When is there truth in the cliché of art reflecting life reflecting art? I don’t find that Life reflects Art except when it is at its most brilliant or grotesque.

Art is the transcendent communication of essential, intangible human truths. Real Life is a sideshow by comparison to one note of a beautiful symphony, or one word of the most heartfelt poem. Nietzche wanted us all to be artists of life by embracing our own elemental passions and power. Indeed it is in those rare moments of immediacy and fluid energy; whether I experience them as sexual, intellectual or spiritual, that I live, rather than just existing. Wherever I go, and whatever I do I work to create or promote that same energy. Sometimes it happens, more often than not, fleetingly or not at all. The definitive factor is that when it comes, it feels nothing like work at all. Philosophically is this because it is when we are most natural? If one pictures the Universe as a single unity, a continuum of energy so unfathomably vast that all of our consciousnesses are just elements of its whole, then can we consider a new paradigm of fulfilment beyond achievement. The reason that all of the hard work and material accumulation in the world can’t make us happy is because those models of behaviour and reward mistake peripheral accoutrements of being as being itself, rather than hollow, trivial options in artificial games. They can amuse and distract but never make one whole. This is probably all sounding dangerously religious. I see all of those structures as hollow in precisely the same fashion. They provide some people happiness some of the time whilst giving countless others the tools to ensure their own disappointment and suffering.

The one thing I perceive to always give the ‘individual’ that sense of presence to and place within the universe is paradoxically the expression of ‘self’ that is true Art is only defined in the experience of the creator or beholder (often the same person). That is why I love music and that is why I want to write.

Poem (Today)

Glass balloon
Floats sparkling in the angle of these five surfaces
Unreal, in relief
An obvious set-piece
Too ridiculous to concieve
From niave reclining
Lime-tinged eyes deciding
The constitution of right and exact
Spillin gliquid over paper
Achieves something
The misss brings back the whir and tick
The end light machine,
The banal, coma inducing
Predictable elements of solitude
At this hour
The misunderstandings and kisses
The blinks and the numbers
The film within film
Within the theatre of farce and absurd opportunity
That takes the weekend off.

POEM- Today , July 2007

The mind is flesh
Every action is an idea
Waiting for the break-through
Waiting on the realisation
A child bereft of titles
Overflowing with dreams
Building her own myths
Conquering Kingoms
Storming citadels
Before the citadel becomes her chattel
Before the kingdom came to rest on her shoulders
8 Hours a day and more

Dreams and wishes
Are humanitie's gift to itself
No charity could ever provide
Gray Matter is inappropriate
Technicolor mind is what
Resides within her
and paints beautiful action
Infusing every second
Overflowing every first.

Poem- November 2006

Teach this
Centrifrugral
Centred
Past a matrix
Energy connected
Interwoven
Predated
High-Strung or Unified
Stoned or Crucified
Resurrected To address my people
Take ownership of our life
No timelimes
Clocks are mobeious
No correct data no erroneous
Got this bathos
as falsness
still takes over me
erosion conditioned
free radicals speed decay
Living
Past existence
Holistic
Ghosts spat forth from the unamused machine
What is this? Is this it?
Amind questioning itself goes mystic
Or mythic
Classical
Like Dead Cultures
Or tastes on sabbatical
Is it practical
Or is it visionary?
Visions cloud Visions and
Lucidity is temporary
Could you be the very
distillation of essence?
Smug in purity
Or is that projection
or reflection of a shallow corner of our unity
Pooled
leaching
reality drain
indecent
impeaching
false prophecy
we nuture seeds and attempt the impossible like venetians
These secretions adrenal trigger incidents sequential
No sequels
Just people
No Sequels
Just People.

The Vallejo Summit

Notes from a 1967 summit between Alan Watts. Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder on the Vallejo Houseboat. At the height of the psychadelic era, these hugely influential thinkers and artists shoot the breeze on the 'lesiure' society, population control, the divine roots of resistance and many other topics. A lot of ground is covered here, and, amongst the wayward ramblings and proclamations, some marvellous insights from genuine visionaries.

http://www.vallejo.to/articles/summit_pt1.htm

http://www.vallejo.to/articles/summit_pt2.htm

http://www.vallejo.to/articles/summit_pt3.htm

31st May 2007

Caffeine sweats and fevered imagination
Of a future not at the mercy of
The universe’s diminutive legislation
Subject to eternal vigilance
His pound of flesh, of self,
In exchange for fleshy gross returns, nightly
Is gladly given.

Pulse Pushes Blood
To its natural destinations
Enriching and depriving
Rushing through his extremities
To ebb ashamedly back.

Stimulants External and cognitive
Live together in the senses
Blood Pulse pushing ideas
Through his skin
Flooding out to give flesh life.

Poem (Written small hours of May 5th 2007)

A coming of age
No rituals
As far as we could see
Just gifts and tension
Anxiety and the largest small talk
Orbiting what rests snugly below
Rotating
And gently revealing itself through reflected
Luminescence
Your presence
Permanently tattoos the field

Paradigms are shifted
Belief Systems fall
The tattoo remains
Branded on our imprinted letterhead
Scorched onto our psyche
Stitched into the uniform of my grey matter

Bright, jagged
Kinetic energy purporting to stay static
The gesture emphatic
Majesterially splendid
And yet so modest in their
Lack of malice
No rituals
But raise a chalice
Raise a gourd
Break a barrel
Break Bread and grow