language
        moves
        into the heart
        hopelessly measuring
        syllable
        by
        syllable
        breath -
        "breath's burial"
        "the association of writing with death" and breath
        One hopes
        to "live"
 
              Have you engendered anything? asks the saint (O'Toole)
              Have you brought anything to completion? 
              Wombtomb            Boombomb
              The struggle of mind with TEXTS
              And so there you are
              gazing at the stupidity of people in high places
              among the prize winners the culture-bringers
              the big "names"
              unable to name them without bringing
              disaster
              upon
              yourself
 
              (death?)
 
        Have you ENGENDERED anything? asks O'Toole in his Irish accent
        I had a child-- he's a man now. A few books. Ideas.
        (Some that came toppling down upon me--Bless me, father!)
                            
        I wish you to speak strictly says the saint
        I want you to tell the truth
 
        to desire
        as D.H. Lawrence did
        at the end of his life
        (Lawrence much younger then than I am
        now)
        a "clean" death
        a "passionate"
        death -
        watch out you see death walks up to you
        smiling
        (he has no plans for a funeral)
        "Do not fear death"
        (how can one help but fear death?)
        "fear the mechanical"
        what springs from life?
        "Not every man has gentians in his house
        in soft September, at slow, sad Michelmas"
        "Now it is autumn and the falling fruit
        and the long journey towards oblivion"
        how
        to restore
        the SENSE
        of death
        that
        darkness
        beyond
        darkness
        that
        flowering
        under
        world
        "bavarian gentians each one is a torch"
        into the loam!
        I hold the golden bough in my hand
        the key
        to
        darkness   darkness   darkness
 
 
        (shouted) MANDRAKE THE MAGICIAN!
 
        Who do you think you are? Cape, top hat, walking stick,
        cream of the bourgeoisie, mountebank,
        talker? With your companion spouse-person
        Lothar (clearly not short for "Lothario")
        People of color, women second in command,
        not really quite it, you being it,      
        you the magician, the one who makes things happen,
        the one who transforms
        everything, here, in this format clearly meant for chidren,
        for me, then, hey, Mandrake, mandragora, "Get with
        child a mandrake root," get with it child, you are your own
        protector, this thin man with a mustache and a slightly distant manner
        everything about him says: "control"--
 
        If you can't be him you can buy him.
 
        (How does one create
        community
        without acknowledging
        the other)
 
 
 

 MORNING RAGA
             
          deliver me from sound
             dewpatterns hushed in stilltime
             the tombs lay open their immense fiction 
             antelope shadows grazing on glass
             footfalls far from the
                BHAGVAN IS GREAT!
             still tepid the mud from which we were born 
             gazing back at us in the sky
             long lonesome drop from eternity
             to this conscious moment
             an hour away from the inflection
             which doubles the chord of time
             and I tell them all
                BHAGVAN IS GREAT!
             and I am sent to the emergency Room                RADHA- 
             to listen to the enormous silence
             with its bells of crystal grass
             glazing the surface where the antelopes 
             guess their form and susbstance
             we all crave to find the immaterial
             the immobile the peace beyond the 
             deliver me from her beautiful face
             in cinemtaic revery imposed
             like a kiss upon the fragment of tissue 
             which is the light of our lives
             riddled with the semaphore of language 
             albumen purple gloss all over lipstick 
             she uses dreaming the still sentence 
             vajra-bolts sudden rifling through the
                BHAGVAN IS GREAT!
             emergency Ward where the loaf tests                KRISHNA 
             its exigencies for the
             if it ever lasts or returns again
             or if the telephone number is imperfect 
             lacking its last and amorous digits
             to endure I said to endure
             as they took notes down furiously
             what there is left to endure
             if you call it the Unnameable
             or whatever on the radio whacky light 
             emerges with synthetic girls in choir 
             Spend One Night with me for
                BHAGVAN IS GREAT!
             monoprosodic dream I am having about 
             transformational process called Breath 
             brother pass the and then some
             in this tepid mud we are having
             to be born in below the rosey light
             Ah I am Onged by the Greatness of it! 
             submerged in the shadow with some dew 
             or portuguese riddles on malabar coast 
             the long boats rounding the
             semblance to a her name was Nikki
             japanese for Unbearable-Life                       RADHA-KRISHNA 
             and to be in love with memory of her
             to retrace in the slime the portrait 
             and plunge dense into the lake 
             of ever darkness
                BHAGVAN IS GREAT!
             to commune with the in a book of
             fragrance from the fresh pages
             the one dead of hunger
             the one dead of thirst
             where is their justice?
             of a what I am trying or have ever been 
             but my fingertips ache the dense
             lorn sad passage about the freight
             encumbered by something gone wrong
             as is usual when you realize yes it
             is but a Life the single one
             against the vast mountain darkening
             which is the immense West of All-Breath 
             consumed by the ineffable unutterable 
             blank end of it this snatch of voice
             on my flank corroding like a nickel rose 
             a wound of some kind earned in the War
                BHAGVAN IS GREAT!
             searching the compound for a                       BHAKTI 
             I said to them and sent me to the emergency
             a young doctor all white from thought
             and aghast by the saturday night punctuation 
             resembled as much for its weight as for
             she kept my book by her head
             in case of death call me Lover
             her immense eyes with their One Thought 
             pause for the spaces in between
             a telephone number wrongly dialled
             is like metaphysics or clouds
             she was right about that her doubt
             I mean dictating this idiom
             lexically brain-dead at last the Soul 
             takes wing
                            swarm of light so
             each inch is worn at last
             beyond Recognition
                BHAGVAN IS GREAT!