that a few recent mergers actually unraveled.

So it was a good dream for him, good

in a shamelessly untrammeled way–

pent-up rage released in flaming destruction

certainly has its primal charms–

but dude, you know, it’s like fantasy,

fly-by-night travel into the High Lonesome

and other destinations

lamentably not real:

you kill the pain with pills

and try to believe one day you’ll join

that mythic, merry band

of Trotskyite bandits roaming the hills,

relieving the rich of undistributed surplus

and passing it on to the poor.

Heck, at his age it’s an act of faith

to even seek a state of grace

in this bloated cultural commodity spectacle

of locked doors and cheap thrills.

Spicer, you lit the lamp:

at the center of creation

cries a longing for oblivion.

So who can blame you

if you finally give in

and dream up a shaman kneeling

with an obsidian blade

to cut the throat of a psalmist.

The psalmist begs, “No. Please. I’m a Lutheran.”

The shaman smiles kindly and slices the carotid,

explaining,

in that oblique Zen way he’s copped from watching

martial arts movies,

“Yeah, and I’m a marsupial.”

Dig his inscrutably cool, deconstructed chops,

but blood is blood, whatever the style points,

and the blood mixes with benzene in the burning river,

smoke curls around the plutonium doorknobs

and momentarily blinds the ten-pound rats

feeding in the landfill nursery.

To escape the whole mutating mess–dreamed up,

remember?–

the shaman, riding salmon-bellied clouds,

floats away at sunset until he finally settles

high in a big-leaf maple deep in the wilderness.

For a hundred years the shaman gathers blood

through the tree’s tangled roots,

draws it from weasels, bears, tanagers, turtles, voles–

from every creature that has died in the sweet

maple shade–

and then the shaman sends it back,

particle and wave, into the singer’s body/breath

so the cracks in Heaven are patched by dawn

and the sleeping children never dream

how close they came to death.

The shaman dies during the transfusion

(man, my red corpuscles are in mass confusion)

and life, in all its implacable matter-of-factness, goes on.

PART TWO: LIVING IN THE REAL WHIRL

The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same
level of thinking we were at when we created them.

–ALBERT EINSTEIN

A space for everything and everything

riding the wild swoop and swirl of flux, the hurl and blur

of living in the real whirl.

Check out the old stuttering projector at the

Rancho Deluxe Drive-in Church:

its unreconstructed light

barely reaches the tattered screens

we bring to see our movies shown

at the little sundance festivals of our selves.

Oh, what a glorious mess of transparency and emulsion,

of confusion that’ll screw you into the ground

and a dreamcast light to lift you back up,

all the fracture and fusion,

fucking and fighting,

the seethe of ego, the fury and swill

of self-interest, nightmare, and sweet dreams–