Mel Waldman

Boketto
on the Coney Island Pier

&
waiting for the first snow

alone
in this barren place I taste the oceanic solitude

&
inhale the vacant universe & the cosmic breath of the Ultimate Nothingness

&
now I dream & gaze mindlessly into the Void where a vast desolation eats my brain

in
Covid time

Boketto
on the Coney Island Pier

&
drifting through the chimerical snow I vanish into a dream a fugitive from the Un-Reality

of
the eerie earth & its unspeakable secrets & the Self growing in me-transmogrified & alien

Here
inside the shattering, I watch the unfathomable

invisible
veil of un-earthly revelations

encircling us in metaphysical mystery covering our eerie madness with celestial visions

observing
us – masked humans wearing death masks tasting inhaling suffering asking why

In
the deep snow of despair

I
speak with the Ultimate Nothingness

&
the snow falls from the Heavens the heavy snow falls without end

&
the vast silence shatters

the
kingdom of I

&
within the shattering I am a beautiful madness unmasked & free in search of divinity

& the strangeness of everyday life
blossoms into the vanishing/suffering

& an existential question mark
pirouettes through the air
where

the butcher’s knife
slices the barren day

& a shattering
spills into nowhere
an oval prison cell

& the emptiness
within
& faraway

becomes a transcendental meditation in the park
about Heaven/Hell

& a non-guru wishes to bless
& taste the trauma & the sin

& within
the eerie
mystery

a demonic force devours the divine
but suddenly spews celestial light in an otherworldly sign

& waits for the vanishing/suffering
mine

Losing faith, a cracked invisible egg drifting homeless in the universe, G-d slipping away, a raw concept with no reality, only Freudian wishes, and an oxygen-spiritual tank in my dreams, and G-d on trial. Now, it seems I’m homeless too, a wandering creature forgotten by You, no Mother, Father, just G-d on trial. Lost, in a galaxy cul-de-sac, I pray to a make-believe Savior; I pray because there’s nothing left to do but appeal to a Higher Power, or cry incessantly, for no one sees me; or die laughing, inhaling laughing gas in Hell’s vast but desolate prison, where the invisible sit in solitary confinement for eternity, drinking a wasteland of sadness or uproarious madness, and pondering a runaway G-d who betrayed them from the start, a G-d intoxicated with nothing more, perhaps, than a fugitive dream He can never fulfill, a G-d on trial.

(the words of a character in the unpublished short story, The Paranoid)

Beautiful corpse, beloved Mother of Creation, you are lovelier than life itself; Lilliputian perfection and little woman of grace, celestial creature and beloved lover, you are my exquisite corpse.

Beautiful corpse, I kiss your cold face and brush against a vast emptiness, a chilling Void. I kiss your vacant face. But you’re not there. I disappear inside your nothingness. Yet when I kiss your majestic mask of death, I become one with you, Mother of Creation, my lover. When I kiss your celestial face, I fall in love forever.

Beautiful corpse, Mother of Creation, you are lovelier than life itself; I close my ebony eyes, kiss your ghostly image, and receive your love. Your icy lips kiss my burning face and when ice and fire meet, we bless each other.

Now, I disintegrate, dissolve, and disappear; I drift into eternity and reunite with you and the sacred earth; I receive the blessing, the bliss, and the perfect moment when we are one; a beautiful corpse in death, in dust, one.

I
am Freud

in my winter home & workplace Berggasse 19 in the Alsergrund district of Vienna upstairs alone in my study surrounded by books & antiquities antediluvian treasures lost truths buried in the tombs of time & still my silent friends speak to me reverberating voices of the past swirling around in the seething sea below the oceanic tempest trapped in the abyss within & now I drift off & plummet into the deep of the psyche

I
am Freud

mind-voyager of Vienna & the world beyond outside the chestnut tree looms in the courtyard & the stone staircase waits for you-my patients & family-ascend & follow it to my office or home here & now in this timeless moment of creation in this exploding genesis

I
am Freud

Death & Creation, Thanatos & Eros, the Destroyer & Creator dissolving & obliterating the old false ways & fallacious ideas & so it goes we shall face your crippling fears for behold I am the Creator of Psychoanalysis & this is the Apocalypse & the birth of a bold iconoclastic beginning this is a paradigm shift & the smashing of idols this is the revolution-the mind-blasting journey of volcanic revelations from the unconscious & perhaps, the opening of the soul

Dancing
across the deep of nowhere

around
the rim of Dreamland

I
vanish

into
the swirl of the dust devil & the fantastic desert

a
phantasmagoria

of
exquisite chaos galloping through the miasma

&
phantom mustangs

tasting
the music of trauma

&
I sing the Blues Apocalypse

while
the requiem shrieks & shatters the ruins of Un-Reality

&
I vanish

inside
the Blues Apocalypse

my
nowhere blues

in
Dreamland’s dystopia

where
my dissolving self

seeks
the Hidden Holy Haven of Ineffable Nothingness

a.k.a.
my immortal soul

Dreamland’s blessing
&

phantom gift
glittering in evanescence & everlasting in the perennial dream of Dreamland

After dark,
in the metaphysical night
I
rush slowly through Brooklyn
&
enter Café Bizarro
our
secret meeting place in Midwood
&
wearing a celestial crown of electrodes
&
a bestial brain-charger that I plug into a wall socket,
I
melt into invisibility & dissolve & drift & dream
of
Sweet Phantasmagoria my lovely Dream-Lady dancing & descending into non-existence

&
while sipping French Vanilla Delirium
I
taste my Lady Divine
swirling
into the omphalos of the universe
an
oval mirror of irreality
&
I follow her into the deep of nowhere
&
perhaps tonight I shall find Heaven
on
Electrode Highway
or
Hell on earth
if
a hallucinatory stranger a simulacrum or the Chimera-Manager unplugs me