ON THE FREE FAKE TROLLEY OF CHARLOTTESVILLE

I am ashamed

That I am mostly disgusted

By two fortyish lovers

I scrutinized on the city's free fake trolley.

She scoured out his nose and ears

Over and over, devotedly,

Wiping the goo on her shorts.

Did she judge the goo to be his gift

Or at least her exemplary achievement?

She is as focused as a  deluxe surgeon.

Her not-ugly face never gets bored.

His head relaxes on her steadfast lap.

In his near-ugliness he is smiling.

The process lasts throughout the ride.

He also does not get bored.

She is the mother cat whose job

Is to preciously clean her kitten without stop;

Or is this vision

A sort of Pieta'?

Are they utterly in love,

In love above most other lovers?

Are they so free they can do such stuff in public;

Or are they bizarrely unashamed?

I devoted myself to staring:

Can my disgust be discussed?

Or do I admire such ugh-ness?

The clothing of the unwary  pair

Verged on being rags.

Will they be inexplicable icons

In my brain?

           © Stephen Margulies, 2019

CAT Trolley, courtesy of nbc29.com

Persist, Resist: 2019, Facing Evil

I will not cease from Mental Fight

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England's green & pleasant land.

-----Willian Blake

(To be human in a hurt world is to evolve from being a tear because aware to

being a wound seeking others hurt by terror to becoming ash yet we revive to in peace resist)

Once we were a walking teardrop

Though we shone while we thought.

Then we were a walking wound

Wound wooing other wounds

Wound aiding other wounds

Wound asking other wounds

"Are you truly a wound too?"

Now we are ashes moaning with memory--

Are ashes anything other than moans?

Yet love exists even in ashes

Love may persist even in ashes.

May the Phoenix be formed

Out of our ashes

Whose feathers flash through the air

Like Blakean blades!

      © Stephen Margulies, 2019

"The Garden of Love," by William Blake
from Wikimedia Commons

THE CITY OF LIGHT—PARIS AGAIN—NOVEMBER 2015

Now we are a tear in the shape of a person—

a tear that screams.

Or maybe we are a blood-drop who is a person—

blood that wails

and walks or rather stumbles

upon our planet formed

to be a blood-drop, a teardrop,

and the entire planet is screaming.

The planet and we, made for one another,

are pain moving upon pain.

The planet floats, reels

upon a foundation

that is not a noble elephant,

a patiently pleasant turtle,

or the dependable shoulders of Atlas.

The planet floats, reels

upon perhaps sounder foundation—

whole horror.

Now we know that there are Believers

who adore horror.

Those Believers may rejoice

when joy is destroyed,

supposedly convinced

that the only purity is pollution,

cruelty the sole permissible cult,

death the one true faith.

So the soul, like the Earth,

attains the purity of worshipped pollution.

Terror thus may compose reality,

and a screaming tear, a drop that is a person,

will not be heard.

Who among gods in the depths of height

can concoct help, healing, wellness?

Has hope been conceived yet,

a mirror in the void to answer

our own agonized shining?

And yet, despite terror, we do shine at times,

a shape, a drop trained by love,

that survives by shining

for the sake of shining.

The curve of a tear may be defined therefore

as a smile, a smiling blood-drop.

Are we brave enough to re-invent fun

as wellness inconceivable

by its well-trained killers?

Is killing the same as believing?

Somewhere, Someone has conceived of purity

that is fun, which is not pollution.

“Those Believers want to destroy

the things worth living for—

food, wine, friends.” 

© Stephen Margulies, 2017

Christmas Illumination Champs-Elysées, Paris
Photo by Didier Boy de la Tour;
Koert Vermeulen principal lighting designer & Marcos Vinals Bassols artistic director
from Wikimedia Commons

THE CHARLESTON MASSACRE, JUNE 2015

(For the nine church members in Bible study murdered by a white supremacist)

Streaming blood, the Bibles flap their wings;

Pages become wings, the wings of strong angels.

The Bibles spray blood over the listening Earth

Like words we must read in order to survive.

The blood is like the trail made by dazzling jets:

The Bibles rise like thrones into heralding heaven.

Each Bible is a throne bearing up a wise victim,

A martyr singing of love and mercy

High over horror, the sanctuary defiled

Once again befouled, violated

By a blank secessionist for the country of blankness

Testifying to hate’s supremacy.

The flag of blankness must be honored

By minds that are blank, giddy with pride

In rebellion against the human, despising all color.

They turn the beauty of the city into old sad sin,

Its crime against the Union of love and justice.

Hate’s flag will not be lowered; love’s flag bows in shame.

Blankness must recreate the Confederation of inhumanity—

The sanctuary of color, of life is refuted.

But the church of mercy has changed into a chalice,

A huge chalice filled with the blood of the killed.

The church brims with blood like the wine of kindness,

The redness of blackness, the color of love.

Even in victory, the unloving stay unloving—

Exposed to kindness, he must murder the kind.

But kindness is sustained on the wings of those bibles

And the church is a chalice offered to heaven,

The wine of wisdom, the oblation of souls.

Our Union must be preserved by love and mercy,

By courage and justice, the strength of the kind.

Blood streams from those Bibles

In words we must read:

We are one in diversity, naked Union of hope.

The fragile city is beautiful,

But its sins have been horrible.

It asks to be forgiven,

But it must not sin again.

May rainbow people thrive

In the joyous color of its markets;

May the pastel mild elegance

Of the city survive.

For blankness is loyal only to blankness

And will stay desolate forever

In evil isolation.

The Union of love and mercy, color with color,

Justice with kindness is never alone.

Honor the redness of blackness, honor all color,

Kindness and courage, the song of the strong.

Note: The terrorist Roof, who had no sheltering roof yet could not accept courteous sanctuary, despising all affectionately protective roofs, deceived himself into thinking he was aristocratic white. In fact, he was blank. Blankness is not a color. All color is lovely—black or white shining.  Roof believed in the supremacy of gunlove, the sovereignty of ignorance. He expected that his hopeless blankness would grant him pleasingly grim self-justification, the light of the loser. He thought the murderous refutation of otherness is power. With skill-less urgency, he would paint his blankness in blood, giving his blankness the insignia of specious superiority. But his blankness gets blanker and blander as long as he dourly dubiously lives. This is gunlove, the emptiness of solipsistic ignorant sovereignty. Roof is not white. He is blank. Clementa Pinckney and his studiously charming martyred friends, are victorious in establishing a better city of kindness and justice, equally and delicately pastel as the beauty of the older sinning city. The amiably raucous color of its market will live, will thrive even more.  Terror over the Earth is unreal murderous rule, fake law , the rage of blankness. Only the blood of love, of courage and kindness, knows how to paint soul, actual art. The reign of dearth and fear over the Earth kills but is idiot illusion. Earth is the loveliest of unmurderous hues, the true spectrum of you, of thou. Relinquish killing animals, grass, people. Unpoison the air.

Acknowledge the gorgeous, ensouling, reviving, healing flag of the rainbow. Race is not real. Life only is valid hope and possible power. The tears of good humans are real. Accept the thrill of otherness, your gifted and giving self, the life of thou and I—joy. Everything that exists in this shattered light is holy. For it has conquered nothingness. Gather the shattered light.

      © Stephen Margulies, 2017

Four winged angels
Stained glass by J. & R. Lamb Studios
Wikimedia Commons

The Validity of Hiding

Like Clint Eastwood recovering from his wounds in a cave,

His blasted flesh made whole by hiddenness,

So that he may stride out into the open a mute hero;

Like a dragon hibernating with fire-breath turned down low,

Untouchable by savage chilvary;

Like Han Shan in ebullient meditation invisible on Cold Mountain;

Like King Arthur the Once and Future King waiting armoured

With untarnished mail in misty Avalon;

Like exiled excited Euripides writing on potshards persistent

In a tabula rasa cave far from his enemies;

Like Buddha in temporary eternity passively morphing evil arrows

Aimed at him into blossoms in zazen under the Bodhi tree;

Like crusty St. Jerome in his sand-encrusted desert study,

Alone with his loyal lion except for his learned malice;

Like the Seven Sleepers snoring safe for centuries in their den;

Like lots of hermits as rocky as their refuge nourished on locusts

And their lust for separation glutted—

As illustrious as these,

My cat needs to be secreted sometimes.

He seeks barricaded enigmas of solace we can’t understand.

He restores his elegant ambiguous vulnerability in the dust under my bed.

His valuable selfhood recuperates in the soft chaos of my closet.

Master of hiddenness, master of comfort among the uncomfortable—

He can stay in a paper bag for a day,

His magisterial tail unknowingly exposed.

He recovers himself but to give himself.

His aloofness makes possible his generosity; his solitude, solidarity.

He must re-incubate, re-consolidate.

He alone fulfills the desire to return to the womb

As he alone can rebirth himself.

He is a treasure that vanishes unless returned to its hiding place.

It must be returned, retrieved, returned again and again.

He isolates himself so that he may burst into visibility,

Expanding into our space,

Ready to present himself resurrected

As our palpable companion luminosity.

Then he will be my alien, un-alien twin,

Frenzied or lethargic as I am frenzied or lethargic,

Matching me in everything I do as much as he can.

His being will be rhyming with mine.

Thus the hero emerges healthier and more sociable than Lazarus,

Forgetting that he was ever entombed.

Purified by solitude,

He is able now to endure my caresses.

Only lightning will frighten him still,

Though he himself is lightning,

Even immobile under my bed. 

© Stephen Margulies, 2017   

Young cat hiding
by 0XX010C
on Wikimedia Commons

With Friends on the Blue Ridge Many Years Ago

On the mellow mountain my friends and I

Wooed tricky streams and felt up trees.

Each strange leaf honored and many kissed,

We sipped perfect water and pissed in peace.

Insects embroidered music; light was an animal

Little but not weak that played hide-and-seek.

We pretended to argue and were almost sincere

Or more than sincere in bartering praise.

It is unchangeable fact that air adored our lungs—

And awed on a tall but considerate stone

We were instructed by color, the costume of the sky.

Since then our brains like acrobats,

Trained in secret, in gaudy caves

Have sometimes been loyal, have sometimes betrayed;

Our flesh sometimes failed; fear turned expert.

Death or shame is a judge who won’t forget;

Who insists on a decision though we soar from jail

In recklessly innocent, half-honest joy.

Despite the crime of our clumsiness,

We remember the silver,

The purity of delight,

Synesthesia and sinlessness,

The unstained yearning

Of our voices sustained

By undeceived inconceivable

Blessable air.

In the mystical mistiness

Of our blue mellow mountain

We yet track the trickiness

Of streams green as grass.

We still follow the untreacherous

Unfailing glow of air.

Does cruelty rule? Have our hearts changed to ash?

But the tall altar stands! The music remains!

       © Stephen Margulies, 2016

Blue Ridge Mountains
Photo by Jürgen Nagel
from Wikimedia Commons

Who

My people are the most hated people in history.

Am I the most hated person on this earth?

Benighted by night, I walk thug-haunted streets,

My only fellow the thug who follows me.

It is satisfyingly easy to hate a race everyone hates.

There is no guilt in hate the world validates.

No nation is so evil, could be so evil, or so good!

Can a people be despised because it gave birth to Goodness?

Can a people be despised because it wasn’t good enough

But wasn’t bad enough to either conquer or disappear?

My people gave birth to many religions, who loathe their mother.

Our identity deleted, our nation nullified, our humanity distrusted,

Our home is negated, old or new, proffered and withdrawn.

Every smartphone glares: hate this race and be spared!

Join certainty, fatal justice!

My people mothered high and low thought—deplored by both.

Sometimes our identity is to delete our identity,

Such unselfing the last refuge of affirmation.

Of course we sinned—but were we sincere?

Are you sincere in your sinning?

Some sinning was earthy, fun, inventive, a bit helpful.

But sinning is sometimes not fun.

Is the Unforgivable Sin to, unassisted, refuse nonexistence?

Is our Use to be the canary in the coal mine?

Though I feel the thug following, I still walk.

© Stephen Margulies, 2016

Anti-semitic graffiti in San Pedro Sula, Honduras
from Wikimedia Commons

TUNIS—BARDO MUSEUM—2015

To become powerful in this world

You must learn to destroy joy,

Destroy the Muse, destroy souls.

You must spray videos of your pride

In the decorum of torture, the ritual of righteous murder.

Your failure to be human

Becomes Absolute Law—unappealable.

You establish the tyranny of arid illusion,

Lovelessness, the faultless Priesthood of Death.

Each person is a Museum

Where memory is a masterpiece,

Where our secret Muse is guarded,

Past and present one vivific delight.

Yet our yearning is art.

Each Museum is therefore a person

Where Joy is studied by lovestruck scholars,

Where art is heart, breathtakingly displayed.

High sadness is here, part of our soul.

So the museum is an immortal Garden

That soars on our bliss into the future.

Here, the shapes of our hope are valid.

We see, and our mind caresses our sorrow and goodness.

Museums are therefore a garden

That must be sprayed with death

By righteously insane gardeners.

Hectic soul-flowers must be poisoned,

The muses disintegrated in ecstasies of hate.

For the failure to be human

To become absolute law, Awe must be identical to murder.

Innocence is declared guilty.

Art, identity, soul can’t exist—museums can’t exist.

The flying garden must be forgotten.

The people in the Museum are guilty

Because they are people.

But the Universe is a museum, a garden

They can’t destroy,

Where the startling stars are displayed

Like flowers, like souls,

Like the art of blessed yearning.

This Garden is guarded, this House of the Muse,

Somewhere almost forever.

The Shape of our names

Somehow, there will be safely luminous.

Yearning will also be solace, home.

© Stephen Margulies, 2015

Garden in Nogueira da Silva Museum, in Braga, Portugal
Photo by Jose Olgon
from Wikimedia Commons

RED LIPS CHANT! (ÉMILIE CHARMY PERFORMANCE, INCANTATION)

Look, good swaying people, good people with good vision, good eyes that see and see and see! Look at us! Visualize the vision we bring to you from upstairs! There is a long lady upstairs. Standing sideways but gazing at you…black hair, black eyebrows, red lips, red dress.  Imagine her into existence before you, paint like flowing flesh and flesh like flowing paint. Imagine a glowing flowing long red dress like a tall waterfall! See us! See Émilie Charmy!  Bring her paint before you, as we sing and dance her into existence before you. This is incantation. This is the charm of Émilie Charmy! Charmed by Charmy! Bring her before you! Visualize, touch the vision, feel  the force of the long red dress like a tall waterfall. Stroke your imagination. Émilie Charmy is here among you. Free! Frank! Forceful! Questioning! Parisian! Brave, free, frank, female…strong in paint, strong In flesh, strong in frankness, forthright before you,  paint flowing like a waterfall,  flesh flowing like paint,  a long red dress as tall as a waterfall. Visualize her freedom, her frankness, her force, her questioning black eyes, her appraising black eyebrows, the black heaven of her black hair, her freedom.  Brave, free, frank, female. Visualize her intelligent desire.  She is appraising you. She questions you. You question her. You judge her joy. She judges your joy. Joy judges joy. Freedom judges freedom. Paint forever fresh! Vigorous before you. The vigor of questions, the vigor of your glances. You and she exchange freedom.  A dance of questioning. Feel the dance of questioning. Look. Feel what you see. Feel her questions looking at you. You look. You feel the red tall waterfall of the long fresh dress. The freshness of the long red dress. The freshness of the questioning eyes. Her force, her joy, her intelligent desires! Feel the flow of her ferocious sexy goodness.  Sexy intelligence.  As fresh as flesh.  As fresh as paint. As fresh as the long red dress like a tall waterfall. Follow the flow!

You and she and we exchange dances, glances, charged and charmed by the strong smart woman upstairs, now before you here in vigorous vision. Wave your red dresses, the red dresses of your imagination. Shake out your red scarves like the flags of intelligent desire. Shake out your red scarves. You and she and we are incantation, together shaping  enchantment, the charm of Émilie Charmy. Chant and vision must be shaped by intelligent desire, by the shaping dance of joy judging joy, painted eyes and flesh eyes together making enchantment. We charm Émilie Charmy into existence before us. Slightly laughing she teaches us her spells and helps us to exist. Incantation! We chant our vision into existence, we charm our souls into vigor, into flow we can feel, flowing with the frank freshness of Émilie Charmy. This is a healthy trance, a democratic trance, unforced, strongly amiable. Our magic spell is taught us by a rare Parisian, a woman breaking into the heaven of art, the heaven of flesh and soul. Woman painter teaches us her bravery, her intelligent desire. Even her still lifes explode into wild rainbow health! Her parlors where women seemingly do middleclass things are changing before our eyes into strange rooms where strange love resides. O enigmatic atmosphere of her parlors where form transforms itself and transforms you. What are you watching….a parlor or a happy bordello!  Victorian décor or paint shaping desire revealed. This is a salubrious trick. What we thought was middleclass is really intense in its calm.

Desire revealed! Not really just another parlor. A room for desire! Unafraid! There is no fear in Émilie Charmy! She unchained herself by her charm. Free, frank, brave woman… Parisian joyousness, smart, strong, amused. She is amused to reveal, to show, to judge and shape her intelligent desire.  She forms us, we form her, in mutual erotic intelligence. We all now exist, paint and flesh and strong smart woman…Parisian in the era where ANYTHING AT ALL could be conceived and brought into palpably amazing being. Sway your red dresses! Wave your red scarves! Dance your healthy trance! Let us exchange trances! Red lips chant!

 And all this goodness occurs approved of by the shining steel cloud of the wavy Jean Arp sculpture curvaceous nearby. Jean Arp approves and shines his approval upon us. We are observed by that steel cloud of a wavy sculpture holding a wavy hole through which we see reality.  Art as curvy as nature! The steel cloud bounces blessing upon us like sunlight! Raise up your red lips, red scarves!

Émilie Charmy, “Portrait,” oil on canvas, 1921. Courtesy of Pamela K. and William A. Royall, Jr. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Travis Fullerton

Is This Synesthesia?

Cassidy’s ears, skillfully lovely yet not quite of Earth,

Swivel like the most advanced satellite dishes

To hear the good ghosts that rustle in the night,

As if cloaked in fine-spun gold.

He sniffs the delicate delight of their healing perfume.

O he sees the benevolence of the thoughts of the good ghosts

That haunt our room and clumsily try to extend help to us

Through the bewildering knots and knots of dimensions

That distance us from these spirits reluctant to deceive.

He sniffs fear and love in the room like aromatic candles.

He hears and inhales good and evil

Though no evil comes from the fumbling ghosts, our friends,

Who haunt us and whom we haunt.

Cassidy attempts to instruct us all 

At least to read lips, seen or unseen, spirit or human.

But even for Cassidy this teaching is not easy,

He who hears, sees, smells so well

And always knows where float the glow and perfume

Of benevolence, in whatever world we are in or believe we are in.

He can hear and smell clouds in their joy swelling

To fill all skies.

He can hear their tenderness blossom like mountains.

He hears more modest clouds move through blueness as if they

Were simultaneously foam, boat, wave, and sail.

Even upon cessation of the rain,

Cassidy hears grass continue to swooningly sip

While worms shape alphabets through the moistened soil

In their invigorated wiggling.

Cassidy hears birds become alert with the knowledge

Of their fulfillment.

The muzzles of daffodils blare out for my cat

The rejoicing gold of their glow!

But Cassidy in quietude will hear dawn yawning

Like an abyss that blesses;

And he will always hear twilight just begin

To feel the sensitive swell and dip

Of the horizon.

He can hear me smile.

He sniffs my fingertips to get perfect knowledge of my heart.

He hears my footsteps approaching his goodness

Down the slightly painful miles of cement.

When I see him in the dignity of his duty

Peering at supposedly unpopulated air

And hearing salubrious sounds unheard by me

I know he is haunting the good-hearted

But imperfectly-skilled ghosts who are trying to help, trying to help,

And whom my admirable animal

Is trying to guide, trying to guide.        

© Stephen Margulies, 2015

Green-eyed Abyssinian
Photo by Petekurt
from Wikimedia Commons