Poetry & Songs, by Charles Carreon

Identified as a trouble maker by the authorities since childhood, and resolved to live up to the description, Charles Carreon soon discovered that mischief is most effectively fomented through speech. Having mastered the art of flinging verbal pipe-bombs and molotov cocktails at an early age, he refined his skills by writing legal briefs and journalistic exposes, while developing a poetic style that meandered from the lyrical to the political. Journey with him into the dark caves of the human experience, illuminated by the torch of an outraged sense of injustice.

POETRY

Postby admin » Tue Oct 01, 2013 10:04 pm

Trash, by Charles Carreon

Image

Follow her down the streets,
down the dingy sidewalks,
in her ashen footsteps -- Trash.
 
She's strung out on him,
and he's nowhere to be found,
and I'm hung up on her,
just hanging around,
so we're both Trash.
 
But she's the Queen of the Night
in my twisted sight,
and down the sooty streets
I follow, hypnotized,
until she wearies and her weary
steps lead up the shabby stairs to a
room with a TV desert view.
 
Frizzed hair, once blonde, is now a cinder,
soft skin, once clear as diamond's
turning back to coal; all this
I see as I argue with her, at
the bus stop, by the change machine,
in the pool hall where she's looking
for her thing.
 
Trash, she's turned to trash,
my emanation, on probation,
turning back toward gates of
darkness once again; they
hypnotize her, draw her back
to worthless contemplations leading in.
 
This is priceless degradation, but I'm
leaving now; you won't turn to
say goodbye, just sitting on the
couch with listless eyes; you'd do
anything I'd ask you to, you're
so demoralized.
 
I close the door and walk back
down the stairs, while television
voices echo in the air.
Goodbye, beloved Trash,
Your soul all turned to ash --
The television images of glamour
that once danced in your hair
Are permanently gone.
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POETRY

Postby admin » Tue Oct 01, 2013 10:06 pm

TV Man, by Charles Carreon

[It's not always possible to write a good poem, but we still have issues. TV is not a subject that we find it easy to deal with poetically. Oil and water might get along better than TV and poetry. I mean, have you ever seen "The Hour of Poetry," or "Great Poets Remembered," even on A&E? This rhyme takes aim at the great glass teat.]
 
The TV the TV the TV
is the thing we use
to soothe our brains
and make our troublesome thoughts all loose
We sit in front of the screen --
Soak up the rays
I heard a man once sat there
for a hundred days
His wife and children
they thought he was dead
But then he yawned and
took himself
off-to-bed
He was a TV man
a real TV hero
Don't anyone say the lie that he was
a real zero
He was a TV man
he lived in a TV land
he had a TV brain
don't anyone say insane
He watched the news
He watched the sports
With a smoke in his hand --
in his undershorts
He watched the weather
He watched the wars
And a personal talk with Louie L'Amour
He watched the Carson
He watched the games
He watched the soaps with
arduous names
He watched the movies made for TV
And an expose of democracy
He watched until there was nothing left
And the news was a re-run
like all the rest
He patiently sat with his TV set
Until there wasn't any dumber
that he could get
And having done that
he knew he could go to bed,
Because there wasn't one thing
left in his whole damn head
And from then on he had no trouble
From that day he felt no pain
'Cause he'd killed off all of the thinking
In his god-given brain
He could smile at everyone
His friends said he was more fun
But he always said it was
nothing
That anyone couldn't have done
He said, "I'm a TV man,
I live in a TV land,
and I'm very proud to say
I think it's a damn good way."
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POETRY

Postby admin » Tue Oct 01, 2013 10:08 pm

Umbilicus, by Charles Carreon

Image

Dragging out of my heart
this long, sinuous rope,
The bloody umbilical cord of sorrow,
shrunken and knotted,
dotted with cares,
Still pulling gently,
weakening the roots,
The placenta of selfhood
still adhering to the uterus
where I was formed ...
Come on baby,
it's over,
let go of it
and let it come out now,
you don't need it any more.
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POETRY

Postby admin » Tue Oct 01, 2013 10:10 pm

Upon a Mighty Mountain, by Charles Carreon

Image

Upon a mighty mountain stands
A temple strong and bright
With pillars wrought of living stone
Adorned in streams of light.

Few pilgrims reach its portals,
No priests recall its rites,
Yet the etchings that adorn its walls
Still glow in colors bright.

The steps that to its refuge rise
Are worn by nameless feet
Of travelers who left behind
Their homes and gardens sweet.

The view from where they sit at last
Is unfettered and free.
Still higher go only the birds
Who nest in Helios' tree.
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POETRY

Postby admin » Tue Oct 01, 2013 10:11 pm

Vajra, by Charles Carreon

So few are willing to lose their edge
In exchange for nothingness.

When nothingness becomes your edge
Everything is pre-penetrated.
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POETRY

Postby admin » Tue Oct 01, 2013 10:14 pm

Very Twisted, by Charles Carreon (14 years old)

Image

Image

When the change comes
RIPS one away
air fills with unreal fog
becomes much more SOLID
Each thought
another fear.
That Makes Fear Come In
an infinite number of shades, arrangements
and
designs
For everything goes twirling past,
Is whipped away by neuron winds
That dance across dendrite plains,
And wearily wind their way
Through towering mountains of thought.

(1969)
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SONG

Postby admin » Tue Oct 01, 2013 10:16 pm

Vlad and Me, by Charles Carreon



Image

I am a Communist
It works so good
I couldn't resist
I tell my friend Vlad,
Vladimir Putin
You know we're friends
Sure as shootin'
I-I
Wanna be like you!

We got the world divided
Into separate blocks
We got nucular suppositories
Nucular socks
Those other nations can
All kiss our ass
And while they're doing it
We'll pass some gas
'Cause I-I
Wanna be like you.

Right-wing bigots
They love me, too
You fight your terrorists
Just like I do
Reward your friends
Put your enemies under
You, my man,
Have earned the right to plunder,
And I-I
Wanna be like you.

Those minor differences
Won't get in our way...
Iran/Iraq United Nations
What the 'hey,
'Cause it's all in a world ruler's day,
And if they stuck a mike
up to my face
Here is what I'd say --
"Yeah, I-I
Wanna be like you
Yeah, I-I
Wanna be like you!"

Hey, did you kiss your sister?
Did you go to prep school?
Did you kill anyone in the KGB?
Don't you wish that you were
more successful?
Whaddaya think about Condi and me?
I think the job is kinda stressful
You seem to handle it marvelously
So I-I
Wanna be like you.

I am a Communist
It works so good
I couldn't resist
I tell my friend Vlad,
Vladimir Putin
You know we're friends
Sure as shootin'
I-I
Wanna be like you!
-- I mean it, man!
I-I
Wanna be like you!
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POETRY

Postby admin » Tue Oct 01, 2013 10:18 pm

Walking on the Razor's Edge, by Charles Carreon

Walking on the razor's edge,
Gods and demons fall away on either side
Unable to scale the obsidian peaks.

Appearing ahead,
Suspended in midnight
An ideal realm

Diaphanous, pure
Bathing the waves of rippling glass
In silent silken light.
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POETRY

Postby admin » Tue Oct 01, 2013 10:19 pm

We Are Not Alone, by Charles Carreon

It was maybe five years ago, I was sitting on the mattress on the floor of my bedroom, that was plastered in a cool garden green, with the sliding glass door open to the deck where the Oregon weather was wearing its most benign appearance, complete with birdsong, winds soughing through the neighbor's huge poplars, and the sound of an occasional goose or a private plane sputtering into the tiny airport across the road.

"I am ultimately alone in my existence." The thought occurred to me as I was sitting there on my mattress. There seemed to be no way around it. None at all. The box was foolproof. No one could experience what I experience, and I cannot experience what they experience. The whole phenomenon of torture is based on exploiting that separateness of two beings. One in agony, the other not, or not precisely. "A warm man cannot understand a cold man." Solzhenitzyn puts this thought in his protagonist's head in "A Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich," after a warm man puts him back out into the cold without a qualm. I had accepted the ineluctable logic of this experiment, because I had been a subject in a similar experiment at a Catholic military school run by Benedictine sisters, very Southern in their discipline, that ran to torturing children by forcing them to march and play on a windswept blacktop in freezing cold as "recreation." I noticed the sisters stayed indoors, and shivered the less for it.

This early experiment slammed home the lesson that I was alone. I remember asking Sister Bernadette, who could've been a trucker's wife and loved it, I suspect, if I could please come in since the wind-chill factor was turning every gust, and there was an endless string of them, into an icy razor, and I had no hat or gloves, being the type to lose such winter accoutrements perhaps to theft, but in any event leaving myself without them. She never had much sympathy for me, I realized in that moment, as she simply peered down from her lofty height from under the stiff, starched crown of white linen, about five inches high, holding a stick in her hand, and said no. Her heart didn't come close to melting, and I realized that this lady was as dry as wood inside.

That was one of my early experiments, and certainly it confirmed the supposition that I was alone, but no one had offered me this theory explicitly, and I didn't formulate the thought independently. In fact, through childhood and into my late teens, I would have denied believing in my alone-ness. I took lots of psychedelic drugs, particularly LSD and mescaline, and like lots of other people who took them, I had many experiences of oneness in which I also felt free of desire and rather amused by the notion of holding a particularized identity. I had a problem finding models to fit these experiences, that formed themselves into the core of a religious orientation that I had never felt before as a child, when I was a happy little materialist chocked full of information and excitement about rockets and weapons, a typical cold-war gee-whiz kid. At sixteen I was a serious peyote eater, yoga student, and exfundamentalist Christian, capable of dropping acid and quoting from Matthew in the same afternoon.

Trying to get some advice from my elders in the realm of psychic exploration that I'd unexpectedly flipped into due to Tim Leary's acid initiative, that caused me to realize that LSD was, as Tim said, a substance known to cause insanity in those who had not taken it. The substance had clearly thrown the Establishment for a loop. The Press was frothing, the parents were talking, the Enquirer was enquiring, and eyes were bulging when the topic came 'round to the Beatles and that song, "Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds," an acronym for an illegal drug, hidden in the title of a song! And I was all like "IMAGINE YOURSELF IN A TRAIN ON A STATION WITH PLASTICENE PORTERS WITH LOOKING GLASS EYES," and I knew I knew I knew that this was coming out of somewhere that no one else had come from, to my knowledge, to that day. I had to get some for myself.
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POETRY

Postby admin » Tue Oct 01, 2013 10:23 pm

Wedding at Canaa, by Charles Carreon

Image

Fine discovery to make
In a crystal realm --
"Velocity is equal to thought,"
Except when the snow melts to wine.
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