Death of the Papu

St. Catherine receiving the stigmata of St. Benedict and St. Jerome altarpiece, detail: St. Catherine by Domenico Beccafumi

I walk into my grandparents' house. The subdued beige carpet fades against the similarly hued walls. My grandmother, Nana as I call her, barely notices me walk in. This is unusual. She is usually open arms, with hugs and kisses. With her head down, she only pays attention to the baby grand Chickering piano that her deceased brother left her. She seems very anxious. My Papu, which means grandfather in Greek, is strangely absent. I feel I have been away too long and my Nana lets me know that by her body language. They have dealt with too much pain without me, and now I am lost to them. 

There is a black coffin on the porch. It glimmers in the sunlight. The coffin rises to the porch ceiling. 

Folk Taoist Interpretation:

He will live longer…the reality is opposite of the dream.

Dreams That Money Can Buy - Duchamp and Cage

(watch the WHOLE FILM!)

"Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and one's desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord."


- from "American Masters" John Cage: I Have Nothing to Say and I Am Saying It

Delia Derbyshire, Electronic Music Pioneer

More of her Dreamwork

Jelaluddin "Rumi" and His Unheard Voice

Koran, Tableau: Ornament by Ibn al-Bawwab

A man pleads with Rumi. "I want to be a Sufi!"
"Can you wrestle?" asks Rumi.
Seasoned wrestlers circle the ring in an encampment.
Menacing physiques tower and surround the man.
"First, you must get our tatoo," the wrestlers respond.
The elder tattoo artist moves hestitantly from his chair.
At the shoulder, he begins.
"No! not there," cries the man, in unbearable pain only minutes later.
The elder tattoo artist begins again, a little lower.
"No! not there," cries the man, in agony only minutes later.
"You must feel pain," the tattoo artist advises.

A Dream begins...to scribe 40 anecdotes of as yet untranslated Farsi, directly, and with utmost brevity, from His Unheard Voice

Basement Emptiness and the Great War for Alaska!

Moon Spots in the Forest, Winter by Arkhip Kuindzhi

I am seated across from my step-father, although I can not see him, he is grayer and older. His presence is sunken and lost in age. I reach out to him, yet he is distracted by the television as usual. We are on cushy, white sofas. I am drinking beer from a glass bottle. As the night gets dark, the ceiling windows illuminate with moonlight cast on the laminated wooden floorboards. He is asleep. I toss the beer bottle across the kitchen in the direction of the cellar door. As soon as I do this, I realize I have to retrieve this bottle. I head down the basement steps, only to find the basement completely empty. I have never seen the basement empty since we moved into this newly built home in 1998. The basement is my step-father's refuge, full to the brim with musical equipment, records, books, boxes and a weightlifting set. It is bare. I find the bottle amid other beer bottles swept asunder in the cobweb corners of the concrete foundation.

I find myself sporting an Eskimo jacket, though militarized. I am in the center of a battle field which slightly resembles my readings on the Great War; World War I. Barbed wire and trenches are masked by the deep snow. I sprint effortlessly across the tundra, murdering my enemies with broken pieces of wood, spears left without whittling, leaving a lacerated, dirty wound. I stick the wooden shaft beneath the snow in the hard-packed, frozen dirt as I would with a peculiarly serrated WWI knife used specifically to infect its victim. Suddenly, I face a formidable foe. As I swing the a vampire-slaying weapon into the torso of my enemy, he lifts his weapon, a broken wooden shaft as well, in a circular motion. I am impaled in the stomach with swift intention.

Bleeding and helpless in the open tundra, I become delirious. The enemy who's mortal blow has impacted my vital organs lies dead, as an insignificant speck of bloodless flesh and white cloth on an ocean of ice. I turn to face the horizon. Curiously, I am led into a domestic home. I find my way through a corridor. I am in an enclosed, outdoor court. A small altar rises with a light bowl at its apex. As I move with delicate strength, on the edge of my last breath, I approach the bowl. I want to see inside to its contents. Before I can see over the lip, I feel the presence of a man in the uniform of a soldier in the War of Alaska entering a side door. I wake.

Dream of Being a Published Poet...

courtesy of The Poetic Pinup Revue

This is my first ever print publication of an original poem.

The piece will appear in the The Poetic Pinup Revue


monosexuality

homo-

erect,

explorations into same

sex soundings,

flourishings, embellishments

on theme,

a blip into sonic humanity, striking

the most sensitive chord


[only the first stanza appears here]


To support this publication say Rusty sent you HERE 

Shared Dreaming

" - They say we only use a fraction of our brain's true potential. Now, that's when we are awake. When we're asleep, our mind can do almost anything.

- Such as?

- Well, imagine you are designing a building, you consciously create each aspect. Sometimes it feels like it's almost creating itself if you know what I mean.

- Like I'm discovering it.

- Genuine inspiration...Now in a dream our mind continuously does this. We create and perceive our world simultaneously, and our mind does this so well that we don't even know it's happening."  

from the film, "Inception" by Christopher Nolan

_________________________________________________________
 
Experience...
our One, Shared
Dream

Uniting All Dreamers
through
Myriad Human Forms

to the Point.

Consequences of Boarding a Rapidly Rising Elevator

Concordance Table by Byzantine Painter in 1020

"I entered the elevator on the first floor of our apartment building in Chinatown. Curiously, you fled up the stairs to meet me at the second floor, where we reside. Anxiously, I hopped in the elevator, keen on matching you in our childish cat-and-mouse games. A great smile rose upon my lips as the door shut, ready for it to open so I could then swing out into your arms. My imagination fluttered with your kisses on the crown of my head, the way you delicately regard my cold black hair. The way I bury myself in your arms as we open the troublesome lock to our home. But that was not to be. The elevator never opened, and it rose, and it rose, and it did not stop rising. Stricken with unearthly and inhuman fear, I watched the numbers escalate beyond counting. The elevator continued to rise. Suddenly, the elevator slows to the sound of crushing metal. The roof of the building, or the final machinery to buffer the elevator's rise into the sky above, lies unmoving above the elevator's unceasing rise. Pressing the alarm button, the ringer calls out, though the walls of this elevator begin to compress. The elevator shaft is emptying as the metal compresses and my space inside this wildly risen elevator condenses unto my end. I wake."

INTERPRETATION ( from www.experienceproject.com/dream-dictionary/Elevator-dreams )

"To dream of an ascending elevator, denotes you will swiftly rise to position and wealth, but if you descend in one your misfortunes will crush and discourage you."

My Love, Seated Celestially At Royal Ease

In succession, a vast interwoven web of dreams courses directly into my imagination with a lucid wit that invigorates my physical intellect in a spark of mental action, a fluid repose enunciates my insides as I feel deeply the excited insights of an active seeing into the contents of mind, perception, memory and the quality of subtle necessity to be, even at the minuscule point of one inner knowing, a shape-shifting life unfolds to meet my dream-woman, Love herself
...................................................................................................................................................
outside of a well-manicured, high-society, private university-type atmosphere, aside elegant glass panes to hold the humidity of an indoor tropical garden, the Autumn light recedes into a root-filled fern forest floor. the damp ground hovers effortlessly before the thriving of innumerable tingling mycelium underneath my bare feet haunted by the rural lore of spiritual flight into the unadulterated natural presence, an enamored romanticism bleeding with dank obscurity in the darkening passageway to my chosen activity. a drum kit drowns the sky in a clamor of happiness. the air fills with the deathless heartbeats of an unschooled drumming, careless and heartening in wild chaos, a laughter from the belly of nature herself. and the smoke of her following lingers, I wander through these free sounds into a labyrinth of hosts, on the screaming edge of Babylon in a glorious architectural feat, a Victorian hideaway, though lightless, subdued red cushions and mahogany hallways lay carpeted, leading with royal ease unto the sofa whereupon my Love resides celestially.
...................................................................................................................................................

 

His Landscape

(written by Her above)

That atmosphere of calm with thunder and with light shows
engulfs me with every kiss, every word, pulse and every sigh
In dreams as in my waken state
Living our Dreams
We strain not to stay attached, but strain any time we are detached
So painful to be apart
even if just an arms length apart

No warmth in the world
Only he is my World
Surrounding me with his glances
and laughter

While I continue to learn of this ridiculous world
As long as I am in Love

Gothic Flight with the Wife-Sister in Mutilation

Supper Masks by Adolf von Menzel

I am in an setting strongly resembling the priest's starkly bleak and violently humorless abode in "Fanny and Alexander" by Ingmar Bergman. Between the cold stone walls that seem to press in closer and closer, I turn a bend to an outside court. I have a video camera in hand, and find a friend's father succumbing to a filthy heroin addiction. I video him shooting up and turning pale, with fangs as bloody and lifeless as a vampire's. In a kitchenette of sorts, a family sits around the table. The small home now mixes in an understated blur of unspoken silence. There is an inhumane stifled and drowned heart, now turned to meat in our soup bowls, its former life surrounds us quietly. I am reminded of a small kibbutz home that I once visited. The kitchen table is cornered in a lonely room. The family is missing the father, and I am seated without thought to mind the discomfort at knowing his whereabouts as he huddles lowered into the darkness of his poverty of will. Then, in the night, my room is ambushed by his figure, cloaked in staunch black robe. There is an air of over-religious prayer turned to a nightmarish cursing as he raises a black knife into the air above me. Motionless, I receive a monstrous gash beside my belly-button. I howl and receive two more along my side and below my left shoulder as blood streams effortlessly down my side. A gun is raised to my shoulder, and I receive a fixing blow below my right shoulder. Nearly inert, my mind turns to shade, yet my adrenaline picks me up with full lungs, I worry for my wife, now mere animal and sister of humanity, to be slaughtered by the tortured weakness of an insane mind frothing at the brim of his asylum grave; this house of fleshless waste enslaves me to a pain unknown, yet I feel life struggling to stand with the rhythmic plan of my heartbeat, calling me to go forth, and the beat is ever important as never before, if I falter I could miss one beat and fall into the void of the stale, rock floor. I finally find my wife, covered in the ash of wood burnt to its lowest ember, cursing through a throat densely saturated with blood overfull with pain. There is a spark of wonder at our meeting. How are we still alive? I am forced, embedded in this sick house, to confront the murderous wraith who balances life and death on the numb foresight of his insidious night killings. I quickly examine our wounds, and though we are in critical condition with flesh flayed in visible touch with our vitals, the swarm of inner heat beckoning us to kill the blind culprit sends me forth into the blackest corner of the most lightless room, to fulfill my fear's overcoming alas and travail the bloody path that I make walking inside the heavy wooden doorway to flash an uprisen knife and buckle down over loosened sinew and the butchered meat of this trivial nightmarish dream, imagining my blood sink with my would-be murderer and pave the stone floor with a distressed need to overcome this body of suffering, together with my sister of humanity.  

Dream Memory Sketches

Finale by Albin Egger-Lienz

These past few nights, coincidental with the emotional upswing of my transitioning back home, I dream vividly.

Remembered involuntarily, these sketches remain in mind with strong complexities, imprinted with such lucidity as to verify my waking experience of intense questioning.

1

Amid the desert, as drab and steaming with insidious fire as the genocidal, pioneer days of the Australian outback. There is a clamping furor in the air, a dream that dreams in images not only frozen in mind, but in heart, a climbing pull up the mountain of the soul in a delirium of ruthless passion. I wander haphazardly throughout an endless desert at high noon it seems, at high season, unprotected from the ferocious heat. The sun is a deathless predator. I hallucinate the presence of serpents into swords, and I am tunneled into an crime-ridden espionage heatwave in the middle of the Maghrebian deserts of Morocco. In the waving perception, a spackled host of armed thieves rush through my body in and out as if I was one with this burning, naked desert. A snake slithers and at once I am gashed, run through and impaled simultaneously at the sound of a hiss with thin swords resembling how I would imagine heroes of the Arabia to duel. A mental fog is lifted, and I am embedded in a cinematic Casablanca-effect, North African environment. I clamber with hopeless futility in sand-erected surroundings dense with trouble and quick death.

2

A bespectacled retired astronaut, mathematician at NASA and managerial sort of government space programs, clarifies into my vision, a full, bald head with rimless, perfectly circular lenses, covers one eye still with another ocular instrument held by his right hand. He tells me I am to travel to Olympus.

The next moment, I am shot at an immeasurable speed through the atmosphere and far into space through the solar system. I arrive at the destination without hesitation. Time is of no matter.

Arriving on Olympus, which seems to be a lunar satellite of some kind, I enter what appears to be my Grandmother's house in Upstate New York. This is troubling and fascinationg, as I look out of her windows and see the great void of space, smattered with stars over a horizon without an atmosphere.

3

I am walking my bike along a highway in my current city where I currently call home. There behind me, stepping on my shoes, is a homeless man bent on being an obnoxious follower. No matter how hard I try to get onto the bike and continue on my way, I am nearly trampled over by his mysterious presence.

At night, down a dark sidestreet, I suddenly lose my bike, find myself in a scuffle in some suburban bushes and begin to run. There is a great steed, mounted by a medieval knight following my with lance pressed into the windless eve in my direction. Running as fast as I can, I devise a plan while I turn a bend and end up in a backyard which resembles a fortified castle's outer court. Sophisticated narratives of children's stories and escape plots churn wildly inside my mind in the twilight hours of the morning. 

Occupy Demonstrator Forced to Immigrate to Egypt

Spring by Abel Grimmer

[In a vivid dream dreamed in my mother's house, the home where I first took flight from the nest, I experience a dream unlike that yet experienced on this visit to the places of my origins.]

I am an Occupy demonstrator; with stereotypical shaggy hair and a wiry beard sparse enough to age me youthfully. At first impression, a fire-born Sagittarius without regret or remorse. I have a taste for the insane rush of amateur denial. A ferocity grows in me to bleed with the public truth of mass suffering at the hand of the few: 1%. I feed off the morning dew before the violent marching of our militant society exhales its smog of consumptive dread over the undreamed folds of a quotidian, earthly stress.

With sudden instantaneous manifestation, my surroundings turn into a punctilious mold of congruent geometry. A seemingly shapeless mass of grey and beige frosts the walls of my interior perception with gross boredom. Enraged, I tear with mad vivacity for a new paradigm. Social dominance does not move astray from my line of sight as it defies internal contemplation and steers ever clearly into the bedrooms of the few: 1%. I give them all the middle finger with raw, open tenacity.

I am reminded of W. Bush; his first trip outside of the U.S. after his term of totalitarian presidency. We geared to angry maximums in a show of torrential defamation at his name.

There is a slump in the public demonstration. The efforts sway to clandestine operation. There is an underground swell of purpose. An optimistic slumber chimes beneath the sidewalk cafes. I am welcomed at a subterranean meeting place. The air is unpredictable. There is a contingent wading in passersby and onlookers who wonder about the end of their movement; it may be nearer than they fear. I have a purpose. I make my delivery and ask desperately for a place to sleep. I need to rest on a surface other than that of concrete smoothed by nylon. The muffled sound of sheets once quelled my silent might and now I am only stirred with the jarring gripes of untrustworthy leaders from this, our autonomous modus operandi of Darwinian survival.

Sleepless, I cower trenchantly outside the walls of an Embassy in Cairo, Egypt. The streets are emptied with sacred failure. The notches of murder scale high across the batons of the street police. I have come here to die to the American Lie. I wait restlessly, dealing with bureaucrats in twilight hours. The Cairo dawn inflames my vital organs with a need to escape this devil-coaxed life of American savagery. I fight for the freedom to move, for my wife and our sanity. We ask only to be awake, and not depraved of a social camaraderie known from collective suffering, shared through speech, and simultaneously lightened through action for one being, our whole. At the same time, we fight for the dignity to rest our heads on a feather of respect in this anthropomorphic hole of modern factory-style life ways.

The struggle continues.

Respect for Other Dreams

Codex Aureus of St. Emmeran by Adalpertus

Recognizing the dreams of others is to recognize their whole being, 

beyond sensual affirmation, 

subject-object reasoning, 

no, 

to prepare intuition 

and heart-to-heart communing 

with the natural creative vibrancy of mind 

to speak in a language before tongues, 

to re-create lifetimes of unknowable voyaging 

across depthless oceans, 

the interpersonal subconscious 

moved 

to collective reflection, 

to see the moment as new 

miracle of Earth's divine creation 

and transcend precise memorization of thought 

habit extinguished 

in piecing together a gorgeous message 

of interpretive ingenuity in 

the experience 

of earthly 

self-

awareness...

(((awareness)))

(((((infinite)))))

(((awareness)))