Ploughing The Clouds

One begins with loss
in order to guarantee
obliquity.

A landscape
of material scatter
along Long River.

One withdraws
in circumspect tranquility
to one's opal
and cultivates
a quiet enthusiasm.

And of course
under such conditions,
when acquiesced unto,
access to Black Lake
that truly subtends all happenstance
is never denied one.

One's opal is deepened thereby.

Deep Storage
comes readily as resource.

Enthusiasm is a positive quality,
often redemptive
of Melee.

Crystal, in sporadic flashes through absence,
is visible.

All this pertains to the practice
of Obliquity.

One gathers in the scatter
and abides.

Look out the great picture window:
How violets
spring up
along Long River
just where its waters
fork
before the Gorge--one branch
zig-zags into it--
one branch
meanders
towards Black Lake
and as it flows by
picks up
from what might be Deep Storage
the roots of enthusiasm,
sowing violets,
the state of release
native to Wrench Boy--
some elements for an heraldic emblem--
gorge, fork, and a sign for Deep Storage
that is perhaps a phallus
or a toadstool--
or an eye
escutcheoned
on a small stone--
but a real eye
released from all thralldom
so that Wrench Boy
shall never seem
an articulation of happenstance merely.
His focus will be that good.
Always direct access
through Long River
to Black Lake
by means of a studied obliquity,
an easy exactitude,
Black Lake and its link to Deep Storage,
the one thing needful
like a small stone
where Justice
in the grand sense
appears in the sudden instance,
with the brightness of the form of Jaguar
leaping
across the gorge
and its bottom,
bottomless, truly,
just like a black lake
without bifurcation--Black Lake
towards which Hammerhead lists in his obliquity.

If Melee confuses,
Crystal alerts--

neither scatter nor misdirection
is finally the essence of Melee--
Fork but a tool of obliquity
in the arsenal of Wrench Boy--
Silence
at the bottom
of Melee--as if held
in a pot, cup, cat's bowl, chalice, caldron
Black Lake itself
the deepest innuendo of Opal--
pot, cup, chalice . . .
its reflex in the heraldry
Wrench Boy devises
when he works with his opal . . .

A bifurcation
certainly
in the esence
of Melee--
she lives
in The Old Hotel
together with Wrench Boy
as her syzygy,
organized in spirit by Crystal.
Together
they reach
in Deep Storage,
are together
by virtue
of Black Lake--

Look out your picture window
onto the handsome meadow--

the colors of its stones and pathways--
beauty arises in
the exactitude of colors--
they are kept and flashed from Deep Storage--
deep colors
not in hue
but spiritual intensity--
within each color there flows
one attitude of Long River--
Violet herself
whose essence is such color--

And Melee knows dalliance with ghosts--
that too is an attitude of Long River.

I bought a fork
carved from a white root.

It was made to keep it in Deep Storage
in a hut of black withies wreathed
by the shade of a lake.

And a single quartz crystal
across many lives.

Though my own being be but melee,
that stone escutcheoned to the stem of an African Rattle
aborts essential scatter

and I am loosed from the coils

of every misdirection . . .

Ploughing The Clouds

Scatter silence
when Happenstance allows.

Out of Deep Storage
a forest of African Rattles.

Search your opal
with appropriate enthusiasm.

Exquisite misdirection
prepares the path
by moving ten-thousand African Rattles.

Bifurcation at this point.

Opal shows a field of aging violets
whose hidden effluence
manifests The Crone.
Her name is Jacinth.

On the other hand, Hammerhead
listens for Silence
when Happenstance allows.
He bows to Jacinth.
Together they work Deep Storage.

Crystal sits as a star
to release the world in syzygy.

[]

Violet, who is Jacinth,
occupies herself with The Gorge.

It is a figure for Great Loss
and commutes with Deep Storage.

A grim enthusiasm
animates release--
enthusiasm for radical birfurcation,
to use, transmute, and surmount it?
Partially.
But Violet, who is Jacinth,
works Obliquity,
always with an eye upon
The Higher Happenstance.

[]

Long River
tempers enthusiasm,
its zig-zags and meanders
study misdirection.
African Rattles adorn its broken banks.
Wrench Boy forever
the Prince of true enthusiasm--
he together with Melee
withdraw for a while to Deep Storage
passing working focus
to the operations of Hammerhead.

Chalice and caldron
bifurcate enthusiasm.

The Higher Happenstance
by-passes Misdirection; that is,
Black Lake
at the secret bottom
of pot, cup, cat's bowl, chalice, caldron.

Hammerhead is leery
of shallow enthusiasts
upon whom he practices
a studied misdirection--
a fork in the path,
a storm in the opal,
a garden of ambiguous berries
whose ambiguously organized lanes and overhangs
let Happenstance
torture Focus.

If you see a ghost: release.
Jacinth is The Old Hotel
and jaguars haunt its chambers.
And The Old Hotel is The World.
And The Crone shakes African Rattles.
And it's time to come to peace
in The Old Hotel.

Interval

That which takes you
to the Other Side
comes from the Other Side.

You do not find it for a price
in the oligarchs' garden.

Leave them alone--these potency accumulators--
and they'll not exert their power

unless they see you written
on the escutcheoned stone.

They see the eye
but not the hollows--
each stone passes through its own silence.

Hide the eye
in a wallet.

Keep silence
in the shadows.

Language is a well.

[]

"What does that mean--"
asked Violet.
"Language is a well?"

Violet who is Jacinth
responded:

"A well does not produce,
it gathers black waters
from tributary streams
under rocks--language
gathers intelligence
from tributary intellects.
They congregate
among stones and shadows
and elaborate ameliatory trajectories--
they sting
the oligarchs
in the garden."

[]

"Being swells into apparency
from its emptiness
like my puff balls,"

the Pooka said
and vanished
behind his own utterance.

Greenness
comes out of the north
from another epoch.

Time in the moment
knows release
and attention
falls into
its own trajectory,
leaves all else
behind. What else?

The mushrooms
spring up
without horticulture.

They are Immediacy's
children. They take you
to the origin
that is the timeless whir
of the moment.

Every word
its own thralldom.

Wrench Boy is The Pooka.

Ploughing The Clouds

The attitude of "Happenstance"
is incomprehensible to ghosts;
nor do they use misdirection
to propagate a fork
in the melee, as
some tactitians
might do.

If they hear an African Rattle,
figures within its sonorities
call to certain immaterial organs
dispersed mysteriously
throughout their ectoplasm.

But the manner of their being
is very questionable.
It is like a gazing opal.

Obliquity dominates ontology.

The mind that exercises itself on ghosts
must release its cracker self-confidence
and suck the juice of a gourd
destined, when well-desiccated, to be crafted
into an African Rattle.
The seeds must be transformed to tiny crystals.

Wrench Boy is Pooka.
He doesn't have to do this.
His gourds are full of the waters of Black Lake,
and this is a Water
That Does Not Wet The Stone, yet
his misdirection
works like The Great Fork.

Hammerhead stands and watches.
His conduct is governed by focus.

There is silence in his opal--
so great is the focus of Hammerhead.
There is an opal of absolute loss--
nothing left but crystal.

Wrench Boy appears
when one's spirit is loose,
empty, not vacuous.

There is an opal of Misdirection.
It releases on Obliquity.

Violet, who is Jacinth,
operates all these opals.

Melee is affinitant to Fork.

Is loss real?

Discover Crystal as affinitant to Focus.

Silence en route or as consequence.

To find The Gorge
focus is not requisite but advisable.

Not a good idea
to be too loose down there.

Take along a well-constructed crystal.

Don't cloud your opal.

Beware of misdirection
at every fork.

[]

Study to find Right Focus.
Needless to say, no ghost need heed this.
They occupy The Gorge
when they wish it, or when they must,
or when Long River
vanishes from the opal and they're loosed
from the music
of African Rattle.

Though my opal reports such obliquity
as Deep Storage keeps from me,
I keep my crystal
across my many lives . . .

Then loss pertains to the Gorge and its merciless scatter;
but they that wield a fork and keep a crystal, well,
when Focus and Release are simultaneous,
Opal evolves to its fullness.

[]

No need to be apprehensive that Misdirection
will queer requisite obliquity.

[]

Jacinth calls Jaguar to her caldron.

Together they call just those ghosts
whose affinity is with crystal,
though their dance has the vitality of Melee.

Jaguar and his cohort
bring ghosts to The Old Hotel.

[]

I can see it all in my opal:
Recompense for the study of obliquity
and a discipline of forbearance
pertaining to sweet Melee.

Ploughing The Clouds

Misdirection gets you to Black Lake.

Obliquity's insemination
loosens the earth for Violet.

Melee, red haired and freckled, red tresses flaming,
African Rattles in her two hands sonorously shaking,
do not so much mutilate Mistress Silence
as broadcast her power.

Violet, smiling, waves in the hot breeze.

Soon matters will come to a focus.

Images of melee cover the great plates of the doors
behind which Hammerhead scurries
and deliberates, watching the forges.
He builds titanic caldrons,
but they'll boil in small huts
with black withies wreathed round
surrounding the virtual locus
where Black Lake fades off in black mist.

Such obliquity releases Wrench Boy
from Loss and its compensations.
Hence, when he summons ghosts
with his African Rattle,
their joy or despondency
as reflected in his spirit
do not come to possess of him.
Wrench Boy is their executor
by virtue of this purity.
He shakes his African Rattle
to scatter whatever
zoos of disruptive attitude
lurk in the ambience.
In this way he works with Hammerhead,
who works in turn the caldron
maintaining his famous focus.

As African Rattles grow quiescent,
Obliquity merges with Silence,
and Jaguar emerges from the flames.

Black Lake comes out of obscurity
in the big cat's form: black spots like Argos eyes,
sentient and shining.

We are in The Old Hotel--
pot, cup, cat's bowl, chalice, and caldron,
each in its proper chamber.

The flame in the ambience resolves
to general enthusiasm
refined by the obliquity
of the itinerary
that led to its advent.

Jaguar stands in the foyer
fisting an African Rattle
tall as himself, like a scepter.

This is the Higher Happenstance--
all things elite
in the releasement of their true nature.
In this prospect each does have one:
The sounds of an African Rattle
brought to a fine, tense focus.
In the center of the garden
a chalice, fantastically wrought.
Obliquity, not multiple bifurcations merely.
Hammerhead masters scatter;
Deep Storage, an orderly receptacle
for what scatter distributes
and Hammerhead hammers
into configured identity
in the forges deep under the basements
of The Old Hotel.

Focus is pertinent
even for Melee.
Her energy allows her to channel
an avatar of Hammerhead
and, dancing with Wrench Boy in syzygy,
to enflame The Old Hotel
till it crystalizes all the "scatter"
that from anywhere
takes out rooms in it.

[]

Call all this a kind of genial horticulture,
Ploughing the Impossible--trowel in hand, no oxen--
by means of the focus provided
by African Rattles, by spirits
divulged in a caldron.

Even The Old Hotel
has a higher nature--
a castle in the clouds,
an exfoliation of supernal silence.
Hammerhead has a form
that rises over a cloud bank,
that feels the deepest currents of Long River,
even if it's only his avatars,
River-Head, Nut-Head, Pot-Head, Head-Head.
However released or realized,
this higher nature
covers the True--
Coniunctio of Focus and Obliquity,
a scattering away of what obscurity
smokes The Opal.

Obliquity itself has its garden--
Gorge deepened to the register
of profundity, sublimity,
when it integrates its own coarseness and declivities
with the way these are oblique
to the quotidian
taken as real.

Obliquity itself
compensates
indomitable Loss.

Ploughing The Clouds

Obliquity makes matters
difficult for Opal,
though silence may come
with studied focus.

Crystal does not
participate in such difficulties--
she sits beyond the clouds,
imparting a violet aura
to the Great Endeavor,
oblivious to the melee below.

She proffers her harmonic to the ghost-like transiencies
that flit across
crystalline refractions
and does not rue the loss
of the physical world.

In this she is different from Violet
who, twining about Wrench Boy's
arms and silver wrenches,
yearns to furnish nosegays for jaguars
with their magnificent physical enthusiasm.
Were all this to fall silent,
she would lose her focus,
the great cat bowl broken,
the physical stability and phantasmagoria alike
of her manifest universe
reduced to triviality and scatter.

[]

The silence in The Old Hotel
stimulates a different sort of enthusiasm.
The melee outside
not so much misdirection
as extraneous distraction;
though if focus comes
too quickly to Melee,
sadly,
an opportunity lost.

[]

Long River flows
from the Caldron Primeval
furnishing in the turbulent
melee of its waters
a proper counterfoil to Hammerhead.

Hammerhead's embryo or zygote requires
Melee as its intimate, if miniscule, syzygy.

[]

For Jaguar, focus is inessential
to the exercise of energy.
Enthusiasm is his bailiwick,
but he collapses in lethargy
at the very thought of loss.

[]

Black Lake abstains from debate about the physical.
Whatever one thinks is real,
there it is at the bottom--
the Gorge internal
to what is material;
opalescent margins manifest
to whatever is not.

Wrench Boy flits among flowerets
or drives steel pistons when he needs to.
Let fixities come to scatter,
Wrench Boy is indomitable--
the emperor of rocky continents,
the prince of ghosts.
Pot, cup, cat bowl, chalice, caldron--
instruments of Wrench Boy.

Consider the Gorge.
The very word
mauls silence.
Happenstance happens
in detail amidst its grizzly declivities
and coarse, uncomely, earthen discontinuities.
What grows there
like what flourishes in badland, steppe, and desert,
realizes a magnificently individuated toughness
or perishes in merciless transciency.

[]

There is a fork in Happenstance
and Wrench Boy travels
all five prickly tines.
Ghosts flare up from the sites
where tine points prick the ground.
Easily he harnesses jaguars,
lacing violets
about his bronze accouterments--
hair knots, benches, wrenches.

[]

When did Wrench Boy
fall prey to scatter?

It was like this.

African Rattles flattered The Gorge.
They filled it with a crystalline susurrus--
sonorities so sharp and sparkling,
so finely tuned and perspicuous,
that in seeking out its particulates,
they actually focused the Gorge.

This was no ordinary matter of happenstance.
Wrench Boy watched and listened
and in this episode
it so unsettled the special balances and complementarities
among members of the collective--
that there was slippage in Deep Storage--
apprehension that loss might vibrate
through Happenstance itself--
the noise of the Gorge
merge with an eruption of ghosts.
Wrench Boy was forced
to manifest as Regulator
imposing rigorous silence
simply to bring focus to his own
disconcert and scatter.

[]

Wrench Boy, the Gardner,
leaned on his rake
and actually cackled at the sight of it.
No one is dead.
Long River rises,
Long River tumbles,
desiccates,
there's only a trickle,
a river of gray rocks
where waters should be,
but tilt the crystal
so another facet faces the moonlight
and the silence starts talking
or you do--
in fact a minute ago I just did

start talking
to a certain interlocutor,
a friend of mine, in the mind,
dead, theoretically,
a decade ago.
Then is Loss not real?
Possibly.
But sadness
is another matter,
thought Wrench Boy.

Ploughing The Clouds

Is silence sufficient
to bring an opal?

Of course not.

Does a haunting by ghosts show
a history of loss?

Hammerhead doesn't think so,
yet he rings his habitat
round with shining crystals.
He festoons his hammers with violets.
Why do this?
The truth is
he's haunted.
We all are.
Black Lake looms and bodes.

Hammerhead weighs the happenstance of crystal--
what brings it
into being,
what turbid caldron
under The Old Hotel
where bubbles are opals
and steam fumes ghosts--
haunted images indeed
symptomatic of loss.

Jaguar bides his own happenstance.

Happenstance is indifferent
to gain or loss, certainly,
but given that this is so,
how does Wrench Boy
manage just to be Wrench Boy,
violets twined round his arms and silver wrenches
all night long
in The Old Hotel?

What night was it?

Violet was tending her pots and composing racemes.

A certain affective quality
saturated the Red Lounge
as if a faint aroma from Black Lake
were being gently scattered by calm wind.

Melee was out
setting up a garden.

Would Hammerhead indemnify the loss
that the garden inevitably would suffer,
it being built by her?

It is not misdirection to release
from the chalice, deftly decorated to honor Violet,
fumes and efficacies,
exact provocations
to higher zeppelins of consciousness.

Hammerhead hammered out crystals
to indemnify the Higher Happenstance itself
to what avail?

[]

The Gorge was listening.
He pondered, openly:

"You cannot grow opals in a garden,
even the one out back of The Old Hotel.
I've seen a universe
carpeted with African Rattles.
They were ourselves.
How did we get here?
Did a crystal appear from beyond
the covering of clouds,
reflecting five pointy pencils of exogenous light,
and where the pencils wrote upon the earth
heavenly violets propagated?
Was such an event what they call the Higher Happenstance,
insemination readily differentiable
from a mere scattering of seeds?

Consciousness might be a ghost,
but such an assertion was once
a monstrous event of misdirection.
Do we emerge one day from Deep Storage?
I deny it.
Nor were we first deliverances in an opal.
There was no first.
A ghost popped out, then another ghost,
and the night space waxed enthusiastic.
Happenstance itself encompassed the egregious enigma.
But when focus returned, it was plain
that Violet--the girl Violet--was no ghost,
nor were any of the other
members of the Collective.
And yet there was life in the opal.
You cannot deny what you see there,
and that it is you yourself
that does see it so.

I myself am a kind of caldron.
What scatters in my depths and along my declivities
may foster, indeed, what they call the Higher Happenstance,
albeit through my wise obliquity,
my being the occasion for loss
should one stumble into me.
I am no ornamental garden though my roilings
may motivate what you see
sometimes in your opal.
Violets grow anywhere inside me,
but the girl does not hear what I say."

[]

We heard a ratchety noise
like some enormous scattering
of who knows what sort of particles
in Deep Storage--
pots and cups and forks.
A row of the latter forced itself
up through the tough ground
that recently had dried up in the garden
and scattered the inhabitants
of The Old Hotel
who ruefully stepped out back
to witness what was amiss.
The titanic tableware was there,
tines up, handles stuck
in the black dirt,
Long River running past us,
too full, too fast--
pots, cups, cat bowls, chalices, tumbling caldrons
off to who knows whither?

And when they were gone, just silence--
silence in the caldron,
also in the opal. Crystal.
Night about Black Lake.

Return to mannerly happenstance.

Interval

Black Lake is hidden
and guarded by a blue mole
that appears
in certain paintings
like an intimation of vast waters
or of the sky itself.

The mole is my left eye.
It's out of whack
so that I must close it
when I need to see
without the duplicity
of my own systematic.

Leave me alone, worldly labor.
I have to plough the clouds.
There's nothing left to see
and Black Lake manifests
below me
without effort
on my part
or audacity.

Give me my mountain of collyrium,
an ointment for my eye--
I see everything.

They broke my brain
and distressed me
for some months,
but then the work began--
to climb the mount of Trakadud.

The eyesight of insight--
steal it from anywhere.

I'll save the scholar her labor
if she'll let me
(probably not)
if she'll fish in these waters--
nothing obscure here.
The doctor put and eye into my eye
and the waters
that are wives
flow out and bring comfort
in the proper cultural context;
otherwise
they give birth to the world.

Vrtra is the covering.
The Cup of Jamshid.
What does Black Lake cover?

Red letters
for the meta-text . . .

Ploughing The Clouds

A good place for ghosts to inhabit
would be an African Rattle.

There is proximity to Black Lake
and the intimate internal scattering
of seeds, pebbles, baubles, tacks, bee-bees, whatever,
inside the gourd bulb.

And Wrench Boy deploys a rattle responsibly,
if quixotically.

And Hammerhead inspects the forest where they burgeon.

High above the forest twinkles Crystal.

All members of the Collective,
taken at the appropriate phase,
have gods in them, or the spirit
that renders them gods, not godlike only,
the real article, hence the universal
enthusiasm, the jazzy elan
that sparks the whole.

Each is like this--
only when in phase, however.

And how the phases are arranged,
each makes known in turn--
a peculiar systematic, surely,
with dubious issue.

Wrench Boy favors happenstance.
Hammerhead hammers and haggles,
calls in authoritarian forces,
is wary of jaguars. All this occurs,
and the order of the phases is imposed
or disrupted, left to articulation
behind the Veil of Distinction.

When Gorge reigns, it seems as if
African Rattles were susceptible to effluences
from Black Lake--dark music
suffuses a general feeling that
all things are rather scattered.
Who knows who plays god now?
It hides in the deeps.

I myself like it best
when The Old Hotel is illumined from within--
lights flash wildly
from window after window.
There seems to be a Master of Distraction,
but which god is it?

Crystal transcends
even her own enthusiasm,
while Hammerhead, as deity,
renders the deliverances of Long River
in the form of a spectacular order:
an ornamental garden
of infinite depth and grandeur,
sparkling, radiant,
as if all being were a crystal
fantastically faceted
and only The Higher Happenstance
reigned over aleatory.

Obliquity, in season,
executes recommendations
intuited because Black Lake
has released them.

What is it like
when the crystalline essence of opal
appears in the smoky glass
as her own form--
an asterism of crystal? Interpretation:
Happenstance itself
is a fork in your focus.

And it is not necessary at all times
to restrain The Restrainer;
that is, to shunpike Hammerhead
onto a big barge
and let him float away
on his own misadventure
down Long River.

If you choose Happenstance, rather,
Jaguar will compensate your loss,
for under Jaguar's sovereignty,
Obliquity is charged with numinous force;
Silence is charged with a lively apprehensiveness.
What comes next?
A stillness not exempt
from forebodings of imminent scatter.

[]

Crystal is like some
fairy story queen. She has a
clean wand. But in an instant
the scene is released, shifts
and you are shown a Black Lake.
What game is this? No
fairy story now,
but the genuine article. Happenstance
modulates ontological provenience--
and Crystal has a nature
like a gorge--
no superficial sparkling
but that oxidation and reduction
function in crevices and down declivities.
What Long River delivers,
what African Rattle
rattles out,
what happened in Africa
ten-thousand decades ago
subvert the primordial--
five tines in the fork,
at least five.
Happenstance won't yield to focus.
Is this a phase? And even so
under just what provenience?
Crystal sparks give way
to liminal enthusiasms.
Melee dances,
red hair flaming.

Not only something that occurs,
but what?

If you lose yourself in the raging
susurrus of the African Rattle,
flaming jaguars leaping,
not jungle beasts, but what?
What misdirection is this?
Pot, cup, cats bowl, chalice, caldron--
are these transformations of the Same?
Does each indifferently drink down Black Lake?
Does Obliquity phase?
Does the gorge?
Under such conditions (are they conditions?)
listen to Jaguar.
Is he speechless now?
Absolute misdirection!
Appearance and apprehension--
a city of black violets!

Be still
if you can manage it.

Listen for Long River.

Deep Storage
is packed up in deep storage.

If Being itself
were a fork . . .

Ploughing The Clouds

Black Lake might just vanish
when melee rules the mind,
but where True Enthusiasm interbreeds with Happenstance
in an ontological caldron,
Wrench Boy seals his concordat with Hammerhead.

This is in the future.
I see it in my opal.
I brew it in my pot.

And is it misdirection merely
that travels Wrench Boy
to The Old Hotel
and its mischievous garden
where mental melee
breeds a spurious enthusiasm
as if there is no god in it--
no god in God--
only a ferocious assertion of sovereignty qua giddy happenstance
and a gorge opens
and all sorts of abuses
distort divine obliquity?

Scatter such exigency.
Banish it to Deep Storage.
Recall it only if your opal
provides an image for it
that is not Hammerhead, for instance.

Obliquity is more interesting
than a technique for compensatory relief.
When Wrench Boy activates his African Rattle
and Hammerhead glances
sidelong into his opal,
even the Gorge will manifest
as something distinct
from ontological loss.

[]

Silence purifies
The Old Hotel.
An opalescent shimmer
calms down its back lawn garden.

Wrench Boy listens to Long River.
Constancy modulates his enthusiasm.
Constant releases snap
within the enthusiasmic stream.
Long River modulates melee.
Mind recovers its eigenstate, its zealous ownness.
Hammerhead, for his part,
rounds up a cohort of ghosts.
These spasm and dance
and interbreed with Happenstance.
The Higher Happenstance
so manages misdirection
as to effect release
on each occasion of its deployment.

All this works toward Concordat--
but at the right time only--
let Long River arrange this.

[]

As for Melee--
she very well might
juice-up Deep Storage so frightfully
that in the unrectified garden,
black violets pop out
inflected with crystal spicules in the night
exceeding any sober rule of happenstance--
Hammerhead's heavy foot thump
would stomp about the garden
serving notice on The Old Hotel--
unruly happenstance occluding, supposedly,
that is, according to him,
every chance of intuiting Black Lake.

There are no jaguars
in such an old hotel,
no silence. Nevertheless,
Enthusiasm, in the true sense,
is actually quite present in the garden
with its strange black protuberances
and their nocturnal luminescence
in spite of the heavy foot and singular eye of Hammerhead
that suppresses but also reflects this.
For Enthusiasm, dark but true,
interbreeds with Happenstance
whose ontology is continuous with Obliquity
and, in spite of everything,
The Old Hotel maintains a timeless focus
that invents
in the end
a Higher Hammerhead.

Such is the virtue of our caldron.

[]

Oh, Old Hotel, smoky opal,
may your garden be ever loose--
a five-tined fork in your foyer, Old Hotel,
Deep Storage corrected by Melee;
Enthusiasm conjugal with Happenstance

. . . to juice-up Obliquity . . .

Ploughing The Clouds

Enthusiasm erupted through the petals of ten-thousand violets.

All the opals were amazed on their bezels.

Misdirection was quiescent.

Jaguars snaked about
the little flowering stems.

All caldrons bubbled promiscuously,
if somewhat peremptorily--
is now the time?

Wrench Boy activated "the People's Mike Check for the Human Microphone."

He shook his African Rattle and delivered:

"I think that Jaguar
[I think that Jaguar]

should come back from obliquity
[should come back from obliquity]

and lend his energy
[and lend his energy]

to the People's Caldron.
[to the People's Caldron.]

It's cold in the gorge.
[It's cold in the gorge.]

I've just been down in there.
[I've just been down in there.]

And I'm here to report
[And I'm here to report]

Long River has been diverted.
[Long River has been diverted.]

All violets will wither,
[All violets will wither,]

all opals blacken.
[all opals blacken.]

Too long have we succumbed
[Too long have we succumbed]

to dishonorable misdirection.
[to dishonorable misdirection.]

Existence waxes intolerable.
[Existence waxes intolerable.]

No slugs or weeds or happiness at all
[No slugs or weeds or happiness at all]

in the oligarchs' garden.

[]

Silence across the Collective.

A fork of innumerable pointy tines
threatened to proliferate.

Let it?
Great melee.

Restrain the bifurcation at the root?
An end to true release.

Listen to the Gorge.

Existence must proffer its own garden from Deep Storage.

Too articulate, what wisdom
can be loosed
from the gorge
or from wherever
into it?

Invert the gorge, get a mountain.

Too many violets or too few,
what violence!

Practice silence?
Will Black Lake come to us?
Impossible. We must
find our way to it.
Instruction?
Misdirection.

"Wrench Boy, Wrench Boy
come out of your Old Hotel.

I sit in the midst of the Collective
attempting Silence.

Long River runs through the gorge, I know it.
I grasp my African Rattle
to summon appropriate obliquity.
What wisdom can be loosed to us?
I am Hammerhead.
My protuberance has turned into a fork.
Jaguar jabbers at my archaic garb, my white chiton.
I am jabbed by misdirection.
Is the time not yet, not yet
to manifest the Collective?
A fork in existence, not only in ourselves.
Forge unity?
The counter-force is terrified and violent.
They summon ten-thousand ghosts
armed with unintelligible gabble
to blot out both energy and silence.
But silence is the secret
in the sound of African Rattle.
We must suffer our own bifurcation.
Hold Crystal
over the Gorge."

[]

I said
in my heart,
"Never tire of the road.
Subject the oligarchs' garden
to irremediable ware and scatter.
Take money out of the banks.
We are the ghosts
out of the gorge.
We shake our African Rattles.
We redirect Long River.
It runs from our cats' bowl, our caldron,
as from Deep Storage.

[]

I took the human microphone. I said:

"The opal's focus
[The opal's focus]

tolerates
[tolerates]

our own bifurcation.
[our own bifurcation.]

We are The New Old Hotel.
[We are The New Old Hotel.]

We find quiet chambers
[We find quiet chambers]

for all the ghosts
[for all the ghosts]

and avatars
[and avatars]

of Wrench Boy.
[of Wrench Boy.]

[]

Will Long River speak?
Will Bifurcation?
Will African Rattle manifest essential quietude?
Will the oligarchs and their garden
purchase the gorge
and poison us
with spurious violets?
Will Wrench Boy manifest as Happenstance?
Gorge-ghost, gorge-garden.
There is a phase of mind's scatter--
infinite bifurcation is no loss
but a time to gorge on silence.

Interval

They were nobody's avatars.
They were lone gray wolves and wounded elephants,
fluttering lepidopterae,
mountain caribou and long-horned cows,
salmon that leap in Long River running
against the edicts of The Counselors,
whose laws propel the skies.
They were clouds of golden dawn light,
massive galactic clusters riven
by the gazes of gamma ray telescopes.
They were little dogs and feral tabbies.
They had gathered in the oligarchs' garden
to assert the truth of Being.

A nameless Glob rose up on eleven tentacles.
Her thirteen mouths required no megaphone.
She used the human microphone with mike-check.

"We are the General assembly.
[We are the General assembly.]

We count, but we are numberless.
[We count, but we are numberless.]

We take on every appearance
[We take on every appearance]

the transparency of local happenstance
allows.
[the transparency of local happenstance
allows.]

No percentage identifies us
[No percentage identifies us]

because no totality tallies.
[because no totality tallies.]

We belong to every species
[We belong to every species]

living and non.
[living and non.]

Matter is our bailiwick.
[Matter is our bailiwick.]

Space is our abode.
[Space is our abode.]

Wrench Girl and her Syzygy belong with us.
[Wrench Girl and her Syzygy belong with us. ]

Melee rides our fire.
[Melee rides our fire.]

Hammerhead, Hammerhead, where are you headed?
[Hammerhead, Hammerhead, where are you headed?]

Will you be with us
[Will you be with us]

when we open our tongues in the Dream Time
[when we open our tongues in the Dream Time]

and occupy The House of Being and its Banks?
[and occupy The House of Being and its Banks?]

[]

Hammerhead raised two fingers
and the nameless Glob
recognized him.

"Here are some posters I made
[Here are some posters I made]

while sitting on my bed with red sheets.
[while sitting on my bed with red sheets.]

Their utterances came to me in a dream cloud
[Their utterances came to me in a dream cloud]

irradiated by a glittering crystal.
[irradiated by a glittering crystal.]

They say:
[They say:]

BEING IS LICIT
[BEING IS LICIT]
ONLY PURE BEING
CAN HEAL THE BROKEN WORLD
[ONLY PURE BEING
CAN HEAL THE BROKEN WORLD]

EACH SINGULAR ENTITY
IS BEING ENTIRE
[EACH SINGULAR ENTITY
IS BEING ENTIRE]

EVERYTHING THAT APPEARS
APPEARS TO BE
[EVERYTHING THAT APPEARS
APPEARS TO BE]

BUT MONEY HAS AN ENEMY
[BUT MONEY HAS AN ENEMY]

[]

The Assembly broke up
into small groups
to discuss these matters.

Some took the posters
and circumambulate the oligarchs' garden
even today.

This happened inside the People's Caldron
under the Sign of The Fork.

Ploughing The Clouds

Opals are crystals
and African Rattles
are instruments
of Obliquity.

The Old Hotel
is an ontological laboratory.

And jaguars
circumambulate the caldrons
fomenting specially orchestrated
situations where Melee
is permitted to reign
throughout The Old Hotel.

We might impose silence
on the jaguars
involved in these
investigations
save for the fact that a garden
as an open public park
is to be their product,
a retrieval from Deep Storage
of certain efficacious crystals
and large smoky opals
to be planted
at oblique angles
relative to several hubs
whose exact locations
Long River arranges.

In the park
ghosts accept blood offerings
and are sated.

[]

African Rattles sound
at the instant of the kill.

There is a fork
with five tines, naturally,
pertinent to the result.

A charge passes across
the crystalline lattice
of Existence
that the caldrons cook up
to zone things in this matter.

Enthusiasm consumes Obliquity.
That's one tine.

Silence drops on the victims.
But we ourselves are the victims.
Their blood drops on us.
That's another.

Our women ululate in ecstasy and loss.
But the feral dead
for whom the practice is propitiatory--
and they are also ourselves--
and Wrench Boy (who is the Pooka)
is our leader in this--
the feral dead are released,
and they leave The Old Hotel.
That's tine three.

The fourth is performed in secrecy.
Its obliquity
is our obliquity.
Who are we?
Indeed.
And that's the point.
We too release.
Tine five.

Black Lake of course is behind all this.

The Ghosts of the Caldron return to the Garden of Violets--
the public paradise where opals hang from pear trees
and African Rattles stand
in comely collanades (sp?),
and the ghosts themselves
are experimental entities.
We call them into being
in order to add sublimity
to our ornamental garden.
The production of such a garden,
an affect of our laboratory.

Scatter is correlative to release.
One might say that--
Deep Storage in a swoon of Silence.

This motivates the sacred chalice,
the turbulence of whose white broth
provided gladly by Melee,
is by no means misdirection
only
for us,
but this
and the formal stillness
of the African Rattles
and the quivering
of the crystalline lattice
is misdirection indeed
if you stay too long in the garden.

Long River provides succor
for ghosts,
if you happen to be one,
and thirst for more
than a diet of violets.

[]

African Rattle
as distinct from the production of his avatars
under supervision of Hammerhead
and their facile deployment
as primordial forest, or some such--
experiences the poignancy of the loss
of his ruined continent.
And Africa is all of us.

"History is Happenstance"
as motto
is small consolation
and quite questionable.

Jaguar, for one, denies it.

He stands by African Rattle--the archetype,
not the avatars--
and feels the presence of the Great Ghost of The Garden
come to an absolute focus.

The African Rattle
is affinitant with Melee.

All three archetypes--
fixed forms at large
beyond the affect of sublimity
but very much an aspect of the future
in the People's Garden.

Ploughing The Clouds

The African Rattles decided on quietude
while Hammerhead circled the field.
The melee had grown silent.
Stillness fell on the gorge.
All afternoon, the guests in The Old Hotel
tamped down their jaguars.
Violets fluttered in the apprehensive breezes.
Time passing had no shape, no interval, no melody.
Even waiting
stopped.
Even the gorge
was a ghost of itself--nothing falling into it,
nothing crumbling from it,
nothing being devoured.
Could The Old Hotel have become Long River, finally--
bifurcation passed to the limit--an infinite Fork?
Hammerhead circled the field.
Instant after instant
time began again
as if to exact Being itself
as a kind of tariff
from the jowls of light
wider than Melee's
primordial insurrection--flash
flood
flash
through the silence.
Nobody adverted to Deep Storage.
Black Lake commuted with Opal.
In the silence, up rose Jaguar
and gazed along Long River.
Would he see the ghost
whose silence was essential to itself
or was it but a cold breath from Deep Storage?
Long River appeared suddenly to him
like essentially interrupted speech--speech
that ever took itself up again
but never resolved to a garden--things said
and to be said, surely--
but Jaguar mumbled without ceasing;
Long River bumbled along
broken, almost dried up, among large boulders.

[]

Hammerhead kept to his circle
and had no regard for Deep Storage.

The Gorge had no enthusiasm for Melee.

If this be a state of misdirection--
but under whose direction?

Violet was by herself --- deep
without reference
to that which is down in the gorge.

Long River is long enough
to pass through whatever obliquity
with which Melee might divert its path;
meld silence through enthusiasm
without scotching it utterly.

[]

I'm trying to work out, work through,
what I don't see or understand.

Is Deep Storage stocked only
with previous storage
or --
pot, cup, cat's bowl, chalice, caldron--
does its melee--
with or without misdirection--
under whom-so-ever's
direction--
stock up The New?
And is The Now
the form
of The New?
And are these my questions?

Hammerhead walks in a circle
obsessed by the forms of these questions
but does he ask them?

When time is denuded of interval,
incapable of song--
does timeless Black Lake
rise up from its bottom
as it?

But here there is release,
Long River is never impeded,
and somehow, without interval or time-shape,
still there is song.

I think the gorge has something to do with it.
That, and the matter of Right Focus.

And remember how Violet kissed Crystal
and how Long River so quietly floated old Hammerhead
that his protuberance
without having to alter its nature
performed its business so elegantly
that it positively glowed?

I am perfectly cognizant of all of that
and of the multiple
instrumentalities of Melee,
but what of this matter about Deep Storage?

People are constantly splitting
in my dream
and unexceptionably returning to their persons
upon my awakening.
Then splitting again.

Neither psychic scatter nor its negative
answer to the query.

And I dare not bring this up before the Collective
though the matter is truly pertinent
to the general emprise.

Neither partial release nor enthusiasm
in the ordinary sense of avidity
can substitute for attendance upon
Long River's intimate actuality.

Long River accommodates loss without compensation.
Long River is the fluent obverse
to Black Lake's appearance of stasis.

Release Great Hammerhead,
the archetype, not the avatars,
but the avatars in all of us, too--
from this abusive focus.

I need Wrench Boy and his capacity
to integrate Long River and Happenstance.

He is the Master of Right Focus -- and everything else!

His Forks
show compassion
for ghosts . . .

Ploughing The Clouds

Melee loves Wrench Boy.

"Why?" Wondered Violet.

"It must have something to do with the ghost
they saw together in the garden,
though we all did,
we all sort of saw it,
that night when the gorge was fuming
and The Old Hotel had shut up its special crystal
in a wooden box and hidden it
under a lamp which
it seemed to us possessed, ahem,
'problematical' properties.
Its wick had been dipped in Black Lake.
And that isn't possible."

I remember the box had been found
at the bottom of the gorge
perfectly fashioned and undamaged
by what must have been
a violent and precipitous spill.
Some of us thought it
extracted
directly from Deep Storage
and never to have fallen at all.
But when the box received its glittering crystals
and was positioned beneath the lamp,
fumes mixed with smoky lamp light
and something was released
as if from the stone in the box
right through the delicate wood work.

A subtle turbulence took hold of the ambience itself,
both the quality of the atmosphere
and, more particularly, the activity of our minds.
Not everyone felt it in a way they could articulate
but everyone felt it nonetheless.
A subtle tendency toward distraction, certainly;
but each thought seemed drawn to some other
with which no connection presented itself,
or else stayed right where it happened
without sequel or indication of pertinence.

The disturbance grew across the Collective,
but Wrench Boy remained on an even keel
and genuinely enjoyed
the slightly queer and zainy
attitudes it produced in his friends.

There was something perfectly admirable
in his demeanor, yes;
but really in the entire deportment of his whole being.
Violet saw that and thought her sister
would have admired it too.

Suddenly the whole thing
jumped a notch,
and there was an entity--
one might call it a ghost --
a wisp of a breeze
and a pillar of light -- the whole
conventional show, truly--
but it held in what functioned as a hand
a tall fork,
like a rake with five tines.

A wave of enthusiasm, not fright,
passed over the Collective.
We followed the Pillar.

[]

It was a time of great obliquity.
The spirits of Violet and Crystal
were split apart like a fork
in their essence
out of deep Storage
in a manner not manifest before.

And all the opals
floating up from Deep Storage
also showed forks--bifurcation
like intricate crazing
in a white glaze
on a bright ceramic cup-dish.

The silence through The Old Hotel and its environs
was of an absolute kind--
nothingness
inhabited by jaguars.

[]

The Great Debt
of Manifest Apparency--
its negative inversion--
subtraction compensates proliferation.

Wrench Boy in fact understood this,
was this
out of Deep Storage--
anti-particle and particle--
negative gravity--
everything in debt
to its own prior inversion.

Only Black Lake--
pure Being itself
and its mythology--
"floated"
as if down Long River--
Apparency itself
the Great Ghost . . .

[]

Hammerhead--the Archetype--
himself the avatar
of the nothingness
that, other than pure Being,
intimately haunts all Apparency
that like an infinite crystal
proliferates
a rational garden.

[]

"Stop all this! Take focus!"
cried Violet.

"Misdirection cannot be the Law!
Will release not come
through the Opal?
Is Happenstance itself in cahoots
with this truly maniacal enthusiasm?"

[]

Black Lake is the Mother of Loss,
Wrench Boy the Master of Enthusiasm.
Why?
Because he understands his Jaguar.
He turns his wrench
and the Great Ghost
confuses Hammerhead.
Melee observes it and's amazed.
Primordial Eros floats up from Deep Storage
and bifurcates at once into Scatter
and the possibility of the appearance of Loss.

[]

Interval

In the kitchens of The Old Hotel,
the chamber crones were brooding
over a certain cup-dish

at the bottom of which,
covering its glaze with delicate crazing,
brown particles of cinnamon
adhered to almond milk residues
and taking the shapes
of elegant wedges and scythe blades,
they twinkled in the intermittent noon light
when the rain broke
and the pumps in the cellars fell silent

footsteps in the upper chambers

faucet drops in the isnk

the significance of the figure was evident--
no need to read this . . .

[]

Hammerhead enlarged his head
until it loomed over the hill
equivalent in verticality and breadth to
the dimensions of that small mountain
crowned with a forest
of mixed forks, hammers, and rattles

even his own avatars
were terrified by him.

[]

But the White Shirts were invisible still--
they weren't even hiding
in heir own sleeves

invented by the laws that permitted them,
they were insubstantial,
equivalent to their functions only--

the people returned to their cauldron
while Hammerhead breathed on the city
improbable anathemas.

The War was taking new forms:
intelligence retreated
to sleeves and virtual cauldrons
that no longer had the forms of themselves--
no forms at all--
but data banks and number crunching furnaces,
dissolution evolved among data points,
schematcs, like wedges and scythe blades
that were not like wedges and scythe blades--

even death retreated from embodiment--
mind simply ceased to generate forms
and fell into irretrievable silences.

Black Lake was All.

(End of Interval)

And The Old Hotel
is also The Bank
and its inordinate extravagance, its bloating
at the expense
of us all--
its hallucination
of an ever-growing crystal--
Faustian humanity
to feed on happenstance forever
without a glance at Long River,
without a legend of compensatory black violets,
without a gaze at the crazing of our opal . . .

There still is a use
for an African Rattle--
not public,
not proved for conjuring
the ghost of social efficacy
out of Deep Storage
but a cleansing brush of sonority
to clear the crazing
from the opal.

Interval

Dragon Semen
fills the cauldron.

In the ocean of fire underneath it
salamanders seethe in the flames.

Adders and sea eels--

white tigers
heads turning, this way and that,
flash in the mind fields
down the boulevards
and the bullets can't stop them--
they block up the barrels in the guns of the sheriff's men.

The tigers take care of the children
but head for the banks.

The druids of Newburgh and Poughkeepsie
(I'll chance it--there'll be druids in Poughkeepsie)
beseech their magical hand stones
thin, flat, and solid,
to uncash the data stream

red water snakes coil round the mind fields
where currencies are sprouted and traded
and the minds cease to generate the forms
through which money is molded--
no one knows what it is

and the druids convene an intelligence
to circumvent its being molded anew.

A castle of titanium and platinum,
a rampart of white silver and gold
struck by moonlight -- one half of it nightwise --
the other half, by sunlight at noon

starlight in the ether rains coinage . . .

What's wrong with that?
An elegant image
of ancient abundance
but today dropped contra naturam
from Nothingness--
the sky is black
where the celestial bodies
evolve on borrowed forces--
the payback is ourselves and all our woe
to balance the ontic leger.
No redress but Wisdom. Yes, Wisdom.
Only Pure Being
can heal the broken world.

But Money Has an Enemy . . .

Ploughing The Clouds

In general,
Violet's vocabulary
has become considerably enriched
since the early days
of The Confederacy
now renamed "The Collective."

Consequently, her views
on several subjects
have expanded correspondingly.

Regarding erotic relations
in the conventional sense
she had a low opinion, for instance.

On the other hand, her regard
for The People's Cauldron,
the magical efficacy of judiciously "putting" crystals;
for the mysteries of Black Lake and Long River, well,
the very proliferation of her avatars, her many gardens,
were testimony to a generous approbation.

She even grew copiously in the gorge
and twined petal and stem
round selective avatars of Hammerhead.

For Long River, with a few reservations,
she often effused enthusiasm.
She was not happy, however
when it flowed away her seeds
and attenuated the flourishing of her garden.

Vocabulary or not, she had yet to develop
a working understanding of The Fork.

Why must our focus divide?
Why must it salt
the curious brews of the cauldron
with contrary medicines?
Why must Crystal break light
into so many paths
contradictory and with such potential
for disharmony, envy, confusion,
that only Black Lake itself
absorbing matters altogether
might spell release?
And why are there crazes in the Opal?

The amity she enjoys
with some of the ghosts
is due to a certain propinquity of nature
rather than vocabulary
and her being with Crystal,
the latter, her sister and teacher.

Focus is necessary for growth,
Scatter for seeding,
Loss, that perennial renewal express
the infinite fecundity Black Lake
effects through The Cauldron.

When her mind experiences
the unpropitious variety of scatter--
the African Rattles that stand
in the fertile regions nearby her,
gather in through their white susurrus
the debits of Misdirection
so that no Loss
in the unpropitious sense
foster a fork in her focus.

[]

Crystal has been listening
to this silent discourse
on the intellectual development
of her sister and pupil.

She thinks, in my mind,
Enough of this.
I am concerned, as always,
about the character of Hammerhead
and how he is working
to integrate his opal.

He has no difficulty in principle
with bifurcation,
and even the melee
it frequently leads to,
he being so frequently
the cause of it,
is just fine with him.

But as to Black Lake,
though he has by this time
experienced more than a glimpse of it,
its true ontological provenience
is inaccessible
to a mind so stabbed by forks.

Hammerhead is capable
of enthusiasm for cauldrons,
but, of The Chalice,
he is suspicious
that Misdirection
has flashed up a "vision."

Its relation to his opal
and its transparitional
co-inherence with Black Lake
are still lost upon him.

He takes a break
and rings the bell
in The Old Hotel's staid foyer.

He takes hold of his five-tined fork,
assumes, to recharge his focus,
an attitude of jovial enthusiasm and familiarity
with that happy bauble, his opal,
unwitting of its bifurcation and obliquity,
signified by its crazing.

In this he is far behind Violet,
in danger of recidivism and scatter.

[]

Hammerhead's release,
considered as history,
is provisional.

There's a fork
in his looseness: One path is
a zig-zag that runs through Deep Storage, alright,
but right to a series of cabinets
and abstract addresses in Deep Storage
that are situated far from Black Lake.
Another path, if he'd take,
leads straight to The Universal Opal.
But the fork has too many tines, too many choices,
so that though he is released
to take whatever path he would, well,
Choice or Chance are unlikely methodologies
to do anything at all
but help him lose his way.

In truth he must deepen his attitude
and quest for The Chalice,
scatter his focus a modicum,
until Jaguar manifests as
a sluggard of a sentinel
in the Garden of Crystals.

Suddenly, dead silence.

I can hear it.

A Fork without Bifurcation:
a Stunning of Ghosts.

A fork at the end of an African Rattle.
A perfectly focused African Rattle at that.

Call back your focus,
for Hammerhead has come round
to The Rigid Fork--
an ahistorical prognostication
whose Rumor is Opal.

Ploughing The Clouds

Crystal said:

"Let the planting be
on the widest
possible
ground."

[]

"Where have I been?"
asked Jaguar.

Laughter echoed
across The Collective.

Hammerhead said:

"You returned
to the province
of 'That Man'."

"If you mean me," I said,
"I vanish from myself
in that direction
as readily as he,
and with as great or as little enthusiasm.
One might as well
imagine we drift or drop or repair
back into Deep Storage."

[]

Rumble, mumble, grumble
echoes across The Collective,
a sound that merges
into the bubbling susurrus
of Long River.

"That Man," I said,
might just as well be That Chalice and its
ever-bubbling fountain.
Do you see it
standing in our Vision
at the center of The Garden?
But we ourselves--each one of us--
vanish from the vision of the others
when we do
see it. If it's there
we are gone
to the place
that is not
'whither' --
Deep Storage does not contain it
in its corridors and cabinets,
its data files and informational arrays.
Only the miasma of light
beyond all databanks
and fantastical inventions alike,
beyond the impossible and the possible,
beyond, in fact, Beyond--"

Rumble, mumble, grumble
echoed across The Collective.
For everyone had something to say
about The Ineffable.

[]

Opal was listening

to gatherings
all along Long River.

"Release, release
all of us
from grievous Loss."

"Let Jaguar's concordat with Hammerhead
be renewed."

"Let Enthusiasm
master
Focus."

"Let us all shake our African Rattles."

[]
And we did.

The problem wasn't Scatter
or the failure to engineer Release.

Obliquity functioned perfectly
on its own terms.

But Hammerhead himself
was compelled to activate
a panoply of avatars,
each with another role
in The Great Awakening,
some facilitators, some covertly or overtly,
mounting the opposition.
The problem was how to elude them all,
presenting no position to attack--
montagnards, guerrillas, really--
but since their numbers were ever-growing,
how might this be achieved?

Wrench Boy fissioned differently, avatar-wise.
There were imps and calculators,
cadres of operatives;
workers, certainly--every one
a master at her post;
warriors, but no soldiers,
no pawns, no functionaries.
Busy bees, in one respect,
but no Queens;
no drones.

The point was to delay the point
of focus -- keep the cauldron roiling,
allow Obliquity
to discommode Centrality,
while the sound of African Rattles
kept rising over the horizon,
and we were mighty jaguars
against the inevitable fork,
the schism twixt African Rattle
and smoky Opal.

[]

The avatars of Hammerhead
threatened to foment
unruly melee merely
or else to prevent one
with hammer blows
commandeering Happenstance,
calling upon Deep Storage,
co-opting the principle of Release.

Hammerhead himself
vacillated between enthusiasm
and abject confusion.
He had developed no conception
of how to comport himself
vis a vis self-arising melee.
The African Rattles moved closer.
Should he join them
or take them down?
And was there an alternative,
not an alternative at all,
but a genuine release
into the space of the jaguars,
and is that what they mean by Black Lake?

He wanted to retreat to his embryo,
inaugurate a new zygote of himself,
come out of the womb of being,
released from the terrible army of African Rattles,
the overwhelming miasma
of luminous ghosts.

"Damn that Long River
and its titillating garden,
always almost in being,
ever being taken away,
so that existence itself
were a long tribulation of longing
with opals to gaze in
but never to belong to--
Long River! Long River! release me,
or at least bring equilibration.
What shall I do with this Melee?
Shall I force her into the gorge?
Shall I fling myself upon Happenstance,
let Deep Storage reclaim
whatever enthusiasm compels me?
Is there a Higher Happenstance
to rectify Melee or use her,
and I myself
nothing at all
but a grim miasma of ghosts?"

[]

While the Hammerheads were tormenting themselves in this manner
concerning their thought about Melee
that would not resolve
into a simple view,
The Old Hotel was at work
expanding its venue.
It had an inexhaustible mandate
to release space and accommodate
whatever Melee herself should send its way.

A twenty volume Encyclopedia of Misdirection
catalogued how many Algorithms of Obliquity!
Even Deep Storage can't count them.
Hammerhead feared them;
Opal resolved them, providing
universally applicable procedures for the release from them.

You pass your palm
over its warm face
and an eye
plants itself
in the center of your hand.
This should take care of them.

You know you're released when you sense
an aroma of violets,
the return of organized enthusiasm.
Oh, let's plant a garden,
keep tame jaguars
in a garden,
leave our scatter-brained states
to whatever world wants them.
Melee--just a matter of happenstance.
What has that to do with our garden?
Hammerhead can busy himself
building little white fences
to segregate the plots,
in the front of each of which we'll establish
a gnome
in the form
of a little bronze statue of Wrench Boy . . .

Ploughin The Clouds

What if Hammerhead
abandoned
The Old Hotel?

Wrench Boy would repair to his opal,
not as a reflex,
and not as a choice
among tines in an elective fork.

[]

Deep Storage is "collective memory," partly,
partly the source of Long River.

Its other parts are pot, cup, cat's bowl, chalice, cauldron,
guarded by an ogre with a fork.

You can break down the vigilance of the sentinel ogre
if you know the way to shake the African Rattle
that hangs on the hook on the door
before Deep Storage.

You focus its noise on the key hole.
You scatter the intent of the ogre.
You reconvene the principle
that breeds the many chambers
of The Old Hotel.

That's what Wrench Boy
upon occasion
does with his gaze
in his opal.

To compensate Loss
or make room for Melee.

[]

When no force charges
the situation,
no need for misdirection
to conjure memory--
yours or ours or another's--
entire histories
are fabricated down there.
They gather on their own eventuality.
Deep leaves.
Night rain.

[]

Is Happenstance with inattention
Misdirection enough?

Enough for what?

Loss
presents itself to Wrench Boy
in the form of a white silver chalice.

His focus has followed upon his Great Loss.

Violet then is his syzygy.

It is her focus
conjoined with his
that performed their mutual release.

[]

Some quests terminate
in an old hotel.

It maintains a certain
focal distance
form the plane of ghosts.

Where Jaguar himself
gathers a focal intentionality
from all the Jaguar avatars
and the disparity of energies and ontologies
they embody and process and express--
"he makes a bundle"
and passes this to Wrench Boy
and violets seal the knots
that bind the focus.

Mem-o-ries are made of this.

[]

Misdirection can rise spontaneously
whenever The Gorge
swallows Loss
and Wrench Boy lets things pass
but Black Lake reflects them
rather than absorbs them
and The Cauldron roils
and the fork tines multiply
and the black handle of it
rises from the roilings
and there, Misdirection manifests--
a thousand lifetimes--
a million lifetimes--
spent in Obliquity.
Focus leads only to scatter,
till Wrench Boy finds The Cup
and puts it in The Garden.

And Wrench Boy runs along Long River, cup in hand,
till his focus turns Loss to Crystal,
and the Opal's focus
transfigures Melee
and The African Rattles
rise with the sun
in back of The Broken Mountain.

Ploughing The Clouds

Wrench Boy walked The Gorge
plying path after path--
each crevice, each crack in the wall,
another road--another access
to The Great Cauldron,
as if there were a way
to recover Africa
and its ruined worlds,
now that rattles
are its only traces
released into a sort of contemporary contrareity.

History is Forks
again and again dividing
virtual from actual;
victors from victims;
shadows in Deep Storage
feeding alternative jaguars,
released toward unrealized melee,
bifurcation established for "losing
the audacity of Loss,"
against the exclusivities of Happenstance--
The Gorge in mutual resonance
with our secret cauldron,
African Rattles arrayed
about the stony rim.

Oh scatter your violets,
shake your African Rattles--
that the avatars of Jaguar
crystallize our loss
through the augmentation of Obliquity.

The Gorge envelops
collective memory as Deep Storage.

Does Silence portend
only Loss and Scatter,
all portals to enthusiasm cut off,
the cat's bowl empty, if not broken?

But Crystal hangs close over the gorge mouth
scattering light, letting violets scatter.

Deep Storage is not memory only,
not only data encoded
but luminous opals
are seed-like principles of newness
nourished in pockets, moist and deep,
storage in the sense of protectedness
against unpropitious scatter--
Deep Storage protects the New for its moment.
Here are the jaguars
released in Obliquity.
They restrain their African Rattles
until the most excellent moment
breaks the gourd bulbs
and scatters their beads
hardened through oblique Happenstance
and Deep Storage is hospitable to Melee
in her inelastic fraughtness
and is both harbor and harbinger
of ghosts.

[]

The Higher Happenstance has a form
that is like particles arrayed in crystal--
Obliquity an attitude in Happenstance
you adopt and adapt for use.

[]

If you take up a stance
in The Oligarchs' Garden,
beware of the tight rays of focus
for they feed on Loss--your Loss
that seems like accretion
but hides its internal scatter.
Deep Storage there is a vault,
and the jaguars that prowl its boulevards
are not devised to foster your release.
You will not hear Long River
nor Obliquity's deep preparation.
Nothing is loose.
The African Rattles that are positioned as fences
are oblique to their own sonorities.
They lack reference.
They do not sound like crystals.
Only black violets and anodynes against happiness
flourish in its clear rows.
No audacity compensates your losses.
Black Lake is intuitable
only when Happenstance
delivers some intimation of it,
and through the proximity of The Gorge;
but its recrudescent possibilities are not emphasized
in the oligarchs' ontology
any more than the mantic function of the African Rattle,
any more than the fragile rejuvenant properties
of sweet violets.

[]

Better remain in Deep Storage,
keep your opals in Deep Storage,
and bide your losses
whatever they may be;
keep the simplicity of one single violet
rather than follow the oligarch's misdirection--
pot, cup, cat's bowl, chalice, caldron.
Whatever is offered,
don't be a ghost
in The Old Hotel.

I offer advice,
like the sound of an African Rattle.
Melee will rattle other Africas or not.
But entertain Obliquity
if it entertains you,

and nourish
The Gorge.

Ploughing The Clouds

Poison in The Chalice,
Poisons flourish The Garden.

[]

"I'm Back," cried Jaguar.
"Back to aggravate or organize
your melee; charge focus
with inordinate force;
release The Fork from the tough earth
where its stuck like a rake in the winter ground.
Tell the boss
in The Old Hotel
to focus on activities.
There can't be too many violets
festooning the lounges and porches.
I'm really on the loose--
my intellectual scatter, as you might call it,
has paid me back with interest.
I have mastered all apparent misdirection
and brought it back to The Garden.
Your Jaguar struts
arm and forepaw with Melee.
We celebrate Happenstance in extremis--
the wildest random, omni-directional zooming
through quotidian occurrences
is to my mental scanners
sharp and radiant as crystal.
I take things in
on every scale,
'from megalith to microspore,'
from wedding feast to the infinite
scattering of the worlds."

[]

Obliquity obliterates
the effective centrality of silence, certainly,
but is not exhausted
by tactics of misdirection.
All along Long River
the motifs multiply.
Even silence stands variously
relative to Focus.
Focus on Hammerhead,
and there is little silence.
African Rattles, contrariwise,
takes silence up as a project
to realize something ultimate in its nature.

Violet offers
the scattering of her petals and aromas to Opal.

[]

Fork in the practice. Headline:

THE OLD HOTEL BURNS DOWN!

We can't have that.

Violet wafts her aroma-fields
to charm the charred ruins.

Hammerhead sets his avatars
to hammer it up again.

Existential focus
builds out of sunrays.

Hammerhead's a good fellow now.

Jaguars zoom and preen,
prowl and shoot.

All this activity
is agreeable to Melee.

Poof!

and The Old Hotel

is old again.

[]

The work in the clouds
builds-- whether the model
is hammer or plough,
Happenstance plume
enthusiasm.

Violet twines about the belts
and implements of Hammerhead.
She scatters her petals
in blizzards of color through The Gorge.

But Fork stands off
from this attitude.

Like Crystal
his contribution is ghostlike--uncanny.

He multiplies his jaguars so that jaguars
are epidemic through The Gorge.

Fork would confuse
The Old Hotel
against its convalescence,
multiplying as opposed
to simply effecting
its focus.

Wrench Boy in absentia
is behind all this.

The Trickster need not come forth
under some defining personality;
but his quirky syzygy, in Melee,
or he, in his many jaguars,
are as effective as strewn violets
in putting a fork in Happenstance--
even a fork as silent
episodes or gaplets--
Focus gapes--
even Melee manifests
as a certain sort of silence.

[]

Hammerhead--your Loss is our Jaguar!
You drink down Long River
with your huge gorge!
Your silence drops
The Old Hotel entire
into Black Lake . . .

Interval

. . . like a Fomorion's tea bag!

The gorgeous ogress . . . the gorge itself inverted . . .
the orgies of her beauty -- I mean the palpable
effluence
came in shock waves
across the meadows
where she'd galavant -- how could a thing so massive
heave itself so deftly
over the huts and hillocks, the megaliths and mountains?
There must have been ameliatory plantetoids
countermanding gravity
in that celestial season.

But the little males
fainted with an overplus of passion--
the feeling was unintegrable, unanswerable--
the female unaware
of the effect of her own steam.

[]

The Old Hotel (at all events)
got steeped in Black Lake
(as the males were steeped
in the orgonic effluvia of the ogress)
and that was how it acquired
its protean propensities.
It had traded away
all constancy of material identity--
cashed it out entirely--
for a nature that ever after
could morph prolifically--
its chambers multiplied,
its decor and period grew multiple and variable--
it was ever another thing--
as episode or circumstance demanded.
Even the sense that it was owned or managed
was labile--Wrench Boy, Hammerhead, Violet, Crystal,

Hammerhead or Melee,
sat in the office, if there was one,
filled the halls and lounges
with lavender and violet.

Interval

The Pooka appeared
in a field of women--

What pleasure! What wisdom! What glory!

The strato-cumuli billowed uncannily.
The cumulo-nimbi glowed.

Out to the mountainside!
Into the trees!

Engines rumbled in the underground.

The Pooka took off his head
for each of the celebrants.

He gyred and gimbled and wound
all afternoon.

Then he changed
and the night howled.

Owl eyes on the shop-shelves.
Owl eyes on the branch.

The Pooka vanished
when the moon set.

The women returned to their shells.

Ploughing The Clouds

Jaguar rode down Long River
as if he didn't owe anyone anything.

The Old Hotel
held its own stock.

Violet's profit
was topsoil's loss.
Nitrogen debit.

Loss defined a certain style of focus.
Release your thought.
Reconceive The Gorge
to swallow Loss.

Place your crystal
exogenous to History.
Take such a focus
as fulcrum to move the world.
Operate on Happenstance
from a position of Obliquity.

Long River remains
as Changeless Change
while The Old Hotel
houses Formless Form
in transformation's perpetual despite.

Violet's handsome profligacy
must change
to ruin Debit's ubiquity.

Misdirection: perpetual strategy
devised by an ethically and ontologically
perpetually divided Hammerhead:
Two shirt pockets;
two different tools.

[]

Hammerhead lusts after Crystal, perpetually,
hoping to generate The Exogenous.

He wishes to fix The Old Hotel,
hammer its obliquity right out of it.
That is to say, one of him does.
The other would ravage Deep Storage for its "minerals":
gold and silver, surely,
but he dreams of manganese and titanium--
blowout all other, more spiritual incunabulae.
His debts augment his investments and conversely.

[]

There must be some sort of arrangement
twixt Jaguar and Wrench Boy.

There are rooms in The Old Hotel
reserved as their offices.
There's even a shingle on the windows,
but were you to enter and inspect these august chambers,
you'd find a peculiar scatter
as if a springboard in their file drawers
had been released -- or rather, one in their minds--
records of owl pellet dissections;
gray squirrel and red squirrel
hoarding differentiae.
They were scientists
when they wanted to be,
but then they'd abandon
apparatus and documentation alike
to the custodial attentions
of the janitorial staff.

[]

Crystal offers herself to everyone
without expectation or recompense.
It is small enterprise
to distort her character
for deployment as misdirection.
See that star?

[]

Happenstance at every level
is exemplary,
for though it is the very
material of exploitation,
its inner nature--and it has one--
is Silence.

It releases itself
without exertion or process.

It just occurs.

No zealot can fully possess it.

When Crystal appears
within or above it,
her highest character is among us.

[]

Hammerhead undergoes
self-revising process perpetually.
He does or does not
shake an African Rattle.
Now he has no capacity to imagine a ghost,
but now, again, he is one.

[]

Impossible to pin down Long River.
Long River, one might say,
is the very principle of Fluency.
Its complement is The Old Hotel--
the principle of Coming-to-Form,
as if it were an abode.
But African Rattles shake in every chamber.
Happenstance is installed right in its carpentry and brickwork.
And the great chandelier in the foyer
instantly descends on its wire
and takes the form of Our Opal.
And The Old Hotel is a shrine therby,
where the Oracle of Profit and Loss
becomes your Hermeneut of Happenstance.

[]

One might desire
even to define The Gorge
that digs itself deep
to the north of The old Hotel,
or regulate the burgeoning of violets.
Then you are Hammerhead, or his avatar.
Your body is The Old Hotel.
Practice silence
if you wish to change this.

[]

Long River flows in the front.

Release is relative to the intensity
for which it is denoument--
different depending upon
whether the Working deploys
pot, cup, cat's bowl, chalice, or cauldron.

[]

Violets require no release
for their springing into being
from Being itself--
forget about the debits of nitrogen.

[]

Crystal inspires
a proper enthusiasm
without misdirection
when the Higher Happenstance
accommodates Melee.

[]

And of course I might set Hammerhead loose
within Happenstance
for purposes of Misdirection and Scatter,
assuming that I myself
can spring into being
like Violet--
I just show up
along fluency--
that is, Long River
delivers me.

[]

And when I tire of Obliquity,
Wrench Boy tends violets
in a quiet garden
whose only fork is a rake,
and ghosts are the sad
indices of Loss,
and you put out violets and candles
to quiet the ghosts;
for Wrench Boy is never
far from Black Lake.
And the Higher Happenstance
is ghost-like, geistliche.
And Long River flows in front of The Old Hotel,
that is the west side.
And Being herself
is like Crystal.

Ploughing The Clouds

The Body
is an ontological laboratory;
hence, The Old Hotel
and its space set aside for Deep Storage;
the Gorge to the north;
Crystal, in principle, a star sustained
above its mighty turret--
even the scatterings and flotsam
that, on a daily, weekly, or other
calendrical basis
just pass through,
must be taken
in both a somatic and an ontological sense
without loss of focus;
The Eastern Garden
where the woodpecker skulls
were scattered by Hammerhead
in one of his hoarding adventures
(following his loss of perspective
regarding the subtleties of misdirection)
is the site where silence can access
the possibilities of Deep storage.

[]

No one knows
what roots in The Gorge.
Crystals can certainly grow there,
but unanticipatable spin-offs of cyclonic containments--
storms held taut within its walls-
so that we have in this geological singularity
Obliquity's Maw.

Only Wrench Boy quite understands this.

[]

What is locked up in Deep storage, anyway?
How does it commute with Black Lake?
Is there anything at all determinate about ghosts?
These are ontological questions.

[]

My body is like a gorge
subject to determinate roilings--
a veritable cauldron
whose soups and elixirs
draw ingredients from Black Lake.
Hammerhead comes to The Gorge
with ladles and cups,
calipers and who knows what other
gadgets for abstracting
objects he hopes to be opals.

But as for Being itself,
you must access my gorge
with respect and circumspection,
for Being is neither a ghost
nor something stashed in Deep Storage.
Your focus must be like a jaguar's--
hungry and avid,
yet set like a crystal on its bezel.

The focus of Hammerhead
lusting for opals--well,
it will be a long trip down Long River
before he is comfortable at Black Lake.

[]

Melee in the body
is Melee indeed,
but Being's inalienable fury--
particulates on very
scale and dimension,
whirling like dusts
in a dry gorge
or hailstones
in a stormy gorge--
spell Being's obliquity
vis a vis the mannerly
arrangements
of The Old Hotel.
For every image and arrangement
vis a vis Being itself
is misdirection.
Even Silence involves Bifurcation;
even a chalice
as determinate implement
for ritual recipience
of gracious forces
cannot guarantee release.

Yet surely the being of crystal
held in the mind's heart of Wrench Boy--
surely Hammerhead's contrition
under conditions of loss,
know Black Lake with some intimacy,
and violets in the springtime
are no misdirection;
and the Higher Happenstance
is cornucopia,
inexhaustible Deep Storage.

Nevertheless we do well
to be mindful of The Gorge--
it is a great nest of shadows,
and Hammerhead's Concordat with Wrench Boy
is postponed or held in abeyance.

[]

Meanwhile, Black Lake
sits in death's belly
where Long River rumbles
but mind's forms cease
and Misdirection has a resource in Deep Storage.

[]

It seems we've been ploughing the Impossible forever,
but time itself is nothing
but a systematic decision for focus.

[]

When Africas rattle,
their focus takes the form of a cup,
and Wrench Boy's cohort of ghosts
swarms about my body.
Then the cut-up continuum
smoothly resumed
itself is misdirection,
albeit an enthusiasmic rush
of misdirection
perfectly adjoined and at one
with the manners of Deep storage.

Ploughing The Clouds

The Gorge has broken up
into nomes and regions,
one fork to a plot,
as if you could legislate
gardens in chaos.

Hammerhead did this
in one of his fits
of scatter-brained intensity,
resulting in temporary loss
of a valued factor
in the local existential modality.

Thank God for Long River,
to restore through unjaded Happenstance
the provenance of Wrench Boy.
What does he look like?

It isn't a secret,
but his image is scattered so parsimoniously
that, it seems as though Obliquity, in this matter,
is being zealously maintained.

He was no ghost, no geistliche phenomenon.
How could he be?
He was no phenomenon at all.
That's the point about gods:
they represent a fork
in the ontological garden--
Hammerhead and his machinations
or simple silence
where nothing appears.

As opposed to this:
pot, cup, cat's bowl, chalice, cauldron.

[]

Obliquity's excess leads to melee.
But that's no loss, but a cauldron,
a foyer in a strange dark riokan in Kyoto
where a crone sits stirring up ontologies.
Wrench Boy checks in on her, upon occasion.
Her obliquity aligns with Long River.

[]

Wrench Boy as deity
loses his apparency.

He inhabits a little bronze figure
and inspires a quaint enthusiasm.

But a god's bifurcation comes to this:
Hammerhead hammers out an image;
Long River runs it away.

We practice non-ordinary focus
upon enthusiasmic silence,
and through a science of obliquity,
nightly go down to The Gorge.

Its nomes correspond to The Qualities,
one jaguar to each region,
an orderly garden
underwritten by chaos,
in totality a transitory crystal.
Here,
Obliquity is served by Long River,
an enthusiasmic Long River.

A cohort of ghosts in obliquity
wake up each night
in the ontogenetic garden
freshened by water from Black Lake.

[]

Now the mind-stream forks.

Loss is a conduit
that zig-zags at last
to the porches and lounges
of The Old Hotel.

Hammerhead is the Prince of Loss.
He offers little succor
but access to Wrench Boy
and the Rite of The African Rattles.

If this is no misdirection,
enthusiasm returns. Otherwise,
the cohort of ghosts revolves
about their prince; namely,
the image of Wrench Boy.

[]

A garden of jaguars,
each with one consecrated opal. Consecrated by what?

Obliquity, certainly,
and the forces instinct
within enthusiasm.

You suppress what is essential
in Bifurcation
and take your stance in the garden
as a member of Hammerhead's cohort
and train for war.

[]

The cat's bowl is broken.
You wield The Fork.
You listen for an African Rattle,
give not a thought
to the extravagant event
whose misdirection breeds war
as if a garden

and eerily luminous jaguars are loose
under invisible miasmas
of all-consuming Loss.

[]

Deep Storage is capable, oh yes,
of fulfilling such dark enthusiasm
till Happenstance--the high one--
rectifies Obliquity--
I don't mean denies it--

and Violet manifests
in a scattering of aromas and petals,
and the coursing of obliquities turns a corner,
and Jaguar is oblique to wars.

Ploughing The Clouds

"Let that which you grow in your garden
soon be released down Long River."
Pontificated Wrench Boy's shadow.
He was not in fine fettle.
That this wisdom were rank misdirection
had been little reflected upon.
"The Higher Happenstance," he continued,
"is never mere scatter,
but plunder out of Deep Storage.
Little danger of misdirection.
Why stir up the caudron?
You cannot count on Happenstance.
What use is silence?
And no one's ever been to Black Lake.
Accommodations are execrable
and impossible to book.
So release your produce down Long River.
I am, or might as well be, Hammerhead.
I retrofit ghosts to non-entity
and put to work
a fist full of jaguars."

[]

This was a poor night at The Garden.
A rostrum of no-shows and shadows.
Long River appeared to be dry,
and no one had the key to Deep Storage.
The Crone had abandoned her cauldron.
All signs pointed
to an enervating scatter.
So we abandoned the arena
and sought refuse in liquid obliquity.

[]

Actually, when the brain is mere scatter,
Black Lake is not
necessarily in absentia.
Remember to take out your opal
and put down, for an interval, your cup.
Silence, complete and ghostlike,
will empty and fill that gap.

[]

Crystal is not, in the first instance,
its quality,
its power to integrate scatter.
It has the zeal of the jaguar
and the immaterial perdurance
of the highest sublimation of a ghost.
And Long River never
forks so egregiously
as to eliminate its effulgent capacity.
Its silence, however,
and its pervasion of all sonorities
are sign-posts
to that which is after, before, and beyond
all qualities,
all activities,
all things.
And beyond Beyond . . .

[]

"Enough of this," thought Violet
right in the heart
of the silence
in my consciousness;
and, for an instant,
we all had assembled at Black Lake
in the shrine
kept locked in the central
chamber
of The Old Hotel on the bank there.
Each held and opal
fully charged with enthusiasmic release
without breaking the silence.

All this, too, were a sign-post.

[]

Deep Storage is also
through commutation with Long River
on the margins of
Beyond Beyond
(but Beyond Beyond has no margins).

Deep Storage is also the potency
for the continuum of strife and war--
the silence that reigns in Deep Storage--
pot, cup, cat's bowl, chalice, cauldron--
are these but signs for The Same?
Continuum of scatter--uncanny.

[]

So the image of a white chalice
beckoned through the melee.
The thought of Deep Storage
was replaced by The Silence--
beyond Beyond
all strife and war--
and Hammerhead appeared on the horizon,
and there was no silence . . .

[]

Ploughing before the storm,
before the armies
rise over the horizon--

Run out of The Old Hotel!
Hide your crystal!
Take a boat down Long River
to another Old Hotel
in another's country!
Keep your focus
in spite of your loss.
Your opals won't show misdirection.
Wrench Boy is with you,
possibly,
but what if he's only a shadow
and the smoky opal shows crazing?

[]

Being is never its qualities.

The Old Hotel has infinite protean qualities.

Release Release,

even Scatter itself.

What sits in Death's belly?

The Gorge is the Mother of Wrench Boy,
or Africa is,
also the Mother of Shadows.

Scatter Scatter.
And they take your ghosts away.

The Machinations of the bankers
would seize your African Rattles,
break the People's Assemblies,
institute poisonous silence,
eat up your opals,
release

themselves . . .

Ploughing The Clouds

Long River flows both ways
or irrevocably one way
according to your focus.

Similarly, Deep Storage is
repository and dispensary.

Pot, cup, cat's bowl, chalice cauldron.

The metatext penned in red letters
is fashioned in obliquity.

Misdirection, in this case,
is consequence of Happenstance.

There is a fork in Obliquity:
principle overwhelming ontology
or nosegay for jaguars.

Misdirection indicates
a typology for ghosts
penned with enthusiasm
to regulate focus.

Deep Storage obligingly provisions us
with alphabets and algorithms.

We come to the cosmologist's cat bowl
like souls to Black Lake,
storm-harried travelers at last
at the porch of The Old Hotel,
weary ones loosed from weariness
but penniless.
The ghost of a fortune in the bank account.

[]

Jaguar is full of zest,
his African Rattles in fine fettle;
and to manifest as a jaguar
is one kind of ghost,
neither revenant nor specter,
but a power to crystallize Jaguar.

[]

Don't get lost in enthusiasm, thank you.

Deep Storage as Memory or Possibility--
both tines of the fork
point to The Old Hotel,
but the ghosts that inhabit that
hang about in the night garden labyrinth,
cooked up in ontology's cauldron.

Such ghosts are appearances merely,
like all phenomena--
a bifurcation in enthusiasm
depending upon ghost-type.

But when Deep Storage is regulated
by the hapless shadow of Wrench Boy,
the pest ghosts recur to The Gorge--
you would not wish to stare into it.

Hammerhead's loss is a ghost's focus.
They are eerily released
to infiltrate Happenstance.

Bifurcation reinforces Obliquity,
which is no principle
but irretrievable errancy,
do you follow?

Deep Storage is an old hotel.

[]

There is a ghost that inhabits Obliquity,
that works it
with African Rattles
that are almost inaudible,
and little violets
scatter about
to the sound of these African Rattles.

But Obliquity itself
as principle
shatters continuum
and rebuilds it
in a single act.
Pot, cup is cat's bowl
broken,
yet chalice, cauldron--
an image cast up on the sound
of your African Rattle
augmented to cosmological proportions.
This cosmos was a gorge
before being an old hotel.

[]

Language as red metatext
can function as an opal
to regulate your focus,
not significantly different
from the sound of an African Rattle.
That's how it works in my case.
I plough the clouds with enthusiasm
and measure my loss,
contain it
with a practice of studied silence.

[]

Deep storage, whatever the phase of enthusiasm,
pot, cup, cat's bowl, chalice, cauldron,
overwhelms The Old Hotel,
for the phase, that is,
with a melee of ghosts of all types
until The Old Hotel, once again,
is haunted by jaguars.

Ploughing The Clouds

Deep Storage compensates Loss
as Memory's Fork.

Who shall be Jaguar
as ploughed clouds thicken towards closure?

He shall be The Silence
of Radical Obliquity.

The Market of Misdirection
serving cannibal children
at the curry shop.

The Market covers Being--
the avatars of everyone
exchanged for their shadows.

Release becomes difficult,
then impossible;
in the end,
unimaginable.

Silence shivers
through The Old Hotel.
The rooms are too costly.
Only the archetypes inhabit them.

Obliquity shuntpikes Black Lake
to the recondite interior of Opal.
Yet
ubiquitous loss
forks.

Jaguar contains his enthusiasm
as quietly, quietly
he bides his force in The Gorge.

[]

Methodology broods among the archetypes
in the decadent, sumptuous guest rooms
of The Old Hotel.

Obliquity is one point.
Misdirection, another.

You must not subject your opal
to impertinent scatter.

Impertinent pertinent to what?

Black Lake and the absolute bottom.

Release each name and morphologem,
but how does one do this
when the market and its debits command?

Attention through Happenstance.
Red freckles harassing Melee.

Hide silence.
Foster Melee
as if she were your garden.

Do you recognize your opal?

Probably not,
though Melee and Discomfiture
seem loosed round every corner--
the market of misdirection
sporting cannibal children--
not only Africa in ruins--
the rattles of melee and loss
in the throats of moribund jaguars.

Rattles not only from Africa
but built in the craft shops of everywhere,
in lonely rooms, in makeshift
trailer park universities
of tactical misdirection.

Far down along Long River
where Jaguar excogitates
fiduciary misdirection:
The Old Hotel is the Co-Bank,
the duplicity of that which seems crystal--
a ghostly market
for usefully spurious opals,
a garden of poisonous opals.

Irrigation by waters
pumped from Black Lake through The Gorge--
Obliquity and Misdirection--
pot, cup, cat's bowl, chalice cauldron--

Black Lake no maw but a garden,
but a gorge without proper focus
hence melee--
a freckled garden--
you sell your wife or your nephew,
then your children,
finally yourself--
all Being obliterated in scatter--
Black Lake impossible to imagine.

Is this some hysterical, calamitous,
scare-monger somnambulist nightmare,
an affect of some particular chamber
of The Old Hotel?
Is it a phase in some cycle?

[]

The Hold Hotel itself
skries in its chandelier opal,
sees Wrench Boy in yabyum, his syzygy,
feral-headed Melee,
her red freckles flaming,
a garden of Black thorn sticks
where the spurs to enthusiasm blossom,
and every gorge is a garden.

[]

Here

(I mean here in the text)

is not here. Not here only. How could it be?

Black Lake comprehends this,
submerses and unfolds. Resolves.
Dissolves.

[]

You don't comprehend your opal.

Ubiquity forks.

Silence is actional.
Yet,
you do not do it, achieve it,
nor does it do you.

There it is
just beneath
your practice to quell
your own action.

Your highest goal, if stated,
is misdirection.

Violets nourished of Black Lake.

Black Lake the Mother of Hammerhead.

Of course!

What else will you skry in your opal?

The fork in silence
is possibly misdirection,
but under direction of what?

Not here
in this old hotel
for Melee is quiescent
and The Old Hotel
hallucinates Black Lake--
it's really there!

Misstep at the gorge rim.

Interval

Black clouds
follow out of Africa,
out of Illyria,
out of Yucatan.

How shall I plough them?

The thing behind them
must be The Sun;
do we know this?
when all the cycles
have come undone?

Do the Druids of Poughkeepsie
see this?

Instantaneous! Ubiquitous!
Draw on The Bank!

Bring me the requisite subsistence
to proffer this magic;
then gladly I'll repair to Black Lake,
and retire to The Sun.

Interval

Where The Waters
are bottled up
is a palace,
no doubt on top
of a precipitous cliff.

An eagle first leads,
then carries or becomes you.
You must fly to the palace.

But that you can fly
is already
powered by the waters
your assault shall release.

(Thought shift
to the intransitive.
Take note of this.)

The eagle releases The Waters--
Black Lake bottled up in a palace.
Hammerhead's dragon
captures and keeps
the Water Maid, who is Violet.
Long River is desiccated.
Everyone works for The Bank,
wage-slave, slave, or debt-peon, no access,
no ontogenetic ecstasy.
The Market covers Being--
liquidity the limit of release.
Every word its special thralldom--
the whole system
an ambiguous mirror--
just which side are you on,
if money has an enemy?

A wolf king on top of Wolf Mountain
whose energy and attitude owns Hammerhead.

Now, for the first time in history--
but when history returns to non-entity,
what happens has already happened--
just that is concreteness of newness--
an instant's thickness towards eternity.

And Hammerhead rode in on his elephant
at the grounds of The Old Hotel.
He'd rescued The Water
and planted The Feather
and The Forest was ignited
with intimate riches--
wealth itself but an image
for bestowal of value from Being
upon its apparencies--
inexhaustible, manifest thralldom,
happy until it is not,
then back to The Bottom--
Black Lake that is the color
of vanishing light . . .

Ploughing The Clouds

Don't use a fork
if you want to foster scatter.

Stay loose.

How can an old hotel
not be full of ghosts?

Silence conspires with obliquity
to addle your focus, and worse,
you lose your target.

Not any ghost will do.

Begin and end with The Gorge.
Scan it in silence.
Don't let enthusiasm
for the auditory phantasmagoria
in the sound of your African Rattle
scatter best intent.

Remember release
is necessary
but not sufficient
if you're stuck in the red lounge
of The Old Hotel
and you've left your opal
on a stone in the garden.

[]

Fill the cracks between thoughts.
Infinite crazing.
Black Lake.
Recipience
for infinite releases.

The Garden--The Gorge inverted;
the mathematics thereof
ought to excite some enthusiasm.

[]

Long River is loose.
Melee, not yet ignited,
of course will foster scatter,
but she is just
and direct
not oblique.

That which she addles
falls straight to Deep Storage
or comes out of it,
Obliquity shaken from the depths,
The Gorge
alive,
Hammerhead's avatars rampant
like heraldic lions,
each with an African Rattle
roaming down Long River.

[]

When Violet kisses Crystal,
Obliquity comes into focus.

There are ghosts in the garden
sprung from The Gorge at Samhain,
The Old Hotel decked out
for celebratory ecstasies.
Red lights and white noises
of ubiquitous African Rattles
flash in the windows or out from them,
Happenstance a receptacle
to that which Long River delivers.

[]

Enthusiasm
has a god in it--
Loss
fills up
with enthusiasmic compensations.
The line from Loss to Melee
to the god enthusiasm harbors--
a mathematical progress
as a trip
down Long River
or up it
to Dagda's cauldron.
(I think it's Dagda's--the druid
did have one.
I'll look it up.
How loose is that?)

[]

Long River twists in an ox-bow
about, is it Dagda's garden?
Does he have one?
Or is it but my enthusiasm
for the name, "Dagda"?

Whatever obliquity I can focus
should serve me
to raise Jaguar
to cosmic status.
He has that when enthused
with Amazonian entheogens
and Long River twists through The Gorge.

We must raise for him
and his Amazonian avatars
an additional enthusiasm:
smoky opals.
Thus enthused, he'll see Wrench Boy
some distance away
loosed into a far-off obliquity.
You can't get there from here--any here.
You need to be off somewhere
smoky
like in an en-gorged spasm
of enthusiasm,
which misdirection
bit into him
one casual afternoon
on the summer lawn
of The Old Hotel.
But it isn't summer now,
though the garden has been
successfully provisioned with a scattering
of tunnel mouths,
hell-mouths, really,
that lead to The Gorge.

Ploughing The Clouds

As a rule it's
almost impossible
to say what one means.
How could one?

Even a loose sense
of mere happenstance
eludes deliberative focus.

Thank God for The Gorge and Black Lake
to which one recurs, or I do,
without recurrence.

A cohort of ghosts
animates silence.

The fecundity of loss
declares a voice.

[]

Smudge before the ink dries.

Black Lake freezes over.

[]

This, then, is a garden
where ghosts whisper
when the plants die, surely,
but in their wake
smoky opals sit on dry juice stems
portending the melee of renewal.

[]

Happenstance actually requires small focus
for The Gorge is right there
behind it
with its
chorus of African Rattles,
its thorn sticks,
its chasm
riven
by Long River.

[]

Ghosts, though they have no
voiced instrument,
roar on their whispering
effecting a scattering sensation,
a deleterious release,
a forced, inevadable focus,
an excess that only Long River
with its liquid fluency
can dispel.

Yet Long river is the Mother of Ghosts.
No violet survives
the rush of its fluency.

If Happenstance is infinite
or just goes on extending without end,
only an opal can stem
the infinite diminishment
that even a chorus
of African Rattles
would suffer
by invidious comparison.

For an opal encompasses all Happenstances.
It can see
the ghosts
of gone violets.

An opal can access Deep Storage.
Its crystal matrix expands
with the growth of the garden,
promoting the inversion of ghosts
in its smoky eye.

[]

Old Hotel
promotes
a wild prolferation of expressions
providing, in its chambers,
an opal for every guest room,
hoping to foster enthusiasm
and extravagant speech.
A Ploughing of the Impossible.

In the clouds,
opalescent palaces.

But invidious comparison
against the infinite
proceeds with its diminishments.

African Rattles roar in The Gorge,
acoustics enabling with echoes
cash payments provided against loss,
but the belly of the infinite death
swallows the white sonorities
of Africa and its rattles.
Thus ghosts, as enthrallments,
force time, the thinking of time.

[]

Expression itself is The Garden,
Wrench Boy, enthused,
presiding.
Deep Storage--
repository and dispensary.

[]

Is there an opal beyond the sky?
I don't think so.
But the opal of space?

Enlist the craft-work of Hammerhead
to build this opal.

[]

Long River runs Jaguar
with his diadem of crystal
until he recurs as sky god.

Fopr the instant of this recurrence,
it is no misdirection,
but the very thing
that constitutes my opal:
"an image out of anima mundi"--
Deep Storage direct
to the opalescent window.
But then the image forks
and The Gorge, whose roilings
cook up all imageries--
ghostlike, geistlich, Deep Storage, smoky opal--
Long River, that is language,
runs through it,
is
the thing that doesn't
get stepped in even one time
only gets stepped in again--
obliquity,
the addled sages--the thing
that presses on the mind.
Let's call it "The Gorge." Why not?

[]

I am, such as I am,
the milliner of ghost fabric,
cloth out of Africa
so colorful--red letters for the metatext--
even today
another rattle
my dear friend presented to me

and the opal
I haven't found yet
the opal

pot, cup, cat's bowl chalice, cauldron--

Melee flmes in the opal,

Long River flows through Long River

each utterance grows a bit smaller

And there is no end . . .

Ploughing The Clouds

The end occurs
under a cloud.

The spirits
return
to the sun.

Where were they?

Some lack of focus
on this matter:
misdirection,
cognitive deficit,
frank loss.

The Garden inspired
little enthusiasm.

Black Lake's magnificent dispossession
harbored, harried, and gave rise to
cohorts of ghosts, certainly,
but these tended to scatter
with the exorcist's enthusiasm;
whereas the spirit--singular or en masse--
proves to be a matter like Long River.
It or they are there
transforming the quality
of calm abiding;
then gone, simply.

[]

I live at Black Lake; well,
it is not life exactly.

Aged Jacinth, like death-in-life,
stashes the African Rattles in a gnarly cask,
hiding her nature as Violet.
Hers is a consummate art of misdirection
like life itself,
occulted under the figures
of Exuberance and Loss,
till The Garden and
its melee of renewal
comes out of Deep Storage.

Also, not "I" exactly.

I rise as a figure
in my own opal.

Then there's a fork,
and Hammerhead scatters
the necessary smoke,
and it seems that Obliquity
retires to Deep Storage.

[]

The geistlich ghost
is The Higher Happenstance.

It obviates, while acting upon,
ordinary aleatory.
Thus is it difficult to distinguish twixt
chance, clear focus, and mysterious misdirection;
almost impossible to conduct
policy from The People's Cauldron.

Jacinth nevertheless provides
African Rattles for Jaguar.

He listens at his station in The Garden
and garners what clarity he may;
and Crystal is stationed
above The Cloud,
and when she sparkles
as if from beyond all transitory phasing,
you can trust what you discern
in the frothing white susurrus
of any African Rattle.

[]

"what if Bifurcation
itself were but a choice?"

Worries Hammerhead.

"And abject scatter,
its ultimate consequence?"

"What if 'worry'
were that creature's nature?"

Fluttered Violet.

[]

I shake my African Rattle
when occasion suggests that I do so
for the sake of cognitive release
alone in a cognitive garden,

Hammerhead and I
are at peace
without worry, particularly,
regarding misdirection,
for we do not take direction.
We live like ghosts
on a house boat barge,
and Long River travels us, as it might.
Where does it go?

No one has mapped its trajectory,
a pot of ambrosia on the quaterdeck.

If the river forks, what of it?
We're under a cloud already.

[]

I'll tell you about
African Rattle
some night
ina pub
over a pint--
Oh yes--I'm in that place also.

[]

Existence itself is its scatter.

[]

I took out the African Rattle
with cowries escutcheoned
on a gnarly brown gourd bulb.
In an old hotel, it was.
Hammerhead, as was his wont,
was extolling the very zenith of misdirecting.

Silence exploded from the many hearts
of the methodologically
horizontal collective.

Hammerhead's heads
turned about;
then for an instant turned into
rich and unruly
racemes of violets--
not just his hammers
but the whole head.

We knew we were in the presence
of some mighty ghost--
all of existence
was about to experience scatter.

[]

Long River flows everywhere.
Black Lake is everywhere.
Even The Gorge.
Especially The Gorge.
Even the geistlich ghost.
Especially the geistlich ghost.
Even at a loss
and underthe sway
of The Great Misdirection.

[]

They shook their African Rattles,
don't ask me who--
and image, intellect, narrative
fell under a cloud.

But we rode Long River
and ploughed it--
Wrench Boy did this--
African Rattle--
The Possible and The Im-
possible
subjected to
every sort of scatter.

The ghosts flew down
along Long River
until Black Lake . . .