Tracks without a train wait in silent anticipation yet do not care.
I am more like those tracks then I wish to admit. Of course I am softer:
You couldn’t beat me into shape or functionality, I’d end up a formless
Mass… which only a modern artist might find a way to use.
I need a dream. All men need dreams
Unless they themselves are dreams
And so need dreamers.
I need a dream to soothe the hardness of the day,
To help me pass
The night away,
To let time flow smoothly to the distant
Waterfall I’ve heard rumors of.
But what sort of dream? There are so many, in all weights and lengths
And temperatures, in all colors and castes and dependencies on life.
There are Freudian dreams, tied like weak Gullivers to the id-infested
Earth without even a strand of hair free to blow in the upper breeze;
And Kafkian dreams bound only to a thick tether of despair.
There are sea dreams and me dreams,
Clown dreams and sound dreams,
Wet dreams and dry dreams and that silence
between dreams.
Should I have an Hors d’oevre dream to flavor reality?
Or how about a mask dream that paints life in pastels?
There are dreams to remember and dreams to forget
(I’ve needed them all)
I need them yet…
For life, see, is a bloated balloon at times.
It is a twisted smile in the heat,
An oily tear in a dirt arena
With thousands of cheers belching down from stone shafts,
Smoky waves that beat down upon us all. And we suffer.
We suffer from their cheers, their cries of hate. We cry too
Though in softer tones, with different intentions,
And out of a different pain.
Our tears form a miniscule ocean
That floats up, over the shafts and the smoke to seek for dryness.
But can an ocean find dryness?
For a second perhaps until their molecules mix into it
And form the vilest of lovers. A hopeless lover is always vile:
And is always dripping in your hand.
Hope then is a sight seen in the distance.
Heaven must be hope without time. For it is time that takes
Hope and chews it into mud.
I see few faces these days. I try but they refuse to stand still.
I won’t hurt them. Why won’t they stand still?
I won’t hurt them.
For to hurt another requires a weakness in your roots. I have only roots
And so have fortified them to the exclusion of all else. I would make
A fine tree if I’d loosen my roots just enough to let the tree start
Growing. I feel it, its sinews unborn but kicking through the hollowness,
Striving to get to the sun, the feet of the sky, the lips of the bent
Breeze.
How can it know they exist? No one has told it, the roots have been
Silent yet the tree to be yearns so for SOMETHING
That sounds just like those things. Are we then born with the knowledge
Of sun and sky and breezes resting in us, a second heart, a third mind?
If so, Heaven must exist
For there are other things we dream of that we have never seen.
Was it Berkeley who said life is a dream? Does it follow therefore that dreams must be life?
So if I dream of Aragorn the King
Should I search the ground for Hobbits?
If I dream I am Don Juan
Should I not feel the exhaustions of love?
I am tired but it is not from love but from its lack.
That is why the preacher is wrong.
The wrong is found in what is lacking;
The hierarchy of emptiness forbids the entry of dreams.
Reality in golden robes and torn slime,
In sweet silk and dry dung.
These only are allowed for they all have lack.
If a dream is what you sense then what is it you do not sense?
If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it,
If it doesn’t fall is it then heard?
To have a word is to have its opposite.
Its opposite is empty.
Seek ye the emptyness and find the meaning of life.
On, to happier things.
Philosophy is, after all, for aborted (mathematically-minded) suicides.
How about a joke?
If a man commits a crime and repents he is saved.
Why then should we not require all to commit crimes
So that the repenters are all saved?
Isn’t that funny?
No?
Oh well.
It is light out here by the tracks. There is sunlight sleeping on every rotting board. And the horizon is Proud in a present grandeur, a horizon of black and gray swords upraised into the blue-eyed sky
To praise its glory… they are happy, these buildings, for they are not bothered by time;
It passes wisplike around them. When they die they do not DIE. For their lives were a second in history and that history exists forever.
Only to man does the sunlight fade to darkness
For he remembers the sunlight. In memory is found the fear of death.
Illusion is the prompter of our tears. What we envision is past and gone.
What we shall envision will also be past and gone.
Where then is hope?
It is in ignoring your penetration into the roar. Forget the way
The water changes color, as if paling in fear; forget the bubbling rocks,
The blindness descending from the sky. Forget the traitor wind who runs
From you now in all directions. Your vision must diminish, diminish
In proportion to the sharp fists of the waterfall, the ever growing sound,
The universe that is beginning to drape itself around you –
Two infinities are in balance,
When there is the omnisound of crashing worlds,
Of theories come to brassy, flaring life,
When all words are defined as noise
Then vision shall shut down,
Collapse into itself
To zero.
Two infinities shall merge to make a third,
One that cares not for senses but only,
Totally,
Completely,
For tender questions
With diamond at the edges.