N  a  p a  l  m     H  e  a  l  t  h     S  p  a  :     R  e  p  o  r  t     2  0  0  6

 

 

JIM COHN

 

 

From The Book of Ololon

 

 

Olonon Visits Fenced-Off American Borders

after Blake

 

Robed in all things waiting to be said,

Surrounded by orange and red nasturtiums

Blooming the desert, she walks

More lonesome than executive privilege,

Covered with a body armor

Of impenetrable distresses

At once romantic and egalitarian.

 

Hers isn’t anything like “the soft soul of America

Bleeding slot machine magic people.

These secrets, they’re not hers to keep.

All she ever wanted was Love’s multiples,

Its live gang convicts, carrying the news

Each shall annihilate the self

For the good of others.

 

Her every move made perfect sense to me,

Radiated a snowy white telepathy

Deeper than Texas blues and gospel.

Up close to her, I had to start believing

In a different set of possibilities,

Even the powerlessness I felt

Would have to be thrown away.

 

 

Ololon Visits The Flag Draped Coffins

 

Drunken bikers, people reading

Pieces of paper thinking they

Are looking into my heart,

Satan’s just another word for

The sickness of intolerance.

The first rule they learn is

Everybody’s channeling

 

The long note, the one

After the end of a piece.

She stands as they dismount

From their planes, lying in wait

In the great grey warehouse of eternity,

Well known by a lot of performers

Still working the old circuit

 

In ghostly screens of speed

Where whatever happened

To them, their daring and sad

Exit march to the blue of tombs,

It is all slightly alien, the bullets

That went through them,

The never see them no more.

 

 

Ololon Visits The Cabinet

 

If everybody is so important

To the war, why is

Everyone so disposable?

The commandant warns the Secret Service

Against becoming indifferent

To loss of life. Those were

Political, not aesthetic, boos.

 

The idea that the queen

Was a teenager on a horse farm,

That the FBI would come up empty,

Fearless judges rolled up in carpets

And thrown into volcanoes,

That with one push of a button

The country would come to a halt,

 

Dubious tip blest the endless blasts

Of the perturbed mad raging,

Its hair slicked back

With rivets of nets,

Fathomless voids, remnant

Stars splitting apart, confining

The obscure separation.

 

 

Ololon Visits Guantanamo Prison

 

Truth is hid in the soul

Of male-female and female-male

As a collection of sharp Spanish knives

Concealed within an unfolding telescope kitchen oven.

The FBI can raid the House of Congress

But it cannot invade virtuosity, neither

Self-revealing nor programmatic

 

In any way. Garrisoned,

We were all knocked stupid,

Expelled from the system,

The huge and crazy cast

As rare as a “watershed election.”

Everybody was embarrassed

Except the Heavy Hand of the Law

 

That slapped subpoenas on

All the socioeconomic rejects

In a hooka of national nightmares,

Dismissed as the art of damage control,

Even as the cannibals devouring the capital

Were stunned by the indictment––

Its reading more like archeology.

 

 

Olonon Visits Nuclear Dread

 

Down through the imaginary eons

Filled with unknown soldiers vanished in mud,

Death appears more powerful than teen star headsets,

More gloomy than enlightened people and drunks,

Children whose names are added

To the National Registry of Sex Offenders

And those who believe God speaks through them.

 

Because we cherish opinion and pain,

Sometimes we just want to annihilate everything,

But male is already female, female is already male.

You always sit in sunlight.

Weeds grow out of drainpipes.

The worst thing to do is to hold back

Your power to cut down someone else’s strength.

 

Chair on a rooftop reaching into the unseen,

Smell of rugs in storefronts converted to mosques,

I do not even have to remember you among these walls

Where the accumulation of what is now resides.

Isn’t all this a miracle, more packed than Dostoevsky’s

Last notebook, a girl unextinguished by love,

Aloft, supernumerous .

 

 

Ololon Visits These Waves Arousable To Fury

 

We melt, we disappear

In a new orchestra of rising seas,

It’s strings of sea grass unentwined

And scarlet trumpet flowers laced with mercury.

Acrobats of the never contented will,

We are the hearse of loss inscribed in tears’

Green metallic silk.

 

What lies in wait are mountains, rivers,

Hells and heavens entirely shattered.

The more you look up, the higher it is.

The more you bore down, the deeper it goes.

You wonder how people so united by ideals

Could be tricked en masse by every state

Of mind opposed by another.

 

Anyone can overturn the polestar,

Flip the axis of earth like a toothpick in the mouth.

When laughter ends, who knows where it’s gone?

If you know how to hold the roar of the surf,

What does it matter that you’ve arrived

At ancient or future shores?

The oceans are already upon you.

 

 

Ololon Visits Thug Love

 

The simplicities were scattered.

They would not be returning any time soon,

Only the complexities of human beings thrown off course

On the immortal staircase of all those that died

And never were resurrected,

Just slightly bent red streaks

In an all-black painting.

 

She resembled nothing else

Anybody around here had ever seen,

Not the strip clubs of innocence

Or the long sermons of intimidation,

The entrails of atrocity, the centuries of murder.

On her arm was a tattoo

Of the entire universe,

 

More luminous and visionary than

Stardom at early age

And what shoes were worn at the funeral

And the networks we now take for granted

In the uninhabited vocabularies

The rest of the gold suited bombers

Refer to as “Death to America.”

 

 

Ololon Visits Lobster Gal

 

By transmitting wisdom forms and

The practice of living under one roof earth,

You entered a period of open rebellion,

Slipped through the cables, turned off the switches,

Dimmed the arcade of houselights for a

White House basement mess production of Waiting for Godot

Starring the President and Vice President.

 

Everything was fair game.

There were no more sacred cows.

Vulnerability was the mark of the foolish.

Trusting the government to put things in perspective

Was like trying to take a Cottonmouth to bed.

They plundered the country until the only thing left

Was the comfort they felt that everybody was doomed.

 

Dirty fingers, dirty pies, it was all there––

The cards were transparent, they were betting big.

If you got ripped-off, at least they had the decency

To do so right in front of your face.

The alarms lit up the switchboard down at Central Security.

By the time their tans had faded

They were carried out in plastic bags.

 

 

Ololon Visits Leverage Neutralized

 

Untraceable viruses, nationality of no importance,

All this traffic of bodies

Going every which way.

There were major malfunctions.

The Americans were getting sloppy.

They thought they were working

For the right people.

 

They were all in a loop that made no difference to me.

Never the same two people, requiring only as little of us

As was left to give.

You want everyone to think you’re a woman that pisses ice,

But you’re soft, you’re sensitive, you love, you care.

They wanted you to see it their way.

This was their major malfunction.

 

It infected almost everything

Unlucky enough to come in contact with it.

Sometimes a money counter got shot in the head.

Sometimes it was a gramophone IED playing old 78’s.

Nothing’s worth a life, but that’s the name of the game.

You think you’re like them, but you’re not.

I’m a little like them, only worse.

 

 

Ololon Visits The Sadness Of Children

 

The indecency of weeping children, alone––

Their “parents” as empty of intimacy

As once they’d felt true love––

Is like rain falling into a little red cup.

A child tosses a handful of rose petals into the air.

They land upon a teacher’s head.

The two of them bow to one another.

 

There is a Tibetan story

About the blue and white lion

And the rabbit that tricked them both into a well.

A child uses sadness like a daredevil.

You get the feeling heaven’s on her side.

Why is there so much unhappiness in the world?

Weeping, a child inherits the earth.

 

So fierce is the sadness of a child, moreso than

All the fireworks on the Fourth of July going in reverse.

All you can do sometimes is weep along,

Caught in that spiritual asylum, at the farthest end of the hall.

Yet sadness is a part of everything.

It’s the jewels God gathers

To light the silence of outer space.

 

 

May-June 2006