The Question?

What am I doing here?

What is this life of stupid cares?

Why do I spend time typing and sending packets through the air?

They go without the aid of wire;

Yet I am in a cloud, bound

to an imitation aeron chair.

Why can't I be like Prometheus

and rebel at three times treble?

What am I doing here?

maybe I should have killed my dreams

I should know by now that

they will only be dashed

like a piece of fragile earthen ware

why scheme and take on other people's dares

just to prove that we should be rated as men not mice

people get silly and throw the dice twice

don't tell me its because of the lexicon of the Rubicon

I won't buy your semiotics

As I travel like an unthinking missile;

eating up miles in the thin air

going through my mad career,

I pause and stare

what am I doing here?

personally many times I wish I did not want

would like to give up my silly cares

especially when life is ethereal

and after 3 generations people will forget me

just as much as they remember breathing yesterday's air

even though I am a progressive pilgrim

who did battle with the grim giant named Despair;

cleft him in two with not one stroke of my sword, but a pair

before he died he asked a question

whose damage I cannot repair:

"what are you doing here?"

"why must you persist with this life of stupid cares?"

Surfing

The earth is my noose

seeking a life 450 absolute proof

Want to surf the universe as a light wave,

a photon traveling past Alpha Centauri.

Not existing as an eater of calamari.

Become abstract

Live beyond facts

One day I will play with ampax

while leaving my shit on wax.

But before then I look for open mic nights

standing under klieg lights

experiencing stage fright

Speaking in tunes in a smoky coffee room

But as I step into the arena

I will be brave and ignore any catcalling knaves.

Sailing a gravity wave

to th dawn of a new age

My board is a chaos attractor

it takes me to where macro and micro fracture

Immeasurable when I am measured

with structure in my destructure.

More basic than masers,

existing in the plane of phasors

But when the signal returns to zero

I go back to Asia from where I came.

Visit my home where the drums sing praise names

the wearers of agbadas rest their cellys on rotund bellies

They shy away and yell “fie!” at the dusty dadas

who recite the chants of the rastas

And in recompense get looks of scorn.

Silent Season

The silent season

The ghosts of reason

the unburned weather

makes men clever

the advert is a red alert

feature creep in death's white keep

more junk on the heap

a stack of tools,

buried under a pile of useless fools

The vapor trail

in the hazer's tail

hung up with a five inch nail

a battle for more goods and chattel

I pay the rent with money already spent

Smoke your shitty mahorka

in the dead city of Katorga

In your crooked left eye

I see a mad gleam

are you cooking up another bankrupt scheme?

trying to revive another dead meme?

The death of cool

over an unused spool

two savior's duel

the crowd drools

in the afternoon heat

they found radiance in the cadence

unlike the Seleucid's their eyes are pellucid

from watching god

who sent a bard

down from yard

to lead us to Asgard

Remembering Sarzent the Mad Man

A celebration of Sarzent,

no not Sargent the English painter

But Sarzent the Senegalese traitor.

I read about him when I was sixteen

It was a book that brought beatitude to negritude.

The Afro-French writers were celebrating a renaissance

as usual I acquired the book by chance,

it's funny Steve just mentioned serendipity

hah! Ain't life silly

But back to Sarzent the mad unholy saint.

The story was a piece of romantic fiction

not like those described in Barbra Cartland's pages.

And other bodice rippers designed for the ladies.

No more like the German who talked about the quest for He-man

Starting with Goethe, through the nineteenth century

they talked about those who try not to bleat like sheep

Why don't you read Keats?

In the present day there was Thomas Mann

But back to Sarzent

the writer's lyrical plan

left me stunned, he showed me a man who got himself canned.

Sarzent who forgot who he was not

he went insane

In mental anguish he forever will languish

and in his pain he did sing

a song about valuing the old age.

It has been more than ten years

the words he spoke I can no longer evoke

However my head still rings with his raucous chorus

“listen to things!”, “listen to things!”

It always made me want to sprout wings

discover the unknown

hold it in my hands

in the meantime I listen for my still, small voice

I see my fading secret self

but he responds with endless silence

it deafens me with notes about ancient tragedies now remote.

The lynching of the Gracchii

for poor romans they kept bitching

I daily mourn over their faded, jaded glory.

Thoughts as these bring a semblance of peace

but I still explore my wild places,

my dark horse kicks the traces

running to and from my ancient places

trying to set new paces

As I swim through my conscious stream

the sun reflects off another mad gleam

and once again I grasp it's supporting beam

May I never wake from this walking dream.

Maybe, next we shall talk about Daddy Mboya's cannibal ram

Procion

While searching for Hiram Abiff,

I crossed the burning sands and died in seven deserted lands.

Raised triple blessed I saw a crescent sun

pay obeisance to the moon and stars.

While Ifrits and beings with seven digits

Wage cunning war ending in amours

All the way from Mars to the plain of Jars.

Two hundred and seventy three extinguished lights,

so the seekers read with three sixty candle lights.

Still, the questioners of I am cause ethereal blight,

Until Alice traveled through an organic singularity

no one could refute the pious claims of universal topology.

Capitalists discuss manifest destiny

Theorists advocate historical necessity

As the materialists become eclectic in their dialectics

Kant went ballistic and exploded,

Kierkegaard denounced low culture’s sadistic hedonistics

I hoist an iron flag and trod through the hyperplane in which I carried a little clay pot

That held a land that time never forgot,

for it is where Gog and Magog ran amok

With many heads operation phoenix was blessed

The diseased speak of peace,

their left hands caress grey, gun metal.

The right sells embalmer’s grease.

Till I rise like Osiris

there will be no end to the crisis

so we ask Horus to lead the mad chorus

We seek one whose oscillations are harmonic,

Travels like a photon that proves the existence of a Higgs boson.

In the meantime,

Industry researchers spend millions on useless chirals

to keep gluttons in an endless spiral

I cast seven cowries with bated breadth.

And wait for Ifa to predict the hour of my death

Listen to things and earthly kings.

But remember that Attila was the true lord of the rings

If while evading spirit sniper’s wiles,

and staring into the bamboo tiger’s hooded eyes

You react with a Buddhist smile

The Western Lands Saga

The western lands

Traveling under an azure sky

I try and escape the father of lies

by crossing the bridge of sighs

With each step chanting a mantra

to break my inner cipher

trailed by cackling magpies

as Apook lurks in every nook

trying to snare me with his crook

impale me with his hook.

But by invoking my seven souls

I enter the realm of the bold

Dodging the crags filled with hags yelling

"evoe!" as golems dance on their arched backs.

I feel the heat closing in

The fuzz look placid from all the hits of acid

as the squealing pigs hallucinate, prevaricate

I call on Dr. Benway to operate.

But the old fucker just procrastinates, acts obstinate

Eventually he objects to the limited torture,

because he dislikes my high couture

After I carrying out the procedure

I suture and make a killing on pork futures.

I summon Kerouac for a game of jumping jacks

we write rhymes on one time

to a beat that is lax

Ogun on his way to Oshun, chants a sutra for smiling Siddhartha

As I free associate

Hoping that no prions act like ions, disassociate

making my brain lame before I achieve greater fame

I have never been sufficiently celebrated

However I am not yet a rotting corpse

But before you summon the hearse

I will read more tales of mystery and imagination

interact with tesseracts,

place infinity in a five sided box

eat my bagel with extra cheese and lox.

I will perspire after my desires and never retire unless I expire.

As the KGB and company sneak around Karlshorst

I play with Airsnort

The junkies with monkeys

carrying machetes and bringing flechettes

endure storms and scrapes

while hunting for rutile

but their endeavors are futile.

So we grab the 103 degree burning man

dance like people with no plan

Pagans in body paint dodge and feint

as our fearless leader tells them "bring it on!"

Bold Ares summons the dogs of war,

in a celebration for gore

as they pant and grunt

once again the poor unduly feel their brunt

they honor their paters

sacrifice to their maters

So we cast our bread on still waters

knowing we shall never have sons or daughters

From Damascus to Aleppo nobody weeps for the Azores

Instead celebration and elation for those who wiped out the canaries

(their interests were pecuniary)

Where are the Caribs to bear witness of what Columbus did?

Who knows the name of Tasmania before the rule of Britannia?

From the banks of the Niger

to the mighty old Miss

I watched the falls of Niagara

with a secret shiver

it traveled from my liver,

passed through my marrow

to the quiver with fifty arrows

She asks me for her locket

As I dig in my pocket

Mind coping struggling to cope, I feel out of hope

Grasping for rope I touch the note

written by Kassim it says:

Seek liberation through desolation

Avoid inebriation

it only leads to alienation and isolation

Only you can bring elation

So I turn my back on the hack

Make a mad thousand yard dash

up the thirty nine steps in time to see

a new sun rising over Proscion

This ends the saga of the Western lands

Go west young man!

Rape and pillage those indigenous heathens

ignore the pipe of peace

Shed blood in the streets

Go west till you reach the shining east

Pray and genuflect in the direction of Mecca

from the plain named Decca

Burn biscuits to Yoshi on the peaks of Mount Fuji

Who Am I

Someone asked me how do I define myself.

I thought about it for a minute and replied in this wise:

Well I consider myself to be a poor righteous teacher

a spiritual prankster.

a constant wanker,

a jaded sage,

a glutton who does not care for mutton

who walks through the valley of death

avoiding the preachers and other hue-man leachers

when i reach the plain of fear maybe my third eye will see the clear

I seek what is real

with a will of steel cos I am full of insan kamil

I seek tales of the travails of those who rode the rails

I like to read about the wobblies and their battles

with the bosses who wanted to gobble the overrated capital

without music, politics, and the the electronic ether

my life would be one long bout of depression with a sliver of repression

all mixed together with a vacuum of obsession.

this would be the most terrible oppression

I think that explains part of how I see myself.