Metamagical Circuit (random excerpt)

Practice, practice, vibrant golden

smoke rings for my lady

Goddess grants this smiling day

ritual of play

Glory Glory fat silver swords

swashling, caressing, violating the air

You with your act of splendour, curtseys,

curses, all guaranteed to cure

a thousand years of sleep.

Once upon a forest

clip-clop horse hoofs

noses snorting change

seasons – paleo to neo

robins hopping to seed greenery

glowing owls, blessedly blind,

grant swift sanctuary beneath wingspans

illuminated in Arthurian myth,

symbols that yearn like long dormant worms

sucking out dark holes over eons

Today we go to the circus.

Gather, children,

hooked to treacly tether

sharing sweet secrets

surreptitious touch

Mind the invisible netting,

safe from trailers hurtling from highway

or perennial city bus discharge by zombie drivers

only intent on fulfilling the schedule, home before

detonation.

The circus is superb.

Imagine a trampoline ignited by grand fireflies

sparkling dayglo spraypaint into heaven.

Imagine noble elephants, gravely kneeling,

telepathic tremolo soothing vibration

carrying dreamtime back to Earth.

Imagine a dandelion trail outside the

schoolhouse window

breathful breezes of mint and lilac

destiny swells to crescendos of urgency.

Imagine the day that dawns when

you are no longer dreaming.

*

Crysta

Crysta eats peanut butter spoon from jar

Looks longingly out the big picture

window of her parents’ home

A busy squirrel swirls over the lawn

chitters at the suddenly appearing

barking white scrappy terrier

attached to a leash held

by oh so wonderful, casual, assured

laughs at animal antics

takes you home

feeds you wine and music

soothes so warmly

Crysta dreams

wild auto-car ride into

hilly fields arrayed in

white, yellow, green

wild flowers smile into

split-screen Sun

She tells her dolls incredible tales.

Monkeys live in the hills, hidden in

treetops. Late at night, they sneak

into our souls to dance in ecstatic

romance, leave us wise in ways we have

no business. Please, take soul, my

plastic playmates, monkey-dance with me.

*

Before It’s Over

They say in dreams a house is a metaphor for a life

Windows open to the world, mysterious eyes

seeking snowfall,

slush debris, snarls of auto travelers rushing through

Hidden inner rooms may appear, unsought buried treasure

Deep within decorated walls, a smiling child

painting with excrement

Dimpling, she offers scented flowers never known

to earth’s earnest soil

Silly dreams, silly living, skillfully denying,

making much of

a molehill here or there

Mountains are metaphors for achievement

Struggling like Sisyphus, discovering like Pythagoras

basic relationships on which to build

Empires, like species of mystic birds

emerge from glowing flame, flogging slaves to

roll those rocks from imperial graves up the peaks

of glory

Like family, and its social cognates, enslave to stories:

“This is who we are.”

Late Winter snowing through conflated years

Fear was my ally, hailing me on, hugging

with glorious laughter, carrying my steps through

onerous trails — and those ebullient ecstasies of survival

Drunk on the gold that surpasseth science or light

Touching the cold sting, letting the song sing through me

Do you?

Feel the music?  Abandon your amygdala to dance free

awhirl in a swirl of laughing snow?

In dreams, inchoate, unremembered, do we relive those

moments of bliss to keep us balanced, to give courage

in a life

less lived, less honored?

Old, glazed-over eyes seek momentary solace, look

long, longingly, into a silly mist of snow beyond

windows closed

securely against the cold.   A dreamworld revealed,

in the interplay of eyes and mind

*

THRU THE LOOKING-GLASS

Some Sunday Evening

When the sky is still half blue

And Spring is oh so present in the scented breeze,

The mind may take pause from the conventions

of the weekday world,

Take pause from its frenzied hiding,

Peek from behind the metal barricade of

“No, no. No time for that now.”

And dream the impossible, unforgettable dream

That brings man above the machines, into humanity;

Above the burdened beasts — into gods.

Then, tell me your dream, and I’ll tell you mine

(Quickly now, before they’re jackrabbit scared

beyond recall — such

fragile things are dreams).

It starts on a pure-white, fine-grained beach,

silhouetting a wide blue,

eternal, crystal sea.

A blazing blue and yellow sun-rayed sky overhead,

and sparkling sea shells beneath your feet.

And the sea breeze and lapping waves make the only

sounds (noisy traffic, heated pavement, not

even a memory. It was really such a bad joke.)

Air, Earth, Fire, Water

See them play.

Then transformed above the clouds

In the knowledge of universes

“Here we are to meet our makers”

— among them ourselves.

Roll call of the gods and goddesses

up for reassignment or rest and recuperation

among the stars.

I dreamed I was on Earth and saw a thing called war

(shudders) — a psychic trauma

to be overcome.

So let us play in pageants past

and watch the field unfold

Tanks and Generals and Implements of Destruction

“Why, they’re only paper cards.”

Pawn to Queen Bishop Three

And check; and mate.

Such silly pastimes we devise to play.

I’d rather make love to you.

Slippery union by the seashore

And close your eyes as we make love

amongst the galaxies.

Let me feel you; let me be you.

Your skin merging with mine

So soft and warm,

ah, sensation . . .

floating higher and higher

and higher — beyond all time or dimension

You know, it’s all one —

The rest is a game

A cosmic joke.

“Hear the gods laugh”

You laugh — delightful.

And now we rest on the beach

under the bright, warm sun

floating through black eternity

amongst the pinbright stars

4th of July sparklers

or Christmas tree lights

Softly floating down and down and

The holiday is over.

As Sunday night turns to Monday morning and

we don our masks and securely hide our dreams,

til its as if they were never seen,

tightly behind their barricades

and a muffled “mornin'”

is all we’ll allow in greeting,

eyes shielded, limbs confined,

back into our workaday existence,

reading the war news

fighting our own private wars with the

infernal traffic.

The dense fog descends to hide the sky and sun.

The waters polluted,

The sidewalks encrusted in broken glass.

And, I’d tell you my dream, if you’d tell me yours,

But —

“Don’t be ridiculous,

We haven’t time for dreams.”

*

March Hare

Another kind of rabbit hole.

Ghastly dark and bruising.

No recompense of wonder.

No luxury of child’s imagining.

No spritely tea time story.

Only caustic mud awaits below

at tumbling’s end.

Now, I leap to a farther garden

to taste the bitter charms,

the salty repartee, tropic spice

and cold beer. Sense, sensation,

cessation of sensation —

not happiness, not bliss.

The essential can not

be sought.

No destinations wave aloft

as banners.

We act.

We affect.

We move on.

I am the rabbit.

That chic Alice had the hots

for me and we had planned

to hole up for awhile.

But then thing’s got too

surreal.  Lewis Carroll,

wacky jabber?

I began to feel used

as a plot device.

Can you blame me?

I ate some of Caterpillar’s

mushroom, grew into

a pooka and moved

in with Jimmy Stewart.

Redubbed myself Harvey.

Loved the cocktails.

Later, I haunted Donnie Darko,

puzzle poser of his final fall.

What I mean to say is

that fiction

is born, bred, propagated

out of pain, vanity, desperation

and the humor we conjure

to spite it all.

I have no legitimacy.

It is enough if

I deign to cavort at your call.

*

REQUIEM ON A WINTER AFTERNOON

Requiem of hope, of passion

Requiem for a dream

And why remember what

we might have been,

who shone through our private fantasies

back then?

How the change parade eroded

while maiming bombs exploded

grasping all we’d ever known

into shards and pain.

Did we gain? Did anyone gain

an iota of grain or water or wine

an aeon more time

to cry in, to more slowly die?

Why hold our trust in

past rationales that betrayed us?

If no future is nigh

we can still look to the sky

to the stars

to dream.