Silent Night

Gather the old Austrian kings for the feast of shadows

Flickering cast daylight in the black run Viennese mirrors

Reflecting the fires of old worlds

And the arbitrary strokes of a modern fame

Some superficial imposition of meaning

Refracted in the sheer glass panes

Holding delicate the city of dreams

In careful placement of the genuine sense

The truest sadness in slipping youthful grace

In the chase for freedom quite material

The fluency of objects

An irrelevancy of walls

No more the towering billows of oppression

Rather as the wisdom

Surrender the things of youth with grace

And the delicacy of all you’ve become

Will settle in the meniscus of thy balloon glass

A myriad of colors mentioned in the chameleons of sky

And running down the curved white walls

Like a water branded in feminine poise

Thy sobriety an ontological intoxication

An elegance of malaise and lethargy

In the boredom of the pieces

Stroked by the passion of an ambitious man

Giving gesture and a rose to the unicorn

As a metaphor of ego

Enclosing the mystery of jewels

That adorned and garnered His retention

Thank God for all you’ve found

Out from a wild Arabian night

Dancing with the gypsies who’d wandered the deserts

No more my lovely

The aged oil which fueled our manic drives

Sat outside our romance and sparse stomachs

For the visage of a storm would enclose us in our artistry

The poesy of a vegetarian dish

Held with care like a violin against the clavicle

And the hand which fed thy soul

A bow like the archer’s mane

Empty of the hunt

And out of reach of the regal dogs

Blessed with God in their souls

And trolling their white tablecloths

As they leave their feast for the light

Trill the strings of their appearances

Leave Grace to the silent night

Prick of the Spindle featuring Stutter the Violins

 www.prickofthespindle.com

Prick of the Spindle: An online journal of the literary arts: Volume 6.1, featuring Stutter the Violins (vimeo.com/44907464), a short film on the struggle of structure and chaos.

To Die at a Lover's Blade

 vimeo.com/55207385

 An uncut reading of 'To Die at a Lover's Blade,' from The Apple Juice (www.blurb.com/my/book/detail/1438964), the epic poem of rollerblading.


Jason Greendyk, www.jasongreendyk.com

Well Dressed

We had erased our memories

And the sheen of the black marble clouded our reflections

On stones hung from our necks

The shapes of billows what fabulous illusion

Was dark magic gone up in smoke

Receding through the streaming silences

Technicolor imagination

And best indulge thy superstition

For to reason without cause

Is a lost in the hollow

A reason left behind

On the front lines of the inner war

The struggle for the blaze of quiet

Reiterated throughout the shifts of self perception

Thy reflection in the other eyes

Staring into thy shallow beauty

An immeasurable depth of soul

For it was no more

And despite the opacity of the reflective shades

Thy true colors were translucent

A Technicolor chameleon in the theater of shadows

Always moving forward

Drafting the light of the coming

In the present movement

The enclosure of the dancing spirits

Granted a beauty the most mundane

And it was an absence of the causes gave it life

It was a drafting pure perpetual

Nevertheless there were stones like gods

That made their ways felt

In the shadows they cast on freedom

The aura of some rigid spiritual tyranny

That salvaged you from an empty despair

For why was the silence of the muse thy calling?

For what dark angel did thy lips soften

And thy spine tingle with revelation?

Déjà vu au courant, and on and on again

We are but the faintest repetitions

Of our everlasting spirits

In the calls of a new age

Wherein the machine was disarmingly gorgeous

In its pristine and rational intricacies

And its blunt egotistic lapses

To be lost in the walls the only freedom we would know

On the precipice but leap dearest

The air has learned to hold thee with the lightest touch

Feint into the arms of a silent rhapsody

And blithely withstand the gallows of their trust

For they’ll hang you from the spheres by your necks

At your summoning

’Las they could never take your echoes

Could never touch you falling

Let thyself limp in the moment of ecstasy

And breathe in the air thy calling

Sweet silence of the musing nothing

Or was it the wall gave you a kiss

And left you idle in the coming?

Would thee even care to speak

Of the immeasurable shallow of the beautiful?

God bless the chains would shackle thee

For hung and shackled would thee find salvation

A black hole to the depths

Dragging the corpse of thy beauty along

Ironically the age was quite becoming

In its allusions to the ties of cycles’ lives past

Samsara gently humming


Jason Greendyk, www.jasongreendyk.com

Meditation, Untrained

I let go of the moment
And my heart raced pensively
Throbbing in unison
With the uncertainty of the universe
Mastering the meditation sequence
As a metaphor of life untrained
Methodical

Silence changes hues
And the colors fill thy soul
One breath at a time
Grasping at the infinitesimal point
That encloses the great all
The eastern breathing in the belly
Was the locus of western reason
The meet
A translation of commodities
Rendezvous la verdad

For the atheist raised to the infinite
In the epiphany of the mathematical trinity
A global enlightenment
Would be the result of some apocalypse
The world's soul locking in its desire for solitude
The great escape artistry
Of some deeply reasoned errancy of a sphere

For me, I remembered the banks of Italy
And the lemon trees
Their meaning escapes me in the errancy,
All things being equal,
But their yellows were mesmerizing
The preconceived resonance
Was the vibration of a former life
Reverberating in the glitches of the present
A passion masquerading the arrhythmia
The heart of the universe is silent
But we are human
Composed of irregular patterns
Approximating formulaic enclosure
But tragically escaping
God's allowance of beauty in all His perfection

For what greater good
Would we return to the great mother's womb
In a veil of light and wisdom?
What cowardice would retreat us
To the apathy of an entropic nirvana?
Letting things slip away into their emptiness
Letting all things fall apart
In the light of some deeply desired absolute
Some great yearning for eternal closure
Contrary the perpetual transience of the universe

Give me all the suffering of the world
And I will hiss like a snake cornered
Fight the overwhelming surge of retreat
To mark just one finite point on the escape from entropy
And clutch
Cling
Grasp dear for life, dear, for LIFE
For the taste of MY humanity
Ego and all
Negate the paradox of existence
Which even emptiness could not withhold from disclosure
Which even wisdom could not bear in silence
As per the direction of the wise
Failing themselves in their intellectual pretension
In their desire for the great solitude and enclosure from the all

'Las the disclosure of your soul
Will mean nothing in the posited end
All things ephemeral
Already empty in the posited will of the future
That is, the predetermined distribution
Of its posthumous possessions
As that which does not yet exist
Nevertheless has a pejorative share in the present moment
And that which comes of that which is yet to be born
Will at consummation of its conception
Already know the deed from which it was handed down
The paper taken from the tree of life
On which its existence was written
In the mathematical codes of universal governance
Despite the uncertainty of the great mother's birthing patterns
That which had FAITH in its becoming
And with a dire grip wrought its perfect order
Out from the shifting forms of world
And doubtful semblances of idea
The master of ITS perfection
Turning from the Nothing to epiphanies of Light, undisclosed
Allowing the mystery recede in its concealment
To attend to that which shows itself
Full frontal nudity

And happily,
This is merely what it is to be ordinary
A master of life untrained


Jason Greendyk, www.jasongreendyk.com

Chorus of Horns

The silence was a movement

A grand gesture of the moon

To implant the shadows’ womb

We might hide on an eternity

We drove our inspirations to the edge of the cliff

In an eclipse of spirit

And scattered to the sea

Sinking our teeth into the anchors of watery valleys

My heart was glass in her refrain

So that each beat threatened to shatter it

Threatened to cast shadows

On the colors bathed in light

Paled in her refrain

The hesitation to embrace new life

’Las I would we emerge close to resonance

I would have our eyes tied to our manes
Us unicorns

Might we never turn our heads

On that which gives us inspiration

That which gives us birth and a name

We sat quite tense

In the chorus of horns

Moaning of the exorbitance

Consequential to indulging our attentions

In the circles of thought

Which ran bereft the straight shots of reason

Formed lines to order and temper our celebration

I had let the banks of the river give us pause

In a measure of endurance

And discovered a great pit in my gut

That had grown weary of the beautiful sadness

For all its embodiment of evil

In the caws of have nots

The financial district is quiet at night

Empty

An intellectual bankruptcy

Wherein dancing had become a dream

I dreamt of rouge and shadows

I dreamt of whirlwinds in the stars stirring of dawn

Imagine if thy life was like a hurricane

And when the great machine takes a breath

The vultures come out

Subsisting of the shadows

Only distracted into the light by lust

An apocalyptic solitude festering where waves

Of the intellect are bound

The storm had demystified the straight lines

Our course however meandering was more apparent now

We learned to hug the curves

Embrace

The white vultures at last showing themselves

Full frontal nudity

O but,

See they are always out

They just shine in the darkness

Holograms flickering of their resonance

To pay respect their commitment to the ceremony


Jason Greendyk, www.jasongreendyk.com

The Concerto, A Manifesto

There is a concert in the graft

Movements of vehicular

Swerving to avoid the idiosyncrasies

Of the people give them motion

Curving to appease their master

I was a vagrant concepteur on the wayside

Reveling in the moment when thee would stare

Into the vast contingency of possibility

And impossibility

Of have and have not

Of life and death

’Las the Concerto had His own plan for me

Remember, I’ve stared into the abyss

I’m hung on the last thread of reason

A puppet of the spheres

And when the pit devours me

It will have a familiar taste on its tongue

That it can’t quite define

Uncanny

An ego that swelled to fill the womb of the universe

And became one

Blood and sinews sewn to the black holes of desire

Reborn to the pop culture communism of the spirit

Clutching at the stray thoughts

I work with the psychological intricacies of human experience

The dogged thoughts that roam the dark alleys of Mind

Would I take them in

Clothe them

Give them shelter and a home

Raise them to believe in the force of their spirit

Against all

And in their abstract consummation

Some great weight was lifted for no reason at all

It vanished

If it weren’t for the capitalist oppression of the spirit

I would be an artist

’Las concepts share the preference of economy

Words are cheap but hold immeasurable weight

And I am all the lighter for it


Jason Greendyk, www.jasongreendyk.com