The Magic Theater’s Eternal Show
This poem was written circa 2004
- Oh! Here again?!
Face to face with the joker
Across, once again
The transdimensional border
The joker’s humor is black
As his laughter is – frightening
“There is no going back”
There is nothing behind me
What?!
My heart and mind hit overdrive,
Blood racing through my veins, adrenalin pumping overtime,
Panic sets in. The laugh begins
His image is before me as on a thousand television screens stacked into a solid wall
His very appearance communicates eternity, insanity
His very image is the punch line:
A silent “you have lost your mind!
Irreversibly, irrevocably, irretrievably, permanently
Ha ha ha! In this state you shall remain eternally!
Ceaselessly, everlastingly, incessantly, interminably!”
He is chanting the spell – silent, wordless, not even symbolic
It feels like eternity
Then he just disappears
No intent of returning.
“Ha ha ha! Hee hee hee”
Echoing through my mind
Am I going insane?
How did I wind up here?
Where has time disappeared?
What will my parents think?
How? What? Why? Where? When? –
A thousand questions
A silent voice from within invokes my attention.
“Relax, let yourself go
This is just a joke
Whatever you see here is for your own good
The fears will leave you once they are understood
Nobody can harm you – no-one ever could
Your pain is resistance to that which now
Don’t worry in this place
All beings are one”
“You only need to learn to trust
For everything is for the best
A thorn to get rid of a thorn
But even that is just a dream
All things will pass no matter what
So just accept what comes your way
Do not create your own pain”
”The energy will rise up within
In unseen waves of quiet bliss
It has been planned
For you to be here
This is your kiss
This is your freedom”
The silent voice continues speaking
“This is the freedom you have been seeking
In the big picture,
Your faults are nothing
Your sins are nothing,
You are forgiven
We will not judge you,
You are forgiven”
“Pay close attention to this wisdom
If you should lose your body image
Do not be sad, you’re not that image.
If you should find yourself transformed
Shattered, ripped apart, reborn
Just relax and float downstream -
You are not the thoughts you think.
If you should watch your self-idea
Melt and seep into a puddle
Turn to clouds and rise above the earth
Or vanish in the ground’s rubble
Do not be anxious or troubled
Attention now, the show is starting”
Your memory refuses to work when you are here
But when you return
You remember everything clearly
You mumble and whisper under your breath:
“When I was just a child,
Haven’t I been here?
This feeling inside
Is extraordinarily familiar”
Taken back to the realms of your
Childhood nightmares
You cannot trust anything
No matter how evident
You are ever uncertain, no matter how clear
Ripped apart just a moment ago,
You’re still here!
The black void is menacing, hanging behind you,
Swallowing half of you
While the other half blindly
Grapples to find some thread of reality,
Just a vague indication would be satisfying now.
As you sink your hands into the
Thin fabric of apparent reality
With the gaping, eternal black hole void still wide open behind you
Swallowing half of your body and mind into nothingness,
Cannot forget the caress of that emptiness
Cavernous darkness of nonexistence surrounds you
Its taste lingers on the tip of your memory now.
Unexpectedly, unpredictably, you have returned to reality
You have come back reassured that safety is still viable.
Barely got through the door, you are already smiling.
Was it outside or was it in the mind?
There is no way of knowing
Now that it is behind
What has happened then,
When I was surprised and frightened,
Transported to the magic theatre
Where I relived my long forgotten childhood nightmares?
That day I had lived a different life
I was once again just an innocent child,
For just a moment, I was
Forever I am
Perhaps decades back,
I felt the presence of people who’ve since passed away
I close my eyes and it slowly comes back:
The linearity of time is strangely twisted out of shape,
I’m flying through an inner maze,
The continuity of space and time severed,
And Déjà vu – I have been here!
I have seen this show already, clearly,
But it did not contain the meaning
And then: unhurried smudging of the screen
The sliding door out of the dream
The groove of soft and sweet external life,
Never before has felt so nice
This linear predictability!
How sweet the relative certainty
Which exists in the eternal moment
When it is not experienced in its actuality!
What have I missed? – I wonder looking
At the yellow moon and green trees moving
As happy shadows on my wall
Play games and dance around the room
I can recall the outline,
But I am certain there is more
It’s been three quarters of an hour –
I have twice checked the kitchen clock,
But what I remember fills a moment –
A minute, maybe two – no more.
The teachings were indeed absorbing
But they had happened in a flash
Yet the remaining time gap is
Inexplicable and mysterious
I pace across the silent rooms,
Although it’s late, I cannot sleep –
I am too curious
I must get back
To see again the theater act
By magic I’m transported there
My room has vanished in thin air
Determined to stay alert -
Mostly to keep the joker from pulling
My specially crafted carpet of reality from underneath my feet while I’m not looking,
Or when I’m utterly confused
By the all embracing alternate reality of the feature presentation,
The intensity of which is unlike anything I have known before
In my twenty two years of aging -
I send signals of thought in patterns with the instrument of my mind,
Encoded messages that are especially designed
To keep me connected to the transitory sense of the physical.
But each moment they are stretched further apart,
The space between them growing increasingly.
Time is again slowing down to a standstill
Only five or six thoughts continue to linger
Circling around a tiny black hole like moths round a candle
An irresistible force draws me in like a magnet
Pulls me into its own wacky reality,
Through the gateless gates
Deeper and deeper down
The show has already started -
Welcome to the feature presentation!
“The repressed memories and fears of your present incarnation”
Some are real and some are dreams
But all are pumped with emotion,
With explosive quantities of fear and tension,
And yet undoubtedly
All are the products of your own creation!
- “Do what you will with me, I’m here to see
I asked to be here, now I will not resist”
Strange voices calling
Hypnotize me with their weird language,
Nonsensical yet understandable
These words attract me to the fifth dimension
Invisible entities surround me,
Quietly chanting,
Throw the net of Maya over me,
Leave me enchanted
I didn’t notice when my body has become a source of building material
For some town across the ocean, which felt European
Two post-middle age ladies with obese and rough bodies
Are speaking in tongues while greedily ripping apart my plastic body
From both sides simultaneously, slitting me through the middle,
Unzipping my being like a transdimensional zipper
Creating red streetcars and black and grey roads,
Molding entire cities of many shapes and colors,
With shining street lights, and busy crowds of people,
With many cars and trains, out of the unzipped part of the I-zipper
Before I could even realize where I was or what was happening,
They unzipped me half way while merrily chatting away.
So this is my destiny,
To be shrunken down from the infinite
From the conscious void itself – my formless, dark body -
To become a stupid city of concrete, metal and rubber
To be separated from this unity of awareness
As they mold me into red streetcars and black roads
To lose touch of myself, by being embodied in forms
In which consciousness is not possible – what we call dead matter
A human birth is of course a million times better
But when parts of me take the shape as those light poles,
Along glittering roads, they forget where they came from
And all remains peaceful
I panic, I scream – do you have to do this?
Please let me go, let me leave, help me through this!
No, they are giving all sorts of good reasons:
“You can’t be exhausted” and “Nothing is missing”
We have to create a small town in Europe
Your body is what we are using to do this,
It won’t hurt at all – if you don’t resist us
We are just doing our job for the boss in the sixth plane
As they shape concrete buildings and mold shiny red streetcars,
Ripping and splitting my ego like putty into parts
Cheerfully chatting like the simplest of farmers
While shaping my being with the ease of skilled craftsmen,
I lie immobilized and watch the procedure
I can’t change a thing – then why should I resist it?
I notice that although parts of me are lost in the unconsciousness
Of that lively small town across the Atlantic ocean,
The split is never complete, something of me still remains
And I am amazed at my unfathomable greatness.
And then I wake up!
Could I have only been dreaming?
But how is this feeling available to me?
It now seems so distant and so unbelievable
Trains and roads, concrete blocks –
It is dead matter – not living
Light poles, grey crowds, created from my being?
Am I not just this body,
Young and innocent,
Twenty two years of age
Foolish and inexperienced,
Alive only for a few decades,
And gone in a few more?
Ah it was all just a dream
How absurd!
