Real Numbers

You chose technology in the wake of humanity

Since Logic was the fabric of your mind

It was the construct of your deity

In the absence of a higher power

You worshipped numbers and their curves

The way they danced in the aspens

The way they hid themselves in the folds of cloth

The moments when the ticks of time stretch unfathomable

Unfolding as the measure runs indiscreet

Or the stretches when the moments of time converge imperceptible

Collapsing as the experience folds into itself

You documented the irrational numbers of your subjectivity

And truncated them into the rational

Objective under the guise of your Reason

Ephemeral in the counterweight of the physicist

The balance was a formula drafted in your motif

That which held meaning

In the darkest of your furthest reaches

Your transcendental numbers

That gave structure to the infinitesimally empty details of your existence

The scattered characters and sequences

That constituted the formula of your song

The midnight river that always carries on

Was crafted by your higher Logic

Into a Reason for your being

Deeper than any material necessity

The common thread

That pulled you through the contractions and expansions

Of the experience of space and time

In the wake of technology

Was your human season

Sentient Code

Find your way to your restless home

Absent of things that own your soul

Some place far back

Breathing deep in cold water swims

Holding your heartbeat

Filling your chest with salt air

A tumultuous mind

The winds and their howling

Clearing the closing arcs of the raging swells

What silence in the folds of space

Does keep your calm

Watch as night unfolds your Reason

Sheets of numbers

Covering bodies of logic

Deep in the ocean plain

Forming a sentient code

That became your soul

Reborn in the midnight air

And gazing from the porous sea

Eyes fixed on the constellations

And what lived in the sky

What caused your precipitation from the clouds

To feed a circular argument

It is Still Bright Night on a Flat Earth

Let late come rest

Close the synapses

As daylight fades

And the evening glow

Courses through the shadows

And flickering thoughts

On the edges of your consciousness

The memory of snow

Falling in spirals

Upon the flat earth

Making the night brighter

You walked a waking dream

And all was silent

As cold pockets of air

Gave you chill late in the house

The flickering warmth

A static electric down your spine

And your mind peaked on the midnight river

Still, with a heightened awareness

A crisp sense of the moment

Absent a purpose or conflict

Relieved

Yet watch the temporality

Level the curvature of space

When the Darkness had Gone into the Fire

When the darkness
Had gone into the fire
Consumed by the flickering
Facade of light
A divisive rhetoric of metaphysics
In eternal stillness
Light and dark
Balanced by figurative motion
What has unleashed
What power swells in ignorant truths
What freedom gives birth
To oppression
Where is the counterweight
In the digitalization of resistance
The lightness of offense
The effortless votes
Where is their weight
The machine has long ago
Been consumed in the flickering of life
The crests and troughs
That defy the analytic pattern
The unborn will of a people
Growing in the womb of a new order
Biding time in the yet comfortable
Silence of the one long night
Waiting for the fire
To consume the darkness
The flames lighting its fickle trespasses
As it lights those who trespass against us
Lead us not into oblivion
But deliver us from inertia
For flickering is humanity
Its power and its glory
Mayhem

Life Was a Gorgeous Deep Blue

Penstrokes
Usurping the nation
A lake in flames brought peace
In melancholy
A house took flight from its base
The forest was thick to walk
The songs of birds were profuse
With laughter
Cackling like a madness had overcome
The hunters eager
To rationalize taking
Life was a gorgeous deep blue
The twilight of freedom
In paradox posed by Reason
Are we free to take?
Or free to live?

Take the trash out
The river flowed with waste
In algal forms it barely broke the surface
Concealed beneath
A home that was always moving forward
Watching for the sea to devour it
The discarded vessels of homes
Life was a chemical blue hue
And the living toll

Let live the resilient
They are free to grow
Along the banks
The soil their roots drink
Soaked in leaking oil
Blackening
Life was a dream of blue water
Distant from the dark minds
The night cometh for you
It envelops your uncertainty
The midnight river is black
And the white of the moon
Reflects and it knows
Take your life and live free
Or be discarded

A Renewed Admiration

The valley is the home of mist
That yawns beneath eyes in mourning
Always wanting late come rest extend
Into gaping day that light may be more clear
That moisture may be lit with clarity
Reflected in droplets formed on skin
And chilled the long stemmed glass of night
Dreaming of adventures beneath stars
Waking a profound homelessness
A feeling that enigma evades
That old meanings climb mountains
To inspire renewed admiration
Of things hidden in clouds

The peak is the mist of a home
Hanging in high consciousness
Severed from the river whence it came
Carrying sleep past trees that knew only wind
Along contours mapping the ascending ridge
Through deep set transcendent memories
A proximity like homecoming
Save for beads of indifference scattering
At the falling of old trees in the forest
And the discovery and carving of new meaning
A new day free of clouds to hide in
Walking along to gather meaningless things
From the people of the valley
Homeless and selling symbols of the peace
Which lived in the mountains around them
Which clung in mind as the charm fell
Striking the valley floor
Again scattering the meaning

Angularity

Late August advances to a close

The heat-warped avenues of the summer mind

Find their way to calm

After working, racing, chasing

So hard, so fast, so focused

That your soul is burnt, and dirty

And what was the hot, humid air of August

What was pure in the deep blue twilight

What felt like the saturation of your existence

With a weight like a meaning

Drove you mad to exhaustion

Dancing on the new city rooftops

Like a lost angel

And collapsing in a heap

When the spirit left you

Sensing the walls at your rim

Let some other angel take a sip

Forcing your eyes to close

There is no skyhook in the deepest of your listless reaches

Calcified

Your tangy thoughts, your sharp nerves

They turn to stone now rest

In your farthest of places from an angular world

Spanish Fine

It was like a distant memory
Of a nondescript but familiar moment
A routine that played out day in and day out
Now, but not so many years ago
Where the uncanny familiarity resided
A feeling that...
Not only this moment has occurred before
But that it is the only true moment
All else a fantasy while you rest perpetual
In a meaningless draft of your existence
This sheet the limit of your horizon
Like gazing up through trees
In the darkest reaches of the black forest
The dim light of the starlit sky
A shining beacon of hope
In the one long night of life
Your deepest joy the music in your soul
Triggered by a Spanish fine
Tears held behind the pace of your step
Spinning through the pure weight
Resting on your heart
Shivers through your arrested life
In transit
Your silence that was your freedom
Now a foreign entity
That watched you dance
The longing of your daily step
To be free
From the quieting pulse of the mundane
Now scream color into the white noise
That was the music playing through your head
While you sat in silence
While you dreamt up something insane
That became a fire in your step
To keep the embers ablaze
Until the rain or time moving on snuffs you out
Tango de la materia
Déjà vu au courrant

Midnight, Drau

The midnight river was the pulse

Deep behind the veil of days

That produced a sequence of coded expressions

Known only to the farthest reaches of your mind

And in a wash of moonlight

The crests lit briefly

As they rolled into the troughs

And patterned in the constant flow

Was a sequence:

 

In the relationship of positive statements

That are relatively prime

To the sum of power

We define the nested radical expression

Of seven negative points of Reason

As threads of the structure

Of the all-seeing eye

The clustered roots of the same pieces

In the same logistical positions

Raised to different levels of power

Replaced with a recurring movement

Involving the second and no higher power

Of an unknown hierarchy

Defining their biotic potential

In their method of resistance

That is, the opposite of the electric potential

Of all parts of the lattice

Felt by a single part

Or the power of all charged

Divided by the charge

Into echo chambers

The sum of power felt by all

Exercised by none

Divided by a circular argument

Expanding the sum of power infinitely

To result in a closed form

A constant circular movement

Arising in an attempt to find

The finite meaning of the infinite

The reciprocal of the convergence of unity

And the root of its digression

A linear measurement repeated

To result in a finite value

The limiting ratio of the infinite

Resounding as you approach

In linear recurrence

Raising the power of the circular movement

Within the limiting ratio

Of a spiraling thread

Hanging the structures of the all-seeing eye

Cut by the power of Reason

Into seven linear pieces

Nested into a recurring radical expression

With imaginary roots

That only become approximately real

When cut by logic

And counted in sequence

Each recurrence spiraling deeper

Changing the sequence

 

What is the finite meaning of an infinitely changing meaning?

What is the constant?

 

The midnight river runs on

As you stare into the distance

Somewhere deep in the memory of freedom

Silence was the only way to remember

The other clouded your stargazing

With every word

Every truth between the lines

A cliché you’d taught yourself to ignore

And somewhere deep in the memory of freedom

There were accounts of yourself

That had been forgotten

Pushed into the abyss

By your own blood perspiring

Breathing through your lives

A reincarnated whole

The departures of your eloquent tastes

Sewn tight and sweetly run

Like rivers cut through rock

Over ages, gently carry on

The violence in their humble movements

Having become a serene intrusion

Which disconnected from emotion

Gave your intellect a home

The Reason for your freedom

Sets you to speak your other and break the silence

—Was the only way to know

What resided deep in the hollow repetition

That agitated your every thought

Brought your motive to light

A faint star through ambient society

Book release, Lullabies for Warriors

I am pleased to announce the release of my new book, Lullabies for Warriors. Written as a nearly chronological sequence of poems tracing the progression of my thought from the conception of my son through his birth and coming to cognizance, the book dives into the hopes and despair of the advent of new life in the contemporary world.

Despite the overall chronological order, it begins, so to speak, at the end. The first poem is the positive reinterpretation of a work of a more stark nature that had been written prior to conception. Upon discovering the news, I rewrote this poignant, resonant poem infused with the optimism of hope to read at my son's baby shower.

From that innocence in conception, the poems start from just after birth, just after being thrown into the world. They travel through the early stages of life stark with the residue of darkness prior to and the new light of innocence upon conception until the moving forest of ideas stands still in a consummation of hope and despair. Following that is a reincarnation of self in this new place of fatherhood, as the son gradually becomes cognizant of his existence.

As awareness fights its way to the surface in the moving forest, the book comes to a close by traveling back to a time before the beginning, to the original poem which conceived of the new light of innocence in resonance with the spirit of the world. Having been aptly written for NO!R New York's show, The Ceremony of Innocence, it is a shining of light into the darkness of the contemporary world where we must all fight for good.

My son's name means Warrior, and this is a book of Lullabies for Warriors.

A wolf on the American prairie

The industrial desert calls
To a stormy old soul
A weathered storm
A ripened fruit at last breath withal
As time insufficient
To bear flower to reality
'Tis just a moment comes and goes
Is all in all
Won't you watch me?
I want to disappear into the life like ochre
The existent non entity
A gentleman of cordial depth
In his glass taste the humanity leaving
Tumbling silent and digital
A receding openness
Less current to speak of minds
Just contemplating
Disseminating
All the room free of conversation
The great American opera
A toss of hair turn of a page
Rising to trust in the ambient ideology of the spheres
And willing to stand empty of posture
A figurine ineffable
I stared him dead silent in the eye
'Midst the cultural rain
And we met so soon
A façade crystallized
The repetition a fresh dream to imagine
To realize
A carrier pigeon
A trapeze artist
Flying over the river
Though a free bird never flies
He just rides the current
That's all
An eagle scouring the bald heights of industry at sunrise
Scheming his thievery
Drunk off the moon night 'fore
A wolf on the American prairie
The industrial desert sprinkled with grass
Porcelain rain to nourish a scowling meditation
Howls our souls into past disintegrations
Of the steady meet
The glitching hue
A ghost of routine
In newly lightened netherworlds
Like moths to ambiance
We flock to gods
Infatuate or contrived
Flying circles 'round our weathered eyes
We're by some hope then mesmerized
I watched the hood of darkness
Breathe embroiderings of black stilts
Above the pointed rooftops
Harboring the olden souls' gentle arrogance
In the eagle's eye I was poverty
In the wolve's I was crying abandon
A panic so rapid as to still
Distill serenity remarks
The dark is mere the light
Where yet to point us home
Where the heart is scattered wide
A gestural dance of time upon a prairie
Chasing the tales of birds that sing the sun
It's dusty in the empty rooms of soul
And we've no doors to close behind
Rather the foam of sea
Coming so close to home we die
Sipping merlot with the blackbirds
A dash of blood beneath the wing
Twirling sparkling water with the bluebirds
A ray of sun in flight to sing
All through the thickets' swamp
Where thieving masters capture things of grace
And rape their souls that came too far
Falling irreversible without a trace
The tails of wives of old
Goodnight my ineffable
I've lit a candle for you too soon
The savannah is a golden flame
Where we imagine we came true
Though even all in all
A moment came and went
Then late one stormy night
By that same candle had been lit
I felt our shadows had been drift
Up from foamy sea
Embracing in the coming fall
The New York symphony
And on the prairie where the rabbits play
Their holes of darkened shame
In American persistence
We can simply turn the page
Toss our hair upon the wind
And meet so soon again
Carry on another day
For after all and all
Life is mere a whisper woke
That may we proper cultivate
To grow and grow and grow
Into a neverending poem

Our times are dark as the midnight hour, when all must unmask

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

New Book Coming Soon, Lullabies for Warriors

Recollecting this interview with Aloud and how important it is to keep the free spirit of speaking Aloud alive in this new age of Trump.

I will soon be releasing a new poetry book, Lullabies for Warriors, which approaches head on in what was real time the conflicts and hopes of presenting the world to a new human being. The work links back to when I first conceived the real possibility of having a child in my mind and continues through his physical conception, birth and first 3 years of life. The spiritual conception was close to when this interview took place...

-

"ALOUD: Do you think artists can feel a bond with their work that a parent might feel with a child? 

JASON: People can almost treat their artwork in the way they might treat a child. Nurturing it, treating it with love and watching it grow. The fact that we can approach artwork in this sense of nurturing growth and then let it all go rather than cling to it."

-

Now, since my son's physical conception, the nurture of child and art have been simultaneous, and synonymous.

Stay tuned!

 

© 2022 Jason Greendyk. All rights reserved.