Dying of Thirst in the Middle of the Ocean
In a place such as this, In the run of the deep, The sky is amiss, And the warden of sleep, The seven depths of the dream, Just slip thru the tides, In a backdrop like steam, A sea vulture glides.
A wonderland of depth; sometimes the bones of other divers faintly light the black emptiness of the brine, Cup the essence of that impassable depth in your hand and you see right thru to the flesh; this is the mocking void; substance and sign.
All we know of the thirst, Is the crack upon the lips, The desire of the cursed, The soul of sinking ships, The rain it holds no drink, Just cloud in sorrow drained, You can't feel what you think, All vision is strained.
The hazard of that fixed stare into the petty bone of the deep is that all you see is the reflection of the surface scar, Uncoupled of nature; a shadow with a halo; dressed in dark gods and symmetric equations that distort the focus of what you are.
And so we suffer blind, With want amid this all, The matter drift of the mind, The precipice of the fall.
In a canvas of blues, A man’s shape undefined, The only water he can use, Has poisoned his wine.
Of necessity there is no bearing on this ocean of directionless surface and obscene depth; there is only the compass-faith of where you are.
When the rivers draw the water from the rain and the oceans milk the blood from the rivers; the heavens are left as dry as a star.
Dec. 02
Ode to Something
If all is one maybe that’s why I feel so lonely, And of these boneless mysteries wither belongs the ode, I beg in the flexed humility of routine desire, For I would sing the storm gathering in my throat.
It hangs; some listless moon bathed in darkness, From every window a beauty of obscurity, And every sailor who begs direction of the sea, Is a patron of this brazen purity, Ways are told in puzzles of make and myth, In a wound it leaves detached from my pain, A painting of a gallery the painting is hanging in.
The sorrow of the river inspires the artist of the rain.
The metaphors of machine invest a style of dying, And in the folk-darkness of world's report, Tongueless medicine babbles a cure, So the motors of Babylon are geared to this resort.
And so I a scholar to the empty ways of dogma’s fill, I study the lean and motion of flight, And the weather beaten thoughts of host-divine, Vainly offer a prism to filter logic from the light, A flirtatious sky offers the throat of an unfixed horizon, And desire is a self explanatory delusion, But there is something in the way she delivers her rhetorical temptation, That makes me want to celebrate confusion, Yet I hear some whispered chant in the wind's unconscious, That woos me to a slow October dressing, And I want to sync the clock-river's-time.
Where all passage has the scars of blessing.
While I hunger for the marrowbone of the mystery, I’m held hostage to the rations of light, And the killer that marries your mother, Is the polygamist who seeded the night.
The wit of the beast served with lightning-kiss, Finds the balm of creation in rhyme, And eternity unriddled like a lover's heat, Flows freely into river's time, As I sift thru the debris of this heavy sadness, For healing and even beauty seems a nihilistic-nurse, I’m just so lost I don’t even know where I want to be, In the poison chemistry of the season’s convoluted curse, It's all a beggar's tide the dynamics of moon and mind, This somethingness; an agent of machine, And I am trapped in the cogs of reason and reflex.
Fixated on what this breath and babble could mean.
Maybe the poet's search for god’s monologue, Is the divine caught in humanity’s rut, In this bleeding oneness I suffer distinct, Ode to something; I know not what.
Oct. 02
John Doe's Children
Brought forth from the emptiness of an unremembered dream, A vacant lot, The worldly rot, In silent movie run the broken components of their scream.
Nubile wastelands drain the wonder from their sex and feed, The sated soul, Unconscious whole, The fingers of mathematical interpretation; the logic of their greed.
Goaded like a river by the rain: the fix of the white noise flood, A frameless howl, Perfection’s foul, Clocked worlds that nurse the milk of this godless blood.
John Doe’s children have the eyes of their mother, John Doe’s children cannot touch one another, John Doe’s children fill the blanks of time, John Doe’s children are the victims and the crime.
The sum total of the burden is the casual tragedy of truth's default, An empty way, A dateless day, The moments turn on the forfeit of Heaven’s vault.
Dry heat of grounded angels dissipates to supernal-static-rain, A nuptial death, Unconscious breath, The bootleg of the anatomy of innocuous pain.
Petty filled minds work great the abstract code of convention, Constructed sight, Instructed blight, Delicate wind-served delirium of the soft dimension.
John Doe’s children have the eyes of their mother, John Doe’s children cannot touch one another, John Doe’s children fill the blanks of time, John Doe’s children are the victims and the crime.
The tension of this flight teaches the traffic its critical crawl, The burden spite, Declension right, The negligible slope and circuit of the orbit of this all.
It’s in the way the flesh is held lightly to these ponderous bones, Religious thief, Omnivorous grief, All monuments crumble under the weight of Sisyphean stones.
Evangelistic eyes that look to the stars and only see the sky, A virgin’s lust, A rainbow’s rust, Dissolved into exhaust of the meaningless mechanics of why.
John Doe’s children have the eyes of their mother, John Doe’s children cannot touch one another, John Doe’s children fill the blanks of time, John Doe’s children are the victims and the crime.
Dec. 02
Those Castles in Spain
Well it’s easy to get a little sentimental when you get a few years on your bones, The future seems like some naïve cure and the past is still throwing stones, But memory is your only tool to work the nature of time, Meaning is a contortionist and your reasons just become excuses that rhyme.
The future started so long ago, A brooding bride of the first rain, The flesh of which you may never know, Just like those castles in Spain.
As the universe becomes a world; you struggle for ways to make the same old thing feel new, You accept the shrug of gravity and stop wondering why the sky is blue, And the days go by in suspended animation; slow planets in the lens, And every desire lost in the comet’s tail turns the list of has- beens.
The future started so long ago, A brooding bride of the first rain, The flesh of which you may never know, Just like those castles in Spain.
Ah; but life is a poor poet that always seems to rhyme when it should reason, And vice-versa-verse that always seems to be out of sync with the build of the season, We never realize that dreaming is a side effect of sleeping, And the hours of the dreams eternal are not within our keeping.
The future was here just yesterday, See where it left a shadow stain, If it’s not used it simply fades away, Just like those castles in Spain.
Oct. 02
Wind, Rain and Tides
The future is a measure of how far a man can see, And hopelessness is a self-fulfilling prophecy, All the meaning in the unturned stones; lost to the season, You sow an excuse and expect to reap a reason, In the poetry of bliss you try to while the hours, Thru winter’s cold hands and summer’s showers, This life is not happening to you; you are happening to it, The dumb days turning heavens and the desolation wit.
You search for inspiration when you feel your soul is sapped, In the nighttime sky but all the stars have been tapped, This world an alter of sorrow; wonder and pain, All congealed into an intangible ache of river and rain, She says “this” and it all just falls into the bulk of being, What the eye can't see is the flawed weather of seeing, An undiminished destination awaits as patiently as god, As even for the willing and the doing favors odd.
Baited by this ostensible orbit we assume the build, Dowered in the future's placebo we are softly killed, Change is the kind of nothingness of machine stress, Sensually lost in the deed and her dress, The ever-ending never over labor-logic-life, Is the meaning implied when the bride is discovered wife, The shifting elements consumed by the mortal's secular clock, Wind; rain and tides beat change into the rock.
Oct. 02
A Man Can Fall
In the earthly battle for the keep of paradise, There is no blood in the mercy; no escape from the price, Vanities and dreams halo the skull of the clay, And keep his homeless eyes focused on the myth of someday.
But when the time has come for the baptism of will, He’s liable to balk and stall, Because a man can fall.
It’s a dark path of meaningless necessity, He looks at the world as a mirror that sees what it wants to see, And the sanity of ebb and orbit seems lunatic, Till the spinning globe of days makes him feel sober sick.
All the useless work that can break a man’s back, Is likely to slow him to a crawl, Because a man can fall.
Under clouds the stars give no direction, Just another false engine primed for rejection, His blood runs a bitter vintage once his heart is crushed, His head just the ringing of silence once his voice is hushed.
His pilgrimage an exercise in humility’s stoop, And the idols stand so tough and tall, But a man can fall.
Inspiration is just the exhaust of his religion's bait, A stuttering desire; the wind and warden of his fate, His swallowed seed yet spread of kindred and kin, His wretched heart a debtor to the bank of original sin.
How like an animal he prowls the face of the deep, And the angels fly so high till the world seems so small, But a man can't fly, Because a man can fall.
Oct. 02
Since That Day
Since that day the universe seems bigger and the world is smaller, People crawl a little lower and walk a little taller.
Since that day I’ve seen so many flags waving I feel a little sea sick, I tried to wear that pride on my bumper but it just won't stick.
Since that day the eyes of a stranger don’t look so strange anymore, And the eyes of a foreigner look like a ship from the shore.
Since that day it’s not safe to walk alone; up or down Wall Street, You’ve got to make a buck to spend a buck; a million people staring at their feet.
Since that day war is much more of a slogan than a war, We may never know who we're really fighting against but we could never forget what for.
Since that day evil seems less theoretical and more substance and shape, And mankind as a species less essence than ape.
Since that day world peace seems even more like a beauty pageant wish, And the fall of America is the beast and his favorite dish.
Since that day people still talk about that day with pain and disbelief, So much innocence stolen and we still want to catch that thief.
Since that day everything that has happened is in reference to that day, Like waking up with snatches of dreams still fresh in our minds we feel our way.
Jan. 03
The Ghost of a River
You can trace her skeletal remains that still whisper of water and woe, Just a dry tear now it once cried rain and rainbow, You can see the polished and sculpted bed of stone, And imagine the artist that carved and caressed this bone, You wonder on the landscape; did she once bathe in this dust, Did the flow of her milk deliver unction for this rust.
And if you stay thru the stillness of your night findings, You can hear the ghost of a river.
Only the river knows what time it is and winds no mortal clock, She now has passed her wisdom to the senseless reason of the rock, Improvised hieroglyphics and babblings that sound no more but can only be read, Yes this her tombstone for this is where she would bury her dead, Now this lonesome unanswered wind is all that’s left of the current she used to pull, She used to drive like a vein of diamonds into the night when the moon was full.
And if you can strain the silence of the weary stars from your pulse, You can hear the ghost of a river.
This print of her unmannered glory still moves all who take the sight, In the windings and wanders still live her lust fed plight, And you dream on the colors of her depths and shallow's-divine, And you wonder if her waters ever flowed with lava and wine, In antediluvian rains she was drenched; the true soul of time, Not clock driven as man; much more like an engine of rhyme.
If you stop all thought and subordinate all senses to wonder, You can feel the ghost of a river.
Nov. 02
Any Man's Ballad
In the milk of the morning into the traffic's panicked pace, Thru the lens of the windshield; a blank stare face, Enough caffeine running thru your veins to blow up a bridge, An endless stream of red tail lights disappearing over the ridge.
Almost here; almost there, Halfway home; halfway to nowhere.
Mind is drifting as body stutters than syncs to automation, Eye to eye with the idiot-brow of civilization, The objects in your memory like reflections in a side view mirror, But agonizing the moments doesn’t make the future any clearer.
Almost here; almost there, Halfway home; halfway to nowhere.
Lie awake and the whole world lies awake with you; sleep and the world sleeps, Private wealth at the expense of public health; he owes what he reaps, Now the rain and the road at dusk are fused into this kind of aching blue-beauty, And the driver studies the weather’s blur of destiny and duty.
Almost here; almost there, Halfway home; halfway to nowhere.
Dec. 02
12th & Nirvana
Escape velocity is fiancée to the will of the engine, The metal on metal of routine orbit gets so astringent, Salvation's puppet strung from a cloud of knowing, Where a dead rainbow's withered husk has stopped glowing.
If you want to take that pointless ride just for the point of pointlessness, Just head down to12th and Nirvana.
You feel like a leaf in a hurricane; suffering fascination, A poverty stricken heart that can’t afford the privilege of exasperation, In an effort to bring the struggle to the sidewalk's pitch, You find yourself in the architect's ditch.
And if you want to just get away with out the risk of going anywhere at all, Just circle the block to 12th and Nirvana.
Labor and god it's all just a very clever waste of time, An a cappella fuse of a song lacking the penance of rhyme, It's no wonder that the moon is stuck in our throat, And the petty joys that pull the focus on the inside pocket of a dirty coat.
If you want to escape the grand bitch of reality at the cost of a few coins of illusion, I know a man down at 12th and nirvana.
Nov. 02
Imagine the Tears
Every dull early morning I turn on the street that goes up the hill, I notice the dead end street sign and that’s just the way I feel, As a little boy I thought maybe I’ll be an astronaut but I never got off the ground, I go to work in this dark factory everyday; king of the flightless I am crowned.
If that little boy could have seen thru the fog of the years, Imagine the tears.
My angst and rage has mellowed and become this kind of apathetic grind, All those future plans are now just dusty dreams in a dim corner of my mind, I used to be the world's ambition and the soul and logic of redemption’s heart, But now the man this boy was going to be never was; the end is a mythical place from the start.
And if that little boy could have known about the random flux of the years, Imagine the tears.
Nostalgia and selective memory go a long way to making the good old days good, The past has a way of living up to what the future never could, Balancing the joy of existence with the pettiness of existing is the life of a man, And it’s a wonderful thing that this is something the
child never has to try and understand.
Cause if that little boy would have ever felt, The horrifying; death-divining; grinding of the gears, Imagine the tears.
Nov. - Dec. 02
Road Rage
The present is a roadside motel where only the junked souls stay, A blur of motion for all the rest; clockwise habits waste the days away, Time zones and mind zones and chaos for a compass guide, But to get somewhere man; isn’t that the point of the ride, Destination is a contingency of the desperation behind the wheel, A driver's waltz is with the stranger; the only way you know how to feel, Movement is the meaning and any other implied relevance is just a wall, These trapped echoes; if this talk got any smaller we wouldn’t be able to hear it at all.
There’s the road behind and the road ahead, There’s a mile-marker baby that’ll tell you when you're dead.
The euphoric pulse of misery’s bride is synched to the miracle mile, And the bastard children of your better judgment are always on trial, More is the scope of desire; idiot savant of emotion's class, Till you're bent over backwards trying to find a way to kiss your own ass, The gears that drive the rotation of the planet are the brakes on the wheel of souls, That free wheeling destiny has a butcher's grip on the controls, Stalked by a dead dream down the blank highway; every exit sign promises endgame, But the rainbow is just god’s guilt and truth is the devil’s nickname.
There’s the road behind and the road ahead, There’s a mile marker baby that’ll tell you when
you're dead.
Fate is just the soft focus of a false moment; a believer’s scar, But it’s a scientific fact that if you don’t keep moving you won't get to far, Futility and rage force the piston against the driver's will, And your self pity preempts any potential pity for the crush of road kill, And the miles foot print gets no smaller no matter how far you’ve come from nowhere’s hub, There just always turns into here and therein lies the rub, Miles turn to mileage; exhaust to exhaustion and the driver into the drive, Just the empty go with the white-knuckled-knowledge that you never will arrive.
There’s the road behind and the road ahead, There’s a mile marker baby that’ll tell you when you're dead.
Nov. 02
Self Sacrifice
Put your self on the alter, And draw the blade.
Put your self on the alter, And draw the blade.
Don’t know why I always bang my head against the wall rather than walking thru the fucking door, But that’s the only part left of the original me; the world takes everything else that’s worth fighting for, Wedges a job into where my soul used to be; politics and religion where my mind used to dream, The dirt; the hunt and the raw sex of my being is now just some money chasing scheme.
Put your self on the alter, And draw the blade
I wake up every morning to traffic; I go to work where they call these worthless numbers to my million-miles-away-mask, I go thru motions; trip thru moods; stupid people; and come out on the other end of some automatic idiot task, They say everyday is a choice but it’s not it’s an ultimatum; you do what it takes to make a living or you don’t, So alive and barely living I surrender myself to the woeful will I know that won't.
Everybody wonders what’s wrong so you reveal your deepest feelings and immediately feel absurd, Because you don’t know if those are your deepest feelings or just some fucking words.
Put your self on the alter, And draw the blade.
So this thing in me; way back in my dark regions that continually emits this low growl; goes unfed yet not starved, It just sits there sneering at the god damn world while I try to draw some sense from this path I’ve carved, Time is like a shy smile you cannot see her teeth; you don’t know how long you’ll have to suffer this game, But it couldn’t be much longer because it’s easy to see the point and we're all almost exactly the same.
Put your self on the alter, And draw the blade.
Dec. 02
The Whiteness of the Whale
Can one describe light to the study of the blind, To the demented; the work and wonder of the mind, I stand weary-witness to the broken bones of my kind, The lost hunter becomes what he may find.
Indefinite source of all shadow's in shape, The piercing persona of pale wine in the grape, In the vast and weathered landscape of this structured rape, Where the agents of fortune keep the point of escape.
The visible elements in service of agenda unknown, Wind reveals the wake of this motion with a moan, Against the stoic bulk and heavy silence of the stone, Where the darkness of the deep out shines the whiteness of the bone.
An indiscreet autopsy bleeds no colors divine, Just a wash of lit-gray and rain-rust impossible to define, And the loaded terminology of the map mirrored line, And so your fear is coached by this unbearable shine.
And the self that is known is lost in this sea of ages deep, The whiteness of the whale the dream of the ocean's sleep, Validations epitomized in the searching color of the all, The obnoxious silence that never whispers of the call, Fathoms-deep and drowning in the wet lips of ocean's kiss, Revenge and rapture of what it means to be this, In every contrivance of motion and meaning you fondle and fail, Is the unforgiving emptiness of the whiteness of the whale.
The same intoxicating agency of the moon’s stare, Its double entendre points both ways to nowhere, This albino rainbow keeps no promise but the rain, Left trying to read the fortune from the etching of the stain, Wonder is a surrogate to the pale and paling fear, And the essence of the wonder has never been as clear, The morbid endurance of the ego’s question and quest, But the eyes will always stare blind into the whiteness unblessed.
In the whiteness of the whale there is no color, Only a reflection of the light lost to the world.
Nov. 02
Restless River, Ceaseless Rain
Sculpting the masterpiece; hidden in the rock, River and rain ambassadors of the muse, This tragic beauty staggers unfinished, In its native dress of infinite blues, The prodigy of accidental truth, The anatomy of dreams wasted sleep, Involuntary motion of the clockless soul, Given to the bride of the river's keep.
This river plays an alter for the rain, Prayers for a petty god of moon and tide, The blood from the throat of the lamb, Only the will of the sacrifice is defied, So the meaning is the flow and fall, And the difference between river and rain, Are the ocean's bitter toxins to thirst, And the water that escapes down the drain.
A man can only face down the mystery with the animal's will to survive, And try to realize some kind common glory in the fact that you’re alive, But oh the rain; the rain; the rain; the rain that drives the river’s rage, The same curses; the same plagues in a different tongue in a different age, Washing the memory from the bitter-bones of this brooding Earth, Till every life that was every lived is conjured unto oblivion’s rebirth, And you realize everything at once is the only truth; the fossil in the stone, Your little life and your little mind the only light in the godless unknown.
So the days add up to a personalized eternity, And we are the end within the ending, You can look into the eyes of Hells and Heavens, And still never know the direction we’re tending, And if this pitiless mechanism can grind mountains to dust, And leave nothing of a man but ruin and pain, He must find his comfort in that same device, For it is also his deliverance this restless river; ceaseless rain.
May 03
Released 01 June 2003.
All Songs Composed, Performed and Recorded by M.M.
All Songs Composed, Performed and Recorded by M.M.
