poemimage

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.