MAGNETIC NEGAPOSITIVITY

Come to me, my healer, my killer,

and bring with you silently my sleep.

(The fact is the oak, and truth the ax.

The wolf is the shepherd is the sheep.)

My love is gold, my soul is silver.

You are the banker. You are the thief.

REPRESSION: “LIVING IN AN UNDERGROUND DEN”

I’ve learned to bury my furies well.

My false rainbow smile

is concealing

my volcano style.

I wear my heaven to hide my hell.

My tornado’s ire

needs revealing

through some Plato’s fire

on my ceiling.

I must learn to unsilence my knell.

THE OLD FOLKS

Neutered and defutured,

even their pasts have vanished.

KO SAMUI

and then,

blue-blade sky nicks cloud balloon–

Utopia’s face undams,

the electric noisebands jam.

 Every horizon quilled by harpoons.

Reinforcement waves charge down

To advance their cpmrades’ ground.

Then fickle DJ changes the tune;

Rainbow’s regiment routs Rain’s.

Beach explodes like a sun mine,

paradise by sails again festooned,

and the night aloud with stars

As sparklers alight in tar.

YES, I HAVE BEEN TO INDIA

Yes I have been to India. To that crazyquilt sari of piecemeal continua. This corner of culture remnant here supraimposed with that antic pocket there — all portions piled on, fu/ture/past juxtaposed and jangled, the mangled jazz of sitar/synth. In all this harem, whose hair is being plucked?

Yes I have been to India. Traced the serial Gandhicide graffiti through each election warren and heard the turbaned urban politicos scrawl their sloganscreed upon eager puppetdom. And thus learned that here, like home, the public part of man is apportioned mainly between play and display — performance shivas into form.

Yes I have been to India. Aboard a portable bedlam chugging from the station, a neverend circus of practived infant beggary — already, no gesture out of place, a persistent pantomime of persuasion and despair (yet my only alms a stone stare and stubborn refusal to be moved, and my sad wonderment at how the heart can harden so, and how soon.) Meanwhile, the Hooghly dawn unfolds in pinks and peach…

And all emerges from India. And all merges there — pedestrians, pushcarts, palanquins, pigs pressed together on the pavement with the trucks, trikes, bikes, and buses — like the constant blendings of ancient gods and newer fads. The whole universe, in India, remains submerged except for heat and mosquitoes.