A New Kind of Saint

November 1: All Saints Day

A NEW KIND OF SAINT

In this Age that couldn't be Darker

When the Lamp of Wisdom grows faint

When the Empire of Lies seems to triumph

We are needing a new kind of saint.

 

A saint who comes out of nowhere

From a direction you'd never expect

A saint who's tantric, organic and quantum

And politically incorrect.

 

A saint that performs needful miracles

More beautiful and bigger than most

Not by him but through him manifested

By the grace of a new Holy Ghost. 

Might not be a Hindu or Buddhist

Nor a Protestant, Catholic or Jew

Nor even a bright quantum physicist

Could even be me or be you.

Could even be you, my friend

When you say yes to that calling inside you.

A Calculus of Kisses

 

Zeno of Elea (500 BC): Ancient Greek logician

 

 

A CALCULUS OF KISSES

 

In a foot race

Achilles can never catch the tortoise

Let alone outrun him.



For Achilles gets half way in one slice of time

And half way more in slice number two

And half way again in slice number three

After an infinite number of slices

Achilles merely gets to where tortoise has been

Not to where he's at now.



Thus no matter how fast Achilles can hurtle

He can never outrun the much slower turtle.

So argued the famous Greek philosopher

Zeno of Elea.



Lat's you and I set a timer for sixty seconds.



In the first 30 seconds I'll kiss you just once

Kiss you twice in the following fifteen

Four kisses during next seven point five

Then in half that time, we'll squeeze in sixteen.



If one takes this game to its ultimate limit

We can fit infinite kisses into only one minute.

So following what Zeno's logic allows

We'll be tasting infinity using our mouths.

Color Lines

Fractal-prism Bubbles by Tammy Wetzel

 COLOR LINES

 

If you can choose your gender 

Why can't I choose my race?

When asked about ethnicity

I''m everywhere in color space.

 

I'm just as red as any Russian

And sometimes, Miles, I'm kinda blue

My grandsire killed in Ohio coal mine

I'm just as anthracite as you.

 

My ancestor's the famous Green Man

Striding through some Irish bog

My uncle's the Jolly Green Giant

I'm cousin to Kermit the Frog.

 

No color is to me unbeautiful

I'm your rainbow troubadour

Call me Homo spectral  

Hear me roar!

Quantum Cat Nap

 

 

 QUANTUM CAT NAP

(For August's Birthday)

 
 Tonight when we're in the mood to explore
I'd like to superpose my body with yours:
Schrödinger-Cat style.
Aligning both our buzzing possibility waves
Till each cell of mine's
In tight quantum connection
With each cell of thine.

Our hearts aligned, our pulses
Our lungs aligned, our breathings
Our brainwaves, pelvic twitches
Each capillary's motion
Completely in sync.

I'd like to merge with you fully, love,
In a way no other man has ever imagined.

Such aligned
Let's experience quantum entanglement
Warm and first-handedly
Not like equation in a book.

Let's both deeply feel
Naked quantum superposition 

Of head, shoulder, knees and toes
Fingers, pelvis, both elbows.
Which part is me and which is not?
Neither one of us on top.

Then when we've learned what we can
From our first playful superposition
Let's fall asleep inside one another
Going to sleep me added to you.
Could both of us then experience
The world's first two-person dream?

Then waking up together
From our first quantum Cat Nap
Slowly breaking the superposition
Experiencing our mutual possibilities
Gently re-scrambling themselves
Like tangled bed clothing.

Alone now in my bed
I recall what I've read
About non-locality of the quantum kind:
No space between us, no time
So the physicists say.

So for billions of years, dear,
We've slept together this way.

Quantum Tantra: One Hint More

Nick with coyote skull: Rio del Mar beach.

QUANTUM TANTRA: ONE HINT MORE

For more than fifty years
I have been trying to discover
some brand new quantum way
to "fuck the Universe".

O, sweet Nick,
When will you realize
that you are actually
fucking the Universe right now?

Only in this present moment
have I spread Myself open.
Only in this moment
Only in this moment
Please give Me your All.

Secret Body

Secret Body (2017) by Jeffrey Kripal

SECRET BODY
(for Jeffrey Kripal)

I was a Hidden Treasure
And desired to be known
Nearer to you
Than your pubic bone.

Every flower flaunts it
Every photon hides a clue
What She showed to crowds at Fatima
She's poised to show to me and you.

You want to make love to the Cosmic Beauty?
You yearn to do so right now?
Well, the Universe is telling you all that She needs
In the only way She knows how.

What Does Nature Want?

 

Astronomy Pictures of the Day (APOD) 2019 August 13

WHAT DOES NATURE WANT?

Others have tried me
to tame me, to bride me
with ponderous kisses
and untutored touch.

I'm easy. I'm moved by
the slightest flirtation
but what really excites me
would be saying too much. 

My beauty has launched
a thousand ambitions
I'm opened all over
relaxing my guard.

All previous lovers
were merely auditions
This instrument
is awaiting her bard.

Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) 2019 July 26

How Language Happened

HOW LANGUAGE HAPPENED

Your mouth was made for eat and breathing
But I surmise it could do more.
Let's play-vibrate the air around us
With whispers, howls, quack-quacks and roar.

Let's make air vibes exciting the oyster organs
attached to the sides of our head.
Not seeing, not touching, not tasting or smelling:
Something dangerously different instead.

It's outside the realm of biology, brother;
It's a wholly unnatural act.
But it's on the side of history, sister,
To make a sound stand for a fact.

To make a sound stand for a fact.

I sense that you're a clever creature
not some crude potato sack
So if I risk to make strange sound for you
would you dare to give me strange sound back?

Hey, hey, sweet love dog,
stunningly beautiful work of art.
Let's do it for the fun of it.
Let's do it for the children.

Don't walk.
Let's "talk".

New Uses For Water

 

 NEW USES FOR WATER

Do not be deceived
by the sleep-inducing swirls:
deep inside we're quantum tantra
altar boys and altar girls.

Tonight we're sharing a tub together
getting hot, confused,
aqueous and slippery.

In the splash of the bath I see you
baring your breasts, your legs
and your hips for me.

Both of us ready
to enter the mystery.

Can we make some Heisenberg choice,
Feynman gesture, Schrödinger voice
that would spontaneously ignite
Nature's deep quantum witchery?

Then Nature surprised us
filled an unspoken lack
gave us full 
quantum entanglement
while I was scrubbing your back.

Nowhere near a grand cathedral
outside any modern physics club
a brand new doorway into Nature
discovered in our claw-foot tub.

Blind Date

These are My Waves: Particles too if you know how to look.

TANTRIC CATECHISM

To adore anything less than All of Her
is to worship a fetish.
                                      -- Doctor Jabir

Why is this tubed cosmetic holy?
Because she has often kissed it
With the lips of her mouth.

Why is this dark brown earth holy?
Because she blesses it daily
With the bare soles of her feet.

Why is this elusive air sacred?
Because to stay alive she feeds on air
That touches the alveoli of her lungs.

Why is this flowing water holy?
Because of water many times
Passing through her body
Feeling her flesh from inside.

Why is this kindled fire sacred?
Because she too is warming this space
With her biological heat.

Why is this common garment holy?
Because she has repeatedly kissed it
With the lips of her vulva.


FETISH PHYSICS

We physicists are terrified to kiss Dame Nature
In hot entangled polysexual play --
No, we've barely got the balls to sniff
Her cold and dead discarded lingerie.

O boys, O girls,
When will we devise a way
To touch the rest of Her,
Enjoy the Courtship Play,
Bring out the best of Her?

Pickering's Triangle (Bikini Underthings Nebula)

Heisenberg, Buddha and the Mind-Body Connection

Nick Herbert: Physics-saving hippie, feadog player

HEISENBERG, BUDDHA AND THE MIND-BODY CONNECTION

Matter for Heisenberg means pure possibility
That turns into Something whenever one looks
How promise comes true is the Measurement Problem:
The subject of dozens of lectures and books.

Buddha with a smile rejects your word-play conjectures
The Consciousness Problem stokes His Holy Fire
Simply freshly experiencing This Moment wide open
Feel impermanence, emptiness, spiced with desire.

For wide-eyed acolytes of the Orthodox Materialism creed
The Mind-Body Problem remains their toughest knot.
How can mere atoms possibly feel pain or pleasure?
And what conceivable motion of matter
Might make these inner feelings start and stop?

Tonight let's set aside all talk of fundamental questions
Be unaware we're heirs to their complicated histories
But right now as I bend to touch my mouth to yours
Let's just pretend we kiss them somehow too --
Both of us enjoying (is this possible?)
Deep kissing three of this life's basic mysteries.

"Can a kiss ever be just a kiss with you, Nick?" 
asks August
"Or do kisses gotta be metaphysical?"

August O'Connor: Graphic artist, bodhran virtuoso

And Every Dog

Plant stomata

AND EVERY DOG

All the bees
To your lips go
Seeking sweets
I can't know.

And every dog
Every dog along the street
Knows immediately
You're in heat.

WHEN THE IMPOSSIBLE HAPPENS

If it's true
what wise men say:
free will's a thing
that's quite passe'

Then I can't help
desiring you
and all the deeds
we two might do.

Our human view of Nature
seems to say
we must eschew this.
But the rigid truth
of no free will
demands we have to do this. 

So let's just both ignore
the so-called laws of physics
And simply learn to wallow in
this lucky Cosmic Jizzicks.

LIFT A GLASS TO YOUR LASS

There was a young maid from Anheuser
Who claimed no man could surprise her
But a chap from Drake's Bay
Simply swept her away
Which left her sadder Budweiser

A senorita named Donna von Take Ease
Was the cause of many heartbreakies
But to help them recover
She'd leave each jilted lover
With a case or two of Dos Equis.

There was a young lass from Loch Ness
Whose sex earned high marks for finesse
She could without rush
Do a true royal flush
Then serve everyone a Guinness.

Some Lines For Henry Stapp

Henry Pierce Stapp

SOME LINES FOR HENRY STAPP
(celebrating his 91th birthday)

The essence of quantum entanglement 
is correlated readiness to respond.
--  H. P. Stapp

Consciousness is our reward 
for collapsing the wavefunction.
--  H. P. Stapp

Light glistening thru the glassy air
Undulates like waves you float on
Until light strikes some open eye
Which turns it into actual photon.

This is the world of the Quantum Mechanic
Not the Butcher nor Baker nor Cook:
It's possibility waves when unregarded
It's an actual particle whenever you look. 

In utter darkness safe from leerers
Huge Waves of Maybe surged and swam
But when I turned to look at them
They turned to little Bits of Am.

But what means "looking"? Where to go?
You'll have to ask Professor Joe
And Joe asks Sue and Sue asks Dick
And he asks Ruth and she asks Nick
Who gives them all a dirty look
And recommends they buy his book.

Though looking any kid can do
Dumb physicists don't have a clue
How using your bare sense of sightness
You wrench real matter out of mightness.

In the land of Merely Possible
Every living thing would die
My cat must feast
On actual meat
And so must thee and she and I.

I cite Stapp, my Muse, Saint John and Wigner
We all assume what "looking" means:
That particles emerge from waveness
To satisfy some sentient creature's needs.

At whatever level life awakens
It lurks there feeling waves go by
Consults its belly, reaches out --
Then waves turn into apple pie.

Henry Stapp at Esalen Seminar on the Nature of Reality

Three Quantum Tantric Limericks

Erwin Schrödinger

SCHROEDINGER'S PUSSY

Erwin Schrödinger was a hit with the babes
His girl friends all gave him top grades
His studies of quanta
Taught him what women wanta
So he had them all coming in waves.


ASK YOUR DOCTOR

Said the famous quantum physician
You don't need to be a musician
To know that these ruby lips
And the ones in her hips
Enjoy an unbreakable superposition.


WHAT THE KIDS ARE UP TO

The hottest erotic newfanglement
Is the practice of quantum entanglement
Which coheres -- Mama mia! --
Her soft Schrödinger labia
With his Heisenberg-hardened endanglement.

Three Spring Haiku 2019

THREE SPRING HAIKU 2019


FOR LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI'S
ONE HUNDREDTH BIRTHDAY

Rexroth, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti
Without these
Frisco's just spaghetti.


FROM EX-WIFES'S OLD DAYBOOK

Fresh morning coffee
Birds singing in the trees
Taste of sperm on my lips.


FOR HIS SKILLED MASSEUSE

Nick's whole life has been
One long out-of-body experience.
Now this.

Touching the New Science

Holy Fire by Bill Tavis

TOUCHING THE NEW SCIENCE

Suppose 
that the way I experience my own body
could be a new way of knowing the world.

Widen the area of contact
Says Linda
Aikido guru
Practice irimi, the entering art
That's what you most need to do.

Could I feel my way into physical Nature
And enter the world of the wordless?
Use sense of touch to palpate
Her lovely quantum absurdness?

Now that I've chosen
My mode of flirtation
The next biggest question is How:
How can studious Nick
Learn a Heisenberg trick
And sink up to his elbows in Tao?

What skill do I most need to master
To sense Mother Nature as Frau?
Show me what I lack much
To do real quantum touch.
Sweet Muse, don't fail me now.

Whoa by Bill Tavis

First Contact

Photo by Gabrielle Cianfrani

FIRST CONTACT

If I open to you
Will you hurt me?
Or will we two be discovering
Brand new kinds of play?

Are we destined
To be known as
That Astonishing Couple
Or will we act out Darwinian
Predator and Prey?

Will we be so overwhelmed
By the humdrum of being
That we miss each moment's role
As a step on the Way?

Or will each moment teach us
A new piece of music
That our bodies will move to
But words cannot say?

Innocent

INNOCENT

When my breasts began to swell
And I had my first bleeding
I went to my friend Janice's house
Who showed me how to use a tampon
And told me her first sexual experience.

With a "bad boy" in school named Nick.

"How far did you two go?"

After dark we snuck off into the woods 
behind Nick's house
Talked about nothing, held hands 
and listened to animal noises.

"Holding hands in the dark? 
Is that all you two did together?"

Well, we did smoke a little pot
And we each dropped a tab or two of CHUB:
(CHUB = hexa-methoxy-triathlon).

And let me tell you, sister.
On CHUB
Holding hands
Felt to both of us
Like the interpenetration of galaxies.

Collapse of the Wave Function

Nick Herbert (Photo by Rudy Rucker)

COLLAPSE OF THE WAVE FUNCTION
(For Kate Bowland and Raven Lang)

Each moment's a never-repeated creation
Hot, sticky, wet, and screaming to be
Feeling this squeeze itself out
Of a hole in the mystery
Each moment's birth is a new birth of me.

The Best Science

Sciencegasm by Rian Fike

THE BEST SCIENCE
(For John Bell)

The best science
Is done after midnight
In the darkest part
Of the night.

The best science
Is done
On hands and knees
Chasing
Some obscure delight.

The best science
Is done
By two or by one:
A risky high-wire act
Which only few can see.

The best science done
Is done for fun
And love of mystery.

The best science
Goes
Where the darkness is deepest
Not merely to bring home a kill
But to become the very first seeker
Of a deeper darkness still.