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.
POETRY
Posted: Tue Oct 01, 2013 10:10 pm
by admin
Upon a Mighty Mountain, by Charles Carreon
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.
POETRY
Posted: Tue Oct 01, 2013 10:11 pm
by admin
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.
POETRY
Posted: Tue Oct 01, 2013 10:14 pm
by admin
Very Twisted, by Charles Carreon (14 years old)
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)
SONG
Posted: Tue Oct 01, 2013 10:16 pm
by admin
Vlad and Me, by Charles Carreon
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!
POETRY
Posted: Tue Oct 01, 2013 10:18 pm
by admin
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.
POETRY
Posted: Tue Oct 01, 2013 10:19 pm
by admin
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.
POETRY
Posted: Tue Oct 01, 2013 10:23 pm
by admin
Wedding at Canaa, by Charles Carreon
Fine discovery to make In a crystal realm -- "Velocity is equal to thought," Except when the snow melts to wine.
POETRY
Posted: Tue Oct 01, 2013 10:24 pm
by admin
What the Eye Wants To See, by Charles Carreon
What the eye wants to see is curves. Lines that come around to meet each other. What the mind wants to feel is closure. The sense that things conclude, come round, reach fulfillment. What the ear wants to hear is rhythm, a pattern in time to pace its passing and provide assurance of return. With each beat we return, coming back to ourselves, back to here, this space.
POETRY
Posted: Tue Oct 01, 2013 10:25 pm
by admin
What We Are, by Charles Carreon
we are colors fading in the sun on tattered fabric we are bones bleaching in the sand next to old rocks we are buzzards sailing silently in high clear blue naked air we are the waters soaking an infinity of interbranching roots while wandering aimlessly in search of stillness we are the ancient sun, burning its life away in the throat of the sky we are an old piece of string, frayed and coming undone, black rocks, washed with salt for ten million years