“They are really fascist forms of underground government
making people believe something but the truth.”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Underwear, Starting from San Francisco, 1961
“Time drops to the ground
like a shadow from a tree,”
wrote Lawrence Ferlinghetti
and I write now in the wake
of his passing on February 22, 2021,
less than a month to his 102nd birthday.
And if time from which Ferlinghetti himself
just ran out is a like a shadow from a tree,
why don’t we see that mighty divine tree
under which, in the hues and darks,
we, mortals, live, passing one another
to and from acts and moments
as if we too were of the sightless shades?
But then Ferlinghetti went to say
that the eternal tree had been cut down
“by an unknown carpenter beyond the sea”
who thus could be Jesus or Set, the One
Who Made a Coffin for His Brother Osiris,
the God of the Dead, the Egyptian Dionysus,
cut to pieces and then collected by Isis
except for the one small, devoured piece
that she needed to replace with a stand-in
to become pregnant in a new and totally
unprecedented, immaculate precedent and way
by this Sun who moved for good to the other world.
But how many know or would suspect how much
of Egyptian there is deep down in American woman
unless you do truly walk one day across the compound
of Rosicrucian Park with the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum,
the Rosicrucian Labyrinth, Alchemy Exhibit and Garden,
and the Rosicrucian Temple in San Jose in the Silicon Valley?
But Ferlinghetti, this new American-Italian prophet
of the new American city and its underground truths
also added (in the same piece) that the tree (the coffin)
was made into our boats that swing between poetry and sex,
making it hard for the souls thus carried to see the Hell of this world.
Yet elsewhere, while still alive, he asked this: “Do the dead
know what time it is?” Are the dead, indeed, still concerned
about the shades out of which Eternity, branching out
through all that is, makes time and its ceaseless change?
But Death, whether Osiris, Jesus, the carpenter, or Set or Saturn,
surely must pay attention to the living shades and time
for it (or they?) must always be on time, knowing when
to strike and when to collect and when to move like a Charon
all who need to cross and be transferred either to the VIP Bliss Club
or to the pledged eternal torture chambers of sadistic and fascist Satans
of which the generous Churches kindly tell tales even to the little ones.
Only the most depraved can attach to the immortality of the soul
and thus her divinity and goodness such a lie of her eternal evil,
infinite cruelty, continuing destruction, and complete separation
from her godly self, leaving of the soul and time not more
than hollow husks, empty shades, the waste of cast-off scales
of the Cosmic Dragon and the Phoenix, the breathing Tree
of the Illuminated Universe, the rot of her deadened leaves.
But elsewhere still, even on the slab in Jack Kerouac Alley,
next to his City Lights Bookstore Ferlinghetti also says
that poetry too is but a shadow: “Poetry is the shadow
cast by our streetlight imaginations.” Do we live just
in the shades by the shades as shades—shades of the dead
prematurely, already, and thus terminally always
in a world where the soul and life itself became an outside
lonely lamppost on a street of a modern inflamed city?
Or can one somehow still collect from the shade the light,
its source, its own golden fountain if, to that shade, the soul
is and remains no more than only—a shadow of the very soul?
And so Odysseus too, having stolen the dildo or “the bone”
or, as the literati call it, the Palladium of Greek Isis,
the Great Goddess, from Troy, went on to disseminate
a gash, a rupture—new orders and new times—some of the last
bold mingling and mixing between the gods and the mortals,
brandishing the sculpted member—the key to Empire and power,
as his Golden Bough that buys both free entry to and free exit
from Hades and Hell, all the while, along with shrewd Homer,
making sure to call it as Cyclopes’ Nobody for the vulgar and profane
either an “oar” or a “fan” or a “stern” to which, for Sirens, he was tied.
And all this just to plant himself on countless daughters of the Sun
and other foreign Gods on his way, thus preparing his progeny
of Latinus, Italus, Romos, Anteias, Ardeias, the rulers over the Etruscans,
for Aeneas and for the rise of Rome, blending the genes of Gods
with the two mutually hostile bloods of Greeks and Asiatic Trojans
while making even his lovers and wives, according to the records,
unsure and confused which of his sons was born with whom
and which of them each was then to marry and have in turn,
thus turning also all the Penelopes, Calypsos, Circes as if into one.
And yet, all this time of trying and tasting all these foreign sprites
on his epic, roundabout, and scenic way back home, the deadly rage
and hate worthy of a devil true from Hell never ever left him,
madly gnawing on all his intestines, against all the other suitors,
all his other stand-ins, and for the other living sons of his war
companions who all perished on his ships when coming home,
those whom his Penelope kept and entertained in her court
as her “darling ducks” who couldn’t resist her cooing spells.
And then all this under many spinning lies of sly and wily
Odysseus and Homer to make the many idolize
and sympathize with the greedy and pitiless tyrant
who does not want to let others live, not even
Penelope’s female slaves whom he coldly strangles.
By character and by design it then became hard
to disentangle chaff from the seeds and
the shadows on that hollow’s walls
from the light that makes us grow
and leads us up and forward
except for the one morale:
to found and seed such an Empire
one has to try to get some Goddess
into bed before she turns
him briskly back into swine.
Such is then the key privileged,
Empire’s great mystery, conundrum.
And for this the chosen aspirant
must bring this Great Goddess, the Queen of Death
along some bough or bone, carved by a forked lightning
or by stealth or by war or some plague-ridden crime
bearing on a kind of death— “souls” already spoiled,
and maimed, disfigured, defaced, displaced, marred
so that there would be no longer any Tree,
just the refuse down to remain and stay,
after peeling off the light, peeling it off the mind and human heart,
impregnated with the plague, the disease, and so leaving
only the one downward, nether way to the caught & condemned.
But I am just one solitary Platonic grinding my little warbling tune
like an ax by the shore of the ancient Crooked River
that changed and reversed her winding course
through the labyrinthine flow of rushing time
in the way in which words bolt to a folded verse
as if trying to fly from its end back
where lies its holy source.
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