ALL NIGHT POEM (MUCH
MUSHROOMING)
all night
all morning
had this dream
these dreams
feeding me a poem
giving
me lines
and no paper to
scrawl them down on
no wall on which
to spray paint them
tattoo needle
to ink
them on my
skin with
many, so many
words, phrases lost
the rest
are here
maybe you look at this poem
in the way they first did
guided by their sense
of the obvious, by the conventions of
realistic representation
trying to figure out the artists’ minds
those first artists of our
race, our entire human tribe
who painted their power animals
deep in the darkness
of the caves
at Lascaux, Chauvet, Peche Merle and Altamira
drew stuff there with care
but probably, given
the situation, exceedingly quickly
if we
were to interview about
legacy, posterity, artistic integrity,
symbolic experience, art
as transformation
you would shake your heads
lost for words, not
having the words
and yet,
upon deeper investigation, interrogation,
would
agree with what we see
because you saw it first, it was you
who taught us
this way to see
this way
the symbol on the cave wall
on the
page,
creates a portal, a doorway
if it does not down the wall
collapse the
cave, all caves
rethinking dimensions utterly, entirely
it all starts somewhere
but in the clouds of paint
clinging to the cave surface
here too, in the image of the mushroom,
which, as
things, thoughts
mushroom, magic psilocybin
mushroom their way
into
the poem
as they did
shaman-style upon your wall
as your altered state text
found its way into vision
lets me
hope that what started so triumphantly
for us all
does not end here, deep in some bunker
of the mind
lights on a board, the big board alight
the hand that drew that
wrote
imitating God in a gesture of power
ultimate act of anticreation.