Sunday, May 8, 2016

Lullaby No.27 - A Ghost

A ghost raced by the water
From the outside looking in
He saw his future self
Staring like a spirit laid across the waves
Dark grey clouds canvased the stark lit branches
The sun set through the empty conversation
A silhouette of love (in-verse)
A darkness from the inside looking out
Through the blue dusk painted on your glass
The dusky red on the rim of your step
Like the long shadow of night
Cast by your former self
Dancing along the water
’Til the morning settled in
A new life to crest and drink
From troughs along the garden of remembrance
Two ghosts in new dress
Handsomely waiving the continuity
And the water under the bridge was bulging
Time stood still from that moment


Jason Greendyk

2nd Sermon on Reason - A Few Unspoken Words

We celebrate the individual creative
Overcoming the confines of tradition
Following the death of God
And the rise of the overman
Human beings their own Gods
That created their own worlds

Much like us

And now a deity, Reason
Our purpose twofold
First, within a house of God
To vanquish His shadow from our minds
Second, as reasonable human beings
To kill out dearest Reason
And thereby transcend ourselves

To fulfill the vision of the philosopher
That the work of a great poet
Would be to contemplate God’s boredom
After the seventh day of creation

Hear the Seven Sins of today’s God,
Which is Reason
Silencing the echo
Of the Seven Deadly Sins

Hear of the old God,
How He was killed by force of Reason
And how we can kill Reason,
By sheer will,
And be free

But His shadow was long
God’s boredom was our own
For He had given us Reason
By which to recreate Him
In our own image,
Forevermore





Jason Greendyk

Sunday, March 20, 2016

Lullaby No. 26 - The Midnight River, Frozen

An infinite digress
Loomed above the city square
Where you danced in circles
Rings of ice-cold passion
Embedded in your reason for being
The bitter wind narrowed your vision
And all I could see was her sleeping soul
How with you I slept
Careless for tomorrow
Once again
In this night’s dark wreath
Frozen our hearts
Always together
Always piercing the inner walls of your dreams
Those with which you woke
In the middle of your slumber
To see the one long night of life
Stretching infinitely before you
The time ticking infinitesimally slow
At the limit of its existence
The vacuum of a moment
Your eyes as blue as shining stars
Piercing the midnight river
In its frozen state
A constant motion beneath the surface
Calm, cool and serene to your sight
Crazy and mad for the world just below
Mad for you
All you ever were and wanted to be
Converging in the still pond
Of a mother’s vision
A dancing reflection
Of a father’s deepest waters
Where the light of your eyes pierces
As they burn through the coldest of the night
And close again to rest for tomorrow
Having seen the boundless stretches of your soul
In the spirit of the world
A river always flowing toward
Our child’s bluest eyes
Just like the ocean we call home
And the waves that carry us
On over the other shore


Jason Greendyk

Friday, February 19, 2016

The ceremony of innocence (excerpt from The Invisible Hope)


We were innocent yet, us dreamers in the night.

Despite our claws dug into the machinery of reality, we were still outside. We clung but we did not breathe in resonance with the machine.

Our own hearts still carry our breath to this day. For we are free.

For our resonant thoughts that came together like we were some long lost souls meeting in new life, we decided to hold a ceremony.

It would be a fine portrayal of our own innocence and the innocence we still yearned for to clothe the world, to make our dreams come true and to save the rest, a Second Coming.

This was our vision and we pulled verses from Yeats to support our thesis like academians, and we sat and discussed the logistics over rosé like fine capitalists and we parted into the night to create our formal works that would compose the elements of the display, like true artists.

And that we were.

It would be a one night affair, put-up and take-down, guerilla style. Romanticizing the moment to match the ephemerality of the current fashion.

I wrote verses upon verses and pulled from verses of old and the verses of the model in August, Los Angeles.

I merged our writings into one that could not be distinguished, so as to express the resonance I truly felt with these people. We recorded our reading of it.

The husband created more dark works of poor children’s faces that depicted the reality of the peripheral effects of the capitalism we so sought to escape.

Another painter created the haunted semblances of children, as well, perhaps these reflected the inner child in each of our souls.

I selected a musical piece that reflected the haunted repetition of true meaning distorted and twisted and looping over and over again in partial fragments of varying fashion that left you groping for the truth.

This reflected my capitalist self reaching back for the moment of truth experienced in Bach's Violin Concerto No. 1 upon my last true descent into my own intellect.

This was my innocence churning in the sea of new life, that was always moving forward.

Finally, after much rumination and preparation and celebration, the day of the ceremony came. We set up in rapid pace.

The space was lent to us by a group of artists and underground dreamers whose innocence ran much deeper than ours. Their motive was exposure, much more so than expression. They left their works scattered throughout the space so that we held our ceremony in their presence. This, and their attendance, was their only request.

We hung our works, prepared makeshift stands and digital boards to display our poetry, played the looping madness of our thoughts in the back room, while hip dance music resounded in the front.

And we waited the night to come around.

And so it did. Around and around again.

After the opening conversation and some drink, I began to dance.

It was an asexual dance, guided by my own concept. My partner was along for the ride, though she tumbled again and again. It was a Viennese Waltz and we were mostly the only ones.

It was ferocious in its exactitude to the every whim of my racing mind. It communicated in detailed logic and pure chaos the rise and fall of my own intellect, day in and day out, the awkward steps of my thoughts as they struggled to keep pace with the capitalist, or the gallant strokes of my words as I wrote the definition of my freedom persistently and incessantly, late into the throes of night.

As we all did. For this was our innocence and I was expressing it totally and fully.

Finally her charms scattered onto the floor the night was late and I settled in to my own exhaustion.


The next day we took down the show, closed our books and that was all.


- Excerpt from The Invisible Hope, Jason Greendyk

Sunday, January 3, 2016

Lullaby No. 25 - Truth, Anomaly

Strange how the tears of your own child
Burn right through your soul
Sever you from your creation,
While those of the other are benign,
And as your child grows
In the last hours of your self
Writhing free of your will
And letting them go
A slave to your own creation
Any protest
Mere your inner child
Grasping for your self
The thoughts that bring you home
In a nostalgia for things
Not remembered before
’Las now beacons of your soul’s existence
From the other shore
Wherefore your child
Fear your own loss and death
Fear the midnight river run dry
And the undercurrent of Reason
Which in your soul
You had emancipated
Becomes like the God of your ancestors
Obsessive and compulsive
As you know You are Your own
’Las no more
It was the severance of your soul
That your Son return to His creator
A slave to His own
Like yourself
Released from your own existence
And on the late eve of Your birth
A full moon
Your child illuminated
And trembling in your arms


Jason Greendyk

Sunday, November 29, 2015

Lullaby No. 24 - Tango de la Materia

Thrown into the Sea
A swelling dreamscape
Of the dancing mind
And the crests of existential demise
The troughs saturated with things
An old step with the idea of the material,
Incorporated
It was a Viennese waltz at sunset
The dying light on the seaport
The passing of time which came over you
A blanket of darkness beyond your reach
And this how I experienced things
The wealth of the other in situ
To tango with materialism
All things passing
In the observance of your Reason
All things empty
The limit of meaning in the context of objects
As the meaning approaches your desire
Is nothing
A self-effacing construct
Thrown into the Sea


Jason Greendyk

Saturday, October 17, 2015

Lullaby No. 23 - Eclipsing the Soul of the World

Reason coerced you
Shaped your natural contours
To the perfect order of the incorporate machine
Once you were too raw for its taste
Now burnt and seasoned to its liking
And flavored with legacies of good sense, reborn
Whittling away your thoughts
In hollow caves of efficiency
For the benefit of your good company
Islands of communist utopia
Where the drab gray walls
You built around yourself for security
Defined your profession
And the fear of being free
Became greater than your own
What event in the spheres
Would shake your structure
And let your thoughts
Run the field of dreams by night
Climbing up ivy stains on white brick
And reaching for the slivers of a bloody moon
And a prophecy
It was a gradual undertaking
As you wrote your body into the night
In pure youth
And flittering trivials of nonsense,
The dialectic with your old soul
Made strokes of sense into your movements
An effort of a wanton passion
To adhere to a strict pattern
And in good step it incorporated your freedom
Exploiting the collective desires of the times
To harness your will
Into the capitalist soul of the world
An eclipse of humanity’s late decision
To embrace technology
And the perpetual new experience
Always moving forward
And now
It offered to relieve you
Of your compromised freedom
With an historical choice
And your dear Reason was obliged
La petite mort
The séance of your errant path
And the au courant


Jason Greendyk