Rendezvous

Last Wednesday, close to midnight, I became possessed with the idea that mind really does reign supreme over matter. So consumed was I by the notion of super-human mental talents, even more of their existence in me, that I at once pushed myself off the couch and stared pointedly at the far left wall of my living room.

I imagined for a full three minutes that the wall only appeared solid because I have long believed it to be. I convinced myself that that time--that one time--the wall was becoming fully permeable in space-time, and would give way to my mass if I decided to run, with perfect intentionality straight at it--head first. And so I did.

I was amazed at what I found on the other side.

I saw a tiny drop of water expand so slowly that it may have taken eons--it is hard to say now, since time has no meaning on the other side. I stepped into the expanding pool and became an oblong love-molecule covalently bonded to everything else. I smelt the rosemary color of space and licked the cool, smooth ceiling of fraternal feeling which borders the squishy walls of compassion. I found my heart jumping with joy as it was caressed by the warm red hands of devotion and I was bathed completely in piety. Modesty lifted my spine with a dizzying rush and my stomach flipped when I squeezed hatred with my arms. Fortune pitter-pattered on my face like honey-rain and I spoiled my appetite by biting into a bitter blue-red anger fruit. And the yanking from behind that I was feeling all the while kept growing stronger and stronger till I fell back out of the puddle and I saw everyone else briefly, and then I saw nothing.

And then I saw someone I have always known, who cried with me and laughed with me, who will die with me. I saw him whom I could bury and avoid but never escape. The one person I know I could never give my life for, for that would be a contradiction. He was one of the immortals, and he taught me a very long “love-prayer” in a language whose characters are feelings and words are little drops of bliss, and it is my eternal regret that my waking mind can only remember and translate the last, most important feeling-word:

*Immortal ones that died a long time ago

Yet invisible but witnessed everywhere still

Please allow me to never ask for permission

And forgive me for not offending enough

And let me follow your example by leading

Help me live by dying to the world

And use myself up living for the world*

I repeated the “prayer” over and over till I found myself on the floor of my living room making soft whooping noises like a fire-truck. I must have awoken to the loud ringing noise that, with shame I admit, took me a few moments to recognize as the sound of my doorbell. I then got up too fast I'm sure, since my head immediately felt very round and hollow and full of lead bolts clanking around and bruising the soft walls of my mind. I thought that that must be what a migraine feels like. I walked over to the front door and opened it and felt the warm sunlight hit my face, and then for the briefest moment, felt the bliss of the closing of the word “love” as it departs into the ether. I then looked straight at the visitor and stared confused for a while, until I realized I was looking straight at myself. I extended a hand in trying to touch my face and then my mind ripped with a sound like cheap copy-paper.

And then I woke up on the floor of my living room, and felt a terrible pounding in my head.

And then I woke up in a bed.

And then I woke up in another bed.

And then I wake up in my bed.

And then I wake up.

And wake up.

And wake up.


(I'm now taking extra-strength over-the-counter pain-killers which help a lot with managing the last stages of my concussion, but I’m afraid there is no curing the being-yanked-from-behind feeling that tastes like green and sounds like "Fur Elise").

And As It Is Written

Lady fine, if I ever wrote a line that
Would have you swifter in my arms round,

I’d carry you over my shoulder
And with an implied essay lay you down.

If there ever was a place where
Bursting clouds and setting workaday sun

Revealed the points of light
You illumine in my soul,

I should wait for the next storm,
Capture a single raindrop in a bowl,

And yell to the sky, so terrible, soaking wet,
“I, too, belong to someone!”

In the hint of a smile over giddy dinner
I’d dream of being your wine,

After catching your sweet reflection in
Millions of diamond shards shattered.

I’d press my heaving chest against
Yours and all that mattered,

And we'd build a nest with just
Your toes and mine.

Still Waiting

Dear Unimaginative Bureaucrat, if you could only accept
The stubborn persistence of life's mystery and randomness
And imperfection as perfection becoming,
Then you would know my sincerity without its mention.

Do you not remember the danger in drawing straight lines on spherical ground,
In trying to confine a soul with hope, feelings and dreams
To a few lines on perishable ruled paper or pixels on a screen.
In worshipping the idols of institutional procedure?

How fair is the fairness of a queue without a question
For how it leads and what lies at its end?
How charitable is charity when not everyone has enough to give,
How alive can we be when our creations teach us how to live?

You mistake regularity for rightness, and order for harmony.
In building your Babelian towers you hammer cold nails into human faces.
You have striven to make uniform black ashes
From letters, songs and dreams in the fires of your furnaces.

How can all that is our essence ever be subsumed under all that we may do?
In the face of the Inscrutable, what is human design?

Accra

Accra cries in the morning light
Before she rides wrapped lovingly in cloth
On her mother's back. She is watched over
By white-breasted crows that circle
Above the wise and wrinkled Neem trees.
She wears skin dark and even as a charcoal stove
And with a personality as effervescent as
Palm wine in the sweltering midday heat.
She cares for the white hen that leads
Her timorous chicks through shallow green gutters.
She tolerates the bleating of the parade of taxis
That crawl slowly round her curves,
And she sometimes puts a coin in the clingy hands
Of curly-haired children walked
In all the way from Chad.
Accra can be read in the palms of craftsmen
Selling masks like their faces by side of the road,
And in the sweat of the unknown genius
Sculpting masterpieces on the beach.
Accra is serenaded in the quiet soliloquy
Of the naked vagrant sitting underneath an ATM
And she sits smiling beneath colorful umbrellas
Selling pay-as-you go phone cards
That connect millions and make some millions.
Accra is a song that school children squeal
Clothed in the warm love of high noon.
Accra is fertile, unapologetically voluptuous
With bountiful breasts and an impractical shapely butt.
She is beautiful though scarred with tribal marks.
She has a dollop of a nose, round cheeks
And a ready smile revealing pearly whites.
Accra is athletic, hard as chiseled ebony and with
Skin stretched tight over abs like cupcake crowns.
Today, she is the sexiest thing on the planet
And she knows it in her very bones.
Accra is old-world chivalry
And libidos undiminished by modernity
Where fathers teach their sons how to be men
And women haven't forgotten how to control them,
And political correctness stays political.
Accra walks like royalty,
Easy, upright, swaggering and bold,
And dances with abandon like the court fool
With sharp rhythm that shakes off the dust
Of struggle and the weight of the world.
She is painfully self-conscious and soft-spoken.
Accra washes twice a day and wears her best clothes
Especially to church on Sundays and holidays
And whenever the spirit moves her
Or her pastor says that we are in the end days.
Accra rains down rarely but she beats down hard
When she does and she wipes the streets clean
And bathes masticating goats waiting to die.
Accra is the imbecile that defenestrates plastic waste
And closes up shop five minutes too early--
And stands too closely behind you in queues--
The drunken mathematician that forecasts the lotto.
Accra is the feeling of guilt that raps at your
Rolled-up window waiting at a traffic light--
The sorry sight of the young leading the blind.
Accra can be friendly and helpful to the needful.
She yells like hell and curses but never strikes.
The city is thick as smoke from burning garbage
And thin as the policeman hiding behind a stop sign.
Accra is free as the soldier urinating on your wall.
Accra is bitter-sweet and must be swallowed whole
As a bolus partially submerged in deliciously oily soup
With drowned meat as prizes.
She can be found watching straight men
Hold hands as they walk down the street,
And she remembers the more than curious school boys
Who grew up to be homophobes.
She can be found walking through doors opened for her.
Accra is the plump prostitute that winks at your husband
And gives next-to-free jerks to your son and his friends
After they've been out smoking hookah
At a lebanese bar where they are bitten
By skinny mosquitoes and go broke buying rich girls' drinks.
Accra can be seen sitting on plastic chairs
With company looking positively morose
At an poorly lit outdoor bar
Listening to those hits from the 90s.
Accra is a spiritual place--
Where talismans worn can bring you wealth
And ghosts and dwarves lurk on tree branches
On the periphery of your field of vision.
Where an invisible owl hoots danger
And a senile grandmother becomes a witch
And a cheating wife's vagina gets sealed shut
And an absentee father will have his penis shrivel up--
Where the rich must have sacrificed their own children
And the poor are atoning for the sins of another life--
Where demons wait just outside your door
And Satan recruits naive politicians
Who forgot to bathe in holy blood of the lamb
That you can buy from the monday commute preacher,
Along with bundles of panacean herbs for
Everything from impotence to back pains.
Accra is a universe unto itself
Where a shoe-shiner has become a millionaire
Where children of privilege have lost everything
Where hotels may grow like trees
And the sun exposes its nut-sack and tans Accra's skin
Where stars are everlasting unchanging diamonds
Where billboards announce that Aids is in fact real
Where dignity accrues with age
Where a gulf vast as the Atlantic separates generations
Where vagabonds get high in cemeteries
Where you can feel your soul gyrate
To the non-stop thump-thump of drums
Fading ancestors continue to beat beneath your very feet.

Litmus

Who was ever a friend 

That cannot be afforded even once 

The chance to offend,

And offend simply

By ceasing to pretend?

No...I'm Mac #3 "Trimming Off Excess"

Smith: Joe there is no easy way to say this. Your usefulness has always been in debate. In times of calm you have covered up pretty well, but in times of excitement you have been inflexible and have only withdrawn. Not once, you have obstructed the servicing of our clients. I'm afraid this has to be done now before things get any harder. Management has taken the matter into its own hands and thinks it is best that you be excised from membership, without further issue, so that a fresh head may take your place as we continue to penetrate new markets--effective eight days after delivery.
Joe: Dick move, dude.
Smith: Exactly.

Most Original

So this is the knowledge of good and evil

How sorry that art is his only comfort
On whose altar he offers pieces of his heart
Stewed in regret over a quiet flame

Line by line he makes bitter lemonade
For his transgressions seem yellow lemons
Grown in an Edenic garden
Plucked unripe from a forbidden tree
And rubbed over and squeezed
On the fresh wound that is realizing
That under the burden of dreams
The seams of reality come undone
Now he is laid bare with nothing left to hide
If only he could trample the serpent in the brush
And win back the eve before the new year is come
For after the rains have come and gone
Who would ever care for a dam?

No...I'm Mac #2 "Driving Miss Daisy"

A: ...that's good...will you slow down just a tad? Great. Did you locate it yet?
B: Good. Will. Hunting.

No...I'm Mac #1

A: I like, totally almost fell into a manhole the other day.
B: ...no shit!

Lines on Life Online

There's just too much noise.
Look through the wwwindow into humanity's soul.
I don't know nothing no more.
I am not responsible--
I have Wikipedia to misinform me,
Google to confirm my every stupid hunch,
And Facebook to make me feel exceedingly boring
And ugly and lonely.
But I have Hotornot to cheer me up-"Not!",
Twitter to drown out my voice,
And Linkedin to belittle my accomplishments.
I have democratic porn to castrate me,
And blogs, blogs, blogs, Jesus, blogs.