America the Illiterate

I want to go on beyond words
But language stumbles in me and I am
A prisoner to her gateway of being
I open it to arrive at duality

Without Oneness, where can I pass?
Into machine worlds of simulation
Into holographic organic imagination
Into symbolic abstractions that are

Fountains of light in the dark of matter
Words go roundabout and arrive forever
In a kind of disassociate state of
Of object and subject, doing and scene

That separation doesn’t really exist
It’s part of the linear illusion of the brain’s
Incapacity to understand the cosmos
From multiple frames of reference

In senses which we do not possess
To see dimensions, possibilities, variables
So I am trapped in a kingdom of micro pronouns
A pigeon-eye view of the same layers

A public square of the corruption of men
In a futile marketplace of bartering
Where people profit over others
And art in literature has long since

Become unfashionable for being less glamorous
People stopped truly communicating
Rather they are watchers of videos, images, screens
There’s too few Socratic questions and

And discourses of platos’ and emersons’
There’s no Nietzsche in the youth of today
Only the boring pragmatism of American determinism
A language of impoverished politics and

A caricature of news, of an enormous campaign
To make the masses dumb, and it’s worked.

As you strode deeper into the world

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
~ Mary Oliver

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Horse-475589992

As you strode deeper into the world

One day you finally knew
The journey had ended where
It had begun, the voices soft
Lifted you to trembling with joy
A grace became your whole house

You were moved, divided
And put together again
Your soul kept crying raining joy
It was delight you knew, that you had
Forgotten, long since you were a child

Joy that has no purposes but to live
Observe, remark, joke to yourself
These were your foundations returned
Your memory wrapped everything
In a calm embrace, like branches and stones

You were a part of this all, energy
Came from one place and was moved
Here or there, but the world you loved
Well, it would go on, it wasn’t so much
A worry of yours anymore, little by little

Love became the silent prayers
Of your steps, until you no longer
Could exist, would exist, no more
One day you finally recognized your purpose
It was then you kept company

With death in that strange surreal space
Between Summer and Autumn when
You saved yourself, you finally did just do that.

On the decline of literacy

“People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book.”
― Malcolm X

All these stanzas look alike
they talk about the same things
with the same words, the same poem

written over and over again
like voices, whispers, copying each other
unable to feel and trust experience
differently, socialized for homogeneity

unified but dull, strong but obedient
their writing seemed the narratives
of machines unable to innovate

plagiarizing voices they believed were
their own, authentic, pure
their literary journals were a politics
of masters of arts and agendas of contests

like car commercials without a proper
enjoyment of speed, or our favorite writers
whose names we only knew because

they were the ones who died at the right time
while somebody was looking, reading them
but the bookstores didn’t know their
metaphors were weak, or their life’s work

was merely symbolic, that’s the thing isn’t it
poets are only symbols, as poems are only
fluff, paper, the labor of writers-in-residence

while the rest of the world are more
interested in serial killers and which stocks
might be worth getting into, and when to sell out
investing in words seemed silly to them

and, in my selected works there was nothing
of how to be a Poet Laureate or how to win prizes
exceptional or not, publication was left to amazon

state grants, fellowships, visiting writers
academics who never felt truly how to write
poetry at its heart was a colonization of artists
few could share what that meant, we were

the first illiterate generation, spending more time
with the internet than with books.

POETRY: III

I know you are reading this poem
Toward a new kind of love
That filled you last night from somewhere
You cannot name, it’s source

The latitude of rush-hours where
Revelation comes, who knows why
The bedclothes of our last
Tattered garments of faith

Towards a new kind of breath
Your life has never allowed
That speaks of volumes of flight
Before the alphabet of precious

Dedication of some philosophical flowering
The enormous sense of being more
Than what our lives seems, as pure
As early spring days covered in doubt

A good kind of anticipation for
Beauty, health, renewal, the touch
And the thirst to live, like reading
A poem silently in our open minds.

A Moment of Creative Seeing

I bring three things for an impossible meeting
To the workshop of your mind
Reproduced like old art books
On the coffee table never opened

Strength, skill and beauty
Above all, the reminder of human spirit
The easy gait of a lifetime of learning
I bring to you the philosophy of self-expression

The movement of harmony
In lost words, triumphant until the end of the world
Ready-made like language, and alien
As the moment of the surprise of enchantment

I bring three things for an impossible meeting
The shimmering of deftness in the brain
Reproduced like ancient books
In the library in an age where we no long read

Strength, skill and beauty, above all strength
The will to create a new world at every meeting
With the previous construct of reality.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Hidden-within-the-Flowers-410798676