©
All poems
and stories
© 1988,
1989, 1990,
1998, 2000,
2001, 2003
by Advaeta.
All rights
reserved.
A cat who lives like a cat,
Sleeping and killing mice,
There's nothing wrong with that --
He's healthy, wealthy and wise.
But a man who lives like a cat,
Sleeping and grumbling all day,
Smug and vicious and fat,
And verging towards decay --
Is this any way to live,
Or is living the only goal,
Scratching your armchair and giv-
ing trouble to one and all?
A cat makes a perfect picture
Curled warmly on the floor --
But a cat's not equipped to conjecture
What did I come here for.
- 3 January 1990
Burst through another gate
Every second a new gate
Every bolt shot behind
Of that strange gate
We burst and blast through which
And always will.
- 17 January 1990
This poem was dedicated to a friend at the time of its original publication. Since I have dedicated this website to my guru, for the sake of consistency that original dedication has been omitted here. In any case, the friend habitually dedicates anything that may pertain to him to the same guru.
That simple fool within my heart
Is nothing but a jerk,
He always wins the grace of God
While I do all the work.
My brain it schemes, my conscience teems,
My astral sphere does tricks;
Laughs the little clown, "It's too profound,
These ways you get your kicks.
"I only know a song or so,
And though it may sound funny,
I can make one sweet, a special treat,
Of carrots, nuts and honey."
Well he can't match me in linearity,
But that boy does get around;
He can't remember if it's May or November,
But he sure knows up from down:
He may not fly machines in the sky
Like Rambo and double oh seven,
But he climbs without bother the lap of his Father
And sits in style with a silly smile
And needs no other heaven.
- 26 January 1990
Though difficult now to say what kind of man
He was, who moved ten thousand people so,
Or seventy thousand (accounts are not the same),
This much we know, he loved them with a force
That flowed away not only centuries
Or thousands, millions years' accumulus
Of silted soil, parasite vine, crude chain,
That held them trapped without a chance to lift
A hand, to stand, to meet and move ahead
And call out that to be human is to be great --
Not only the concrete casing those themselves,
But of each tiny life form on the earth,
Dying for the sunlight and the air.
He lay one time in prison, so they say,
Too weak to lift his head or talk, and held
In hand an alphabet board, as does a child,
And with flaming purpose managed to convey
BE FIRM IN WAYS OF PURITY -- these words,
Which gave him joy that few could understand.
- 28 January 1990
I sat on a star,
Far in remote space, far
At the outermost limits of the galaxy,
Overlooking Los Angeles.
And when all time had stopped
And seagulls chomped the cosmic clock,
I knew I would be there evermore,
There in Los Angeles.
TS Eliot wrote a poem
And an unreal city lay bare, exposed,
But even God wouldn't write the whole truth
About Los Angeles.
- 8 February 1990
100,000 dead.
100,000 bleaching skulls
- 2 March 1991
Sorry, friend, your hard disk will remain locked.
Guess what, "Your PC is stoned."
Pixels pulse painfully, as do the nerves
Messages after midnight,
Points of light bleaker than the black.
CRC's inflamed, files decompose;
Another slipped disk wings to the wastebasket.
We could call this gadget a terminal illness.
My present, if any, lies in a bad sector.
With insufficient memory to learn from the past;
A future that may be unusable.
Sometimes my whole life seems like a
I call on God.
Registered users dial 1-800.
It's almost dawn.
Robert Frost thought he was weary of
And took it out on the woodpile.
He would have put his ax right through that
BLOCK AND SAVE YOUR LOST CLUSTERS
BLOCK AND SAVE YOUR LOST CLUSTERS
Send for the nurse, that expert told me.
- 16 September 1991
It got so that on those daily visits of His,
I wasn't sure if I was a butterfly dreaming
Or if He was the butterfly,
Or if suddenly certain cortical cells
Representing rational functions
Had defiantly flung their larva stage
And gone fluttering rudderlessly
Testing out some new sky.
Where He had winged in from I couldn't be clear,
In spite of this spinning through sunny transparency.
Do butterflies break their heads about such issues?
What a whirling world for a while,
Caught in God's solar-energy smile.
- 4 February 1992
I'd like to take all the things that I really
With the perfect timing that I really should
Pack them together into a cannonball,
And roll it toward that overwhelming question.
At best, it would flatten the question.
People would say, I did a good thing.
And at worst, I'd feel lighter --
Lighter by one cannonball.
- 7 February 1992
Out on the street,
Flung open after sitting in that room,
I flipped over two or three cars
Just to see that they,
Like insects,
Could not get up off their backs.
Man, I was strong.
"This is Larry," I said.
"You sit in your rooms.
You sit in each other's brains.
You got your committee."
The street was quiet.
Still the birds on the phone wire slept.
With a last look into the furnace of the night,
I sat down,
Having, I thought, made my point.
The author once arrived late at night in front of the place where he was to stay, a spiritual center in Los Angeles's inner city. He noticed a powerfully-built but perhaps overwrought youth snapping the antennas off parked cars and yelling, "This is Larry! Come out and mess with me if you want," or words to that effect.
The wind is howling through forty-six splintered
The visibility is fine.
Having pushed around a broken bicycle for two of
Muscle tone is great.
Walt Whitman started out at thirty-seven in
Just think what my generation can do.
But hey, dancing child, what a matchless motion.
Don't I know you from somewhere?
Out of a thousand radiant horses you paint in
How many do you ever get to ride?
Three or four maybe, five or six:
Not more than that.
How many did Anne Frank ever get?
-- Probably none.
But once in a while you do,
And that's where the real question comes,
That is really the strangest thing.
So you wear that coat you imagined
Before that pair of bright eyes you imagined
In that place you imagined;
Everything worked.
(After much anxieties.)
Such a struggle.
Stay in your seats, ladies and gentlemen,
In a few moments is act seven million or so, scene
- 15 March 1992
Who are these people,
Clowning it up on CNN?
Whom the gods wish to destroy,
They will first make mad.
A land where only the bombs are smart.
Who made you queen for a day?
O my people,
Pursuing happiness for eleven score years,
Where did it get you?
Better go back to Philadelphia,
Play it again.
Where were you, Daddy Warbucks,
When that last chopper flew out of Saigon?
Only Prof. Henry could be found
To collect the Nobel Prize.
Keeping and bearing arms --
I also thought I was Davy Crockett --
You're not seven years old any more, brother.
You look pretty silly behind that toy bugle.
O my people.
- 12 November 1994
Like the water that was on the roof,
Like yesterday’s six o’clock news,
Like a shooting star.
Om shantih.
- 2 September 1995
Looking back on it all, I wonder
Why I took the trouble.
True for a while there were sunny meadows,
With wildflowers and other wild things,
Some words of praise, some picnics, and
Some soft sensitivities splashed on canvas or
But then rows of failure and columns of defeat,
Cockroach armies beneath, fume-blackened
The dreary winter of Taipei
And the stinking commuter tracks around Bombay.
There were joshua trees in the moonlight outside
A playful comment on humanity,
But the cold station like the Last Judgment of
And no one to explain these things,
No one to guide,
And to prove by his living and giving
That anything was worthwhile.
So sometimes I really wonder.
But at the end I always say,
"Maybe I should give it one more try --
"There might have been something there
* Videhiimánasa: a "mind without a body".
God is in the sky,
God is in the streams,
God is in the food we eat.
The same with disease.
As above, so below.
In the fillings of your teeth,
In your air conditioner,
Coming up through the ground
On a barefoot summer day.
Flying business class
In ingenious insects,
Precision-engineered bundles of want,
Themselves all business;
Up, down, back, forth,
Needing, caring, feeling
For your blood --
To harvest it, not to populate it,
Yet unremorseful if they do,
Driven by instinct.
Malaria, anthrax, rabies,
Aids, elephantiasis,
Scurvy, consumption,
Neurasthenia,
Hypertension, hypothermia,
Compound fracture.
Oh, there just isn't time to do everything.
What is your body?
If not a rundown playground
For behavior-problem kids.
"What's so bad about cancer?"
My college friend said,
Fishing for a book of matches.
"It's just another form of life."
Our universe is a big bang.
Big to us, maybe --
Within a bigger universe
At most just molecules released
Side by side with the more effective shrapnel
In another bus bombing
Read about on continents
That might meaningfully be called distant.
Yet genuinely,
As Che Guevara said of revolutionaries
(A riesgo de parecer ridiculo),
Guided by sentiments of Love.
- 16 September 1996
In March 1997 thirty-nine Heaven's Gate members suicided thinking that a spaceship traveling in the wake of the Hale-Bopp comet would carry their souls to a higher level of existence. (The outcome of their experiment was not mentioned in the police report.)
It's like we all need a good UFO once in a while.
U is for you, my love,
Blazing comet of my lost youth.
F is for fashion show,
Some effulgent stellar affair,
To which most are not invited.
And O is for optimistic,
Which these people certainly were.
I want to rejoice here, though,
That desperation is not at all dead:
Sweet chariots parked like a getaway car,
Hallucinations blowing through the head.
Ten thousand false Atlantises from now,
When these folks have reached the true,
Time Magazine will write it off,
"Jonestowngate II."
- 14 May 1997
On the occasion of an invitation to a high school reunion. At the school, a boys' prep school, five days a week began with a chapel service.
"Some ha'e meat, but canna eat,
And some would eat that want it,
But we ha'e meat, and we can eat,
So let the Lord be thankit."
And life's so sweet, but incomplete,
If lived for bread alone,
O camerados, O campers,
Spinning toward the sun.
Yes --
I remember the boys of those days.
There was Holden Caulfield, who saw through us
And Huckleberry Finn, who flowed only so far,
And Jim, invisible to most of us,
As much of the world still is.
A secure place in those days, with the
And Hotspur and Henry the Fourth.
And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge,
Dividing Gaul into three parts.
(Now the Gauls are divided into many parts,
Studying entropy in separate rooms.)
After the commencement party,
What floated to the top of the swimming pool?
As a boy Frank was an idealist.
This might take some time.
This might take some time.
In each closet an old blazer,
The pockets full of unpaid bills.
Shedding our skin.
Some more years passed.
(Eighty-six hands busy thirty-five years --
Have they cooked up anything true? Anything lovely?
With preachers like Hugh Hefner
Stirring the Methodist mix from Bell Buckle.
O camerados.)
"When you get out in the business world,
And when you get out past Aldebaran,
A few things more than that, searching in silence,
To only the remembered swish, swish
Of the moon we left behind,
Orbiting our abandoned planet.
Shedding.
May I have this dance?
I'm getting damn tired of you, Hornbeck.
And let us not be weary
For what doth the Lord require of thee
We thank Thee our Heavenly Father
We thank Thee our Heavenly Father
- 24 September 97
On a wave of God's thought,
Voltage surges my spine,
Crashes down nerveways,
Out through my fingers.
On one spinning dustspeck,
Dazzled folks watch the interplay --
Particles pulse
And colors convulse
Round that planet,
Conjured by them.
Riding the starways,
I go on always
Surfing the innernet.
- 24 April 98
It took me a while to find the place,
Shimmering in the air, with a freeway
A hillside not the only thing that's been
And suppose it had still all a-been there,
My Indian-head pennies with a
A few dead leaves to be dusted off my treehouse,
Wouldn't I have remembered now just what it was
That made me climb down one fitful afternoon,
Wouldn't it have started me out now
On one more cycle of boom and bust,
Disgust and wanderlust?
These things take time, however.
I might even come here again and again, as if
The world were not already full of that.
Sometimes there's nothing like a bulldozer
To widen one's tunnel, or clear away
A big rock-candy mountain that fills one's view.
Freeways can be ruthless, but at least
They get you there on time.
- 18 October 98