Dr. John Babylon

Jah-tistics

The lights on under and through
Dig round the roots and live
Burn up the sky for me
Small mystery to make, to match my marvel
Far away prickling of peace
to see without thinking.

We drink to die
we smoke to see without ourselves in this way
freedom from me
closing the openings
closings the opening

synergy

Images on the tv screen
flicker and fade, resurface.
They do not match the sounds
emerging in long, rolling waves.

The old, old movie tells the tale
of Noah, his gray beard, his ark,
and the complexities of God's mosaic.
The dialog, however, offers up
a French existentialist comedy about
laughing at despair.

Such inconsistencies can feel
like the universe opening up and
showing you a secret that
it's been keeping for ages.

xanadu

God's voice on the radio again.

Divine revelation is full
of essential vitamins & minerals
and can be included
in a complete breakfast
if
you open yourself up to it
if
you stand on tiptoes
and look upwards, upwards.

Keep your ears open and God
may share a bowl of Rice Krispies with you.

Soon soon soon
it will be
time for lunch,
a time for meat
and sweet siesta.

but sometimes

Television announces
with a zest for crisis
the terror alert level
has gone from "oops"
to "oh, fuck it"
so today is a good day
for watching the skies.

:)

And so goes winter
in the gold rush years,
the tiger getting closer.
Poetry based on faulty premises.
Rubicon river just behind me.
Thought I was running forward,
but I've barely begun to gather.

:)

Sleep almost feels like a memory
after seven nights of insomnia.
I slide the bed into the corner
and pile atop it the collection
of books known as to-be-read
and so
when sleep comes like a flood
(and it will, someday)
I will curl up on the rug
like a man in a lifeboat.

:)

The weather ahead feels invigorating,
the electricity in the air causes
the hair on my arms to stand straight up.

northern wolf

Lenin sits
banging on his old typewriter,
that 1961 model with
the sticky S key and
a missing question mark.
This goddamn great novel
will not be coaxed so easily
from its Platonic cave it seems.

Summer, 1979, 4th street.
It's like a scene from an American film,
curtains in the breeze of a summer day
while the smells of human endeavor drift
through the open windows.

Russia, the idea of
a Soviet worker's state,
just an image, a memory.
Only America now, and fuck it
there will be a great American novel
spilling from his worker's
stiff and callused fingers.
American because
the line between the haves
and the have-nots is deep,
flows down into the bedrock,
forms a crucial part of the foundation.

Yet this is old news and
there are other divisions
worth celebrating
and writing about.

From the apartment down below,
same time as every day,
the sounds of rock and roll.

happiness is an option

The Mongol Hordes besieged our city
during the heart of winter,
as a blizzard swept in like a shroud.
Visibility was measured in inches and
not even dogs would venture into the snow.

When our bullets ran out
the captains ordered their men
to load the catapults
with fallen soldiers
and fling
those broken, bloody bodies
at the invaders.

I tried to tell them
that I
was still breathing.

no regrets

Putting on the mask
is the last thing I do
before going to work.

It's showtime!

black ops

Bought special glasses
for viewing the eclipse,
went all the fucking way
to the island's western shore
to buy those special specs,
only to leave them sitting
on top of Sartre's "Being"
when the darkness rose.

And today of all days!
Monday's usual curious
shotgun mixture
of early-week hope
and casual despair.
Only the strongest coffee
can possibly shore up
my pierced defenses.

speed, speeding, sped

Pedal to the floor,
driving fast as hell,
sometimes the only chances
are the ones you take.
Lost highways, American horizons,
road maps used for beer spills,
the feeling of a gun
pointed at my head.

Those were
the old days,
the road days.

Now I'm middle-aged,
settled, pacific.

Not sure what's coming next
but I hope you're there
to see it.

naked stars

In the
Voyage of the Dawn Treader,
there's a great scene where
a boy repents his Wicked ways
and embraces the Good life.

His wickedness is in fact so wicked
that it changed him into a dragon,
not that bad a fate until you realize
that in the West, unlike the East,
men kill dragons for sport and treasure.

Well, in any case, the boy repented
and his scales began to fall off.
Aslan helped, his big furry paws
peeling off the scales to reveal
the human underneath.

It's a beautiful scene,
noble lion and naked boy
beneath the Christian stars.

**

(postscript)

"And immediately there fell from his eyes
as it had been scales:
and he received sight
forthwith, and arose,
and was baptized."

Acts 9:18
King James Edition

way of the samurai

Note posted on the 'fridge
this morning:
need party food.

But the messiah hasn't arrived
yet.

Underneath the kitchen chair,
the kitten sleeps,
curled up on her blanket.
Her whiskers twitch.

She knows.

exile and the kingdom

No confessions were offered up today
in the church of the Ascension.
No prayers were heard.
No hosannas were sung, no wafers
were consumed, and no wine was spilled
on the cassocks of the altar boys.

Instead everyone gathered
in the plazas and the markets
where the news spread
like evangelical fire.
Merchants closed their shops
and all along the watchtower
soldiers kept a steady vigil.

God's voice spoke in dreams
to pilgrims on their way
to Santiago de Compostela,
final resting place
of Saint James the apostle.

Riders were approaching
from the south.

la ciudad

Beautiful island of second chances,
wet leaves on sidewalks and
sepia-toned storefronts.

You were discovered by the poets,
colonized by the merchants
and invaded by the priests who
came looking for the hand of God.

When you were young men fought for you,
for their right to conquer and own you.
With their long phallic swords and their blood
they came and they fought and they stole.

Beautiful island
I first read your books
in the summer of my crossing.

In glimpses, now and again,
a vision of your one true language.

morning commute

The whole thing is fraught with peril!
Distant with my book, leaning alone
against a door of the L train,
sometimes distracted by cute boys,
sometimes never noticing the mad
preachers with the hidden hands,
this is no land for the lost.
Bumping along, the car fills with humanity,
all of us perhaps busy with our busyness,
eye contact at a minimum,
the train is like a waiting room.
But then the stop, then detraining,
and the platform and the stairs.
The whole enterprise is fraught with peril!
Misjudge the flow of the crowd,
get shoved trackwards, backwards,
misjudge the stairs and get trampled
by ever-marching shoes and the rat-a-tat
of soaking wet umbrellas.

Don't drink the Kool-Aid!

When my ancient, crumbling regime
finally gets tumbled down,
brought down low by the boredom
and general fed-up-ness
of everyone around me,

it'd be nice to hope for
a warm, soft bed
and a forced exile
somewhere

but no, there's a fence post
planted by itself near the city gate
and there's a man out there
in the noonday sun
busy sharpening the point.

I know just where my head will be
someday.

Post it note (A Dream)

Criminal pop tunes, rushed
seatbelt paranoia. Midwest congestion.
I can't find the moonlight, too many highways
not enough stars.

Peach tree advocates, November
apologist. I've eaten days with nothing
but slumber and apathetic hangovers.

Autumn.

ohhhhfuck

Break glass in case of
emergency,

well, that's what it said

but of course there have been
false signs, false omens, before
and more might be on the way.

In any case it wasn't
the apocalypse
just a small uprising, a minor coup,
sweeping down the coastal valleys
and up the solid mountains

and what's called for now
is a broom for broken glass
and a redrawing of the maps.

and I slept through it all

Last night,

Millions of madmen died for love & were given
nothing but shallow graves. The women of my village burned
a man for obscene thoughts & no one thought anything of it. I
Wore a mask to sleep & only when i woke up did i realize I
had always been wearing a mask. My father rose &
it was deemed a miracle. A new deity was born, while another
one was massacred. The cycle continued & I wrote out the last
line of the longest poem ever written on a window that looked
out to a wall. My neighbor finally perfected his song but knows
that no one will hear it, suicide seems like routine. With my left hand
I lifted the ocean, with my right the desert. I waited & waited, divine miracles
cascaded off of the rooftops, in every apartment a rose. A father
slept in his empty child's bed in hopes of holding onto what little was left.
I wept & it went unnoticed.

at the temple of the underpaid prostitutes

We unpack each heart with care,
using words composed of honey
to pry open the chest cavities.
We gently press our fingerprints
into the tender ventricles
(so malleable, so vulnerable)
in order to ensure
a true connection
and then
we test the heart strings
for any weaknesses,
we really make them sing.

This way, no fear, no failure,
and a good time will be had.

In the words of the prophet,
"Maximum pleasure is guaranteed."

Have you read our sacred writings?

"Please rest assured
that we consider
august and sacred
each & every heart."

So says our big brochure.

hooray for entropy!

Don't look for me at my desk,
not today.
Don't much feel like workin'.

Instead, depressed,
gravitating towards
Thanos

whom I find in his kitchen
whipping up both
black omelettes and
nihilistic plans.