The Mouse Eats Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken II
Concreteness
fortifies
the Garden
as
a gorge, beneath foundation,
enriches with dark life
The Old Hotel.
1
Happenstance, as ever,
happens to Hammerhead.
Jaguar, older than riches,
holds his opal
skyward
over Black Lake.
A catalogue of images
helps, vis a vis dispossession.
You can go either way:
Jaguar as essence of jaguars;
concreteness as guardian of happenstance.
Dispossession makes of the gorge
a treasure-trove of riches.
Go down there.
See what you find.
Concreteness,
an essence of happenstance,
may articulate a mazeway
or toy with an image like Black Lake--
Black Lake create deep shadows -- attractive shadows --
through the vacant chambers
of The Old Hotel,
its garden
a place of delicacy, seduction,
or serious work,
exempt from the scattered attentions
requisite to negotiate happenstance.
When anything happens to Hammerhead,
the need for such attentions
motivates other diversions
than the peccadilloes of Jaguar.
These cover the gorge
with cold-colored eye.
Concreteness happens
as dispossession
in a garden
that were it the sedulous locus of serious work
opens, from the center of each floweret,
onto Black Lake.
Sit there and look.
Maintain your focus.
African flowerets, stamen and pistil,
like fair little bells, rattle
with an extraordinary fixity,
as if their hammer-tongues and calyxes
were crystal,
if dispossession
sweep across the garden
or the bellows send a ripple across Black Lake--
not melee
but celestial Jaguar's
deep basso sonorities--
each boom expanding across space
to neutralize obstruction--
[]
Up above us
was The Bellows,
an image merely,
but that Jaguar
compelled with his silence
as if to organize
all degrees of scatter
from translucency and pattern of pure crystal
to rigorous dispossession--
opacity, no pattern at all;
Crystal sighs when such happenstance
occupies Jaguar
and he builds a maze
out of sound
and Crystal's heart
will not come loose
till happenstance
come round
and stab with a fork
the passionate chaos of her dispossession.
She remains aloof
and a ghost
not concrete at all
covers the gorge.
For Jaguar
there is no such obstacle.
For Jaguar,
when scatter no longer dominates happenstance,
when bellows allows
existence to seem concrete--
it is not to appease
Crystal
or obviate abstraction.
[]
"No one can fathom
the attitude of Jaguar,"
says Violet, "Why bother?
If concreteness were everything,
we'd have to lock down Wrench Boy,
and scatter concrete proposals
throughout the whole complexus
whenever Bellows
discovers opals
freely placed and floating in a ring of gray luminosity
around Black Lake.
But happenstance shall bring Crystal
mysterious intimation of a harmony
concrete enough, in its own way.
It will happen.
No need to fathom
our Jaguar . . ."
The Mouse Eats Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken II
2
Dispossession
was
the consummate realization
of Wrench Boy.
His spirit
filled
The Old Hotel
with wildly pulsating
African Rattle sonorities
crashing through material obstacles--
whatever obstreperous happenstance happened to bellow.
And The Old Hotel was happy.
The Old Hotel aflame
with abstract dispossession?
Never!
A mighty bellows roused
the green fuse in the garden.
This is something that actually occurs.
Abstraction, of course,
sets the course of it.
And dispossession itself
like an empty light
charges the Jaguar Mind of each of us
transforming in the instant it arises
every obstacle
so that nothing of obstruction in it, is it.
The Empty Light
is the Gorge of Space--
concrete happenstance
aflame with its own dispossession,
Dispossession of what?
How many ways
can language say this?
Wrench Boy at large
in every chamber
of The Old Hotel.
He eats what others grow in its curious garden--
hortus conclusus,
an abstraction planted
as a dispossession by bellows.
[]
You cannot list the concrete elements of passion.
Description in the instant it arises
poses a fresh obstacle.
Nor does the articulated harmonic
intimate its exigency.
Nor does the questionable advent of Melee merely.
She bides her singular instance--
a forest full of hammerheads,
a choir of meddlesome pipers
squeezing their bellows.
[]
The event is always concrete, not existence merely.
Silence subtending
is never obstructive.
But what if the violets you allowed to proliferate were poisonous
and The Old Hotel a refuge for spurious opals?
[]
Ghosts eat happenstance.
The Old Hotel
bellows of dispossession.
Hammerhead to the rescue!
He rides in on his resuscitated elephant,
his incoherence and obtuse obstinacy
no obstacle now.
He sees right through the impotent phantasmagoria
proffered by spurious opals.
Abstract or concrete,
no matter either.
He laughs and lets Melee be music
in the red lounge
of The Old Hotel--
The Old Hotel an exercise
in radical focus.
Hammerhead threads the maze
that The Old Hotel
and its grandiose, comedic, if twisted topology
throws up as a vision in an opal.
Where are we going?
One night of passion.
What does an elephant do in a delicate garden?
Sign Release!
All the stodgy guests in The Old Hotel
grumble and start to scatter
till the grand resort recovers
majestic silence.
What dignity!
[]
Open the locked maze door for Wrench Boy.
His dispossession infuriates, then magnetizes Crystal.
She abstracts from the maze
its impertinent happenstance
leaving a remainder of silence
that is like a Black Lake.
What happens now?
Melee pumps bellows.
Abstract dispossession
is not enough for Hammerhead.
He takes up his genuine opal
and watches events in the maze inflected there.
Africn Rattles spring up at the corners
forcing innumerable forks
to unrule the grumbling guests
in The Old Hotel.
The Mouse Eat Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken, II
3
Air is ambience.
Bellows devours air
and expels it
changed alone
by having been
so devoured,
outered as Mazeway.
Subtending ambience,
a gorge and its undefining melee.
We see this in our opal:
the advantage of dispossession.
Silence spells the Gorge
lest Gorge be hamstrung
by too many forks.
Bellows deviates silence.
In a concrete sense
there's a fork in the bellows;
one way elaborates an Old Hotel,
the other manifests an opal.
Opal in one sense
is the prince of manifestation--
it opens on a garden and is one;
in another it occasions
abstract dispossession.
But Bellows, in every sense, bellows:
its pattern in time
is not like a maze,
not like a gorge.
In a concrete sense
it is like a fork
with two tines only.
If its silence is abstract in a high sense,
so is the opal--
a scattering only of violets.
Wrench Boy, majestic, opens on silence.
[]
But there is
abstraction
in the ghost
only in a mental sense:
it has no thought
that its being is only
as in a smoky opal,
the aberration in
a questionably broken crystal,
existence too long
in the rocky walls of the gorge,
too loud, the jazzy
redundance of an
African Rattle.
[]
Here our Jaguar is a god.
He haunts the maze in the opal.
His silence obviates Bellows.
His garden lies over a gorge.
We use happenstance
to obviate tyranny over intelligence
effected by too accurate an opal.
Dispossession requires many things to be broken,
many things to be eaten.
This is direct hermeneutic,
not ghost and its erratic silence, ever-so eerie.
Still, the gorge is audible in all harmony
if it is no obstruction
as syrupy angelicism merely.
Here Here! for the Great Gorge
and its poignant archaicism--
violets perennial
(are violets perennials?)
Silence pervading the melee
(subtending it also).
[]
Here we say what is;
stamp a fork in the foreground.
It must be tight and loose.
The gorge in this heraldic sense
recuperates scatter,
as the five-tined fork
maximizes focus.
[]
Hammerhead has a fork in his tool kit.
He deploys it to loose release
and sustain his focus
as all manner of things break all about him
revealing Black Lake
as the boon for deep dispossession,
as the Gorge opens on Silence.
[]
Nobody operates the highest instance of Bellows,
not even Wrench Boy.
Apart from all exigency
Opal shows African Rattle
how to obviate Fork:
it is proper deployment of Abstraction.
Violet so heartily embodies it
that she has no need of Focus.
First Interval
Thread
an inerrant mazeway
through happenstance, appearance,
seductions of symmetry and de-or re-construction.
Call the point of arrival
as their advent suggests:
luminosity, pure being, pure consciousness,
the intelligence of Jaguar,
the silence of abstract crystal.
In an instant, these cover Being.
Does Being
cover itself? Don't answer that.
Where the signs fall or accumulate
as you gather their tokens,
follow the narratological exigency,
follow the argument,
do nothing. When you come
to the five-tined fork
or the fork whose finger are flashing,
how many fingers?
Do nothing. The point of arrival
precedes you. What you know
precedes you. What you know
precedes what you do.
Impossible inquiry.
But eat what you will.
Consume what consumes you.
Do you still beat your cat?
They cover you with a blanket in sudden night
and beat you up in the night cell.
No formal initiation
but transformation anyway--
invention of degradation or wariness--
a fork in the incarceration mazeway.
Who are you, two decades down the pike,
toothless but wise
in the new light
of release
at home in the uninitiate city,
at peace in freedom's mazeway . . .
The Mouse Eats Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken, II
4
A silent Jaguar
repairs to his secret garden,
not particularly well-bestrewn with violets; rather
gnarly African Rattles
grow in its verdant shadows.
In terms of the phases of the bellows--
half an inhalation.
There is a ghost in this garden
causing the quivering gardener
to take frequent refuge
in the sound of African Rattles
because silence is most hospitable to the ghost.
Sound in this case is no abstraction, no joke,
though the Rattles at their most vehement
harbor a secret silence--
a lasting affinity for the gorge in Central Africa
where the Rattles first rattled with zest.
Fixed in a concrete block, handle-down,
a five-tined fork.
As the phase of Bellows changes, sucking further,
and manifest phenomena grow blear and blur,
Silence comes to qualify Existence
and silent Jaguar
grows ever-more happy with his garden.
An abstract principle resumes the African Rattle.
Secret silence animates the ghost.
The tines of the fork
flower and flame.
The Rattles shake to the rhythm of happenstance
lending a crystalline articulateness to the most contingent incidence.
Silence so thrills of the ghost
that it fuses with the fork
and, for an instant, Black Lake itself
darkly flashes
in the white sonorities
of the dancing choir
of the African Rattles.
Even Hammerhead approves of this garden,
if he can get there,
even Melee.
Curiously, The Old Hotel
is not sanguine
regarding this nearly universal approbation.
Something seemed too loose.
Black Lake, though it flashed up qua its imagery,
was nothing concrete.
And though the Garden attracted Melee,
there was little for any of us
in the way of genuine dispossession.
The gardener was not errant in his terror.
He wished to recur to Black Lake
in a concrete way,
to find true release in true Melee and silence
while preparing
among the flowerets
his skrying opal.
An interesting fellow, the gardener.
The exception he took
to the apparent complacency of Jaguar,
who always was ready to lounge
and indulge his intellectual propensities.
And the Ghost in The Garden
was a ghost indeed.
The question was
was this specter a revenant
and if so
of what or whom?
And why did he haunt this garden?
When Existence itself is a-scatter--
(the concept of Existence, that is)
as the phasing continues
to extract the "mules of apparency"
(someday we'll explain this, if we can)
and there's nothing but an amazing
paradox of ghosts
and an ominous, intimate silence
that tinctures the garden--
every garden, not just this one.
We wait for the melee
at the abstract apex of phasing
to tear all gardens up,
every obstacle fair game for Bellows
as the apex of inhalation approaches,
even the mazeway's walls collapse
and dispossession is distracted
from "Null Property."
And The Garden
is Black Lake,
and the integral, orderly, though recondite maze is a melee,
and the suck turns to swoosh,
and The Old Hotel is happy.
Wrench Boy applies in a rush
his excellent African Rattles--
that is the sign.
Hammerhead appears as the gardener.
A certain commencement of focus
regains the garden.
The Ghost was Existence itself
and is--
The Silence of Jaguar
rejoins his release.
All this appeared in my opal
and I was happy
with such opalescent harmony.
The Mouse Eats Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken II
5
If anyone,
the ghosts
have best access
to the secrets of The Old Hotel. What will they do with this?
It takes time and thought
to become (dis)possessed
of concrete realities--
hence Crystal's affinity for Melee.
She is not possessed of time.
She is one thought. Who is?
Light passes through her
in instantaneous flashes.
Apparent realities glow still and silent.
Black Lake is there concretely, certainly,
as concrete focus,
but ghost thoughts smoke out Black Lake
without forking inner angles or focus points.
How do they do this?
The ghosts rise up
like whisps of smoke in the garden--
the common image
can be configured as true
(with a wink and a nod)
if truth be the heart of Melee,
Melee the avatar of The True.
Abstraction may release into silence:
then you have the ghost of a ghost
and The Old Hotel
the haunt of secrets indeed.
But let's be concrete about it,
plant a fork in the ground and establish a focus.
Let all ghosts repair to Black Lake,
release themselves from the Mules of Apparency,
Melee dispossessed of what quiddity obsesses her--
there is true juice in it. Zest enough
for Hammerhead and Jaguar
to know Black Lake very well
without exorbitant mystery.
It is enough to be loosed from obstacles,
integrate with Melee,
enter into confederacy with Wrench Boy.
The point is that
there are many senses of concreteness,
many ways
to come up smiling
with a fist full of violets.
[]
In my opal
an eerie silence.
A portentous grimace
on the countenance of Jaguar.
Abstracting from Abstraction itself,
Jaguar was staring at a terrible ghost.
One glance was enough
to scatter his focus.
The Bellows was empty.
Only the ghost
could sustain its focus--
configuring an obstacle
that was perfectly concrete.
The happenstance of The Nation
so organized its potential for melee
as to assemble an obstacle
to every possibility of release.
Jaguar was stiff and cold
from ghost-focus.
The violets in his forepaws,
giddy with a ghostly harmonic.
In public parks and common ways
concrete puddles
decked out to look like Black Lake.
At night, the ghosts
flew back and forth from their gorges
and filled The Old Hotel
with a sickly sort of melee--
greasy table-ware and napkins
crumpled and soiled,
dumped in a vat of dark water
and settled to a kind of stagnation
as if the stillness of Black Lake
betokened but a filthy lethargy.
And the ghosts had fashioned a maze
and enforced a muted silence
upon Jaguar and his avatars.
All forks were plunged tines down
in vats of congealing concrete
that blocked the exits.
African Rattles were stopped--
impossible to instigate
a salutary melee.
Black Lake, lost in a Black Lake
of black concrete--
Black Lake, lost in a Black Lake
of concretized abstraction.
Third Interval
Take what thought with you
as you will
or can--
I am lost
in my opal.
Will Bellows
fill again soon?
The silence of the bottom, the stillness
at the bottom of the breath,
the point of the empty bellows--
pure possibility commutes with abject horror
there is nothing
nothing to be done
nothing to come --
Then the Opal changes
the breath returns--
manifestation fills the earth and the heavens
the galaxies proliferate
but I am still lost in my opal . . .
The Mouse Eats Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken
6
Life around Black Lake
wasn't like life only.
There was a gorge
and an irremediable tariff of abstraction.
You paid
or never got out.
Hammerhead understood this very well,
but for Violet it was as if you required
that she see ghosts.
It was an obstacle
just to intimate abstraction.
Yet an abstract altitude
mediated Harmony
at Black Lake
from which
too exclusionary an attitude
towards life itself
would prove an obstacle.
One would want to be loose on this matter.
Not that things weren't lively, mind you,
or that the applicable harmonic at Black Lake
excluded life in concreto;
and Violet herself
was easily conversant with black violets.
But there was an inevitable
fork in your focus,
a willingness to entertain ghosts,
and not to entertain them merely,
but at Black Lake
one was implicitly solicited
to be quite zealous about them,
for Black Lake was their home and habitat actually.
Being loose--and that alone--
produced harmony at Black Lake.
Anything else were a serious obstacle to focus.
Violet--at this phase of the Bellows--close to full,
ambience almost empty,
but air enough so that whatever was there in the dark
positively glowed--
Violet
clung to Wrench Boy.
She knew very well that even now
back in The Old Hotel
there'd be no obstacle to her
attaining sufficient focus
and finding her own being in my Opal.
For to Violet it was not at all amazing
that affinity and nature change with phase,
and she felt in the windy fluctuation of her petals
that abstraction itself
was pertinent to Crystal, her sister.
So harmony prevailed.
Melee held her melee
inside, abiding
an opportunity to lure
Wrench Boy
up to The Old Hotel,
there to release him
from too restrictive a sense of harmony.
Focus, however, does not preclude the Dead.
So Wrench Boy was wont to succumb
to his own abstraction.
It wasn't a matter of happenstance but of phase.
Violet, as floweret,
surely could get that.
In her black habit
she was the accoutrement of ghosts.
[]
We countenance the antithetical in this phase, yes;
but regarding Crystal as total
covering and encompassment of Being, no.
Death is not the antithetical.
It is closer, in abstracto,
to Silence
in the sense of absence--
not abstraction,
but there, where though there is no sound,
there are all the possibilities of The Opal.
To abstract is to pull away,
but once you are away,
in your dispossession relative to one world,
surely other worldliness might absorb you.
In a blink of an eye
you find you are intimate
with what just now was quite alien, non-existent even;
but after an eye-blink or an epic,
you are released once again.
Thus Wrench Boy found ghosts no obstruction
to his wonted fluency
and was happy to be abducted
to the Old Hotel
by Violet, was it? Whomever--
hand in hand with Crystal,
the three or all four of them
entertaining a harmony of their own.
[]
But let us resume our focus.
Where does Happenstance find us?
In the middle of a field
of serially ordered tokens.
We take them one by one
like images in an opal.
We are free to entertain Abstraction
or attend to the all-consuming white susurrus
of an African Rattle
whether we hold one or not.
To seem to be is like ghosts
in The Old Hotel
seen in a skrying opal. Do you actually have one?
I do not.
Though I am solicitous to acquire one.
[]
The Abstract comes in many species--
there is a many-tined fork in it.
Jaguar treats it in his way;
to be a ghost is another.
But at all events
these are not necessarily obstructions
to the realization of Black Lake.
And realization it is
as you penetrate your own scatter,
abstract harmony aside.
Wrench Boy is past master;
in his hands a fist full of black violets,
a ghost in his tool kit
of wrenches.
He tightens up salutary obstacles.
He modulates your garden.
He'll tell you he abides in his gorge.
When a profusion of violets--too much life--
becomes an obstruction,
he opens an inward existence
that is like a black lake.
The Mouse Eats Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken
7
So much for obstacles.
The Garden is lined with forks
stuck,
tines up in the sod.
Wrench Boy advances
on his tour of inspection.
For him the measure is crystal.
He imagines Black Lake
and its chaplet of luminous opals
in a ring around black water.
His wrenches are forks.
He forks the butts of sluggards
when he encounters mental scatter.
He himself pretends to be an obstacle
while all the while he
furtively looks in his opal.
There is nothing like focus
to find a use for your scatter.
There is no such thing as obstruction
in a final sense--make mulch!--
no matter the depth of abstraction,
obsession, or abject desolation.
Your functioning part-psyches
seem forced to adapt to experience.
Experience resolute or distracted
must open crystal,
if crystal phases in or phases out.
Release will snap desolation
though this phase deny
all but grim-most disharmony.
No advice.
I drowned in a simulacrum of Black Lake a thousand times.
No such access to experience available
lost in opalescent obstruction.
My cat is nervous if I am.
She won't retract her fore-claws
or take up her wonted
attitude in my garden.
There's a fork in her feline focus
while my part-psyche is a-scatter.
My obstacle--I admit it--
is the fog in my opal.
I pick up the harmonica
and try to imagine crystal
in its suck-blow notes
interspersed aptly with silence.
Existence is a maze, a gorge.
It quivers when presented
as such in my opal.
Hammerhead and African Rattle
recorded with inappropriate technology,
too complex to render
the simplicity of clear crystal.
Oh Fork!
Find me my Jaguar!
I am Hammerhead!
[]
Awake in his gorge now
Wrench Boy took cognizance
of his inward scatter
as something immediate and concrete.
He did nothing with fork or opal.
The evident appearances
flashing in the Gorge
were quite enough to summon
a lively attention
from himself
in the form and attitude of Hammerhead.
His opal was clear now
but now was no time to skry.
He climbed back into
the ambient atmosphere
and sniffed for violets.
The atmosphere responded.
He saw the orderly forks
with some vehemence
achieving a focus.
The obstructive phase of the Gorge
faded away.
Crystal was strolling with Hammerhead.
Sunny day. Melee,
arms raised,
ready to dance.
The avatars waved to her.
Black Lake was as remote as Deep Gorge,
as close as a ghost.
In a blink of an eye
valence of experience
flips its token--not even a fork
or the sudden eruption
of rattle sounds out of Africa.
You find a sac full of opals,
sink a fork in your high-class sashimi--
not a thought for the new phase of the bellows
if that's what it is
but it isn't
unless you subtly say so--
but you don't.
There's a violet in your button hole,
a fork and an African Rattle
in your shirt and corduroy trousers.
You gorge yourself on oysters
with appropriate forkage.
You are Hammerhead.
You never surrender your focus.
Fork it over!
Whatever.
You focus your African Rattle.
Surely this goes on forever.
No use for dispossession.
Why skry in an opal?
There is no obstacle ever.
This condition cannot scatter.
Ah! I see a maze.
Snap and I turn into Wrench Boy,
scatter previous Happenstance.
A fork to mark a corner.
Look! It's The Old Hotel.
It seems concrete.
Things of themselves are a-scatter.
Where'd everybody go?
You do not name what's afoot,
but a vast black lake opens out
under the cognitive scatter
and the eerie smooth white sound
of a tiny rattle . . .
The Mouse Eats Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken
8
Worse than fog
the opal filled
with black resin
concretely,
not in image only.
Strategies to release it.
Think like a maze.
Hammerhead said,
"Smash it!
Existence itself is the obstacle."
Noise of African Rattles fill the head.
Rattles uttered,
"Strategy to loose me?
Trust Happenstance.
The opal will clear.
Your head lose the rattles.
Harmony rise out of Happenstance."
"Fine for you to say," I said.
"You have no black resin in your opal."
"Pick up a fork," said Hammerhead.
Hammerhead was growing wiser by the pico-second.
He had no necessity to focus.
Radical scatter--no obstruction.
Rather, the stuff of wisdom's substance, like jet fuel.
Opals spewed out of his fontinelle--
opals, in a concrete sense
and every other sense. He said,
"My logic is loose--loosed on the world,
neither subservient to harmonic desiderata
nor any other desiderata
save the intimate coursing
of The Higher Happenstance.
Put that in your opal!"
An eerie little rattle
inside of whose sonorities
one might listen
to tales out of Africa forming
through the complex movements
of tiny sounds alone
scattered as quietly as it came.
Hammerehead at last saw a ghost and was amazed.
It had the form
of a vast celestial Jaguar
settling over the Garden. He said,
"I am not born again,
but for the first time ever
I sense my own gestation.
Henceforth may I scatter
incandescent particles spermatic as I shake
my African Rattle
with small movements
to realize weird worlds only. Melee,
will you come to your Hammerhead?
Shall we meet in The Old Hotel?
Rules of accommodation there
are usually quite liberal;
at least that's what I hear
from that fellow, Wrench Boy, ahem.
I think you know him."
Strange words, or was it black fog
talking?
[]
African Rattle itself
sat quietly
trying to realize an opal
out of sound alone,
but all he produced was Melee.
She laughed, quite at home among happenstance.
Existence itself was her opal.
Nothing to release or cut loose.
What she was striving to produce
was an abstract garden--
she needed to dispossess her own release.
She practiced silence
among the boisterous May flowers.
The sky was full of complex sonorities--
white susurrus their origin--
of an African Rattle
that at last had assumed the function
of a skrying opal.
[]
"I myself am quite released," I said.
"I am Wrench Boy, my alibi today
is to proliferate blatant harmonies.
I loose myself into the being
of a clear quartz crystal,
an incarnation of my syzygy.
We do this while causing a garden
to manifest those harmonies.
Hammerhead pretends not to know me--
such is his wisdom--
but as the narrative disposed by the African Rattle progresses,
he will be released
from his obsession
with newly gestated
species of harmony
and Hammerhead will recognize his Wrench Boy.
It's just a matter of adjusting focus."
[]
The problem was the proximity of the Gorge
and the way it was oozing black resin
to corrupt the public opal.
It was Jaguar from his celestial purchase
that discerned this:
he determined to take command of the Bellows,
modulate African Rattles,
and cause the obstruction to scatter
back into the African Rattle's white susurrus.
Release would be followed
by a salutary melee,
and we all could go back to Black Lake
and tend our various gardens.
"Logic is properly tightest
when thought is loosest."
Wrench Boy said that
while quietly attending his opal.
Interval
Organize human time
into corporate bundles
sociality effectively broken
into familial corpuscles
and sentimentally so focused upon them
that the sky dome invisibly defragilates
we survive a rain of
cracked ceiling paint
and improve our huts
our happiness
to our own detriment
salutary ruin requisite
for further prosecution
of The Great Possibility
as if Being winked at its victims
from behind the veils
of Cosmos City
the sun behind
one hundred billion galactic collectivities
winking
into salutary oblivion
such is your original nature
without reduction
to vocabulary of origin
The head and its mouth turns around
and takes up secret utterance
one oath of allegiance
that is to Being only
no temporized equivocation
any longer the possible
waste time
in the waste time
pluck from the skeletal arbor
perfidious opal.
The Mouse Eats Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken
9
African Rattle went on strike.
Well, not a strike exactly.
But an abstract action
with a universal focus.
Its target--
samsaric thralldom in toto.
Jaguar spear-headed
dissemination
of the pertinent ideological tracts.
Wrench Boy as Trickster
though certainly committed in principle
to the ideological attitude of the action
was equally in principle committed
to provide its antithetical complement.
Not that he intended to stay put and bide his opal.
But rather than boycott thralldom
he thought to go whole-hog including the postage,
if you get the reference.
This might indicate melee
to complement focus,
but focus to subvert
too blithe and unresponsive
a practice of dispossession.
African Rattle disregarded his apparent defection.
He had his own use for Melee.
He thought to exhaust her--
in the meantime
to deploy her energetic scatter
to disarm and dispossess the sting of thralldom
that African Rattle conceived
could not be loosed
until its energy be properly sapped;
though for the most part, in contrast to Wrench Boy,
he just remained impassive.
This in fact would have been
an excellent tactic
had his business been war against Wrench Boy.
The Trickster for the most part requires
that there be something for him
to subvert or counteract.
His esoteric mission
was to reassert
a certain harmonic
vis a vis immediate happenstance, if you follow.
Melee would occur
and not as the simple result
of statistical happenstance.
There was also the questions of Violet
and Wrench Boy's intimacy with the Gorge,
and the kind of focus that threads the invisible mazeway.
But at the esoteric center of his actionless action
there was no opposition,
so all, as it were,
ought to have been
at peace in the Universal Opal
into which
African Rattle allowed himself to gaze fixedly;
African Rattle, resolute in his abstract focus,
was proof against the general scatter
implicit for samsara.
Total dispossession
seemed the perfect analgesic.
African Rattle
in stillness,
yet contracted to jiggle sufficiently
to instigate an adequate melee
so that Happenstance itself
would seem the source of it
and Wrench Boy
have nothing to operate
his utterly unpredictable performances
in response to.
But consider:
A certain duality obtains
between Black Lake and The Old Hotel.
Well, not duality, exactly.
Nothing concrete.
But if you wished to work
against samsaric thralldom
by establishing a factory system
effectively to do so--
training in various tactics of focus
formal invocation of ghosts
supervision by instructors
regarding the progress of your dispossession
judicious introduction of cognitive scatter
at the proper phase
graduated deployment
of your personal African Rattle
when to keep silent
when to gaze in your opal
Then:
The Trickster Function
will certainly come into play.
The whole system will be made to seem like a maze
in a concrete sense;
your practice itself
your quite personal obstacle.
Whether you focus or not,
you will not find a violet.
A veritable melee of dispossession.
Perhaps you'd think you'd better take out rooms
in The Old Hotel.
Red-haired Melee be your bedmate,
Hammerhead the sneaky-eyed maitre d'
provide a veritable menu of focus objects.
He himself, of course, designed the system
so he ought to be able to provide
an antidote to its possession
of your dispossession.
And violets are provided in vases
in all the chambers.
Perhaps abstraction itself is the adequate antidote.
Focus until dispossession
arises without compulsion.
Things just fall off the juggernaut
and Harmony itself
allows the proper focus
to deepen the harmonic
that fosters further focus.
Suddenly there is Crystal
in her closed but luminous car
beckoning you to be her. Joyous
dispossession--The Old Hotel full of light;
The Old Hotel of Silence.
Hammerhead winks at Wrench Boy.
Melee brings out her rattle.
It is Africa
of primal time
eternal
dispossession
a magical fork
its handle
in the sod
the archetype of focal stability
the Universal Garden
the image in the opal, realized--
Melee and African Rattle
in trine with Jaguar
a new Loop
of Dispossession.
Not even Bellows will dispel this.
Appropriate focus at Black Lake
just below the surface of dispossession
where Silence glows.
The Mouse Eats Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken
10
If Melee is too virulent
even a five-tined fork
cannot force
harmony.
Only The Old Hotel
is good for that.
A maze and an African Rattle,
a fist full of violets,
and a new chromatic harmonica
with sixteen holes--a quest
for harmony.
If a bellows fans fiery melee
and your violets blow on the hot wind
and happenstance fans your bellows,
Melee will suffer
no remediation
unless exorbitant focus
defines the phase of the bellows.
What phase is that?
When the Bellows is at Still Point--
acme of swoosh and suck--
fully empty or perfectly full.
Apart from that
there are other consequences
than statistical scatter
when virulence rules.
Violent dispossession.
An angry African Rattle
in the hands of the morbid sentinel.
Melee becomes unsociable.
Her human form burns off in the flaming melee.
Nothing but charge
and the raging winds
full of forks
and other quasi-
magical but pertinent weapons.
Harmony stricken by happenstance?
Study your bellows.
We are more familiar with a less virulent Melee--
one that occasions
a wide proliferation of violets
and fosters universal dispossession.
Big cats and small ones,
white tigers and sleek panthers, calicoes,
wide-ranging cougars
appearing in urban centers--
this happens--it is erratic but not unfamiliar.
If the Bellows explodes
when negative ambient pressure
discombobulates the physics of the instrument
or some egregious obstruction
impedes ejaculation from its nozzle
and the viscous ectoplasm
in which it was wont to wallow
is expended on the wind
or backed up egregiously within it,
then the Gorge will be bereft
of the abstract order
provided by its regular operation.
Otherwise it is just possible
to ignore the archaic gadget.
Violets sustain their delicate dispossession
obedient to phase-work
of an internal order.
Crystal is autonomous
vis a vis the bellows.
At some later point in the progression
of the tokens in this matrix
we may hear of a garden
and the many hungers
of the gender pairs
and other figures
erupting from its sod--
a polydimensional harmonic
configured by Jaguar.
[]
Harmony, whether engendered
by systematic prescription,
if you take the wider view,
is a matter of happenstance
of which the systematic
is but an element.
Melee or maze or the ministrations of Hermetic Wrench Boy--
but the gorge is not a part.
It is on a par with the Bellows.
You will have it or not,
but it will not work as an element.
Violet, thank God, is ubiquitous.
She tinctures Possibility itself
in the rooms and porches of The Old Hotel.
That these might be Harmony, it all
follows from the sweet consideration
that she is of the effluence of Being, and directly.
At all events at this point we do feel
the necessity to entertain that prejudice.
The big cats are hungry
for something concrete
The big bulls bellow.
Melee laughs and remembers archaic pleasures.
Happenstance, is it, that rolls over Africa
and a mule cart rattles
on a rocky road to the Gorge.
To each hut one bellows.
The ambient melee is precise in its degree.
An abstract figure
orders the common elements
that comprise existence. Even the great maze
believed to have been erected
in a field where the woods clears unaccountably.
Functions to inscribe
the outer mystery
in a sort of inner sanctuary
albeit inscribed and sanctified
to holy danger--
a jaguar prowls there--
a jaguar surveys the maze
as if to scour
the bounds of his intelligence --
a maze in-bound by silence--
a silence not pertinent to harmony.
But to the Gorge,
if this is an abstraction, it goes to show what severity--
black violets oblique to happenstance.
A maze does not just happen;
it is built to the measured pulse
of a thousand African Rattles.
Violet and Hammerhead
in their ancestral avatars
pulse the rattles;
ancient pipers press the bellows
and force the reed-noise drone
underneath a rain of fragments
from the leaves of African violets
purple and green
and with a raucous texture to the touch.
If this is an abstraction . . .
The Old Hotel has transmuted backwards
through an inverted chronotopy.
It has the shape and construction
of an enormous hill.
And the bellows accompanies an anvil.
Time itself is tight and loose;
an abstraction of general happenstance,
the Bellows but one figure
the Gorge another
according to your focus.
To get a sense of the severity of abstraction,
the tautness possible for harmony
consider Crystal.
She has the fortitude to trap a ghost.
Harmony beds down at Black Lake.
Wrench Boy makes a house at the Gorge.
It has the form of a maze.
It is adequate to convert
scatter to magnetic harmony
and replaces the fetid ambience
with innocent violets.
The Mouse Eats Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken
11
Thank God for violets.
Release.
Scatter whatever is so, up to now,
into The Great Gorge.
Let the world seem composed of little Jaguars
irresistibly smart and snappy.
Let Melee commute with Crystal,
but for superficial morphology,
they already are each other.
Scatter be the matter-side of Silence.
All things arranged to sport violets.
Crystal glistening with the spirit of dispossession.
Silence tinctured with a violet fragrance.
A tincture harmonic with Jaguar,
The Great Jaguar,
pervading his avatars,
a perfect master of happenstance.
He introduces, in place of The Bellows,
a principle of Obliquity.
It enters wherever
with a wink and a nod.
Even Melee's disconcerted. She whimpers:
"Thank God for violets."
Violet stays loose and fresh
and keeps on scattering her tinctures.
The new principle might serve
or utterly dispossess
any of the others.
Even Silence
is not immune or immured.
She huddles close to Violet
in contrapositive anxiety.
Violet forms an ambience with Crystal
whose deep morphology
already incorporates obliquity
in one sense,
in another is rife with small jaguars.
I see it all in my opal.
I plant it all in my garden.
I fence it round with five-tined forks,
imbue it with intelligence like crystal.
Hear Hear! for the intelligence of Obliquity.
A brand new zygote for Hammerhead,
now that his embryo's been located.
Jaguar's ascension will bring
issues beyond the concrete and its sublimate,
something other than scatter.
Hear Hear!
Summon an assembly
in the lounge of The Old Hotel.
[]
I was the first to speak. I said
"Greetings to all.
We meet to welcome a new principle,
neither abstract nor concrete;
neither silent nor fixed in focus."
Melee interrupted.
"I cannot keep silence.
Hammerhead, Jaguar--
can Obliquity come to the Garden?
Is it not enough that we have Forks?"
Wrench Boy, who was tardy,
leapt in through the great lounge window.
"Melee," he laughed,
"can it be that you are anxious over Forks?
Fear not. Whatever is meted out to us from strange angles,
no angles interdict Violet,
no angularity,
even from our mother, Black Lake.
Let us wield Silence like a mighty shield
and receive whatever comes at us
with grace and aplomb
in the lounges of The Old Hotel.
We know how to work with all obstacles.
When Fork arrived,
there was no call to scatter.
Violet twined round its tines like a tendril.
We let him form a fence about Black Lake.
And ghosts already share
this new character.
And Black Lake can never
be distracted from its focus."
Jaguar responded.
"Mine is the current presidency.
I vote for the persistence of violets
to turn to good account
all incidence of scatter.
It is time to elaborate the maze
from new directions and dimensions
with hammer, fork, and whatever
instrument will manifest
from the treasure chamber
beneath The Old Hotel.
Behold--All Things are New!
Hear Hear to Dispossession!
A fork in a maze makes a garden.
Apo-kako-daimones!
All bad things--a-scatter."
And for the moment,
they did.
The African Rattle
and its great sonic scatter
filled the air
of The Old Hotel.
The Mouse Eats Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken
12
Crystal was satisfied. She pondered:
"This matter would do nothing
to interrupt my focus.
It's just a specification of
a certain sort of happenstance, actually.
And, as for the Garden--well, actually,
if truth be told, it always shifts radically
depending upon whose thought
affects it from the ambience.
Likewise The Old Hotel.
And we have the assurance
that it will not violate
gentle Violet.
And Hammerhead has to be put to work somehow.
And we all are already open to happenstance, so what's so new?"
Suddenly a ghost
flashed through the silicon
flesh of Crystal.
Hammerhead loomed enormous
and multiplied his avatars, one to a facet.
"I am Obliquity," he thundered.
("Sounds pretty direct to me,"
I interjected, parenthetically.)
"The very Ghost in the Crystal.
I come where I can,
in on the Winds of Scatter.
"I fill The Old Hotel
with incoherent impulse and interesting attitude.
The Old Hotel dispossessed of its wonted Silence!
No Violet can resist me now. O Crystal, Crystal,
I come in on the very angle of your focus.
Happenstance is my instrument.
You cannot calculate Obliquity.
Like a ghost in a crystal,
I am the Hammerhead of Old,
the bane of every silence,
the Prince of the New Old Hotel!"
[]
African Rattle was astonished.
"A concrete, shake-'em-up, world extravaganza
seems in the offing,
not just some little-ol' local release.
Hammerhead would be coming in from Everywhere.
But now the momentous question: Has he learned nothing?
Has he no appreciation for Silence?
And what about Wrench Boy?
Would his doctrine of antithetical complementarity
withstand the onslaught of Anywhere?
Was the ancient Enmity
to be renewed?
In The Old Hotel, the house lights flickered.
Abstraction reached a concordat with Happenstance.
Everyone waited for a response from The Gorge.
[]
"There are no degrees to proper dispossession.
You have in every instance
either to let go or not.
When something jumps in on you, are you ready?
Wake up!
Don't keep your head in your opal,
unless your very being is clear as Crystal's."
Wrench Boy was talking to himself and swatting ghosts.
Melee sat beside him,
mockingly assuming Wrench Girl's form and demeanor.
"If there's a ghost in one's harmonica--"
The thought out of nowhere
struck the two of them simultaneously--
"There are ghosts coming out of the Gorge,
startled and randomly flocking.
And Black Lake must be letting its ghosts.
And the maze must be in a panic.
It cannot articulate its own stress--
it has no un-
anticipatable angles.
And of course wicked shearsmen might appear
or simple mowers
and clip sweet Violet at the stem,
ignoring that she's a perennial!
We all are.
We have roots
in the soil
of dispossession
and return, O Hammerhead,
as if fixed in an amulet of crystal,
as if loosed forever
in the magnanimous halls of The Old Hotel.
We are ghosts in a great museum
of black winged statues.
Vast chambers
as if buildings
housed gorges
and the gorges were full of ourselves
in the forms and demeanors of ghosts."
We all were thinking this together,
not only the trickster and his syzygy,
as if in a whispering choir of absently prattling psyches.
Jaguar observed this
from above and within
and stroked his whiskers
and worked his feline chin.
"This is collective hysteria," he expostulated.
"It only happens if they say so--
and all of it is on my watch.
But I only wished to spice up their tedious dyads
with the advent of input from Elsewhere."
Jaguar pulled over Wrench Boy
to disabuse him of his possession by the Collective.
"This is not the proper use of Obliquity," he remonstrated.
"At least it's not the use that I intended.
Release this bunch from their thought--
it opens up a wound
and lets in ghosts.
They suck them out of anywhere,
the crystal palaces within them
are distorting the angles of their facets.
They abuse their own Release,
as if it were not enough to be
the legitimate residents of the excellent OLD Old Hotel.
By god, I'll have to chase them like a big angry cat
into the gorge
to dispossess them."
[]
And he did
chase them
into The Gorge
that was really a Garden;
and it bit them down
until its angles released.
Crystal was the first to laugh.
"An obstacle can manifest from anywhere--
a fork in a violet garden."
Jaguar bowed
and took the hand of Hammerhead.
The Mouse Eats Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken
13
Even our rejuvenant Hammerhead had had
an oddly angled attitude toward harmony.
This was no consequence
of any dispossession
but a concrete application
of his basic nature
to the practical business of hammering things together.
He had a native abhorrence for The Gorge.
His ideal for organic excellence was crystal.
Wrench Boy, rather, on this subject,
had long learned to let things be.
The key was dispossession.
This no doubt was one source of their perennial enmity.
Dispossession is not different from Black Lake,
about which Hammerhead hovers ominously,
not knowing quite what to do about it.
Advice on the matter from Wrench Boy
was generally greeted by silence.
Black Lake is not, obviously, a means
to the perpetually rejuvenant state
regarding Hammerhead.
Happenstance is wedded to The Gorge.
The Gorge in this regard,
a matrix of Obliquity.
You don't know what might come barreling out of it
or how or when.
Ghosts love to hang out down there
while preparing an assault upon bright Crystal
and waiting with grim resolve
for the exorcist's hammer.
Crystal is What She Is,
perennial object of admiration
under the attentions of Hammerhead--
Hammerhead's conception and vision,
the very image of Harmony.
But under the universal Law of Dispossession,
every nature must pass through a silence
peculiar to itself,
on its antithetical journey--
a requisite violation
of what it holds to be its nature.
Such is the Law.
Therefore, Black Lake
has a peculiar relation to Hammerhead,
like a syzygy, in a certain sense.
Wrench Boy had long since abandoned
dialogue with him about this.
Eventually gorge-ghosts would get him,
activate requisite melee, distract
the abstract character of his focus.
Wrench Boy knew very well
he had long ago been initiate to the antithetical,
but initiation is but the beginning of the journey.
And he had only recently
become initiate of ghosts.
There was a maze ahead, and one depot of it
would be The Great Gorge--many-a-fork to be added to his tool kit
before pure dispossession
would realize his garden.
[]
Wrench Boy went back to his opal
having breached a latent jungle of obstructions
only his opal was able to scatter before him.
Then the smoky clear bauble
would recur to silence
beneath which the Gorge
turns into a garden
enriched by Wrench Boy's
perfect dispossession
at a site where ascendant Jaguar
would arrive in a car made of crystal
and his dispossession
further transfigure the Garden.
There was only silence
and the taste of dispossession,
dispossession the opening
for an African Rattle
not to break
but deepen the silence,
its dispossession
abstract
but not abstract,
the dispossession of the Garden itself.
This is a veritable maze of dispossession.
It will never cease raveling and unraveling
the antithetical looseness
associate to taut Crystal. If Violet
had a thought
in her vast dispossession,
that thought's sweet garden
would go on forever
reflected in Black Lake.
It is to such a garden
that Hammerhead was tending
in spite of his peculiar antipathy.
Black Lake
must come to seem
The Old Hotel--
The New Old Hotel.
The means to effect this,
an abstract focus
with an ambient aura of silence--not absence
but a way of Black Lake,
abstruse and diamond hard,
evolved through and in one sense by
Hammerhead for himself,
with his peculiar manner of focus,
for a long while
obviating The Gorge
but allowing The Garden.
The Mouse Eats Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken
14
Wrench Boy and Wrench Wench
together assumed the Presidency.
From that altitude they were forced
to observe the general scatter.
Obliquity forces entropy, certainly,
but its disturbance might just as frequently
provide stimulation,
not in an abstract sense only,
but so that the Garden grow
unwonted botanicals.
Hammerhead busied himself
correcting the maze.
Its pathways must illustrate
oblique angles
and thus be able to receive and integrate
input at entrances from anywhere.
Obliquity was quickly
losing its ability
to generate obstacles.
Thus a new item on the agenda
of Wrench Boy's presidency:
Skew the Maze.
Let it be the receiving platform
for a random flock of ghosts.
"These would not be obstructions,
but rather activate everyone's obsessions.
Where you're stuck, you see them,"
Wrench Boy speculated.
"Up the ante on Dispossession
and let the garden generate strange genders.
Let it be The Gender Garden--
dyads and triads and quaternions
for new modes of propagation and new ecstasies,
confound identities or suffuse them
with transcendental tendencies toward union or distinction,
a path to transfinite, pointwise, division.
The image of Continuum as a journey
all the Way to Black Lake. Let anyone
that can think themselves to abide there,
abide there."
Wrench Wench smiled
in admiration of her syzygy.
Hammerhead stood there eyeing Wrench Boy
with his signature elevated left eye crease
and humped up shoulder.
"I know what you are contemplating, Wrench Boy,
and I hereby serve you notice
that whatever you elaborate to scatter my hammer work,
I'll built it back again
into some responsibly hammered out form.
To you I am still Obliquity,
even to the extremity
of conjuring or laying ghosts.
But do hear this, my young fellow.
Together, you and I,
will transmogrify all obstructions
by our very opposition.
Opposition is true friendship, as the man says.
To think it makes me weep
tears of joy."
Wrench Boy stood aside and observed him
setting to work
building his maze
of such an order of complexity
that, at the limit,
it would approximate Black Lake,
continuous with infinitely branching pathways
passing back and forth across themselves,
attaching, running under, running along
tangled arteries and tubules
that in microscopic densities, green and fluent,
allowed not only The Garden
but all the viridescent scenes
of Demeter's realm.
Violet was not innocent of this discourse.
She sensed a radically forked harmony
fracturing the maze,
a deepening of the darkness of Black Lake,
the capacity of its recipience
vastly enhanced,
with she and Jaguar, in their different modalities,
decorating and encoding
the margins of it.
[]
Violet twined the Fork
oblivious to its harmonic.
She became the maze.
Her heart was a black lake.
Jaguar eyed her ruefully.
It was a time
of universally mutual
objectification
and observation.
There was a change in The Garden.
The little flowerets were loosed
and grew obliquely
green protuberances
from their pliant stems.
The change was irregular, concrete, and rapid.
The Garden was redolent of Black Lake.
Faint smell of mud.
Its rows and pathways
were maze-like now.
To walk it was to take a walk in obliquity.
A faint sense of the presence of a jaguar at every corner.
A crystal glittering oblique ray-like flashes
across silence.
You could sense The gorge
in or as the deeps.
Jaguar really did
prowl the pathways.
Oblique gender formations
opened fomenting mazeway.
Unfamiliar harmonies rode on silence.
Obliquity and concreteness
in an articulate complicity
welcomed ghosts.
Quietly, quietly, a chorus of African Rattles
grew to a focus of intensity.
Hammerhead was amazed.
Was Wrench Boy / Wrench Wench behind this?
What of their wonted practice of Dispossession?
He saw jaguars everywhere
with strangely flashing extraneous parts and organs:
every spot was an eye; four tails coiled snake-like
about his hind parts.
He could not claim to be Obliquity now--
that quality HAD him.
Wrench Boy held the Fork.
"Damn these African Rattles," he muttered.
"I cannot locate Happenstance.
Some oppressive intention
overrides and obstructs it.
Damn these changeling jaguars."
Suddenly Silence reigned over Obliquity.
Every concrete thing shifted slightly.
Every silence seemed oblique.
The attitude of concreteness
sought the form of ghosts.
Garden? An abstract Gorge.
Fork? But an obliquitous transform of Melee.
Harmony? The clanking of wrenches in a rucksack
attached to the back of Wrench Wench.
It was African Rattle that at last put a stop to all that.
By certain pauses and dampenings in his sonorities
he managed to form an abstract of these obstacles
and place before us all
a shining opal
whose obliquity
approached infinity.
The Mouse Eats Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken
15
The Maze of Happenstance is never silent.
A fork in concrete existence.
Wrench Boy returns the presidency to Jaguar.
Jaguar reconvenes the assembly.
Silence sets the scene.
Silence fills the opal.
We gaze and listen.
A maze appears.
Jaguar opens:
"Let us reflect Black Lake."
White scribulariae
shine on its waters.
Opal opens:
"I stand back
from what
appears in me.
Existence is like a maze:
wherever you seem to be in it,
newly intimate doors and tangled passageways
defy you to signify the scheme of it.
If obliquity captures concreteness,
this obviates history.
Unaccountable factors
sidle in from elsewhere.
Concreteness grows ghostlike.
Everywhere cognitive baffles and immaterial obstacles.
I stand back
from what appears
in myself
that others might watch and listen."
Wrench Boy jangles his back pack
and the wrenches make sounds
with odd shaped gaps and spaces.
He waited till everyone was distracted
and there was an erratic clatter
of disorderly responses.
He found holes in the general disarray,
rang a wrench that made one tone,
and the maze of sound subsided.
"Existence is amazing," he said.
"Happenstance proliferates over silence.
Black Lake is where it comes from,
a mouth comprising our hunger,
a stomach devouring what we know."
The opal turned white. He had just realized
that everything was occurring inside him.
Now Maze itself wished to speak.
"Mr. Jaguar.
I protest that I am no obstacle
to the operations of The Old Hotel,
whether concretely focused
or permeated by deep silence.
I am my own abstraction.
I countermand the Fork.
But are we really all inside the opal?"
[]
Jaguar stepped back from the plethora of obstacles
that rendered concreteness itself
an impasse on the pathway to Crystal.
Is that where we are going?
"Don't think in advance
of your own release,"
he commanded.
"Let each thing devolve
to its particular scatter.
If we see too many jaguars
lurking by the drum,
this well might be
our community obstacle
and cause The Old Hotel
to lose its concrete focus,
foster radical silence,
mop up the general confusion
with an abstract generalization--
in this case that might be--
I am not strictly asserting this--
a good thing."
"What are we doing here?" Asked the Fork.
"Do we know? Obviously
we cannot
inquire of the Opal
if we are all
inside it."
"Nonsense," African Rattle contradicted.
"I am not, for one, inside that smoky pebble.
I'd rather be drowned in silence."
"But I am made of silence," whispered Violet.
"Shall we solve the secret of what we are
by this sordid scattering of fragmented attitudes?
Jaguar, can you throw some light
on his terrible maze
or find a thread to lead us through
its immutable confusion to silence?
I will not survive pure abstraction.
I long for Black Lake
where my ten-thousand sisters bloom
in silent obeisance to its waters.
Concreteness itself would be a garden
if only we were released
from the closure of this opal.
Sweet harmony once contained us
in opalescent dispossession.
Why own anything at all?
When Wrench Boy juggled his opals
in the lounge of The Old Hotel,
Jaguar laughed and produced in us
such a dance of happy attitudes.
Scatter is not the same thing as Dispossession.
Can Abstraction scatter Obliquity?
Is there nothing at all
but this intolerable cognitive melee?"
I said,
"Concreteness exchanges obstruction for loose scatter.
But what thinks The Gorge?"
"Ha ha ha. Wrench Wench and her silly sibling--
scatter-heads the two of them.
I'm amazed that Melee hasn't overwhelmed us all.
That boy--President?
When was that, yesterday?
Ha! I eat your Old Hotel
for crunchy soup at lunch!"
[]
I said, "Should we sustain deep silence?
Should we quietly recur to Black Lake and silently stay there?
Shall we read our garden
with its havoc of genders
as an insoluble maze?
Shall we resign ourselves to insupportable scatter?
Strange.
but through all of this,
Hammerhead keeps his silence."
The Mouse Eats Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken
16
Jaguar studied
dispossession in others
and measured it in himself.
Remainder: the ghost
released
by abstraction.
[]
Not so easy
to abandon
the maze of speech.
It fills the bowl.
It feeds the many-motley-ed guests
in The Old Hotel.
Every word
its special thralldom,
every utterance
its own ghost,
every ghost
its special accent
and its access
to itself
along precise sonorities
of the African Rattle.
[]
Jaguar inquired of himself,
"Perhaps I must take possession
of The Old Hotel,
encounter every obstacle
in its special chambers,
shake the African Rattle
and rid our Collective
of every special thralldom that yet binds us
in one grand performance of devouring.
That just might expunge
the whole famous cave of phantoms
in a single chomp."
Jaguar chomped
and there was silence.
An abstract of all possible abstraction.
Yet Black Lake had withdrawn to its opal
and the maze outside of Vicinity
was chock full of jaguars.
Jaguar collected himself
and continued to study
his own dispossession.
Here are his notes and comments.
"Not all ghosts
are obstructions.
That is one thing.
African Rattle, in totality,
for instance.
As Jaguar, I've decided
to stop making speeches. That's another.
The Old Hotel
could function quite well
as an Opal.
Let everyone agree
to seek the proper
function for Abstraction.
We all can help Hammerhead activate and sustain
his proper focus.
And each of us must discover
how to happen happily in happenstance. Ha ha.
Well. If Old Hotel is Opal,
what of The Gorge?
Abstraction cannot contain him.
That's a fact.
His being before and after
the cat's bowl is broken.
Harmony is differently a desideratum for each of us--
One Law for the Ghost and the Fork is Oppression.
As the man sort of uttered.
I'd rather appropriate scatter
and grow a great forest
of African Rattles,
install Obliquity ever-changing, ever-surprising,
let African Rattles fill The Gorge
to see what anyone might hear there
whatever their obliquities,
however the exigency of happenstance
whether abstract or the other thing,
rather an Old Hotel
a jaguar in every closet
around each corner in the halls;
the broken bowl is anyone's cosmos
importuned as The Great Release.
Let African Rattle commute with this--
the purity of Melee, in just proportion,
the symphony of ghosts
invited to the party
Saturday night
at The Old Hotel--
or else the devil with the calendar--
away with every covering for time;
as long as the whole Collective dwells concretely,
time might well dispel the ghost of its measures
or else invent some new principle,
The Great Ghost fill time
as the perpetual liberation of obstacles requires,
Happenstance hand-in-hand with Release.
I'll take charge of Abstraction myself.
Perhaps I'll not cease making speeches
but in the guise of Jaguar
grow fluent in managing my focus--
both on what
and at what degree--
don't be too sharp with ghosts,
too narrow with violets.
Let Happenstance occasion methodology,
choose how many tines
you sharpen on your Fork.
Do we need a Minion
to work on our Koan?
Ten sharp men,
persons of whatever gender,
to work together
in a garden,
each at a turn in the maze,
another angle
of Happenstance.
Then light will fill the Gorge
coming from ten points in Anywhere
and the ghosts go back to Black Lake
and the Ghost enliven the Ten Facets of Crystal.
Does it take ten beings together
to make it concrete?
do right by what a maze really is?
reconcile two five-tined forks
with benevolent forces
coming in from Obliquity?
No leader ever, but ten angular singularities,
each one visitation, one ghost?
Well, it's a thought."
The Mouse Eats Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken
17
The Old Hotel had so long entertained Obliquity
that the old crone longed for the healing waters of Black Lake.
It was not just a matter of focus or bifurcation.
For instance,
when Jaguar called an assembly
or anyone grew cognizant of The Gorge,
the thought of Black Lake awoke
as complement or counter-cognizance,
Black Lake in turn, being ground and bottom
to every sort of Melee,
had accustomed The Old Hotel
to the bottomless call of The Gorge,
abyss of illicit riches,
material and phantasmatical,
opals as baubles, or glasses for conjuring
single images or ontologies entire--
all this transpiring with such constancy
that the phenomenal melee of it all
seemed to The Old Hotel
the natural attitude of historical time.
Now it was just too much.
To see a ghost or face a fork in one's itinerary
were all an afternoon's entertainment.
A fork to a guest were an obstacle, possibly;
the full complement
of agitated African Rattles,
something for Jaguar to bother about.
But for The Old Hotel
these disturbances were part of the local temperature;
locally assimilable, but in the aggregate
and as history continued to deliver itself,
quietly exhausting.
The Old Hotel was worn out
from the constancy of Obliquity.
She looked for Black Lake in her private opal
to quiet the implacable melee and was appalled.
She was no closer in essence
to its healing waters
than her obstreperous guests.
The Old Hotel in dismay
turned toward The Gorge.
She adopted a new attitude
toward its rattles born in Africa,
to the forest of forks
that carpeted the slopes of its walls.
She thought to hire Wrench Wench as agent or safari guide.
She'd commission an expedition down there
in quest of the elusive Principle of Harmony,
herb or stone or rubric,
something, perhaps by magic,
to make possible a healing mind
whose dispossession
legend told
paradoxically held possession
of The Gorge.
African Rattle was available for the assignment.
A path among sonorities.
It waited in a patch of the backyard garden for command.
It hitched its gourd to a fork
and abided the moment when
to begin to scatter sound
in quest of the chthonic equivalent to Black Lake
and bring back the token, the charm,
the anti-mechanical key
to final release.
And break the Koan.
[]
Bifurcation is a condition
distinct in the encounter
from its recall.
African Rattle
subsumes temporal distinctness.
In this sense its white susurrus transforms
harmony to foul abuse.
You must wrench yourself out of its measureless measure,
assert adamant dispossession,
exaggerate the concrete if you must,
and dispossess your jaguar.
All this was wearily familiar to The Old Hotel,
sharp as crystal.
Similarly Happenstance
was distinct qua principle,
from, well, happenstance.
You make your energy
take the form of Jaguar
and jump into The Gorge.
The Old Hotel
did that.
Opals in saddle bags
as exigent currency--
who knows what expenses
one might incur down there,
what rough paths
bifurcate continually,
morally,
materially.
At the bottom
anticipate Silence
or rather seek release
from all anticipation.
Dispossession is both method and result.
A fist full of violets.
Melodious Melee.
Release for The Old Hotel.
[]
Black Lake as ultimate principle
is not like a maze. Black Lake
is not like a garden. Not
like a crystal. And not
like an old hotel.
To what can they compare thee, O ultimate etymon?
For Garden compensates Melee
and we all, to release ourselves,
just might jump into The Gorge,
and the world
is the scene
of abstract machines.
They don't give a hoot
about our dispossession
in regard to them,
and a garden of dispossession
releases us onto
a certain instrumental silence--
use it by all means
to call forth your private Black Lake.
[]
Hammerhead hammers out Obliquity.
Do you have money?
This conditions your attitude toward Melee.
Can you find your Jaguar?
If so, why jump in The Gorge?
The mouse eats cat food
in the kitchen of The Old Hotel,
neither does he squeal
for dispossession.
He is delicate with chopsticks and forks.
He cozens Silence.
The Mouse Eats Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken
18
When the Gorge is silent
--ominous obstacle.
One wants one's harmony to roar
lest there be no release
for the elderly Old Hotel--
dust and mould spores,
broken stones in a garden.
Obstruction no obstacle for Violet.
She covers The Gorge and makes
the old garden emanate perfumes,
exploding with African Rattles.
Violet is settled at home in The Gorge--
no need to remember Black Lake.
Release is loosed in her nature.
Her gender affinitant is Opal.
When proper melee roars,
her numbers augment the May-scene
all about the Old Hotel, so elderly now.
But The Gorge was engorged on Silence.
Abominable lacuna of waiting
for the advent and passage of Obstruction.
The forest of African Rattles
settled its beads and pebbles
at the bottom of black gourds.
Violet's petals were calm on their stems.
Neither Gorge nor Garden
hospitable to Melee.
She bound her red flaming tresses
in a tight knot
pending release.
Mechanics and carpenters
were at work in the Maze,
no distracted avatars of anyone
wandering lost in there.
No scatter, no disarray;
not a hint of obliquity.
What is a garden
without Melee concretely
to gamble (or gambol) release?
No Carnival of Happenstance, no jouisance.
Perfect stasis is obstruction--
nothing quixotic, nothing zealous;
only an extravagance of focus
fixed on the fixed Collective.
Nobody moving.
[]
This species of obstruction
was a spur to action for Wrench Boy.
Spontaneous emergence of multiple bifurcation,
a scattering of point-sharp tines
poking the statues,
provoking release.
"Loosen up, ye statues!" he remonstrated with a laugh.
Renaissance of Obliquity
to complexify focus.
But you know the drill.
And a ghost is primitive to Jaguar,
Obliquity propaedeutic to Release.
Scatter allopathic to Obstruction.
Gorge must be black, and even when latent only,
mysteriously present with a hint of the tumultuous,
otherwise the Collective comprehends no sublimity.
And the True Work realizes
rather than requires
Dispossession . . .
We have paused here to offer this summation.
Time itself comes loose.
There is no determinate sequence.
Let us take out rooms in The Old Hotel
neither new nor elderly truly.
But the Crone herself
a great Mistress of Obliquity.
She prunes the poison berries from her garden,
applies the latest studies
in psycho-neuro-pneumatic-pharmacology.
She is herself the gardner
with mowing scythe, great shears, and wicker-work bucket.
Those dainty flowerets were never violets merely--
they focus the will.
In her many-jointed fingers
the African Rattles deliver
educated sonorities
set to obviate obstacles
and harness abstract machines.
You'd never believe The Old Hotel
ever suffered gray senility.
Oblique olfactories freshen her corridors.
Wrench Wench importunes her avatars,
one maid to a chamber,
released from the womb that is the Gorge.
You can witness primordial midwifery
from oblique windows
if you know how to find them.
An army of African Rattles
honors the mystery.
And the crystal cat bowl's no obstacle.
It glistens in the kitchen winter dawns
as sun strikes frosted windows ever-miraculous.
Racemes of transmutable violets
scattered, released
throughout The Old Hotel
and its eternally transmutable gardens . . .
The Mouse Eats Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken
19
The garden was guarded and bounded
but opened onto the world.
The ghost of worldly logic
lit up the opal.
Positive propositions
fell prey to an implicative scatter,
then came to a focus
like nasty black turkey-vultures
circling over the gorge.
The picture was quite concrete,
though a queasy feeling came over me
as I gazed in my opal.
Some enormous mammal
had expired down there,
according to the opal's logic.
Seven small black crystals
encircled a big block of jacinth.
The mammal is Existence itself
(or is my thought distorted?)--
leaving a blank in our garden,
concrete with melee occulted.
Crystal the goddess, the person,
is also herself The Garden,
inalienable obstacle come to a focus;
focus itself like an African Rattle--
brown black, dried hard gourd
inlaid with tiny white cowries,
stem handle twined round with violets,
its quality redolent of The Great Gorge
that, like a garden--
if there were a ghost in the garden--
as an image might work like an opal;
but the secret melee--you could see it--
disturbance among facets of crystal.
Existence--if like a garden--
a concrete category no longer--
but a vivid sequence of similes--
but a string of violets in focus--
and the thing itself,
a proposition alive
only in the funk of our Jaguar.
To call it a matter of happenstance--
well you might say that if you have to;
but better let ignorance keep silence;
concreteness of simile, like a long string of violets;
abstract machines in focus;
all this to persuade dispossession
and open out in the opal
what you might call An Ultimate Harmonica--
like the swoosh and suck of a bellows,
sour breath from the guts of a world.
Black Lake resolves but's not like this.
Black crystal takes Abstraction for cat food.
That's a wish.
African Rattles
function like sonic opals--
deliverances like shadows
in the orders of Harmony.
When matters snap into focus--
what disruption!
Let loose all messages at once--
discombobulate Information--
in the depths of your opal--
harmonica suck and swoosh--
opal all swirling and smoky--
African Rattles
run amock in The Garden.
Gorge engorges Abstraction.
May the Goddess abhor this.
[]
Dispossession allows
Existence (the thought of Existence)
to show and dissolve
in anyone's opal.
Then Wrench Boy Girl Boy
Wrench Wench
rest at home
in The Old hotel
and The Gorge
but the play of happenstance
(something happens).
Every ontology is like this--
a way to tend a garden
or qualify the gorge.
It is not possible to show your process.
Abstract machines
disorganize your opal or
for better or worse
ignore it -- concreteness
something a little off from this--
a fork in a gorge--
a violent assertion of silence--
in your face--
the oligarch's garden.
[]
For all that I keep looking in my opal,
bifurcation a temporal illusion.
I know a gorge out of time--
an opal at the center of an opal--
Being itself is a Black Box
and Hammerhead stands alert in one corner
to prosecute his quarrel with Wrench Boy.
An opal at each tweek of the mazeway.
Release itself keeps talking
and you cannot silence Abstraction.
Put opals instead of pebbles
in the gourds of your African Rattles.
Qualify Obliquity with crystal.
Make love with Melee--
flaming red silence
flares from the Great Harmonica.
Kick a stone down the path of a garden.
Fake ghosts.
The Mouse Eats Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken II
20
Concretely speaking,
Black Lake is tranquil
whatever constitutes your world.
The world. While
African Rattles
kick up a rumpus,
even if Happenstance has it
that nothing is happening.
Harmony essentializes as Garden.
Abstraction has no essence.
When Africa rattles,
it jumps into action,
and African Rattles shake across the world.
Hammerhead, concretely speaking,
has always manifested
as Master of Abstraction,
while Violet decorates his lists.
Where Hammerhead has anxiety
is in concrete situations
involving gazing opals.
He doesn't like what he sees, so he
takes out his harmonica
and tries to harmonize melee.
A sad joke.
Essence-wise, Crystal's in her element.
Being itself appears
as an intricately realized shining garden,
entities arrayed in even rows
but patterned handsomely, even fantastically,
strange geometries concretized.
But even so, concreteness allows for shadows,
each shadow like a shaped black lake.
African Rattles stand as sentinels.
Violets shudder when they sound.
Hammerhead's longing grows concrete
when even abstractedly Crystal
flashes her intrinsic harmonies.
The Old Hotel on the Hill
maintains a stately dispossession.
If there are ghosts up there--
confusion everywhere. Who knows
if abstraction reigns
as collective malady.
Crystal bifurcates the moonlight
to harmonize Obliquity.
African Rattle scatters tranquility
where concreteness has been called upon tendentiously.
There's always a fork
in reach.
Hammerhead has it in his arsenal.
He glances all about
and the miscreants scatter.
Who are they?
[]
We only seek release--
break up the oligarch's garden.
We--the ten-thousand ghosts
to haunt this
oblivious to dispossession.
We'll stab ten-thousand forks
into the obscenity that is this garden.
Let Happenstance follow our focus.
No hortus conclusus unless its abstract orders
rattle its Africa for all of us.
We are Abstract Machines--no abstraction merely.
We take up African Rattles
because we are being scattered quite concretely
as if already ghosts--
O Hammerhead, Hammerhead, where are you headed --AGAIN--
your ten-thousand avatars shall never know peace
through your evil-spirited Declaration of Dispossession.
We are Wrench Boy, Wrench Girl--
our African Rattles carpet the world
like trees in the forest pirmaeval.
The ghosts you see are ourselves.
Call off your abstraction, O Hammerhead.
We enlist you for the all
but universal scatter.
There is no alternative now.
Behold our army of jaguars,
all shaking African Rattles.
[]
Existence, though concrete, is a maze.
Every picture of it, in some sense proffered tendentiously.
Will you scatter the ghosts?
They return to The Gorge.
No harmony yet
can master dispossession
which, in spite of its abuse
and superficial application
is the key
but practiced now
mendaciously certainly--
it rests on a gorge of appetite
while ghosts starve in the scatter.
Obstacles ubiquitous, Obstacles inevitable.
Hammerhead's concordat with Wrench Boy--
pray, not yet.
Not yet recall ghosts from their scatter.
Greet Obstacle with ominous silence.
Harmony only in Obliquity.
But keep shaking those African Rattles.