One Atom Away

One atom away,
toward the Invisible City,
where spiraling minarets in the moonlit hell shine,
and the night like a liar
spins fire and spine,
the feathered serpent
fled; lured in delirium
through the Elemental Spires,
through Shangri La
and Sheol,
cloaked in a quicksilver shawl,
crawling snakelike through kingdoms of
wisdom’s desire,

to the labyrinth of Theory, inspired and
singing a rhythmless song, curving in Silence
as Time feeds the souls of her long dead Lovers;
She will live. One atom away,
in the days when Animals
speak codes and the city
trembles in it’s slumbering roads

and a comitragic galactic act of
auto catalytic
nodes,
shocked by mystic stigmata,
harmonizes the blood vine of Gaia,

Eternal modalities rise. A molecule
of angels breath
wakes the white whale weeping,
the Old Oak shrugging,
the rainbow cooking Thunder,
and the Anointed One anoints the One
from the fountain of the flaming Flood.

The sacrificial bull
lives forever on the Altar; it’s nostrils
flush in fury and sulfur; burning
Anti matter cherub,
one atom away,
swirling in the vortex of science;

the spidery iris
erupts in kaleidoscopic skin,
webbing ebbing flows in unfrozen flowers.
Deep in the desert, bones march solemn

through dream vacant hours,
beating drums in the darkening dawn
of heroes maddened by the long

Shadows risen on the necromancer’s tongue;
the star glows blue as a lily;
For nine years, the earth will shake--
it’s heart grown empty and silent, slaking
it’s thirst on the strange
light of the eyes of the dead.

An Orphan will write the Word
on the skin of an angel
and time will fold
into an apparition;
one atom away,
a dream starved
deity agrees.

The trees take root in the sacred soil;
time runs backward,
the oceans boil.
Magic is unleashed in samsara’s mass.

The upraised serpent pulses an urgent nocturne
in Freedom’s heart,
a song beyond song
crashing in the Queen’s eggshell ears.
The Ground burns;
a glassy mandala, a talking salamander

fixes it’s gaze behind a mask.
Bitterness;
broken songs. The rain weeps, a widow’s tears.
The madman in his simplicity
wakes the Leviathan; a yellow eye rolls
across the bottomless void,
nightshade is all it needs.

Under the dream, a slipstream of Martyrs ;
Pisces swallows the moon in a
moveable feast. One atom away,
The lovers descend toward heaven,
so as not to awaken the behemoth.

Retrograde, the flowers fall, one by one
into slumber; hibernations of love made
manifest by invisible fingers
drumming up dreams. Exchanging
flesh for the liquid fire,

the orchid nests
in forgotten symbols; a tangled iron mouth that bleeds
in rust and chance, as a harlequin quarrels
with a raven. One atom away
the silence erupts like disease; the symphony
is brought to it’s knees by a maestro
forged in Vulcan’s black smithy.


Holding red flowers, the Queen manifests in the
heart of the Theater.
Her crown mirrors the Wheel.
A terrible seizure of tragedy;
the alien Hierophant
posits salient rage.

Nigh is the night of the philosopher-sage, made
fruitless by the coil of Sin; his ghastly
image is splayed on the page of Forbidden Arts;
He rises like Lazarus on the sea foam, tongue
galloping over each syllable. A triumphant horn
sounds across the chasm;

One atom away,
the serpent is slain;
the memory echoes, caustic, in
the ninth heart of Heaven.
Sanguine angels languishing with Fate;
the future state of free will falling,
a black and white void

pregnant with the embryo of light. The fall
of selfless flesh through the karmic wheel,
the marriage of sweet flesh to steel, one atom away,
destiny radiating, creating the
circle of vines.

The languid wine
of the silver spine, an emerald Eden one
atom away. The feathered serpent’s
urgent dance, the ghostly trance of the ballet
of chance. Creation ex nihilo; billowing
plumes of ammonia and flame,
shocked

by brilliant bones full of butterflied eyes.
One atom away the dragons
rise, an undisguised Lie of lightning and sticks
tricked into living.
Howling, ancient faces born in
the mud have found their mouths full of vowels;
blackened like the winter sun,

the acid rises from the heretics flame into
something we have not yet named.
It is there,
one atom away,
the executioner’s chair is waiting and
the trinity is squared,
like a crucifix rising
on a mountain of embers,

a flickering pentacle of impressions remembered.
One stumbles from stone to stone,
as the stars transmute a changeling’s skull,
and an exorcists hand
reaches through the ashes.

On golden feet, one atom away, the golem
dances; a carnival of slapstick horror,
as the Elemental City
corrodes in broken laws.
Upon the husk of nursery rhymes
suckling the bloody rebellion at

the Gates of Cerebrus, the golem throws
it’s magic stones,
in a requiem for the living word.
And the anti matter cherub

permutates through a spectrum of spirit,
chimeras of fate preordained by free will.
It is eternity ending here, one atom away,
on the dust of this roiling shore of bones.

the minotaur, in an urgent trauma
has found his eyes rolling like dice
as the aeons lap at the wounds in his breast, fulfilling
each prophesy with promises foreshadowed
by a crystal skull in the vampirical garden,

the voodoo of the starry graveyard,
a labyrinth vibrating with the breath
of the all-suffering God. One, one atom away,
amongst the numbered
stars did surrender to the sacrifice,
walking, crossed the schism, fishlike,

shapeshifting in an empty tomb,
dead to the dead. Casting no stone before
the feet of a whore, as if it mattered to matter itself.
On this scale, we balance uncertain instincts
with the urgency of a Poet’s dreams. In the shadow
and the shade

the myth is our charade,
face and senses grown robotic, as the
lotus blooming
in synaptic rapture
captures exotic histories in
the atoms of a dream.
And numbers drum up distant thunder;
the art of damning
the world into some impossible heaven.

It is there, the lips break open
like a bonfire,
ancient astronauts strumming strings
howling paean to the perfect rhyme
of the milky spine of
light’s final night.
One atom away,

Fabled creatures gathered
on brooms and magic carpets
prepare for the magician
to paint
the Nth dimension
with a palette of winds
driven across the chameleon skin
of the great invisibility.

A square of blue, trapezium yellow
the carnival purple, a choir of reds,
an ego shaped surface of green.
One atom away
Geometries erupt,
ghastly architectures drift lost and found,

tantalizing still frame flora and fauna
hovering on horizons of
glittering Elemental Spires, skyscraping smooth lines
risen in the black and white Shibboleth of Time,
in Shangri La and Sheol,
in Nirvana and Gehenna,
each new gravity propagating through the
weight of the mutant soul, featherlike
spinning
out of control


into Maya; the elusive delusion of
an old woman’s weather beaten
face erasing itself
as a fish in the pond unwinds.
Farewell to flesh; the Dali clock of skin,
a hyperspace where the chaos chases

an ecstatic synchronicity of
the calculi of
chrysalis
One,
One atom away.

the Djinn

Coming or going,
Day or night,
You must just strive to
Face the incomprehensible.
- Daito (1282-1334)


Under the Colonels gaze,
twisting silver wire for
the safety of the free world,
I discovered in my American blood
an addictive poison; namely--
the spirit of wisdom. She
rushed in like a whore, leading
me through the city streets,
lured by lingerie, perfume, and
a Sybil's gaze.
As a cripple, she invited me to walk
across the burning coal. In my
leprous flesh, she dressed me
in the finest clothes, and dared
me to pirouette on the funhouse
floor. In the hurricane eye,
she quieted my fears by
pronouncing me dead to the world,
on K street where the sugar tastes
like the sacred heart. Riddled by
her logical gaze, I became obsessed
with the formal ecstasies of man.
Religion was the antidote to everything.

And the Colonels in their shiny silver
and blue invoked the Saint
of Apotheosis. Philosophies were born
on the Mountain; we traveled through
Mosaic and Christian law, daily
observing magic eagles rising from the smoke
in our pipes. I grew wild, barbaric,
eating blueberries in a Russian dawn.
Wisdom nursed my temperament with
the promise of retroactive salvation,
the kind bestowed on thieves. I began
to explore the language of the Crucifixion.
And it was beautiful. One evening
when the sorcery of isolation was strong
enough to kill a man, I laughed myself
into a curious exile. The waitress,
acting as Sophia---judged me with her
glance; I was Judas, a synchronistic chrysalis.


Transubstantiation was the clue; the
alchemy of the word. I practiced
neologisms on the ears of dying bluesmen.
The word became manifest in strange
occurrence; grasshoppers followed
me everywhere. I gave birth to highly
differentiated monsters in the cool gloom
of a waiting room. Once, I caused an eclipse
by saying my mothers name backwards to
a gypsy descended from elves. The
tetragammatron became my obsession;
I was certain it was coded in my DNA. The
neologos; Socrates died for this. The green
tongue of magic bloomed in my mouth.
Rainbows followed me into dusk across the
sun drenched rooftops. I placed
chameleons on mirrors. I summoned Houdini
in a séance, saying “Mariana wiccicana soefulteo
marilla willici.” And the phantom audience
applauded through the dark night of the soul.
The alchemy of the word. And then
one night, many syllables into a magic spell,
the sky erupted in a fiery
Djinn.

The Orphan of Rhyme

her eyes bulged like the syllables
of some unspoken word,
and as she placed her tea
cup on the table, her fists trembled
like mathematical curves.

A quicksilver crush
of fluttering luck dust,
two wild orphans,
in the gloomy blue room.

Truth ululates, swirls
in a dolphin’s brain,
amphibious universes
slicking stained glass.

her mouth was a funnel cloud
hovering inside a carnival of rain.

Night slicked back it’s shiny black hair,
and rippled in a blitz of glitz, the lost
tribes of fluorescent reptilians

fluttering like black holes where the humans
had been. An anti
particle of crucifix dripped like a wave;

it was Twenty Three Skidoo
in the ghost lands of dusk.

Twenty Three Skidoo

As the rainbow spilled
on the veins of the blue vine,
the scarab sang to a pear.
Fairy bell petals swelled
as the genie awoke,
with lightning asleep in it’s hair,
dreaming of fluttering moon dust
in the milk of the hallucinatory sky.

Alive on evil, a livid devil lived in the division of seasons...

And the scarab, speaking to the rain said:
”Onnabronaron, kuntunthurnuk.”
While curious geometries jazzed
in the liquid of her heart.
Tripping through the rippling roses,
the starling found earth in it’s beak.

In a prism of pyramids, vampires
spiralled towards the sun. It was as if
the night was eating itself
in a flash back of Original Sin.

the wings of a green skinned stranger,
swirling to life above the mud.

Zen

To drink up the ocean and turn a mountain
Upside down is an ordinary affair for a Zennist.
Zen seekers should sit on the site of universal
Enlightenment right in the midst of all the thorny
Situations in life,
And recognize their original face while mixing
With the ordinary world.

- Huanglong

Startled

a fiery dream born
bough like a crown
of imaginary numbers
wrapped around
the laughing Astronaut’s forehead,

by the wild primes of multiplicity,
an anarchy of equations
X and Y, rioting in the
Springtime Sun.

where it all began-
word 111 on the page of a book;
a startled look in the mirror,
two atoms trapped on the
windowpane.

This vertebrate engine
gargantuan, climbing Christlike through
backbones like stairways,
the Grand Central Station of a
cluster of nerves,

the brain an alchemist’s prison
of impressionism, transmuting
memory to clay

And somewhere it ends;
a long sulking
swallow,
swirling into the soil, disappearing
into Time

as if.

The One Campaign

They're not asking for your money. All they are asking for is your name.



"a tsunami a month." That's about how many people die preventable deaths in Africa day in and day out. Every month, Africa loses 160,000 people to disease and other effects of extreme poverty.

So if more people in Africa have died since the tsunami hit than died in the tsunami itself, why haven't we all put the same kind of effort into poverty relief as we have into tsunami relief? The answer is simple: The tsunami replayed on our televisions every night for a month while the people of Africa have continued to suffer in silence. The crisis in Africa has gone on for years, but it is out of our American sight and out of our American mind.


The One Campaign

“WE BELIEVE that in the best American tradition of helping others help themselves, now is the time to join with other countries in a historic pact for compassion and justice to help the poorest people of the world overcome AIDS and extreme poverty. WE RECOGNIZE that a pact including such measures as fair trade, debt relief, fighting corruption and directing additional resources for basic needs – education, health, clean water, food, and care for orphans – would transform the futures and hopes of an entire generation in the poorest countries, at a cost equal to just one percent more of the US budget. WE COMMIT ourselves - one person, one voice, one vote at a time - to make a better, safer world for all.”


The One Campaign

Chaos in the Permutation

the graffiti slick blitzkrieg of glitzy
cities rippling with wild poetic orphans,
ghost tribes whose bioluminescent hair sprouts
from reptilian hindbrains coiled in dreamborn helix
of night terrors riding shotgun underneath a sea
of stars cut loose from their moorings.
A human, caught in a crush of wild litter as silent
helicopters thwap over thresholds.
Gargantuan nocturnal gatherings burning with
attention deficit languages
fluttering across a sky full of miniature
black holes that seethe with the spirit of decaying
anonymity. Ululating universes dreamt in cloned
dolphin brains, translated by amphibious beings
from the tenth dimension, carving polygonal shadows from the
dark flesh of night, illuminated by auroras of spacelike-timelike
faces. An angel dancing on the feathers
of a ruby throated thundercloud, hovering inside
spring’s carnival of rain. Night carving an anti
particle of crucifix as all chance and circumstance
evolves into one seething uncertainty. The ocean
giving birth to a blue eyed whale as
the Eldest wave crashes
into the seashell of her ear

for Mozart

from the ashes,
a reminder of the song;
a twinkling sprig in E,
rondo alla turca;

a tongue dripping
with honey over the
fire of history, sizzling
with the adamant diamond

of heaven’s white flower;
this musical hour,
andante,
a flute,

twittering, talking
the Phoenix at Zenith,
Mozart gone mad
with Mathematical sadness,

crystals of light at the
birth of a pearl,
listening for the sun
to arrive in a hearse.

Gravity's Rainbow

Kirghiz Light

"In the ancient tales it is told...that a land far distant
Is the place of the Kirghiz Light.... It comes as the Kirghiz Light--There is no other way to know It.... The flash of Its light is blindness .... And a man cannot be the same
After seeing the Kirghiz Light.... For the Kirghiz Light took my eyes

Now I sense all Earth like a baby....It is north, for a six-day ride....And if you have passed without danger

The place of the black rock will find you....But if you would not be born

Then stay with your warm red fire....And the Light will never find you, And your heart will grow heavy with age .... "

What Happens Next?

Diet Update

Ok, I've been on the Atkins Lifestyle Change Diet for around 16 days and have lost.....


12 Pounds!


Not bad, eh? Only 78 pounds to go!


wish me luck,
KH

Did she just say....

"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building. " --Ann Coulter.

and:

"Last October, two liberals responded to my speech at the University of Arizona — during question and answer, no less — by charging the stage and throwing two pies at me from a few yards away....Unfortunately for them, Republican men don't react favorably to two "Deliverance" boys trying to sucker-punch a 110-pound female in a skirt and heels. The geniuses ended up with bloody noses and broken bones. " --- Ann Coulter.

Black Gold.

The next time you complain about gas prices in Podunk, Texas, consider this quote from Baghdad Burning.


"The situation seems to be deteriorating daily. To brief you on a few things: Electricity is lousy. Many areas are on the damned 2 hours by 4 hours schedule and there are other areas that are completely in the dark- like A'adhamiya. The problem is that we're not getting much generator electricity because fuel has become such a big problem. People have to wait in line overnight now to fill up the car. It's a mystery. It really is. There was never such a gasoline crisis as the one we're facing now. We're an oil country and yet there isn't enough gasoline to go around...

Oh don't get me wrong- the governmental people have gasoline (they have special gas stations where there aren't all these annoying people, rubbing their hands with cold and cursing the Americans to the skies)... The Americans have gasoline. The militias get gasoline. It's the people who don't have it. We can sometimes get black-market gasoline but the liter costs around 1250 Iraqi Dinars which is almost $1- compare this to the old price of around 5 cents. It costs almost 50,000 Iraqi Dinars to fill up the generator so that it works for a few hours and then the cost isn't so much the problem as just getting decent gasoline is. So we have to do without electricity most of the day."

an August night with no electricity in Iraq

Hi,

just a reminder: there's a war going on.

Here is the Blog that you should be reading:

Baghdad Burning

What makes a good poem?

the question on the Yahoo poetry group was this: "What makes a good poem?"

Here is my response.


Imagine using tuning forks and a hummingbirds beak to perform brain surgery on a robotic vampire bat in a translucent egg shaped UFO that has landed in the Amazon river basin during a magnitude 9.0 earthquake. Your goal is to manipulate the neurons of the bat so that henceforth, it will be able to sing Opera. The only light you have is from a jar of fireflies.

Good poetry is as interesting to read as it was to write. It is like the speech that falls off angels' tongues as they descend into hell. It is the disease that cures itself by self propagating through a tent of faith healers. It manufactures multidimensional universes one atom every thousand years only to set them on love as if it was fire. It should be as exact as it is difficult ---- the field that refuses to yield until a Farmer stumbles on a lost iron key and unlocks the DNA of it's soul.

A good poem walks the walk and talks The Talk, whether it be a eulogy for a hamster or an epic poem about the tenth circle of hell. It tangos on a trembling tongue, it licks a debutante's ears, it trembles on a clown's swollen lip, it winks like a punch blackened eye. A good poem is like a wedding of a hermaphrodite groom to an androgynous bride. It pronounces itself man and wife just microseconds before the jury pronounces it's verdict of guilty. And then it hangs on the gallows like your oldest ancestor.

A good poem should express what we all know: the universe is a strange, mysterious place, and the human voice- whether it be written or spoken, sung or burped--- is our greatest tool against all oppressions, and toward all freedoms.

April

Bush Country

A statistic is worth a thousand words. Here's a summation of where Texas ranked nationally on social issues under the Governorship of George Bush.


Gotta love it.


Texas Rankings Under Bush: Do you Want Some of This?

The "Education" Governor of Texas


Statistic: Texas Ranks:

Teacher salaries at beginning of 1st term 36
Teacher salaries at beginning of 2nd term 38
% Change in Average Salaries 1989-99 constant $ -1.1%
Teacher salaries plus benefits 50



High school completion rate 48
SAT scores - 1996 combined math & verbal: 995 44
SAT scores - 1997 combined math & verbal: 995 45
SAT scores - 1998 combined math & verbal: 995 44



Bush "Family Values" in Texas


Highest number of children living in poverty 2
Highest number of children without health insurance 2
Highest % of children without health insurance 1
Highest % of poor working parents without insurance 1
Highest % of population without health insurance 2
Highest number of people stripped of Medicare benefits 1
Highest teen birth rate 5
Per capita funding for public health 48
Delivery of social services 47
Mothers receiving prenatal care 45
Child support collections 45


Number of executions 1


Teen smoking - down nationally, flat in Texas
Teen drug use - down nationally, up 30% in Texas w/ Bush



Pollution in Texas

Pollution released by manufacturing plants 1
Pollution by industrial plants in violation of Clean Air Act 1
Greenhouse gas emissions 1



Quality of Life in Texas

Spending for parks and recreation 48
Spending for the arts 48
Public libraries and branches 46
Spending for the environment 49
Best place to raise children 48



Affordable Housing 48
Home ownership 44
Highest homes insurance rates in the nation 1
Spending for police protection 47

It's ALIVE

experimenting with the template, trying to implement a three column page. Having difficulties in internet explorer.

Starfall

Here's a section of one of my poems:


the First wave, Mercurial,
swathes of sun drunk
silver pearls, frothy eyelashes of
an ocean, twinkling
in a disappearing crystal ball
where life's myriad faces effloresced ,
inspiring innocence
as the angel of the bottomless void
quenched the thirst of the lilies of the field
with time,

the spirit,
self organizing tempests of white tapestries of rain,
with quasars of emotion in a carnival mask
of coalescent shadows, mysteries of the two waves
where a witch bird from Venus, splitting the seam with it's beak,
gave fast pursuit
across the sapphire oasis
for the eggs in your belly,

an incubating underworld,
three waves of raging mirage
on the cave pocked shores
of a fevered Grecian reef
of scarlet corals growing wildly in the
lacunae, with empathic neon anemone
wrapped around a sailors borrowed skull, toward
the place of the Unreal symbols
where even Gilgamesh once trembled like
a severed ear,

While Mars, a heartbeat pulsed in
the kinetic aura of a fourth wave lull, with knotted sea
vines pyramiding in a heliotropic abyss,
chancing the wisdom that love itself
is a reversal of the void,
and the helix turning,
a serpentine valentine
of rivers run against
all gravity and
time,

and The Triple Faced Queen, once
an elfish wish bringer, calling to the fifth wave
with the red eyed giant in the empty house,
as messages from the unwritten
book were written on her endless skin
by history's great
sadness,
chased down a golden sphere in glowing forest
full of iridescent Lucifers where angler fish
and others dwell;

in the sixth wave, a glissando of tides
crestfallen, and wise to the moon lit death of Ophelia,
who's tears were falling stars for the
dolphins of the liquid night, her love gone silent
in Saturnalia
with her silken purse full of lost iron keys and
spiny sea urchins, and in that moment,
a metaphor
slipped into the
sky of uncountable worlds;

As above, so below, the
coelacanth sang, wordless
in the white hot foamy static as sailfish
flashed in the seven waves, a Uranian nursery of souls
and the ocean floor
rehearsed infinity,
as messianic eyeballs surfaced
in the hypnotizing zero-dom of watery dawn,

and during the seductions of this delirious passage,
through the phantasmagoric allegory of the eighth wave,
called Atlantis
where seahorses rode gallant
through cities of nautilus shell,
in the aquatic fable of the Neptunian night
each turquoise flower splashing in
subterranean bliss, a many worlds
where Unicorns speak in the
language of birds,

one day, in imitation of the Christ, you rode
across the water of the nine waves and in an underwater cave,
you prayed for magic;
and thousands of heartbeats away
jungle lungs gathered in the many worlds,
and an eye gave birth to a plutonic
flock of photons
that flew

through the freedom of patternlessness;
Visions of one hundred million
angels swarming around a maternal womb; moons
where great Saints sit meditating on the swirling
histories of man, still points where the universe itself
invokes the salvation instinct,
perfectly flowered eyes blooming beyond breath
beyond the death of all living beings, in the many worlds,
out beyond the static mass of mountains, the prairies,
the glistening lilies of the field, the yielding
nightmarish oceans, the empty soul of God;

and it was then, you found yourself in
infinite incarnations
standing on an myriad of
of an infinite number of
washing waves,
so alive and unwilling to die,
with a ray of light shining
in the many worlds,
the many worlds of
the One World
of
your
eye.

Zen

A leaf of a boat drifts across the
Endless expanse of water,
Lifting and dancing the oars
To a different melody now.
Clouds on the mountain,
Moon over the sea:
All tossed away;
This done, Zhuang Zhou’s butterfly dream
Will last forever.

- Miaozong (1095-1170)

The Psych Ward

Ok, so I visited my friend in the psych ward. She was listless and unresponsive most of the time. When she did speak, it was random and chaotic sentences, addressed to the visitors at the table next to us. She's been in the hospital for almost eight months.

We met at that State Hospital during my own third episode. That's what they call it--- an episode. It's a strange word to use.

Yes, I am considered mentally ill. I prefer to say I am a cognitive variant.

It's a long story, for me, as it usually is for anyone. There were indications all the way back to the age of twelve or so, but I wasn't diagnosed until April of 1995 when I was 27.

I consider myself fully on the road to recovery, now-- after ten years of dealing with a psychosis--- I have found a medication that seems to balance out my brain chemistry and prevents maybe
75% of the delusions and perceptual issues that I experienced.

And what a long strange trip it's been, these ten years of being diagnosed.

Mental illness is insipid-- starts out slowly at first. Little variations in perception and cognition express themselves as quirkiness, and until the psychotic break occurs, most people don't think twice about the eccentricities of character that the burdgeoning psychotic displays.

So it was with me.

The peak experiences I've had have been tremendous. Delusions involving the CIA, the FBI, Interpol, the NSA, Illuminati, Masons, local police, God, Angels, Demons, Aliens --- I've run the gauntlet when it comes to these experiences.

And I have experienced the hallucinatory effects of altered brain chemistry as well.

Black seams, like black holes, rippling through suburbia.

Giant blue super heroes shaped like muscular bubbles racing down the street.

Thousands of number sevens, shining golden in the easter morning sky...

A strange creature --- call it a bee owl --- escaping from a window in my stomach.

Being attacked by a bat on Shakespeare's birthday, during a thunderstorm.

Strange days indeed.

I do not seek to glorify the psychotic condition, but let me say that sometimes it is an exuberant sensation to be alive in a magical universe full of such mysterious dimensions.

To this day, quite stubbornly, I insist that the Universe is much more dynamic than the Doctors and current science allow.

To this day, I will not deny some of the more bizarre notions and concepts that have occured to me during my "illness".

My only regret is the paranoia that I experienced. It still comes and goes. But to paraphrase someone--- "you'd be crazy not to be paranoid in times like these."

Paranoia is the worst sensation one can endure. Imagine that you are a gazelle in a field full of lions. The chemical fear --- the very real, chemical fear --- that you would experience would permeate every ounce of your being and disrupt every moment with a strange and almost glorious sensation of morbidity and death.

I've been there, for extended periods. Whatever paranoia is, it is not something to be toyed with. It is almost a SKILL, such as good manual dexterity. To survive paranoia one must perfect it, turn it into an art.

As Tom Robbins says "Those people who are following you-- consider them talent scouts from a transdimensional Hollywood."

*************************************************

A young John Paul II.

After Midnight

ah. the wee small hours of the morning...

nothing to do; the streets are quiet and haunted by the violence of the day. I wish I could be out walking around downtown, but realize that NOBODY walks around this downtown this late at night. Sad but true.

I'm craving a burger, but will resist.

Today, my friend -- let's call her Elle -- who is at the State Hospital called. She's been in this hospital for almost eight months--- it's a psychiatric ward. I will go visit with her tomorrow, probably.