8

This was explained
away quite easily
at the time as just
another kind of schism.
Inside his mind a ribbon
of time unfurled,
An underlying truth
incomprehensible in words
yet overwhelmingly
existent, broke him
through the boundaries
of infinite awareness;
However being observed
those who would observe
him read this with skepticism
and, ironically superstition;
Primed to interpret such
behavior signified madness;
Lumps of matter others
lay claim to know better
than spirit knows itself,
Acting no longer like a
personality constructed
by society but in its
cosmic incarnation, well—
that is simply a sick mind
disassociated from reality—

9

And, that way we are
conditioned towards
fanaticism on one hand,
rationality on the other—
each glares over its reflection
Obscuring incomplete images,
Clouding everything’s
               interdependence;
Each feeds into the other’s
               negative energies
And sustains this perception
               of duality,
This deterministic, binary
               war universe
all of us are conned
               into inhabiting,
under full compliance
               with its laws
Convinced they are
               unchangeable;
Kept vigilant in crusades
               against
other people. As such
the awakened youth,
viewed darkly through
               the lens
our systematic programing
colors with its delusional
               sanity,
Appeared possessed
               by spooks;
Mad with mental illness—
the unfortunate path one
leads to unprofitable
               servitude.

10

As he grew out of the past
way of correct thinking,
“Correct” being whatever serves
               the status-quo;
Following in the footsteps of those
               likewise to be ruined
By what they had seen—
So too this young man
began to understand the history
               of the coup;
Questioning his war-obsessed
nation’s dominion over the land;
Its revolution betrayed by secret
pacts with Power and Wealth
that erect under the nose,
               on the backs
Of its people an Empire
               of world control,
Completed under Liberty’s banner.

11

Daily norms include
               perpetual war—
Standing armies around the globe—
Covert alliance with dictatorship—
Revival of the nuclear fallout
               underway—
Cutting edge weaponry
               burning for usage,
Designed especially
               for sowing annihilation—
Everyday conflict heating up,
Keeping a media-possessed
               people
Prepared to accept the
               next invasion;
Brought to you in part
               by Capitalism,
False-Christianity and other
Dominant ideologies
               that structured our minds,
All covered under
               the blanket term:
Democracy. We loved her
more than kin and kindred,
this hideous and tyrannical
Hydra—cloaking itself
in the clothes of an Ideal—
Adorned in Athena’s crown
a slimy beast, which
               stood for precisely the
Opposite of equality and peace.

12

The new Awakened, confronted with
A choice between violent uprising
And non-violent protest, nonetheless
Remained certain of the need
               for revolution;
One uniting its ends with its means,
Destroying only what it
               alternatively creates
Out of the old world’s corpse;
Emerging like from a rotten chrysalis
New societies founded
               on leaderless leadership.
Voluntary associations would form
The basis for our organization,
An idea met with ridicule
From this era’s most vehement
Masters and slaves; whose freedom
Depends on dollar signs
               & signatures
On officiating forms, through which
Tyranny always meets with approval;
Wealth to power, always power to wealth,
Crushing the people—grinded through
This cycle of oppression;
               forced into
Conditions no sentient being
would have ever consented to—

13

Though tantamount to
               treason in our time
Not only to say as much,
               but simply
Acknowledging the
               possibility was enough
To cause many a mind—
               shackled by
Self-correcting thought editing—
To reject the idea outright,
               without even
Knowing. Our minds have
               been enslaved.
Rather truth became the illusion,
And therein lies the real beauty
of this deception, which turns
its own loathsome perversion
               into the norm—
Critics of it into traitors,
               degenerates.

14

There had been such a one
among you, an old friend, who
I will call, for purposes of this
work, Valonté. I consider Val
a visionary although before
his traumatic transformation,
he was largely unfamiliar with
the scholarship of mysticism;
the fundamentals of this realm
into which he was ‘reborn,’
Yet, even that most simplistic
tenet of the metaphysical,
Clouded with codified confusion
Perplexed the rationally minded,
Stuck in assuming either one
or another fixed set of theorems
about life and death. Many believe
that random nothingness is what
has propagated things throughout
the expanse of space and time;
life is but a brief, meaningless
flash of ecstatic sufferings;
a mostly bleak, yet seemingly
verifiable fact, from which,
dogmatic religions, of course,
offer an escape: But only for
those willing to close off from
other possibilities of both
the spiritual and scientific.
This was the trade off.
Narrow your mind
so as not to fear death,
the infinite. Just one
of a great number
of keys securing
our mental slavery.

15

Raised up in formerly sacred lands
now possessed by an oppressive force,
Valonté came from
               the heartland;
A community cut off,
               closed in
Along strict lines of conformity
And the tributary of a once
Mighty river polluted
               with
Consumerism’s residue;
Only several hundred years before
A wandering capital
               of proud nations
That the brush-fire of civilization
Has razed to the ground;
               erecting dead
Monuments to precious metal,
The exploitation of resource,
From a once vast pool
               of replenishable
Life-force—Valonté only knew
Its mechanized skeleton—
               this era;
which had grown out
               of the former order
Like a cancerous structure,
penetrating through space
while draining the energy
               of its host,
Shading its world from
               the eternal white light;
Lost within the spindles
               of a shadow play.

16

Faces of the multitude.
We were molded from birth
to fit cog and wheel,
appearing to be
Appearance
rather than of
               the essential
Oneness underlying
               all existence;
Role-playing without
               realizing that
we follow the script;
Likewise is this
               being rolled out:
Truth of a kind hidden
               in verse
Fashioned with designs
On your perceptions
with which I intend
to deprogram your mind,
Subverting the dominant
               narrative
With all of its pretensions
               towards domination—
Countering Propaganda
               with Art—

17

Creative sparks
               catching fire
in your consciousness—
fanning flames of personal
               transformation.
Moment to moment
               from birth
our being conditioned to see
ourselves as distinctly isolated
from an origin; thought to come
               into the universe
rather than out of it—Valonté
               as a boy
wandered apart from his
               mother—
through artificial wilderness
wondering at tamed vegetation
which grew around a neighbor’s
               garden,
Dense quite often with
               dandelion
blown cotton white,
               yellow in
summertime,
               his birth season;
But three at the time
               when
On boyish adventures
               of the imagination,
Warring with invisible
               enemies—
Ghostly wisps fluttering
               around in the wind—
Consciousness seemed
               to enter him.

18

Between the vast trunks
               of these trees
Only a small garden in reality
A tiny fly flew into
               the young boy’s eye.
Abstractions coalesced.
The first thought being how
Such a creature might
               build a house
And take a wife,
               foster children.
He rubbed and rubbed,
Progressively more
               worried
Yet sympathetic,
               understanding of
Symbiosis and sacrifice;
One eye squinted
               beyond which,
Orange-red mindscapes
               morphed
From shape to shape;
Here being in a top hat
The fly walked with a cane,
Erected a two-story mansion
Inside the eye
               of Valonté’s mind;
Still rubbing the raw
               red socket,
His eyelid flipped
               open to sunset.

19

Only significant in-itself;
otherwise an unremarkable
moment, Valonté described
this to me some night during
one of our heady discussions.
Oh, that’s right. I am called 白森.
Before his untimely passing
Valonté was a close friend of mine
about whom I’m compelled to write.
We had developed a coded phrase:
“The fireflies are out tonight,”
which implied the time had come
to create new fictions; radical verse
traditionally phrased; rebellious
philosophies; concepts of the
metaphysical that empowered
rather than enslaved. This world
within a world was just one of many
back in those days with awakening
beginning to spread like wildfire,
beaten though it was underground.
Both having experienced visions—
or psychotic episodes officials would
brand them—before being acquainted
we had already begun to question
what of vision possessed any worth.
Why else had we grown so anxious,
isolated and neurotic if having
 truly glimpsed the beauty of
Oneness. The illusion of death?

20

Our experiences were indeed
so peculiarly similar so as
to cancel the magnitude of
               each other’s out,
simultaneously confirming both
their bizarreness and mundanity.  
All was catalyzed by a single
event which occurred chronologically
first to Valonté within our
collective narrative but only
               later did I
understand that; for when
game changing occurrences
transpire in our life
we are often blind
               to the resonances
interconnecting ours with another’s
outside of the all too human
understanding of linear time.
I am lucky to have been given
the opportunity to come full circle
in one attempt, interpreting
the enigmatic past through the wisdom
               of future eyes.
Such opportunity was
               taken from Val.
How he would have interpreted
these things nowadays that
would have been interesting to know.
Instead we can only relive
the experience again through what
he expressed in his writings
that do after all survive and which
I shall make available to you here: