Oh Grandfather, What Do You See?
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.
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 knowledge of the 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 history of the psyche.
Oh grandfather, what do you see?
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.
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.
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