The Gleaners

The non- place

The no mind

The bend in the road

Thoughts profusion of memory

Certain elementals

Work to be endured

Correcting and stabilising memories vision

A coelacanth waves into

The tidal pools

Look down to see your reflections

Take Being to be the mask

That reveals more masks

Lichtung

No app will find

This clearing is the way

You can cheat or choose to cheer

The life in death wholeness

Walking into a Being

Recognise the surroundings

The mental furniture, as it were

To light the way, signposting the excessive

Contempt mankind has gathered

Around the base of its intentions

Perhaps enslavement is

Too strong a word for it

Like a descent into an abyss

Thoughts are pressure

Our pressure, becomes an aneurism

Exploding eternal, the internal

Lights white behind the eyes

The forest clearing

Gleaning what is left over

After a saline harvest

Has brought wet fish to the shore

Tropical wind

Holistic entropy boundless

Listing lacking

Long overdue embrace

Will come will stratify

The block of wasted time

That sits like melting ice

On years of glacial

Erosion

You slid out of view

Striation’s scarred over fore arms never seen

Oh wow, and when

Who were you? father

Sparkling crystal dark

Volcanic ashy minded vision

The minibus era

the mountain

The extra urgency

Time just slipping oozing black mindless mass

Punctuated by food

And movement

The mangled wounds will heal; sore body parts will glaze in the sun.

We jogged around the perimeter fence that day, dusty blossom got into the corners of my eye. Slowness, heaving the body round and round like centrifugal force drawing inwards, towards the coffee shop, whipped pastry satiates the blood flow, regulates the hearts thud, live another day.

The birds screeched and the subaltern looked up and saw first time a parakeet

They are canny and predate on most other bird inhabitants of the park.

Earlier that day it was plant theory and also notions of public private space that preoccupied.

To be free to inhabit a space yet not truly at liberty, coincides with ideas in lecture about ‘vegetal being’ or the ‘vegetal turn. This shares the same idea as the ontology of non-humans and objects, animals classified here with object I suppose included plant life.

The shamans do not differentiate between the human and non-human; between animals, plants and humans. This is a taxonomy imposed by Empire, the jungle bio-mass is a spirit garden for all too share, this knowledge is not even knowledge as such, it is perceived as a form of secular belief. Where ‘belief’ in this instance has a contextual meaning like its use in the phrase,” I believe it will rain today”. Not in the ritual punishment for non-belief prescribed by Judaeo-Christian religious orthodoxy.

Turn to leopard man, turn to parrot faced god, turn to fungus, turn to stone.

That pesky priest runs around the corner beckoning still, in neon Nazca lines with aerial tracery, come hither fresh jungle dew drops from the canopy you come face to face with no-being no face no replacements here.

The library is cosmic repository for all knowledge, here the maester resides shuffling through all time, carrying the burden of wisdom, where there is knowledge there is guilt and envy.

The face of the night is blind to your envy, the smouldering dung cares not for mine or your woes, the force that drives

The bind weed through the decomposing carcass is not concerned with our being, life is decay, in life we decay,

The shaman’s response to climate change is ’Fuck It’.

Along Nazca lines

Overhead symmetry

Noiseless flight

Call up the summer post, evoke the goddess, the fountainhead

Blossom bursting into a weightless world

Holding the body level, feel the blood flow

Observe your position in the plant matrix   

Scavenge a thought out of the grotesque cattle truck that pulls into and out of the day

The only thing is real is not real the only thoughts that come are no thoughts

We hang on we hold onto our culture as if it was our Nature our sustenance enriching yet at the same time making it ever harder to join in to these daily rituals that dominate life, that are enforced by silent invisible powers that whisper “enjoy, be free, live….”

When all the time the borders close in further, with every breathe out they constrict further in, sharpen your blades boys, it won’t be easy, if you can un-learn, if you can resist you might have a chance.

Enter eco-monstrous omniverse a ragged retreat / a reversal of will

noble savage look into the eyes of your being and tell me wholeheartedly that you exist at all

It was that time of the late afternoon when the day gives out to empty silence. Some call these days towards the end of summer the “dog days”; the air felt inert and even the smallest resonances were amplified, echoes and sudden shrill cries performed in the air for us. The dock was empty and cast in cool shadows, a wide expanse of concrete dock, with waves gently lapping from the passing swell of a larger boat not so far from the shore.

Apart from that, and our arrival, the place was empty, the bell towers a few streets away began to strike four, we could see them looming as we disembarked from our small gondola style boat, we moored on the narrow wooden landing bay and both took an end of the heavy wooden case each, making sure we kept the boat in balance, was not an easy task. Once we had unloaded our burden I stopped to catch my breath, standing there with Juno it felt safe and cool a far cry from the frenzied world we had left behind. As I looked about I put my hands around my waist and felt on one hip the ceremonial dagger that I was forsworn to carry at all times. This time I hoped it would not be necessary to use it.

I had arranged for a porter to come and help us take the box to the palazzo at this time but still the dock was deserted, kicking up some dust we wandered the shady peninsular of our arrival spot, perhaps to seek a doorway that might lead to some refreshment. Overhead great birds of prey, maybe eagles or vultures soared on the warm air, they were so very high though it was almost impossible to say for sure what species they were.

It was to be a short ceremony this time but without the casket in place and intact it could not possibly be complete. The master expected all to be in place by the time of sundown. Out of the shows round a heavy wooden cart pulled by one ox. Juno helped me load the casket and we plodded slowly into the labyrinthine streets that would lead us to the sepulchre.

Heaps of skulls piled up against a large wooden doorway, its’ green paint flaked from many weather worn years of abandon. Darting across our path now and again I caught fleeting glances of bizarre courtesans with long scarlet silken capes flow from their backs and shimmering grotesque plague mask visages.

They would be realizing the hives now, it was only a matter of time soon that the bees would flow, no, I should say ooze towards a present moment where their destiny would be all encompassing and sweet, sweeter than any honey known to you or I.

By this time though we would be below the catacombs presenting our greatest work to the master for his perusal and devouring, we would be in raptures of ecstasies; the moonlight grimoire would then begin.

In a twisting unreality the wind picked up and Juno’s face caught my eye, it was definitely all coming together, all our plans all those many many months of meticulous study. I beckoned the porter to make his oxen fasten its pace, if we had not vacated these streets by bee fall we would be dammed to hell along with the contents of the casket. If this were to happen we may as well throw ourselves to be dashed on the razor jagged rocks that line the peninsular, where the eagles make carrion out of the slaughtered martyrs whose rotting bodies fizz with flies in the noonday sun.

Rotting beast, flying birds, secret pans wooden caskets flowing robes flowering heads wooden hearts the life of saints the streets soon run with poisoned blood.

At last the massive carved wooden doors of the sepulchre creaked into sight and we sank into the cool black depths below the streets where the dust could not find us. Excitedly I rubbed the palm of my hand across the daggers sheath, tonight will be a feast for the eyes I said out loud to Juno who merely shrugged and plunged ahead on into the darkness as if following a spectre beckoning.

Tentative childlike steps / wisdom trepanned out of existence

I walked along the passageway like this for what seemed a very long time.

Gongs gently wrapping themselves around the breeze / green moss and hanging purple flowers

It required supreme determination to get through that day and many subsequent days.

A light-bulb moment of indiscretion /all assumed notions slithered away tension realised.

I came here to die, I thought that was true, I knew it to be true

The shadow of the sun on overheard hovering kestrel to be seen and attended to

Blank spaces in the corner of peripheral vision / hoardings ghost people memories collapse in on themselves like black holes in the street where it is cooler than

Before

A leaf falls
a dog barks a car door slams
a resounding “fuck off” repeat
this symphony

Rub it in like bloody polish over the face and arms it will protect you against the brutalizing rays of the sun

The sun that wants to eclipse all / all burnt out wretches we worship the sun we lie prone against it

A reminder of our mortality that we should decipher try

And unravel if you can a violent thought process and live again be born again

The process known as metempsychosis unadorned threshold altar prehistoric retreat

A fast axis towards deaths drivel end howling writhing clawing waste materials

Walking lonely through the city catching glimpses in reflections the process the words

The getting up going on begin again roll an orange ball down the hall

The process the living the lying the shades of hate the pulsing lights of life

Sleepless howling caressing clutching screaming living diving

To do it again racing too fast

The cameras eye the lenses the final show the end of the line the unclasping the oxygen the minds bowl the yes the frame

Time travel wrought you here and it can take you back again

The literature the small talk the fresh fruit intake

Heatwaves dust the pollution
the sepulchral the shady plot

An overgrown burial mounds the progression from pale to translucent from lucid to awake

Technique practice evolve emerge from under a clod of disused ideas the train oh the trains and the very border of eternal return the scurrying the black mirrors the tears of blood the hurt

The Thames so much music everywhere jazz flutes bent horns car tires screeched black patches of spilled petrol everywhere the dogs the men with the dogs the trial the sentence the impression that you are being judged the paranoia the ravaging conquest of it all

Those victories those small triumphs that tell the mind to communicate with heart and breathe deeply

The small talk over and over again the

Only thing to do be zen mindful do not resist keep the flowering skull mind open the slack jawed hypostasis the memories of songs the bleed out of those old radios all coalescing in a billowing smoke cloud of ideas yes ideas not real but withdrawn like objects

If nothing exists apart from my mind, then

How can I be real bones?

And blood floating in a

 Watery moment   now

Look up

It has begun again

Cul-De-Sac

Let us reformat

Can we rebirth right now?

Try and utilise those Uncanny reverberations.

We must create a flightpath

Go beyond oily oaths

And swim out too where the Orca hunt in packs.

Leave tonight

Trust the bandwidth to guide us

Make sure that gliding into paradise we are undetected.

Let’s toast the city

Praise its ungodly glory

Right down to the freezing marrow of its bones.

Toes that curl right away

Will uncurl mechanically at the sound of the foxes’ howl.

Bins rattle dogs bark in this wind-swept cul-de-sac.

Hollow out the inscription

An Anglo-Saxon burial minds

Sutton Hoo heat haze provoked complete collapse.

Refer to the guide book now

Later, on the UFO trail

Will reveal strange goings on

In the pine woods.

Take a lonely path please

Through a mock Tudor wilderness

Ending up in a cul-de-sac.

Ferocious wisdom

Ferric utterances from the caves mouth

You flew in too soon

Sodden rinsed out transference

Now that Being is a frank exchange 

With sensual objects it could be said 

That this chance encounter is completely without precedence.

In keeping with the dank energy

That runs in pools inside

Outside the body

What mind exists to capture this beyond

A moment now

Staggering at the vaulted edge

Thoughts wheel round to try and catch 

One last glimpse of what it was

Refuge from rain?

Caring for the young?

Survival in the inner city?

When compassion leaps to save the heart

The response wound mechanism

Are complicated reflex energies

Blood thermoregulation

Like a tidal plane

The mind is washed again

Tumble dried.