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.
For both a ride on me, ageless against you, and the age of the suns, I’ll be thousands of fallin’ underneath my mind, startled by the springs of enlightenment, and the cards are in play but too grandiose for my design.
Involved in the history, I’m not chuckin’ wood, but let’s face it I’m this little man in a little play. Now look, even in my beach job parking lot the herald of swift event patterned life. I saw the nuances of things to come, and I was a bearer there.
You can’t grasp this in your hand. I held the Earth in impossible lilies. I knew it was a steamboat. I handled it carefully every damn day. Can you imagine sleep without it? It held me at night, working on its intricacies.
I saw the world comin’. It held my gasping hand in its own. It was a birthday kiss. It was a holocaust of things known. I did not put all my rocks there. I had bigger plans than Earth.
Can you starry enlightenment? It will do you away. You’re not there seein’ it. You’ve disappeared, standin’ right there in the middle of it, and you’ve gone father than the world.
I know this land. I can’t describe it to you. It’s taken the world away in perfect seeing. I am not sure of its moorings. My times there have been brief, but you hear it in my gifted speech.
A whole field’s to play, famous hotel, unknown to the world. Can you imagine seeing the impossible, a world where none is, sights and sounds that not be, thoughts where none be? A whole world arise from the Void where nonexistence is. What arises now?
I don’t know if I’m worth this. I don’t know if it’ll come, the springboards of the Earth a seer’s grasp, the passive in God’s hands, the no-self of enlightenment, the end of suffering for individual man.
The floodgates are open for this puny start, a beach bellhop boy liberals through the strong right-wing the doors of enlightenment, contentment and peace, where the wild things are. I carry that trailer. I tarry there.
It’s worth it, no firecrackers in the belly. Wish you that payment. I started looking at shiny objects. I realized there was a behind the behind in every word that’s true, when you touch base with reality.
I wanted a bridge. The vehicles of enlightenment silence the world, engineer reality to make the grand crossing. Uh-Huh, there’s a reality there enlightenment leads to, the nature of reality, where we come from.
And you think you’ve stalled on enlightenment? There’s a beyond. It studies the world for you. It’s its master design. The roads ever get deep. Another universe holds this one in ours, and we go on from there.
The All-Encompassing All-At-Once is the study of the game, and we’re on flat level Earth, the first rising structure to pick up This land. How can I get this across?
No sight can show you it. No mode of thought gets there. You can sit in the All-At-Once of the sun to use a metaphor, and there you can see the dynamics swiftly over your head in a secret passage to our Source.
Now bring enlightenment into the picture. It’s stills the world for you to get to the other side into the reality beyond the universe, into the reality that made us.
Glory in the spoken word of poetry. One bad dream is this universe to cross. Right this minute, can you get the sense of creation? Can you see it larger than the book?
We went past it. What happened? We got services hello Cape Canaveral. One accident, it’s gonna be close. Till Hunter gets back we don’t leave reality to the fishes. We get out of these beach suits, the mere survival looking for enjoyment, the group mind. I’ll be right back. And it was a hunter for spiritual dawns.
Can you see that out of the routine? Bonanza, we’ve established this fact on earth again. The pilot’s license, where we start. Oh my God my head on my shoulders, this is like the bus you know.
The muse gave me a message to you, the muse rise and poetry. I’ll see it in the garbage can, won’t I? I don’t know how to negotiate this landmine in outer things. Every world has rejected me. I’m a nation to nobody, dear reader except you. This is across the board. It’s unhand me. It’s blue and it’s red and it’s gold. It’s unbelievably tight.
What do you say to no, we don’t want to have anything to do with you, and this is the entire of the yoga you follow, the city on earth that’s to realize the human dream and be alright with each other? I get kicked out of there too and in the hearts of every man and every woman who could make it possible to see my boy again right out in the open his daddy again, and that anomaly is solved: why the divine in-look on me carries his name, and it is a phantom make.
I stand here confused. Even the halls of poetrydom have spit me out. I have no place in society. I live in some little island of bright, and Douglas and our dogs hold the world together. Our visitors only want something, all they can get, and they only come here for that. We have no friends here. We have no one looking out for us. We are here alone and that’s it. This squeezes you, you know? You don’t understand when humanity and the world mean so much to you.
I’ve painted this isolation for myself. Douglas has friends and family who care for him and provide, else we wouldn’t make it. He lives in his room and I live in mine, but our best-friendship has reached the stars, but can I tell you about Paul? A friend for all the years, who is in the world at large giving me e-blasts I’m your friend. When the world rejects you, you get compensation, friends for all the world, if you’re holdin’ hands with the world, if the world means as much to you as yourself.
I can’t bear this, spit on by everyone, and I’m just diggin’ my hole deeper with these poems. They cost me so much. They tear me apart I am so real with you. I don’t know how to begin to really say it, the be there of the human being.
Oh my God I want to describe it to you, so we can join there. I want you to see my humanity. I don’t want to be an outcast no more. Oh I wish you could feel that. God does, and he’s here with me all day in bright thoughts and muse on the edge of time. Would that you could feel that.
A meaningful life, that’s established. Come to terms with myself and terms deeper. This is all in the sky. I’m a blockchain. I matter to mankind. I’m significant to your notions of self. I’m good to all you haven’t seen yet. I love people and feel their oneness. I am not about the snake. I touch you with deep meaning. I am really there.
The world blows up inside me it has eyes. I commune with the Unknown. I’m about your rocket ship. I ease on you these things: the starling oneness inside us, the jumprope to God, everything we have to do with each other in our ballpark with children and the animals in the room. You hear me there petting my dogs in wonder and taking children to the sky.
I cook meals for you and attend to your business all day. I am not just a selfish wound. I have lifted up the race everywhere I look. I am dawn on you the understanding of poet, and here I am, in my most serious mood, standing up and be counted, because you’ve shunned my face, a rocket-man that knows we share meaning together, that knows my part in the world, that knows I can’t live without you.
You’ve kicked me out of your homes, you’ve kicked me out of your hearts long enough. I’m not a beggar at your gates. I’m the poet at high noon. It’s time we fly. It’s time we fly.
image by the author, Earth in space public domain via Wikipedia
The world is at the skid point. We are so caught in this movie we can’t even see beyond. Tell me you don’t care. Tell me you’re hangin’ out clothes to dry, and your little one’s screamin’, and that’s just big stuff on TV. Got caught in the movies. I know you ache at night, just about to spill it all, everything you know about the world but don’t. You don’t know what to make of it it holds you so close.
Can we climb out of this? We can sure get lost in it. Will you play with me? I’m a poet from Skid Row. No I’m not a drinker. I’m a free world thinker, and I want the world to last longer than its appointment in the annuals of our sun. I’m with you on that. I want to outlast the sun where I know I can be happy.
Have you ever seen the world up close? It’ll finger your dickens. No, no I’m not talkin’ about the rovin’ mania all around yah— the whole teeming world as an entity in front of your face. Got boxes and spring cards, but it’s the real McCoy.
I don’t know if you know what I’m talkin’ about yet. I scrap it off my shoe no. This is a divine appointment in time, the world as an organization that brings God on earth, and we can’t get over the word divine. I’ve lifted up your skirt and showed you religious offerings. I mean an intelligence bigger than the skies that can fit in our green Earth and bring it to the next level. You think of the universe as a flat individual organization, but the many levels of the universe go beyond the universe, and I tell yah Earth is scheduled for that.
I’m far from the clothesline now, but that screamin’ kid, I’ve gotten into his ache. We want a better world, expressive of need, and the world as an organization can do that, be unto our need. It’s flat and big everywhere we look today, but have you met the world yet? That’s what I’m tryin’ to say so that it matters, so that we can get bigger than ourselves, knowin’ the world’s done with livin’ for your kin.
Bigger than any national flag, the world is our step-brother that needs to know its name spoken on your lips. Oh no Mohammad you don’t own the world, nor Jesus Christ, and certainly not Hindu or Buddha, and the Jewish people will not rule the Earth. We’re all gonna get goin’ to see the world in each of us, to understand its nature bigger than the machine.
Are you with me on this? I think you’ll fight me some, until we realize Earth’s got an appointment in blue skies, and we will all revel in it, giddy with the realization of harm’s end. Do you know that cost? Can you turn around and see the world today? Flabbergasted can you see it?
A step-mother, seven kids, and digital shock, can you grab that? Help me chase it to we meet the world there. I’m not horseplay. I’m the world looks in on you, not the teeming multitudes, the world as a being in front of you in time, and I’m travelin’ a poet to forgotten shores, what a seer give society, its determining wings, how it lays out itself and what it be's. It’s the arms of society to tell you the truth. You must not let that little you. It’s the One looking in on itself. You’re the One. I am really here for you.
Now sing along. You can’t fool me anymore by your nonchalance. I know the score. You can’t shoot me anymore either. I know what I’m about, and even dead I’ll know it, and so will my poetry.
Open up in there. There can be no losers. Bite into something hard. Stare into something new. I gave you the congressional service. No shame in that. A wardrobe you know you can catalogue here take this self: we’re goin’ to the end of society as the machine.
Sheltered animals move and breathe. They just don’t get away. What was defeated in Mexico? Waiting by the bomb. You’re encountering that work’s envitalment, and you can’t get out of it. Best documentary That Worked. What are you doin’? Getting our own hands dirty in blowing up the machine, a long action that we can do without war or blowin’ people up or shooting them down. Here I am doin’ it don’t you see?
Never mind the behavior they stopped us from realizing it. What was that membership? Blowin’ up the world in I don’t care, oh no. I’ll give you as much as possible to farm time freedom from the machine.
Love, it actually gave us tomorrow, is the active ingredient. I find that news with anything. It’s real and normal if you realize you have met the world out during the day in every box you’ve met today, in every pair of eyes staring out at you, all of it, the whole damn show.
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?
This photo-poem was posted to Twitter/X February 11, 2024. In vision it came to post it here. All photos by the author except photo one, which is by Douglas
We all understand tomorrow. I’m goin’ somewhere. It’s not dishes. I find my boy, bring him home to me and do something bigger than life right there in my homegrown. It’a about my consciousness and its see. I arrive my boy first, giving him healing. This is a new brand we will get good at so it can be mass-produced.
I’m in enlightenment shares healing my boy, a spiritual consciousness override. They’re dealing with a mass showdown. Right now it’s all black. Not even a pinpoint of light gives hope. It’s all gone, the whole save my boy plan, and spiritual practice has fallen by the wayside. I’m merely drifting to no ends.
I count my stupidities now, where I am half-crazy in rants. I sound good on a piece of paper: I’m gonna see my boy; I’ll get that spiritual consciousness again; it’ll all work out. I talk to his parents like I have the power of God. His parents have the absolute power to rule his life. I just make them mad and guard him more. You’d think I’d learn by now my voices are deceiving me; my voices are derailing me.
You’re in trouble. You’re on a stage. Are you there with anything bigger than life? The world’s not gonna listen to you. Everyone ignores your pleas, and your knowledge don’t turn anybody’s head. You just sit there and sing. This is the gist of life. This is how almost everybody feels the world. It’s impotence sings.
I’m a diamond in the hall. I’m on top of everything. I really know my business, and I understand the rise of the world. I don’t spit there. I feel humanity like it’s my very self. I can see the cutting edge of time. Movements I see, world shaping movements, that give me a great yard. I’m of few people see them. Now I come back to myself again. I’m not the stupid guy.
I have reason to believe my boy’s comin’ back to me, and I will put on the Silence once again. It’s evidence I can get big as the world in tellin’; I can wrap the hours around God, and I can make you examine yourself in your hands on children. You sit there and believe me, some of you, because you hear the angels sing in this poet’s gut. I’m a strong one you know, and I hold up the world an Atlas unknown. I really do it, take the ideas that change the world and transmute them into verse, one rocket at a time.
You know I’m there because I love you in that special formula that makes you feel me in the very place we meet, in the intimacy of a poem that’s got handles on it that bring the world closer to you as God sees it, dangerously in love.
You must have some grace to journey this day. It’s the vulnerability of a poet I give it, just role of bein’ hallelujah. [line heard sung to tune of Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah”] You doin’ okay?
This is the station of the Earth. How are you? A thousand at gunpoint. The quality has left the brigade. It’s in the stars now. Not a soul sees it, except you and I. I have no reason to write. This has no fellowship. I’m not cryin’ about it. I can see what’s goin’ on. I can see the brigade.
I lift my voice up, even though it’s meaningless down here. I have a field to write, and that is my star-gas, and that is my thang to do. Goodbye cruel world, you won’t hear me say that. I’m mountain sing. I’m all over the place. I’m at your door right now.
Shoot me will yah. You hate pedophiles, even if they don’t molest children. I’m not your moppin’ bucket. I’m taller than that. I have Heaven’s spears. Where you goin’? I thought you were ready for art, and I’m not a pain in the ass. I’m always chapter of my other dinin’. I can’t call you up here or me down there. No, I’m not an hourglass in the sun, but I see wide and free. I don’t have band-aids on where I reach for the sky.
I’m Marcus Aurelius on steroids. I can show you more of the world than you knew existed, the letter of more than the Earth can show. I’m daring. I have lifted the timetable at the art college, and I expose you to poems now that come straight from the rising sun. You are so derelict I am dead before I am read. Is that how it’s gonna be?
I write anyway. I write the commodity of the sky into your habit, and I know what I’m doin’. You guys aren’t listenin’. We’ll be here for few minutes. How to make a report and give it to society? You’ve seen the Earth from afar. You’ve had God’s eyes looking at it, and you were behind them, and you saw the Earth from there. Just one direct flash, some seconds and it was it. Maybe a half minute? This came to pass.
I had no idea this even existed. I met Myself on high. That was 30 years ago. It redirected my life. It was the only thing I saw for some time. I was turned on. I went crazy with the Earth. I lived in isolation in a college setup, my little job and me and a handful of family, not all of them related. You get the picture?
This just happened. It wasn’t the first thing. Would you believe me if I told you I found my soul first, and, before that, the station of the Gods? Not all in the same week. It was why I was stationed there. I had seen the Gods in cutout portions of Them. So I settled in to get more at it. I knews the world was strangely arranged. I had questions, and I asked them thoroughly. An open consciousness had visited me to do so, what the initial opening did, seeing how God thinks in Overmind.
Are we gettin’ somewhere? Why me? I had the consciousness for it. Infant orgasm had opened me to the Void a childhood demon had tricked me into. Weird I know, but that’s how I came in life. I don’t think you have that structure. Are you listening to me?
We gather too let’s take a pedophile and change him into someone that helps the Earth. Can you believe that? Listen to my voice. We start with the bottom-rung you know. How else do you see the whole bunch? Oh man I’m talking Earth. What a head trip.
Can you just stop a moment? We are not your regular keeper. I was born this way, put in the sauce, and I have been weird all my life. My story would make you question reality: Green Beret, Classical Greek scholar, tactical nuclear mission, I mean like the bomb, world crawling vagabond, like for seven years, then in India behind an iron curtain that only let the net out, and I’ve been here 20 years. You tell me I’m strange. Do I have the prerequisites to give you the lowdown?
I put up poems in Jerusalem on the Fourteen Stations of the Cross, after a fall, inside the Great Pyramid and on the top of Mount Sinai. I was a gold digger on fire. I put that in. No one paid attention then, and no one pays attention now. I’ve done the groundwork to be a world speaker.
You’re confused. Is this true? My history’s online. You will find out I’ve been suppressed some. The major articles of the press know I’m here. They never say anything. I’m not just a loon to them. I’ve seen one site change policy over a single poem. Now the agencies, who are they? I do imagine I get watched. I don’t even worry about it. I see the Earth. Why wouldn’t it look back at me?
You guys are just stupid and won’t let me out among you. I’m banking on you to try. This is some weird shit. Let’s go back to a funny video or a world I can believe in. I’ve never heard of such. Now whaddawe do? You should read my other stuff. I’m dancin’ in music here. The view from here’s incredible. I’m not an unhappy man. I get so excited just being on a moment on earth. It’ll wipe the tears outta your eyes it’s so miracle arranged, the whole damn world. I just rub my eyes and see. Are you seein’ this? The Earth’s just moved.
How do I show this to you? It’s dancin’ right before my eyes, and it’s big. I see that, this smallness I am, wrapped around the machine, trodding on earth. I’m just a part of it all, not it’s maker or mover and shaker. I’m like you, but I see, where a seer meets the Earth, and I’m changin’ it a little more directly than you are, just by my see.
If I get out among you, I’ll replace the room, give you something to think about, so many people in the machine. We will see the future curve in my thoughts of it and be the world I predicted. We’ll talk about it later. Now I just got some things to do to keep goin’. Take a look. Give me a read and see what I’m talkin’ about. One move forward in each and every poem, you will see that, and I will see you again next poem.
Harm's End 