Your Missus Will Not Miss Us

Modern Jazz Quartet : Softly As In A Morning Sunrise

Modern Jazz Quartet: Pyramid

Let’s go
Come on
Let’s go
Empty our pockets
And disappear.
Missing all our appointments
And turning up unshaven
Years later
Old cigarette papers
stuck to our pants
leaves in our hair.
Let us notworry
about the payments anymore.
Let them come
and take it away
whatever it was
we were paying for.
And us with it.
Let us arise and go now
to where dogs do it
Over the Hill

where they keep
the earthquakes
behind the city dumps
lost among gasmains
and garbage.
Let us see the City Dumps
for what they are.
My country tears of thee.
Let us disappear
in automobile graveyards
and reappear years later
picking rags and newspapers
drying our drawers
on garbage fires
patches on our ass.
Do not bother
to say goodbye
to anyone.
Your missus will not miss us.
Let’s go
smelling of sterno
where the benches are filled
with discarded
Bowling Green statues

in the interior dark night
of the flower bowery
our eyes watery
with the contemplation
of empty bottles of muscatel.
Let us recite from broken bibles
on streetcorners
Follow dogs on docks
Speak wild songs
Throw stones
Say anything
Blink at the sun and scratch
and stumble into silence
Diddle in doorways
Know whores thirdhand
after everyone else is finished
Stagger befuddled
into East River sunsets
Sleep in phone booths
Puke in pawnshops
wailing for a winter overcoat.
Let us arise and go now
under the city

where ashcans roll
and reappear in putrid clothes
as the uncrowned
underground kings
of subway men’s rooms.
Let us feed the pigeons
at the City Hall
urging them to do their duty
in the Mayor’s office.
Hurry up please it’s time.
The end is coming.
Flash floods
Disasters in the sun
Dogs unleashed
Sister in the street
her brassiere backwards.
Let us arise and go now
into the interior dark night
of the soul’s still bowery
and find ourselves anew
where subways stall and wait
under the River.

Cross over
into full puzzlement.
South Ferry will not run forever.
They are cutting out
the Bay ferries
but it is still not too late
to get lost in Oakland.
Washington has not yet toppled
from his horse.
There is still time
to goose him and go
leaving our income tax form behind
and our waterproof
wristwatch with it
staggering blind after alleycats
under Brooklyn’s Bridge
blown statues in baggy pants
our tincan cries
and garbage voices
trailing.
Junk for sale!

Let’s cut it out let’s go
into the real interior
of the country
where hockshops reign
mere unblind anarchy upon us.
The end is here
but golf goes on at Burning Tree.
It’s raining it’s pouring
The Ole Man is snoring.
Another flood is coming
Though not the kind you think.
There is still time to sink
and think.
I wish to descend in society.
I wish to make like free.
Swing low sweet chariot.
Let us not wait for the cadillacs
to carry us triumphant
into the interior
waving at the natives
like roman senators
in the provinces

wearing poet’s laurels
on lighted brows.
Let us not wait
for the write-up on page one
of the New York Times Book review
images of insane success
smiling from the photo.
By the time they print
your picture in Life Magazine
you will have become
a negative anyway
a print with a glossy finish.
They will have come
and gotten you to be famous
and you still will not be free.
Goodbye I’m going.
I’m selling everything
and giving away the rest
to the Good Will Industries.
It will be dark out there
with the Salvation Army Band.
And the mind its own illumination.

Goodbye I'm walking out
on the whole scene.
Close down the joint.
The system is all loused up.
Rome was never like this.
I’m tired of waiting for Godot.
I am going where turtles win
I am going
where conmen puke and die
Down the sad esplanades
of the official world.
Junk for sale!
My country tears of thee.
Let us go then you and I
leaving our neckties behind
on lampposts
Take up the full beard
of walking anarchy
looking like Walt Whitman
a homemade bomb
in the pocket.
I wish to descend
in the social scale.
High society is low society.

I am a social climber
climbing downward
And the descent is difficult.
The Upper Middle Class Ideal
is for the birds
but the birds have no use for it
having their own kind
of pecking order
based upon birdsong.
Pigeons on the grass alas.
Let us arise and go now
to the Isle of Manisfree.
Let loose the hogs of peace.
Hurry up please it’s time.
Let us arise and go now
into the interior
of Foster’s Cafeteria.
So long Emily Post.
So long
Lowell Thomas.
Goodbye Broadway.

Goodbye Herald Square.
Turn it off.
Confound the system.
Cancel our leases.
Lose the War
without killing anybody.
Let horses scream
and ladies run
to flushless powderrooms.
The end has just begun.
I want to announce it.
Run don’t walk
to the nearest exit.
The real earthquake is coming.
I can feel the building shake.
I am the refined type.
I cannot stand it.
I am going
where asses lie down
with customs collectors
who call themselves
literary critics

My tool is dusty.
My body is hung up too long
in strange suspenders.
Get me a bright bandana
for a jockstrap.
Turn loose and we’ll be off
where sports cars collapse
and the world begins again.
Hurry up please it’s time.
It’s time and a half
and there’s the rub.
The thinkpad makes
homeboys of us all.
Let us cut out
into stray eternity.
Somewhere the fields
are full of larks.
Somewhere the land
is swinging.
My country ‘tis of thee
I’m singing.

Let us arise and go now
to the Isle of Manisfree
and live the true blue simple life
of wisdom and wonderment
where all things grow
straight up
aslant and singing
in the yellow sun
poppies out of cowpods
thinking angels out of turds.
I must arise and go now
to the Isle of Manisfree
way up behind the broken words
and woods of Arcady.

--Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Junkman's Obligato

With My Indian Rug And A Pipe To Share

looking east
outside
Grapevine Canyon


Colorado River
above
Trinity Canyon


Gillian Welch and
David Rawlings:
"Pocahontas"


fool in a pool
many moons ago

------------------------------------------------------------------
The northern mountain is hidden in white cloud,
A happy place for hermits to retire.
So we can meet, I try to climb the heights,
My heart is fading like a goose in flight.
My sorrow's prompted by the creeping dusk,
But then clear autumn spurs on my desires.
At length we see the villagers return,
They walk the sand and rest at the river crossing.
The trees against the sky are like shepherd's purse ,
An islet by the shore just like the moon.
I hope you have some wine to celebrate,
We'll spend the autumn festival drunk together.
--Meng Hoaran
Climbing Orchid Mountain on an Autumn Day

Three Minutes Before Midnight

National Geographic: The Story of Earth

Sooner or later in every talk,
(David) Brower describes the creation of the world. He invites his listeners to consider the six days of Genesis as a figure of speech for what has in fact been four billion years. On this scale,
a day equals something like
six hundred and sixty-six million years, and thus all day Monday and until Tuesday noon, creation was busy getting the earth going. Life began Tuesday noon, and the beautiful organic wholeness of it developed over the next four days. At 4pm Saturday, the big reptiles came on. Five hours later, when the redwoods appeared, there were no more big reptiles. At three minutes before midnight, man appeared.
At one-fourth of a second before midnight, Christ arrived. At one-fortieth of a second before midnight, the Industrial Revolution began. We are surrounded with people who think that what we have been doing for that one-fortieth of a second can go on indefinitely.
They are considered normal, but they are stark, raving mad.
--John McPhee
Encounters With The Archdruid

In The Days That Are Forgotten

No, you don't understand, naturally said the second swallow. First, we feel it stirring within us, a sweet unrest; then back come the recollections one by one, like homing pigeons. They flutter through our dreams at night, they fly with us in our wheelings and circlings by day. We hunger to inquire of each other, to compare notes and assure ourselves that it was all really true, as one by one the scents and sounds and names of long-forgotten places come gradually back and beckon to us.

Laurie Anderson: Hiawatha

I tried stopping one year, said the third swallow. I had grown so fond of the place that when the time came I hung back and let the others go on without me. For a few weeks it was all well enough, but afterwards, O the weary length of the nights! The shivering, sunless days! The air so clammy and chill, and not an insect in an acre of it! No, it was no good; my courage broke down, and one cold, stormy night I took wing, flying well inland on account of the strong easterly gales. It was snowing hard as I beat through the passes of the great mountains, and I had a stiff fight to win through; but never shall I forget the blissful feeling of the hot sun again on my back as I sped down to the lakes that lay so blue and placid below me, and the taste of my first fat insect. The past was like a bad dream; the future was all happy holiday.

--Kenneth Grahame
The Wind in the Willows

And Then Where Should We Be?

Clash: Armagideon Time
Clash: Justice Tonight / Kick It Over

No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon
that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy
to let you make your decisions for yourselves.
But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades,
and then where should we be?
--George Orwell
Animal Farm

Life Of Man Is Most Uncertain

John Renbourn / Robin Williamson: Wheel of Fortune

Every fortune-teller I ever met was a faker.
First thing you should do to a soothsayer
is poke them in the eye and say,
Didn’t see that coming, did you?
--Mark Lawrence

Robin Williamson : Sheffield, England...9/16


OUTSIDE BOUCHER CANYON
THE COLONNADE FROM PHANTOM CANYON
OUTSIDE COTTONWOOD CANYON
ELVIS SIGHTING WITH SUMNER BUTTE AND FRIENDS

Here Is The Place To Be

Grateful Dead: 8/24/72...Dark Star

Yet could anything
be more obvious
than that the past
follows from the present
like a comet's tail,
and that if we are
to be alive at all,
here is the place to be?

--Alan Watts
The Joyous Cosmology

I Considered My Life And It Too Was A River

clear,

unscaleable ahead

rise the mountains

of instead

from whose cold,

cascading streams

none may drink

except in dreams

--w.h. auden

Yes Siddhartha, he said.
Is this what you mean:
that the river is in
all places at once,
at its source and
where it flows
into the sea,
at the waterfall,
at the ferry,
at the rapids,
in the ocean,
in the mountains,
everywhere at once,
so for the river there is
only the present moment
and not the shadow
of the future?

It is, Siddhartha said.
And once I learned this
I considered my life,
and it too was a river,
and the boy Siddhartha
was separated from
the man Siddhartha
and the graybeard Siddhartha
only by shadows,
not by real things.
Nothing was, nothing will be;
everything is,
everything has being
and presence.

--Hermann Hesse

COTTONWOOD CANYON
CHEYAVA FALLS
GCNP : ROARING SPRINGS
ROYAL ARCH CREEK
LOWER RIBBON FALLS
ELVES CHASM

For This Is The Land Where The Pharaoh Died

i wanna tell you
about texas radio
and the big beat
it comes out of
the virginia swamps
cool and slow
with a back beat
narrow and
hard to master
some call it heavenly
in it's brilliance
others, mean and rueful
of the western dream
i love the friends
i have gathered together
on this thin raft
we have constructed
pyramids in honor
of our escaping
for this is the land
where the pharaoh died
children, the river
contains specimens
the voices of
singing women
call us from
the far shore
and they are saying
"forget the night
live with us
in forests of azure"
meagre food for
souls forgot
i tell you this:
no eternal reward
will forgive us now
for wasting the dawn
and one morning
you awoke to
a strange sun
and opening your door....
---------------------------------------------------------------
Tower of Ra and Shiva Temple
outside Palisade Canyon
Doors: "Texas Radio and the Big Beat"
"Love Me Two Times"
Dana Butte from Utah Flats
Hermit Canyon

Man Running

A man was running running for his life, across and up a naked dome of golden sandstone. Far off in silhouette against an evening sky, dark figure running across a field of gold, a flash of gashed vermillion, the flaring fanned-out rays of setting sun peering for one final moment, under a reef of purple clouds, into the slickrock desert, over the rippled sea of golden, lifeless petrified dunes of sand...
He ran, ran to live, up the rising skyline curve of rock, across the huge plasmic crimson bulge of sun, black running human animal caught forever, in perpetual motion, eternal in his fear, upon the red sun and background of the yellow sky.
A stocky man in boots, jeans, no shirt, big hat, puffing like an engine, hoarse and gasping in despair, laboring at ever-slower pace up the barren and unsheltering incline of monolithic stone.

He ran because he was pursued. Fifty yards to his rear and gaining rapidly came a snorting ramping bellowing machine, the diesel-powered forty-ton dirt scooper, product of Caterpillar Inc., bouncing after its prey on rubber-tired wheels each taller than a tall man. The operator's cab projected forward above the front wheels; the windows of the cab, covered with dust, spattered with mud, obscured the nature of whatever it was, if anything, that guided and propelled and animated the machine. Reaching the upward slope, the machine redoubled its efforts, bounding ahead. Puffs of black smoke jetted from the upright exhaust stack, floating like little balls of dirty cotton up and backward on the pure golden backdrop of the sky.
Hopeless flight, implacable pursuit. The running man stopped running, stopped climbing, stopped and turned to face the iron black joggling goblin that approached him, closer, closer, with spinning wheels and howling motor, towering above him, about to run him down, crush him like an insect, leave him smeared in a paste of hair, calcium, protoplasm and blood across the gritty surface of the rock.

The man drew a small object from his belt, something not much bigger than his fist, dark against the sunset light, impossible to immediately identify. The man raised this object and pointed it toward the blunt flat advancing snout of the machine. His finger twitched.
A red flame leaped from the tip of the object in the man's hand. Leaped and disappeared, followed presently by the report of a small compact explosion. The man froze, waiting. The machine slowed, stopped as if surprised, and jiggled for a moment, up and down, on heavy springs, twelve feet short of its victim. An arc of cooling liquid spurted like blood from the creature's nose, spouting under pressure into the air then looping down to spatter on the stone. Hurt, baffled, astonished, the machine remained at a standstill, one dark and solid silhouette of steel, rubber, glass and iron upon the forlorn red flare of dying sun, a complicated outline of angles, joints, hoses, couplings, wheels and linkage rods flat black against the horizon. As the light faded the engine died, the coolant drooped in a smaller arc and petered out, the surrounding sea of desert silence closed in complete upon machine and man.
Silence. Stasis. Creeping darkness.
The man replaced the object in his belt. He turned away from the stricken machine--dead tech--and walked upward on the ridgeline, descended the farther slope and vanished into a dense violet twilight.

We heard him singing. Singing, that is, as a wolf sings, a proud prolonged profound Promethean howl of triumph and joy, a hymn that dwindled after a time to the faintest vulpine vibration on the air but never died, never died completely.
New moon. New moon and evening star.
The new moon, signal of hope, glowed in the western sky. Quite near, almost within the moon's embrace, hung Venus planet of love, rare as radium pure as platinum more precious than gold.
--Edward Abbey
from Hayduke Lives!