old mountain hop (Updated Jan 23)

once i was like you, a prisoner without a name. i dreamed the same dreams. i wore the uniform and swore to the cause, grew dizzily nauseated on the sweat of money pouring from my body. i lived in a glass-room under an all-seeing eye the rays of which penetrated right into my head. i was allocated a number by which i became known, and i sorrounded myself on all sides with machines of all shapes and sizes.

theres one thing living on the edge of the city taught me is that there's always a hand or a boot behind everything, and as i drag my heels through the night like so many people have done before me, as i stop to watch at the impenetrable holy light of televisions that falls on my face like an anaesthetic i have to weigh up the atoms of physical dirt that saturates the scraps that my clothes have become or the weight of the spiritual dirt that television bequeaths; your life becomes nothing but a series of reruns and channel flipping and well, im all caught up in it

consider the soft becoming light of the moon, under this tree so shy as a deer in this star dappled night, and the smell of the night air like fresh mint and sweetly bruised grass, consider the wind that brushes her skirts over the hills a good woman busied up with armloads of pure living scents.

life is a morning in heaven and an afternoon in hell, or vice versa. I envy those oldtimers still following the sun westward. They have nothing to fear in the lands of the dead, they've outstared the devil and his snake eyes. I watch em shuffle down the street, barely disturbing the dust, more of the air than the earth. If you look careful you'll see they grown faint like an old photograph you might find up in your attic. they're feathery and apart from this life, just waiting to take to the air.

keep your eyes on the sun and you can't go far wrong. If you lucky, you may fall off a cliff like the young hawks that spend their days warming their wings on the summer thermals and end your life among the crushed heather and the mountain flowers that smell as sweet as the air that comes ahead of the desert rain

my grandfather was a wise man, he was fond of rolling his own cigarettes and talking, also, he liked the wine. some folks used to say call him mysterious, some even called him a teacher, my grandmother called him a blow hard, his brother called him a die hard, and that was the kind of guy he was, difficult to pigeon hole. something different to everyone. he could be stubborn but mostly he was plain sweet unless he got riled.

when we asked him about his big belly, for he sure looked like a woman carrying.. he would say that it was a sign when a mans life was about to change. he said a time came in a mans life when he was going to reap everything that he had sown, he was going to give birth to the fruit of his actions. said it was no less painful than having a baby to some men.

A man gets to ruminating when his sandals stir up dust on the road. A man gets like a cow, digesting the grass of his thoughts again and again. Sometimes thoughts are all you have for company, but theyre weak company. Ghosts make a man tire easily. Ghosts can make a man lose his way; they can lead a soul into bad country.

Same thing for books. A book can be as satisfying as treading the deck of an old boat bound for the gods knows where, but it can also be a pocketful of stones dragging you down into the dark.

I prefer to read the world, which is itself an old writing, endlessly affixing new chapters onto itself and god only knows what the ending will be.

woman are as good on the road or off it, their souls being deeply rooted in the earth, bhiksuni graceful and satisfied from within.. but the man is a creature of air and settles for a moment only, before taking to the wing once more. nothing will ever change that. to oppose that desire is slow death. it poisons the mind with the clap of mundanity.

i am, like my father before me, searching for the pure note. in all this music, the pure note is the one left unplayed. it may be found in the space between the dischords. or perhaps the earth itself, tumbling through the void a rock caught up in a mighty river, is solely a dischord in a perfect note. the question over which i scratch my head, pinch my nose, pull on my earlobe is this ; what is about emptiness that nears perfection?

This city, this infernal melting pot of souls. this lake of ashes. its enough to make one take up a sign, a wildbeard.. repent ye fishes of the ocean, repent, the moment of extinction is at hand. the day of judgement is today, yesterday and tommorow your souls, have given up the boughs of your bodies, taken to the sky, the muscular hacking of machines has driven them back to heaven and left us in a slow mocking dance with automobiles, bridges. skyscrapers attempting an abortion of the sun.

as i bump from person to person down a nameless avenue, people recoil from the fire in me, hiss with escaping steam, brush off their coats as if i were a contagion.

A man walking needs to put the fear of the dark behind him. We labor under the illusion that we ourselves are light, but this is simply untrue; wishful thinking. We reflect light. Our emotional qualities may take on the nature of a light, but we are quite sensibly dark beings. Stop seeing yourself as being sorrounded by the night. Become of the part of the darkness looking outwards. Feel the strength in your arms, the spring in your feet. Listen to your heartbeat and imagine tearing at flesh. You have as much right to the night as a jaguar.

jesus, what in hell happened to the craftsmen of the world, forced into bondage, reduced to flat straight lines, nothing of the curvature of the mind, nothing of the cloud shapes inherent in a piece of wood, a block of stone. jesus, theres nothing sadder than watching a man plane a straight beam, nothing more insulting to a fine oak. they crucified the artist, drove a wedge between the common man and his link to beauty.

now i once died in a car crash, in those days when i used to drive em. it seemed i was slipping in and out of conciousness. the smell of charred flesh, gas, burnt plastic.. the scream of twisting metal.. all contributed to a particular hallucinatory experience of being very close to hell..

it was a deep darkness, and it seemed that there were contours to it. sloping hills of shadow. scrubby pines. valleys that dropped miles. i was real close to the edge of hell, so that the crying of the damned penetrated the blackness as if it were a living red flame. i sensed that if i climbed just one hill i would be presented with a scene from dante, a vast bowl filled with struggling life, living dead boiling with emotion.. steam gushing from their every orifice.. i imagined living fish dropped in hot water.. didn't doubt that there was a place in there for me & damned if they werent right with all their talk of religion

as i were about to drift over to find my place for burning, i'll be durned if there wasn't a little something brought to me, a scent or a current of true darkness. it was like an arctic breeze in a desert. it came to me as if i were fingertips rubbing at a rose-petal.

so i climbed, always climbed. followed that little deer trail winding this way and that. in time, if time it were, i left the crying and the pain a way behind me and became engulfed wholeheartedly in silence. the trail grew to a knife-edge, then to a thread that played itself out somewhere up high. my life seemed like an afterthought, the moan of a wind up in the rafters of an old house. this was existence purified of its dross. that high place with infinity within arms reach and out of mind, there seemed a great untouched plain all around..

it seemed at that moment as if there was nothing more beautiful than desolation.

if every day i could say one honest word, i would die with a smile on my face that would ring through eternity like a the sweet call of a bell. don't reckon art is worth anything more than that, and maybe something less by today's standards. they say an honest word is impossible because truth does not exist. i say that too much thinking can bury you. you dig your ass so deep in the mud that there isn't a living soul in the world thats going to want to dig you out.

thats where we are now, buried deep. Our symbols are so loose and strange they evoke nothing but a rigor mortis. We fake our own deaths constantly until eventually we are dead.

now i picked up a glass at at a friends house. i can't why it attracted me. He used it to clean his brushes, sometimes as an ashtray and sometimes both at once. Maybe i like the energy in it. I never seen a glass so filthy, so paint caked. The final color of that glass was a dark serpentine with scales of ash. It smelt of foul breath that made me think of waking up next to strange bodies after a night of drunkedness. I scrubbed that glass for the better part of an afternoon, watched it shed layer after layer of dead skin. No one would have said it would shine again. No one dreamed it would smell of river water and fresh cold air.

i chose this place to sit, to become a stone. i'll share stone thoughts that contribute to this mountain, and when she goes, worn down & tired with the weight of time, the passing of hot storms, curtains of cold rain.. i'll go with her. we'll go together to find heaven, me and the mountain, we'll kick in the doors of paradise together, raise a little serene hell..