I told the painter, who had lived on a boat in England’s waterways, my idea for a poetry video about JFK’s widow in Dallas. I want to use a passage from my mother’s journal about tree shadows. She walked past a garage sale and picked up a book with pages blowing in the wind. It was Jacqueline Kennedy’s biography. She took it as a sign & told her ex-husband, a cinematographer, about my project. He traded time and expertise for my paintings & we worked on many projects, over many years.
The mystical Musten Baba poster thumbtacked to a bare wall.
I face the wall balanced on a wooden chair.
A common fly enters the torn screen,
flying lazy figure eights.
Now it multiplies, flash-frozen in the amber air,
dotting and dashing in Morse Code.
A roller coaster in slow motion photography.
A grainy ghost-numbness revolving in my chest.
My mother does not know where I am.
Musten Baba blinking his eyes – open and shut.
Oh grandfather, what do you see?
I imagine you.
I search the mirror cloudy with obsidian rain:
no shaman or spirit-guide, no wise-woman or medicine man,
no ceremony of initiation anticipated with dread,
to face the wilderness with a bone sharpened by stone.
No braying like a donkey beholding pianos made of sand.
Flung into the wind: a kinetic, psychic storm.
Such is fate in this eon of neon.
Oh grandfather, what do you see?
I imagine you.
My wound echoes in temple ruins – I fend off phantoms
with an upper-hook, blowing smoke rings, off-kilter in a scramble,
stuttering verses, stealing my own identity with lyrsergic acid
diethylamide – in the parlance, ‘peaking.’
In this speeded-up version of the monomyth,
still point ascending into a zenith-portal,
climbing a chlorophyll rope ladder to a skull-shaped window,
balanced upon the head-of-a-pin flowering like a lotus.
Oh grandfather, what do you see?
I imagine you.
Ever-scuffling as I am, yet peaking, zeroed in,
I attain knowledgeofthe mystery
in the shortest eon:
Stone Age-Bronze Age-Iron Age,
Neon Eon.
My End the War button glimmers a spotlight beam.
Faster than a pirouette my knowledge wiped clean,
gone like melted ice cream down a drain.
I struggle to return, I even pantomime
this moment in a historyof the psyche.
Oh grandfather, what do yousee?
I imagine you.
Knowledge received on the head-of-a-pin
flowering like a lotus:
in negative space – starlight.
in positive space – starlight.
No butterfly net captures starlight
heavy as stone, bronze & iron,
shot through with diagrams of the mystery sun.
Beyond megalithic. Beyond sacred geometry.
Oh grandfather, what do you see?
I imagine you.
Starlight all-consuming as love when love is night,
when love is day. When love is eyesight,
round as the pupil of a mostly-open third-eye.
Too condensed to bear.
I am spared from a thousand-pointed star,
impossibly simple to operate.
Musten Baba blinking his eyes – open and shut.
Oh grandfather, what do you see?
I imagine you.
LSD elves do not get the message, pushing holographic visions-in-a-ball
up a spiral stairway, their breath disappears, the stairway fades as it must.
The chlorophyll rope ladder fades as it must.
Oh grandfather, what do you see?
I imagine you.
My third-eye blinks in a rain forest,
in a cloud on Jupiter, in a comic book.
My heart turns silver opening a vault in the Akashic records.
I cast a bird-like shadow upon tapestries someplace quiet in Atlantis.
Musten Baba blinking his eyes – open and shut.
Oh grandfather, what do you see?
I imagine you.
In the doorway of a pizza parlor painted black,
Procul Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale wobbles through a speaker.
I kneel before cosmic colours in a comic book:
a horizontal river of paisley patterns,
flat as a veined dragonfly wing,
pressed to the concrete sidewalk.
Grandfather, oh grandfather, what do you see?
I imagine you.
You die when I am one year old.
As you fade you build me a basketball hoop.
Grandfather, oh grandfather, building in my DNA,
not only in this world but also the world to come,
imagined into being & sculptural form,
as real as a tree – gigantic & wild,
as real as a garden – meek & mild,
existing in duality – imagination and reality,
casting shadows not only in this world,
but also the world to come.
Paisley patterns (only I see) swim like tadpoles, like osmosis,
like a blood transfusion,
creeping up my finger, covering my hand,
rising to curve around my paisley arm.
A Whiter Shade of Pale resounding like Zeus in the heavens.
Faces in the summer morning – heavenly yellow, tangerine orange.
A firebird rises, spreading its fiery wings, above a bone-white temple
filled with typewriter ribbons and glass ashtrays.
Voluminous clouds push into the leaded-glass windows.
Rain is not expected until mid-week.
In the Chiaroscuro Magic Show, an orange parakeet eludes twin birds
of prey. The marionette puppeteer said identical twins.
I was seventeen & flying high.
The underground paper said come to the canyon.
Grandfather, oh grandfather, what do you see?
I imagine you.
My grandfather, V. B., in law school.
Two long-haired girls in the kitchen, move like ballerinas,
table to stove. Music on the psychedelic radio station.
‘Steven, are you hungry?’ One flowery ballerina offers me
a plate with easy-over eggs. I describe a ribbon of
yellow-orange yolk winding through the kitchen air.
She said (quiet as a butterfly), ‘How much did you take?’
I said, ‘Four tabs of comic book acid.’ She calculates.
Round tablets, clay tablets, signalling in language carved with a tool,
with continuity, a scribe’s stylus, or imagination,
in temple ruins baked beneath the mystery sun,
in the language of poetry, prophecy, law & portal,
in pictures that do not belong together sequenced together.
Musten Baba blinking his eyes – open and shut.
She said (quiet as a flower), ‘You might be out for the weekend.’
Ships belonging to the Magi sail overhead,
I intuit poetry, prophecy, law & portal,
the darkened wooden chair mimics my heartbeat
signaling the wooden ships across eons.
I am one year old.
Outside the window
a piano made of sand braying like a donkey
interrupts the anti-war demonstration.
Deep in a cave, stained hands drawing (incantations) on a wall
in depths of darkness, paint mineral-paste scrubbing stiff, short
hairs turned into a brush. Cascading torchlight scorches chalky
twilight auras on the walls.
Animals migrate on the undulating wall, beginnings flower
in belly-vessels, a belly laugh echoes.
Symbols signal sigils, like honey in a tree – there for the taking.
Unseen wheels, a whiter shade of pale, generate the deepest now,
seized in the belly of deepest now – received at the peak
of deepest now.
Thousand-pointed stars operate within teeth & bone & the hypnopompic
state,
magic embers glow, falling dark as crow –
in blackness, the pupil of an eye.
In a musty oak grove, or stepping ashore, or kneeling beside a sacred spring,
hands build the ceremonial hardened by the sun.
Grandfather, oh grandfather, you build the ceremonial,
your reasoning echoes in my DNA.
Keep me clean as a whistle,
turn me homewards in the desert,
to hear the praying sand beneath the mystery sun,
to not commit any crime.
You build me a basketball hoop, round as the sun.
Grandfather, oh grandfather, you understand consequences.
Unless I am imagining things – I promise truthfully,
Yes, I will. And not the other – because I must.
Even if doomed, because I must.
I am a coward but I must. I am a crowbar made of salt.
I am a crowbar made of iron. I am a crow.
You echo in my DNA.
*
*
*
I found the (uncredited) paisley patterns online and ever-so-lightly textured them in Photoshop. To the best of my knowledge, the artist who created Musten Baba is (the late) Rick Griffin, co-founder of Berkeley Bonaparte, a company that created and marketed psychedelic posters. The ‘suns’ I created in Photoshop. The downtown photograph found online (near to locations in this poem) was uncredited.
My grandfather was a law student in this photograph. The original is sepia and clearly defined yet soft. Obviously a long time ago. My (late) mother was close to her father. I started thinking about him quite a lot recently. He died when I was one year old and he built me a basketball hoop.
The highly visual (psychedelic) narrative weaving in and out within the poem is factual. I remember it like yesterday. Of course it was many yesterdays ago. If I start to discuss the poem, and tangential matters, I could end up writing an essay.
In terms of copyright, of course I wrote the poem, and I mentioned in the first paragraph my source of materials, and of course I make no claim on material not mine – which I used for educational & artistic non-profit purposes.
My father brought home FBI WANTED POSTERS his friend, the agent, gave him. I spread them out on the bed and frightened myself with aliases, previous crimes, and last known locations. What is white slavery? He has a bazooka? The square inked fingerprints looked like Neolithic patterns connected to the criminal’s inner mind. Photographs were specific yet vague. He could be at the music store, in line at the Frozen Dairy stand. If a car slowed down, surely one of the most wanted had followed me – possibly for hours.
I created these three GIFs before my Photoshop 5 program became unworkable. A face in Art History seems out of context yet provides commentary, a touchstone. I remind myself, in various ways, of this day when the carnival came to town. A long car driving through shadows into the sun of art history.
I walked past the row houses where I spent my childhood, stepping over syringes, watching for wild dogs, hearing hammering & avoiding ladders leaned against altars in late-afternoon shadow. The wind blew a torn page to my feet: Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. Without understanding why, I put the folded paper in my jacket pocket. A touchstone.
Across the years I return again and again to hear The Small Faces sing Itchykoo Park. It all seems such a dream. Steve Marriott’s pleasure and Ronnie Laine’s pleasure and their back and forth expressions. Their Carnaby Street fashions.
I argue with myself and contrast realities. The rebellious joy in Itchykoo Park juxtaposed with Joos de Momper the Younger documenting great Babel. Soon to crumble. Soon to fall.
The laboratories & the madness of Babel. Soon to crumble. Soon to fall.
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