Charles Stein

Stroke

(9/16-21/01. St. Francis Hospital Poughkeepsie, Rhinecliff.)

black ink

fantastic tangle of minatory tubes
    subject to pressures of mind—
tensions and distensions of a world release
  radical interrupts in chaos itself—

Strike One! and the eyeball seems
  to bugle from its socket
and images slide away in double deficit—

When will the hammer fall a second time?
            What range of world
  elided or eliminated outright?
 
 

Mind falls into world,
                      world
            launches missiles
                  back at
                mind.

The Towers of Extancy
    hoard all the being they can
as if being were substance
        and measured thereby.
 
 

There is a little panel in the intellect
whose rotating dials and levers measure extancy

and another darker panel back of that
where being’s ranges and categories are decided.

The ghost without a hand can turn these dials—
the one by measure ruled and read
the other by a kind of absolute dead-reckoning
moved toward world or away
back to that which feeling searches for home—
an open radiance watching through the meshes of thought and world
but spaced by love
to reach the spaces in all other beings
and lead them home
 
 

blue ink

    murky liquid looked at long
  until the mud wall's small gleams
   intensify—triangles
of silver hot to the mind—
mind burned by sharp edges of the light—

draw it up from the little glimmer
until brightness hiding in the tiny gleams
burn the mind that draws it up and out
 
 

    How can light
    burn the mind?

But the mind
pulled it
out of itself
straining its own
possibility—that's how!
until major lesions streak the thought-flesh

The mind's own edge
alarming its right to be
light—

  inside itself
    the mind as light
      is sharp as diamond
              tough
and ever-growing harder and more bright—
the clenching intellect
    the riveting intensity
        the keenness
  wounds the possibility thereof
until all
       is edge
           and keenness
and the teeming feral darkness of the wold
    wherefrom that brightness first took gleam
falls back into itself and seems no more
 
 

When
           mind was parked as parcels mixed
in murky liquid swirling indistinct from element
and muddy textured wall before all face—
was there no mystery, no deity?
Appearances were flat as they were.
No lightnings crashed the ordinary.
The originary groaned with debile process.
Sparks adhered to resins.
Aged vessels sat on aging ledges.

Then—
           river of tetrahedrons
              flowing from a point
        gold and silver alternate
     bordered by triangles of silver and gold

          river of cuboids—
               intensifications of themselves—
       coherent blotches of light in turbulent blackness.
 
 

Writing is violence.
It draws from turbulent blackness
      cuboids of light—

   checkerboard swatches of intensity
           edging out absence—

the field of loud I Am
    that grows ever more distinct
  trumpeting edgeless edge
        and will not die.
 
 

red ink

Whence this incursion
on the visual field?
This incisive oval of geometrical light
that scares me with the mad
distress of "the origin"—as if
I could see thereby
the lesion itself—the tear
in the minatory tangle
of vessel and tissue—a singular
violence distressed from the physical
object of myself—the
thought of the tangle
in which it is posed
by thought itself—invisible
thought of selfhood—hyper-
spatial to the tear
and to its terrible
ovoid incursion into
its own thought flesh. From what
but the action itself
enunciated now as a vibrating inset
of an order unintelligible
to the object it disturbs—
as if the "I" itself were
incised in its intuition
or the hyper-space of its
occurrence were inscribed
in a vicious act
that is no act but a thing
from that other zone
where terrors spring

—thus "I" must die
to heal the lesion
of its own increasing
clarification

and the afterspace
      that includes its violent incursion
return to the space before
                 the space before

           all violence began.
 
 

thick ink

words without purpose
the embarrassment of apparently
real contingencies / asleep
on the cool embankment—
now ascend to the highest rank—
the empty empty;
the clarity; the breath
at home
with the bodily
meshes and hulk
it happens to be breathing in—
the largesse at large in the tangle
of cause and consequence
or purpose and embarrassment—
contingencies the meshes
of the snare / the alphabet
of contingency scrambled
so the noise of speech—speech noise—

You can't get out of the
coil of speech noise
and the mind that
eggs it on—turning
about its axis and attempting to SAY
the state it wants to have and be
wanting to think out with mind brush
and mortar and pestle of intellect
the possible rank—IMpossible and RANK!
The gargoyles leaping from the forehead!
The bouncers and the barkeeps
locked up with the brawlers in the brawl!
 
 

If I knew it
why not get on a bus
and go without delay
to the city beyond concomitance—
the luminous Room in The Hull of the Ship of Truth—
the moon man aloof in the saddle
shining
           shining
   bounteous grace rays
 down hospital hallways
sneaking glances and casting beams
into desperate units
where groans and miseries turn on their axes
and the minds of medics are disjoined
from the bodies they've wired.

Why not get in the cab
of the big truck
in furious exodus
to comport oneself

home
on the bluenight highway?
 
 

no ink

strings
           and nerves
                            and roadways

    bundled in a tangle

                     snakes and phospherescent insects

    phos    the remembrance

    of light

                    when things leapt up
                         from themselves
 

                long ago
 

            in the dawn of   ta onta—

eon

           esti—it is—

the singular

                       rife

                                   orb
 

   released from the tangle
 

        mind saddled on      being
 

    without digression or part

                        galloping dayward
 
 

just ink

a ball of tangled "yarn" or nerves or vessels

        themselves the course and the message

the singular message of self-luminous Orb

                tigle chenpo

    totality      coursing through each span
 

the orb returns to the tangle

                    knotted yarn's

             impossible story
 

anomalous

           timed to burst

                       function to break down

         the furious space between the crossing strands

   that things are ripped out of their nature

    when the message explodes in the channel

the mindful light of the space through which it courses

         breaks into the coursing
 

  When earliest intellect

  awakens in the telling

the oldest gods

                            pass before the Face
 
 

              (care nothing
but for the moment of this passing
 

                even in death

        the "green cloths"
 

                solicitous friends disarmed
 

launching the world

                        against its own    form
 
 

The Terror-
ists

1.

Mind to mind.
Moment to moment.
The caterwaul goes on in the night leaf wet time,
and when it stops—it isn't there, stopped.

Now the eggplants weigh down the eggplant plant
      blue-black in the blacker wet night.

Wind—a process of orange leaves of the tall trees
       that enclose the back yard.
Wind sound—report of the process
                           of tearing the leaves off
     and how they tumble in what suspends them.

Ideal air is green, as
ideal water—white, flame—red, etc.

When we know everything
   only these pure color forms
      will seem to beam and blend
from out of the timeless vortex.

There is a process that is no process.
There is a curdling of selfhood
            in the rank enclosure.
But when the door is open on the night
the curdling then is a happy one.
Thought drafts wafting away and other
curdling thought drafts
wafting up
on the green wind.

The self that watches and the self that waits
or the one that rises   as
a vast enclosure—
each but a buckling in another's awning,
a wrinkling of the skin
of a being's conjugations.

Now the edge of change
blurs and blurts
and dinner's served.
 

2.

       Things
are known as things. And each
       leaps
from the invisible bucket
                that serves
things. Was it what it was
          before it leapt
                                  up
         from the bucket
                      into the soup
                                           of my eye?

Everybody's N-most Great Grand FatherMother:

                Being—
 

                                that bucket maker
                         bucket breaker

            provider   of   these days—
 

For a while now   things
                        have broken rank

     so no one's there
                      to catch the leap!

While here, in the midden zones, between and in all things
the broken buckets hang on invisible lines
and terror rides.
 

3.

The word is out.
Terror Mongers own the wind

which is not green.
 
 

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