XLII

A blasting shower of false sun
Extinguishes the dark soul
Burning in hopelessness,
Screaming in pain,
Leopard fantasies jumping spots,
Minds killing themselves in misery
Shaking like a mad child
Ugliness glued to the world;
Hope
Is broken into daft spokes,
Leaving only spookish murder.
A dark tree dies
A crow falls
Rotten teeth enter the pulverized soil.


XLIV

The sun is out
Upon the mountains
At a bar in La Calera.
This was a Chibcha village
With mountains all around,
Its name meant 'place enclosed'.
In Spanish times there was an hacienda here,
And a limestone mine nearby,
The church has works by Vásquez de Arce y Ceballos;
The main plaza is delightful,
In its colonial architechure.


XLV

Try to forget your wounds
And even forget your own being,
Without pain and suffering
There is no happiness, nor truth

The blood of your difficulties
Will feed into flowers,
Your cries in your deep dreams
Will burst into flaming stars


XLVI

The Evil Axis of Boshy Blur,
'Chemical Blair' and 'Nuclear Bush',
Invaded a city called Baghdad;
They met no real opposition, yet
They fought some stiff resistance.

The enemy had very foul weapons
Yet American weaponry was so superior;
It was so easy, yet Americans
Were truly heroes in battle.

I saw some birds fly blackly through
The smoke and fire and dark clouds
Throughout Baghdad: the battle for hearts
And minds, must be going very well.

Americans and British are very brave,
Iraqis are dreadful cowards,
Thousands of Iraqis have died, but Americans
And Brtitish have very few casualties.

Britain and America fight the War;
France, Germany, Russia, China
Are all cowards, do not deserve
To get in there after the VICTORY.

Americans captured the arch of crossed swords
Built to celebrate the war against Iran -
The one encouraged, praised, supported,
And equipped by Britain and America;

Who now charge in without consent
In the world's forum, to overthrow
The dictatorship they propped up and helped,
While it murdered by the million.

This is a War to liberate Iraq,
So sweet and kind and lovely:
Have you ever known such evil lies,
Or such utter, bleak hypocrisy?



XLVII

All of us are equal in deep
Soul. You forget that at your peril.
The karma from arrogance is the worst of all
Because it comes so unexpectedly.
Forget one minute that all others
Have the right to live, feel the same things
As you; yearn like you, hurt like you,
And you are effectively dead.


XLVIII

Gracias a la vida!
Be careful with it.
Be kind, considerate.
Consider human problems
As things to treat with great imagination;
And never ignore Nature!


XLIX

I have been always of an anxious ilk,
As if brimstone fire were touched by acid,
Firing up smoke into colossal dark waves
Of cloud as blue-grey, imposing, descending
Weirdness, like around Bogotá
The mountains most evenings are drenched in death
As the lights prickle on, electric dots
Dancing like ghosts so crazily:
As the salsa starts up,
As we drink rum or beer,
As Muisca thoughts spread upwards
Into a star-spattered sky.

Sur Ia neige, tones of lost dream
Fill with otherness, drifting like flakes
Of fire, darkness, dancing
As birds in dream-fire, waiting:
Circles of lakes, rippling.

Love descends upon me now
My darling kisses me, as if of snow,
Bird-sounds trickle into my ear,
She touches me with her lips, lovelily.

As if of hemlock I had drunk,
Swooning on Hampstead Heath, the Nightingale
Invites me to Her Temple of Delight,
That passes, with all Her Beauty.


L

I cannot pretend I knew what would happen
Exactly, but nothing surprised me greatly;
I was just in agony to see such pain
Which was all totally predictable.
Will this continue forever and ever?
Those with the biggest bombs exerting their will,
Controlling opinion with their media power;
How, then, can we change the world
To better forms of living, production,
Government, better in tune with Nature
Which will choke and die if all this continues
Long more? That is the Question.


LI

Did you like to hear the sound
Of the twittering birds in Colombian dawn,
When it is strangely blue,
And brightness comes up through thick clouds
In unpredictable colour and hue?
O, I dream anything I like,
The less constrained, the more I see.

It is an inner eye that sees
From the soul into the Soul
The sky is my being's retina,
Celestial bodies are my dreams

And if I die, perhaps I merge
Into oceans and wild mountains,
No fear then, let's just roll
As all is anyway one and all.

We will hear the same music
Cradled and curdled in God's Birth,
Sibelius will be ever greater there,
Fjords of the ultimate intensity
Will throng in ecstatic, wild, dangerous
Music, when my cells break
And disintegrate into madness,
Or Oneness, or when I merge
In love with you, without thick skins
Separating me from you:
We will drown in our fantasies!

I think you save me from oblivion,
Your love and perfume and moist deep kisses,
Your soul, amidst the bizarre powers
Of explosion, the crazy animal wildness
That cries and screeches through our wildernesses.
What is the Dog with the big Spoon?
Who is making the clouds crack
Like blue-black drums that drop enormous
Crates of balloon-chaos day by day,
With all the love that any may
Care to feel, for all fellow humanity?


LII

O Peace, Peace!
Purely a word, but of this I pray,
For it matters to us all!
The world is very full,
We must be careful of each other.
Like in a barge on a sewage canal,
Let us care for the free floating of our craft!
No Bush-Saddam-Blair madness more!
A little more subtlety please.
Be polite, try to see
Other people's points of view.


LIII

You ugly, empty, violent brutes
Who know nothing, study nothing;
You 'think' from your idle holes,
Devoid, totally, of imagination
Or sympathy: no, some of you have that
So long as your hardmen point you in the right direction

Your fixed images, unexamined prejudices,
Combined with your arrogance;
Your emotional structure which is far from sound,
Wrapped in such power of electronic control:
Make you utterly terrifying. You bastards
Are not my cousins: the ones who resisted are.

You won! You won! Like a hard-trained football team,
With a little 'human studies' added in
At the end of Semester.
With such a Man at your Helm,
Surounded by glamorous, swaggering, gangsters,
Self-righteous, cruel toughmen,
How could you resist?
Thank god to hear only thirty per cent
Of black Americans (always the wisest)
Support Bush and the War!

Quite apart from World Capitalism,
Controlled from the United States,
The whole Jewish-Christian-lslamic
Mindset is at the root of these problems:
So dogmatic; give me Taoism, or Bob Dylan,
Or Mozart, or Oscar Wilde;
Or Nelson Mandela.

I will fly now, as I must,
With music in my plumed fire,
Sandals of fiery gods, mine,
Giving rise to highest ecstasy.

O when only you touch her love,
Her flesh, her sweet, perfumed kindness,
Her soft, gentle loveliness,
She touches you, and it makes you whole.



LIV

Hell is War, Paradise is Love,
Purgatory is normal life.
The shaman's flight is into Paradise,
His descent below earth, his involvement with Hell.
He departs from normal life to fly
Or descend, as is his wont.

Dante, the shaman-poet explores
All realms, and sings out in a shaman-chant
To all those who listen: to learn
Of the divine, the normal, the world of misery.
Like a Tairona shaman with his magic figurine
He enters the supernatural, and returns.


LV

Christ believed in Universal Love, Universal Forgiveness,
But somehow Christianity stuck to the idea of Hell
Where sinners will suffer, without hope, forever.
Christ wanted to stir up some kind of riot
When he threw the money-lenders out of the temple,
And got himself arrested, deliberately,
And refused any verbal compromise with Pontius Pilate
Because he wanted to be martyred.
He was some kind of rebellious revolutionary,
He wanted to transcend all religions, churches,
In an absolutely universal, uncompromisingly inclusive
Idea. Christianity made of it just one more
Religion on the world's list.
Why should Christ need to come back down
Again, if he has already saved the world?
To judge and separate the good from the bad,
Just like Jehovah of the Old Testament,
Whom Christ wanted to transcend!
Good old Christianity, in its empty robes
And hopeless contradictions: goodbye.

The fountain of life burns now,
Love defeats fury, ultimately.
Many thoughts flow out from the rivers of fire,
Like humanity's birth in lakes of gold,
And Christ, that fool, he had to sacrifice himself
And cause all this trouble;
However, nowadays it is not in vogue
For Christians to burn at the stake:
Those wild, foolish Moslems do it;
Because they are so pagan, their flames
Are bad flames, the Christians say.
But I say, all flames inside the heart
Are real, but we need some intellect
To direct them in a good direction.

The fountain of life still spurts,
So powerful in spite of hate,
The lizard-man-jaguar flies
Over the sweet, gentle lake.

Mother of all, gives birth to us all,
In order that we keep some order,
And not destroy all equilibrium,
When all will return to Chaos.

You can remain alone, or you can unite:
In the one you are free, but lonely,
In the other you sacrifice complete freedom,
But feel a closeness, sometimes called Love.

"The trees are free," she said, as she pointed
Out of the window. And I agreed;
Separate, and waving, in the cool blue air,
I have also lived out there.

Upon the morn, where I feel extraordinary
Because upon your love all is wonderful
And here I might die, merge with Chaos,
Because you are so beautiful,
And I am happy, in your gorgeous love.


LVI

New light, and lost notes,
Intimacies and intimations
Of peace; the pink streaks
In the early dusk,
Streets in lively agitation
Just before nightfall;
All are symbols of other things,
Which in their turn are also symbols
Of other, deeper things.


LVII

Hell of War, Paradise of Love
Purgatory of waiting and wondering:
Which is it to be today
Which psychic possibility will
Triumph in the world today,
Which choice will humanity make?
Where shall we fly, up or down,
Will the sandalled jaguar ascend, or growl,
Downwards to the sterile flames?


LVIII

Pain, beauty of extreme agony
Flies, hovers throughout the celestial spheres,
That rawness soars to the ultimate divine:
Sanctus! Sanctus!

I see the burning Light of Death,
All is more complicated than Biblical texts,
Our dark souls soar like demons,
Fly like hellish bats around the Sun.

When I dreamt by the pond in Esher,
Perhaps I imagined the Sabana de Bogotá
Or the basin of the great Amazon,
A river that runs as the trunk of life.

We feel in sound-colours of power,
In hallucinations of subtle spirit,
Alloys of infinite scales, possibilities
Of visionary flight and blazing sight.

Those bright stars above Palermo,
Shining as wild eyes of fire,
Are Muisca reminders of beautiful woman's
Love, and softness to eternity.

The light that does not shine on Nidia
Is not the Light, because her face
Is not reflected, nay; all the parts
Of everything around it, are not yet her.

The light is not the Light,
That does not shine on Nidia.
If not her face is full with it,
All is dark, forever!



LIX

The evil defeat of Love, it is
Whenever, wherever, happiness
Is blocked, human oppression sustained,
In unnecessary defeat of the Sun.

Fire surrounds the real Love,
Blasting Light intensity of Sun,
Burning Truth into us with flames,
Awakening us to Life.


LX

Bush-Bosh, Blair-Bare!
Nothing to offer but bombs, threats,
Complexes of superiority, lies!
Yea, while the world starves, chokes, bleeds, decays,
You go BOMB, BLAST, MAKE UP again,
BOMB, BLAST, forget the past,
Forget the reasons for everything,
Just assign blame then BOMB, BLAST,
Look serious on television, very firm,
Then BOMB, BLAST, but always talk, too,
About peace, reconciliation, bread, justice!

Bloody cheek! Imagine the Nazis
Demanding a change in the leaderships
Of the French or Dutch Resistance!
Imagine them saying De Gaulle should not
Organize the fight from London against German Occupation!
That is what Ariel Sharon and Colin Powell
Are now demanding! No, Palestinians will fight
Against the occupation of their land.
As Churchill declared: the British will fight
In the air, on the beaches and in the fields,
And would die gurgling in their own blood
If Britain was invaded! (Palestinians too.
Now they bear the hope of the Sun.)

Colin Powell has blown his cover,
Fucked it deep,
Boo! Syria bleeps, you're asleep,
The world is just one chop along
Its road of chaos.
Great game!
You can never squash all the world
At once, and get away with it.
(To paraphrase another Yank.)

And Blairmouse squeaked.
Bare mountain of a fair arse.
Blurbosh Shrubpowell Don the Rum.
How long before your dust is well dispelled?
(And shall we gather at the river.)


LXI

A girl was in the street
I saw her through the window of this bar
That smelt like bars in Leticia,
Perhaps because the music playing
Worked me up through synaesthenia
Although I was really in Bogotá.

Manuel Vásquez Montalbán said
Death is a metaphor for Nothing.
For me it is a dissipation
Into the unknown of Paradise,
Disappearance into a pantheistic whole
A drop rejoining the mystical sea.

Ineffable fragrance of a dream
The sky whose blueness blocks out the black
Night with points sprinkled like pins;
I notice the barman put more ice
Into a drink, and light a candle
On one of these wooden tables


LXII

There's nothing like a war
To turn a dodgy leader
Into a great hero:
Making a country that sucks the blood
Of the whole world look like
A Godly defender of freedom

There's nothing like a war
To get a dodgy leader
Off the hook:
Rallying the troops, the ignorance and arrogance
Of manipulated citizens, sycophants, and braggers.

Bushblair knows when to drop the bombs
And chooses which country to blast each year.


LXIII

Obsessions for gold, spiritual and material
Mingled in the Conquest of Latin America;
Pieces of the sun, opportunities for power
Fused into the dreams of Latin America.
From here I observe Anglo-America
Wage a strange war against the Moslem world;
Fundamentalist dogmas and narrow horizons
Merge into a fog of confusion and lies.

Here from the sounds by the Magdalena,
The buzz of cicadas, the sight of stars
Through the night-trees; the moon and stars
Bristle through the symphonies of nature:
O here, I hear, here I hear.


LXIV

A huge black moth when somone has died
Enters the room through a dark window,
The strange black man on a black horse
Rides hidden in his black hat,
His serious penetrating stare reminds all
Of their deep responsibilities in life!
La Candileja with three monstrous heads
Torments for all eternity
Men who have shown infidelity
While La Muelona, a dangerous woman
Seduces men, only then to murder them;
Those who escape know not what happened.

With interior movements of the soul
Signs are delivered from a sacred river
Deep within; this is art, or myth,
Ever enigmatic, extraordinary, intense
As a firefly spinning its incandescent point
Of light out from vast darkness,
Like the human soul buried in the night,
The soul immersed in the whole of nature,
Deriving nourishment from all around
Then sending out its amazing signals,
Its flashes of light, truth, and love:
Thus Lao-Tzu, Dante, Shakespeare, Mozart,
Or the legends of the Upper Río Magdalena.


LXV

Her eyelashes were even more beautiful than
The streaking dawn of infinite colours
On the Río Magdalena, with the mountains behind
Blue, dark, light, crazy,
Intense with a beauty like her mouth
Opening, smiling, sounding like fire
Of eternity, beauty, that inadmissable
Glory of happinesss: ah! I love
That moment, gorgeous, overflowing, absolute,
This is the window into Totality.


LXVI

"We will not compromise over peace, nor freedom,
About the rights and necessity for people to blossom out,
To grow to their full potential, or as near to it
As nature will allow; we will not accept
Arbitrary restrictions upon Universal Justice,
Arbitrarily imposed by the powerful, for whom
It is convenient to maintain Hell in places
Such as Palestine, while they croak on
About Democracy and Human Rights."
Thus spake a Prophet from high mountains
On his descent to lower earth,
But the oppressors heard with only half an ear
As they were busy, ripping hearts for blood
To drink, and pour as libations
To their ghastly, greedy gods.



LXVII

The night, a flower, a few green leaves,
The sense of lace, delicate and wild,
Perfumes of all nature, colours,
The life of all natural nerves.
The beautiful stars and dark shadows,
Splendid when the birds sleep,
The light penetrates your divine eyes,
The world perfect, in non-existent time.


LXVIII

One Light,
One indivisible Love,
Hope like sweetest Truth,

Your perfumes breathe into my soul
And I, at last, know peace in you.
The sky at dawn in Bogotá is fine.

Bogatá, Colombia.
February to June 2003.