H e a r t S o n s & H e a r t D a u g h t e r s of A l l e n G i n s b e r g

N a p a l m H e a l t h S p a : R e p o r t 2 0 1 4 : A r c h i v e s E d i t i o n

STEVEN HIRSCH

Transgressions

But may I, when again I have the city's crush

and tangled noise-skein and furor

of its traffic wrapped around me, alone,

may I above that thick confusion

recall sky and the gentle mountain rim

on which the far off plodding herd curved homeward.

––Rainer Maria Rilke

from "The Spanish Trilogy"

I

I wade through days of light

like movable night

enter them

with a carnival of rich

carnal klaxons

blaring what I think

unable to uncover

clues about who is moving

in these tight pants and sunglasses

who steps on New York City sidewalks'

hundred billion club-footed bacteria ––

Deafening din of the "world"

declares our separateness

walking down a gritty street

in downtown summer city stew

mass tepid squalor

compartmentalizing my

contemptuously stupid boring advertising job.

At 5:58 again

no matter what the song

clockradio curdles spirit

sours mind, kills dreaming

slays the composer writing aubades

in lazy morning afterglow.

On the dawn-chilled depot platform

I resist the deep despot echo of ghost freedom deposed

barely making it through the commute, a simple refuge

sinking deeper into my vinyl seat

on this loco-

motive with no ulterior

centrifugal express identity crisis ––

journalizing these petty bourgeois inconveniences

at each of the many station stops

on this transforming track ––

Temporary comfort of rattling sleep tames no fear

desires sublimate under fluttering lids

and you can't hear the difference

between the voices of spirit or of ego ––

inner talk blares as towns pass quickly

smudge of sage and tobacco resolves the blur

sated, grateful and impatient ––

Phantoms xylophone march abductions in childhood's nightmare

paper skeletons grab yr neck and armpits, you pull the covers up close

aliens in the elevator shift yr lymph nodes through shallow throat ––

Dad speedballs with a diabetic whose wife throws his leg prosthesis

out the 19th Fl. window

while mom gets high to Leon Russell in the kitchen with her hairdresser ––

Indian doctors whisper like chipmunks in a sterile forest

of disinfected linoleum, crackling their foil and bubblewraps

pop out a superdrug which makes things worse on purpose.

Remembering these dreams feels like moving chest-out through a swarm of bees;

violently thrashing at your artful, evasive enemy

who analyzes you with surgical apparition ––

Leftover dung and litter grains hang out of the cat's butt

you kiss her anyway,

crumple up a page, drain the juice glass ––

On 16th St. bright morning work walk

city keels over its incendiary bed

repeats like greasy eggs on a stale roll

I am point at the moon ––

May my spirit be like rock

The "Temp" life is a freelance shaft

by wealthy bosses who ruminate on the art of suppression

and ram it up your ass

so there is no problem as long as you have

no problem with that

otherwise, you will french-kiss iron storm grating,

tear flesh on razor spikes of office chair floor mats,

travel with an attache of grief and heartburn, a stained tie, ink spotted pocket

get bloody carpet burns connecting ethernet transceivers under a hundred desks

pavement gravel embedded in shoulder and knee, tangled in a mass of localtalk

red rose petals sprinkled on your forehead, shower drips on frontal bone

ÜÜ they will wrestle the cellular phone from your cold, rigid fist

and you will have no big idea whatsoever ––

II

Sitting meditation; not sitting

what's the difference?

Lotus fold of knee or

mind rasp, inhalation –– filter of

auric mouth

taking and giving pains and pleasures

folded like origami on mirror

pulsing tingle between scrolled eyes and thighs ––

All the time

I wondered who you were

because I had no idea who I was

it was over before we knew

it was over just when we got

a glimmer

or because of that ––

Crescent moon

in crisp October twilight

cuts through blurred vision

embracing the current dilemma,

surrender completely to falling leaves, burning in piles,

unsharp smokescreen above orange sunset at century's horizon.

Autumn brings death

as a call to practice

mindful awareness,

stir static life into sweetness,

what we cling to like newborns

ripped away impersonally from the breast

like leaves from its tree by the solvent wind.

Beauty continually ripens.

It seems like roses but blushes deeper.

It just seems and traffics in the illusory.

Place the hidden market between us

and we always move toward that boundary.

Create the hungry mouth on yourself

and it sucks only a brief moment of forgetting

like phantom nipple rising and falling with breath.

You root for the ghost and she

suckles you in dreamtime rebirth.

Autumn renews

a call to satisfy every wish

a sleeping song

to last the winter long

a warmth to counter

bright coldness we deny most painfully ––

deep reminder of stellar origin

siren who calls you singing from the

blackness between stars.

I stare out the window at

blur of yellow trees in

bright sun glare ––

My thoughts rush ahead

to spring out of body

on the 7:52 ––

There is no hour and seventeen minutes wasted

each trip defines what your made of

alone or in public

another bead is pulled along the string.

Must careful rosary the Samaya

and not transgress it

this pious vow of comet entrails

drives its repetitive emptiness home

curls like incense into rams horns

crushes them with huge epochal tires, great red cushions

beneath blinding afterimage red-shifts ––

icy star pizza scraped off the

cold dark roadway acclimates quickly

halting convection, her specular black lace teddy

dresses the breasts of the Milky Way ––

Mala beads tap out an invisible code

to name my aspiration, invisible man shielded from

who mustn't see me, night as I am

often marvelous yet reaching closer into fear like

abundant mackerels on my spleen

nibbling away self-esteem ––

A fair day follows a suffering one

as I fall asleep in the warm satin

Indian-summer breeze.

III

Gaia mother, our survival all but forgotten

betrayed daily with a kiss and a chemical

driven away with your car and your testicles ––

Forget other lives, your almond eyes,

persimmon juice running down your chin ––

Carthaginian goddess worshipper sins

gasping with spotted fever and a curse on his breath

innocent youth who lay on blankets of rabbit fur

listening to Simon & Garfunkle's Bookends, watching

a votive flicker behind colored crushed glass, crackling hempseed

through dirty windows over Murray Hill rooftops.

Deep memories come forward with faces hardly recognized

masks you wore light up in sequence, a museum

running through bush in Rio De Janeiro

in 1683 on the tribal stump fasting

from wild rice and boar ––

Castle Duino crashing surf, night life in Prague

distant sound of Rodin's chisel against stone ––

Sad, hobbling cripple struggling

across 11th Ave. to reach the bus stop and the bus doesn't stop ––

head bowed in ghostly shadows of florescent shelter ––

Crow pecking carrion on frosted Palisades

family members die mile after mile, you walk down that lonesome road

toss through sleepless nights worrying ––

Every night of new love includes the danger

of eighteen years of hard work commuting from a vapid suburbia

to raise a child that will betray your image and make their own way

maybe make you proud, maybe not, President, rapist, doctor or killer

surely watch you die one day and take over your world ––

Illness takes root in slums and dark alleyways of cities

from Atlantic to Pacific

while you tune your electric guitar

and fumble through the Pentatonic

in your comfy condo with two TVs and a full pantry ––

Blind woman in front of the Helen Keller Center

who hailed a taxi, lost the U-ring on the harness of her seeing-eye dog

and bent at the waist, arms outstretched, called out "Sasha!, Sasha come!

Come Sasha!, Sasha!!"

Even the Pakistani cabbie called out with her while the black lab

was smelling the curb three feet away ––

That lame old man who walked past you signing Reiki

transformed at the Union Square farmer's market ––

his cane caught your pants leg

came out from under him and fell ––

for a moment he realized he didn't need it ––

You acquire his limp and count your blessings ––

You forget you bless others in mysterious ways and

bless yourselves, being instruments of teachings moving through life

auspiciously with blinders ––

Remember

simple fearless embrace of wind

maskless riding endless roads, strong as you stride

past the aisle of parked cars toward the depot platform ––

Remember

when the teacher fails you can only turn to Nature

not your little 'self' ––

night steeps a rich supple mead,

your damp, slippery costume witchy leather cape ripples

you carry armfuls of indian corn, wear the brick bandanna of city ––

Remember

you were not made to lose track of yourself on these tracks

lose face in the face of a sea of blank stares, lose right action

right livelihood, the Paramitas, lose the one you love to painful cigarettes

through a salesman's mask, psychic carpet mines in your office zone

war theatre of corporate Amerika strategized void of nature:

'no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body

no mind, no appearance, no end of appearance, no old age and death

no IRA, no Keogh, no quarterly bonus, no dental, no pension

no end of old age and death, no suffering, no origin of suffering

no cessation of suffering ––

you were not meant to suffer this way

not made mean, not made to suffer but to be reminded ––

IV

Vanguards of meditation's temporary silence

shout primordial raw closure of millennium

come back to simple easy breathing.

They took the long way home but got there

and lived for impermanence.

Cradling zen, I sit quietly and remember them ––

Pioneers hoisting sails to course new destinies

arrive in promised lands great guns blazing their grainy, immigrant film.

They took the Ellis Isle short stick and struck a staff to part the celluloid sea

standing by the West Side Hwy to capture newly homeless men

sitting one leg, one bottle up on the cement dividers, tilted fedoras backgrounded

by a misty Hudson sunset.

Brooklyn Padmasambhava on his lotus-throne barstool, swirling skullcup

of ambrosia on tap ––

casting thunderbolts across pure-land skies to magnetize wandering mind ––

Mahakala's consort in tight lame, singing in her anguished pleasure, one leg

across his thighs

in leopard skins and pumps, eyes and fangs gleaming.

Exotic dancer devours our mutual neurosis, our transgressions are bounced at the door ––

Teach crash course in physics by direct chemical injection of crossword theorem solved

juice to draconian brain stem, cloned mind of Elohim re-heralds new age

a mega-bio-ragtime-raga, music which generates

surreal freeform holograms, atomized fragrant oils and pulse of

tuned endorphin pleasure as you recline in your vibrating nuclear Barcalounger

of 21st century quantum schismroom chomping ginseng bonbons ––

How safe with a wife and kids and condo and reliable sales job

and how dead, lost to one or another unreasonable reasonableness

falling out at night with a bag of Fiddle-Faddle in front of Dynasty to fantasize

about lives that seemed even more unreasonable though richly abundant

lives that moved from scene to scene, tortuous pain, sex, revenge, elation

without ever waking up from their programmed dream ––

Open rivers of faces rushing in waves of spiked, slicked, curled, flowing

freshly washed hair dancing through Beltane –– how open morning yogurt and granola

greenness of green, redness of red, smell of coffee from street carts on 5th Ave. ––

open grip on my attache, open destiny with a face veil hiding its beauty ––

early astral AM dream reveals:

< moving too fast on a motorized skateboard down a steep and curving hill

comedian Adam Sandler dressed in a young girl's Sunday church outfit

standing on the high dive in an Olympic swim meet, a giant crayola crayon-mobile

like the deep mine drilling rigs from Total Recall, rides through the grassy field

in one huge sexual insinuation >

V

In other homes, other ringing clocktower bells peal, other skylines hold you

Fearless Dharma Bridge is approached and crossed with Radiant Intellect ––

Crisis and suffering keeps you crossing avenues, keeps you dancing, groomed to truth

favorite watch telling time in mantra, not hours.

Your child with limbs intact, conscious compassionate demeanor of sweetness

polished mirror

until the day you die and become one for her –– being mirrored, remembered,

grateful for life

beyond the limits of sense, free in the moment, at home where nothing's happening ––

Sing precious incarnation with any voice that suits you, imprint the cloudy fabric

of this blue sky

realm with your unique design –– no talon to tear it open at the heart, or get you past

the Eagle's

devouring eye, tortoise rising with its head through a ring, serpent's devouring surge

to ourobouros ––

Your lover leaves and then returns, ripples on the mountain lake converge and spread

who you really are becomes a taste in your mouth like an ancient fruit you cannot name

a garden you cannot tend, beliefs you can't defend, feelings you won't recall until

you turn that corner

and she's there, bright eyes swirling with mischievous light ––

Leave yourself behind in the time it takes

to evaporate deep releasing signal breaths

integrate everything suppressed

to your senses dilate and forgiving

in a flash of instant remembering

with no big deal, out of nowhere

an old friend phones and then

the touch on an elbow from a Lakota wiseman

sends up smoke signals

he observes the environment through hawk eyes ––

The hawk teaches its lesson of the "Old Way" to

a field mouse by devouring it, releasing its spirit to the wind ––

Nothing is lost in that warrior's love

no memories distract his victorious beak from the kill.

No track squeal distorts the absolute

knowing where you are truly going.

I wade through days of light like movable night

push through nights of pain

like a wind-whipped nightflame into the lamp's mantle

like a sun ray lifting the faces of new spring flowers

on the other side of the hill.

[Originally published in NHS 1998, http://www.poetspath.com/napalm/nhs98/hirsch.html.]