N  a  p a  l  m     H  e  a  l  t  h     S  p  a  :     R  e  p  o  r  t     2  0  0  7

 

 

JIM COHN

 

 

My Video Game

for Andy Clausen

 

In my video game, Allen Ginsberg calms police

Into putting away nightsticks,

Chickadees peck at the windows of Muslim bakeries,

Truth-bound monk sits years on end,

A woman opens up an orphanage

Where trees stand quiet once again.

 

In my video game, the leaves are sixty colors.

We free ourselves from these lifetimes

Of search and destroy, securing the nation,

Locking down cities, locking down the populace

With sacrilege and blasphemy

Though the gods are everywhere.

 

Cotati, CA

3 January 2005

 

 

 

 

The Great Magician

for David Cope

 

He found himself in a flophouse,

Living out of old suitcase,

Threadbare suit

 

Over hulking frame.

His lama had told him

To kill his enemies

 

If he truly wanted the teachings.

So he killed the enemies

Of his lama.

 

Bring them back to life

And I will give you

Instruction, the lama told him

 

What happened to him

Was hardly unusual.

Still it contained

 

Something deeper,

More uncertain

Than what is known.

 

He built mountain towers

Only to return the stones

To where he’d found them.

 

Live one day in this manner

You awaken others

For hundreds of years.

 

22 January 2007

 

 

 

Home Town Visitation

for Mooka Rennick

 

The hills are very subtle here.

The ground is very hard.

The soil is very black.

 

I’m driving past a bar

Where I burned so many brain cells

I think I see them in a pile

 

Right off by the Budweiser sign––

A pile of brain cells

Floating like fireflies.

 

24 February 2007

 

 

 

Coloring The Gongs

for Anne Waldman again

 

Anne––

Isabella has been pencil coloring the gongs in my copy of your Structure Of The World Compared To A Bubble. She colored the gongs in the lower left hand quadrant of the Diamond World yellow. That was all she did with that page. She colored more gongs some red some blue. The red ones were aspiring action. The blue––ritzy coastal areas & urban abandoned houses. She was coloring the gongs black when no one said death is part of love part of a relationship part of the empty throne part of a helpful dream. The inherent nature of all phenomena is pure. light hanging on cracking branch over the abyss that sounds like awe letting go beyond all the Jealous Hell Gods all the weariness of wanting anything. She colored the gongs green while someone was releasing classified military information someone was saying the source of pink oil barrels from other countries is the march of armageddons caught in the ten thousand hands made visible to save the world. She colored the gongs white empty of manipulation, empty of too much industrial information never enough wrathful deities never enough first arisings, never enough Strange Liberties In Whom The Hopes Of The World Are Joined those passages about fables of identity being only “a representation that interrupts itself.” She was sent as a messenger to the fur-covered human female living at the center of the universe. One of her duties was to combat the slave trade. Left on an uninhabited planet, with only the supplies she could carry, her ordeal was shifting among worlds, losing all she possessed each time.

 

4 March 2007