(If you go to
http://archive.kpfk.org/parchive/ and “The Music Never
Stops” with Barry Smolin, and advance to 1:38:00, you will hear
Raj Bavnani reading the following.)
poem for 2008
Creeping out, reeking out, the new artificial
time-chunk oozes from the rotting detritus of the last
embryonic, wrinkled, sickeningly pink, screeching
Sure to bring
Every little thing
maybe a diamond ring
These are thing collections, housed in day boxes and hour files
and month cupboards and year folders
We saw them off every twelve months, and watch them plummet into
the abyss of memory, or no memory
The hopper of history
The spin of story
Fight for love and glory
Where yesterday and 10 billion years ago sit elbow to elbow at
the TimeSpace Bar and order a couple of drinks
And wonder what in hell 10 billion years from now is doing,
drinking at the same joint
Set ‘em up
While we perk around, bright-eyed awareness machines,
consciousness creatures
Evolved for knowing
Designed for chemical interactions that yield comprehension
Brain monsters from the Planet Think
Trying to figure it all out
Automatically, incompatibly, can’t-help-itly, compelled impelled
imperiled
Sawing off the time-chunks, short-lived beau hunks
Less consequential than an amoeba’s amoeba’s amoeba
To what end?
To what beginning?
But then,
Better that we still think the world is flat
With scaly horned monsters and boiling seas somewhere past
the horizon
and gods lounging in the clouds
Than to stare dully at photographs of cosmic sculptures that
look like
Psychedelic trees
Each containing a quadrillion galaxies
Better to offer the occasional sheep to Zeus
Than to hear theories about finite universes
Sitting next to infinite numbers of other finite universes
Better never to have discovered the Americas
Than to sit dazed on the human-entangled earth
death and birth ball
adrift in the stuff of stufflessness
Playing magnetic games with the such of suchness
Round and round and uh, up and down we gooo again
Round and round and baby I love you soooo again
Columbus would have turned around if he knew he was discovering
Oprah and Larry King and Dick Cheney
Better to be fecund with birds and flowers and horse dung and
sky
Than chewed and burned and gassed by machines and wars and wires
Better to believe that Krishna and Shiva and Jesus and Manitou
and great bureaucracies of ruling astral bodies await
Instead of The Big Not There
Man does not live by dead alone
But then,
We’re all doing the interaction rhumba over and over
Just as our great-grand-monkeys did, well
Over and over, well I’ll be a fool for you
over and over, what more can I do
‘Cause you’ve got Personality! Walk with personality
Talk with personality, smile! With personality. . .
Charm with personality, Laugh with personality
And plus you got a great big heart
Now over
And over
from life to life with me, as George sang,
in another time’s forgotten space your eyes looked from your
mother’s face as the Dead sang. . .
So really, it might as well be not real, as Lennon said. . .
So we balance on a meat cleaver between seriously and absurdly
Hoping to not slice our feet up
Until the plasmatic fantastic talking dummy dies
But at least we can see beauty
An evolutionary necessity
A trick of brain chemistry to kill the blues
Well I never felt more like singing the blues
‘cause I never thought that I’d ever lose. . .
But then,
Beauty call!
Beauty facilitates all manner of lovely delusion, illusion,
allusion
Hope, aspiration, effervescence, and the worth of The Big All
This
Despite The Big Not There
Miniscule dew droplets on a fuzzy leaf succulent
cat whiskers in morning sun
Yes, it all does come down to raindrops on roses and whiskers on
kittens.
Shakespeare, thunder, Ray Bradbury, Buster Keaton, apple trees,
Kay Francis, Rachel Carson, happy dogs, Hamlet, Euripedes,
Mahler, Eva Marton, Puccini, a Pacific tide pool, really green
eyes, a Raymond Chandler metaphor, Claudette Colbert in “It
Happened One Night,” a Beatles song, Kandinsky trying to turn
music into color, Ravel trying to turn color into music,
Einstein trying to turn everything into sense, an oak tree
trying to turn a field into a poem, Laurel and Hardy trying to
turn circumstance into logic, orange cats, quiet nights, jade
oceans, jaded outlooks, antelope, icicles, and
Maybe.
Beauty. . .
Van Gogh berserked it into his canvases
Trying to show others
George sang, “and because of all their tears, their eyes can’t
hope to see/ The beauty that surrounds us/ Isn’t it a pity?
And Krishna danced with beatitude and joy abiding
And Buddha taught to see past self
And Misterrogers taught that everything is neighborhood
And Beethoven epiphanied the night away
And Zappa composed junkyard sculptures of truth
And the Sufis swirl, the monks chant, the birds flap, the bums
beg, the unknowing do not know, the searchers get lost, the
curious ponder, the angry explode, the machines facilitate, and
Jerry Garcia’s guitar still echoes
In this place
Where beauty is everything,
including wrinkled pink embryonic new time chunks where humans
live
Where the only there there is
Here.
But then. . .
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