Tonight is the Night of the Bone.
We’re all together and each alone.
The Storyteller
strikes a rock and water pours out
provoking our attention.
Words are weighed out on the thin desert air
like grains of gold on a hand-held scale.
The scintillating light vibrates with each gesture:
an arch of the arm, a cloud of ashes let loose.
Tribal sharing
when ears become eyes
a story is savored by the full body.
Fire light reflects in our sweaty faces
and when we look up
stars gather and take shape.
(Be not afraid of the Universe.)
With this in mind allow me to degenerate
and dwell with the tribes of today.
These tribes overshadowed by delicate high-tension lines of
electromagnetic fury, like ley-lines of old,
straddling the dragon of perilous beauty across a landscape abused.
These tribes fleeing to the outback, rattling bones on bareback mountains,
filling the Void rightly and divinely.
Tribes of fire circles, a moonylunie communion with the trees.
Tribes humming and drumming, keeping time, folding space.
Tribes raging and engaging.
Tribes stretching out, hand to hand, heart to heart.
Temporary Tribes
Extemporizing and rationalizing.
Tribes cast asunder and wandering lost (lost)
Crazed in tracking a useful path
through these badlands and high dry desert.
Tribes lighting twigfires in the thorny night.
Tribes spread thin. Too thin.
Can we find our anchor, that place and time to gather.
Will we survive?
Join in, enter the fray:
The thunder rips the air, the rain weaves it together.
Standing forth naked, revealed:
A blaze of Darkness and an androgynous moon.
(Be not afraid of the Universe.)
Let me tell you a story:
I remember
One Far-off Day
when I stole my soul from God.
He raped my wife
and left me a bastard child.
So we had a score to settle,
you see?
So I stole my soul from God
gave it to my Mother to keep safe and warm.
It was then I took to the road
That was when the chase began.
Chased out to the edge of a minor galaxy.
I am only now
just beginning to
Remember.
I am only now opening doors, entering unafraid, waxing full.
We’ll go in the garden
and God won’t find us there.
pooka
pooka
pooka
pooka
pooka
pooka
pooka
pooka
pooka
pooka
pooka
pooka
Have you ever been invisible?
Composed Quarklike—Strange yet charmed—Illuminated hand print.
Wearing the mask of the Faceless One.
Cold howling Craft—shifting introspective damp forest mind.
As if by chance—unveiled and resplendent—the pooka Dances.
pooka
pooka
pooka
pooka
I can smell the islands:
The islands of my birth into this world.
Orchids swell and burst
frail and translucent in the crescent moon tide
leading me along towards paradise.
I live on this earth without regret, doing little harm.
This earth rich and dangerous.
This earth clad with wild innocence.
This earth singing every fine and faithless hour
with the tongues of cockatoo and butterfly,
of macaque and man.
A hollowed out canoe rising then sliding down
over warm ocean swells.
I am a floating world.
Enclosed in a silvery membrane
a creature that knows nothing
paddling indulgent forgotten oceans
feeling ripe
breaking easily from the vine
chances are I’ll pass this way again.
Without distractions and unchained from the Self,
always the Same Self,
my passion spins in turbulent desire.
I greet the foam and spray,
being filled and emptied all at once.
My heart leaps
as I follow the spindrift scent
to my Lover’s island.
pooka pooka pooka pooka pooka pooka
Yet here I lie, under a stark and wired sky,
a fading hero to desperate love.
I will now dwell in the valley of my friends,
partaking of the nectar in common.
All of us are injured, scarred by eons of abuse and neglect.
All of us taking time to lick each others’ wounds.
All are trembling as the hitmen from God corner us
and deliver salvation with words and weapons.
All opposition is futile, they say.
All you need to do is sell your soul to us.
They’ll give your a good deal.
Become slaves of God.
Like anonymous file transfer protocols
we become casual data in the mind of this God.
Like pigs being herded into the slaughter house,
He eats us for brunch, thin and crispy.
Read up, read up!
It is all in this BOOK!
The transcribed indelable forefinger of God
so they say.
The rightly divided Word that none can transgress
so they say.
The Law
so they say.
I’ve read it three times
all the way through
and believed it
without knowing what I believed.
Perhaps I wanted to believe.
Perhaps I needed some kind of story to give me hope
To reassure me that I’m not alone.
I needed to be ashamed and abused.
But now it is like a fantastic trashy novel
one that spawned a religion
who knows?
Perhaps that may happen again.
Yet now that BOOK is drenched with blood
not of God but of us.
Where do we go from here?
What comes next?
Oh yeah…
Now hear me out:
Burn your Bible today.
Do not be mislead for a single second more.
Burn your Bible today.
Cast off the rags of that old tribal warfare.
Burn your Bible today.
It is a Book of Tales like a Bed of Nails.
Burn your Bible today.
It tells you that you are born into Sin
and in your body you can never win.
Burn your Bible today.
Shake off the sham.
Say goodbye to the Son of Man.
Burn your Bible today.
There is no entrance fee to reality.
Burn your Bible today.
Burn your Bible today.
Burn your Bible today.
Burn your Bible today.
Come let us dance:
We are the gates unlocked.
We are the hot breath and sanguine touch.
We are the silence piercing the air.
We are a sack of dreams.
We call for redemption and hear only echoechoecho.
We are lovers and livers, losers and givers.
We rage in caves, undulating to truth hollowed out in a beat.
(to a beat!)
We make motion to sound to scent to slither
through to a sharpened moment.
We believe we can walk right into the oak grove and unfold.
We form and fire and feel and then finally break.
We weave and whisper and pay heed to the wisdom of the Snake.
We are a collective stigmata.
We remember the seared flesh, the smoky whip
and the hard glowing steel.
We are angels for all that it is worth.
We can laugh at our gods and they can laugh at themselves.
We nurture ourselves on the ancient teat.
We bless with our small blessings.
We will be here to welcome you.
We will be here to welcome you.
We will be here to welcome you.
We will be here to welcome you.
The Storyteller pauses
the shadows lean closer
the fire leaps up.
Is the story unfinished?
What comes next?
The eyes of the Storyteller sparkle
as if with some unspeakable jest
and the only words I hear
ring in the hollow of my Heart:
Tonight is the Night of the Bone.
We’re all together and each alone.
