31
Every few days, I fall into a pit, a self-induced coma
It is forgetfulness and dullness
This place is called normal
It is a zombie show
An endless parade of violence and gore
And yet, everyone is bored
It is a fashion show.
Full of desirable creatures in various forms of undress
And yet nobody has a hard-on
It is a detective series
With an arcane plot
And yet the serial killer is never found
It is a comedy full of canned laughter
And not one joke
Is genuinely funny
It is a sci-fi series
In search of paradisical worlds
And yet, everything is exactly the same out there
It is a romantic comedy
With no love and no romance
About nihilism and disappointment
It is a reality TV show
About the automatic life, the unconscious life
What Monsieur G calls ‘merde’
It is a nature documentary about sharks.
Written and performed by sharks
A true crime series
Except nothing is true
And everyone is guilty
Yes, as you might have guessed
I am the director
The lead actor, the stage manager of Samsara
This is my confession
But Thank You for the gift of ‘remorse of consciousness’
Let me drag my ass up the stairs
Pour the tea, offer the flowers, tell you I’m sorry
32
This is what we do:
Affirmation/negation
Round and round we go in the circle game
The only reconciliation will be music
The only diplomatic immunity, a guitar
The Only Peace Between Man and Woman, a song
My song is called ‘The Red Goddess’
Yours is ‘The Titanic’
I declare your beauty; you ironize
I romance the stone; you mock
Well, mock on ladies
Here I am with my hard-on in my hand
Put it on the chopping block if you like
I’ve got no choice but to provoke you
And face the consequence
Of course, I hear your warnings
I know your doubts
And yes, I am afraid
But, like soldiers, we go to battle
Our orders are obscure
The trenches are filled with blood and piss
But we have been told
Given an ultimatum
If we don’t fight
We are already dead
33
It is winter, and the trees are painted red
We don’t ever think that this might be
The last day, The last hour
Because everything just keeps going on
The bone-crushing and the sweetness
The newsreels of horror
The afternoon lovemaking
The child keeps crashing around the living room
The wife keeps the accounts in order
And I have found some stolen time to play with words
The same song, the same words, the same variation of a theme
For we only have one song to sing, said Leonard Cohen
Every song is about the same thing
It is all about the Red Goddess dancing in the living room
It is all about Kobayashi Issa whose daughter died and wrote
’The world of dew is the world of dew, and yet and yet’
It matters because it’s all going away
I love you because you aren’t you anymore
The images we have of our friends are obsolete
They aren’t the same friends anymore
We are surfing on an invisible Tsunami
A big wave waiting to break apart this image, this dream, this narrative
And who will we be once cracked open?
Will we be dancing, or will we be breaking teeth?
I guess it’s up to You, dear Red Goddess
I am in Your hands.
34
Even though nothing works
The trick is to smile
The trick is to compliment the red Goddess
The trick is to give her whatever she wants
The trick is to give up on the project of reformation
To respond to her flirtation
To know Her beyond good and evil
When I learn to take my own advice
A microdose of faith
Everything can change
Even though nothing changes
When I realize how free I am in my chains
Then a new man can inhabit
This failing project called a body
The new man who has humour
He is no longer in the bottleneck
He can walk over the field of corpses and flowers
Weeping and laughing
At the same time
In the song of the world
We are already corpses and flowers
There is nothing to become
But dust at your feet
35
What we need more than anything else
Is your interruption
Is your cutting of the fabric
Is your elixir of blue sky
And to be unstuffed, unsewn, unmade, unsold
And to find ourself to be
Not at the same old afternoon picnic
With its rotten potato salade, said says tk
But at the great cosmic ball
We see a bunch of pictures
Clichés we call the world
We are lost in the clichés, and God forbid
We even start to make a cliché out of you
Please forgive us moderns and our cliches
And our cowardly forms of living
And our suburban hiding
Please forgive our cameras and our satellites
Our award ceremonies and our puppet statements
Our school slaughterhouses and our hospitals that are the same
How did we get here? How did we lose access to your world
How can we become divinized as Man and Woman
Without the contraption, without the apparatus
Without the dream control
It seems we do everything wrong,
We’ve never learned to suffer or even love
So, we make a mockery of both
Please forgive us for wasting precious time
Please allow us to feel the honest remorse
Please help us turn toward the bright innocence
That is the only wisdom
36
I thought I caught a glimpse of you
On a Grecian island
In a deep forest
In a truck stop in Texas
In a room full of amputees
No criteria for beauty
You are everywhere
I thought I saw you again
But then I stuck a cigarette in my eye
And made love to a goat
Such is the absurdity of humans.
While living in the abundance of abundance
We insist on being small
The problem seems to be
We don’t like to suffer
The problem seems to be
That we don’t want to be nailed to a cross
The problem seems to be that we’d rather sit on a beach with
A cocktail while the vultures circle
And the pedophile’s dance
The world goes to hell
And yet yet
The beauty of those noble vultures
Who picks our bones clean
And make us ready for the crematorium
Where She dances in the coals
37
When I first met the ‘Dear Great Grandfather’
The father of the fathers
He told me, ‘Who taught you to lie’?
He showed me first that I was made of lies
Mostly I lived in a house of lies
In a country of lies, on a continent of lies
How to express gratitude for that painful Gift
For the sheer ‘horror of the situation’
For the possibility of the Red Goddess
For as Monsieur G tells us: first notice the sleeping bed of lies
Then, one day, you will be ready for the realization of your own nothingness
As Grandfather Trungpa said
‘Only then can nothing be something’
These poems are a collection of ancient bones
The call of grandfathers
Beyond that wall
The Red Goddess lives
In her house, where none of the machinations of sleepwalkers
Matter in the least
And yet, still, she takes a form of divinity out of kindness
She can be seen and heard
But those who are not sleeping
She is intuited by those who
Long to wake up from
The Bad Dream of Contemporary
Civilization
38
Dear Red Goddess,
I write you from the impossibility of myself
I write you on the edge of nullity
I write to you knowing that crawling to the grave cannot be the right path
I write you because of a fundamental ache
I write you because I’m losing the game
I write you because I’m a failure in every sense of the word
I write you because somehow You love me
I write you because I don’t actually believe it
I write you because I know that it’s true
I write you because of the denial of love
I write you because of the affirmation of love
I write you when both arrive at my door at the same time
I write you because Jesus is Judas, and Judas is Jesus
I write you because original sin doesn’t exist
I write you because I’m a wretched sinner
I write you because I don’t care
I write you because I care too much
I write you because of the desperation of my indifference
I write you because the brothers of Karmazov are at war in my breastbone
I write you because maybe you know the way out of this place
I write you because there is no way out of this place
I write you just because I need an excuse
To say I love you all over again
39
Insomina is your grace
Gap is your fullness
Night is your lantern
In you all opposite are sames
All twos are ones
All ones are broken
All the street lamps are smashed
Wild animals roam the imagination
A crescent moon shows that holy tension
A tension that will not allow sleep
That will not allow death
That keeps me raving at 3am
Dear Red Goddess
Why do you keep me up
Writing these poems to you
Why won’t you give me
A moment of swoon
A moment of loss
Turn off the machine
Turn off the lights
Turn off the dreams
Give me the deep sleep
That is your waking
The death that is your living
The moon no longer full of hallucinations
Just that moon
Take me over the bridge of winter
Let me sleep again in your infinite arms
40
There are certain women
Neither Lilith nor Mary
Neither Whore nor Virgin
Who are none of those fantasies that sailors have
And yet, who are all of them
It’s just that the Red Goddess
While being an image
Points beyond image
While being an icon
Points beyond idolatry
Of course, Alister Crowley
He knew of you, but did he really kneel before you
Or did he just posture
But do we have to climb mountains to find you
Do we have to count a zillion mantras?
Do we have to lay our bodies down on the dirt?
Certainly, a sacrifice has to be made
The sacrifice of our complexity by complicated means
The creation of the rare blue pancake?
Dear red Goddess, please point me to the sacrifice
Whatever strange form it takes
And make me ready to receive you
Show me the simplicity of the red goddess
And the irony of Her snake
The poem is the secret currency.
For you can’t be seduced
By any other means
This continues to be good Andrew. Thank you.