If you are reading this poem on a phone, note that the integrity of the lines, a major feature of poetry, is not displayed properly. Many if not most get cut short because of the small screen.
How do we know each one of us is a liar? How do we know each one is true? We’re not criminals anymore, those of us thinking the worst of you.
It’s just procedure, the inhumanity of our times, despite all the books that say so: let’s get our humanity down to a science, the feelings test, the look in the eyes, the agreements made by hand and not the machine.
The ones who take our humanity to the test crowd us up upon ourselves the attitude of you are a liar until proven guilty. We would just make them mad writing poems on their behalf.
Just to get a library card you have to take a lie detector test, and you live right next door, can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt you live there, without paper-wiping the machine.
Oh God give me a break you’re playing trivial pursuit— the one who looked me in the eyes and needed confirmation they were true. / I’m as tall as grass, and this is buggin’ the shit out of humanity: prove you’re a human being.
It’s everywhere apparent we’re crowdin’ in on each other, and you have to prove the rule of the machine. Oh my God bylaws, and I’m a derelict for sayin’ so?
We are all too common now, the gateway to total control the way we are with each other. Can I sing this to you where we bake our bread? Poetry doesn’t have a shoreline. It’s unhanded. It’s not the way we have with books.
Now they’re for leisure time. It’s not to challenge us in our thinking. It’s not to make waves where we meet each other to take us back to square one in mutual trust.
How do we lift the veil and get yah to read a poem? Any poem points to the human being getting higher than themself. Can you copy that? It can be in an estuary along a manatee’s spine line so glad you’re there leavin’ them alone. You feel better highin’ their part with you.
Now give that to everything you need to look at. Home owner’s insurance, are you sure you got a poem there? It’s the poems that take on life and better us with ourselves, and you’re not whistlin’ Dixie. Wow, I’ve landed a poem.
The podium on the stage of the Art Hall in Koreshan State Park, Florida, where the utopian religious group, Koreshan Unity, had its community, whose founder and prophet was Cyrus Teed. A visit and a meditation there inspired this poem.
If you are reading this poem on a phone, note that the integrity of the lines, a major feature of poetry, is not displayed properly. Many if not most get cut short because of the small screen.
In dreams and visions my voices speak. What are you doing over here? I’m a religious nut. I can’t control myself I hear visions. I count the salesmen in my dreams. Go wake up humanity, I can’t count the number of times I tried. I can’t even get a word across.
This is not save the world vision. I mean like I’ll never forget that I made the wrong sort of mud pies. I write poetry to reach the world. I’m not a religious figure to charm it. I’ve opened up consciousness inside. There’s no barnstormin’. I’m a quiet place takin’ a mile. I sit and read muse, no religious fanaticism, but I answer questions bluntly and with sarcasm. Let’s see what stinks here. Your mind.
Flying saucers from outer space did not tell me a thing. I have not been visited by angels tellin’ me I’m the man. I don’t want to get in your pants. I don’t want you to obey me. I would like a better society. I would like to say things that mean somethin’. I would like to hold your hand, where you don’t look down on me. I would like to lift you up in your mind where you think and touch that heart of yours.
We have a society here growin’ money and hate your neighbor. The mind of us is not the best of us. Our souls are only beliefs not houses kept. We think each other wrong. We don’t hand out society so you’re a prized member. That’s the rich and famous. We don’t know how to do it, be kind to one another, and it’s not a social laugh, the uncomfortableness of putting each other down to get at time with one another, or at best we keep our distance from heartfelt communication. We laugh at one another and wear big social masks to prove it, or we’re tryin’ to sell somethin’ when fake that sincerity.
Who is vulnerable and sweet? Who lets their guard down and give people meaningful communication? Our minds are full of the kingdoms of ourselves. And I’m not sure how to write that. Would you group with me? I’m a group-minded person, and I give group to my human being. I don’t consider other groups human, the Democratic Party for instance, or those Republicans. Man I love everybody. Now you everybody’s get off the bus. I’m lying to my social lying. I can only tolerate certain people.
You disguised my I, and I’m sharin’ in your business I don’t understand. You’re not the biggest people in the world Americans. You’re not even tryin’. What happened to me? There are changes in consciousness ahead. I’ve had some previews. I was not someone you handled correctly. You didn’t know how to see me, and I just fucked up. I got intah trouble. The previews came as a start to help me feel you as I feel myself, even if you look down on me.
I saw humanity. I’ve seen the world as my eye, no, no, not its offerings to me. I am a vision of the world as we speak. We look out each other’s eyes, in the world being that we are, and we look out the eyes of God, who is the vision everything. It is possible to break free from single vision’s number lair, from one pole of consciousness don’t you see? I’m about that vision. It’s universal. We all share it.
We’re lost in me’s and the boundaries of our group. I’m so sorry this chain gang has defeated my eyes too. Can I help you some see the truth, reality as it is, no religious overlays, no scientism that can’t see past its own nose? Reality’s bigger than you think, and you have identity outside of time. You aren’t this puny self laboring on a hapless globe that can’t see itself and know it’s true. You’ve put on actors wings, and it’s a hell of a ride ain’t it?
And all your dreams represent things to you because you are representative in time. You’re bigger than you think, in household wears, not your peckin’ order. You are actually beyond the stars lookin’ through a thin pigeonhole at that embarrassed I down in time. We’re all naked down here, and pride just can’t seem to go with us to sleep. It takes coffee to perk it up, and who knows the master plan of the universe? Kids we are and kids we’ll be, until we wake up on ourselves.
Do you know a mature notion? It’s not here, in every man for himself, in the little world we’ve made, in the societies we’ve engendered that make you obey it like it’s a real group but blames its faults on individuals, a world that does not know itself.
Good works and technology, you can’t move the field there. We have consciousness to change, and that’s not a thought process. The consciousness changes into its larger type. I’m puttin’ this in your hands, the ideal for the ages, the thing we’ve been workin’ at all along. It’s not a messiah you see. It’s not wings from outer space. You do the change and me, and we get bigger than ourselves. Blinded I am?
All since childhood I went busy with it, the message I’m supposed to give of another. It makes for short poetry. Where are my feelings for me? It’s been the subject of my lifetime. Self-centered rides there, but so does a vantage point to study life, the name of existence on my lips. I can only see me as the protagonist of this drama, only imagining what it’s like to be another. That’s not self-centered fact.
I live here: watching the world go by the center of myself. You do too, and I’ve found this out myself: our integers are the same. What makes a person a person fills both our bottles and crashes them at the same time.
The social hierarchy will not let me poet to you the discovery we are the One. I cannot wear a poet label because I have not yet been given it by the crowd, and I bleed to tell you things.
I’ve been all over this place, climbed the mountaintop, sojourned in hell. I have been on broad rivers of mankind, and I have suffocated in stinking swamps. I have entered duality to wear them both till kingdom come, and then I get saved by the bell. Reach inside me and see I’m writing the papers of existence, and I help existence be.
I’m fighting for my room. You cannot harbor the truth, the truth of anything in its bare-bones reality. They will get you for it, the powers that be. Reality is being fed to us on a silver platter with cyanide, and we all believe the lies.
I’m easy to take down. I’m the most hated scapegoat of the day, but that opens up truth in a man, having to face himself to society’s mirror, and you are sincere to the test. It can open up worlds of seeing. It can make you love humanity when your self-love has joined the same.
We stand on great big tests today that eat our lunch. Never a lie’s been told, the dinjins will tell you and mothers and fathers all over this land and governments and snake pit operators. Oh my little child you are safe in how we rule things. You must dog eat dog and get out there and compete for bread. It’s greatness of your kind. The devil dance on a great mankind, and we will go to war to prove it.
Now let me tell you somethin’. It’s all subterfuge. We are avoidin’ what makes Tommy safe, Wendy grand. We have to flower in our room to humanity my dear, find the Self in everyone, and let that be our guiding light to discovering God lookin’ at the world through our eyes in the fullness of his vision here on earth. I just told you the truth, what’s happenin’ in the evolution of time on earth, in the world play we’re all a part of. That’s the secret that all existence hides. Can’t you see it yet?
Spoken word poetry, till I get it, I leave it alone. Wow, it’s left alone. In case of good poetry break this glass. I just sit here and discover, letting the word explain itself in the giving of lines and in the hurtin’ of the world.
If I show you the pain will you stop it? Will you even know it’s there where you feel your pain? Oh no another Holocaust movie all about bein’ numb. I can’t give you this star-glow to ride the world on its tongue feelin’ people. I’m not a robot I’m free, but the price of my freedom is your pain, your wellbeing I feel like my own.
It’s shoots me all the time, or it gives me stars. I’m there with you in the delivery room of another bucket of world today, huh?
I see through all these sleeves of world maker’s art, a world upon world in the moments with mine, a conglomerate of worlds of this group of people and that, of this person alone, of all the mini worlds that make up this world that we call Earth. Can you see that simultaneously with your own? I taste you there. I know you’re there.
How do I communicate this to you so you feel it too like you have your children’s hands in your own, like your best friend’s smile, like your mother’s love? I don’t die there, but I question God all the time and Sri Aurobindo.
These are terrible times, and they get ready for tomorrow terrible too, with a past just as terrible starin’ us in the face. Let the good times roll, and my God they do. How sweet life can be in its gathered moments, how manageable, but why does it always add up to this: life is not a bundle of joy; life gets us in corners and does bad things to us. Can you understand that?
Why does the world go on like nothin’s happenin’, like it’s free and easy and clean, so standardized? They scream on the news bad news to an audience of normal, of tie your shoe, of everything’s alright here, ain’t it? Not in every bubble. So much quiet desperation it has been said.
Do you know the rovin’ hellhole? Somewhere on Earth at any given time they’re eating each other alive. It’s the worst place on the planet for a moment. Hell swallows them whole, unbelievable cruelty, and nothin’ to redeem them. Goddamn that stinks.
Alight I’m blessed. I live in a little pocket of warmth and forgiveness. I have opened the doors to humanity in the stadium of my room. I ride there all day figurin’ you out. I take great thoughts to the skies, but I must remember I’m a low man on the totem pole in your eyes. I do nothin’ here that grants you my room, that shows what I’m doin’ larger than life.
A poet of world standing I am not. I’m a poet among many thousands in the availability of today, and no poetry comes along and wallops your head or smites your heart from my pen. I just spit in the breeze. That’s the trash dumpster, and here let me give it another poem. I put my dogs to sleep, and I wish you goodnight.
All united and happy they think. Come here Luna. Get your head… [vision of Luna Rottweiler putting her head in a hole in the ground] One doggy at a time. Oh fuck I’m on Candid Camera. He’s just gonna go for it. Well then the surprises and bad secrets, heart is ruined on the same thing: waging war on the Fourth of July. What’s the significance of your dog growing? Into a likeness of you. What I didn’t have: put every slept of it complete. My God, they should be spilled.
What is it this time? Dr. Milk Powder— I haven’t called you; I’ve had enough, is that the plan? You know he’s lost his boy. They’re travel uneasiness way to stutter. Don’t you see? Alongside with it it’s real. You know his boy’s called not in awhile. Suffer this, and it just last of people’s hittin’.
Do you like people? Is this fruit juice? Why is it we always hate somebody, run there all the time? You really enjoy this life don’t you? It seems all fair winds. Need to pull her pregnant with the grenade. It will get you every time. Just look around the world. Just look at your neighbor.
Do you know how we get along? Do you know how we get through this? We don’t be monsters to each other. We don’t be mean. We try to be kind and giving in our painful moments. This is overcoming the world and getting better at yourself. It’s a love angle, and we need more love. That house definitely, where you put your hat off, where you sit around. Love those people, the people you’re life-in’ with. You don’t know how much this counts.
It’s all an effort I know. We have to overcome ourselves to do it sometimes, but we have to give this baseball to all the standin’s in the world, so we can have a world that works. Is that so hard to believe?
You know the world is full of holes. Even the divine is negligent and will crush you to make the world, will just stand by and watch. These are not pleasant times, but we have to endure them, tryin’ to find joy inside, tryin’ to give our children a good time.
What else is there? Spirituality’s a pole we lean on. There are surprises in consciousness if we let them. There’s a world maker’s art you can see. These are deep down inside, past the underwear, past all that gets in the way. There is strong inside, even after you’re shattered.
This world’s a dream maker’s art, so much more than show, but this is a common dream we are having that the significance of dream shows. We’re living out a representation telling a story, and all our lives add to that One involved, and all our lives keep going. We’re where time loops around itself a great big mechanism of being that has definite boundaries that we can cross and get out of here after the whole has been complete. We’re goin’ somewhere together, and yes some escape before time, but they’ll end up on another world soon.
This great big ship has a destination you know, something worth time, something bigger than ourselves and is ourselves at the same time. I’ve gone out of the universe you see and been myself on high.
Stupid me, I describe experience like you’ll believe it, but you can kill me and it’ll still be there. It can’t be erased from time. I’m a nobody because of it, liftin’ up my room for you to see. It’s got crosses on it and monkey bars, because I’m just like you, but I’ve been given a breath of supernal air, and I need to tell you about it. It’s affected my vision. I see the world.
I’m just like everybody, but I don’t live like you inside. I live with you and inner vision. I get rocked by joys that fill my noon the outside world doesn’t bring me. I feel oceans of sadness I’m not in the world about. I feel existence pain, and when I walk outside, drive my bike through the town, the countryside, it’s a wonder-weft of miracle, and I feel every person I come across. I see the One inside, and all the many representations surround me. I can’t get over it.
Now I’m here with another poem. Let it ride the day if you read it, because it puts us together if you escape, because it’s here we learn to live again after your world has been taken away. Can you see me now? Can you hear?
I remember now. I built a mile high stadium. Stupid show, look what Hookah did in the center of your program. We’ll always have that voice.
I would murder in words anything I tried to say. We have our long lists of hurt that’s been put out there. It’s how we tax the world. It’s how we feel better about ourselves. Would an actor see that?
And if I reduce it to a role, do I bleed responsibility? Do I reduce it to an abstraction in the places I’ve bleeded reality, the places I’ve burn?
I’ve grabbed the sun, live on a height of thought and life I write about all the time. I see the representation, the symbol we all are. It eves my day. What then?
How is it possible to hurt someone and not know their pain because you’re a writer of sky dreams? I communicate with the dead, have them all around me, each little life I’ve lit on fire in the bucket of intimacy.
I don’t think the possibilities of healing surround your room. You are not stark walking the symbol. You know the outer lair. An inside all day long, you don’t approach that.
You don’t know what it’s like to love the world in those places you’re sorry, breathing those words all day long to a you know you’re heard way beyond man. I don’t think you’re aware of the price you pay when you become aware of man. The pain you feel humanity.
But on the cutting edge of this is who I make it up to, a little boy growing in time. He represents you. He represents the world’s eyes, and I am there for him.
We can take joy on the Earth, sweet, innocent and kind, holdin’ our humanity close. It’s not all a razor blade. We can get sweet on the Earth, and when you get home, you can love the world like a little boy, and your representation grows.
We have everything to do with being creatures on a role planet. Our time in space blackens our time in thought. I promote myself spits in the wind. Art and thought, I wonder if you feel anything derelict. I’ve perished this bloom. Since everybody’s here, except any majority of people, I might as well clear my throat.
What do I hog to you today? I wanna pull existence out of the hat, be right on the ground of being. I want you to say, "that’s me." I put it in flower pots. I sit here all day and fight it, our anonymous with each other. This is stadium big.
We are all points in space too big for our britches. We see ourselves huge in other’s eyes. I’m talkin’ about ourselves. We feel and think and be the center of any room, so big to ourselves, and even if we are not the reason everybody’s there, we see reality that way.
Take us off the megalomania lists. I’m just talkin’ what it means to be human, or the dog in the corner, or the ant in the windowsill, and you know that plant think? It’s just not corralled its self-aware. It just does not pedal to the end of the room. Those thoughts aren’t in motion, but you’ve got a plant big there, everybody in the room.
How do I toll the star-gate? We are stuck on one world in our rounds of thought. We cramp existence here. Oh my God the experiment, would it be the same in every laboratory? Can we count existence a cheat? Does it handicap worlds, universes, or does it just stage things properly?
Do you know you’re blind, deaf, and dumb to what you see on the inside of the person sitting next to you, or leaving a comment, or submitting a poem, or who’ve you’ve encountered on the news? Their inner reality is blind to yours. We have bleeding cakes in dream and vision and in our thought wares unawares, but these things are disguised.
You can’t hear another person fill reality’s room. You only hear yourself. Hey Jim, let’s create a world… Screw this. You handicappers. Can I explain the problems in the world?
Taste another person please. Know they’re there as big as you, and if they think they’re bigger, well, how many times does this happen in any given day? We have to mitigate it.
They’re just stupid that’s all, like we all are. I’m sorry you’re stupid too. Do you treat everybody as you, give them a break, the benefit of the doubt, or forgive them their trespasses? You will have a million excuses why you can’t identify with them.
Come on people please. You’re the center of everybody’s pole, as you imagine them looking at you, but they put themselves there, you know? We can get better at it, givin’ people the credit they deserve, givin’ people their own self in our very own eyes.
Who’s humanity in the room? Can a poet speak that voice? Can we ride poetry there? The productivity’s there be a hurt bag and find humanity. And watch everybody spill the beans.
I am so very blacklisted, I could rise to the occasion and blossom humanity in my heart and write it down in gifted speech, and they would just turn and look the other way, the stadium managers in humanity, who’s who who block poems. Now do you hear me blossom humanity? Now do you hear me blossom poems?
A bridge is the universe. We are reality big. It’s a major crossing. Focus on the many aspects of this visual poem heard while doing science. In a round about way put it on your shoulder I’m your friend. It’s been a lot of Scottish in here. I’ve done a daily put people in the shoes with me. He put the swim in there. I am the render in time, the render in space, that’s the One I’m worth.
That farm, that house is play, here’s where you too, not the separate consciousness but the localized in space, God of the whole evolves. That’s the cherry blossom. That’s where we all rise in sync. I’m an American band I’m comin’ through your town, [sing line] this is exactly what the stadium room, that cherry bloom.
Have we always been human and universal Brahman? I killed 14 people. Frying that up, do I lose my humanity? Back to the recent times. Are people just badder than before? What can we say about humanity? You know I’m countin’ sheep.
We drag clothes wear. This is not our first costume. Where do we come from? Do we come from ugly, or do we come from good? Do we come from the chaos down under, spawns of hell that evolved to light?
We’ve been in the engines of the universe for a long time. Are we emerging, or was this a soul’s fall into matter’s plight, great heavens we wore and then lost it all in a sudden decision? Are we universal existence lost in individual chains goin’ through trapdoors all the time? How does our unity play? How deep does our unity go? Do we evolve together or separately?
You think the protozoa created us scientific doctor, and we emerged to man, no soul in the machine, no universal existence beforehand, no Brahman with his gun. The fish in the sea are our ancestors on high. We dream of being human again you idiot, where life meets the universe on every frustrate world.
Is this all there is pond? I can speak from my crash course in reality, and we have scales of being that rip us off and brighten our days and sometimes hold nothin’ with us in the great majority of cases. There’s the earthling man, the universe revolves around this?
I have more fields to show the origin of the universe wears. I’ve poked my head out of the sky and seen more than I can show. You don’t know what it means to look beyond and carry the glow of the universe like it’s your backyard. I’m a small man in Earth shoes bustin’ at the seams with immensity, and I can give you a ride home?
I ride these poems too, and I’m a bucket in the sand joinin’ reality with you. We have more roles to play, don’t you see? And even existence is not all we are, but let’s get down to Earth, shall we? We are not the demon’s room. We do not come from hell. Escape it is our price— a real punishment you don’t need to worry about all existence long. And we were not once Gods, and now we are men and women, but of Godhead we did wore.
We come from beyond the universe to inhabit these fields of clay. We are existence before existence in the planetary field ride. We are burning suns each and every one, to use the symbol that ignites the universe. We come from on high. We are principle actors in a principle game that has stars for robes.
I just spoke the alcoholic’s din bin, the wayward president his lair, the child molester in bed with a child, and the tax collector at your door. I can get muddy these or just be an ordinary house mum or field husband or kid in school dreamin’ of what will become of me.
Lift up your eyes sweetheart. There is more to come. There’s the Diamond in the room, and all your lives lead to that as in the making of a star, the crash and founding of a universe, and we can be there kids. We can be there in great lone moments of the direction at noon. We can see the sky, have great Earth thoughts that make us feel God inside and hurry this along folks. Yah hear me kids?
This is a photo-poem from my Twitter/X account, and there are years of them there. This one was posted December 11, 2020. It came in vision the other night to post it here.
These three photo-poems were posted on Mastodon January 21-28, 2024, and I was shadowbanned on the site after posting the first poem. Because I was left with no way to use hashtags or tags, no way to post comments on other people’s posts, and no way anyone could search for me on Mastodon, I left Mastodon. I had gone to Mastodon because I had been shadowbanned on Twitter/X, but on returning to Twitter/X in February, their shadowban had been lifted.
Posted January 21
All photos my own unless otherwise stated.photo by Douglas
Harm's End 