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Science-fiction cum reality. Are we going forward, or is fear of the unknown sending us back in Time?

When Twilight Comes.

When twilight comes and consciousness sleeps in,

age-old echoes from prehistoric times begin to hum

Ego’s cradle-song .. first with low, dark-brown

cello tones which cause bone-marrow to tremble until

it flows, and then with high, glossy, unheard shrieks

which can only be made by angels who mean to provoke.

In time, my uneven breathing becomes transformed

into turquoise-colored waves which whip my oversensitive

psychic fortress from sobriety, and near panic.

There are no guarantees that I am ready for the

extraordinary gift that I am to be given:

a glimpse of existence in its unbelievable purity, which

is so personal that I am forced to grab onto

my earthly reality and smash the perfection

into countless, cloudy bits of mirror which rain lightly

upon my consciousness. I awaken sweaty, but not

completely empty-handed .. and I am not the person

I once had been.

Nocturnal Journey.

In the twenty-fifth hour,

as sleeplessness concedes

to Jungian twilight,

the inviolate ticking

of the bedside clock

betrays consciousness

with sinister rhythm.

It is a requiem of

abandonment, whereby

unprotected souls are

magically ushered to the

threshold of time’s end.

Clockhands melt into

surreal images of groping,

disembodied appendages which

pull me down into the

infernal swirling oblivion.

I seem to fall forever;

plummeting past floating

sandstone ruins, through

prehistoric jungles and

at last into a vast galaxy

of translucent emerald shards.

The heartbeats of innumerable

still-terrified predecessors

urge me to scream before

striking bottom, and I

awaken in panic: grasping

for the luminous dial

of my unwitting timepiece.

Retrospective.

Over the decades,

endings muted into beginnings

like swirls of blue-grey smoke

creeping toward alabaster palaces

in primordial consciousness.

There, in the garden of creativity,

the ashes of one zillion charred

impulses rained heavily upon

furrows of expectation,

cultivating dreams with experience.

Mushroom picking in the Kingdom.

Barefoot, I stumble through

the forest of the kingdom

without a hint of

either understanding

or danger.

I am on a treasure hunt,

and looking for the mushroom’s

hidden secrets — much

as a naive child

in the age of fantasy.

Every now and then my

beauty sleep is

disturbed by nature’s stillness,

which brings forth the
subconsciousness’

agitating and enchanting

images from places without

time or name.

Behind a fern from

the era of dinosaurs, and out from

under a moss-covered rock,

peers the most beautiful mushroom I

have ever seen,

with a broad red surface

speckled with gold.

I extend my arm

toward the precious find

and pause just

as I am about

to touch it.

The rock has begun to glow

like an emerald:

first with the quiet

intensity of

red hot coal, and

then with the overwhelming

light of God’s eternal love

and mercy,

mirrored in a trillion smiles.

At that instant I rise

out of my body, and

my chakras line up

perfectly while

I look down at myself and

the totality of

human existence from

far above.

And in the perfect harmony

I re-experience life

as in the heavenly periods

in between earthly incarnations,

and all of my daily worries

and obstacles seem just as

dreamlike and insignificant

as a midsummer’s daydream.

I never fully return back

to the consciousness that

I once knew,

but retain a small

portion of the glow that

has now touched my heart

in such a wonderful way.

In my backpack I carry home

not a single mushroom, but truly the

most sought after treasure from

the forest of the kingdom:

certainly, a simple rock —

as a souvenir from

life’s journey of dreams.

SATURN’S BLUES.

when the moon is in Fresno

and the sun sets a purplish

haze over early-autumn skies,

the cold winds of Hell

breathe heavily against

the hopes of local heroes

and the women who made them.

farmers stare off into the fields

without realizing, and housewives

pull their young close to their

bosoms – suddenly and

without explanation.

intuitively they sense the onset

of a long and severe influence;

a time of hardship and hindrance

when the faith and courage of

more than a few good men

and women are put to test.

the carousel is out-of-control,

and in the whirlwind confusion

crops will fail, loved ones will

pass away, jobs will be lost

and the simplest of dreams will

be stifled by saturn’s blues:

a mocking nursery rhyme telling

of horror and despair, and sung

over and over again with endless

variations on the same cruel theme.

Spleen.

Screeching,
flamebreathing dragons
soar low over violated
plains of brainmatter.
Fires of fear incite
waves of internal uproar
to sear the ulcerated
lining of delicate
abdominal tissue, while
glowing corpuscles ferry
hysteria into distended
veins and scorch alarmed
nerve endings.
Crops fail, dams break,
control centers malfunction.
Eyelids clamp shut in
retreat from the horrors
of imminent disaster but
optic darkness is cruelly
marred by vermillion blotches –
bits of displaced spleen,
proclaiming realization of
all that was dreaded yet
intuited as inevitable.

For the trolls: The Screen-Generation Gospel (or The Illiteracy of Seeing) 

They do not read—
they glance,
they graze,
they sip the froth of meaning
from the rim of images
and call it understanding.

In the Screen-Generation Era
the page has been flattened,
pressed into pixels,
stitched into a tapestry of instant seeing
where thought is too slow
to survive.

You labor in the deep mines of language—
chiseling argument from silence,
stacking evidence like careful stone,
threading reason through chaos
until it hums.

But no one hears it.

They arrive late,
boots muddy with scrolling,
eyes trained not to read
but to recognize.
A headline is enough.
A caption is a conclusion.
A picture—
ah, a picture is gospel.

And so they speak:

“The essay is good—
but the image ruins you.”

Ruins you.

As though truth were housed
in pigment and provenance,
as though a thought must be hand-drawn
to be believed.

They crawl from comment sections
like damp apostles of certainty,
fingers greasy with outrage,
declaring heresy against the unseen process—
against the quiet collaboration
they cannot detect,
cannot parse,
cannot imagine.

You write with a ghost beside you—
not haunting,
but helping—
a seamless mind-meld
where tool and thinker blur.

But they do not see minds.
They see surfaces.

They worship the artifact,
fear the method,
and guard their crumbling gate
to a past that never truly held.

Listen—
can you hear it?

The slow regression,
the turning of a great intellectual tide
back toward the shallow shore
of image-before-word.

A new illiteracy rises,
not from lack of symbols
but from refusal of depth.

Once, paintings taught the masses
who could not read—
light and shadow carrying stories
across cathedral walls.

Now we return, inverted—
not because we cannot read,
but because we will not.

This is the horror:

not fire,
not ruin,
not the collapse of cities—

but the quiet capture of the Mind.

Held hostage
by No-Think terrorists
who chant in looping feeds:

“Too long.”
“Didn’t read.”
“Show me instead.”

They fear the unseen machinery of thought,
the slow burn of comprehension,
the discipline of sitting
inside another mind.

And so they cling
to hand-drawn “reality,”
as if the hand were sacred
and the idea disposable.

As if truth cared
how it was rendered.

You stand in the fracture—
between word and image,
between effort and ease,
between the long-form and the instant verdict—

and you keep writing.

Because somewhere,
beneath the avalanche of thumbnails
and the tyranny of the glance,
there is still a reader.

Or the ghost of one.

Or the possibility
that the mind,
starved long enough,
will remember how to hunger again.

Until then—
let them shout from their glowing caves,
let them polish their suspicion
like a dull, inherited blade—

you are building something
they cannot see.

And that,
more than any image,
terrifies them.