a poem by RICHARD THEODORE

Saturday, December 22nd, 2001 XYXYX we were offered clues to hallucination in the street & some of us would not believe in a heaven built on the bricks of hells we'd invented some said amid the hamstrung danced anarchist convexing sexrites: I know I've been taken - slow do satanic surfaces emerge.  A manchild fights daily for the stale remains of discretion tempting him from further crime it's a style  a human attribution: all men resemble ME said the actor. afterward we were consoled by a manic angel-in-disguise  a gnome with a broken handcart came asking to be held anonymous awhile we hid him among the memories of oceans continents & islands isthmuses & mountains  times passed in places  names now forgotten  found out behind a factory that vanished suddenly one morning - my mind holds everything a total universe devoid of self (said a healerhumanist) an echo death just another doorway.  drugs offered us were taken gratefully without remorse we remembered miracles that we had spoiled with our speculations on their meaning  rumors of the fall of Babylon were in our ears day & night but none of them were true (the truth is that mediocracy will in the end end itself in the murmuring and chaos clocks telescoping calendars horrific end ganme inventions  cause & effect are one  calculate the difference & you will lose it inbetween the sheets of the sound of sanity that has its own raison d'etre apart from us)  we saw the rays of an alien sun as twothousandone klieglights blinded us  bipolar pleas to the Queen of Spades  in a swell of mimicry sardonic lust  radium umbrellas opened up as THEY (who they were we never knew) began to question us in a glossolalia" hallucination in the street?  The Steel Age?  tumescent mysteries of left & right brain waves?    weirdities of trusting everyone & no one: we were the children chosen by the Spirit breathlessly to go beyond into cosmic emptiness to see the flowers grow out of the glass and the granite.  we are the people patterned on the tragicomedy of Kubla Khan we have been displaced & divided  all of us are still alive tho despite the coroner's reports the chronicles the deuteronomies of mortal time (lenz - 1201)