10 more songs for the Red Goddess

Epilogue or New beginning?

Varjayogini: https://www.vajraweb.org/tsakli; These Tsakli were created by the German artist Anna Lieb-Dubino.

Dear friends of Parallax: Last year, I wrote a book of poems called “108 Songs for the Red Goddess,” which is available now from Parallax Publishing here: 108 Songs for the Red Goddess—Parallax Press. Please buy it. It’s fun, erotic, and easy to read—and yet it’s also kind of deep.

Here are 10 new poems which may be an epilogue! Or the start of something new. Who knows. It’s in Her hands.

1

People think that God is just like Dad
Offering a stern word
A machine gun and a flag

People think that God is a castrated holy man.
Sitting on a pillar, talking to sheep
Sexless as a tomb

But what if God is a lascivious woman, with curves
What if God is a toothless old bitch
What if God is a post-metapausal lesbian
What if God is a horny old she-goat

‘All women are Dakini, ’ they say in Tibet
‘All women are God’—we should say

And the fact is:
The Mother of God will bring down our edifice
And make mincemeat of
All of these marching toy soldiers of ideals

2

Thus have I heard
We have to be truthful to spiritual kin.
And lie to idiots

Thus have I heard
We need a disguise, a mask
To enter the domain of the Red Goddess

So here are my sweet lies
A Trojan Horse.
An excuse for worship

Please teach me to lie the way you do
Your theophany, your mythopoetics
Your bridge to the land of truth

The all-too-human lie is just a habit
The habit of persona
The habit of the clown
A habit of suffering
The lie that can only be cured by annihilation

Dear Red Goddess
Forgive me for writing these lies
Whatever is true belongs to you
Whatever is false
Is my drunken stumbling around

3

The game is running out.
There isn’t much gas in the engine
We are dead ‘the day after tomorrow’ you say
Or even sooner

Better find a way
To light the ignition
To play that strange music
To offer flesh and wine

In the end, what’s left of the spiritual path
But some cheap entertainment?
The eyeglasses and bones of the master

And yet Rome has never stopped burning
The Red Sea has never stopped overflowing
Rip tides keep tearing up our perfect afternoons

So let us drink your dark wine
In this rare moment
It’s not coming back again
And the world is fading from our eyes

This flood of love
‘A 10-ton catastrophe on a sixty-pound chain’
Sings the Wild God St. Nick
‘I’m vibrating, I’m transforming … ‘

4

Let us choose the useless path of poetry.
Join Lee Lozowich's bad poetry society.
Be holy idiots of love.

The more useless poets we become,
The more useful we can be

Not measuring loss and gain.
Not interested in ‘the right words’
Opting out of the argument
But ready to go into battle for
Goodness, truth and beauty

No more tolerance for
The prosaic, the serious, the academic
Kindly and tender-hearted, but not fooled.

And above all, Lee Lozowich's bad poets
(who are sublime poets)
Let us make offerings, not excuses

5

The education system
has taught us to be small and stupid
While talking big and smart

It is a cosmological demonic edifice
Is Darker than any medieval sect

Its Biology is pornography.
Its Chemistry death worship.
Its Architecture is moloch.
Its Religion is pornography

But thank Goodness for the
Sublime alternative school system
That is: The Red Goddess and Her studies
of Nothing Ordinary at all

Dear Red Goddess
Forgive us our ‘intelligence’.
Forgive us our ‘education’
Let us get down to undressing the world

5

People fear the devil.
But it’s the power of the slug
That is truly terrifying

An army of slugs can go unnoticed.
The lazy slug in your soul
Is your worst enemy

Slugs don’t get to be butterflies.
Slugs remain in slug Ghettos.
Even with their PhDs

The boon of slughood
The curse of Sluggland
It is overwhelming and underwhelming

The professor Slug
Has proven again and again
Through empirical studies
That God doesn’t exist

Bravo. But what is the reward
A trophy for a slug?
Slug heaven?

6

I am a big fiction
You are the facts
I am the spectator
You are spectacular

With your legs folded on a sofa
Disguised as a fat midwestern biker/gardener
A Hell's Angel in drag

Now your ‘words flow down like mountain streams’
Now your silence smites spiritual practitioners
Inmates of the loony bin

The more drunk you are, the more sober
The crazier, the more sane
The meaner, the more compassionate

My heart, this block of ice
This Titanic selfhood
Sinking on its dark sea
Roses bloom in my eyeballs

How did this happen
Tears and gratitude
At last

7

Did Jesus walk on water
Of course he did
In the same way
You breath
And bleed
And talk

Is the Red Goddess real?
Of course she is
She is real in every curve
And every glance
Of every woman

Do I believe in God as Man
Of course I do
Just as I believe in
The Mother of God
And in the nothingness and everythingness
of God too

What happened to the believers
What happened to the holy fire of mystics
Why do we put so much stock in human logic?
You can have it all, my empire of dirt, sang Johnny Cash
in his last gasping

8

Confessions of a spiritual pornographer:

I am the diletant magician
Welcome to my garçonnière
To my Boy-Pharos world of spirituality.

My ambition is relentless
I have ransacked all the ashram libraries
Partaken in the finest free lunches (And learned there are no free lunches!)

I have mumbled words in Sanskrit, Hebrew, and ancient Japanese
I have Jerked off to Nisargatta and Ramana
I have sat for 40 days watching a bug on the Zendo floor

I have stolen eloquent phrases to seduce spiritual ladies
I have put on airs of detachment to cover up my envy and lust
I have spoken about my ‘non-dual ‘experiences’
Collected gurus and spiritual names

I’ve tried everything. Orgies, celibacy, monogamy, polyamory, Men’s work, Western Occultism, Neo-Tantra, Tarot, Cabbala with a K and a C,
Zen, Gurdjieff, Cosmic Christ, and Lillith (on top)

I’ve got to admit
It’s all fashion and Pimping
It’s all bullshit in the end
Until we fall into the real orgie
The way Things really are`
The way You really are
The way Love really is

9

There is nothing wrong
with unruly roses and barking dogs
with the assassin cat and the headless mouse

Life is a bloodbath, life is sublime
And on this spring evening, the Empress rules

And I am remembering
The rusty nail of youth
We played the roulette wheel and lost!

To live with loss and heartbreak
That is the sweetness
To drink this bitter liquor in twilight
Mumbling words of prayer
That is repentance

Death is so close only we don’t know it
But so is Her transparency
So is His Endlessness

Now that death is knocking
A rattling terror machine
So is the ladder to the divine
The legs of heaven open wide

10

Nothing needs to be added to
These blue mountains
This golden ground
This May riot of red roses
And yet I am compelled to sing the blues

Birth and death
Old age and sickness
An ink drop in a river
A burning bale of straw
And yet I am compelled to sing the blues.

Chorus: When all else fails
When all else fails
You are the only
Wind in my sails

Let me tune into your Radio station
Let me shout out for salvation.
And learn to be dead.
And learn to be dead.

If only I could do nothing
Yet my mind keeps on spinning.
There is silence in the center.
There is Divine Revelation
And yet I am compelled to sing the blues.

This much vaunted Work
A splinter in my eye
Your beauty makes me tremble.
Your terrible symmetry
And yet I am compelled to sing the blues

Dark Wine by Just a Tourist: