Necessary poems

Because poems

by Jon Rappoport

August 12, 2016

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Power Outside The Matrix, click here.)

I’ve been entranced by one kind of poetry or another since I was 11.  I started writing it when I was 17.  Poems can’t be classified.  If you want to say there are types, they are infinite, which defeats the whole idea of cataloging them.

Poems SUGGEST.  They refer to what isn’t there.  But now it is.  That’s the underlying point, and it quite startling to know a poem can do that.

But of course, you have to be willing to receive suggestions of what isn’t but then is.  You have to shake off the predisposition to want language to do certain things but then stop at the boundary.  That is a fixation, a form of hypnosis, the limitation-complex.

Reality is a fraud.  It’s what is left over after all other options have been exhausted.  I’m not only talking about the content of reality, but also the position of it, the front-and-center of it.  Yes, you need to deal with it, and cleverly, but hypnotic attachment to it is religious.  If it weren’t, why would you keep dreaming of extraordinary things while you’re asleep?  Why wouldn’t you dream of walking down to the corner to buy a cup of coffee and a newspaper?

Here I’m publishing three poems.  The first one was published by The Massachusetts Review in 1966. It was written after an intense period of reading William Blake’s short poems.  The second one I wrote today.  The third one is a brief excerpt from a very long poem, Visions of the Empire, which I finished in 2013.  I’m currently revising it.

First poem:

Burned flowers of the field

My noon is over, growing old

Everything I have is finally sold

Sewed designs for men with money

Thinking it was duty

To watch them lead the world to war

From my little field of beauty

 

Second poem:

Because night has no name in caverns of sky plantations of stars…

This is what Hermes said in a loud wand voice over and over

As he walked the length of a broken down bar

In Times Square

And the drunks in their stools lifted their heads

As if they were poets

 

Waiting to join an army

Of long sword

The army they’d deserted a thousand years ago

On a spring morning when they stopped shining with green lanterns of diamond-throated Merlin birds in the high clouds

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Third poem:

one version of what the old Tibetans

called the Great Void:

 

everybody looks around and tries to figure out what to do

because the long hustle of discovery is over

and all the explorers have been paid off

 

There is nothing left

except a few magicians

living in cold mountains

punching holes in the universe at will

 

In Lhasa they were indeed faced with that Nothing

and they turned to it in the eastern sky hanging like a lamp in a long vacated whorehouse

and bowed

 

that was the only ceremony in the original book

which they later

in quiet rooms

burned in wood bowls

 

before starting their exercises

 

Worship?

Decay?

Never heard of it.

 

 

And now think of something else, perfect automobiles

         streaming down a tropical planet toward the

      mirror lake on which stands a demigod in green pantaloons

who holds All Data in his outstretched arms

 

and freeze THAT in memory like a sword for sixteen hours

without moving

and finally see universe

is a product

of mind

 

this is what they were doing

before they wrote the books and ordered the prayer wheels from sears catalog

and jingle jangled their way into a theocracy on a cold saturday morning

 

they were the dim sum masters

never ordered the same breakfast twice in the holy rivers of energy

took apart the river and the energy

too

down to Nothing

sat in Void for

indeterminate length of no-time

stopping all creating

because they could

and then emerged

those few

magicians in the cold wasted hills and

 

and said WELL

if you folks want to elect a billion reincarnated hopalong cassidys

as your head chief go ahead it doesn’t matter

we’re out here on the edge

inventing and destroying dimensions like porcelain plates

 

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine.