Part IV  Polistrophy (political catastrophe)
Part I: What Kind of Holiday Was That?
Part II: Holding the Vision
Part III: All That I Could Be...

It’s a gloomy day here today in Cleveland, Ohio.  Ponderously overcast and the air’s as still as a mummy on display.  And I’ve hopped into my truck and driven to Lakeview Cemetery.  And I’ve put on my shades anyway ‘cause even though they allay the meager light, the yellow tint warms the appearance of these ruins.  Yes, the home of any tomb—a cemetery—is a ruin, however you cut it.  Time, here, is quixotically ticking on the other side.  The side of eternal trans-temporal, trans- and post-ruinous transformation.  But since I now must see my laptop’s keyboard to here type…*takes off shades*…ah, much better!   *pops top on can of beer* …ah, much, much better! 

Now I’ve got to keep track here ‘cause it’s 4:12 PM and the sign says at 5:30 PM they’ll lock the gates to the cemetery and my truck will be hostage.  Maybe I should just leave, park my truck outside, and come back.  Then there will be no time constraints.  I can stay the night, if I wish.

But, I’m just about in the proper mood… *takes a swig of beer* …sitting on the bottom back step of the mausoleum of one of Cleveland’s once most rich and beneficient families: the Hanna empire.  It’s a nice view—Grecian granite columns declaring architectural dominance on the top of a secluded highly-landscaped hill—a  nice place to pretend to spend eternity.  Here’s to ya Hanna…*takes another swig of beer*….

So I guess soon now’s a good time
To prop-push a curious post
To let you see just how I saw
A world leader turn to toast.

*hrm…clever rhyme.  But if you do the rhyme, you got to do the time…*

*so now I must let festivities depart*

*now I must detach even from you, dear Xangeroos, to find a stillness in my heart*

*I am trying to find a moment of sinking.  A moment that blessed me some years ago.  A different cemetery.  And a more brilliant exposure to the ultimate*

*That’s why I’ve come here.  And there’s no turning back…or is that a trick?…since I am journeying, journeying…and time itself must now lose track…*

…Corozal, Panama, August, 1981…still in a cemetery…

I usually run in this cemetery like a hot-blooded stud would make love to Madonna: at least daily.  But I never stop, never stop.  Here there’s a gauntlet of death and of dreams met and unmet. And I bring a freshness, and a tease of life recovered and revamped.  So why stop until I’m dead and I drop—cause I’m a falling star….

But rules—who makes the rules? 

So upon one blessed day, I stay alive…but I stop.   I drop.

down

down

and I’m underground.

And in the grave of a young girl, she was 12 then, and nevermore.    Her body’s here—a ruin evacuated: Sprit’s gone!  There's such a residual vibrancy here and clear of maculate morbidity! 

Then…

I’m evacuated, too. And I’m back above the grave but still *stopped* .  And my first conscious realization is: *necromancer I am not* and then…

The flight of “reality” began.  Having stopped, without any reason, for the first time ever while here running about, and *sunk* into a grave, and then rebounded out, I began to notice, to get a sense of, how to say?, a suck-ance, a rip-pance, a tear-age … And then I’m clearly sensing: a soldier I am no longer.  And the powers-that-be are no longer either…as some tragedy has befallen all and the world has become the earth…the dirt…the dust…the yet-to-be-evacuated womb-tomb…the bleedless crust.  And all is forfeited.

So what was actually happening?  I had stopped running—unconsciously—first time ever for years and years and years—and then found my conscious self above the grave of a 12-year-old girl.  The grave marker was constructed of iridescent blue tiles that were mortared together and appeared like so many Central American tributes to the Virgin Mary.  And I had apparently been psychically-seduced—*sunk*—???why???—into the privacy of her, this young girl’s, tomb.  When I recovered—consciously—back above ground, I was immediately struck by an overwhelming sense of a total power vacuum pervading the country politic.  Say what??   I no longer felt the pull to duty from my own organization nor was I able to discern any form of order or organization from any authority anywhere about, at any level of awareness, opportunist politicking, notwithstanding. 

* I am free—a world without boundaries!!! But why and how?*  

Then thirty seconds later American choppers flew overhead, towards the Atlantic coast, at full speed.  Three—tail-on-tail, just over the tree-tops.  Not an exercise.   I crisply understood.  More than: something was up.  Something was down.  Bit the ground.  And those three choppers were lovingly on that trail like hounds of Hell on the stench of Satan.  I had just psychically gotten entwisted in a wastage of true, historic and epic proportions.  I knew it.  And though I didn’t yet know the precise details, I was soon, very soon, to find out….

Gen. Omar Torrijos Herrera, the charismatic leader of Panama, was dead.  His airship had "mysteriously" crashed into a mountain.  At the very moment I had stopped.  As I had sunk into the tomb.  And emerged to an awakening sense of powerless bliss.  It was just like being a kid when your parents would come home Saturday night totally-wasted passed-out drunk, and you realized amazingly that you were the only law in town. 

Synchronicity??  Call it what you will.  For this pattern, at yet another time, was repeated and repeated with clearer signs and darker stigmas still…

By the way, the weather here in Cleveland has just cleared.  It’s brilliant and summery once again.  It’s 6:12 PM, I wonder if they’ve locked the gates??

*drinks another beer and tours*

Nope!  haven’t locked the gates yet and it’s 7:13 PM!  I think they close in the summer at dusk…that's what a couple I encountered said: dusk!

What time is dusk??

It's now 7:40 PM.  The sun is orange through the trees in which the crickets are starting to chirp and the shadows of all that are about are preparing to creep.  I could just as well stay as leave, for a communion of souls most rarely yet alive or perpetually dead is a communion, nonetheless.

Afterthought (out the north gate):  Life is a paradise yet paradox of delight.

Art of artifact? 
Be not so hard on yourselves.
The waves still wash the sand.

All the talk of snuffing and killing and mixing it up here on Xanga (Crim, Deadeye, et. al.) has played on my mind.  To the point where I actually pondered—but for a moment this morning—carrying a concealed piece again.  Picture me sitting around the coffee shop (where I happen to exactly be hanging, and writing this, and from which I’m about to post this) actually looking at everybody who looks at me as if they’re thinking of beating me to the draw.  Oh yeah, what’s that point?  What’s the point to that, you ask??

Picture this:  a young man, living alone, no parents, no girlfriend,  just a job and a huge house filled with over 200 plants (spent 1 hour each day watering ½, then the next day the other half).  And seven weapons.  Assorted mix: rifles, handguns, shotguns, one semi-automatic.  Strategically positioned around the house.  And I practice.  In the dark.  Pitch black.  Rolling out of bed.  Rolling off the sofa.  Seizing the cache, loading, locking, in the bitch of the pitch of blackness that stares back at me without expression.  Never locked my doors.  Just hung a sign: “If a friend, come’on in; otherwise, think again.” 

Picture this: a classroom filled with 250 students, my classmates.  A funny Physics class where the  professor (Jearl Walker, used to write for Scientific American) popularizes his Flying Circus of Physics road show by graphically demonstrating all types of physical phenomena.  So one day he is laying on a bed of nails to prove God knows what and another day he is dousing his hand in water and then dipping it into molten lead to prove God knows what else.  Always something.  Always a twist, always some amazing unexpected or counter-intuitive outcome.  One day while he is discussing momentum and inertia and transference of kinetic energy, a distraught student rushes into class.  Obviously outraged about a grade, the borderline student starts berating the professor with threats and gesticulated insults.  And then he pulls a pistol.  And shoots the professor.  The professor flies backwards, hits the wall, and slumps to the ground.  All the girls are screaming, and I…I reach into my book bag and pull out my .38 special.  Oh yeah, I’m a 4.0 student who plays chess all day, renowned for the intellectuality of the conversations I fall into, never without a copy of the Tao Te Ching and the mystic Merton’s “No Man Is An Island” in my back pockets, able to amuse others by reciting arcane poetry in totality, and… I discretely carry a loaded piece.  *Who’s next?* I wonder.  And in self-answer I visualize a bullet penetrating the back of the assassin still looming over the fallen professor.  But wait…the professor moves—he’s alive.  What’s more, he hops to his feet!  Is he wearing a bullet-proof vest?  Is he Superman??  No—the “disgruntled student” was a teaching assistant who fired a blank to assist the professor in demonstrating that day’s lesson on mass, inertia, and momentum!  I take my finger off the trigger and slip the pistol quietly back into my book bag.

A buddy of mine who's uneducated beyond high school but is a street-smart mastermind, having mixed it up quite a bit with knives and guns, escaped deadly pursuit by popping manhole covers and fleeing underground, and has privately confessed to me to taking out somebody “who had it coming to him,” used to constantly harangue me with his belief that I had certainly killed someone sometime.  “Come on,” he would chide, “I see it in your eyes.  You have that look.  I know.”   So I finally told him: “that look” of involvement was  awareness by proxy:  Death as a psychic scream ripping a hole into this fabric called consciousness.

And I’m relating all of this, all of this, to clear the road for my next blog.  Which will be brutally honest.  And to many, unbelievable.