Singing Down the Drain is a musical with two players, an aging couple who may or may not know who the other is. They have just met or they have known each other for fifty years. The only thing they can remember with any consistency is the lyrics to the music of their lives, and that becomes an effective means of communication, and fun, between them.
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Poet in America is a compilation of three books of journalese, written over a ten year period, from ’75 to ’85, including Savage Amusement, Dear Nadja, and Invisible Lion. These books chronicle the life of a poet from age 33 to 43, before, during, and after booze played its role in his life. The story, moreover, is the chronicle of his consciousness of himself as a poet and as someone living a poet’s life, in one of the most beautiful and welcoming cities in the world.
There are two versions here. The unpunctuated version is harder to read. It was a experiment. I seem always to want to reinvent form, but the punctuated original is easier to read.
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The Chair Outside the Door is a book of 26 poems, originally written as sonnets to Rilke, after his “Sonnets to Orpheus.”
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I Write Poetry is taken from four books written between ‘02 and ‘04, Victrola, The Essential Occupation, The Greening, and The Open Door that Oceans Are.
Matisse in LA is a small book of poems, written months after I had a real scare, from my first myocardial infarction. I was happy to be alive and suddenly conscious,in my body, of my morality. I said I was 18 until I was 60, when that happened. I was someone who embraced the presence of death, but my body hadn’t gotten the message, until then. It was a kind of awakening that produced these poems, which I had slighted until recently.
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Fall Awake is a play, written after another piece called I Am Godot, written after reading Waiting for Godot, by Samue Beckett, many years ago. This recent play bears little resemblance to that iconic play, but it owes itself to that original work.
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I Am
Sun is shining in its place as Sun, and here, now, Sun is shining in this place I am. Sun fills me with its heat and light, and I am made the same as Sun. Never thinking I am the Sun, I am Sun.
“The Wind blows,” we say, but Wind is Wind. Standing in Wind, like a fish swimming in the ocean, I swallow Wind, it swallows me, and I am Wind.
Earth, this land, this soil, this ground beneath our feet is lifted from itself by wind. Earth becomes scattered across the surface of itself, as I am scattered from my origin, across the surface of my life. I am Earth, I live apart from myself, I settle down to myself again.
Rain falls, as rainfall does, down upon the land and sea it rises above. My eyes rain from themselves, in brokenhearted memory of what’s been held close as my own self. I am the rain of a tear that falls to sorrow from sorrowing. I am this Rain that evaporates in the air, to fall again, when sorrow calls again. I am the rain of my raining. I am Rain.
I breathe in and out the Air that breathes me. I am the Air that fills and empties me. I am its vessel, its container, the shape of its strength. Air opens and drains my lungs. I taste its nectar. I am the shape of shapeless Air. Without Air, I am the shape of its destruction. I am the Air of my demise. I am empty Air, from which I breathe myself alive. I am no difference between in and out.
I am Water, as I seek the shape of my container. I seek my shape in myself, as flow seeks itself across the flat bed of a stream. As I level myself with any like me in my range. I am Water, in being round in round things, narrow in narrow things, spiral in spirals, wide in deltas.
I am true to myself in many forms. I am Water. I am Air. I am Rain. I am Wind. I am Sun.
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All Fall Down speaks of the state of awareness, the consciousness, and the thinking of a man in the time of letting go of desire, who discovers the romance of reality lurking beneath desire. This Romance of Reality also needs to be let go, in order to be clear of the attachment to living a certain way of life, so he can live in life itself.
“In 1992, I attended a concert in the meditation hall of the Osho International Meditation Center in Pune, India. The hall was a white marble floor as big as a football field, surrounded by netting, with a tented roof, surrounded by a jungle garden, surrounded by a complex, called by some Club Meditation.
Hundreds, both sannyasin and local, attended the concert, given by some of India’s most honored and revered musicians. It turned out the performers weren’t able to attend, and their children, nearly as well-known as their parents, carried on in their place. In India, music is a family affair.
The stage was elevated, carpeted with beautiful rugs, and the show was introduced in Hindi and English, among other languages perhaps, since the ashram was visited by people from all over the world. After lavish introductions, the musicians assembled at their instruments; tabla, sitar, etc., and began to play. I sat with my friend, Suryo, and listened to the beautiful sounds.
I didn’t know what I was listening to, so I listened the way I might at any Western concert. I listened to hear songs, pieces of music, but what I heard had no demarcation, it simply went on, without apparent parts. After an hour, I thought I was listening to a long composition, and I anticipated an end, but none came. After two and a half hours, I had a different sense. I was led by the open-endedness of the music to the sense that I was inside the music. I was in a neighborhood of music, a park, a garden, an open space of sound. I felt free to wander around, to see what I could see, to smell and touch the music, to listen or not. The effect was not in any part of the whole, and it was not in the whole, it was in the environment.
All Fall Down is intended in a way to be something similar to that. All Fall Down was written as a long poem from many poems that became, here, many poems from one long poem, but the demarcations are almost arbitrary. There’s no need for them, or for the poetry, for that matter, except for the uses of form. Poetry is more easily digested in courses, even dishes or cups, but hopefully here, there’s an environment of awareness more cogent than any part or even more than the whole.
All Fall Down could be called teaching the unteachable to those who would learn the unlearnable, but there’s no intention to teach anything, and no intention to understand anything, either, except the un-understandable. There is an intention to be as clear as possible in language about that which has no language, using language to point in the direction of no direction, to distract from the lack of clarity in the use of the language the poem employs.
We have instruments to make music, but sometimes the effect can’t be assumed from the shape. Music can be made to accent the stillness in which it occurs. The luxury of music can become the environment in which it occurs, more than the definition of anything that occurs within it. I invite you to ride along with this language and look at the scenery as it goes. Dance to the music, all fall down.” Steve Abhaya
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Prepare to Dance is a small book of poems, written in 1993, a year after I got back from India, during which time I had seen myself surrender to myself, to Being Itself, and to the love of another. All of these surrenders mirror the same emptiness of intention. Recently, I thought to give a copy of Prepare to Dance to a woman friend, and, realizing that the poems are often addressed to a woman, I tried addressing them to a man, instead. The result is helpful, I think, in removing that gender hurdle for women who might want to read the poems as close to the heart as possible. I include the two versions here.
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Savage Amusement The Autobiography of a Semi-Unknown Semi-Genius - A Portrait of the Young Man as an Artist in San Francisco in 1975.
The Ocean in a Bottle
When I told you I was embarrassed
To know you so well as to become you,
I was confessing a terrible emptiness.
When I look down and see my cloudy
Transparency, I become afraid.
My yearning to be full doesn’t diminish you,
But makes you unbearably desirable.
I don’t see through you, like I said I did,
I can’t become you, I can’t fill myself with you.
If I alone ghost the space between us,
I will succeed only in vacating myself.
Sometimes, I’m lost outside my bones,
And I look so hard for them, I think I see
Other people’s bones beneath their flesh.
When I feel their bones and their flesh,
Temporarily, I quit looking for my own.
I find myself in being alone.
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