approaching shadow | fan ho. 1954.
The fiery sun of my passions evaporates the love lakes of my soul
Clouds my thoughts and reigns you into existence
As I take flight on bolts of lighting claiming chaos as my concubine and you as my me
I of the storm you of the sea we of the moon land of the free
What have I done to deserve this?
Am I happy?
Happiness is a mediocre sin and for a middle-class existence
I see through smiles and smell truth in the distance
Beyond one dimensional smiles and laughter lies our hereafter
Where tears echo laughter
You’d have to do math to divide a smile by a tear times fear equals mere truth
I simply delve in the air and if that’s the case
All I have to breath and all else will follow
That’s why drums are hollow
And I like drums drums are good but I can’t think straight
I lack the attention span to meditate
My attention spans galaxies here and now are immense
Seconds are secular, moments are mine
Self is illusion, music’s divine
Noosed by the strings of Jimi’s guitar I swing
Purple hazed pendulum hypnotizing the part of I that never dies
Look into my eyes are the windows of the soul
It’s fried chicken, collies and cornbread
It’s corn milk, flour, sour cream, eggs and oil
It’s the stolen blood of the earth, used to make cars run and kill the fish
Who, me? I play scales
The scales of dead fish of oil slicked seas
My sister blows wind through the hollows of fallen tress
And we are the echoes of eternity, echoes of eternity, echoes of eternity
Maybe you heard of us
We do rebirths, revokes and resurrections
We threw basement parties in pyramids
I left my tag on the wall
The beats would echo off the stone
And solidify into the form of light bulbs
Destined to light of the heads of future generations
They’re releasing it up in the form of ohm
Maybe you heard of us
If not then you must be trying to hear us
And in such cases we can’t be heard
We remain in the darkness unseen
In the center of unpeeled bananas we exist uncolored by perception
Clothed to the naked eye,
Five senses cannot sense the fact of our existence
And that’s the only fact, in fact there are no facts
Fax me a fact and I’ll telegram, I’ll hologram, I’ll telephone
The son of man and tell him he is done
Leave a message on his answering machine telling him there are none
God and I are one
Times moon, times star, times sun
The factor is me, you remember me
I slung amethyst rocks on Saturn blocks
Til I got caught up by earthling cops
They wanted me for their army or whatever
Picture me, I swirl like the wind tempting tomorrow to be today
Tip-toeing the fine line between everything and everything else
I am simply Saturn swirling sevenths through sooth
The sole living heir of air and I, and, and all else follows
Reverberating the space inside of drum hollows
Packaging bottles and chips and tomorrow
Then sold to the highest nigga
I swing from the tallest tree
Lynched by the lowest branches of me
Praying that my physical will set me free
‘Cause I’m afraid that all else is vanity
Mere language is profanity
I’d rather hum
Or have my soul tattooed to my tongue
And let the scriptures be sung
In gibberish as words be simple fish in my soulquarium
And intellect can’t swim
So I stopped combing my mind so my thoughts could lock
I’m tired of trying to understand
Perceptions are mangled matted and knotted anyway
Life is more than what meets the eye and I
So elevate I to the third and even that shit seems absurb
And your thoughts leave you third eyesolated
No man is an island but I often feel alone
So I find peace through
Ohm
— W.H. Auden, In Sickness And In Health
— Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
That’s how my heart is, I thought –
It lies coiled up inside of me, asleep,
then it springs out and shocks me
with all of its muchness.
Which lingers,
and loves for no reason.
— Tony Hoagland, from “Muchness”
