hesperus · lux

all those rides, all those pages of Kerouac, all that jail, to
die alone under a frozen Mexican moon, alone, you understand? can't you see the miserable puny cactii? Mexico is not a bad place because it is simply oppressed; Mexico is simply a bad place. can't you see the desert animals watching? the frogs, horned and simple, the snakes like slits of men's minds crawling, stopping, waiting, dumb under a dumb Mexican moon. reptiles, flicks of things, looking across this guy in the sand in a white t-shirt.

Neal, he'd found his movement, hurt nobody. the tough young jail kid laying it down alongside a Mexican railroad track.

The only night I met him I said, "Kerouac has written all your other chapters. I've already written your last one."

"go ahead," he said, "write it."

end copy.

                                  -bukowski, notes of a dirty old man

Oh comely
I will be with you when you lose your breath
Chasing the only meaningful memory you thought you had left
With some pretty bright and bubbly terrible scene
That was doing her thing on your chest
But oh comely
It isn't as pretty as you'd like to guess
Oh comely
All of your friends are letting you blow
Bristling and ugly
Bursting with fruits falling out from the holes
Of some pretty bright and bubbly friend
You could need to say comforting things in your ear
But oh comely
There isn't such one friend that you could find here
Standing next to me
He's only my enemy
I'll crush him with everything I own

Your father made fetuses
With flesh licking ladies
While you and your mother
Were asleep in the trailer park
Thunderous sparks from the dark of the stadiums
The music and medicine you needed for comforting
So make all your fat fleshy fingers to moving
And pluck all your silly strings
And bend all your notes for me
Soft silly music is meaningful magical
The movements were beautiful
All in your ovaries
All of them milking with green fleshy flowers
While powerful pistons were sugary sweet machines
Smelling of semen all under the garden
Was all you were needing when you still believed in me

And I know they buried her body with others
Her sister and mother and 500 families
And will she remember me 50 years later
I wished I could save her in some sort of time machine
Know all your enemies
We know who are enemies are

Goldaline my dear
We will fold and freeze together
Far away from here
There is sun and spring and green forever
But now we move to feel
For ourselves inside some stranger's stomach
Place your body here
Let your skin begin to blend itself with mine

-NMH

Student. - Tell me some ways by which intuition is to be developed.

Sage. - First of all by giving it exercise, and second by not using it for purely personal ends. Exercise means that it must be followed through mistakes and bruises until from sincere attempts at use it comes to its own strength. This does not mean that we can do wrong and leave the results, but that after establishing conscience on a right basis by following the golden rule, we give play to the intuition and add to its strength. Inevitably in this at first we will make errors, but soon if we are sincere it will grow brighter and make no mistake. We should add the study of the works of those who in the past have trodden this path and found out what is the real and what is not. They say the Self is the only reality. The brain must be given larger views of life, as by the study of the doctrine of reincarnation, since that gives a limitless field to the possibilities in store. We must not only be unselfish, but must do all the duties that Karma has given us, and thus intuition will point out the road of duty and the true path of life.

For as much as a year Satan continued these visits, but at last he came less often, and then for a long time he did not come at all. This always made me lonely and melancholy. I felt that he was losing interest in our tiny world and might at any time abandon his visits entirely. When one day he finally came to me I was overjoyed, but only for a little while. He had come to say good-by, he told me, and for the last time. He had investigations and undertakings in other corners of the universe, he said, that would keep him busy for a longer period than I could wait for his return.

"And you are going away, and will not come back any more?"

"Yes," he said. "We have comraded long together, and it has been pleasant - pleasant for both; but I must go now, and we shall not see each other any more."

"In this life, Satan, but in another? We shall meet in another, surely?"

Then, all tranquilly and soberly, he made the strange answer, "There is no other."

A subtle influence blew upon my spirit from his, bringing with it a vague, dim, but blessed and hopeful feeling that the incredible words might be true - even must be true.

"Have you never suspected this, Theodor?"

"No. How could I? But if it can only be true -"

"It is true."

A gust of thankfulness rose in my breast, but a doubt checked it before it could issue in words, and I said, "But - but - we have seen that future life - seen it in its actuality, and so -"

"It was a vision - it had no existence."

I could hardly breathe for the great hope that was struggling in me. "A vision? - a vi -"

"Life itself is only a vision, a dream."

It was electrical. By God! I had had that very thought a thousand times in my musings!

"Nothing exists; all is a dream. God - man - the world - the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars - a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space - and you!"

"I!"

"And you are not you - you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. I myself have no existence; I am but a dream - your dream, creature of your imagination. In a moment you will have realized this, then you will banish me from your visions and I shall dissolve into the nothingness out of which you made me . . .

"I am perishing already - I am failing - I am passing away. In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever - for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and better!

"Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago - centuries, ages, eons, ago! - for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities.

Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane - like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell - mouths mercy and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him! . . .

"You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks - in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.

"It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream - a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought - a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"

He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.

--from, 'The Mysterious Stranger' by Mark Twain

Then the wise Antenor said to her: 'My lady, what you have said is true indeed. Once before now godlike Odysseus came here with the warrior Menelaos on a mission about you. I was their host, and entertained them in my house, and came to know the build of both and the thoughts of their minds. Well, when they joined the assembled Trojans, Menelaos' broad shoulders were higher when they were standing, but when both were seated Odysseus had the more impressive dignity. Now when they came to weave their thoughts in speech before all the company, Menelaos would speak with the words running fast, at little length, but very clearly -- there was nothing long-winded or rambling about him: and he was indeed the younger man. But whenever resourceful Odysseus leapt up to speak, he would stand there, staring down with his eyes fixed on the ground, and making no gestures with the staff, forwards or backwards, but gripping it stiff, like a man unskilled in its use -- you would take him for a churl and a mere booby. But when he released that great voice from his chest and the words which flocked down like snowflakes in winter, no other mortal man could then rival Odysseus. And then we forgot our surprise at the sight of Odysseus' manner.

-Homer, the Illiad, spoken to Helen in the presence of Priam.

the air in the room was thick like breath. moonlight squeezed through the blinds and fell with sheen and luster onto their slick shoulders. the light transformed her skin, making her even paler and blue like a frozen ghost -- the light turned his pitch into a raven's blue. "nooo, and stop asking me!" she said and shoved him to the mattress's edge. he whispered 'okay' and pulled the blanket over his head.

they were still. in the distance some drunkard howled, a car honked its horn. a minute later, only the ticking of his watch could be heard. he pulled the covers down again and put his head on her shoulder. when she finally looked he gave her sad puppy eyes. in a mouse's voice he said, "kiss it?"
.

In spring she slept in my bed, especially after a night of love making, with a slight and serene smile, as though, politely, as to not disturb the body’s rest, her cheek were responding to a tickling feather. She throws her body around and the air is instanly perfumed with this human, sigh-laden musk, which is part caramel sweat, part shampoo and dreams. No matter how bad the nightmares, or how many, which may visit me during my slumber, I feel as if my mind is not incurable yet. No matter how insufferable I am, how many I have bullied, how complete and self debasing my skepticism, I assume there is still love for me, or at least caresses. This optimism derives from the musk, from the dream part of it, especially if she seems, this morning, to be libidious. Mornings like these, my psyche indeed acquires an element of satisfaction, what with the promise of weary kisses resembling blind pincers or bumbling sleepwalkers, and the lazy sway of breasts rubbing silky across my arms and melting on my torso.