this is practically a good-bye

to all that's come before


the fever dreams

that were hallucinations or authentic visions


the holy lust the wild free sex

a desperate attempt to escape the self


the angels we imagined whispering to us

of lives we dared and didn't dare to survive


on some illuminated road of ecstasy and terror

that we thought showed us the face of God no mortal


could withstand...


well we lived to tell the tale

so that face wasn't the face of God


but only our grinning skulls of self

and tempted us back into our mortal dwindling flesh


and all we thought was enlightenment was an uneasy truce

between all we were and all we thought we should be


as if our limited human consciousness could begin

to comprehend the vastness of a creation


that encradled us as it does all black holes

and starbursts and black holes


those knots of being and not-being

that generate all the conditions to which we are subject...


good-bye to all our imaginings

our egos slowly burned away by ordeal and process


beyond anything we could imagine at all

the fact of the Ineffable so beyond fact we


could not sustain...



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