Soap Box

Yesterday morning

I had a Thought

A damn good one

All warm and soft, vital and clear

The product of good sleep, perhaps

To the city I’d take it

To the wharf where the birds and the people feel grand

Where the sun peaks through the stomach

Where the nice parts of the self can breath

A place where we make our way

When we have nowhere to be, no one to please

Not compelled like the rats we often are

This, this is where I will share my Thought

Amongst the sounds and smells of peace

Of rebirth

I dress in my best

Feeling some extra sobriety

Secure composure                                

Evenness in balanced weight

Atop my body

Clothes I’m reluctant to abuse on the regular day

But this no regular day

With lunch tucked away

In the pack over my shoulder

I ride my old mountain bike through the suburb

And as I ride out through nosier streets

Passing endless shops and homes

Passing schools, warehouses, traffic

I carry myself with stolid dignity

Back straight, slow breathed politeness

As though taking center stage in some ritual

As though I am meeting old mentors

The wharf downtown arrives

As does the mighty noise of crowds and cars

I leave my bike unlocked in the rack

If someone needs it that badly

Then they can surely take it

What meets me shortens my stride

Soap boxes

Soap boxes to every person

Thousands and thousands of soap boxes

Of acidic thought sharers

Talking, screaming, humming into the void

Did I come too late?

Manifesto of the Lifestyle Experimenters

After the given materials of life begin to look themselves rather given and circumstantial, a search ensues: a search for fertile grounds, for a way of life that does not hang itself on the merely local, the merely familiar. With eyes toward this search, our hungry gaze looks out over its own history and it's species history. We earnestly sift through personal traumas and gifts, and scavenge the fruits of the intellectual generations. Here, some of us halt in our tracks, solemn, energized by the breadth of the systematic puzzles or the empirical beauties and tragedies of nature. Vitalized, they'll tell stories which back up their settlement: everything points to the solution of this problem, they say; everything follows laws which can be understood if only we would apply the correctly balanced efforts. For instance, one such settler would appraise themselves thus, "I'm lacking in assertion and my life has become a slavery because of this - and so the way out is to cultivate the powers of self-esteem." Or another would appraise that,  "The world would evolve with the advancement of education, with the eradication of this or that social hang-up." With this, a "battleground" has been facilitated. The search has revealed the fertile grounds we sought, has gone beyond the merely local and fertile.
A great majority at least nod at this approach - in fact, I would wager that all do, at minimum, nod at it. Nevertheless, a minority is not ultimately persuaded. They feel that the "battleground" is just another version of the given, the familiar, the circumstantial. Their suspicion is that the values by which the "battlegrounders" gravitate only goes skin deep: the world does not provide them, only human beings do, and only human beings within circumstantial ruts. From our minorities eyes, all values are experiments in lifestyle, can only be experiments in lifestyle. Building a life on a battle ground is fine, but the added qualification that it is the ground is, for this minority, a kind of shortsightedness or immaturity. They say to the premature settlers: "Look, you have forgotten that always and everywhere we humans are winging-it. We are organic, doing what we do with whatsoever equipment we have access to. Your problems are happenstance, your methods happenstance, and your vision happenstance. There are no ultimate, cosmos signifying obligations that demand to be responsibly met. The world issues no clues which are not first inferred and interpreted by us dying animals. Whatever values you participate in are values you have made up, or else they are values you have followed from the example or compulsion of others. Everything undertaken, however, is guesswork; in guesswork lies all the human possibilities. The approach of you, the battlegrounders, to wholeheartedly get behind some problem you deem central, then, is a strategy, particularly a strategy of coping with life. All there is can be summed up thus, unaccountable weirdness and unaccountable longing. Our movements, which follow, can only be experimental attempts to deal with the unaccountable."  

God's in the Crowd

I see it in some people

They’re veritable Gods

In a crowd of the second rate

An omnipotent grin

A sure footed step

Reveals the vitality at their disposal

Freezing

In our cramped igloos of late

Shivering anger is our only move

And yet it’s a weak anger like that paleness, falsesness

Of the freezing, melting walls

We shiver as our bed fellow chills us to the bone

The sleepy paths of their bare feet beneath the covers

An aggressive reminder of the involuntary

In our chemical dreams

Our teeth fall from our mouths

Out of the blue

Abrupt complexity floods the nerves

Triggers dimensions of commotion

Puzzles which demand ordering

A reminder of the impossibility of preparation

This life business is a trying stream

Obstacles are the rule not the exception

We watch over ourselves like clouds

But also feel ourselves from within

Feel the raw panicked wounded soldier

Elaborating plans from the emergent patterns

Sometimes hearing damage in our bunkers

Sometimes divining floating hope

Let us talk without our logic holes

Talk threw our hearts

For the only way to speak is like lovers

As though to our younger selves

In the heat of crisis

As though to a fellow way-farer

Mounting the same chilly climb

The hardest thing in the world is self-control

Why else would we suspect the rulers

Black Green Fever

Out on this scorched prairie

Where I haven’t seen another in months

Where I panic every night

Ungovernably scared that it’s all gone

A dried up dead-end

Where I don’t have enemies to blame

Where I’m the last word on all things

And since I’m the last word

As far as I can tell

It is my word that counts

An argument that stands

Only because I make it stand

And only because I am the last to speak

Angelic

Warm my speech

Brighten that secret resolve
Clean away the distraction of youth

With you

Not trapped up

Not the gloss of new clothes

Or the stalemate of compromise

I’ll make us food

Cut out the light

Turn high the wall heater

Stare into your eyes

Kiss your scars

Roaming the Debris

Before the Revolution

Cows would keep the grass nice

Such nice grass

I would romanticize it occasionally

Jump fences

Tenderly place my cheek up against it

Feel like a noble savage

A teenage fiend

My scraggly beard with the earth’s

As though roaming the debris

Searching for the quiet countryside

Calling out

Befriending the free filth and vitality

A funny contrast for the mind

Amongst the blended crashed bankrupt Technicolor

Yet the sun shines pretty well

When you don’t worry about disease

This springy absurd green

That smell of burnt plastic replica hurt

The sneezing rumble in my nose

And sometimes 

When I'm off by myself

Along to fill my canteen, stomach
Along to kill some pang
(I forget how hard those pangs pang!) 

I pretend my life's a film

I think of that last shot before the dark

Before the credits dissolve the threads

In that tumbling tense frightened resolve

When the hero is vulnerable

Lies bare their neck

Discloses their gentle hopeful forgiving path

Everything they've got to the World

It's shaky and mumbled

Yet warm and vital

For we live to say just a few things

Tailored, slowly orchestrated

From the weight of the world 

To pefect their delivery

Getting nearer and near to their source

Just as cows used to keep the grass nice
In that world market of nostalgia

So too we'll keep our words warm

At least this is my thought
Off in the collapsed acidic slimy erased

And I think this, too: 

I’m an old jungle

And some shinny things

A bit ill nourished

A bit cold

Tight and bruised

Some more sleep would suit me

And the course of events

Warms my speech

Despite the fall
That burning of magnificent fields
Where cows would practice their art 

Indeed, revolutions gotta fly

Revolutions gotta come

In this world that needs gentle hands
And gentle words

Wrinkles

The streets of the city

They’re filled with cows, apes, and pigs

I watch them

What they get up to

Their shit and feed

It builds up

So damn hard to breathe

What once was a path

Now is a dump

My God!

Such efforts spent

To find some transport

The gymnastics I do

To not ruin my shoes

But perhaps this is an Island

And perhaps I cannot swim

Such skills were never taught

I’m placated

I’m ensured

For everything we need

Is right here

Of course!

And how can I argue

When I cannot speak

This among other skills

I was never taught

For everything is as it is

No need to elaborate

These practical animals

They’ve worked out all the wrinkles

Like jocks and journalists

They bore me in my sleep

Where the commonsense should have no reign

Yet my wrinkles

They dry me out

And the mirror

A dispassionate reminder

Asking me

From where do the wrinkles begin?

From where do they unfurl?