THERE WAS A TIME, before clocks were invented,
Before days had names, and before years were reckoned
when ancient towns sat on the edges of smoldering
volcanoes and the brightly colored sails of emerald
green feluccas filled their harbors. And along
the yellow shop walls that lined the Street of
Wine Merchants, or the Avenue of Spear Wrights,
or narrow lanes without names (where illicit lovers
traded their bodies for nine pieces of bronze)
ancient historians wrote their stories, and poets
scrawled their lyrics, and the ribald sons of
local tribunes scratched unmetered limericks.

Tell me, Amanita,
Before the hour of supplication is past,
Do you live among the citizens of such
A town, where I must seek you out
And read your story on the walls of
Long deserted shops in the late
Afternoon when the westering sun
has painted the bricks a soft yellow
and the ideograms of the mythology
known as the Fables of Mindy Belapharus
are memorized each day by
young men who
despair of ever
finding wives
and so live
in your reflected
glory?

Write to me
And I will interpret
For your geen eyes only,
The meaning of the morning star
And the colors of the autumn leaves
And the currents of the Alagosa River.

On the second day of the Feast of Leeches, near the old cathedral of Lost Pen knives, when Gloussa of the Mixed Representation presents his visages to Leo IX, nameless Pope and dealer in mismatched fire arms, then I will come for you, ropes in hand, hooded and desperate to carry you away, into the frosty night, silent night, into the forests of dying trees, along the caustic beaches of the lye Oceans, under a false umbrella whose labels we cannot read in the daylight, whose protection from the gods remains uncertain; and I will carry you down through the ancient tunnels into the shopping centers of the dead guarded by a five headed dragonfly, until you speak my name and predict the average rainfall of Argentina, and pledge your undying devotions; then you will be free of me, and once more able to recite your secret name in the Halls of Your Ancestors.

Are
You
Out
There
Someplace
Bound in sometime
Wandering somewhere
Beneath the cold stars
In lands devoid of comets
Peopled by indolent mannequins
Set in motionless clusters
On treeless hills by invisible
Philosophers of inorganic life
Whose few surviving letters
To the wives of French bookbinders
Leave us wondering about the
Chromatic theory of light
And the intelligence of carpenter ants?

Lycosa, here you can see, docked in the bay, just off shore, the magnificent
ship-of-exploration that I have commissioned and built; it is almost ready
to carry me away around the horn of Afrika, across the Sea of India,
into the rivers of Afghanistan, up through the mountains passes, and down
into the vast inland seas of Russia. Soon I will be floating in the dead of
night, waiting for you to make your escape and hence, using the secret
rocket engines that I have installed below the water line, we will leap
into the sky, cruise above the clouds, skip over the ionosphere, and
sail on the Van Allen Belts over the vast deserts of China, over the
cold waters of Japan, over the treacherous ice flows of Hawaii,
and finally settle once more in the warm
waters of Santa Monica Bay where
florescent jelly fish and purple
star fish will sing your
name and welcome
you to Redondo
Beach!

Amanita!

It is just after midnight. Strange to think that we are nearing the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Time seems to speed along, propelled by a fusion of indistinguishable events, carrying us in a maelstrom of ineluctable kismet into a new universe where the known laws of physics are unknown and the victory of fire over night is incomplete. Behold, the quest for certainty remains elusive. I cannot write a sentence that has a single meaning. You must be the translator and reply in your own words to the geometric algebra of a field theory understood only by the speakers of first order polynomials.


Write in the heartbeat of the moment.
Practice the song of Jezebel when morning is upon us.
Abandon clothes.
Seek sanctuary.
Let me see those tattoos
Of indistinct runes
That run along your arms;
Create matter from energy,
Paint your lips with indigo inks
Praise the mysteries of photosynthesis,
Dance to violin music
Under a rainy night’s moon

Time is drizzling away and I am wondering what
The hell has happened to you. Send me a secret message
Encoded in the usual way with the pheromones of
Eternal distraction and the lip imprint of your fairy
Godmother and the bewildering signs of eleven and
The octagon imprinted in the paper. Don’t make me
Send you another letter, woman, they only get more
And more demanding from here on out!!!

There is an old world on the other side of the hill,
where strange images are carved into rock,
they are the record of a people who left long ago
and with them they took the language of clouds
and the music of trees and the poetry of dragonflies.
Beyond these strange figures is the River of Salt,
on whose smooth surface glide golden feluccas
filled with the ashes of ancient libraries
long ago burned to the ground
by those who have abandoned
their dreams. Do not be a dreamer
of empty voices my Amanita,
learn the poetry of dragonflies
and recite it to your friends
in early morning coffee shops
when the snow is thick upon the streets.

To what lengths will she go in an effort to learn the rhymes of ancient mariners?

Amanita, I miss you, Won’t you answer me in little sentences made in stanzas of anapestic pentameter? Cast your response in midnight puzzles and so become a Cassandra and foresee the end of silence

Pack your rucksack.
Hurry to the wharf.
Stow away on a Caspian steamer.
Live by the kindness of strangers,
Sing your songs in whispers to
Strange illiterate sailors
who will feed you at three bells
And play the lute for you in the morning
And cast your future in the runes
of Phlebas the Phoenician who died
in the depths of the translucent sea
All for the love of Amanita,
whose steel grey eyes
Bore witness to his deception,
Among dank sails of a Frenzied clipper,
And whose bare breasts stained with tar
And scared with harpoon blades
Bore the carefully carved tattoos
Of Jeremiah, last of the sailing spirits;
So be brave and filled with wanderlust,
Leave your dreams behind,
Come to me under a night sky of
Blue white stars and dripping palms
And the smell of kelp and salt
Blowing in from the vast warm Pacific
Where I will take you away
On a winter Tuesday
To the hills of Avalon
Where we will
Say our devotions
And sleep on the palmetto
Grasses while above us
The Constellations of the
Summer skies whirl
And meteors cast their shadows
On your smooth body
As I read to you the
Homecoming of Odysseus
On a similar beach of rock and thunder
Three thousand years ago
When I was just a lad
Tending serpents
In the hanging gardens
Of Babylon.

THE FATES. Living in a second floor ceramic container below the abandoned railway tracks of Market Street just beyond the unpolished docks of San Francisco where the last maple trees are in bloom, and the City gypsies plunder unattended cars, and snake whispers trade their ex-wives for cold bottles of beer,

The Three Fates of ancient Greece live among the tourists, casting Trilokki stones, foretelling the past, and seducing the occasional taxi driver whose sense of direction and fairplay has finally failed him.

Ah, my beautiful stranger whose words
I miss and whose thoughts I desire, and whose
Smart sense of the world had lead her down a
Wicked river of Kismet; Ah, yes, when will she
Realize that there is another portal into another
World of bright azure seas and Egyptian palms
On the far side of the western hemisphere where
Translucent pelicans glide over the waves singing
Broken melodies to wandering pods of blue whales,
And star fish leave the ocean each night carrying
Luminescent jelly fish as they rise into the heavens
Forming new constellations and new worlds
And emerging nebulae that we earth bound
Waders along the beach mistake for just another
Bright flickering star shinning in a distant galaxy
Where, circling in lazy ellipses, emerald green planets
Peopled by left-handed centipedes go about
Their lives unaware of the laws of Quantum Physics
Or the rules of Russian Roulette or the principles
Of ninth century Haikus?

Send me a secret message laced with secret thoughts
Written on thin velvet paper with a fountain pen
Of chocolate inks whose words weave among
Your drawings of the fourteenth alphabet.

Good morning.
I wonder what is happening
In your world, are you thinking of the stars
And wondering if they will light the skies for
The next trillion years; are you translating
Fractured tables of Indo-European cuneiform
Only to discover a lost epic of wars fought
On the edge of the last ice age; are you
Designing a new generation of thermo-nuclear
Cars that will free mankind from its
Dependence on recycled paper napkins;
Are you wondering what shoes to wear
This morning, what color lipstick, and
Whether those pale blue nylons
Will look good with that yellow dress?
I can only answer one of your questions,
So think carefully and ask that which is
Most important (which would be, I think,
Do you know where I can get a bilingual
Cuneiform dictionary?)