order must never change.
Jesus of the Bible was faced with the books of the Bible,
and that would smother in:
the prisoner held infinite in a phrase.
We are also like infants.
But to be prisoners is not all our fate.
Growing,
the fundamental name of existence,
the growth of Self in things.
You need convincing.
I need convincing.
By hearing it over and over.
All shadowy doubt must turn to trust.
Doubt pretty much because I know there are frightful things.
A person can get better at faith if he longs to.
There be a time when faith is no longer a doubt but a transformation.
Vanity will be her danger always in these depths.
The sense on world famous.
Looking for greatness,
unlike universal Mike.
Um, I’m a spiritual master.
The dummies that cause this place,
the babies that same here.
He stands there and idea of himself,
the dream poet.
Humanity would most tear it apart.
I had a too high opinion of myself.
Ripped it to shreds.
You don’t have to be a star to get to God.
The clouds are the lids of God pointing the way.
I became just one in all.
Interwoven your intercourse with your temperament,
as the maker’s hand is not supposed to be cleared.
There’s a way to do it without destroying the harmony maker’s whole.
I was only special because I showed my butt in the wrong place.
What do you say when you’re the center of people’s attention?
Celebrate God and thank the moon for what he brings,
a story of how the sacred got out the secret.
Love, purity, divine action
is a result of the soul that has come to the surface.
What Mohammed wanted.
There vainly.
Seven jars of karma.
Dissatisfaction,
the bits of Mohammed did not stick together.
What he did was wrong,
the way he put it together,
when he put it together.
The text was improperly inspired,
choosing this over that.
It leads to hatred,
hatred against the Israelis,
hatred against the Americans.
His soul,
that Mohammed nailed this together
precisely for what he couldn’t say.
Yet within line.
Simply Mohammed issues.
Can issue it remote from There,
yet issues it remote from There.
Islam as it expresses the world soul,
Islam as it teaches the world soul,
in answer to the music of the love of God,
the Quran as a medium expresses that.
They don’t want to take the world away by leading ours.
Not that my soul is ever to direct Islam,
but it may heighten things.
What is difficult for a man is not to have faith in faith but in God.
It’s almost as indescribable as it is hidden.
The difference between us and structure is in it
we need to fill what structure so painstakingly lacks.
Islam tries in much order to bring down the golden people,
but all this repeating order can lead to a chaotic place,
and that’s what the Valley of…
He killed them all except one person,
just one person.
My friend asked if following were to lose control.
The result of this chaotic order has held his heart prisoner.
(from that same manuscript)
The suicide bomber poem begin in that healing community in Brazil I’ve named, when a dead suicide bomber began speaking to me from the other side, not one of 9/11, one from a much earlier suicide bombing in Israel. A 9/11 bomber wouldn’t have been possible given the time it takes someone to get to where the bomber spoke from, the Heaven of Islam, after having gone through the hell his act had opened because he’d “turned to the one evil that saw a lion like a snake” (my muse then). Just read the poem.
Can one ring the bell of afterlife
and stand at the gates of God looking in?
Overlooking death,
on death’s ridge,
saw the image of the dead or the dead that want to die.
I have secret duty.
I’ve met people in death.
I hear a dead of experience.
It’s just, you know what I mean, a different country.
The suicide bomber,
I took what didn’t sound like me,
some soul from there.
The suicide bomber begins to speak.
Some of our lines are talking death.
(from that same manuscript)
On that mountain on Crete I decided to resubmit to The Atlantic (if you remember I submitted the suicide bomber poem to them from Paris earlier in this story, not explaining then it got lost, and I had to resubmit and then was rejected), but this time I’d include a long cover letter, which turned into my submission and my major writing project on the island, one I never finished nor submitted, where I attempted to organize my muse for publication, composed by then of several notebooks, put it together like fitting scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in place, which just wasn’t possible, or it was; it was just too construed. The cover letter is a mixture of verses of poetry and prose, like this writing. The muse would name it The Inspired Word, and then a little later, Civilization and the Art of Terror, as it’s about Islamic terrorism, or started out that way, but it turned out to be more about poetry and spirituality than terrorism, with a lot of me thrown in, and consequently my sexuality, the ins and outs of it. But it’s the human baby and small child that actually gets the centerfold, because that’s the handle of human change. I just kept both titles.
The Inspired Word
or
Civilization and the Art of Terror
Dear Poetry Editor,
It is not, I would imagine, in your guidelines to read a letter of such length included with a poetry submission. It seems to me also, however, that those instructions cannot cover all the possibilities of poetry and letter combinations that might come to you. The suicide bomber also follows instructions, to the letter I might add, but perhaps if he would take the time to stop and read the letter the world is writing to him in the hour before he blows a crowded corner of it up, or the tank commander or bomber pilot for that matter, he would hear his soul speaking its sorrow of what its body it about to do, and he would definitely decide now would be a good time not to carry out his instructions. Of course there is a big difference between a poetry editor and a suicide bomber, but is there a gap between them no bridge, no linking idea, can cross? Is there really underneath it all a big difference between people as like we like to think? This letter attempts to build bridges and close gaps between a poetry editor and a suicide bomber, citizens and terrorists, poetry and prose, the rational and the mystic, the secular and the religious, you and I, the good and the bad, between soul and nature. When you finish reading you may not agree with it, but like the suicide bomber who decides to disobey orders, you’ll be greatly relieved you did.
Since we have to overcome these differences,
we just couldn’t be afraid of them.
You need a short mystical breath.
Bridge the gap all life must take.
To gap it spiritual is to hurt.
See to a letter see to/too a country. [words spoken simultaneously]
Heart hearing wood,
a social adventure.
The word social trigger has come up,
a glad, long and windy adventure.
At the end of July I sent you two poems for consideration, but it seems that they were lost. In the reply to my email inquiry I was informed you had no record of them, and it was suggested I resubmit. I had originally sent the poems only with a short note saying they were unpublished and thanking you for considering them, but after dwelling a bit on the tone behind the short reply I received, which was nice enough, I feel the need to explain where the poems come from, and why, out of the enormous amount of poetry submissions you receive, you should publish mine. In doing so I feel it also necessary to examine poetic process, since my submission is part of that greater whole, and attempt to give answer to two very old questions that seem not much asked anymore by the public mind: where does poetry come from and what’s it for? And since in my view those answers are inextricably linked to world process, specifically the process whereby it solves problems, I must as well observe that process and what in the world of today stands in the way of earth’s advance.
Turning to the view which sees her world as a gloomy eye,
do you see only the fear of civilization,
even fear we’ve never been supposed to be?
Where does it all come from?
Worse, where is it all going?
We can stretch as far as history and maybe an epidemic wipe it out.
How old are we?
How long do we?
Is that what happens is just fate?
People who have no meaning in their life,
where will they find it?
To their view life doesn’t matter.
Is it matter gonna matter?
Are you conscious yet of your soul?
Are you aware of your significance in the world?
What kind of cosmic question is he asking?
Like at some critical stage in our evolution.
End of an age this crossing era.
We were at that generations place called the 11th embattlement.
Oh boy the history we could lesson.
Had a chance go at moral mercy.
The solution that God wanted,
and we cling to our small motives.
We are killing each other to destroy good and bad,
but the surrender to armed impulse,
if we continue with this world view,
where will it lead us?
Worse, where did it all return?
Whenever you get to this genocized, spiritualized, wrong view of things…
Sometimes we don’t understand tooth’s tendency.
From accumulated wrong war rises.
Acts of violence turn into the wrong war.
Only shoot if they are shooting at you.
People seem war to think he was a hero.
Each of these drives can slow these worlds down to a crawl.
Kissing Earth’s one-minded solution there is another way,
the top of the head to kingdom come,
the ultimate country,
perhaps the ultimate level of universe.
At this stage at 11 the impossible could give answers.
Let’s not eat at a crossroads.
Feel don’t make war.
Give truth a chance.
Awaken the sense of a labor within the world.
There is a labor in God’s worlds.
You can’t sink them.
We aren’t just images of the Creator.
The world is big enough to see the world.
To perceive things wrong is to suffer.
Distortion is simply seeing things in the wrong way.
There is made sunlit views from which the eyes truly take form.
New interpreters,
we’re just putting a new perspective on God,
the work of a poet.
The poet,
a civilized popular engineer,
a truth professional.
Open a crack for you.
Poetry can move many a map.
You like the sound of a poet.
It seems to me that the poet’s market has little faith in the unsolicited, unpublished poet’s ability to write real poetry. That’s okay. I have little confidence in the modern media’s capacity to recognize and appreciate genuine poetry. I tried unsuccessfully to publish a few poems ten years ago. That’s alright. They were by no means great poems. On Easter morning of 1995 I did, however, publish poems in an unorthodox manner by posting them, with the help of friends, on the fourteen Stations of the Cross in the old city of Jerusalem, and during Passover on doorsteps and around the Jewish quarter, and a few days later on the Golden Gate and around the Muslim quarter, and the following week at the Dome of the Rock or on the Temple Mount, and then continuing the poem posting on the top of Mt. Sinai and ending it inside the Great Pyramid in Cairo, poems dealing with human unity, the healing of human evil, and the misunderstanding of religious ideas.
[the prose paragraphs that go between some of these verses I’m not including]
Pen. Mountain,
a bridge twixt Heaven and Earth.
There’s a better saying than just guns.
The poetic attack,
a language action.
Strong thinkers change reality.
Passionate people alter space.
Solitary effects but nonetheless
just about made us non-different.
Passion, by a secret oneness of our world.
I heard saw unusual,
a strange thought thinking about such strangeness.
It doesn’t deal with hearing as much as it deals with deafness.
Things like this just slip into the mind.
A dime rose peddled up from within,
a dim rose of peddled strength.
Reflects the sweetness of poetry.
I want to see where it’s coming from.
I saw backlit in myself the light of infinity.
I saw backlit in myself the truth of infinity.
It’s faith that calls the line.
God’s breath opens the door.
The wise is electric charge.
To be united in the ear is to be united in electricity.
A zone I come to meet where words come.
I would stay in the heart for the word.
This is where the pinpoint of consciousness is pointing down.
This is where the jet of consciousness is pointing up,
almost vertically back to infinity.
Do you know where that place is?
It’s angels’ gate isn’t it?
A poetical inspiration,
good sometimes indicates how do we touch it.
In the fly that was buzzing around my ear when I died
can be heard such a conscious note.
Here William Blake’s Victory of the Innocents was made.
Whitman, ah, he went above the E the teacher said.
He settled down to Earth.
Shakespeare had some fear whether or not he was Shakespeare.
The life of something governs it.
Shakespeare was a slave to poetry.
Those pearls were his eyes,
are what bound his eyes.
Of the soul takes aim it’s to be a dramatic soul.
And the fruits of life?
Part of the enjoyment you seek.
The epic poet is concerned with these issues,
all of life’s trees.
I was walking down the street thinking woe is me,
when up came this from my soul.
I forgot.
Oh too bad,
it would have helped you bridge the gap between earth pain and hard fact.
You hear these things,
but not without a lot of refreshment and problems.
You always have to be on guard:
did I miss to write something down?
Poems dying at your feet.
I can’t stay here and wait;
many left.
Not such things as the shooting star of a record player?
Visions will keep going about everything.
They have something to say about what their gold intimate seeing keep.
With lines you could see for themselves.
Anyway, I am bound by choice.
Are choices of his thoughts.
We were wondering how short there is a gap
between the poet and the fired off intuition.
Listen,
I should listen.
I haven’t quite mastered the technique.
There’s babies can listen farther.
More of a time to correct it Classical Modern Poetry.
Grammar is not all set by rules.
The love gospel of a mounting thing,
it’s cosmos create it’s conscious create act.
Cosmos. Butterfly.
The star building his clothes with dark glasses and his eyes with light.
The agency of stars,
the stars illume more than they show.
The stars are observable in the daytime too.
Light rays invisible from everywhere.
Space becomes the brilliant front of the background of light.
What is the magic of a shooting star?
The miracle of a shooting star confides.
With poetry you can just wait for the truth to come.
You would not be in any rush,
and your time for reference would be less.
On the ancient wings of poetry
I didn’t do much asking,
just self-sitting absorbed in the One.
Sometimes I ask the muse if he’s wrong.
The stars illume more than they cure.
Is it necessary to have spiritual experience to see?
I would say yes.
Like I say,
you must be open to the bright order for to see.
The soul takes a station as a very high spiritual experience.
With this opening of the well of vision in the soul,
it’s not my eyes that form the most record.
It’s my ears,
but nonetheless there is an instrumentation higher than knowledge.
There are more direct ways to be told,
beyond the senses.
You get the idea. It goes on for 45 more pages. Beginning on that mountain above Matala and continuing during my five month stay on Crete, lines began to come to include in the letter, lines that came to continue ideas introduced by lines that came before I started that letter, the lines in my notebooks since the muse began, as well as suggestions on how to write the letter, and at the end I was just overwhelmed with so many lines coming to add to different places in the letter I couldn’t finish it. Adding that constant addition with trying to fit them together so they flowed like they belonged together, the whole thing just wasn’t possible. Like I said: I found myself construing it, and I didn’t want to pull a Mohammed. (I may try putting the lines together again one day into the long poem it obviously wanted to be, letting today’s more organized muse fill in the blanks and keep me from construing it.) The thing is, the muse knew that it was just a practice run the whole time it was helping me write it, what became clear when I had to leave without finishing it, and that’s just like the muse not to tell you the most important thing you think you need to know. Reading that muse of yesterday today, it’s crystal clear sometimes it was talking 20 years ago about the epic poem I recently submitted to The Atlantic (four and a half months ago), not that letter I was writing then. When it said, “You are just one Atlantic fascination out of jail,” it wasn’t talking about the magazine reacting to that cover letter that it would never read; it was talking about The Literary Eye.[i] And back then it was not only talking about that future book-length poem, but also about the writing of this story and my life as it is now, even naming names and specific incidents of my current now, and that’s the most magic thing about the muse and also the hardest to reckon into your reason, since you don’t see the future it’s talking about until it happens, but when you do it just blows your mind, each and every time. Sitting here going over my muse notebooks from Crete could be likened to that scene in the Jimmy Stewart film Harvey, when a character looks up the word pooka in the dictionary, and the book talks directly to him. I’m talking about how it hit me, like over the head. I’m not saying my notebooks came out and directly spoke to me. The question here is not, however, my notebooks speaking to me but The Atlantic. They won’t speak to me at all now, as I’ve said earlier, and we go way back, you know?
That’s just so unliterary, and that’s how it’s always been; it’s content and not quality that’s the deciding factor in getting published, for fear of messing with that sacred social construct, but in today’s don’t you dare say anything the mainstream media doesn’t agree with, media being of any public kind, literary magazines included, it’s in some ways similar to the days when you had to submit to the Church (talk about being on the wrong side of history), something I hope to make very clear with my poem and The Atlantic’s refusal to even speak to me. You see the stakes are very high. They know it’s not the news but literature that writes the soul of a culture, and that poetry is its special forces. Do you? Though not impossible, it will be hard for you to deny The Literary Eye’s not both poetry and literary, even if it makes you rend your clothes and gnash your teeth you disagree with it so much. Just read the poem. Oh, you can’t, until I post it on my own social media, but it seems it’s not to be published that way, at least not at first, interpreting a line of muse that came on that mountain, “it” being not what I thought it was but that epic: “The closer to publishing it Homeplough Publications.” I’m doing just that: getting it closer to being published by ploughing it home here on my blog, as the muse suggested I do 20 years ago.
We’re surrounded by awesome amounts of printed material.
How literature conforms you.
She turned into the waiter of the compliment’s daughter.
The tethered word,
a verse difficult brought to lip and bare.
The writers empty a front,
grounded by this type of writing,
for years after the expelling of truth and appeal.
Put milk into an atheist container and spoil it.
Dry wisdom secular wisdom.
The function of poetry has taken the wrong road.
Medicine not applied for medicine.
What is in a man may stay in his memory or not,
but poetry has first on his nature.
Poetry comes from a sky test of thinking
in reference to a strong idea,
ideas that go to the path of overlookingness.
Our poetry is to define what is to say.
What do you say about a poem?
Read it.
The poet’s the writer that shall never be in oblivion.
(from The Inspired Word)
Thank you for the scroll.
Thank you for the present.
Testimonial and the divine art human,
you own a suitcase.
You’re not going to provide a perfect example.
You’ve got something here.
Don’t pop up,
the idea of a superintelligence?
I bask in its sunshine.
I wear it on my sleeve.
What is more to being human?
Would you get out of your car and look at it?
You know it has guided us all along.
It’s in your court
if you can find it.
Oh my God the origin of the universe,
you can see it glowing now
all over this page.
Now just keep repeating your mantra
nothing is knowable
God is not.
The unknowable is here
on the Earth.
(today’s muse)
The bar Kreta my muse spoke about was near the village square, the kind that didn’t have walls, only a roof, but it had a regular restaurant-style table layout, and I got permission to sit at a table during the day and write. I was writing by hand. I was also working on a children’s short story in addition to the aforementioned piece. The story was about a fictitious little girl named Delta, who in my story was a member of the infamous Donner party, which had resorted to cannibalism snowbound one winter in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The story was never finished either, but it was also a focal point of my muse on Crete, though a smaller one. “Delta Donner screamed,” the first sentence of “The Sharp Mystery”, the muse providing both the title and sentence. The story has since been lost, but I didn’t get very far along with it. I didn’t just spend my days writing though. I went to Red Beach often for a naked swim and once a week to the market day in Mires, the larger town of the district.
I also did day labor, how I bought my food (before a large donation of 270 euro I got), doing some fruit picking and painting work for women who lived alone. The men who ran crews or needed a man never hired me. I’d stand at the day labor pickup place in the market town with other men, all Cretans, and not get picked, and everybody else would be. I felt like a nerd or sissy or something at school recess not getting picked for kickball and having to be put on a team by the P.E. teacher. Most days when I waited there I’d just walk off without a job, but a couple or three times, right there at the end of the day labor choosing spree, an older woman drove by looking for her pick, and there I’d be all by my lonesome, and I could see the doubt on her face as she looked me over—I didn’t exactly look like the hard working type—, but she’d take me home, and I’d do the work she needed, and I’d not only get some cash but also some fruit and vegetables or maybe even lunch. It wasn’t a dog’s life.
“This is the cord of Bob Fisher.” [vision of having found a cord and a man walking into Kreta’s Bar to tell the owner I had it] (my muse before help came from that bar). I was at the bar in the first place because the muse, if you remember, told me help would come from there. Well, it appears I was sitting there fishing and not only writing, unbeknownst to me, and about a week or so after this line and vision came an older German woman walked into the bar to speak to the owner. As they spoke they were looking at me. Then she walked up and introduced herself as Irmgard and asked me if I wanted to come and live in an apartment she had upstairs from hers and be her handyman. I’d get room and board. Well I’ll be. I caught a retired East German spy. You’d have to have your head in the sand to say the future was not foretold, twice, by my muse, to chalk it all up to coincidence, seeing patterns that aren’t there. If it were you, tell me you wouldn’t see a superintelligence looking out for you.
What’s with that hearing mechanism thing?
I don’t know if it means broad daylight, but… [dream vision where the crew of the Enterprise, though caricatures of them, were fitting a hearing device into Captain Kirk’s head, who only had one huge eye, which was in the center of his forehead. He was about to meet Athena, who was beaming aboard]
(my muse on the mountain)
But look at the way it was foretold, not outright but in a representative fashion. Someone needs to tell Hollywood about this. “We’re representative creatures and that’s the way our dreams represent things to us” (my muse then). Understand man. I met Irmgard there the next morning with my things, and we got in her car and drove away. An astute student of Greek myth, I didn’t look behind me as we left.
What did he mean by foreign body intelligence?
How did he write it?
He didn’t say anything about the cells.
Is that the next chapter?
He thinks we should go home tomorrow.
It was in the good of the world,
Captain Kirk.
You mean linin’ his big stomach with space?
That all-embarked journey
to something higher than reason.
It’s what we mean by going into space,
the spiritual consciousness.
No, not now.
I’m not a good storyteller.
I don’t need to Crete any love,
make Crete my spiritual paradise.
Who pays for it?
Now, the autopilot.
We have our own guest card.
We have our own place.
Hanna dog
and Luna puppy,
an introduction,
oh man Jan
top dog,
the number one puppy
in an email
to the function of dog in man,
to dogs in people’s houses too.
Makes me think
love dog,
cat.
What just happened?
Somebody brought the cat in.
They belong.
Take a look.
I rescue a cat on the other side.
I’m sorry,
and everything is expensive.
Cats get trapped too
as ghosts.
Their owner,
that’s what cats feel,
and that’s what
really scares you
about the death hunt.
I give you a horror story.
Memories apart,
the living presence of Sri Aurobindo
drives me to work
in a dream where Sri Aurobindo meets life,
and a kid and I come together
where integration meets life.
Can you count the ways?
The right one is that boy in my lap
such a good thing.
You hear the future breathing beside me?
A little boy sleeping beside me.
He’s got the whole world in his hands. [heard sung]
I put integration together
with a whole lotta love.
A sweet little puppy dog
somebody put him.
It was the Earth Mother.
Can you see this integration?
Puppy figures first.
Oh puppy I love you.
I don’t think you understand me yet.
Puppy does.
Search for it,
cat on my floor,
or dog.
Hey work this out:
molest them no.
See that puppy?
And then we ended up here tonight:
everybody here saw puppies.
Now puppies
worlds behind our back with the roads of children.
And we have to let Luna baby up,
and she’s happy.
Off together,
better into right current technology,
multiple batteries.
Bed is just a centrifuge.
There’s a difference
between fingertips.
Oh you stroke the future,
and that’s the size of it,
their future.
How good a future do you want?
Three dogs and a boy
crowded in bed with me.
What movie now?
The babysitter.
I’m a function of society,
and I love my job.
Now move out,
get this show on the road.
Try to take the bird home then.
Who put the rose quartz?
America for the later on use.
Simple as yours.
Do I like to speak the truth?
Dogs and cats,
you don’t
think they’re children.
It’s where they are with us,
our children.
Knocked out
we were living
tense lives
all the time.
I hit the hall pass,
the breakfast area of man.
He stole around ten mil.
Luna baby,
I put it all courage to be missed to monster you know.
We think we drew Drew Binsky,
open range.
Wasn’t that over the phone?
That was funny,
you’re a paradigm.
And we argue about it.
Prosecution books,
hunter bags,
function poetry. [vision of pulling out a drawer in a file cabinet and seeing the last two lines, the last one slightly different than I heard it]
How do you handle relief?
You don’t.
And?
We live
Monopoly game
opportunist.
They gonna talk to you.
Get out of jail free card detective lunch.
That’ll just bowl them over.
You remained unprosecutedscathed.
You are so sent home,
out of their control.
Is there nothing?
To doors keep me
a violence
of emotional bad speaking
people direct towards your living room.
It’s scathing.
They can’t touch you.
Talk to them every day
when you’re online.
I get left behind.
They drive this fence around the corner.
I’m Operation Blue Book.
You know what that means?
I have so much to share.
I’m on my way home.
I’m getting my rocket into space.
And there’s where I’m headed,
spiritual enlightenment.
Can we say greenway?
I’m in that chute.
Here I come.
Come on let’s go.
You don’t like the look of it.
It’s a battering ram
to get you to see reality.
I’ve got all the principles in place,
and science just can’t stand here yet.
It wants reality to be this:
as godless as it is,
as meaninglessness show.
No I don’t see how the string gets loose,
but I will rock the boat.
I’ll do it now or I’ll do it later.
I’ve got some stuff I got to tell everybody.
A lost leak,
The Literary Eye,
gather out there.
Can you see reality from here?
Proper reality:
we do get our act together.
I do I want a strong reading,
so you don’t miss something.
I’ve got a stack of investigators [vision of several people opening the trunk of a car to see what’s in there]
goin’ through the files now.
Go after The Atlantic Monthly.
(today’s muse)
To Be Continued
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
[i] The poem is divided into two parts, section one, which is a short poem and conforms to current literary magazine preferences and tastes, and section two, “Thoughts on Unique”, the rest of the poem. Section one can be a standalone poem and is actually what I submitted for them to publish, asking them to provide some means for the reader to read the rest of the poem, a link to where I’ve posted it if nothing else.
© 2021 (although I’d probably give permission for you to use the material on your site if you just ask, but please ask)
The Unknown in Perspective 
