Last Daylight 1

Note in response to some queries.

Nothing wrong at this end. I only posted once in June because I've been busy submitting book manuscripts to publishers and working on a 9-part long poem tentatively entitled Voyage to India: Updating the Map Incognita. I've thought of writing the poem for more than a decade but didn't get around to it until now. The poem's in part a response to Whitman's "Passage to India." The map incognita idea comes from Whitman's India poem in which he uses the line

“Doubts to be solved, the map incognita, blanks to be filled”

to indicate that the explorers who located the landmasses that came to be known as the Americas did more than merely serve Europe's mercantile ambitions. They were also, according to Whitman, information gatherers who

(a) filled in the blanks in our limited knowledge of our place on the planet and in the universe,
(b) used this new knowledge to develop maps that showed us more of reality than ever before, thereby
(c) allowing us to comprehend our destiny as a species.

This conception of material progress (highlighted for him by the circumnavigation of the globe) going hand in hand with spiritual and/or epistemological progress drives Whitman's "Passage" from beginning to end.

My take on progress etc. almost 150 years after Whitman wrote his poem is, not surprisingly, a little different.

Haiku written today on a boarded up window at an old plastics factory

Pressing her
against

the oak
he yells, then bloodies
Sue’s lip

years ago

4 Short Ones re: the Prophetic Arts
for a. j.

1. Adaption of Early Buddhist Sutra

Only a person who changes his whole body
into a mind concentrated on one aim, knowing,
can enter the sacred trance-state,
a form of focus which, hunted
by the true wisdom-wanter, is itself the liberation
it was evolved to achieve --
consequently, this arrival method, which
in order to find
one must follow many knowledge-paths
into dangerous places, is considered
those paths’ blessing.

2. epistemology

beetle eats through
rose leaf

light burns holes in
white-mist
mind

these
passageways

3. Graffitti Apotheosis

I spraypaint on the boarded up window
a picture of the boarded up window.

4. Random

At the East End, the lead singer’s spittle
drips radiantly from the mike.
Strips of ceiling paint curl downward
like thoughts slowly peeling away from the mind.
Inside the music: roaring
silences, deathly quiet sounds.

in the
empty stadium
the firing squad
lines up
& shoots
itself