VOLUME 8 TABLE OF CONTENTS

DO ME, THEREFORE I AM          (1996)

(A White Goddess poem: Narcissus Catches Up
     With Mother Nature After a Trip to Hell)

The high tech towers of borderland
rise through the mist and overshadow
the gone world of techno-catastrophe.

Narcissus, now dwells on Olympus,
restored to modern life.

From the balcony
of his tenth floor apartment,
Narcy looks down,
dribbling food and crumbs from his chin.

He spots the little woman
on her way home, his wife,
Bivalyn, who lives only to
idolize him at his sacred feet.

Her joy is that her punishment
will never be complete,
like never riding the elevator alone
or without her husband.

Tranquilized by his control
she dutifully waits in the lobby.

Narcy grabs an elevator going down,
shares the ride with Art, the maintenance man,
who feigns a sheepish grin.

But, Art can't be but so smart, he thinks.
A soul among the souls.

Narcy doesn't trust the likes of him
to ride an elevator with his wife.

He doesn't even know he's lost;
doesn't know who thumbs the down arrow button.

Alarms go off as they plummet
to a belly dweller's undergirding,
far below the city where the sick
and sane take refuge from each other.

Panoramic hells of borderline society
stretch out end to end, where
broken people sit in homeless quandary,
telling stories, making theories,
perched on heights to escape
the millions caught in human traffic
and prepare to die with hopeless legacy, 
lost in a burning, oil-drum world of history.

Narcy and the maintenance man
can only hope to find the furnace room
that leads up to the building where they live,
to reach the lobby of light.

Art has trouble seeing,
being another wall-eyed engineer,
and yet, he draws with a stick
in the subterranean dust
and pictures happen:

Kids stuck in daycare,
maniac mother drives through grave yards,
throwing bloody items out of her car,
screaming the names of demons.

Father, self-absorbed,
puts the dampers on his sexual hysteria.
No time to socialize, time saving devices
take up too much time.

Kids grow up shattered, shadoobie,
can't handle ambiguity.

Stick pins hold the pieces of Narcy together.
Narcy can't hide his deeper faults.

Wives and mothers eat poets
for their great nutritional value,
bear the poet's children
just so they can brainwash them.

Narcy's wife declares
with twisted motherly intent:
"I hate you," hissing like a back-draft.
"Don't you dare leave," she snarls.

He and the wife play together
in a game taken much too seriously,
filled with a dark sexuality of ecstasy,
wild feelings of omnipotence,

thunder struck in the black holes
of a personal universe.

Yet, Bivalyn knows there can be no children;
like Medea, she would kill them
in a fit of chaotic passions, hoping for an Oscar.

So she prays to the rebel of neurosis,
protector of eels and souls,
plots her vantage with all the skill
of a smart-bomb surgical strike,
leaving behind a silence that grows,
shifting vague magnetic fields.

"Creative glimpses into private hells
give people like you a second chance,"
says the maintenance man who's
beginning to pop his circuits, blow fuses.

Narcy wakes up from the dream
in full recognition of his problem:

"Quiet strength that wheels through heaven,
please, respect my interest,
give me a second chance to be calm
and softly colored by personality.

Spare me from another robot session.
No computer therapist need apply."

"I'll go quietly, maddened by love,
bent by urban life, gracefully sinking
into cultural extinction, neurotic, urbane,
applauding the Sears catalog clutter of the world...

and yes, I will accept Yanni
as my musical mentor and guide through life."

"How could I have fallen so far and
still had the courage to forgive myself." 

No myth, no culture, no invention left in me but misery
that seeks out the same sick people toting brown bags
and blank memories. The world limps on with no ancestry,
no intuition and no revelations of the soul.

Suddenly,
for the first time he sees the dingy park across the street
and hears the wildlife calling, flapping deep in the forest,
echoing half remembered.

"I know that bird," he says,
"I hear her dropping little bones as she eats."