brianburke.net

No, I don’t have good reasons
for all the things I do,
and I don’t think I ever will.

Isn’t it enough that I simply live,
in a world whose cruel tricks
have silently persuaded me
to consider leaving this fleshly,
painful existence of my own accord?

But this is not for you
or your questions, anyway.

What it is for I can’t really say.

If I could give you the way
the place in between the worlds
courses through me without explanation,
I would. I really would. I mean it.
But your gateway in has a different
key than mine.

See, now you might be starting
to get the picture; this is where I live.
It wasn’t much of a choice, either.

After enough trips around the bend,
you may start to notice, as I have,
that there really is no divide after all.
Paradox is the truth and the myth.
I wish I could tell you more,
but I have to go and do the laundry.

Fading.
Half-heartedly wishing in semi-defeat that the machine would just work the way it’s supposed to, and trying to act upset when it doesn’t; failing.
Drag my right arm with my left arm like a sack of bricks to the pen. Forget it. Dead weight. Dead sentences languishing themselves onto a page, as if they were dead fish suddenly endowed with one last pitiful lunge toward existence, reminiscing of dead anguish.
A sad porno set post-climax, wiping up what once possessed traces of true romance, eyes toward the floor and/or the proverbial distance, the energy required for human eye contact having been exhausted and replaced with malaise and melancholy. Rocks. Islands. And everyone pretends not to notice that she’s just behind that flimsy door, getting herself off in a makeshift bathroom because she needs it, and he didn’t care enough. No one cared enough, not like they used to anyway.
Partial images of past lives, once-experienced miracles, play across movie screens in the background of my memory, for some reason taking place in ancient Egypt or San Francisco bars at night. Endless adventure, eyes twinkling with rapture. I kind of watch. Look around into what remains of my hollow and lonely environs, and the moment spreads nothing before me but flatness and cornfields as far as the eye can see. Corn everywhere. All the same color. Flat.
Really though, bear with me, this is where it gets good (I guess). Take up the middle of one chow mein noodle with the right-most tine of your fork and raise it above your plate. Now close your eyes and picture to yourself the essence of limpness. Now open your eyes and try to remember why you’re doing this exercise. You can’t.
The end.

I have been going like crazy- three dreamy spiral nights in a row at the Fillmore last weekend, reverberating with positive vibrations late into the early morning each night. I even stayed up all the way through to the sunrise on sunday morning. Sometimes the night is my playground, especially when I am in the city, and after the ceremony it all blends together.
Is there really much of a separation between the world and the ceremony? Yes and no. The world is the ceremony, and the world is disgusting, and the world is beautiful. It’s all true and it’s all false. The night gives me permission to live as a partly enfleshed half-cyborg phantom within the playground of paradox. (apparently you are a muse to me). human beings are monkey bars and slides and the gravel and sand pits that are alive and moving, and I get to run jump slide hang spit scream masturbate love hate dance sing be loved and be hated with them and within them and they respond to me. This has been the playground of my incorporation, unfolding, expanding, ripping, cradling, simultaneously.
I love this thing. Radiant unexpected abundance flushes out musty cob-webbed corners of my being I never knew existed but I see now have been there since the beginning of time, in all of us, and one bit more of my one little being thrown into the river of eternity, tasting of it, leaving those undiscovered corners the essence of clean, the exact way a thick flower petal feels between thumb and forefinger upon drying after a heavy rain. Plump, firm, watered, trembling with readiness spread wide for the sunlight. Almost bursting. Rainbow Raven. Essence of clean. Essence of life, earthquaking. Do you know that?
Rainbow Raven is alive, her story seed has been planted into the fertile garden ears of some willing souls. Mothering me, tantalizing me, weaving a tapestry out of me that only makes sense on the level that harmony makes sense, pulling subtlety out of a hat. Mystery presiding at the midnight marriage of magician and witch inside me, and the newlyweds hide in caverns during the day, allergic to sunlight, casting their rainbows out for all to see in the daylight, yet wonder where they came from. Invisible craftsmen, cackling in secret, disappearing the moment they are discovered, setting spells and transmuting the human canvas according to the unpredictable designs of their wedding master. Swirling. Manipulating everything that possibly exists with their bare hands; all is media, ripe, ready for digestion and excretion, transmutation.
MAKING IMPORTANT DECISIONS! to let things be as they are, despite the wills of Terrified, Love, Loved, Elated, Despondent, Judged, Death, and Peanut Butter, the characters in this unfolding melodrama.
In the face of it all, being, anyway.

I’m actually part ghost and part human.
I’m not exactly sure where I live.
You see, I’m made of the earth and I breathe of the sky,
and sometimes like warriors and maidens
they war with each other on my soul’s battlefield,
and I don’t care how much it hurts,
you’ll never take either one away from me.
I swim through the brackish waters,
where rainbows fornicate
with the pitch black of moonless nights in the forest.
Of course, everything softens in the moonlight,
especially a lover’s milk-red lips.
And in the desert, my brackish soul spreads out
like invisible wildfires into god’s mysterious wide open spaces.
In the strangest ways the vague and undeniable sentience
in the myriad faces of the desert landscape
always implores me to move forward,
but in no particular direction except around,
so all I can really do is raise up my hands inquisitively,
as if to say,
“Yeah, ok, and now what the fuck do you expect me to do with this?”
But as long as I’m alive,
there will never be a clear answer to that,
and then I have no choice but to fall in love.

The land is the one
Who invites me to breathe
My fragrance into her,
Without asking anything in return.

She carves for me a spot
At her infinite table
And serves me a taste of
My own freedom, for breakfast.

In her heat I learn of my passion.
In her wind I learn of my strength.
In her cold stillness, I learn of my patience.
In her transformations, I learn of my origin.

In all of her seasons I am revealed,
Like a reflection in an infinite pool.
To breathe of her is to live,
To live of her is to love.

Give me something I don’t understand,
So raw it compels me to ride
My drums like a horse
Until the sun comes up
And shines its light on my purpose.

Give me, in this one,
All-total and only moment,
Holiness,
And lead me to healing as
The water rises into my appetites.

We have come here with but one desire,
to EAT!, then exclaim,
“Yes! We didn’t miss it!”

Tell me with silence,
The language of my ancestors,
That the trees downstairs
Have the same raw stuff
That I do in my blood,
And pump Interbeing through my veins,
With an explosive surge of
Flooding liquid granite.

And in this one and wholly
Necessary moment, reveal to our bones
That the grass is no greener over there,
That we may arrive at Love,
Complete and undivided,
Right here,
Only now.

Move me.
I don’t much care how.
Just bring it on,
Like the red wine
Drips its slow molasses honeycoat
Over my windows of perception,
Resulting in a slow dance
With Time itself.
Or do it like
That girl across the room,
Who poured the magma
Through my eyes to light
The very flame
That licks my deepest recess.
Nudge me in the night
With the might of fifty steeds
Trampling through my dreams,
And play me like the grandest piano,
Tapping out your mystery
To an audience of everyone.
Or knock me down like Frazier,
But raise me up as the champ,
With nothing left in me but faith.

It came to me

from inside my bones.

A package sent from the past,

The future urging me to open it.

So I light the sage,

Bring the package out,

And set my body upon the land.

The Earth, she reveals it all to me, every time.

With gratitude,

I return.

Having gone empty,

I’ve been filled again.

I cross back over

while my heart shakes hands

with the Infinite,

then greets the world anew with a smile.

At the core is only love,

Founded on humility so honest

it requires me to shine,

and call the others out from their hiding.

Sing to me of your soul’s magic,

That I may give mine forth in dance.

Please, be like the river,

And let your rhythm flow downhill to me as it must.

Sing to me of the heavens inside your mind,

The way the night sky winks at me while I brush my teeth.

Place the trappings of society inside parentheses,

And I will, and together we will ascend in purity and truth.

Sing to me of the earth inside your pleasures,

And sing of it with impulse, informing great detail,

For you will be an artist then,

And I will view all of creation inside your hands.

Sing to me of the passion winds inside your heart,

Of your most brutal wounds and of your biggest courage,

So that I may wander your peaks and valleys,

And here or there fall down in grief or fill my belly with laughter.

Please, sing of your soul’s magic like the river goes downhill;

Let me hear how that Eternal Drummer beats his steady rhythm through you.

Truly, we will be together then,

As we dance in harmony with the golden-robed Spirit of the Infinite.

For Christmas my sister gave me a book of poetry by Yusef Komunyakaa and it has been inspiring me to try a different style of writing. This is the first poem I wrote after beginning to read Yusef, and I think it goes a little bit with my post from yesterday.

The New Old Hat

Every otherwise bright morning finds them coming,
Grey old over-greased drones on fear’s
Autopilot to anywhere but God. Buzzy ant
Tin-foil conversations crinkle into stiff air,
Waxed-up food in plastic packaging tides
Them over. Neon warning signs on their facial
Displays caution the user to avoid at all costs
Anything reminiscent of sticky, bloody, fleshy
origins. Mall-bought lip gloss veneers woefully
Disguise the raw heartache, earphones hardly
Silencing the deafening sickness.
“Hate your job? Have a Starbucks, with a side of
Pretend!!!”
In the eyes, the pitiful resignation to lives of
Tragedy, ideals gasping in gas chambers of empty
Promises, feet lodged in the mud, false comfort
Found in silken white-gloved waves of apathy,
masquerade of pure terror. Cattle being led to
slaughter, preferring not to realize it.
Coyotes howl at the whole of it.