Madness et Cetera Et Cetera and so on

R.p. ybanez

Bottomlessness
Where does it end? Siddling into the abyss of a shadowy esophagus, nails carve their tallies all the way down, agitating angry peristalsis into grammatical periphrasisthe suffixes suffers sufficient morphemic freedom towards Uranus, still not light years away from the end of the digestive tract. Mark my words: whatever lighthouse beacon distracts you fizzes a fireflys aspirin trick, soon finding yourself on the merry-go-round of Saturns rings for an Ouroboros mythrecycling superposes the coiling rhythm of a spiral staircase like clocks wound up, springing toward Hell if you still think convention tames the beasts for the love of everything sacred and damned, I am infinite, containing multitudes. Subjectivity is absolute. Resolved in dissolution, disintegration is elation.

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Madness
You are born into the condition of being an amphora; whether it is wine or water that fills you afterward belongs to the afterward. Cynthia Ozick A means to perceptions until the self sails the soul down the River Lethe, washing multiplicities to a sole singularity, drowned in forgetfulness. One must jog memory for clarity via journey to return to the point of flow as non-reactive noble gases in ever-changing systems the amphora cistern, glazed with the draught of infinity and void, refills and spills as desperation breeds. Spines lean back to ease tired bones one more round, reminding its okay to relapse a cycle of relaxtime to unwind from figure eights. So much silence lines the stitching about existence. Ghost stories and fairytales help mankind reconcile with paradox opposing forces are puzzle pieces at war for one spot.

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Let Us Go Then, You and I

Let us visit somewhere exquisite before all clocks tick and talk away the names of callow brains for here we arethis barrenness due to duresssomewhere now far from paradise and fire and ice Convinced by a wavering illness from stark stillness, some ages hence when our mending wall had fallen your face was the place to chase always some days, its light shape was my grace when darkness fell with autumn breaths Now let us go then, you and I post-winter, we wait on life again

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Cellular Respiration
I build and burn rooms with every word breathed I cannot create your dream house yet I am only able to keep you warm until then

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Sincerity
Everyday, the shadow self riles my anxiety with a bark setting up the next argument to complete final cut. Fatigue follows such insidious intent sparking every unreacted atom in this cloud of misery. Weariness leaves me armorless, defenseless against weathering elements battering my chest. I launch in the elevator toward a librarians brain where I delve into books of memories with old strategies. Im learning to fail using ancient techniques on depressing mutations feasting upon my body. This Babel will shatter and shake a psyche split across a breaking Pangaea once more. The hands do the best to collect my selves littered across the Wasteland, the death of imagination. Though Ive never said a word about the garden planted ages ago, miles away from ruins. I stare in the abyss to laugh.

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Autopilot
Self aeronautics: the idea where one is able to propel consciousness in some fleeting way, perhaps running a balloon when one gets a little hot-headed or as a commandeer needs a drink while hes flying a plane, abandoning ship until tension is eased. Whos left to run those controls is the inexperienced subconscious, forgetting dream physics dont apply to realitys gravity. You wonder where youve gone as soon as you realize you havent said a word to a single soul, bathed in a few days, nor eaten for that matter. Imagination alone cant nourish how one steers or mans the deck. The mind is elsewhere, playing cards with its Jungian masks or sailing away on a Gibraltar, exploring seas for new land. Everyone needs a vacation, but the Bermuda Triangle becomes what it eatsall those thoughts thinking they could run away and forget the world in front of them. Zen Buddhism tells us to get lost within ourselves, not stray from our livingness.

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Timesplicing
Time cuts me in two. Czeslaw Milosz Leave it to Occams Razor to shear ones sel f in two. Divided among past and future, the souls sutured contusion rips, bleeding life into the grimoire of the rift, relaying story after story to make up the movement from presence relentless, one artificially connects times fitness in natural selection via frenetic dialetics, driving pragmatist sense to veer toward historical void or potential infinity: How fast is the kinetic drop? Stopping doesnt change a thing. Yin and Yang cycle between seconds of a clock to metastasize the metaxy of being watching hands wave back to stir anxiety and doubt as humankind keeps going, using machines to manage how much light they can have before suns set out.

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The Ugly Organist

Seeming to be a traditionalist hiding in organ rooms in cathedrals he swipes on his mask, feigning medieval and performs a masque, shaking trembling fists! Left to right, his hands run tarantism: spider waltzes, typewriter gymanastics, multi-manic appendaged semantics, manualled prance in dissonant schism Oh, God! The foghorns blare and the cannons shriek! Pulling all the stops, the pipes then leak the Art of Fugue in a deluge of keys melted in a plumed dreamworld profusion: His madness calls the throngs of undead spirits dancing drunk to a devils demerit

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Lunar Eclipse Sonata

A blood-red moon floods the night Leitmotifs raise chalices for a vineyards baptism Atonal tunes tunnel into madness Wozzeck drowns in a deluge of fugue The Romantic Temper tampers the mood Who did you murder al moto perpetuum?

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Facade
And so it happens the masquerade begins. The ballroom fills with festive physiognomy flashing away in the ghostly smoke of peripherals. The anonymous conglomerate congregates to celebrate forgotten identities fogged over the dance floor, waltzing under vaulted ceilings and closing walls closing in. Beneath every mask wails Fortunato, screaming for the love of God as the clay mocks Requiescat In Pace! with a silent return, never returning. Sometimes the stone walls worn over mouths crack if hearts could speak, only when such things give up their own chains. Reactions flare out when fires have no oxygen to feast on, fading fast. Familiar faces smolder in dying embers as we stoke what we can within the dark chasm of lost memory, hoping our cries crush through to be known again.

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Ambialence
*Whee-ooo whee-ooo* the children sing, slipping down the spiral slide for carousel dreams now look out Helter Skelter! Children climbin back to the top with heads capped with dizzy spinners helicoptin in the descent wobblin and warblin a trillin melody looped in the cursive es of telephone cords 'Ello? Yello? Hello? We've an emergency, see, were stuck ringin round this poesy, throwin away this prosy! Ashes to ashes, rescue cars alarm such loud sounds so the youngins say all day, undaunted by the smoldering shipwrecks voiced by wooping sirens passed this park of play.

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Death,
You pull cheap tricks, blowing sand in my eyes so I cant see you creeping in my sleep in a form of shadows, you spawn from deep waters saying they love me: whispered lies! Raising up your scythe, the white-crescent knife, above my headmy napeI cant escape this cold, trifling sleight-of-hand of fate piercing through the window blinds in moonlight Hark! a gust of violin suspence chills a sanctioned evening as bladed lip smacks with delight to hook a smile. Oneyou laugh my funeral march. Twoyou trill in reaped breath, but you stop counting. You jest? Its three in the morning! Now let me rest!

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Food Chain
Capitalists with the whisk of a wrist bend behavior for mass production. Power is measured by how much control and pound per square inch they snap between jaws. We need more appliances! We need more energy! Something about the way they treat fellow men cheapens the arc of fellowship down to the price of a raftWe need more computers, they continue. Must create iMacs for survival, the mantra goes, crashing into coffee trance, crashing waves of information, constantly recycled and renewed. We surf the web and keep it all in one place, pooling our thoughts and feelings inside an entity the Internet: the collective consciousness. The more we feed it, the more we need to catch up. Have you forgotten stars lately as they shine, attracting vacuum mouths of ancient black holes. Physics says the singularity lies in the midst of their hungerthe galaxys densest point. Everything we do mounds up to decay, so we space out cyberspace for our existential sepulcher.

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The Future Freaked Me Out

My life as a dinosaur in the 21st Century makes me worry much more about landing a career or knocking on the door to agitate limen among people, walking through the threshold to slip a word or two between some ears. Over the years, Ive feared no one would hear mystical histories I hoard in a mesh of mind feats and defeats over eons and ages debauched by victors of campaigns from lore and romances though who am I to quail under tremulous wing when nothing happens without consent? Ecce tyrranusnon! Ecce homo, without the crown of thorns, only a myrtle branch instead for peace and fortune: O fortuna! Perhaps a piano will not fall from the sky maybe the next rain will cry and reign: maybe one drop will fall onto my face, like the finger of God zapping Michelangelos Adam, splicing between my eyes to tap into the enlightenment of constant motion, steady as I go.

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Just Shut Up and Play the Hits

And now shes leaving once again from complications. You chase that white rabbit in mind lest you erase her by cleaning the gossamer of memories, but they tickle all those wax LPs kept in storage in attic dreams on some janked-up jukebox jiggling the rings. You think about unplugging the crunching crisp of speakers speaking easy whispers brushed through ears, on shoulders, down your back, trickling midnight organ fight rain as you recline her on her spine and refine her like a diamond, imagining you are dining at diner while she fills your cup of coffee: cmon now! Whatcha whatcha whatcha gonna do now? Will you drop it? Will you stop it? Or will you rock it? You got a quarter for just one songhit it, kick it, dig it until your broke ass aint got it longer. How many ghosts will you screw until you get your head out of the fog? You go after her and trod and trod and trod. Keep strutting on the catwalk path and holler back. The moon is out: howl out loud. But shes just a phantom from the past whos running the laps of remembrance as long as this song will last just go back home and hide in a mist. Just shut up and play the hits, my friend.

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Fragile!
Fragmentary missiles launch from hatches of bombers, sweeping battlefields to siege all enemies under a veil of smoke. Clouds from cigars fog up the interrogation room until the Red Sea parts apart. From the other end, I see a man shuffling Liszt compositions on a Steinway, dealing chops to crack those pearly whites and ebony fangs a blow at a time*snort* ahh!snowbirds and showgirls laugh and clap, breaking up chalk in applause during the 10 count. I lift my broken self up from a scrambling haymaker among a mirage of Kodachrome sparkling everyones watching adrenaline wake up that tiger blood as I shoot torpedoes at the contenders gut. He kneels down to kiss the canvas, spitting blood once more. I leave a trail of dust with precious cargo.

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Incubator Calculator
We do not know until the shell breaks what kind of egg we have been sitting on. T.S. Eliot An efflux of nurture and nature rests on the eggs of creativity. Our proclivity to wait out for the moment babes hatch out of their husks is the mark of Zen genius a test of patient insanityas movement in stillness breaks the calcium shell: we do not help a moth erupt from the chrysalis nor does the sculptor force his hands into clay. Centripetal force sped by the pedal allows a swans grace to mettle resilience into form. As immaculate wing skims the water while landing in a pond, hands wrap the curves of their loves as fingers glide and impress themselves. We create not, but we manipulate what we touch. How? Give it time if you believe in such. Poetry is acupuncture when you pen the paper and fix imbalances of qi the Wushu of chakra will flow once youve allowed a fog of ambiguity to enrapture you into enlightenment. Art will come to you, fisherman: fish for sense in your streams of consciousness until awakening, it is fine to dabble with an abacus or carve tallies, counting days, until the bomb calorimeter dings. Just keep silent until combustion.

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Hunger
Sometimes, Ive skipped meals to taste the words out of stories Each character, each morpheme clicks stops from the roof of my mouth as I lick sibilants from fricated syllables off teeth and lips, slurping sweet, juicy sounds like white apples tasting of stonesnothingness flavored rich from bones of conversational gust: celestrial dust of angels and demons stuffing human voices behind each fingertip I cant shake the ache for more, being poor and all, cooking another book to pour its contents through my eyes instead to drown in aqua vitae only to die from the black dye

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Strange Brew
Jarmusch pairs up with Anderson to cinematize this dull life I live, where most scenes involve me sitting in a recliner with a cup of black Assam tea swirled with Cream, living the chai life, smoking a pipe under a 70s filterthe bedroom is red and white, my pet tiger is red and white, my pants are red, and my shirt is white: the antithesis of Jack White, wearing his guise, still a bad ass. The final act will fade into me playing guitar like Ira Kaplan, jamming so much noise and ambiance on a Jazzmaster like Thurston Moores from Sonic Youth note how the dynamics of volume and picking style I vary on ther reflects my revolution against the mundane, though I dont leave my room often, preferring the Aquatic Life of tea dreams. Turning the Marshall off, I go to Tumblr to check any anon hate or cool messages from chicks: Fin. Soon, conversing walls swirl the more I drink my tea as Heart Full of Soul by The Yardbirds loops the broken record memory, skipping heart and beats sometimes, I wish I went with coffee and cigarettes instead of agreeing to let genius film directors put my life in motion pictures to Beatles soundtracks, but I feel this way when people look at me. Everyone is Jim and Wes. Jim Anderson. Wes Jarmusch. A strange brew, but good! Dont tell me you wouldnt make this a box office smash: I know youre already reserving the matinee, though why buy tickets to the coolest goddamn film youve ever made?

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Evening Walk
Niagara Falls flumes from an ocean sky to fog up Venice into Atlantis. Night life paves a path 'twixt a severed Red Sea where fat cushions huddle around houses in fluffy Victorian garb, vanguarding the haunt! Lets trod and ride this widened l ane for higher consciousnessa nocturnal zeitgeist festival for lunacy at the cul-de-sacs end, before the dawn smolders dark lives behind us to ash. A bonfire dream plumes away, seeping from cracked memory.

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Refrains from Rain

The rain is social tonight So many things prattle and rumble under a shifting atmosphere. Everything just in-betweens of white noise, chilling chatter punctuating the glass into exclamations or questions, crying out loud, weeping from interrogation. What did I say to make you quiver, somber evening? How do you carry on in your beating? Where will you go from here? I inquire the skies, wondering who may returnskeletal lightning whipped across a rusting sky, lowbeams spotted in the rearview, perhaps a human voice and so the rain drops, and so the rain drops

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Nocturne
O winking moon! squinting behind my back: you wait for the right night to dip dark minds in a beam of light Love is full once in a blue while, yes (I guess so as I rest a weary soul) knowing one day is enough: now then youve spun again to hide in a blanket anew, anew, anew you chase your sun with such coyness! "A kind of retrograde," I begin to digress

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Graced Erasure
Unconditionalsteeped in weathered earth, we, too, have been turned among the rich soil to replenish our leaves and stems uncoiled with a budding bloom in a garden. Birthed by resting roots absorbing nutrients for growth, we bathe in sunlight and we dance in rain, roasting in starfire from days trance and pelted by arrows of sustenance the reign of rain casts a cloud over us from time to time only to make sure weve been prepared for photosynthesis. Leave us to drown under the weeping nimbus! Oh, well have our foodour honey and dew as mornings then wash our faces anew.

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Riddle in the Air

Beware the air youve been breathing lately. Its been contaminated with contagion the kind affecting populated neurology with mass hysteria. The unaffected plague the diseased like phagocytes gulping prey when the immune system is at bay. Sweating selves obey to mania and craze over dancing, laughter, or dizziness as they dive into madness. Sickly people fumble in flight or fight, frightening healthy people into submission, not considering that this seasonal transition leaves psyches fickle. We are thrilled and tickled by overwhelming melancholy weathering away calcium asylums enough to let consciousness run rampant. For all hell has broken loose, but fear not, as this will pass, too, and such symptoms will fade after a week or two. Hang in there for now. We are ridden with inabilities to relay this phenomenon into languagegridlocked in ego death and pensive mood, dipped deep in darkness. A caretaker will come by candlelight if we remain patient to our self-physicians looking for enlightenment as we crawl out of husks. Our dusks pray for a dawning.

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Chaos, The Imprisoned

Spectrums are nonexistent. A butterfly effect twitches this point in time. Everythingthe immensity of emotionjuggled between void. This moment depends on variables just as it depended on a red wheelbarrow. So much suspends our animation right now: fibers of language webbed rampant, scientisms glorification of capitalist enterprises under the ruse of logic, the imaginationstill everything about the infinite refilling the paradox of creative drought and rain looping together underneath the skull. CT scans and MRIs cannot measure what they cannot consider, though the saying goes all matter is made up of nothing. What does matter? Nothing of course. Even learnd astronomers puzzle over the physics of bottomlessness, arcanum of doors opened, unopened, cracked among twisted corridors in annexes of communications. Every word puts conversations through hyperspace, opening wormholes between universed minds within a multiversed universe. Did you know time travel exists? Weve been moving, even in stillness holding us in a rambling REM sleep as memory runs its course, diverting into indifference from time after time, and then it all shatters and reconfigures like the mice we are in lifes labyrinth, like libraried paradise held high in the clouds, preparing to precipitate and fill us back up with who-knows-whats and how-you-ares for we have left it to dreams to make something out of nothing. Dreams are the helium fed as fodder to expand our heads into heroismthe self cannot delve into schism. There must be a marriage through irony: Heaven and Hell exist inside of you, regardless definitions. Stop looking for prisons. Look for keys. A way out exists. - 26 -

Garden Delight
Old man, dont you remember all those Septembers, Octobers, and Novembers ashing into the white snow of December? Of course you do, as the seasons age in you. But youre only twenty two with eyes glued to blank pages of a memoir. There is no future presently. Surely your fast memory tunes you to some summers drenched in spring song and rain, when you decided to view the dusk roast and simmer into a deep night. Obviously you still make out those delicate colors dabbed upon a napkin earth from each bloody sunrise, blushing from one to anothercolors men and women yet to witness, for they have not been touched by enlightened feelings you know by name, giving them a hue for every joy and pain. Even those wild flowers hidden in woodsy brush turn every field into a pied cloth, polkadotted life, no matter the season or reason they shine, but youll always know beautiful things never go. They sleep and they grow.

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A Couch of Flowers
cushions the weight of light waves as they fill petals for synthesis, drinking sun to exhale O2. Who needs a TV when faces dip down and breathe laughing gas in chamomile dreams? Its a wonder how anyone floats on the stems, turning over to relax as this day now ends. The descent closes our eyes when we sink into blooming sheetsthe lazy blossoms eating us alive tonight.

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Movers and Shakers

dont forget the writers are the earthquake, hovering above in roaring thunder: we are the grooves jived to every funk song we are the undertakers you shook up for too long!

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Weight(less): The Way Last

I The path splits off in a manner of splintering fig roots My name is not Atlas, though a globe rests on shoulders inside an aquarium: each footprint in Borges labyrinth is a death wisha prayer to Algol in Beta () Perseus for a guillotines kiss! II Dismiss me, Carelessness, so I may fall and shatter, so the snakes of the Gorgon can find their way through the haze of Hades maze lest you fill this mind with nuclear fusiongive me He-3 or give me eternal damnation. III dixitque Deus fiat lux et facta est lux

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