Look at how I stumble, what I spell. 
The way the letters well up, waiting
To be sent. I’m not wondering yet
Where they came from or who 
I’m sending this to, just practicing the art
Of reversal, the volta, a knack
For talking back that earned ellipses 
On my ear and that cosmic dust I hear 
Carrying Ziggy on its tail. A wail becoming A whale in sonar verse with comic gust
-O. In a fit of introspection, watch me Bleed lightning and make this
Transmission: this mite
With a mission, reverse-engineered 
To transmit beyond transmission
The immaculate apperception,
Key in the ignition, intervening,
Has turned.

Captive’s Log

Daily. The daily act of writing. Showing up I find the unraveled thread yesterday left that I tug at like I’m climbing out of a hole, a well, something that delivers water and catches the tears and the snippets of conversation of the Samaritan woman and…

What was that sound? You heard it, too? The crackling of fire and sweet smell you can taste. It’s talking. The fire. The incense. The taste. Of

what’s to come.

I don’t want to leave it there. That’s unfair and hubristic. Not that that’s stopped me before. But I’m older now. Midway through the walk of life which I share with Dante, Virgil and Tolkien who walked this way before me. EPIC!

That explains the footsteps leading to this door, this door opening to this study, this study housing a desk, and on that desk a sheet of paper and a pen and

See how it moves? The Story. See the spirit wielding it like Puss in Boots deciphering the hour? See me

begin? In it?

What’s half? What’s that? Flicked, flickering Half halved again? Halved and halved nots, a lifetime, a century: it tests the metal of the precious petal counting down the counting game, half past the half mast, cocked and ready, the Hour

against my head, held, its last lash of the last light counting down the final count its screaming kettle at the top of the final inning, equal parts forgiveness and sinning. Helper halving the living. Two quarters in a cup. Heads or tails?

Toss it

Up.

To renew my vows to writing is to write. Therefore with the time I have:

Today is Mother’s Day.  I go in search of the fluted valve of the scalloped shell once held, conch-like, in the spell of a relative of the trade widely regarded not just as a writer but as an Introspector of the highest order, there astride Orwell and other mighty orators such as MLK, who could lay the rumor to rest that the last prophet had spoken, because clearly, as time attests, these were prophets of the highest order.

When Proust wrote about the madeleine, that harlot of a cookie, time’s bandit, it was the song of a trumpet sounding. A benediction forbidding mourning. Whether attended to or not, those notes rang out and trembled the glass of the visible world with an announcement which is still quavering with the revelation within it.

The revelation has always been there, but with differing degrees of visibility to the observer depending on the observer’s capacity for truth.

Yes. There was always a correlation beyond the visible with the beautiful that reconfigures the visible world every time we revisit it. And this is what these prophets perceived.

More than that, they shared their vision. They shared what each could see and each could see a world beyond this one. See Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies open the visible world to the one lit from within and

There, inhabited, unveiled and clean is the storyline that solves for humanity. I intend to follow it past its bitter end to the fruit of the labors of transformation done by the great characters who surface from the mists of time as if from the tumult of an outraged ocean to compose themselves into this ship I now command whose prow is the very face of noble fury focused and fulfilling its sacred vow.

Last night I chose my saint’s name: Mary Magdalene.

I’ve read my deconstruction manual

Have you? I’ve read it 
and ripped it in two. It was a bit of a snafu,
that not-knowing what to do about
outliving your instructions and the destruction
of those instructions matter it made.
Turf garden branching with the calculus 
of contained chaos that such junctions
create. Candelabra, it was not. More
menorah-like, ripe with moon bows, mystery 
and a big hole in the sky I might just fall up into 
and cradle inside of. Nook of my Father’s arm, 
what took you so long to find me here 
among the forking paths of the garden, 
climbing Skywoman’s climb back up into the sky,
backwards, bringing my boyfriend Borges, with me?

At the end of every day, I would open a vein.

Then the vein stopped. Wouldn’t open. 
The Colorado stopped flowing, stopped glowing at the lip of California Bay with phosphorescent conversation. Grew brown. Frowning. 

It developed a scowl, wouldn’t budge. Crossed itself out and became fudge.
Fudge of existence. Fudge of persistence. A Dickensian Thames. A dead end. A ditty. 
A tick in an imperceptible clock. Shocked

I didn’t go on. I didn’t say
F* this fudge, and let it all go. I stared
And stared. Ogled you might even say, in such a way the ice cream fell out of the shop. Before you knew it I was on the floor. You could hear

The Roarsharch of it all, the flop, the tape being placed down in a crime-scene snapshot that would make Keith Herring blush. It sounded like a bandaid being ripped off, the outline laid out, all the way back to Dorchester, revving like Hagrid’s engine, tearing a door in the sky.

A PUKA. A what? An excuse me, what? A Puka you have- a Hole. Like in Pukalani, You see the hole in the sky? She saw the man explaining the name for the first time, her first Hawaiian words, his finger pointing to a rainbow overhead beyond the windshield.  When a person has a Puka, they have an ancestor on their back. They are torn between worlds.

Welcome to Pukalani, he said, letting me out. PUKA? Yes. L a n i, he said. Sky. Hole in the sky.

That was years ago. I was a hitchhiker then. 

“A sestina’s not an ode,”
An ode, in a competitive tone, said.
“Form is dead,” importuned a ballad.
As a ponderous raven rose into the sun
Absolving the sky of a solution. A song
Rung out instead. It solved the solution.

Ashberry rained from the sky. A solution
Not yet seen since Pompeii, “Smoke & odes!,”
Croaked the voice of History, breaking into song,
“I’ll be damned if I’m writing this again.” Having said
Her peace, History took wing and the sun
With her. It was bleak for a bit. Until
the Ballad

Of the Unsung Hero. Hello, hero, your Ballad
Is here. It awaits you like History her solution,
The next generation in chariots, run on Sun
Ten centuries ago or so, Homeric-ode
Level stuff. It starts. It Winnebagoes. What
Was witnessed, but not written-down. So many
songs

Ago, not-yet written, has arrived, now, as Song
Carried in waves, pageantry of carrier pigeons in a ballad
Of wings, winging-it through the sky. The sky said
It. The message was written clear as day. The solution
Rose up, big, brave and blushing though  an ode
Of rays, disguised by day, colored by Sun

And scribbled all over cities like graffiti. Sun
Shouldn’t reach, but does, its graffiti, a song
The light has long since sung, wordless ode
To the unknown answer sitting in the ballad
In the middle of the road, more of s problem than solution,
Unable to explain how it got there other than—by way of he-said

She-said, and I don’t identify with what anyone said,
Has said, has heard say, or will say again. The Sun
Was in her eyes as she said this so the solution
Fell casually from her lips like ‘Icarus,’ in a song
From heaven, making a splash. With all eyes on her ballad
Of lightning bolts, the Bad-Ass Bitch rode

The thunder of her story, no solution
In sight, all the way to the end. Far out! Cried an onlooker. No one said
Anything after that. The song of the sun ode her a ballad.

Look at it there. Draped over the chair.
A bath towel. A sprawled gesture
Of surrender at the end of a certain
Calibrated tenderness whose dropped 
Cube drew dew from fingertips that drip
The morose code of loss that has
Echo as its pet, induced to signal distress

Without signaling it. Look within. After all,
There is the belly button that composes 
Itself backstage, behind the spotlight of 
Life where the cord dragged you, right up 
To the Lotus position of How do you do? 
Before any instructor instructed it, and 
Whose neat bow you can only claim like 
The handlebars of a motorcycle that you, 
As Bodhisattva renouncing top hat and 
Tails, know what to do with. Baby, the ice 

Cube hasn’t dropped

Yet. It’s just about to, like the other shoe in 
This Edward Hopper painting I offer as an 
Offering , this forensic of the evening, this 
Something to be grasped with tongs, 
Glittering, let glisten, held over a register 
And registered: diamond in a Cubist 
Masterpiece in a vignette Pot Boiler fiction 
Cameo nod to Marat that turns out to be a 
Tear, turning in the light, catching the 
Smoke of accusatory geometries and 
Exposing them, expiring effusions of a 
Revolution: the unfinished cigarette, the 
Ashtray, the fried egg

Frying, that is. The sound of it. The 
Stale sizzle repeating & unaccomplished. 
Rough. Fizz. Static. Note the conjunction. 
Not cosmic: The source of all the trouble, 
The heartache and woe, that is, hides 
There. But! You want to say. Don’t do it! 
Domestic ated Mastadon

That you are. The glass waits to catch the 
Cube and become a scene in a flick with a
Dame and a fedora. But it can’t. No one 
Can put her lips together and blow here.
The candle has gone out: There is no 
Prayer to pronounce with greater Clarity 
Than that drop of What’s to Come,
The faucet not-yet-turned off of a shower
Just taken. The sound of What’s next?

And what has been: Still Life with Glass.

Not like the daffodils did. But here they come again, in place of Whitman, in place of their enigma, yours and his: the taxi cab’s anticipation you cannot taste driving away the big catch with your name on it at close of day.

An emblem? Yes: Remove the police tape! YELLOW is the word for it! Confess! The sun, the daffodils, the tape: We are blessed to be talking from beyond the grave, from this page. The way the light leaks out at break of day. Reliably. That word. To say what you took from the sun, what I gave back. To name every flame.

Candlelight. Dimming the curtains again. The gentleness of the day has caught that which cannot be distilled in it and it flickers there, in the curtain, in the day.

Beckoning. There is a word David would have collected. A collector in the American mold who marvels at sensibility itself, à la Henry James. Polishes, pockets it.

Brimming, the beckoning world does not collapse but sighs forward, a raft willowing into childhood, a memory whose river froths with laughter towards light so buoyant I almost cannot stop rising

All the way up to the top to splash the water droplets off, cloud and pillow, as morning opens, lifting the coins of my eyelids like it’s a game to say, “Come play.” And I open my eyes.

The windfarm on the West Maui Mountains dropped its fleet of points in stillborn ascent. Raised and lifted again and again they raised and lifted, the way, the professor thought, the oars of a transatlantic slave ship must have dropped the raising: a redundantly laborious salute to the natural world forlornly harnessed to the will of man.

This man was not yoked to a hull or a human. Other than his implicit oath of allegiance to the consensus of his profession that his acting as a professional entailed, he could see according to conscience, circumscribed only by the prerogatives of his civic duty.

What did he see?

His profile against the optimistic Pacific ocean proclaimed what a profile was. If assurance were a line it formed his nose, minor lip, determined chin and his fixed brow that framed his comprehensive gaze as it extended, extended, isolated the vanishing point on the horizon, moored there and, having gained an inviolable reference point, relaxed into a meditation that couldn’t be called seeing at all.

Professor Atom understood something. He understood something he did not want to see but could not help but see coming. He was wrong. …Wrong. Not only was he wrong, both he and his colleagues were colossally wrong. And the consequences were unspeakably ugly.

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Adrien Levitator saw the recognition in her professor’s profile bloom like stained-glass windows hit by rays of light. The struggle that ensued played upon his fine cheekbones and emphasized his hawklike focus, as if the very act of grasping something, the vestigial predatory root of apprehension satisfied him even as it disoriented his orientation to what he thought he knew. He knew he had been wrong; the damage, irreversible. And worse: Monumental and as publicly displayed as the Colossus of Rhodes was in its day.

A line of titanic, broken, white strokes ladled the skyline in pantomime of hunched giants subtracting any progress from the point where sky and land meet, swimming without moving like an endlessly collapsing flock of cranes and conjuring the same sense of desolation.

It wasn’t just desolation, though. It was desolation laid on top of the living breathing shoulder of this animated island where the whales migrate in winter as part of their birthing cycle when they minister the oceans in sacred stewardship of the earth.

This made it desecration. The kind that even the visible penitence stamped in mournful pilgrimage on the mountainside couldn’t unironically disclaim. The kind that required a response. The kind of response a fleet of ships makes when commanded. The kind Kamehameha’s made the day they set out to unify the islands.

Subtracting the fruit of their labor with a Sisyphean shame, the line of turbines remained on public display, tracked by the metronome of their perpetual swing, nonetheless subject to the wind and ever-undulating.

Professor Atom turned his head, the stained glass of the close of Kihei-day breaking as he appeared for a moment to Adrien like a pixelated quotation of everything he had just been thinking but hadn’t said. She could have said it was written on his face, had the very thought he had been wrong (and confirmed as such with such basic undeniable facticity) been so incomprehensible as to reorder the very fabric of his being/ composition of his complexion.

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That the windfarm at Kaheawa was an epic, colossally bad idea, however, was plain to see. It could not generally be missed, in fact, giant semaphoring eye-sore that it was, oozing like some mutant form of Dali’s clocks whose hands had been irradiated and gone looking for their faces.

The conch blew. Footsteps. More footsteps. Chanting.

No one gathers here without being called, the ever-expanding pink notes of the bellowing conch seemed to say. But no one could hear the call without being called.

Slowly Professor Atom and Ms. Levitator walked back from the coast toward the parking lot, the mild winds of Maalaea Bay blowing in beat with the bellows of the conch, the crisp salute of a flag in the wind, the starch salt in the air blossoming alongside the whale songs ringing the coast like nature’s sonic love songs.

We’re going to be late, Adrienne complained. Again. As we are every time. She stopped and looked at Professor Atom’s back as it turned into a compilation of Aloha shirt, straw hat and ponytail resting on a giant open flower design on the collar of his shirt as he diminished toward the driver’s side of his car. Aren’t you ever worried about seeming disrespectful to the kamaaina? About acting like a… malihini? She asked, arms akimbo, bag swaying in time to the magnitude of her reprimand, as if its frequency had a measure. I hate being late, she said, head down walking toward the car with a growing sense of shame.

Although they were not far from Keawala’i, they were far enough that the surf, like poi being pounded, could not drown down the chanting that had already started when they entered, the dying strains of the conch still hanging in the air although it had last been blown several minutes ago, when they were still parking the car, like a bugle call making Adrienne’s pulse race as she felt the tone resonate with her bones and realign her heartbeat with an urgent yearning to get to the source of the call.

What was taking Adam Atom so long? Professor Atom that is. The title was an optical illusion for the ear, more or less formal based on mood because both ‘atoms’ are homophones that sound the same even though spelled differently. She slipped, and smiled, feeling the language of the hula wash over her hips like it was the first time she saw the hula and felt its story move through her all over again, decoding all the undulations of wrist, ankle and neck: each inflection and salute of esoteric wisdom she registered as mimetic resonance.

When she first encountered hula her body registered its account as if she were kinesthetically-sensitive paper storing the story of the formation of the islands and its index of winds with each fleck of the hula dancer’s wrist or bend of her knees. Adrienne felt the ancient wisdom transfer to her and lodge steadfastly within her body like wares on a ship laden for port; she felt herself carrying the whole articulation the history the hula spoke like a filmstrip its film in one unfurling gesture from hip to hip. She felt its ingestion, gestation and endurance.

… to be continued / in process

There are no scare quotes big enough
To capture what lives here.
Between its ears, shiny, polished,
A dream lives on,
Past its expiration date,
Past its existence.
It surpasses itself,
Becoming something we all did
To get here,
To our safe place.
A specimen
That has broken the glass.

And yet, this is the key to understanding how we got here.

How we are all now living under the shadow of Epstein’s neighbor, of Epstein, whose partner-in-crime hand-selected the current ‘president’s’ ‘wife.’

The president is a fixer for the crime ring that brought us 911. Behind BlackRock stands an oligarchy which is bent on taking control of global assets and managing them in our countries’ names but not for our countries’ end.

Wring your hands, but this level of stupid is its own sacrifice.

The crime ring that brought us 911 is now in power in the United States. And it’s our own fault. Because we all pretended 911 never happened, that the official story we were fed at the time was true and that nothing had changed: America was still America, even as we watched a new national security police state squirm and parasitically hatch from the republic’s dead body.

We pretended, we saw what we wanted to see in spite of what was there, we looked and did not see America crying out before our very eyes as she was systematically raped and dismantled before us.

We did n o t h i n g as this happened. We watched it happen. We all knew what was happening as it happened and as it has continued to happen since 911: We were occupied and being lied to. And what did we do about it? We lied WITH it. Like an abused wife. Like Melania. Like a walking Stockholm syndrome. In that regard: We are all complicit in this.

We made this… thing. This antichrist we are living under today which feeds on war and the essence of its own people and planet. Trump is merely a symbol of our own vanity, our miserable egoic meanness: Our pride.

Trump is us.

And yes. We should be ashamed. Very very ashamed at what we’ve become.

There is such a thing as too much trauma. As there is such a thing as too much truth.  The bald head with the scarf ripped off by a callous wind cackling at the chemo last light horned last night like a desert memento by Georgia O’Keefe, embalming the objet d’art before the life has fled her. Fledgling tide of too much time:  Too much time to talk, to unwind, to be unnoticed by the noticing of little minds, like your own, that has not the capacity for mortality, that has not the necessary number of rooms. Occupancy and square footage assume the house of your subtleties and leave the cat lapping at the window in importunate thirst. It is not enough that her scratchy tongue is a mockery of the word soothing, the sound of liquid; the drop falling into the abyss of relief with the sweet culmination of the cessation of pain.  It is not enough that this is a portrait being painted by the plain ticking of a heart beating from beginning to finish imperturbably to the talk of its purpose. It is not enough that we are insatiable, alive to live, living to leave, leaving to bleed our lives onto the bed like a page not slept in but leaned into with the whole weight of hope and aspiration like a sigh not leaving the body but assuming flesh, shape, the necessity of a baby needing to be fed, held, rocked, held onto, wept over, won, resurrected with the recognition that you would die for her: She who is not me but who has swept up my need from me as recklessly as a tide colluding with a cove to hold water, as naturally as hair forming a downy halo on the head of a newborn.  Me.  Who are you?  You have traumatized me, Life.  You have taken my veins like strings and plucked Beethoven’s Ode to Joy from my anatomy like a composer wed to a chorus confined to my DNA and bones and marrow like a sparrow in amber caught in perpetual song. You are the arrow that pierces my whereabouts with wonder and teaches the thunder to tiptoe into my innermost secrets so it does not wake the baby I shall perpetually be, bleeding to god as my witness as a lamb on the altar that it is a choice, my choice, the choice I lead by clearing my throat of stars and calling my fleet of sky and unencumbered lesson that I unleash like one perfect note that does not break the glass, but allows it to tremble, held there perpetually, a tear not breaking, holding the world in its tension, portraying us all as we are in our infinitesimal, complex unity like a wish not blown out but believed in, eternally, uninterrupted, extended, at the edge of breath. Oh heaven, I accept you.