Letter from Don Meredith re SCCF Fellowship

Letter from Don Meredith

ON THE CONTRARY (HEIOKA)

ON THE CONTRARY (HEIOKA) 

Nothing matters but baroque excuses 

tangling the mind during high tide.

Tell me what words make sense when the tenant is that nothing—

and I mean the void—is what matters.

I stand before you tabulated and ordered,

the answering machine, a barometric enigma on wheels.

The solemn survival of the moon is dependent

upon cryptic messages of oracular world order.

Tell me what resolution reveals 

the root passion of word order, of war?

This knowlege comes with a sense of urgency 

but no place to send it.

I believe we need a river of light—no, 10,000 pints to stop this one.

I lost my moral imperative, my sanity journal of the latest excuses.

What really matters is something surreal and convincing

like voluntary plaid islands looking for granite dreams

during the creosote freefall of slumber

where we fasten ideas to our sleeves in order not to lose our way.

I can't make excuses or sense of the multiple aspirations

for ancestral fetishes struck in the cathedral of desire.

I felt this much while sipping cappucino

beneath the waterfall of resolutions.

Someone says make a pledge using some of these words.

Turn the other cheek among those stumbling stones

tabulating horse's hooves and men's lives.

Cobblestones break tradition like fish from the stinging river.

Pardon the madrone for she is a body stoked by summer.

Overlook the flamboyant borealis seeking more northerly routes.

Forgive the moon who knows no other way of survival.

Ignore the offer of world ascent and relinquish

surreal convictions to resolve excuses.

Summer ascent is always crepuscular in notion.

Perpendicular winter descends upon us all

at one point or another. Heioko.

Don't you know everything is backwards at times like this?

2/18/91
Garden of Allah, MIll  Valley

I think there was an earlier version Heoka
2/27/1989