The Oneness Program

By Roy Dean Doughty
Written 5/17/08

The late spring heat seems to have angered
The oleanders to trumpet white flowers
From their contentious leaves. Already,
The resinous husks of their burst seed pods
Barbarously litter the crumbling cement.
It is clear: We are at war.
Before the city had disciplined us to its more
Astringent functions, we used to perceive
These intense arousals another way.
Those were the years preceding the insurrection,
When our sense of identification had not been
So blunted by these clutters of civilizing symptoms.
But now, our vast social mechanism, smooth
Enough in its outer workings, has effectively
Eliminated those primitive modalities.
We no longer feel a thing for these white blossoms.
We stand before them completely unashamed.
Although it is treasonous to suggest it,
Perhaps we were happier with that old collaboration,
Now vilified as appeasement. Perhaps the optic
Pleasure made up for the hectic mess.
But now we are inundated by an inert mass
That stubbornly resists our push to own it.
Why won’t these blossoms join the other
Antagonists, the carnival mobs, the image makers,
The police in league with the corporate greenhouse looters?
Why do their pallid lips, unkissing, keep sighing,
“Without our babies, your own babies die.”
Well, that is the way war is, more human, than humane.
But now, we have to initiate long series of complicated
Processes in lieu of what was once a single step:
Happiness triggered by seeing white with green.

By Roy Dean Doughty
Written 5/30/08

In the evening, the sun, falling into hazy
Yellows and lavenders, its last lights parsed
By the hushed chatterings of big sycamore
Leaves, throws our shadows eastward
Toward a dawn we may or may not
Wake to see. We find our identities
Blurring with a particular level of
Consciousness, not that of any one being
Or entity, but that of a euphonious
Aggregate, a many-manyness shuffling
Gently through the trees. That inhospitable
Plateau, so high, so arid, of the merely human,
With its histories of tight smiles, which speak of
Sparse vegetation and mechanical fatalities,
Is submersed in deeper, more primordial empathies.
The sun, the colors, the shifting,
Whispering leaves, have successfully
Completed their abortifacient activities,
And the incomplete one is drawn back,
Not merely to the womb, but to the instant
Before conception, where the path in is the path
Down, down amid calamitous waves,
Upon whose murderous sarcasms,
The divine survivor walks. This he, this she,
Is the light, the resplendent light of the world.
Now the calm of evening, the slight breeze stirring
The trees, tell us that we, too, have survived
The shipwreck of another day, and that mundanely,
Miraculously, we walk on water again,
To the sweet haven of our waiting beds.

By Roy Dean Doughty
Written 5/29/08

Walking, again, barefoot, on grass, we come
Once more to that most neglected corner of the garden.
Here, under a gnarled, storm-ravaged pear,
And amidst impenetrable baffles of bamboo,
Ivy, and untamable shade-thriving brambles,
A few gray chunks of plywood, thinned, damp,
And weathered are rotting back to fecundating earth.
Children played here, this the remains of their “fort”,
The stumps of their shrill, delighted voices
Still flowing from the ground, still insisting
On the privilege of going to war, the ruins
Of their predictive, primitive architecture,
A map for bombed out cities. Our hearts beat
For them, adults, now, somewhere, trying,
No doubt, to untangle the riddles of their fears
And aggressions, trying, no doubt, to prepare themselves
For the uninvited and unwelcome violence
That comes, perhaps, as the infamous thief
In the night, who brazenly defies even
The query of the incarnate saint,
The angel of God’s final enunciation.
“Where are you going, thief in the night,”
Asks the Savior, and the thief replies: “I go to kill
Children and pervert their dreams.” Now
The pilgrim, the walker, not the Saint,
But the other dreamer, barefoot, among
These vestigial dilapidations, cries,
And asks why the thief is allowed to pass,
And why the world of play is a world of war.

By Roy Dean Doughty
Written 5/24/08

“I was born already old, naked,
Except for a large, soft hat, my eyes,
Cat-acute to a point beyond the domains
Of the four elements, being comprised,
As the best Bestiaries assure us,
Of lynx urine hardened into gems.”
The skies today, arrayed in innumerable
Translucencies of gray, say things like that,
Their outlandish quasi monotones
Bearing crotchety testimony of the blesséd
Fissure where reason is engulfed by revelation.
Perhaps it will rain, and our dry thoughts,
Like an old king awaiting death’s ransom,
Will dine happily again on silence and water.
Perhaps we will stop trying to number
The six million million million molecules
Of hemoglobin replicating
Syllables throughout our stormy bodies.
The old man cries: “Did you think that these skies
Were only grey with a chance of unseasonable showers?
Did you think that the twenty-thousand atoms
Emitting each molecule of blood,
Each one’s intricate thornbush structure
Perfected in every twisted thistle,
Would average out to average?
Did you think that the miracle of reading,
That tossing of tears into the air, to touch,
Each one, its particular drop of rain,
Would be but another mist made bland by thinking?”
The lynx cat peers at the sky, and marks his rock.
While we, amazed, now read the grey anew,
Finding the poem, because we have found it before,
Not spoken or written by any human being,
But by those skies, like these that hang above us,
Alive with both water and blood, and promising rain.

By Roy Dean Doughty
Written 5/15/08

The reds of this ornamental Maple’s
Wavering leaves might as well have acquired
Their pigmentation from the morning’s
Rising heat as from their manipulated genome —
Deep blaze being the feel of the day
As well as its color. The Mullahs warn
That somewhere it is written, perhaps
In the Collar of Pearls, that our cooler,
More nocturnal devotions can always
Be brought to a boil. Thus they urge us
To ignore these swarmings of gnats
Winding up the infernal columns of the day’s façade,
And to confine our attentions to architectural
Dogmas whose vertical divisions are fixed
Forever in mosiaced bits, things we have seen before,
Not things that bob and hum in the morning’s sparkle.
The Mullahs may be adamant, but they are in trouble.
The spine disease of the fundamentalists’ usual
Neuropathy is making an unprecedented demand
For gratification. Luminous beings are flying
Through the Porch and in spite of those cylindrical
Mechanisms attempting to ratchet closed the port to our ecstasy,
Our ears are abuzz with the gossips of golden retainers,
And our sight adrift in a sheen of fiery leaves.

By Roy Dean Doughty
Written 5/9/08

Spring bloom has shoved the last of autumn’s leaves
From their retentive branches, and when one
Of these stunted exiles is crushed underfoot
On the patio’s flagstones, startle stimuli
Come cascading down from the vault of our
Spidery skulls. Thus, the abandoned choirs bring
Us a wondrous presentiment of our
Next night’s dream. The voice of the dwarf says, “Go
To the woods and build a fire.” Then, the
Melancholy banker gets out of bed,
And saunters listlessly through blasted trees,
The damp, dead leaves under slippered, shuffling
Feet, making whispery post-mortem
Murmurings with each impoverished step.
The banker has a pasty face, imprinted
With the metahistory of a funereal climate,
The effect of too many hours
Responding to the random numbers generator.
The banker arrives, and the dwarf tells him
To stop. But, he has brought no matches. The dwarf flies
Into a rage, breaks sticks, bashes trees, bites bark,
Stomps and kicks the moldering, black leaves,
Lofts catastrophic curses through the choirs.
This, then, is when the final music starts,
When the doddering organist, fingering
Obscure keys, is suddenly joined by the
Breath of the organ blower. The flaccid bellows
Of the lungs puff out, and activate a motley,
Mad parade of soothing inner, and angry outer voices.
We wake. We shout. We pull out all the stops.
Polyphony riots through the golden vault,
New-minted money sprouting from the trees.

By Roy Dean Doughty
Written 5/8/08

Like stiff hoses, which hold and transport
Water for a long time, even in drought,
The leggy stems of the roses, stressed,
Squeeze out multitudes of blossoms
As big as human heads and as frilly-full as peonies.
Add their pinks to the soft blue mists
Of morning and we experience that lesion
Which Xes out the rules governing
Latin nomenclature and brings about
The autistic’s exquisite dream music
Pulsed from a total wakefulness. Thus,
The universal language of dialectic
Plunges into a howling gulf noosed
To a thunderbolt. The baby we, up there,
Experiences this, while our many replicated
Castings crack to bits under beauteous hammers.
We take note now of the moral and mental chasm
Separating insentient from sentient surfaces,
Sight as bludgeon or sight as sweet caress.
Exit Judas. Et laqueo se suspendit. “Tooral,
Looral, kick the Pope, hang him with a tarry rope.”
A child will sing as a child skips,
Touching the rose on its hose with praises due.