10 Things You Should Know Before You Leave

1. Stasis is never an option.

2. Repetition is the substance of progress.

3. Change occurs through an accretion of inconsistencies.

4. All shapes are illusions produced by intersecting lines.

5. Structure is a mind's reflection in entropy.

6. Life is a malleable chaos.

7. Environment alters perception, perception alters action, action alters environment.

8. History is the creature's face and we are its eyes.

9. Triumph and tragedy are inseparable quantities.

10. While there is no irreducible quantity, quality will withstand no reduction.

YELLOW RICK BROAD

That's the bit I don't like frankly, the bending road ways bisected by white lines like imperial notice of eviction, "out ya go into transit like everyone else." If escape were a thing merely of finding the right road and taking it our only hurdle would be traffic.

But in the circuitous world of travel by committee and love by numbers the first issue is naming a destination. What end point would satisfy the requisite sensation of freedom?

And let's hope its not some hippie-dippie transcendental oblivion. I'm talking about cluster bombs of rapture, the excess of enumerable joys, not unspeakable rest on the cusp of nirvana. You can keep
your oblivion, I want to play.

So with that in mind I've scrounged up a deep green pith helmet, chased out the family of chinese boll weevils living in it, gathered up my collection of commemorative thumbnails sketches, lifted my life
upon my back and bundled it all into my rotary motor bath tub and set out to find a northwest passage
of sorts through the trendy shopping malls and commercial districts, a city to found on the other side
of the billboard horizon.


That's the plan as we motor above the mainland and unwrap our candy bars, letting the Reese's wrappers float down to the seashore, "I wrote, 'save me,' on that one." We have been kidnapped after all. How else to explain our arrival on a plane of existence we have no prior investment in.

Election Year Meditation

A Word to Progressives:

Just because the future is inevitable doesn’t mean it’s not mistaken.

A Word to Conservatives:

Just because the past was comfortable doesn’t make it correct.

A Word to Everyone:

Subject your feelings to reason and assumptions to their opposite.

Take possession of your thoughts or else you are not thinking.

Even beasts know what they like and will trust it.

© 2012 Yorgo Douramacos

Here I Dreamt

I dreamt I was in Kerouac’s New York and met Kerouac’s Kerouac.

He thought I had a job somewhere frying chicken ‘cause I had grease on my pants

and I didn’t correct him. He told me I had a tongue loose with truth

and that he liked my right use of the shambled word caterwaul.

He quoted me a verse of Tennyson I don’t myself know

and we slammed a brown bag of beer together.

In the dream I'd woke and found myself in that New York and knew it immediately.

I heard a man on the street talking in cadence that touched me and I could hear its music.

Jack walked by and I instinctively knew he’d want to know.

I told him people spoke with accidental poetry better than poets

and I sang the man’s words to him in the tune of Gene Kelley’s Broadway Melody

and Jack Said he loved that song.

I told him I was a time traveler and he asked me about the future.

I said I only knew the future as well as a hooky-playing schoolboy knows the past

and that all I could say for sure was that the bomb doesn’t happen but the computer does.

America wins the cold war but not its soul and that the world slowly loses its poetry as people talk less.

© 2011 Yorgo Douramacos

A Beginner’s Apology

The night ends on the smell of corn stalks by starlight

A pollinade scent fertile in the humid air

The custom of thought in empty space

Is window upon time and reason and time.

I chose this path to make complacency impossible

Conspiring against the future of least resistance.

The poison of pragmatism and currency, well monied lies

Bids my attention from mouths on first names with fear.

But the huckster’s traveling canvas can only sell which it has

Stories and potions, unrest to no purpose.

A doer begins or remains undone.

A soul must find peace where a body finds bread.

Home or not, the soul is stationary

And turmoil will not cease for wishing.

Creation in summer, earth is home

A journey to the inner distance.

To get the thing you must plant the seed.

© 2011 Yorgo Douramacos

nihil fit

Hideous wreck of echo

World

No location

Only reports across time

What faith can have or had

Persist

Everyone

Tells me a world of things

I have not seen it

© 2011 Yorgo Douramacos