How I Read Myself Through Life

Those first years of life,
I learned to look at books,
Turning pages, adoring those printed pages,
Colour plates and pictures too!
What a sweet eye opening treat!
Careful not to tear or bend them!
More learning and with that more yearning.
Later, when I was six, with my broken green-stick,
Caused by bravely leaping chasms beyond turned pages,
Fracturing those early elemental schooled years,
Memorizing alphabet and a b c's,
Deciphering learning, those foreign bunches and groups,
Bags and tags of letters, scrabbled into meaningful words.
See Dick and Jane run,
Quickly becoming Spot's dog story too,
Running and ranging through a formal alphabet,
Tearing up the wordy yard,
Searching sentences and paragraphs,
Chasing printed words through alleyways and libraries,
Laughing and reading out loud,
Dick and Jane in hot pursuit.
Reading rearranged understanding,
More words on the page becoming knowledge,
All that written wisdom teaching me about hunger,
"Please sir, more!"
Such an appetite at that young age.
Ingesting bunches of compound words,
Chewing on confounded sentences,
Digesting groups of impounded paragraphs.
Thus my opened eyes read on,
Treading page after page,
Trekking chapter after chapter,
Journeying year after year after year.
Teen age discovered me reading science,
All that modern technique rewound,
Copernicus, Tesla and Shakespeare,
Conjuring quadratic equations, triggered by a period of tables,
Three act plays and tragic poetry,
Reciting inert poesy penned by Wordsworth and Browning,
Reveling with emotional Arcturians, peeling oranges with Cohen,
 While Leonard spun round and round,
Arm in arm with lovely Marianne.
Head to head then with Robin and her red breasts,
Wishing I was still suckling instead of simply reading,
Delving ready and readily into my twenties,
Yoga and cigarettes coffed a certain path,
investments in religion and scripture,
Remanding wise words,
More trial with that proper diet,
Would and should maintain,
Reading quantum and quality.
Yaqui ways of knowledge leading me,
Deep into secret canyons,
Crossing strange prickly deserts,
Delivering me unto sacred water holes,
Don Juan and those Yaqui sways and rays,
Forging written words into formal wants through process,
Writing script and scripture, into poetic rhyme over time,
Ten years sped by, just a blink of my third eye.
Historic words, iconic paragraphs,
Wondrous books and fabulous ideas marking tides,
Remarkable Ides rocketing me to immoral Rome,
Admiring brilliant togas in that brutish vomitorium,
Past Mediterranean beaches, leaving Ibiza for another circus,
Grazing in marvelous galaxies, far beyond the Adriatic,
Revolving novel stars into nova and novella,
Gravity grabbing hold of my fruitful mind,
Picking juicy peaches and green gage plums.
Segments and stories finding repose,
That resting place in my open heart,
Numbers of perfect pages, spelling out destiny,
Fate's perfect songs and psalms sung by Sages,
Crowding my tiny finite alphabet,
Encompassing vast infinite worlds.
A  B  C-ing it around the sun,
Crossing star clusters, drawn into that universal recipe via letters,
Entertaining oddity throughout that calamitous multiverse,
Sacredness pointing a secret way,
My compass pointing  to spiritual north,
Traveling by dogsled into Antarctic night,
Traversing that frozen icy realm,
I hurried along, snapping my long supple whip,
Eskimo dogs yipping excitedly,
Pulling my loaded sledge along,
Deep into expeditions unknown,
O'er cracking glacial rifts,
Melting ancient glacial ice,
Hot tea made from pure white snow,
Luncheons of rich seal meat and whale blubber,
Resonating in Nature's vibrating dominion,
Reconnecting ethereal white and red and polar purple,
Spectral aspects of existential trenches,
Eclipsed by mystic Arctic rime,
Transcending to the surface of the moon,
Jumping with Apollo, landing roughly on both feet,
Entrenched in some hidden crater, some mystic cave.
Thirty-something found me ingesting tomes,
Turning pages steeped in ancestral medicine,
Barking and howling at the feral moon,
Running with hungry wolves,
Sipping bone broth beside a welcome fire,
Roasting bloody mammoth o'er red hot coals,
Shimmering embers in the family hearth.
Cave bear clans, configured by disfigured Mogurs,
Dancing summer nights away under blinking stars,
Naked and oiled with nubile Ayla,
Galloping past herds of grazing wild horses,
Beauty saddled and spurred into segments,
Tracking an uncertain future.
Back to Eden, raising lodge poles,
Imagining teepee life and a million thundering buffalo,
Seeding my wild trust with John Lust's herb book.
So much chewing, so much digesting,
Infusing medicine, barks and leaves and roots,
Feeding my body, nourishing my soul,
Lifting dead weights and chopping wood into sentences,
Scribed recipes for life and magic,
Picking up litter, wandering along my stony way.
Digging ginseng, trading dandelion root for bird songs,
Unearthing thick burdock roots from deep within the sacred earth,
Enough medicine in my medicine bag to carry me through this lifetime.
Burrowing and ferreting I read on,
One busy pissant,
One powerful and brave badger,
One busy beaver, building dams to hold back the wordy flood,
Racing with knowledge into my bustling forties,
Perusing Kerouac as we trundled down that lonesome road,
Wondering if Raphael and Gabriel might join us in the park,
Begin to end,
Ending to beginning.
Ascending Desolation Peak,
Standing in the raging wind on that blissful spire,
Meditating and singing, following sacred songlines,
Stepping briskly along that unsure route,
Stopping at the very end of Kerouac's linear road.
Buddha met me there,
Four corners meeting, so many stars beckoning to me from above,
Entertaining novels and other dreams.
Thus the antithesis of life,
Oh those dreadful roaring forties!
Reading words that made less sense,
Than good old Shakespeare ever did.
Poor Yorick and odd transfixed Hamlet,
Ophelia drowning with that rancorous gang,
Never a jolly old elf or kinder folk as village bells rang.
Such is the golden ring of mysterious life,
Bleeding profuse literary thoughts,
Wading barefoot into muddy shallows,
Diving raw into clear deep pools,
Finally discovering I could breathe without gills,
Forever floundering in that maelstrom of wash,
Oceans of words, waves of sentiments and sentences,
Washed over me,
Washed over me,
Washed over me in tidal waves,
Tumbling and stumbling,
Rumblings of tomes and poems,
Over and over again I sailed.
Delivered across a bleached and crumbling reef,
Landing on a lonesome sandy beach,
Exhaustion constructed my simple shelter,
Survival ignited my welcome fire.
Wrung out, finally dried out by the morbid sun,
I sought solace under a sprinkle of callous stars,
Feeling strung out and wretchedly bound,
Unwound, I stowed cruel love,
All those faithless words, brutally shoved into a dark closet.
Finally that adored alphabet was out of sight,
Accompanied by a momentous speech,
Involving elemental rights and curious freedoms.
Leisure visited, lingered deep within my porous brain,
Spelunking to those hidden depths of my melancholy mind,
Discovering elementary being,
Meeting such effervescent souls along the way.
Fifty plus found me crossing oceans and equators,
Unwritten books in hand,
Novel ideas simmering within my nervous brain,
Scripting horse latitudes and leviathan longitudes across blank paper,
Marveling as towering thunderstorms cruised the vast Pacific.
Walking southern songlines,
Discovering kookaburra and magpie treats,
Absorbing eucalyptus feats,
Wallowing in wild deep ocean,
Becoming unhinged under that southern cross,
Struck deaf and dumb by outback lightning,
Leading me out of Alice Springs.
Lying dead and buried on old boot hill,
Nary a flaming comet or Wisdom's entrancing star nearby,
Without Festus or Batt Masterson in attendance,
All rawhide, wrangling bonanzas in those sixgun days,
One or two massacres occurring on frayed occasions.
Slipping out of Dodge,
Envisioning Virginia City as I rode,
Having left the plains of Abraham far behind,
Getting out of dancehalls and rickety jails,
Over lifetimes,
Over centuries,
Over decadent decades.
It was fifty fifty in those heady days,
One foot to the left,
One foot to the right,
One foot in my midnight grave,
One foot treading in pure morning light.
Fifty something through speeding night,
Trips that rip the mind to bits,
Freedom found after many tortured arrests,
Divorced from words while opening my eyes wide,
Spotting lonely Gitchimanitou camped in his singing forest,
Listening to the echo of ancient story and song,
Floating through the fragrant pine,
Building another wigwam as winter nights were long.
Crossing rivers, advancing toward distant horizons,
Great caribou herds streaming across that barren land,
Following ancestral starlines and cosmic abutments,
Detecting written words teaching perseverance,
Sucking it all up, through straws, through my nose,
Down vacant forgotten passages,
Inspecting ice caves in my worldly deliverance.
Strength reckoning direction,
Directing life,
Drifting across the broad earth,
Clambering down cooled lava vents,
Rappelling into middle earth,
Strings of hope keeping me from falling,
Rafting through toxic atmospheres,
Wafting lonely into deep space,
Grafting bits and pieces in hopes I'd find my way.
All the way to Heaven's pearly gate.
Falling asleep one winter night,
Recounting half a century,
Accounting sleepless dreams that night,
After reveling in cake and icecream,
Rejoicing in a new found land of milk and honey,
Lucid sleep conjoined with alien thoughts,
Dreaming of two beating hearts,
Fighting Viking battles and Ptolemaic wars,
Sailing solo o'er vast oceans,
Rocketing to the moon,
Propelled to Jupiter and Neptune,
Acquiring asteroid scars,
Irradiated by x-rays and gamma rays,
Somehow surviving quadruple fly bys,
Marred by all that violent quintuple thought,
Vehement words sporting psychedelic neckties,
Treading muddied water in Kerouac's footsteps,
Footfalls banking on Alex Mackenzie,
Thompson and Fraser too,
Mapping a new world,
Climbing tall mountains,
Paddling down wild rapid rivers,
Coursing through treacherous canyons,
Plummeting helpless o'er high waterfalls,
Blundering in sinkholes,
Mired in poetic quicksand,
Stuck sometimes in stinkholes,
Where everything turned black and white.
Skunkish if not brutish,
Speaking Salish and Tlingit and Salmon lingo,
Reading and ranging with spiritual grizzly bears,
Chewing and munching on green leafy sedge,
Relishing fresh sushi paraphrased from a pristine sea,
Composing steamed muscles and spiny urchin on my wooden plank,
Cultivating deep roots amongst towering giant cedars.
Finally turning my face to the east,
Watching the wordy sun rise,
Blinded and bathed in chapters of astral rays,
Sunshine pouring newness onto the vellum page,
Sharing goodness with the paragraphed earth,
Showering enlightenment on every living thing,
Waking in my imagined world,
Oh what may come!
Earthquake and tsunami,
Erupting volcanoes and speeding meteors,
Wormholes sucking the marrow out of life.
Tripe opening closed eyes to a rising tide,
Flooding tide pools, imagining poetic gardens,
Sharks and other words, those worlds swimming endlessly,
Dreaming fish and an end that is always near.
Fear gripped my literary world,
Heaven seemed so very far away,
Words appeared closer,
Boxed in by that tanglewood fear.
As I stared into a dark and smoky mirror,
Reflecting quantum leaps and coral reefs,
Sleep stalked me as I slipped silently into my sixties.
So many lucid dreams, tortured prose racking my brain,
Nightmarish demons still plaguing me,
Riding on my back into a dark unexplored wasteland,
Conquering trolls in valiantly fought battles that seemed grand.
Overcome with deadly challenges requiring that I take a stand,
Clinging to the broken edge of castle ramparts,
Plunging Ulfberht's sword deep into the demon's black heart,
Old Hag chuckling, half-hidden by a darkening sky,
Watching gleeful, her yellow eyes glinting in the moonlight,
Witnessing demon adversaries pitching forward,
Sinful wickedness failing, forever calling out the mistral wind,
Stone dead, calamity roared from that precipitous stone ledge.
Long before trench warfare was invented,
Strapping on my armour I went to war,
Long before Eric the Red sailed west,
Wrapping courage round a dragon heart,
Coursing westward to Vinland,
Sojourning in a new found land.
Helvetia rising, Viking fires forging Odin's destiny,
Historic bubbles bursting as red seas parted.
Beotuk dreams haunted that untamed land.
Iroquois sang winter songs, huddled in snug wigwams.
Dakota Sioux crossed the Big Muddy,
Riding Tatanka, crying out,
Hanta Yo!
While sacred bison thundered across unbroken prairie,
Savages painting magic buffalo on teepee covers,
Crossing the western horizon with horse culture,
Praying in the sacred Black Hills,
Weeping suddenly on snowy windswept ridges,
Wailing as mystery unfolded on those lonesome ledges,
Watching Washington's son of the Morning Star proceed,
Rewriting history and city editorials,
Marching forward into future design,
Custer slaughtering innocent women and children,
Shooting naked warriors as they leapt from burning teepees,
Lying bleeding and beaten on the Creator's blessed grass,
Tingeing tufts of bunch grass blood red,
Watching cruel blue coats cross the continent,
Crossing trusted men, uncrossing treaties with their giant X,
Maintaining mining law, serving out whiteman justice,
Hanging truth at the end of a twisted rope,
Charging forward swords drawn, all those sharply pointed lances,
Thrusting civilization into untamed wild, the American way,
Gilded lies burned into the sacred heart of First Nations people,
Massacre after massacre after bloody massacre,
Until goodness and nature surrendered,
Conclusively stalking, walking that lonesome trail of tears,
Searching all that madness for a single grain of compassion,
Construed in all that textbook history.
Hanta Yo! Came the call, more variegated words,
More blessed prayers, Grandfather speaking through silent rocks,
Animating assorted stories around a once happy campfire.
Another cuneiform chapter, another hieroglyph book, another handprint alphabet,
Composed each new day, every new word discovered and recited,
Constructed through my verbal weakness,
Words coating my swollen tongue with that dictionary of vagaries,
Allowing new spells and spellings, leaking out of my sutured mouth,
Ultimately understanding this spill of never ending stories ending,
Endlessly closing that final book, abased in that recurring dreamland,
Myriads of fused stars urging other legends to be born,
Truth dancing beneath my moccasin clad feet like true heyoka,
Interpreting my simple way around our orbiting sun,
Reading my way through my translated life,
Dressed and composed with that novel attire,
Leaving only elk tracks around a generous blazing fire.