A black sun of life

washes the scummy oceans.

The midnight of renewal

brings forth stars that were drowned.

Angels of a deep fecund abyss

land on this ruined town.

Multiply the deer in every park!

Stop all the cars, dash through

their linear haze.

Let all our days be babies,

let babies be all our days.

My friends, my old friends:

our ways are no longer the same.

Our collapsing culture has alarmed you:

it enlivens me with darkest joy.

The pressure of our panicked architecture

has made me soft in the places

where you have hardened; it has

made me hard in the places

where you are soft.

Still, the flowers bloom, now

with something akin to vehemence,

in my vaginal, hot-peeled eyes.

But the stem from a refulgent Earth

is rooted deeper than this body, this time.

My girth grows in the tunnels

where you still refuse to go.

I'll let you wilt on the outside,

in the same place where

these blades and blossoms reign.

I can feel the pain of the water,

the erotic infusion of photosynthesis,

deep in the soil, in the cool caves

that my hands have painted.

I don't need sainthood to be resurrected.

Ferocious in the clutch of pink and green

thorns and petals in a stream of fists

opening into feathered fingers

the sky is a sphere

the trembling movements

of squirrels on powerlines,

pines creaking in the disturbed breezes

hawks calling over indifferent deer.

Where was I going?  The stores are closed.

I walked offroad and into the heart

of an inhabited rose.  The small depths

change you, the big depths rearrange you.

Sidereal epiphanies come soaring

through dark matter, apartments are arranged

into People's Mansions.  Utopia is crawling

on my bones.  How did it get here?  I got lost.

I lost everything, and everything was gained.

These blades have learned to paint.

This glue is filled with seeds.

This emptiness is almost all I need.

I see tree shapes that are cosmic figurines.

Lingering clouds compare.

The breath of birds above my thinning hair.

No more fencing this in unless it flourishes.

No more removal from the water of life.

Let the vines climb me.  I'll eat the ivy if I can.

The womb of life has vomited a twisted man.

I let the knots come out in slow uncoiling.

I furrow in the flower's plan.

It's not a plan.  The tendrils spouting luminescence

scanned me as I ran, with second sight.

They share not the fear of my errors.

In a cone of long green stems

my terror takes the silence of these threads

and hears it shred.

The voices of the shed are gone,

the fire's out.  The mushrooms

in my ribcage then now sprout all around.

Their colors abound and include odor.

I will lie in this clay and walk later.

The grasses synchronize lights.

That's not just fireflies.

It's the remembrance of a lover

who knew my drive was life

before I knew.  All thoughts are dew.

The water runs through claws

that turn to baby fingers in a blink.

The blood of my cells can think.

Over stone pastures it sings me

a song.  In exile I belong.

Out of the ageless veneer

and into real and rotting flesh

watch the chickens pecking

seed from scattered planet skin

and the sun dragging like a blade

cutting coiled plants

loose from melons and berries

paths of cherished rain

and walls of painted wood

spice of radish in the mouth

tongue's fever cooled

on palpitating sky

all the lives of the earth in mind.

In the darkening woods, blue-tailed newts

dodge among curled leaves, one

bounces off my feet, trickles quickly

to a square ditch carved by machines,

flickers along the seams of concrete,

invites my spirit into mud,

into thick interrupted soil,

into paths that lead back

to a forest's core

where the deer snore

beneath sloping branches.

COLTRANE'S ASCENSION

When John cut out the heroin and booze,

his soul grew even deeper and more true.

The violence of his sax transcended space.

He balanced all the cosmos on his Black back.

His attack was supreme love.

May all our architecture imitate his deepest Om.

The thrum of him is larger now he's gone,

a Jedi's seed.  He channeled all the forces

dark and light, with perfect discipline.

I tell my men to imitate his Zen.

We should drink from the well

that his blood filled.  He sanctified

and transformed all the demons

that he killed, with perfect will.

When you meet your craft clean

day after day, in solitude

and with others in improvisation,

all things bloom.  John cut down

the avatar of deadening masculinity,

and worshipped the Womb.

His manhood grew there too.

In his ascension we can be renewed.