Pharaoh, Oh Pharaoh,

Please just let me have my bone marrow.

Didn’t your mother ever tell you,

“Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater?”

Rain Babylon Rain

You want to know the world I see, this post-apocalyptic downstem of the post-modern love affair between the man and the money, this piranha-free wasteland where the malls are empty, the migrations of humanity to the moon craters, and the few urbanites that stick around rule with venison growing in the carpool lane of an abandoned superhighway, speak-easies with women in cowboy hats and guns under the counter, Mad Max on a chopper swinging across the desert, Elvis, King of Vegas, paupers plagued with radiation sickness living in the subway terminals, because when capitalism goes it’s gonna leave burns that’ll take millennia to fix. But they will be fixed. Nature can heal when the fires come and the wind comes and the rain comes and the sun, the sun comes while the clouds come and go, the animals and plants come and go too, and the radiation will seep into the Earth’s very soul.

But in the meantime, we can pack our bags and head to the mountains, to the woods, to the fields and push ourselves back to the dawn of time, while the moon rots in a dystopiatic-nofuture. If we can’t go forwards, as our post-everything selves have proven in their electronic laboratories and supercomputers, we made a wrong turn somewhere. Let’s retrace our steps.

So we pack our bags, and we get to foothills of our collective subconscious, gears twisting in the hearts of icebergs, and the cooking spit of simplicity will be known again.

Let me be straight: your very existence in this world is wrong.

We have, over the course of our history, spread like cancer. And we have run out of room, so we’re eating ourselves alive. And while the cancer forces its environment to adapt to it, the lion eats the antelope, and then dies to become the grass, and the antelope eats the grass.

We shall let the Age of Grass to commence, and watch ourselves be again one with balance.

Make sure that bag you pack contains the ever-changing blueprints to utopia, because it is up to us to build it if it does not exist.

Hundreds of years pass. Earthquakes remold the world and we lose history for awhile. The Fire Prometheus gave goes out.

Picture the colonies of us slowly setting themselves along banks of new rivers, putting the lid back on Pandora’s box, telling their children the dangers of the mystical skyscrapers of the ancients.

And imagine their children wandering back to the cities, experiencing the empty ghosts of the mighty Empire, global and obscene, groups of deer eating venison on that abandoned superhighway. Imagine them sharing stories about the ancients now living on the moon, astronomical migrations separating two now separate races.

Imagine the children learning their long past through primitive archeology. The dust on the chalkboards of schools, the rooms and rooms of books in libraries, the remains of taxis and manhole covers and street-signs, and then while the archeologists are digging, the moon-dwellers come back for a visit, (but do we agree that history repeats itself?) and a war between the pilgrims and the natives proves to us all that Babylon is cyclical.

Life is cyclical too, so must we carry on this rocket-ship up and out narrative charade?

Let us converge, and talk wilderness.

Illinois.

Brother and Sister find themselves lost at a Greyhound bus station. The neon lights of the run-down bar across the street reflect through the panes of glass into Sister’s eyes. It’s a nowhere part of the nowhere state they’re stuck in. A set of train tracks on the other side of the Greyhound station articulate the severity of the nowhere-ness, that if you become stuck in No-where then you will become No-body.

Nebraska, says Brother, maybe Nebraska, but what he doesn’t know is that all the travel brochures say Illinois, and the night manager is closing the station up for the night. She locks the doors and Brother and Sister find themselves on the curb, at least until the next bus, which leaves in four hours. Sister pulls out her cell phone and it won’t turn on.

She says, It’s dead.

He says, What is?

Our phone.

We better get comfy.

Their four bags become pillows and their jackets become blankets. They bundle up close to make one large blob up against the building, next to a rack of telephones, the kind that still take quarters. They’re not alone, vagabonds and weirdos walk the block back and forth, back and forth, there might be three or four of them, with plastic bag shoes and shadows over their faces. Brother feels in his pocket for that butterfly knife Sister found when they were camping a few states back. Just in case.

Let’s do it in shifts, Brother says. You rest your eyes first. I’ll wake you in a little while.

I’m cold, she says, so they get closer and they can smell each other’s breathe and the snow starts to fall in Illinois with a soft dry touch.

The tracks suddenly become alive at the crushing loudness of an incoming train, and the wind becomes still for a moment before sucking by their ears. The cars behind the engine are all boxlike, with graffiti straight out of the Chicago scene, but there’s a bright white light just on the other side of the train, and Sister and Brother are both ogling at it, trying to see what exactly had happened, is happening. The cars keep on whipping by and the light gets brighter.

But then the light disappears. The rest of the train rattles right on by, and Sister and Brother leap to investigate. They just clear the caboose and onto to the other side of the tracks, where there happens to be a crater. This crater is about the size of a two bedroom house with a wrap-around patio, as deep as a telephone pole, and as dark as the vagabonds which have gathered next to Brother and Sister as bystanders.

What is it?, Brother asks. Sister grabs her brother’s arm and clenches it. Smoke rises from the crater.

The vagabonds stir. One of them speaks. A gift from God, he says.

Black ooze comes out of the crater and into the dirt. Everyone stands back as the ooze sets a nearby tree aflame. The ooze bubbles out of the hole and suddenly spurts up fifty feet into the air, a geyser of oil. The snow picks up particles of ooze and the sky turns black. Flakes fall on Sister’s shoulders and her coat starts to catch. She notices immediately and puts it out, and Brother guides her back to their original spot, underneath the protective awning of the building.

Originally by Al-Junayd al-Baghdadi

"And now I see learning like heavy clouds wide spread above you, rich with the promise of life-giving water, their deep shadows foretelling imminent rain and your hopes high for it. Seek, then, the rain which is in these clouds and wait patiently to see where it will fall. And make your plea to God who brings on the rain, who spreads wide the clouds, who removes famine, who gives freedom to the bound.

“And know that God gives life to the dead desert places by a drop of her merciful rain which he causes to fall upon them. Seek out these places which require and receive the life-giving rain and you, too, will be well watered. For surely the first light showers from these clouds will cure your ills and the steady rain which follows will wash away from your innermost being the leaning towards the things of this world. When this rain pours on your body it will wash away from you all your spiritual afflictions and when you taste it its exquisite flavor will kill all passion within your soul.” 

All Hail the Railroad Earth

All hail the Railroad Earth!

           

On Fridays especially,

lay your hands down and

celebrate the orbitronic gramma

ray hoagaphoning       Saturday

morning cartoons.

Your ancient Kings build                                 spaceships

statues, gardens, dams,

spaceships.

All hail the Railroad Earth,

the ocean claps in                   mediation,

palm trees laugh and bow and

dance, the sand          

breathes          forth the white.

And white, my fat grounded friend,

is a pirate, a                fiend.

white swallows into his arsenal

Railroad Earth, stones and     sticks and

weed and bones. Mountains sing in

baritone, as Railroad                          Earth melts like

a television                  set.

But worry not, friend, for white slings

on its wide back the holy gorge of Truth.

Truth derails Railroad, rails in time—

proceed gently.

Truth slaps white in the face.

Truth is black.

Blood on Truth tracks, sunshine clay facts, green lagoon Earth matte,

Blood on Truth tracks, sunshine clay facts, green lagoon Earth matte,

Blood on Truth tracks, sunshine clay facts, green lagoon Earth matte.

Railroading ties slurping shoestring ties,

Brown and hoary and American sweet sweat

it steams.

Kansas, oh Kansas, bleed. Bleed for me, Kansas. Kansas bleed for me, Kansas bleed!

Bleed Kansas!

Bleed Kansas Bleed!

Bleed Kansas!

Bleed Kansas Bleed!

Then the Railroad Earth must

drop its            load into the mouths   of

Children,

deep and dark             and warm and the sounding

the sounding

the sounding of drums across the castle wall.

Drums white brown across leopard skin castle wall brownstone pavement—

dancing fire drums, dancing mud drums dancing doldrums dancing fire drums dancing fire drums, dancing mud drums dancing doldrums dancing fire drums dancing fire drums, dancing mud drums dancing doldrums dancing fire drums dancing fire drums, dancing mud drums dancing doldrums dancing fire drums!

All hail the Railroad Earth!

Love

me.

Work in the kitchen, the dishes

always need cleaning.

People are always eating.

Cheese and mustard caked

On silverware and the equipment

Is stainless, always wet.

First the dishes, then the revolution,

But I got a feeling that the first

One will never ever be finished.

Hierarchy in Mordor

Hierarchy is fundamentally different than order,

Heirs we are to Hier-

archys but if you stick “na” between A and r,

freedom ensues.

We are heirs to order as well,

but if you replace the e with an o and

add an M to the front, you get

the one place we don’t want to be,

the one place we’re trying to get to.

Walls of Elysium / Caribou

O People! Listen to the Children of Jimi!

The walls of Elysium come crumbling down.

The walls of Elysium come crumbling down,

as We decide to pass the torch to Our

Children, Our Friends:

the notion

of freedom.

The walls of Elysium come crumbling down.

The walls of Elysium come crumbling down,

as We decide to pass the fire to Our

Children, Our Friends:

the notion

of humanity.

O freer of slaves, what say you?

The Word, the Word, can no one see

The Word?

The Word speaks:

The world is a lonely place.

            The world needs light.

*An ongoing project of poems and narratives aiming to explore what religion really is through creating a Frankenstein out of all of them. This poem by itself is pretty ambiguous, but so is most scripture. I'd like to think of it as my attempt (however poor or great it may be) for a Psalm.There's a lot of material I've written that might post, or not post, but we'll see what plays out. 

Here's one about Jimi, an accidental founder of this imaginary movement:

Bow before the Word!

Sure enough, Elysium’s doors

open for the Word’s

Fed-Ex delivery, sign there, the

initials of Elysium she etches with

a bad and used-up Bic pen.

Hunt antlers down into the valley,

green with life and ganja.

Sunflowers crushed by the

forever-tripping vine scuttle.

An arrow out into the fields--

wind pulses Jimi’s voice cries out:

Caribou.

Caribou.

Long live me but through the Caribou.

Caribou.

Caribou.

Long live me but through the Caribou.

The buck Jimi finds half alive

In a thicket. But look there’s

The Word! The Word!

Can no one see the Word?

The Word speaks to Jimi,

The Word is Jimi,

but Jimi is not the Word.

And The Word speaks to Jimi,

sez:

            There is a season

For that which is Caribou.

And the season is nigh.

The Word asks:

            Would you be so kind as to

join Us behind the walls of Elysium?

And Jimi sez:

            Sure.

The Word sez:

            Then hunt your Caribou before

the week-

end of Labor. Not after.

And Jimi sez:

            OK.

The Word commands Jimi to wake

            Up.

Elysium be damned, Jimi is hungry.