a trilogy from
SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN THE UPANISHADS
an electronic chapbook by
Ivan Arguelles
JHANKI tava pada kamala / mora mana madhukara (at Your lotus feet / my heart, a black bee) idioms in mental lexikon about to break down the world meadow from where I see the long green breath not an ambulance but the celestial car of Brahma racing through Illusion at the speed of Mind out of hand and on fire with police in tow the bridge to Beyond collapsed! corazon of egypt how I miss thee! and meanwhile in the sectarian tombs south of the smithy of Dolors with poets straight out of the 13th century wailing the world-loss all angst and tavern flight of the soul through chimneys narrow how can we get to know the supreme One? foolish churl far from your heart flung and the lotus feet have no rhyme your head spins in elemental despond the tragic yore of an untranslated and untranslatable heaven down the avenue Shambala-me this Shambala-me that the Dalai Lama ate bloody corpses!? AY! the mountain above is the lake below and rushing to and fro headless the hawk of desire in his green tumult banging persistently against the glass of memory as if that could be me in the other life! AY! mental breakdown in the lexikon himalaya versus temple-dome of sapphire! everything is burning all over again radial symmetry just an illusion or opium her heart like a candied yam I ate and fell into a mountainous swoon far to the east of the universal paradigm But this poem of twelvehundred thousand verses sometimes irregular with no given length all based on a misinterpretation of a truth some dusty millenium ago near Balkh wherever that is in the goldminer's map to the soul of threadneedle street ???? I am hungry for Mother! cruising down West Pico Boulevard the night just before the alphabet came to be juggling dialect over dialect in the withering span of Brahma's eye or nicomachean ethic noon with long thin neck of famished ghost To Know the Universe! begging bowl and bell the little animals in their lair innocence in the Lexikon of from where I see each day a must to exist and no more green breath and Krishna Copy waiting for the year 2001 Rumi in his magnificent cloak of poverty jamming with sun-ra the Pyramid priest each eating the other to doomsday or the rain that destroys whole universities leaving nothing for the dead pundits to ponder my heart a black bumblebee is that how you say it in ideolect? Good, JohnSir, Good, yes that is close to urdu cognitive based phraseology research at your lotus feet translation please in mittelhochdeutsch! Ziele und Methoden and with a maiden to the side testing the black waters of Naraka which is hell, yes, JohnSir, Hell winnebago heartbreak with noplace to go NoSir, Naraka I mean broken begging bowl the syntax of all registered thought BOOM at your white lotus feet swan dreaming in the eleventh hour city my heart a wretched black the poetry section has been reduced to a few volumes between mystery & movies bumblebee in ideolect at Krishna Copy forwarding address Naraka 3rd prefecture I think that's in Nagasaki, JohnSir just a few blocks south of the crematoria where dawn is always a black crease in the heart the fine arcadias gone GONE! bhakti mumbling in braj-bhasha Jhanki it is through us Radha the human soul must pass if it must pass from dejection to rebirth and round and round again in modern Vrindaban there are no more than 24000 and in Mathura another 101000 waiting transmission miracle play alternative current to Heaven My Sweet Lord on their connective tissue Mirabai & Surdas wrapped in mystery expounding in the supermarket parking lot a cigarette IS a chance to be Thus-gone conversational hints in Pali rumors in cuneiform avestan that I have come home to your lotus feet, my heart a black wedge driven into mental idiom foreplay the soul drifting from tavern to tavern ashtrays with burnt names in glass the tray of syntax emptied from Dilli to Agra then in search of although this has been an emotional and yes there has been some catharsis to evoke the appropriate uh Tantric hers was rather yes quite big the size of a uh as later reported in zend newspcast ca. 3rd millenium BCA about the time of the great Wanderung as casual as that may sound and rumors of floweer- play lotus foot white jamb at intersection with crossed bee the black variety my humble apologies I crave to undress her of all that untidy grammar reduce it to the left-branching kind a magnificent antlered stag for example at the window anticipating lyric hiatus perplexed by the enormous idiomatic sun and the spontaneous Lord Raghu! all manner of drum and cymbals and the light that incredible light on the Hoogly not in the least affected by the burning ghats to vast meadows of green breath advaita constitution of unparalleled Self ATMA thou'rt a Great One, Brahma! face it all four directions you look the vast unmapped sky of origination but Salvation? a cortical question at that, JohnSir please as to face toward the water see? the City is sinking sinking what can they know of fire alarms & industry? garlands of wood flowers and But salvation? muhammad's engine is running and it's not even breakfast time yet "tava pada kamala / mora mana madhukara" this was the Wastelonde this westering sump migrations of souls like gnats at eventide hovering in the inch of air known as history RAMBHTI! HUNKTI! the cattle out of their pen lowering toward the banks of the Jamuna childhoods childhoods lotus feet black bee sweet thought WORLD ETC MORNING RAGA deliver me from sound dewpatterns hushed in stilltime the tombs lay open their immense fiction antelope shadows grazing on glass footfalls far from the BHAGVAN IS GREAT! still tepid the mud from which we were born gazing back at us in the sky long lonesome drop from eternity to this conscious moment an hour away from the inflection which doubles the chord of time and I tell them all BHAGVAN IS GREAT! and I am sent to the emergency Room RADHA- to listen to the enormous silence with its bells of crystal grass glazing the surface where the antelopes guess their form and susbstance we all crave to find the immaterial the immobile the peace beyond the deliver me from her beautiful face in cinemtaic revery imposed like a kiss upon the fragment of tissue which is the light of our lives riddled with the semaphore of language albumen purple gloss all over lipstick she uses dreaming the still sentence vajra-bolts sudden rifling through the BHAGVAN IS GREAT! emergency Ward where the loaf tests KRISHNA its exigencies for the if it ever lasts or returns again or if the telephone number is imperfect lacking its last and amorous digits to endure I said to endure as they took notes down furiously what there is left to endure if you call it the Unnameable or whatever on the radio whacky light emerges with synthetic girls in choir Spend One Night with me for BHAGVAN IS GREAT! monoprosodic dream I am having about transformational process called Breath brother pass the and then some in this tepid mud we are having to be born in below the rosey light Ah I am Onged by the Greatness of it! submerged in the shadow with some dew or portuguese riddles on malabar coast the long boats rounding the semblance to a her name was Nikki japanese for Unbearable-Life RADHA-KRISHNA and to be in love with memory of her to retrace in the slime the portrait and plunge dense into the lake of ever darkness BHAGVAN IS GREAT! to commune with the in a book of fragrance from the fresh pages the one dead of hunger the one dead of thirst where is their justice? of a what I am trying or have ever been but my fingertips ache the dense lorn sad passage about the freight encumbered by something gone wrong as is usual when you realize yes it is but a Life the single one against the vast mountain darkening which is the immense West of All-Breath consumed by the ineffable unutterable blank end of it this snatch of voice on my flank corroding like a nickel rose a wound of some kind earned in the War BHAGVAN IS GREAT! searching the compound for a BHAKTI I said to them and sent me to the emergency a young doctor all white from thought and aghast by the saturday night punctuation resembled as much for its weight as for she kept my book by her head in case of death call me Lover her immense eyes with their One Thought pause for the spaces in between a telephone number wrongly dialled is like metaphysics or clouds she was right about that her doubt I mean dictating this idiom lexically brain-dead at last the Soul takes wing swarm of light so each inch is worn at last beyond Recognition BHAGVAN IS GREAT! RASLILA (whispers in the eaves it is more like dawn than milk this whatever you call it all around galactic foam) how quiet before the illegal press-release ink-fresh prints upon the leaf bent inwards toward Dhyana which equals ZEN No-Mind if that were the case instead of this rushing from hospice to tavern and back in a day's wink the bright blue like a flower just opened then threshed neck-worn the bow has been bent never more to see again how the light slants off the mountain her eyes were moist was it Green Street? her pulse like champagne in the morning before the milk-carts have set off for the mysterious trek inland toward the unravelling light there where ecstatic singing in pre-dawn indo-iranian dialects suffused with enigma and Transcendence toward No-Mind the shoreless we must pass-over Stranger over the depthless holy lake but that everything exists in a state of utmost precariousness all faltering to fall like gigantic elephants of epic myth their tuskers entangled in dream-green dew this is about to end the grand summation being the question Mark the infidel ingot in the heart of the soul "we are not meant to last" HUNH? dubious lyrical techniques piled up rhetoric evasive syntax and corrosive semantics it was ever out of dalliance the Knight his sword the One Word came pricking 'pon the Plain as it is to see we must be ever strangers in the fell passage adumbrations of eternity in the quoit quivering in the mind's last closet given that we are not able to spell what was it she was trying to ? the ensemble of different voices broken up at starfall just two hours after dead-delivery I wonder if it will ever come back her tender the remote flower corollary between skies the color of plasm some kind of editing it is comment c'est or some kind of ending you can never the rush to enigma a sudden whisper hundreds of voices in dead-letter box endless detail of recall in water five ells deep the ex- plosion of whatever it was my ears! you will remember that night in May the stars were bright above SHOO-DOOTN-SHOO-BE-DOO in a car with King-of-Gods-Indra shaking like a leaf behind the wheel he'd just seen a Ghost virtually everything in state of utter precariousness the machine grinds and grinds in its novel electing a fiction of non-returnable homes the inner sanctum of dead-radio-nite when all the raindrops clamber for their bell fleur isotope hydrangea weather cycle SHOO-DOOTN-DOO-BE-DOO in the grace faint traces of ammonium but no palpability to speak of the failed contrition of the greater Beings who have ransacked myth for history and left us to cope with empty bag outside hospital closed for repairs and the cab-driver turns his great indigo Krishna eyes in the mirror all backwards taking us to a junction called No-Resolution No-Resurrection "I've gotta get outta this place" frantic being alive conscious all wet depth charge for a heart in love frantic for next hit a fix with death she could be my girl SHOO-DOOTN-SHOO-BE-DOO the sanskrit implication being the Void itself a hangover from pythagoreanism bright the stars shine high in May her wings were just gossamer you coulda pulled em right off moonlight and madness duality the monkey in the mirror that's me, Mom comment c'est heaving their white breasts like coils of damp dark hair their delicate white white faces mind and body dissolved in Krishna's Round Dance unwinding cloth they become slowly naked an evolution of form into ecstasy ankles to top-knot all dissolved in one vast whirring the sound like a razor cutting air in half melting in his enormous indigo eyes Be My Gopi Be My GOPI tonight shine high white starlike night in May what unutterable Phantoms! a thousand million kalpas below dust and turn turn turning around the music SHOO-DOOTN-SHOO-BE-DOO melting swoon evasive nowhere drive over the next life I wont see you again? HUNH! drifting just drifting into next worn out the thing was just what a pair she had you coulda just mile high starfoam galactic stuff mystery of adolescence grassy clouds white physics something squirting so lazy it felt and hard too the between the other what was dark I couldnt make out she was on my lap maybe puking or the floor going round a song stuck in my brain she coulda just drifting maynight flyboy hey almost a fever in the grass and everything spinning hot thick the denim stiffening wet was it the sun? took my hand and called me Ulysses flyboy go back to your cavern drink a lot race from door to door looking for the Prophet utter precariousness of everything this whatever you call it night after night until no more wont see you ever again lapse horizons blank ( comment c'est WORLD ivan arguelles 11-21/12-08/1997