THE PESSIMISTS
These pessimists are always talking about death.
Death to the lazy bull
who cowers instead of charging.
Death to all those survivors of atomic bombs
who remember so hard.
Death to the 9th International Congress of Poets
because the 8th was so anti-everything.
A double death to all those
who believe they won't die.
A single death to all those
who believe they will.
I'm sick to death of pessimists
and always keep a wary eye on the optimists.
That's me - enthusiastically depressed.
Concerned, braced for anything,
I stand and ask everyone I meet -
What do you think will happen?
They never have a clue.
When it happens, it'll happen
is all they say.
I notch the wall.
Another day and still no answers.
I have to stick to who I am.
So many battles to fight all at once.
So many nights camped on the edge of chaos,
the dead streaming over the field calling out,
crying for water, for help,
for dreams, for death and more death
and the end of this war
and the beginning of another.
For me the blood never dries.
The cries never dissipate.
II
Growing up in the land
of silver buttons
and bright, big screens,
of terrible events tempered with calm
and monkeys running everywhere,
the sad earth just pulls and pulls
until the strain, discontent and moody,
snaps me off into the land I never
seem to want to be.
And I go, passively, intently,
saying it must be my destiny,
or because my father didn't break his heart
pounding steel into shape for nothing.
I go beat the whirlwind
and watch the birds from the highland fly.
Drinking deeply the national geography
I become drunk with the suddenness of it all.
I listen as
my country sings a song that confronts
but does not comfort.
I watch as
my country imprisons its passion
and condemns me to solace.
In my stupor
I bleed as I sit among the men
with harsh, untreated wounds
and become one of their kind,
bloodied by fear and shot full of despair,
in constant need of a scalpel
and a sword.

Gone (,-) Blink

 Silverfish withstands

Heat, cold, flood

Radiation

Wriggles and squiggles

At forests edge

Dead

Food

For this fish

Flash of light

Off scales

Not delight

Darkness descends

Will foot crushers know

Imagination, no?

Merrilee, your analysis is frighteningly correct in that we may be at a crossroads unlike any humanity has ever faced.  And you are also correct in that it’s all moving too fast for almost everyone to assimilate in any kind of coherent way, causing many to throw up their hands and say to the various powers that be: just fix it; make the chaos go away; give me peace.  And by abandoning our ability to direct our lives, we tumble into the darkest parts of man’s mind where power becomes absolute and woe be it to anyone who chaffs or resists that power.  We’ve seen it many times before, and always with disastrous results.  Can anything be done?  Are we facing various forms of extinction - environmental, cultural, psychological, and physical - that cannot be stopped?  Have we moved beyond the point of no return?  It would be hard to argue that we have not.  My singular question is what does it really take for humanity to transform itself; what did it take?  Have we been at this nexus before?  I have one glimmer of hope. The transformation of humanity has always been, it seems, the result of it being at death’s door with no obvious way to avoid total destruction.  Merrilee speaks of prehistoric peoples who drew images with sharpened stones and pigments made from dirt, charcoal, and animal fat.  It is unknown what were they trying to say, but what they rendered on the cave walls in those simple but powerful images activates our imagination.  We look back through a blurry portal in time and try to grasp their mystical visions, their hopes, their fears, and their uniquely human sense that tomorrow need not be like today, that what is done today can alter what happens tomorrow.  What a revelation that must have been.  What power could be wielded if the future could be changed.  Draw a galloping beast and stare at it in the dim firelight as a hunting tutorial in how to avoid it or kill it tomorrow.  Conjure up in the cave’s dark recesses a mystical vision that imports a talisman with magical powers that promise a coming good fortune.  Gather around a fertility image as a group initiation into the mysteries of birth and death.  If our ancestors were not trying to glimpse into the unknowns of their world, if they were not trying to alter their future, if they were not trying to prepare themselves for battle with some demon or beast that could suddenly appear in the mist, then there would have been no need to summon magical powers from the rocks and drawings.  Only in our dreams can we modern humans drift back to those ancient caves and have some sense of the intensity and immediacy of our ancestor’s waking lives.  Only in our nightmares can we feel the paralyzing fears they faced in the darkness of the cave, and only in our comforting fantasies can we exalt in their ecstasy when, in the firelight, they triumphed over all that awaited them.  But in the reality of the daylight, they must have felt defeated facing down the terrors of their day.  Since then, humanity has constantly reinvented itself to face down the terrors that each age presented.  And this points to what truly separates us from all other forms of life, and that is, unlike the wild beasts, our behavior is not driven solely by our environment, but by our imagination and by our deep desire to anticipate the future so we can alter its outcome.  Can we alter the future before it is too late?  That depends on what we consider as being ’too late.’  Maybe it will take an apocalyptic event to catalyze a ’new’ version of humanity.  It seems we have come finally to the brink of deciding that question.  We are at the stage now that has gone far beyond corrupting our physical environment to the point where we can literally recreate a variant human species using frighteningly simple and available genetic technology.  There is no roadmap and nowhere near enough psychological and emotional acuity to be able to handle this almost unlimited God-like power we have invented.  So the question is how do we deal with this duality of our minds: on one hand our visions and our dreams, as Jung points out, are always trying to drive us out of our unconscious selves towards a future where everything in the unconscious is realized; and on the other hand we stand helpless and paralyzed in front of this shapeless vague future that is shrouded in all same fears as our prehistoric ancestors had.  I think Russ and Paco, and each of you who have been sending in eloquent and meaningful comments, have been intuitively providing an answer to this question.  We humans have a strong need to try to link our days on Earth as if they are a string of pearls, each one connected to the other forming a circle around our intuitive sense of wholeness, of our understanding where we are in space and time.  It is an illusion.  We are more like dotted lines on a map.  Here there is a known path, a clear direction; then over there the path and the lines peter out and we find ourselves going in circles or retracing our steps unknowingly, only to find we are back at the start or, more likely, lost and forced to find another route, another set of dotted lines.  And in this way, we make our way through life doggedly trying to make sense of it all, to nail down our futures, to revisit our pasts in a new, more benign light.  But deep down, buried towards the very back of the cave wall in our minds, we ‘know’ there is something coming; its reflected in our fantasies, in our wisps of intuition, in our rare moments of great joy or sorrow, and always in our dreams that we discard and discount.  Early man had dreams too and they meant more to them than to us.  They must have seen something in those dreams that we do not, and they played out the meaning of their dreams in vivid drawings and rituals that carried them through the night and helped prepare them for the coming day.  It is people like you that will help create a viable answer to the question of where do we go from here.  Humanity will rise or fall not because of any modern weapons or biological entities, but whether or not we have lost all ability to change ourselves and our future and to decide once and for all if we want to be, as Paco discusses in his book, members of the ‘universe community,’ and where his ‘feeling of fellowship’ extends to all things whether seen or unseen.  Paco so beautifully anticipates this in his book when he says, “There may come a time in which new and deeper structures of consciousness will compensate this historical imbalance we have all inherited.  There may come a come a time in which significant numbers of us learn to accept and differentiate our own inner darkness, healing our inner divisions and recovering in the process the discarded values of the soul.’  Well said, Paco.  Al through his book, Paco speaks of love as an all-enveloping resurrected vapor that encased him as a result of his collision with destiny in Caborca and his confrontation with himself as a result.  As Merrilee fears, we are heading for a collision on a global level and that may finally propel all of us towards are own ‘Caborcas.’  And as that goes, so goes the world.  And finally, the stimulation you all are providing me keeps careening off into poetry.  So here is a shorter, poetic response to this latest series of comments.

Oh, my, this seems a doubling of the Ragnarök dream!

Things Seen in a Dream Scene

Clustered they were—here and there
Yes, remnants of humans remained
Living on mountains of human remains
No one knows what lies beneath
The alluvial deserting and swamping
The constant rain washes everything
Thirst is quenched but hunger is not
So very hot the wet rises steaming
But the birds do not notice, they are flying
While all the animals follow them northward
Humans not following, they’ve forgotten how
No children are seen, no babies' cries are heard
There is talk of what might have been, what could be
Forgotten now that humans were gatherers and hunters
Not remembering humans are animals, are mammals
Not remembering anything useful now, not even dreams

The Gateway

Bumbles Crosses the Line

Bumbles felt himself calm down a bit after his beer bath courtesy of CedrosCM. Jinney’s ministrations didn’t hurt either.  A few hours of celebration later he got up. “I’m going to call it a night blokes” he yelled as he stumbled towards the pub’s front door. “I’ll see’s you later, ta”. Bumbles made it to the door, opened it and froze. It was like something strange had passed through his body. He couldn’t tell if it was the beer, his supper of Buffalo chicken wings or a ghost. Maybe it was the cold night air he thought self soothingly. Confused by this conundrum, pondering “what” as deeply as he could, he began to step over the cill. This being an old English pub the cill had energy unto itself. It was if the cill reached up and gleefully tripped him. He tried to grab the door handle but it swung with him. With his immense girth underway a gentle recovery was not in the cards. Bumbles fell sideways in a gentle unrelenting pirouette landing face down in a thicket of brambles growing on the sidewall of the pub.

“Ow, shite. I’m going to kill you, you damn bushes” he screamed. The brambles were unperturbed. Thrashing in his attempts to free himself only made his pain worse so he stopped. Facedown in the thicket Bumbles realized he had well and truly bumbled this time. Any attempt to lift his head caused the thorns hooked in the skin of his face to cut deeper. “My face, it’s on fire” he sobbed.  “I’m going to die, bled to death by a bush”. Pull yourself together Garth (his true name) came the voice of his mother. Lying still he began to sort out a plan to get free, to LIVE. Wriggling his arms he found they were only lightly hooked. Moving eel like, he broke free of the thorns, slowly moving his hands up to his face.  Feeling around with his fingers Bumbles was able to unhook his skin from the crown of thorns ringing his face.

Lifting his head away from the thorns Bumbles noticed an odd disc like thing mixed in with the dirt and blood. Wrenching free he hauled his bulk up grabbing a handful of dirt and hopefully the disc with his left hand.  Finally released from his thorny prison he staggered to his feet only to hear Jinney say “Bumbles what an arse, you’ve destroyed my dessert bush”. Bleeding profusely from multiple lacerations he didn’t have the energy to bellow some profanity at her. Shaking his head Garth staggered down the street toward home, #10 Drowning Street. A block down the street he remembered the odd object he had tried to grab. Looking down he opened his hand. Mixed in with the dirt and clotted blood was an oddly shaped cobalt blue disc. Stuffing it all in his pocket he began to whistle. “Things might be looking up”, he thought. Little did he know…

BAKERSFIELD

He sat on the edge of the bed

waiting patiently for his memory to return.

He knew he’d find it again,

like the left shoe to

his dress-up brown wing-tips

that he liked to keep polished

more than any other pair.

The shoe turned up again,

didn’t it?

Why not his memory?

He looked at his bandaged finger.

Someone said he caught

it in the toaster

trying to fish out his burnt bread.

He didn’t remember having a toaster.

Looking at a photograph of someone

whom he thought he must know,

he had to admit he didn’t.

'I am not sure I ever met that person.

I don’t think I would associate with someone who looked like that.’

Maybe he left his memory in the penny jar:

‘A penny for your thoughts’, he thought.

‘I’ve a penny, but no thoughts.

What are they worth if I can’t remember them?

Now let’s see, I’ve my nice,

polished brown wing-tip shoes on,

but where was I going?’

He sat back down on the bed

to think it over.

He looked down at this shoes and asked them:

‘Do you know where we were going?’

I like my brown wing-tips, he thought,

and don’t want to get them scuffed.

I will take them off.

Maybe they will find their way without me.

But if I don’t know where I was going,

how do they know where they were going?

He untied his shoes and turned them over

so as to keep the soles clean.

He couldn’t help noticing the precise stitching of the rubber soles.

Looking closer at the embossed lettering

He slowly pronounced the word he saw: Bakersfield.

He drew a blank; ‘Never heard of Bakersfield.

Don’t remember being in Bakersfield.’

He looked down at his shoes and asked:

‘Do you remember being in Bakersfield?’

He wondered if Bakersfield was where bakers baked in a field.

Dozens of ovens lined up puffing out smoke

and sweet smelling plumes of sugar and cinnamon.

He realized he was hungry but could not remember

when he ate last.

‘What is wrong with me?

I need to lie down and dream.

I remember my dreams all right

But nothing when I am awake.’

That seemed, to him, very odd.

Should be the other way around, he thought.

Unless, of course, he was not the dreamer

but the dream.

So, of course, then he would remember the dream

since that was his true reality,

while the man with the two brown shoes

was caught in some nexus between waking and sleeping,

and thus quite a fragmentary and forgetful figure.

Unable to decide the matter, he quickly fell asleep

and in his dream, he remembered everything

he knew he had forgotten,

Including his misplaced memory.

It was right there all along.

Right there next to his pair of black shoes,

the ones he bought before the brown ones.

Come to think of it, he remembered, he didn’t buy them at all,

He won them in a lottery, a lottery with a catchy slogan:

IF YOU WIN, YOU CAN CHANGE THE FUTURE;

IF YOU CAN CHANGE THE FUTURE, YOU CAN WIN.

Now he was confused.

Did I change the future before or after I won the shoes?

Then he remembered what he did do about the future and he smiled.

Upon waking, he looked in the mirror and saw that he was smiling,

but could not remember why.

He looked down at this nicely polished brown shoes

and thought maybe that is why I am smiling.