Nothing Today Save What Wisdom Inspired by Ye Poets in my Comments

Nothing Today Save What Wisdom Inspired by Ye Poets in my Comments

L. Edgar Otto    Monday Sept. 23, 2013

For the Toad Poets  whom I thought of today passing by an old lady's garden who once asked me to help her up when she was stuck on the ground at her digging.  So I took this photo...I got some of the comments in, sorry if I missed you...

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The Great Grand Joker Calls Neptune Up to Visit Him in Overworld

The Great Grand Joker Calls Neptune Up to Visit Him in Overworld

L. Edgar Otto 10-Mar-12    Posted for the imaginary garden toads   Sept. 18, 2013 beyond the stirring of chaos by a Trident, but fivefold... you see, not only may the ancient gods have been alive in the blossoming of the world with gifts of olive oil or horses for the awakening of Greece and science, but as embryos in recapitulation our individual hearts also go through these stages where such gods were real and yet beyond time and trickster gifst of Trojan illusions.  So we pass thru the shells of Dante's heavens and hells all for the face of Beatrice beyond and outside of time, up from the chaotic sea to walk upright and firm, the pray again to gods higher than the stars and sun.

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In the great silence the continuum remained undisturbed
and the sacrifices made for the fisher folk that they continue the cycles of life, sweet and far from equilibrium. The multiple dreams of the SphereFather that set the plan of the village and their clocks were never know by the people save some vague and haunting thoughts that put a lone and moving star in the night sky, but it was without a name.

The SphereFather broke into a few then a myriad of mirrors.  Some blurring and some crystal ice like angels immortal down to the last of a bottomless pit of nothingness without limits, the precipitation into the being for their world as if not unique their snowflake souls.

Olney was the fifth of the dreams, the SphereDream, integrating through time the depth and span of creation, walking the endless beach near the central city of Far Rock'a'bye yet returning there a thousand times and taking supper with the villagers at Mullet Port at the mouth of the wormhole just outside the seething hive of the city.

"I don't know, SphereVirgin, there was once a place before my hair went clear and I became in this world the ghost of vanished quantities gone nova.  The endless walk has to end sometime as if to return to the bright star that appeared from the beginning.  But I will miss your thin veil vanquished and our mixing of scud and phosphor light although I have to read your mind and you act as if you had a life of your own."

"You must think highly of yourself, Oln. You always say that there will be an ending to the work and the walk but again the better part of dreams break through.  I will be surprised if I come to believe you for unlike those who seek oblivion you seek the immortal light that cannot be beneath the measure of the smallest grains of sand or beyond it all the tragic vanishing of love and life into the silence of the sea.  Let us keep some things secret in our cycle of the dance, I mean it is the colors and the thinness and the promise that is depth enough to weave a blanket for your dreams tangled in and renewed awhile as I remove my underpants."

"It is never you, my Mare-maiden, that mellows me and draws my heart and soul back to this fading world.  It is the new ones we spawn and yet they cannot be but less than us, not us, and in sorrow and joy they go far beyond us in their right of being and as us immersed in the design while young and living."

"Oh yes, my Neptune, we are drawn to the knots of the dance despite ourselves knowing the peace or loss after the exhaustion spanning the single sea, return to the sacrifice in Pisces, chaos where all things may begin again- but I am lost in the cycles of the moon, sometimes full, sometimes angry, the scandal welcomed when its missed of the eclipse, and often angry for no reason wherein to tame me you go forth to war or to hunt, my hidden light to guide your way as there is all there is, and make you track the source under the threat that the scampers leave no tracks and dripping wounds in relief on my winter snow for how else can I tempt you short of my perfume odorless and blowing far in the indifferent wind?"

"I did not chance meet you at your doorstep and as you, M'Lady I fretted if sleeping outside under the stars alone was not the better course, a refuge and a prison if only the moshies would not bite and the panthers seek my blood.  In the nuthouse I could write given enduring solitude.  I came to you with the beginning of the universe and of free will and crossed that thin silk curtain aware that all beginnings forewarned the disciples of the seeker advise one does not do errands like draw water or pick fruit and light fires for the damsel in the house or his path goes astray and she traps him in her web of passion. Like in the over and the underworlds life and wisdom begins with the once and only unique first kiss. If you settled for me by chance, you settled only for that within yourself like romance that is blown by autumn leaves in wind.  If you had to kill our love, you did not have to rend."

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Gravity and Dark Flow Pushing against the Nothingness

Gravity and Dark Flow Pushing against the Nothingness

L. Edgar Otto     18 September, 2013

I evolve and climb up on the beach so feel the heaviness
pushing down on me, far from the freedom in all directions
weightless in the sea.

Gravity, its flow and direction plus some change of colors and flavors, the seemingly unbroken gel of water, sand that gets into everywhere, and the sting of salt.

Overall and universally constrained in unity or some local knotty line thru space, gravity may make a world of layers that its boundless formal cause will quantum-ize as much as we fancy she needs to be to distinguish the hearts and seeds of cells and atoms, of flowers.

As if an indefinite dream outside and independent of the motes of matter and self sustaining rolling waves its reach seeks everywhere in the twilight state of indefinite Being pushing on the illusion of solid ground it too illusion, against the Nothingness.

But she that cradles all can tunnel thru the shells and layers, bring to our choices of endless arrays of dominoes her source of endless touch in fall.

She is cloaked by our imaginations as some turn away from watching too close the heat of her naked singularity.

Her belly dance and bells and Doppler shifts of time only the long lived mayflies in their long life time can hear or see ride the loops in circles floating on the waves its center fixed.

She can sunbathe inside the hole of an inter tube in perfect calm against the crashing seasick rocking of the sea. Only from her view there's nothing in between infinities reached as proven or not provable as she.

So independent and indefinite, her matrix a change of mind sharp her intuition beyond her ballet spins or ice sheet toe picks, to the music judged by numbers the reentry and ritual of her half whimsical dreams.

Her vision beyond the insight of higher things half free in symmetry or branches broken, a weaver of knots of ropes and strings in the natural dimensions as she mediates a trinity of persons different yet the same, finds higher bed sheets of knots and one sided arguments that snap until the work of her fingers misstep and rewind.

Her dance to feed the molten core of worlds and stars, galaxies with bars can appear reverse in retrograde. In her dreamy ether no speed of light finds certain measure nor does it change yet she can fold things in dimensions far beyond our few of time and fate and narrow shadows reduced in n-ply reentry to condense shapes Platonic.

Such is her non-necessity that we may conceive and be convinced of those that tenably can be the exception save like her not directly observable nor provable the symmetry or asymmetry of up and down as principle aside.

Somewhere in my dream the weight of the world grew heavier and heavier as if I were moved slowly from the moon to Jupiter.  I could not move too far and eventually had to stay where I was, lay prone on a bench as did M'Lady we holding hands against the shrinking world reclaimed by the pole of night.

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Small Craft Warnings

Small Craft Warnings

L. Edgar Otto   17 September, 2013

In our deeper dreams than those that review encounters of the day and set our memories, our throes and fall as we pass thru the wide wall of sanity before we make sense of all the creatures and fantastic worlds our unlikely stories ground us in mangled pictures we impose to protect our rest that for awhile we do not startle back awake, there in our second sleep like a second death we rehearse imagine warnings, fight the shadow beasts of night.

Or is there a real place to go down into some imagined future that fate itself binds us to foreseen actions we cannot change our dreams walled off too far from others that we no longer connect to each other once we have touched in shared entanglements save some parallel place, space time travel the echos and actions to which we can make a ghostly difference in some other world?

I caught a lucid dream before it was forgotten of a place far away I had never seen before, a warning horn startled me to awaken, to seek some level of familiar world of home yet felt at home there awhile until like a lightning bolt's echo going around the globe and coming back the static overloaded the crystal cat whisker whispers of my mind's sensing waves of radio.

I was walking down the streets, the capitol stood high in the distance but grew larger as I let it guide me closer.  The isthmus grew more narrow between the two lakes.  The streets had familiar names but it was summer time, and a joy to just be where the snow cover lingered but I did not know this was some future bright and not a wishing to take flight from the reality of an empty depressing season.

Odd plants growing by the street and on the bricks of buildings, in the gardens and the lawns were different than places I had been but neither these nor the town seemed to bring to me that sense of fear of strange lands and strangers
when on the road open to shadows of the unknown.  The motor and specks on the bricks and the painted houses and picket fences with many layers seemed to be there so to see the thousand stored memories in the air from the minds of brick layers on some particular day, of some particular brick pattern they had long forgotten so deep into the years - or like the no two snowflakes the same in the complexity the whole season of them, and all the seasons over time, that I somewhere found time so to leave awhile my footprints.

Just one glimpse of a hint of chilling resonating in the lower notes of my spine, that from where time folds back again into itself to take a clearer or different form, a teardrop like a world in a drop of rain of denizens in the distance really small, on the face of my indian grandmother stopping a moment in daydreams as she roasted the acorns, and fried some fish, here caught between the lakes and the isthmus, a warrior chief and his tribe were subdued by the federal force leaving too damp to preserve paper treaties what was still left in the grass of their dew.

As I came to the canal, briefly watched the water fill to height and the sleek fast pleasure craft within it, I crossed the street and walked along the wall.  Being raised near the Eastern ocean I knew of fog horns moaning in the distance at night but did not know such a warning near these locks would be so loud.  As I turned the corner I saw a little girl fishing with her cane pole by the bank in the park like grass and a Spanish man near her.  But she was close enough to the road to be startled seeing me appear from behind the wall just at the time the horn blew loudly.  So startled she jumped up and fell into the canal.  I rushed down as did the Spanish man and jumped into the river but we could not find her in the tangles of the growth and mud, and for awhile it felt like I myself would be trapped and drowned - then woke up to the chilly room thinking how strange and creatively intense our dreams.  We sometimes avoid the final ground of our dreams as we fall.

Yet, a year and a half later I found myself in that town chasing a job in the New Orleans style restaurant and on a day off decided to walk to down town.  I would use the Capitol as my compass and guide.  Sure enough the scene became familiar as if I had been in that place before as I came upon the horn, one that I found later would act as a warning to all the small craft in the lakes for changes in the weather such as storms.  Then I remembered the dream. I wondered if this premonition like event was destined or if we in some sense were free to change it.  I did not know but I hesitated to turn the corner by the wall and waited while the horn went off sure enough as if this was a certainty.  Then I slowly peeked around the wall half curious if I would see a little girl.  With their cane poles I saw her and whom I presumed her father holding hands walking away down the grassy park and nearby road.

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Footnote: this story inspired by the Monday open link poem by grapeling.

Fork Falls Island

Fork Falls Island

L. Edgar Otto    15 September, 2013

The secret place , out of the way, in the city. Upstream of the old bridge where the channel splits around an island in the river's center the rapids begin to fall.

Ducks, geese, and cranes know the place, pass by in season unaware what forces of town will banish them, remove the wetland oasis in the concrete desert. Give them a trial to adapt to toxins, cling to the roadside, railways, and rivers ever less pure what was the natural prairie fauna and flora.  A bounty then on these half domesticated breeds as if they no longer fit into the world and are in the way, so do not matter.

The island goes under the flood waters three times under that its life like terrain saturates so reviews its life in a second before its final freeze and its ghost departs the second and vanished final time.  Such a drowning in the burst of light prepares the way, its path and self-vanishing.

The boatman over that river Styx between this sunlit shore and the underworld may stop at the lost and re-discovered island to which all myths think there is only a river round where the snake may bite its own tail with purpose or with a chance swirl of spin, its loop by magic self sustained.

We are our own boatman who juggle the fox, the chicken, and the corn across the other side that with only two of them at a time and reversed some trips bring all home safe that one does not consume the other.  Yet, from his higher view he solves the puzzle and higher still his mindful vision sees two ways to choose which are the passengers.

Some of us live in this higher world of shells much greater than we have dreamed or with shifts of time dance in the world as if we are like the foxes heeding nature or subdued having lost so tell others to lose their tails.  At times but in the chicken's mood back and forth, changing sides just for the sake of moving endless random walking only to return to where we began until the lightning strikes blind creatures with their heads cut off. Then some are just the corn, so long to sprout and dream if then and if no crows consume them.

I have watched the boatman in his work along the river and when in the concrete desert of city streets and star obscuring lamps felt the buildings, echoes in their granite stone of messages lost to the wind or in holding patterns in crystal lattices that seem alive enough to climb, set tendrils in our trellises, scale, root, and crumble our ivy skyward walls.

I have come to what without its measure as magic anymore in the sunlit day so late an awakening, free as if in us all beyond scale and degree, even the lesser creatures sufficient to their short lives and memories time enough outside of time to find what seems a Spirit again.  I know more of the secret, the still half unknown of what we and the world are and can be.

We all rest who reach this unrestrained and justified optimism despite what scaffolding in the emptiness of intelligence or ignorance circumnavigates the held face of the moon far from its dark side.

Thus we ask of walls, shells of our mental universe, with a little more wisdom can pass thru them, even before the imagined beginning or tunnel thru that cave wall that we fancy holds the universe as much as we imagine ours is a limited and isolated realm of mind. I understand better the broken souls, their crust that shifts on mantles, membranes that mold their beating hearts of sparks and stems.

They feel in the way and wary of my all to human shelter that they heal fearing the vague deep source of naked light do deny the inevitable drift or crashing of life's continents and of such a gift of compassion born of love, love the substance there in depth by tragedy itself that there be longing, these lost souls sense but cannot truly believe.

Yet in the here and now as there and then how can they understand without their growing that the unexpected consequence of my dabbling alchemy of esoteric physics is that I see with compassion into their hearts so walk among them, share the water and the wine, net the fish, labor to sift for their gold dust pebbles in a dish.  Let us who hath ears and eyes forgive them for they knew not how much more than their earthly dreams they are and still will be.

These islands at the falling rapids, forks in the river, paths that fade slowly a dying species or half tossed away as nature her acorns and apples so replete for those that ripen as this old world keeps on and the source of light renewed. Or that if failed unto others so failed into themselves those that take or lie to what can be, save the narrow chains and parasites on each a universe yet more, thus self unforgiving.

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A short narrative for Open Link Monday although I considered posting a poem from my early teen years on this 50th anniversary of a significant moment in civil rights struggle I called  "Who Are the Damned in Birmingham"  I may link to that page as it is on the web somewhere...

Her Twin Towers in Fantasy Land

L. Edgar Otto    11 September, 2013

Miley
Cyrus
catching
Virus
Wrecking
Ball
Clamping
Legs

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for the imaginary garden with real toads community

Fireblossom (whose picture for this evoked an opposite of maiden and fishy parts) and Margarets (Not to mension also a Fibonacci minimal 112 112 form) Eight Words very good... I don't feel a kiss will give the sealing in me a soul or tell me I am beautiful...Live long enough and the metaphors make new memories and new metaphors... slow connection so this is too much like homework to respond all the time to all of you... eight words, who says we don't like haiku?  Well, I liked the song but the video was so contrived.  So forgive my contribution today, it is an endless lazy eight.

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Lyrics in Progress, My American Album

Lyrics in Progress, My American Album

L. Edgar Otto   August 26, 2013....

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Submitted for Open Link Monday  song writers use many methods from vague associations of sounds and words to fourmulas... which comes first the words or the music? How can some of the best poetry in our day be found in our shared songs and music?  I tried all such forms, well, not setting out to try them... but there is a transition to what can work in the simplification of a long poem turning into what is required for a song... these are such a transitional set to which as pre-lyrical I keep for the ideas and poetry's sake.

Lyrae

L. Edgar Otto   06 September, 2013 composed, Posting September 09, 2013

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Easy Bake Oven

Come Christmas morning, at our last supper
without a warning the second coming
computers crashing, new millennium
moment to capture before your rapture

The plots so woven, your witches coven
pepper spay and whistles without warning
set fires and sirens, surprise as burning
love left your easy bake oven

My doppelganger so filled with anger
became so silent, rehearsed the violence
listening to those losers tramping violets
the old coat hanger, their cause gang banger

Maybe if I stopped or let you drink
you would have stayed around or if
I slapped you silly like lovers past you found
who didn't call you stupid but didn't let you think

You picked the pockets of the Christians then
shared their gifts of grace, turned up their tables
at the fair, now say I rejected faith as fables
you searching God-filled singles in chat rooms without sin

Like Daddy's pockets for change and cigarettes
you said control leaving my forty years a wilderness
my brain did not wish on you chains to leave us all a mess
his punch bag rag doll. he too rests in free fall from regrets

The old coat hanger, the kids don't believe it
seek their own manger not what we've woven
this time to try again lightly light their easy bake oven
that their children's world is real, we once conceived it

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Crystal Tokyo

Fishes all aglow the ice wall melts
mantles fall waves break over sea walls
Damn, hell, Godzilla strewn on all I am
world shrugs, another childhood bones strontium

Oh the top hats tell us stories not as bad
the dark rain's eerie glory not seen sad
Glass bobbins break off the fishing nets
to ride the streams another millennium

The waning moon dream of Crystal Tokyo
still out of sight of school girls magic turns them
Into planet big eyed long legged goddesses
the rise and fall of empires made of meatballs

Koi fish live long while its rising sun, death white
red spot on its middle eye, chrysanthemum round
Short lived the hope of youth, Western ruby lips
sold to tourists as in dreams one falls in love

Don't we all long to go to Crystal Tokyo
climb the staircase of the planets safe to home?
Love's watched waters do not boil nor
up from the core and perfect cones, lava larval flow

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Neal, a Note

And for all the poets who lost their pets after a long time... old Neal really did drink beer (we kids stole from our parents when they had company) and loved to eat pancakes, so big a dog we rode him... he was a protector and childhood companion who went with us exploring the mudflats of Tidewater Va...  nothing more can be said, comments save.... I understand having been there.  Such things make most of the magic of  earlier and gentle, simpler times... of the poetic sort that does not fade.

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*Digital clip art from Jennifer White in the Oklahoma heartland, Victorian Boy, Girl, and Dog... she asked to let here know how we used it...