Weathering Tornados from The Lover's Music

Vi An Music

"If we go somewhere on foot, we know the way perfectly, whereas if we go by car or airplane, we are hardly there at all. It becomes merely a dream." 

Excerpt from "Meditation in Action" by Chogyam Trungpa

_______

On my way to see my Love! She’s giving a presentation in a high tower, what a glorious teacher she is, a teacher in secret, with hidden wisdom and enlightening prophecy leaking clean out of a package of such humble eloquence.

The road is dry in the warm, new summer air. I see a woodwind shop to my left. A Xaphoon, hanging in the wall! Why, I do have one at home, but that one looks so beautiful today! I have been enjoying this instrument so very much, but I think I’ll have to buy another for the special occasion that is this day. In the shop, a saleswoman is short with me. No extra conversation ensues despite my attempts after I’ve decided on their only functioning Xaphoon. For the $30 I walk away with my new instrument, smiling quaintly in sweet visions for the day, gaily in love.

I arrive to the towering silver building. Strangely, I decide on the stairs. Massive windows bedeck the entirety of the walls, the low plains stretch as a mercilessly singular mural throughout. I find the room of my love’s presentation. There she is; a ghost of decadence, beauty, a word in her honor, is unready for its true name. In her presence I am light with the fresh gold of summer dreams. Her hair is bunched and flowing, the gargantuan black mass swells and streams down her side as a mythical waterfall of visceral lust, untouched and unrivaled by any substance beside. As I move in closer to her, weary as not to interrupt her occasion, a mirror image of her hair in the sky appears!

A black, icy fleece of cloud boils upside-down into the gleaming pasture, a wild tornado approaches! “This is a building of glass!” I scream weakly and run alone back into the stairwell to find sanctuary. The tornado crashes violently. A 9/11 of natural law brews gravely in the high destruction. The crude aftermath burns with electric ash as the ruins fume, awaiting the ever-darkening sky for yet another whiplash. Too afraid to return above, I journey onward outside of the city core, with instrument in hand, I dreamily invoke the unmoved trust of community in the survivalist reign of mounting fear from the shape-shifting sky above. Human vibrancy responds coolly in the aftermath of lost pain.

_________

Tornado

"If you dream that you are in a tornado, you will be filled with disappointment and perplexity over the miscarriage of studied plans for swift attainment of fortune...Tornadoes in dreams suggest you are very angry about a current situation and are afraid to express your feelings - which you need to do - for fear of hurting others."

________

Echoes from the polar wisdom of our earthly rotation
unraveling the truth in the thousand-worded letter
and pictographs of ethereal meaning
climbing through the bowels of a holy mountain
to the void of spiritual absence
in the land of prophets
unheard since ancient words lifted
to the ceiling of the temple built before time

On the sands of the strong & fuming,
leaving no one to posit an older order of belief

In sky temples & borders that signal friendship
enmity awaits in the selfish vine
a mark where the western mind strayed too far
to become its own enemy
in the reflexive mold of war
for basic rights.

- excerpt from "Royalty of the Weird" 

Basho Pops My Dream Bubble of Jungle

Picture and Poem by Matsuo Basho

Still I have always been drawn by windblown clouds into dreams of a lifetime of wandering.

—Matsuo Basho, Narrow Road to the Interior, Translation by Sam Hamil

Source

_______

I walk into an ecological sanctuary where exotic plants and fish thrive in a hot greenhouse. The humid air transports one to a transcendence of spatial dimensions, wherein time breathes with the quickening pace of an intensified microcosmic environment. Jungle leaves brush against my face as lotus-bloomed lilies freshly spring from the fish-born soup of breathable life in the density of my deeply woven surroundings. A plant scientist and professor live in a nearby hut within the transplanted immersion of moderate rainforest. Also an active marijuana enthusiast, he keeps to himself, remote behind a fastened wall of swollen wood. I and a few friends meander through the delicate passageways, magically mysterious fruits and vines hang down with a gift of flowering beauty unknown to our Massachusetts scents. Our eyes glisten in the cool dank inner workings of such magnificent spires as they that mount upon the blank calm of a recess and serenity in this isolated outgrowth of our Earth’s most advanced biological developments.

As we glide effortlessly, weaving in and out of the rejuvenating corridors, a glint of an eye sparks in an unseen corner. The walls open to encompass the ever-widening viscera of inbound flora. A blue panther sneaks beyond the encircling brush, masked by the glowing façade of a charged, fearful night. We are unprepared. Dropping everything, we rush headlong into the deepest corridor, seeking refuge. This otherworldly animal, prehistoric and enigmatic, bleeds into the folds of any remaining sensation of physical security. We manage to find refuge beneath an enclosure of tables. Frightened beyond the immediacy of thought, we smash the external glass of the sanctuary and carefully stretch outside into the neighboring cold, modern presence of the un-bubbled Earthly night.  

________

Jungle

"The jungle in dreams represents the wild, passionate side of your personality. How you feel about the jungle in your dream indicates how comfortable you are with this side of yourself." (iDream)

_________

gills 

swung & cushiond by a sacrament of fear

bluish

fine heard at the doorstep 

launch into the outer, outer face

punishd by grub 

bleary & entwined 

drunken 

hatching

encouraged to bleed freely

whitish as the granted 

millions of empires 

hunting forgotten, manmade laws

strapped to so much matter 

wholed or scrappd

left out, dried

mushroom fat, swollen spiritual 

mind 

one  

- excerpt from "stir." 

Reclusion at the End of a Plank on the Amazon River

A City on a Rock by Eugenic Lucas

In the dream I am being chased down, my location is under watch for committing criminal activity, however it is unknown to me exactly what I have done. All that I know is that I am in reclusion, finding myself buried deep inside what appears to be the Amazon rainforest. I can see the sides of the river as I have visited them in my past, along the Pacaya-Samira banks of the Maranon. I find my home in the neighborhood of Belen in Iquitos, where I once followed a young brazil-nut merchant in downtown Iquitos to her sick mother's home along creaking, thin wooden planks above the river that served as walkways between homes in the poorest neighborhood. I am now living, there, at the very end of the neighborhood, and there is a shrouding mist about in the opaque, dark fog that surround with an edge of a kind of fire as if I live on the cusp between Earth and Hell. One day, I lead an investigator into my crimes to my home, he sees where I live and feels sorry enough for me that he intends to let me serve my sentence out there rather than have him go through the procedures of bringing me in. I am transported to that little girl's home again, feeling through my dream, a subjective perspective on the imprisoned nature of poverty in a place overcrowded with the starkly opposing reality of a bitter environment, wherein nature itself has made a deal with the devil and lives dankly through the spindly fibers of a human community holding onto Life while experiencing an all-penetrating social malaise.