The Desert Sun

Candles lined your thoughts

In the crafted soot of your inner mirrors

The things you would not allow yourself to see

Not for some fear of depth but more for mere pleasantry

The sparkle in your eye

Rose with a dark red resolution to the meniscus

And formed divergent ripples on your surface

Some profound sadness bursting in the transitional moment

And settling in a cool rosé smoke

Through which shone bright like a diamond in the rough

The bitter desert sun

A perpetual calling in your dry psychology

The mirage of sweet wine

And candlelit blackness

A contemporary denim torn for your machismo indulgence

The façade of grace an infinitesimal point to flock toward

Journey ever on

She begged you to leave behind the desert of reality

Where apathy was your cloak

And enter the mirage of life where emotion held no ground

And all was truth in reasoned eyes

Your ripples are your salvation said the pond

They speak to the depths of your solitude

They beg you to come back

Over a glass of Spanish fine

Slate your bitter smile with each caress of the stem

The midnight river was the tears you refused to cry

You needed the bitter remedy to make sense of your porous heart

Always filling your glass with devotion

So long as there was nothing left for you

The administration of freedom your box

Mechanisms to harness your spirit

To the branded thoroughbred

Spin your mane with the finest yarns

Just to keep the warmth in

And how is it these poet’s sleeves are filled

With fine holes of considerable depth

Yet all that matters is the imaginary number

Dancing through your mind at the end of the day?

And even that is meaningless as you slip into a waking slumber

A dreamer in the veil of life you carry on

A frugal spirit carving beauty out of nothing

To find a home for thoughts like blooming flowers

That would perish in the structure of the mirage

For lack of timely watering

Yet free to blossom the desert

Even as the valley of death is yawning

And the stems are sulking in the shadows

Bereft of any poignant sadness to softly mumble on the wind

In hopes the soul of the world would take note

And bring your spirit back to Him

The poetry dried in your mouth

Kneeling prostrate for the judgment of your rhetorical soul

The answer was becoming

You were nothing more than your thoughts

Than your dreams this desert high

Your reality was a mirage you’d found it proper to deny

And because there was something more

Something in the way that could not be defined

But pined nonetheless for you

Whenever you closed the door

And the whimpering of that spirit kept you in the sky

No matter what desert you were crossing

And why should it abandon you now?

 

Sift sift sift your soul

Gently through the sand

Consistently, peacefully, methodically, patiently

For somewhere in the desert

On a wild gypsy night

A mirage will rise before you

Your hearts will mend the stars

And love will fill your sky with an ancient lullaby

Peace will be your sands in the arid land of souls

And silver flowers will blossom

From the earthen rains that visit

Upon the yawning valley of death

That lies deep in the middle of darkness

No there’s no light in the darkest of your furthest reaches

The sun will rise again

 

 

Jason Greendyk, www.jasongreendyk.com

Leur

The springs of the rain wore fast

Time tested lunges yet falling to nothing

For lack of change in annuities

’Tis a drastic flow of the midnight river

And the dawn of wonder

Its silent tributary

The wolf had imbibed of its waters long ago

Tainted with the sweet shavings of apples

As the inhaled mists of perfection lifted

A full breast

And the Black Madonna stood at the bath

Vierge de Noir va lázni

She came from the shadows of dreams

In the wondrous dawn lethargy

And she warned not to let them take me

’Las was I falling into their arms

Yet if the fall is calculated

Can it be truly thus?

And if I am merely aware?

As for cognizance had become

An empty shell of nothing

And there was a need to gallop the risk

Of compliance with the same

Strolling the labyrinth of vested knowledge

My soul was torn and mended overly

As I waited on the gun

Beg release my fears the rising light

I dreamt on what night did loom

Above my callous chivalry

A pure and weighted saturation

In the gentle warmth of our settlement

She spun me

For webs of solitude

Incumbent on the waters of late stars

Gleaming of their beauty

Shroud the early collecting dew of darkened airs

A woven tapestry of raindrops held together

The pure silk strands of a work wrapped through thy soul

Entangled in the malleable walls of some meaningless maze

And moved by the gestures of thy parlance for creation

Le jus de pomme a baigné le Madonna Noir

And became a pagan goddess once again

Moving as thy seasons

Why must truth perish in the wind?


Jason Greendyk, www.jasongreendyk.com

Valentine

Deserts sang for you

Deserts sang for you

They sang of woven tapestries

Looming in the east

So some wild Arabian night

We might board the caravan of dreams

Set sail across the deserts an ocean toward

Following the stars of our hearts in the sky

We found love in a hopeless place

Beneath spears driven through black hearts

And suspended on the Technicolor threads

Of fluorescent gods

We danced with grace

And kissed like vines reaching for the light

Soul mates trimming the selvage

And coloring the drab of such Technicolor suspension

With earthen hues

The colors of passion filled thus this black heart

Of a beautiful soul

Red roses set in blue glasses

Love was a cold vase in the winter chill

’Las wrapped in tapestries of woolen ambiance

The black sheep was fulfilled

And a warmth settled in

Having birthed a white lamb

Adorned the door that hung dreams on the stars

Crossing the heart’s great night

Swathes of northern lights a loom spinning purity

And at the farthest point

Deep in the middle of sands and darkness

A white orchid grew profusely

An elegant despair

And in but a moment

Black hearts flavored red

And so delicate

Warmed them pink

Against the drab of deserts’ stretches

The sands of our souls

Colored like earthen paintings

Holding fast in the fleeting measures of the wind

The night was long and we embraced

Held tight and settled in

The Silence of the Bard

Clear your head of the moving forest of ideas

Implanted by the river of mankind

Free of places called home

Where the whims of Mother Earth stretched infinite

In the wooded shadows of an aging aesthetic

A nostalgic yearning for peace and quiet

Closed beneath them

The tall standing trees

Holding fast their gentle sways of wisdom

As spiders writhed

In the lightless clearing of their existence

Ceremonially paying homage to their roots

Silently prepared their next departure

See we keep coming home in our minds

Night by night

We keep fast to the lost yarns of Bohemia

No matter how far we roam

On the frayed currents

Of deeply clutched desires

Even should we shelter our coming

In a veil of absence

Our spirits are felt

Dancing with the spiders of ourselves

As they do their best to entangle us

In coy silk webs of the past

The resolute familiarity

A journey of shadows

By which to stir the old oaks of wisdom to life

Weeping happiness

And searching in circles for an inspiration

Rustling in the branches

Of the categories of an aged reason

In the movements of the wind

A mind left to hearing

Towards Mother Nature’s throes

The mistress of the thoughtless echoes

Of trees writhing on the forest floor

And not a soul to hear the beauty

Of the silence of the bard

The temptation to sing

Gently swaying like a pendulum

Muchas gracias por la inspiración, Andrea Dispenziere, muse309.squarespace.com, her dance piece "I came to the forest."


Jason Greendyk, www.jasongreendyk.com

unsung basquiats

The black angel had vouched our silence

Amidst the scrolling tales of Reason

Held the trust in confidence

Lest the old world haunts mingled with the vested new life

Lest the abandon intruded the current fashion

A ghost in the machine

And stole it away

Like thieves in the night

Shifted the vagrant motions

To the other side of things

As the unicorn stepped into the abyss

Pointed first

The all seeing eye fades to black

A darkened heart chained to the hope less belief

There was no choice in the matter

The shadows forsook when hath turned to the light

No longer writhed their pressed firmaments

Like fake smiles to ploy the intellect

Brush the ephemeral disgust from thy lips

In gallant strokes of humility

An ailing preparedness for death

And the embrace of this new life perennial

Once such abandon smoked the mirror

Broad divestitures of the real

It mattered no more

All thy chagrin and grit a farce

All the hard skin a wish away

The abandon of the moment

Yes despite the wisdom of the sages

I clung to that which tore a hole in my shadow

My beautiful soul was a black denim

That was tearing at the seam

As the snake which cannot shed its skin

Perishes

And I have seen one of the lights of the universe

It is that we must continually renew our pores

The holes in our spirits

In order that beauty might forbear

And if now I wax ephemeral

It is because I stand on the shoulders

Of the unsung basquiats

’Las it was ours

Fell to the hands of a Rusnak thief

Exploited as the child of the midnight river

The underground current

Moved under the dark side of the moon

And we are chasing the tail

That scrolls through the fog of Reason

The black star that keeps shining on

An angel wooing us to heaven
The black kingdom in the night clouds


Muchas gracias por la inspiración, Intervenue (www.intervenue.com) and Dreemz & Co. (www.dreemz.co), notably Basquiat's Black Kingdom.

Jason Greendyk, www.jasongreendyk.com

Constant Progression

On the road we encountered authenticity in transition
Always moving forward
Never looking back
And this forthwith motion was an inevitable force
Slayed the black beasts strewn along its path
A teeming existentialist wake
As life can only be understood backwards
But it must be lived forwards
Skål, Søren
Fake out the night
A snapshot of the derivative of domestic still
Would reveal the deaths of lesser beings
Feeding the semblances of nostalgia in the glass menagerie
And children’s playthings
Puppets of the wayside murders
Passed in the driven moment under the halo of Reason
Memoirs and figurines of a fake life
Painted to resemble in living color
That which was lost in their retention
The mandalic essence of the downward spiral
Forsaken the grace of the natural dance
As it is not that life was taken
In the chase for freedom quite material
But that life was disgraced and there was no repent
A blind eye to the sacrifice
And we just kept moving forward
Hastening the production of things to epitome
In the still essence of the derivative snapshot of the race
Nothing left but deserts and brushstrokes
And stark snaps some decay
The vultures’ feast awaiting their talons
Beckoning to rip and tear
The carcasses of childhood dreams
Reminding us of the world’s soul
Outside the windows of transitional space on the road
The horizon of our finitude
Gently looming the direction of waning aspirations
Spinning the dress of our lives
In a grand linear motion
The resemblance of a divinity driven wind
And all the figurines they sat silent
In the company of vultures and death
They were still even in vibrant swathes of color
Emanating the essence would they represent
Amidst the tender loins of dead animals
As if they were soon to dine in memory of their creation
Having never known the spirits of their sustenance
Blind to the invisible hand that feeds our forward motion
This corporate life a constant progression
In the still hum of the process flow
Bury your rivals, not your desk

 

 

Muchas gracias por la inspiración, the cell, www.thecelltheatre.org, their exhibition, On the Road, January 17 to February 7, 2013, and particularly the work of Cara DeAngelis, www.caradeangelis.com

 

 Jason Greendyk, www.jasongreendyk.com

Natural Progression

The days of the fall

Were these beautiful symphonies

Orchestrating gently the reason

In lethargic awakenings

Greeting the chilled but rising light

To thy glassy eyes

And world weary machinated motions

Creatures of habit stroked like regal dogs

Delegating their energies

To climb out of the slum

And into the city proper ’cross the great river gap

Bridging the suspension of its flow

Each day met with the question

What’s the point?

Each day moving forward

Driving the weathered machine

To the heart of American beauty

The stitches that closed the veil of class

Quite casual

Clothed the steady crawl of the mourning streets

In the relentless waves of necessity

Detailing the algorithm of consumer thought

In passing wayside distractions

And the singular swifts of pigeon flocks

Drafting the abstract of the grid

In thoughtless swathes of sky

Waxing ephemeral

Composing the negative space of perpetual rise

Always moving forward

A natural progression

The only constant in the capitalist experiment

And each morning she entered the vacuum of the current fashion

In the dramatic circulation of trends

Weaving the fabric of days to come

While he kept driving on

Crossing the further river gap

To the fringes of the machine’s cognizance

The implementation of its subconscious ends

In the automation of human processes

Reducing the measure of distraction

Masked as the liberating of innovation

A global movement to free your mind

From its enslavement at binary hands

Gripping his keystrokes in a streamlined legalese

Embedded with silenced poetic gesture

And incorporating the evolution of humanity

At the close of the world’s curtain

Upon which things shifted to the other side

To the silence of the Eastern shore

A reason unburdened by its linguistic permutations in history

He raced back to the swing of the Big Apple

Now the black heart of an evening Grace

A dark glass veneer

To masquerade the void of endless light

Wherein the aspirations of thy reflections were the black beasts

Bags in the wind on Fashion Ave

Watching the cars pass outside the temple

He sat in a moment of quiet

She left behind the vacuum

Pulled herself from the wall of the abyss

Having cleansed herself of the question

Ready to dream another night long

Let late come rest steal us in the sleep of stones

Cast in the forces of the world’s soul

Holding on persistent through the silent kisses
Every brush of the hand

A love that never questioned the source of its becoming

But poured forth in dreams and daily drummings

Sounding for our consciousness

The sweetest nothing of the All