Karl Hammerschmidt's Open Salon Blog

Uncoiled by the Fire of the Sun, a Tempest of Hydrogen

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 15:08:41 -0400

In the arboreal synergy,

where the Taoist Lao Tzu

is planting a garden of emptiness,

the crushed ear of the chestnut

is listening

to the human heart

opening on the other side of the earth

where the sea foam is racing

towards the center of the city.

At the moment of inextinguishable wisdom,

there is a pause.

The flesh of the earth (wood knots and chlorophyll,

the mandibles of Lightning Bugs, the open eyes of a Child)

recombine to form

something that not even Picasso could stop laughing at,

a palace of Eternity,

the Exoskeleton of Paradise,

a strange river of Green Ones

traipsing through the fingerprint

of a Storm God

whose words are like ferns,

uncoiled by the fire

of the Sun,

a bloody hearted tempest

of hydrogen

White Noise, a Whirlwind of Cruciforms

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 15:08:49 -0400

In the colors of the eyelid

there are chameleon tongues that rise against the silvery

canvas of the sun,

dropping pearls of blue fire

into wishing wells that haunt the world

with their seeming unmitigated normalcy,

as if the entire life of the Other World

was somehow a farce,

which of course. It neither is nor is not.

In that strange cobblestone where the dragonfly

pursed a trillion chromatophores

the flesh of the daffodils

bursting into white noise,

the moment the airplane ascended through the sky,

a whirlwind cruciform,

the Whale of Jonah, it's belly racing through the sky

like some ancient curse,

revealed on page thirty two

of the Book that contains the Code for Terminal Velocity,

when the last shadow draped it's wing

across the cobblestone

and the dragonfly turned agains the wind

for a moment

and looked into the Eye.

Wings of Ourobouros in the Mirror of the Light

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 15:08:05 -0400

When the playwright leapt

off the stage

a sudden burst of insanity,

filtered downstage

revealing, in the egress

of sulci and gyri,

what the world could not explain:

a Minotaur

balancing Jewels

in the Heart of an Actress

whose name was described by a cook book

when the real world decided to disappear

and run through the world disguised as a mirror,

a mirror that knows the threshold of being,

the infinite regress of Light,

the stage directions written by the Ouroborous itself,

where the Wings are pulsed with indeterminate

language,

the gossip of actors

whose tongues are canticles of invisible fire,

tastebuds bursting

with syllables inherited from

the strange fruit of far Arden

In the Mantra of the Mandala, Neologisms of Creation

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 15:08:00 -0400

a passing bird escapes her eye

it is the wisdom of Apollo,

leaving near earth orbit and racing into the garden

to remember what it taught the birds

that day

when Socrates slipped into the Smoke of the Sybil,

and memory raced around

the world in a language that Plato could not comprehend,

the Neologisms spinning up from the ground

like spiderwebs, catching thoughts

in circles of light,

prismatic displays of creation,

a strange fire that races from brain to brain

as if anyone knew what the brain could possibly be

Socrates himself

inhaling the breath of the Sybil

as if it was the perfume of Olympus,

sulfur and the strange fruit

swirling in the Temple

until the Sybil began to inhale,

the night stars clouding over

in a whisper, the stars that hush themselves

in a labyrinth,

the labyrinth of birth

a maternity ward spinning in the dark spaces

where nothing happens,

the Zenith of the Mandala

A Scar of Beauty, where Flowerhead rests on the Guillotine

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 17:08:35 -0400

The human skin, a roadmap into the Afterlife.

The spirits assemble,

congregations buried in the ligament

opening their throats to the sunlight

where the chessmen have gathered, their eyes

like raw plums,

waiting for instructions from the Buddha

of Faceless Lightning

She circled the mirror in shades of infinite regress,

her eyes,

white diamonds of suspended animation,

like a memory cauterized by wildfire.

On the Television they sent ten thousand subliminal messages,

the kind designed to get children

to eat high octane candy until the End of the World,

because everyone knows this is the final, final, final

last offer

Act Now, just do as we say.

It was then, in the curve of space around the silence of an otherwise ordinary room

that the light bulb began to flicker

as if it knew something, as if it had something to say

but couldn't quite slow down,

perhaps it is being chased

for reasons unknown.

As the light in the room went from white to yellow to translucent orange

and the sky slipped like a woman's tongue

through the window,

and curled on the floor in imitation of the Cat,

a series of unasked questions began to arrive in the World,

as if they were passengers in some strange caravanserai,

their mouths (all questions have mouths)

open like birds into a rain

that is not falling, but is suspended in the sky

like something painted by Henri Matisse.

In the Louvre, there was a docent,

whose eyes were full of Tea and a strange darkness

that gathered everything it could from Tourists eyes,

everything: memories, lost umbrellas, the laughter of children,

the eyes of stray dogs, dust motes, broken necklaces racing towards

some unfinished heaven --

and kept them in the back of his consciousness

trying to determine how they wound up there,

here in the Louvre,

where the windowsills

were painted by such famous people

as Degas, Manet, Picasso. Every painting:

a windowsill. The eyes of God could peer into the eyes of God.

Flowers could hang like dead men,

suspended upside down, rotating above a bonfire,

trapped in some network of molecules

alizarin crimson, hunter's green, cornflower blue:

every shade of light,

in the Louvre --- a scar of beauty.