You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place?
Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees.
One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.
~René Daumal
A sigh towards the window
the heavy sun passing over a fabricated lawn
the sub-woofing of an overhead fan hypnotizes my attention into deep grey circles
It wasn't but three days ago when the sun rose on these eyes through pine tree icicles and the morning air bit my fingers like box cutters. The pure smile under suffering is the raw life I've missed so dearly in this fine linen and cheap cologne supermall of a society. Now, in full comfort, I sit in bitter bile.
Hit with a Great Depression in the silent February industrial town
as fast as far as the airplane can fly, the great wide skies of paradise California were no ceiling for this dull drizzle of lead.
A few days of hope and joy, energy, fear and worry pulled at my fragmented life into a whir
Static electricity between speckled memories
so many hours minutes and moments of golden dust that has become the airy dream of an endless Summer.
What to do, Kathmandu?
What to DO?!
Effervescent, iridescent, alkaline butterflies
wings like the nights when the lights perform
float and dance on sunlit dreams
and silently die in the sigh of the storm
Because I have only the strength to step out the door once
and nary a fairy as clever as Carey can live on the wage of a dunce
So I'll join the industrial military
give it up and bow
and marry
Scary
to the one who cared
to the dream who for four seasons Winter spared
"Peter Pan
be a man
be a Man!
Peter Pan!"
All these voices inside my own chorus, drawn from the highways, byways
looks of clean cut passerby
looks from the aeroplanes, helo-drones and satellites in my desert sky
none of them my ways
"the world isn't going to change for you" but it did for the gays!
and how softly I fall into the nightmare that this is the world
that I surrendered,
settled,
made my peace,
forgot the East
dumb my mind with the fatty flesh of the simple innocent beast
leech and leech
the pathetic plight of the cow, their skittish fear and slow dumb vengeance rot my body
drag me into the mog of suffering we inflict on the land
No more machines, I want to cry!
no more
NO MORE
I am going to break
to tweak
I shake
Inside this conditioned air I feel so weak...
so weak...
...no more...
only with Earth's wild voice do I wish to even speak
be my voice, oh Mother of mine
the Musk Deer trees and still-clean streams...
so few to speak for
so few to speak for
And the one's there are
so far...
so far...
No more air-planes, jet-planes, jet-trains, jet-boats, re-motes, scape-goats, rain-coats
Rain on me,
Blue
So I can finally be You
