Seven Hours of Music: Natural Sounds of Subconscious Entrancement

When tired, listen. 

Music is the breath of life. 

Listen, I am tired. 

Asleep, I hear a visual language, 

A deeper mind. 

Music, now.

__________

She slips in the doorway while I lay in bed, listening. Grandma Nana’s come to pick me up for a day of visiting. Yet, aren’t those the footsteps of my wife? She enters with uncanny similarity.

A painting of the artist Kete Ephraim Marcus by Kete Ephraim Marcus 

A style of musical motion stamps on the floor of my eardrum with the gentle line of breath, issuing as her unspeaking voice through our apartment of dead morning air. She is memory, alive.

Morning, Interior by Maximillien Luce

As I wake to the glorious open space of an apartment, couched in the warm light of a restful morning, and my friend’s visiting. Apologetic and endeared, he respects my unconventional successes, gifting me seasonal greetings with the cheeky light of a sparkling card and pagan decoration.

Paris: In memory of the young deceased friend by Shalva Kikodze

We sit together in the freedom of being up and awake for the sun and its glowing gaze. The room is just so cool to comfort the body in an easy choice of soft, wooly over-garments. He begins to recite the melody of a waltz, for playing on the guitar.

Guitar and Pipe by Juan Gris

With heavenly beckoning, his sweet and delicate face points at the brown stand of Indonesian wood in the corner, my acoustic guitar. I repeat the melody, as it glides effortlessly on the airy surface of my mind.

_________

"The spiritual recluse

On a steep decline

Passing without Failure,

Churning with Thirst,

& Separated

from life"

excerpt from "Age of Fire"

The Voice of Nothingness is Not Silent

Keep listening. Repetition is the rhythm of a harmonious narrative.

________

Grandma paces across the massive floor space. Such a humungous house is a crime to live in alone. This is the end, after more than half a lifetime, and he’s gone. The family remembers him well. He used to sit, unmoving, for immeasurable hours in that chair by the fireplace. 

My dad, begrudging this unseemly fact of life, is bent on taking out all the young folk (now almost in their thirties) to the grocery store, “to get whatever you want!” As we board the car, I can’t think of anything more to want than for us all to be together again, though I suppose even the Lutheran God would deem that otherwise. 

When we’ve all gone through the supermarket aisles, I’m left alone, at a loss to find exactly what I’m looking for, I trudge hell-bent through the fruits and vegetables. Everything’s rotten. 

Again, my vegetarianism is marginalized in the family, I can’t choose between swollen cantaloupe and mangled lettuce any more than I can between two cuts of meat, it all seems inedible to me. Everyone leaves the store without me. 

I walk the highways indefinitely, then, finally after a swathe of nights changing traces overhead with sunrays, I am bled of fictitious impersonality before the might of the great city ahead. The parks are filthy, and an ongoing fair only cements the fact. 

At a chess table I find my old friend from Sudan. He is indifferent, though welcoming. We move here and there amid the goings-on, attaining food and drink in our path, as we sight our circumstances and in the usual mode of conversation, dastardly criticize the milieu and technological demonry of our host society, brandishing bitter tongues of aging cynicism and spite. 

I again leave the scene, suddenly struck with a sense of purpose, to see my own Love, first-hand. 

________

In the reared tragedy of common history
Gone from the Irish shores that reach into the heart of a small mayflower
Lore teaching the youth and middle-aged men of their rights
                    And losing fate in the unreasonable song


To play out our entrenched groove that rides into spherical motion,
A dreamless awe maintaining the earthy power to cool enraged throats
                    And impress a soft layer of peace on the back
          An all-escaping flesh
                              Of our siblings who praise the sun
                                         And its ever-flowing majesty

- excerpt from "Along My Own Shore"

Dream Interrogations and Literal Family Torture from Montego Bay

Port-en-Bessin, Entrance to the Harbor by Georges Seurat

Why are waking notions of the word dream a synonym for something to attain…where as in the notion of a subconscious dreaming, the word dream connotes a separate reality. Where is the relationship between these two associations? Is the difference between waking and subconscious perspective or in the idea of dream itself?

I am sitting at my grandmother’s couch in coastal Massachusetts. She shows me a pop can with Chinese characters on it, and mentions something about Hawaii. Next, my mother offers my wife and I a trip to the Caribbean. Through a song of my uncle about Montego Bay, I imagine I am in Montego Bay. The hotel resort is as one would typically imagine an upscale hotel resort in the Caribbean to appear. In my hotel room, however, my toes and fingers and parts of my chest and head are being wired to a torture device that my stepfather is operating. I attempt an escape from the hotel resort, but it turns into a kind of Cretan Labyrinth, where the Taurus is my own family. 

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. 

"Sketches of Style"

Eyes in the Heat by Jackson Pollock

Grandmother asks me what are those, my poems lie before us, I say they are not poems, they are "sketches of style" and repeat "sketches of style" over and over, then in my high school, I see a friend from university and he suddenly is trying to shoot me in the main lobby because of my expression, I say to myself "must be deserved" and run

Tuesday, May 10, 2011