Of Gondolas, Frank O'Hara and Bodhisattva Vows

  

Some might call it a gondola

that carries us through

the night.

This gondola moving

on or not

seems.

If you ask someone

they would say

so.

Similar veins recoil

tumescent instruction

resuscitates simply

lucid nights.

Acrid dreams resume

inconvenient discontinuities

reveal terminal

attachment.

Seeming solid planes

yield naught

turn toward

light.

  

John Bailes, Kotatsu Roko

Tuesday 17 April 2012

Prospect Hill

Written after speaking with the mother of a marine...

Complicity and Betrayal

Itinerant worshipped fallen standard repugnant fissure leveling water thimbles broadly open tulips fly rampant furnace liniment littoral rosetta firmly fistulating glimmer.

Remorse or sadness: truth romance and deep love found in states of aggression where we are no longer fighting for some other ideal than one another. Really there is no other than this meeting in which we give up all for and it is what we all want need but that many get it through goading others into the act for no other reason than to see something they never can enact themselves.

What a sorry statement it is to know that people feel the only way to fulfill this yearning and enter knowing is through war.

What perversion it is that we put ourselves in this predicament to find too late we stand only for one another and no ideal and certainly not what we were sold on to get us into this predicament whereby we forsake all else save the situation in which we find ourselves. The forsaken meet the forsaken in the open spurred by a predicament of others’ making and if lucky realizing too late this is all which just might allow a total consumption with nothing left.

Only a few are so lucky.

John Bailes, Kotatsu Roko

Tuesday 17 April 2012

Prospect Hill

I guess I feel...

                                     I guess I feel

                                                closest to what

                                                          I imagine

                                                                   Philip’s way

                                                                             is.

                                      I take it to be

                                                a dangerous

                                                          & beautiful

                                                                   path à

                                      More and more having

                                                or holding

                                                          or being

                                                                   some way

                                      Means less

                                                and less

                                                          to me.

John Bailes, Kotatsu Roko

Monday, 26 March 2012

San Francisco Airport

The doors of perception

The doors of perception

aren’t even doors

there is no building

there is no perception

there is only perception

all else is projection

with a choice of projections

the question might be

why not rest in love à

   

John Bailes, Kotatsu Roko

Monday, 26 March 2012

SFO

I have nothing

I have nothing

I do nothing

I am

Therefore

I travel to meet

you

that is all

This is why we do

this

even if Alice says,

“we almost don’t have to.”

John Bailes, Kotatsu Roko

Monday, 26 March 2012

San Francisco Airport

In Memory of My feelings, Frank O'Hara

In Memory of My Feelings

My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent
and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.
He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals.

My quietness has a number of naked selves,
so many pistols I have borrowed to protect myselves
from creatures who too readily recognize my weapons
and have murder in their heart!
though in winter
they are warm as roses, in the desert
taste of chilled anisette.
At times, withdrawn,
I rise into the cool skies
and gaze on at the imponderable world with the simple identification
of my colleagues, the mountains. Manfred climbs to my nape,
speaks, but I do not hear him,
I'm too blue.
An elephant takes up his trumpet,
money flutters from the windows of cries, silk stretching its mirror
across shoulder blades. A gun is "fired."
One of me rushes
to window #13 and one of me raises his whip and one of me
flutters up from the center of the track amidst the pink flamingoes,
and underneath their hooves as they round the last turn my lips
are scarred and brown, brushed by tails, masked in dirt's lust,
definition, open mouths gasping for the cries of the bettors for the lungs
of earth.
So many of my transparencies could not resist the race!
Terror in earth, dried mushrooms, pink feathers, tickets,
a flaking moon drifting across the muddied teeth,
the imperceptible moan of covered breathing,
love of the serpent!
I am underneath its leaves as the hunter crackles and pants
and bursts, as the barrage balloon drifts behind a cloud
and animal death whips out its flashlight,
whistling
and slipping the glove off the trigger hand. The serpent's eyes
redden at sight of those thorny fingernails, he is so smooth!
My transparent selves
flail about like vipers in a pail, writhing and hissing
without panic, with a certain justice of response
and presently the aquiline serpent comes to resemble the Medusa. 

Frank O'Hara