Gospel Adventure

The gospels are infinitely more fun to read as an atheist/agnostic than when I heard their fragments as a kid believer. They come across as a Harry Potter-style adventure story with a wünderkind wizard dude as protagonist ferrying around the weird lands of Roman-occupied Judea, wowing folks with his startling deeds and his cryptic intellect, where every now and then the devil appears like the Joker skulking from out of the shadows to try to f•ck with JC - like in Luke, el diablo shows up and somehow jets him from Galilee to the top of the temple in Jerusalem and says to JC "you think you're hot shit and you think God's got your back, so jump off of this thing and have him catch you, come on, m'fer, do it!" and JC just comes back, cool as can be, with "you don't think I know that you're not supposed to test God?" but also legions of angels materialize with trumpets in shining glory at certain key moments, as if to certify the divine nature of these incidents, like in Luke when JC is baptized by J the B, the sky kind of opens and along with the angelitos we even hear a voice thundering out of the heavens to declare the portentousness of the occasion, and you also catch all of these funky details you would never catch as a kid, like a nice little bit of animal sacrifice at the temple in Luke - after JC was born, Joseph and Mary took him there and before presenting him to God, they sacrifice a couple of doves to Yahweh. Makes sense... Amazing how the church managed to extract all of the fun out of this text -- this shit is wild, as out there as the Ray Harryhausen stop motion work on Sinbad and King Kong. JC in the different gospels can be kind of a dour and dyspeptic fellow at times, but the stories themselves -- you can see the influence of the Greek myths on the four gospel writers, texts which they inevitably read in order to become literate and competent writers in Greek. Last point is a stylistic one: the gospel writers are masters of the use of the word "and." It is deployed with such mastery that it functions as a kind of fast motion pulley, yanking the reader along from weird scene to weird scene with the insistence of a heartbeat.

There Are Marvels to Behold

 

Butthole Surfers

Album titles

Are good poetry

Psychic... Powerless...

Another Man's Sac

Rembrandt Pussyhorse

The irreconcilable joined together

That the alchemy might resolve

The collision of boredom

Prosperity & mayhem

America was producing in 1990

Locust Abortion Technician

Independent Worm Saloon

They say Gibby Haynes

Studied business

If I understood this

I might know

The thing that I need

And that eludes me

Sparking into the cobalt night

High above Holy Hill

Diving grey into the waves

Off the ferry to Peake's Island

Shadow-moving along a building

In Milwaukee Third Ward

Poised inside my dream on an island

In the Quetico

Children Born Now

 

Children born now arrive

Into this thing we do not know

We know the discipline & long nights

Of the Ice Age

It caused us to scatter

Across frozen straits

To the tips of peninsulas

Deep into eastern caves

Far into western deserts

We know the rhythms & kindness

Of the Holocene

It left us radiant in the sun

But finally drunk & embittered

Among its lush lands & leaping oceans

Which we felt we must conquer & subdue

Somehow giving birth to this new thing

What is it now that awaits our children

Over the crest of the hill?

What is its shape?

What is its breath?

What is its movement?

What is its mind?

Even As

 

You see them

On the street

Begging for money

In torn clothes limping

Or their wheelchair

Rolls crooked

Their eyes glossy

Or they're clear but gaze

Far beyond the scene

Their hair is matted

Or their head

Is shaved unevenly

And they need money

For a roof in the rain

Or some food

For drugs or alcohol

Or hot coffee

Sweetened thick

With packets of sugar

This is not defeat

It is a moment preceded

By some other calamity

We can scarcely imagine

Even as they shuffle

Or push along

The highway offramp

In the sunlight on

The painted yellow lines

Signals

 

Borges writes a story
About a cavalryman
In Tashkent
Who finds a musical score
For bone flute
Written in an unknown
System of notation
Buried among the ruins
Of a battlefield
There are conversations
As the soldier speaks
To imams & scholars
Seeking to decipher the tune
I write a poem
About the story
Somebody reads it
And writes a song
Which contains the melody
I try to find this person
Where are they

Wandering Through the Caves

 

sete cisnes voando sete corvos cantando

a pantera andando

pelo rio da caverna

as folhas da planta se abrindo

na chegada da noite azul

o espírito quer voar

pelos ares

Wandering through the caves you find a skiff

You sit down in it and drift
A panther appears on the ridge of the stream
And walks beside you
Mica reflected in the black water
Waking in the bones feels like cold water flowing
The plains blossom across the color spectrum
You see this in your mind projected beyond the cave walls
Words travel across the wind
Though the air remains still inside the cave
Along the dark stream you encounter an instrument
Five strings, a gourd bowl resonator
And you know how to play this
The panther appears again on the ledge beside you
You try to speak to her
She only looks at you
There is a guitar figure you wrote 30 years ago
Or maybe you dreamt you wrote it
You can play it now
And now the panther speaks
You are to follow the cave stream
Until the open fields blossoming
Across the color spectrum
Your old injury is gone away, disappeared
You should have been a swan
Gliding in the night lagoon
How is it that your ancestors lived
On a black volcanic island
Covered in flowers
You should have been a firefly
Flickering on the night plain
Or you were
Or you were a worm purifying soil
For the larger creatures
To eat, grow, die and decay back into the earth
The scale you play on the instrument
Has intervals that mirror the distance
Between thought and action
Between cloud and rain
Residue on the side of your craft
Blossoms iridescent as you push forward
Crystals flickering silently beneath you
You're drinking the cool water
And you approach a threshold

***

Hymn translation:

Seven swans flying Seven crows singing The panther walking Along the river in the cave

The leaves of the plant opening up With the arrival of the blue night The spirit wants to fly

Through the air

***

A composition with MiM for our set at the annual Night of Modular Synthesis at the Empty Bottle, Chicago, 8/27/24. Linked video is a portion of the set.

BENZOS ALCOHOL WEED

 

People take benzos

Drink alcohol smoke weed

To bring down a panic

Whose origin remains vague

Flickers in & out of the system

A rising a fluttering a wind

Benzos alcohol weed

Rearrange thoughts

Interrupt a chaos ritual

Whirring swiftly

Like a night insect

And place a gauzy calm

Between you & the world

Between you & that part of you

That prepares the ground

For the winged creature's eggs

That you must unearth

Name speak to befriend

Or bid farewell one day

(thank you to Carlos Monsivais for the phrase "ritual del caos")