1
**Underbrush**
My life these last few years was spent in a cracked sick house.
Estranged — I was wrenched from my home,
Relieved of a jealous foe, who
Even before the lifting of foggy appeasement, made
The last of my people alien to our children —
A kind of extinction for me.
In a hospital, a surgeon cut threw to my lesion
With a stainless scalpel,
Exposing a strange tangle of nerves,
Such a thing seen through stupor,
Barely responsive after years of insult,
Though still with sensation.
The surgeon cut out the yellow growth,
Leaving drunken vessels draining
To places never known.
2
**Malebolge**
I woke to the grotesques, remains of name-lost actions,
Beside bottles of stale beer, wine bottles and dry bread;
Flat, bland — though once noticed by men
And women, those scraps rubbed between coarse fingers by protocol —
Flatness kneaded, blandness seasoned —
It better goes down so
To be served by one-pitch, with studied-head-cock by mannequin announcers,
Consumed, chuckled over, then filed and forgotten,
Of course — the rub's that while busy, the busy don't forget
To keep the flames on and the pot simmering,
Thus, even after the rub of new scraps,
Still servering to stew me.
3
**Aegri Somnia**
And with pitilessness, under the (will's sun) star,
Through petty (title, balm) pale with pale faith,
A tick, a counsel (‘ee gone) styled a bill,
Swollen red with letters — can a frame be set around a storm? — (How well?)
Conveyed he to a council; and so compelled by a higher
Shadow, the council — _latet anguish in herba_ — staged a foregone act
To convey and conclude on the pale tower green: Boleyn.
They — under (moon joy) — issued counsel-forged writ
To seize a sometime waxing, sometime waning life's work,
With no nod to prior grand works, grants or deeds;
No means afforded to bridge or rebuild —
_Damnant quod non intelligunt._
Grave ablution in privy water
To cleanse hoop-tied basketball dreams with Ballard's strings,
With a toss, it gives and gives, and it takes
Like chicks hatching from cowbird-egg husks.
And with cheers always on the razor of jeers,
The priests temporizing hock indulgences
To laymen and -women for Nike, goddess of victory.
As they hustle along the banks of green-choked lakelets, does it matter?
Village markets attract the hungry,
And hungrier traders from very close and also far,
And also-hungry clerks may impress presses with their designs;
And clerics may gild the church,
But a bishopric is not earned, not inherited,
Cannot be bought with trade or bride;
Now that's all.
2^2 = 4
**Break**
There's no end, bereshit;
And so it came to pass that a group of sticks,
Called upon and unwarranted, ascended some steps,
Pushed open a door — menacing lightning and thunder —
Broke, threw down and delivered many men to
A throne thick around with courtiers,
Cruel and (bare) on one side, costly on the other.
Cynics barely would conceal
Dripping teeth behind impenetrable words.
Nine of ten men dispatched in minutes were
No sooner condemned than forgotten —
Away! — most for a rugged hand stretched out,
A gram in pocket, amplified error;
Then ground to hours — stretching —
With a mind in a toilet.
That is mechanical madness,
Madness as machine —
Metal screws and bellows.
Each man turned out,
Each was discharged —
Disappear or return again to the industry's bosom;
So was the medieval Jew barred from every other industry? —
Or the albino Negro barred from acceptance by all? —
Banished to roam…
Nervously with fear,
To wander until the end of uncertain fire,
Wander as the Florentine wanderer in half-life's dark wood —
Exile.
5
**Art**
Leftover taste of shames remain,
A thirsty mold on my tongue.
Did I throw realization into the
Yellow fire of middle age?
Could I accept the waste of a life
By recognizing life's froth as a work of art?
"The sorrow of the world; once amiss, hath bereaved me of all."
2(3) = 6
**Weigh**
And in the imagination that makes radical art,
Peace would only keep delicately, unless such false strokes
Were made a new vision or revision.
Is self-realization always an audacity?
Is failing always a loss?
Longing can be transformed into passion - passion to love?
And then what nature of love?
So to engage or renounce?
7
**Will**
Now, how can I know whether to engage again,
Even if against windmills that are truly giants in the sun,
Or to renounce, not not being, but to be
Turned eastward, setting plenty childish things aside?
What I ask myself are natural questions?
I have appended questions with notes,
Made them into charts,
And they have put the questioned weight of
Expectations on me,
Except perhaps when I drink coffee from my canteen.
I would choose a private goddess over a public tramp;
I would choose a living ideal over an infectious act;
But what is private can be forced out into the public,
And even a goddess may sell her glow.
To engage or renounces; the eye within or without.
2(2^2) = 8
**Diversion**
They say it's so, that the unwatched mind is
Sophisticated and sly, always wandering in restless,
Hard to outsmart of restrain.
The chess games I win still a bit swell me,
And the losses deflate,
But I get less stuck up on strings
When instead I play cards.
3^2 = 9
**Insight**
Letting go, like playing cards, is an ancient art,
Games reduce to an equivalence:
To let go is to become unperturbed by those things
That children pick up, play with and throw away.
2(5) = 10
**Contend**
Holding on — not letting go — brings in self-pity,
Though pity for me is more a gran conceit
That my daemon is suffering itself.
If I offer, "Why this?" and "What that?"
And "What for and if?"
Who hears, who answers?
11
**Evergreen**
Then it occurs to me that being without perturbation is
A state of feeling that symbols and words create me
As I draw symbols and words from myself.
Consciousness interprets what the senses perceive,
Each impression conditioned by past interpretations —
Mutual invention and mutual reinvention: self-emerging.
Mind impels experience;
Experience impels mind.
3(2^2) = 12
**A Kind of Lotus**
Breath has a symbol —
My goddess sits in a grove of April's delicacy;
Jasmine, things gentle, serene.
She is my private truth — see?
And if another believed in her too,
She would no longer be true.
She would not, could not be cruel.
She is a kind of muses, giver and given.
She is water and earth;
She is ether too.
I am fire and wind.
She is rosebay, and she is not,
She is all opposites,
So not pure truth that is not manifest;
And though she is purer of essence than I,
She derives one unit less than half from me.
She is mother when she, by and from herself, returns
To purity; with fire
She may return to the single essence.
I have never met her or seen her arising,
But it is certain she exists.
13
**Prophecy**
Long-abiding peace is the redwood tree
Tower in mist impalpably breathing
That arises from the work of microbes and worms —
As the chaos of ferns not worried in earth —
To talk to the sky.
The tree is more ancient than the Indians were in the forest,
More gently conceived, slow like midnight mushrooms,
As a part of the first myth that echoes yet still
From the chance fixed from the beginning.
The tree's roots are yearning.
The tree's trunk is its kind of heart.
The tree's top is its essence, offering water to light.
The tree has no nerves or muscles to burn away light,
Nor hinder reconciliation of extinction and birth.
And with the end of fire and the indrawn light,
The tree will be first.
2(7) = 14
**Becoming**
As mists lift from a dream of reason,
I come to see that the paradox into which all paradoxes fold
Is the only perpetual motion — ultimate process,
Which renews itself from itself in eternal,
Arising from two irreducible axioms:
Existence is, and there is symmetry over all —
And it seems cyclical.
There's much to be revealed,
And then one not of a thing's nature that does cannot reveal
Itself, much secret, without natural solution, paradox regressing —
Self-creation without beginning or end —
A flower always blooming, each petal growing as each is lost
(Or too a dog endlessly chasing its tail).
So it comes and it goes, each dream chain
Stretched from each past to the next.
Does each renew itself without history?
Or does each course renew itself with a memory
But still never reach an asymptote?
Or does it lead to a threshold of transformation
Where with one last step it is there - thus neither coming nor going —
And thus timelessness and spacelessness fold into each other,
And end equals beginning —
Such that negation of our possible is unreleased potential and is
Unemerged from one point of indrawn fire.
3(5) = 15
**Fifteen**
I may reach for a moment from acting in time.
It may burst on the nerves as a flash.
To lighten hours of grey effort
With a terrible suffusion of intimate
Vastness and ease.
(2^2)^2 = 16
**Friction**
My eyes defocus from that floating point,
Still in a kind of slow time.
As frames move by, I perceive action again,
As when the turning wheels on a bike
Makes the bike move forward against the street;
And though wheels spin, only what's ahead is seen,
And only that holds attention.
17
**Cataracts**
I begin to present with dis-ease again,
Drawn back into the old sick house:
A world of mold and clogs in drains,
Where my sweating body shivers
On a shoe-stained mat cut from carpet scraps.
2(3^2) = 18
**Discharge**
I may recall that moment of fifteen minutes ago,
When the reel slowed, not playing an act for an audience,
Not man, nor woman neither,
But now I feel like an unsmiling fool;
I was discharged from my function and duty
Within family and a friable society,
In whose primitive mirror
I was a kind of medicine man once.
19
**Outside**
It's hard to let go of attachment to my kids,
Made futile by a zealous clan —
It cuts as the needle splits the heart.
It's hard to let go of the last gram of hope
That I might glimpse the ocean beyond the elephant forest —
Once taken for a high fantastical shore —
Even before my mother pulled me from the crib.
Now there is gossip and shame;
I'm like Pinocchio or Pierrot,
Sometimes taken in by beggars or thieves,
Sometimes an errant with wandering players;
My sole companion is a donkey.
We sometimes walk on the banks of hard-forded currents;
We see the other side over the waters
But no bridge and no ferry to that shore;
Sometimes we see bronze-sterned pageant ships with purple sails
Mocking as the current flows.
5(2^2) = 20
**Mysterium**
I would thus choose to close my eyelids —
To think, undreaming, unsleeping, awake —
To see that the voyage itself is the destination,
And the destination itself the voyage.
Each imagining is a second coming,
Each time between the first and the third.
Process is the sober, solemn driver, progress the public side of its Janus face;
Lovers pursue each other in a round of longing,
But, finally, what is more:
3(7) = 21
**Omnium**
When all opposites are reconciled and their qualities reduced,
There remains at least one unit more of Is than Is-not.
For when subject and object — say, speaker and hearer —
Are reconciled, the speaker who speaks becomes
The hearer who hears, each both the other:
Then what remains is the verbal noun,
Speak-hearing/hear-speaking,
Which is sounding.
Sounding is paradox, process and impulsion.
Sounding is self-emerging and self-creating, but
Then ultimately:
When sounding itself is denied,
The final remainder is singular sound,
Not yet and no longer spoken or heard
Not creating nor created by mouth or ear:
The unvoiced word, like a sound complete,
Eludes reason and the grasp, has no condition,
No property and no name;
This it is neither this nor that.
It is unity, which is yearning let go, unmade, so fulfilled completely —
The self-buoyed seed enfolding a sea vent's fire.
Thus the myriad diads and triads and so forth,
Holy and worldly, integrate to one,
Not cancelled to nil, nor super numerated to infinite,
For the paradox resolves to the all of one,
Leaving one unstuck note of one primal string.
Essence with final fire becomes pure and absolute;
Thus essence is all being all from one self,,
And all manner of quality and quantity is just
Self-surfacing bubbles from the lather of This-is.
2(11) = 22
**Lux**
And after all, all things are from the primordial —
Expansive, cooling to differentiated energy,
Radiated by stars,
Residing in matter,
Reradiated from substance transformed
Or reflected straight back to the bustle.
There's bubbling even in the vacuum,
Like embers of inward flame
Conserved in the vault of all.
23
**Open**
Past and present both present with immediate problems.
The more tractable of these concern future.
Fear, anxiety and misty expectations
Arise when future is conceived as a flight from dawning memory.
When instead the path-head of the future is imagined as nearer now,
All possible trajectories are less weighted by past.
Thus with all possible futures intact and open,
Future renews itself with each renewing moment.
3(2^3) = 24
**Inexistent**
To let go of future, which doesn't exist,
Is also to transform past, that clings to exist.
Deep past is a tale made and remade from scraps of scenes
Whose meanings were never really apprehended or clear.
Memories are pieces of frozen emotion,
Conditioned by past flawed perceptions and interpretations,
And storified by the mind to myth.
Present — elusive — too is past.
Present treadmills from just now... to just now...
When I try to bind the instant joy to myself,
It has already flown by.
Time must pass, so briefly, just to form
The intention to embrace the present.
So present is always a few frames of immediate past.
Potential only is present.
5^2 = 25
**Rest**
Exile - genuine exile - is upon me.
"Wanderer heavy hear:
Trouble to rise and go to the point
From which all ways radiate and return,
The place where there's no coming, no going."
How I want to know where to that is, how to go and when.
I feel but don't see clearly.
Well, to go? No crying — so, so?
I've wandered, and merit's accrued in surplus to demerit,
But that too needs to go and come.
I don't make out the way.
I know a partly shelter place, though, were I can go
Now to rest and wait to see.
2(13) = 26
**Stream**
I'll go and wait there in the grove
Where the goddess sits;
And I'll go from there when the way draws open,
With practice, a guide, reading, musing.
When I go from there, just then I'll know if I come again,
No longer looking to return to a broken kingdom.
I may find or make a path;
Far along, my path may join others' to form a common way,
Freed from exile and process with progress.
The way would be lighted, when attachments are let go.
3^3 = 27
**Flower**
Thus I'll stay and shelter for some days,
In the rising mist of uncruel April.
And I'll sit on a mat in the immediate past
And study a flower becoming itself.
— Gabriel Fenteany, July 2015
