Frank Russell’s 1987 Dinner with Dr. Rocksteady

It’s harder than you know for you to be able to grok this.
Back before there was a “when” or some “place,”
we and the Beatles were created out of vacuum fluctuations,
born of an absolute nothingness that elaborated itself into hummingbirds and hurricanes in the time it takes to boil an egg.
Fourteen billion years ago, space-time and matter burst out of an invisible point somehow, and now here we are,
a consensus of atoms allowing you to sit in comfort
to the cosmic voudou drumbeat of the nation of your heart’s cells
keeping your neurons and dendrites mentating.

The Stones’ “Satisfaction” and your last lovemaking
were already composed in the first millionth of a second.
Even stranger is that there was an almost exact quantity of anti-matter particles produced by the Bang, and when these collide with matter, they cancel out into nothingness again.
Now hear this: the ratio of matter over anti-matter was so close that matter was only ONE particle more per billion than anti-matter particles!
This doesn’t mean that there is some sour-bearded god who sends us to hell for dancing or thinking, but Something sure as hell seems to be going on!
We are Simians-in-Wonderland, in an experiment
of which we can barely conceive.

As for me, I feel such treasures to pass on, my mission accomplished since age twelve: I know now how matter began, life, self-conscious life, even how the universe and simians end, and why. But who cares? They’re glued to the commodities board and 500 cable-satellite channels of mind-numbing schlock of violence, surgeries gone wrong, 700-pound housewives, fake wrasslin’ and Nascar, and retards with balloon tits eating worms.
Instead, I’m tuned to the Beuth and Trudy show 24-7.
How I loved those gold and silver wings of my youth!
Yet now I see this strange wingless angel in the mirror.
And all my missing children feel like an emergency.
I’m left smooching the treachery of bad sex with lines of slick chicks on speed. I’ve been running from those lambchops everywhere, in every ivory tower, wearing my crown in shame.
Stupidly happy in that psychedelic season in heaven,
I now joust sweatily with reason just to get through the night.
What trick makes it possible to grit my teeth until death?
Turkish poppies on ice work awhile, but then they’re a dead-end.

Give us back our world you ate, you smarmy yuppies!
The taillights fade on the Earth’s last amusement ride.
You try to make me murder for you in your “wars without end.”
But your Rome, Jr. will fall around your ears until the crash
of civilization lost wakes you and your nuclear family up in Hell.
The hope gone for a world for everyone-with no more poor,
no more planet mudball literally drowning in hungry monkeys!
It actually is so utterly simple to achieve, I hope to find us there someday, rather than a world of skeletons bathed in the gamma rays of 70,000 nuclear warheads shot off by aging sociopaths trying to take us all with them.

65 million years ago, humongous beasts laid down to die together. Then, almost exactly 100 years ago, we start pumping their slimy remains out of the ground to light the entire planet and send men to the moon.
Now the oil’s GONE! B.S. Reilly’s not going to tell you that,
but you can find out if you dare. Just Google Hubbert’s Peak.
The light sweet crude is gone, natural gas gone–and solar, wind, and water can’t pick up the slack for the globalization They are grimly plowing full speed ahead with. America’s only solution is to battle and conquer the entire planet, besting even Rome. Impossible: five pounds of C-4 and a camel can blow a pipeline, shutting down an entire refinery.

All this bad news, yet what we each secretly are is a huge shining smile! Deep medications I probably shouldn’t have taken gave me visions, so I know a tomorrow where there is time to really live.
You’re all invited to the party! But Bring Your Own Bliss.
The Virgin King feels cool most days, but the nights can get rough.
As for me? I’d break a window with my fist just to get to something interesting, something new.

I witnessed my Magic Generation of historically unprecedented educated boomers pick up briefcases and sell their psychedelic souls for a 3-car garage and a Beamer. The greatest chance in history for a free and honest Earth swapped for 401K plans and an ignorant arrogance befitting a teen brat. Blind know-it-alls in deep denial tugging the tattered remnants of 6,000 years of culture into its grave! This monstrous technopoly they’ve built is so inter-connected it could topple like a house of cards before sunset.
Earth will survive, but not our species.
The overflow of CEO-wannabees balloon out into distant suburbs of half-million dollar houses not built to last even a generation– thrown up only thirty feet from each other, yet they don’t even know their neighbors.
Earth sickens and groans with distaste and embarrassment.

But goodbye to all that!
There’s no time to cry over this leaking Ship of Fools.
Ever since the chieftain-kings of Mesopotamian Ur this ship has been floating, with power-mad men rising to the top like scum, a human history of endless war and wasted resources was inevitable.
Genghis Khan’s high piles of skulls spread all over Eurasia are
mere Tinkertoys compared to 70,000 nukes and germ warfare.

Yet in the midst of this mess, I retain dreams of her– stone crazy in love, dancing ecstatic in sunny fields of flower power, laughing.
Anything’s possible, everything’s permitted in a Romance that is
Dylan’s Green Fuse that powers up all nature to grow and glow.
Youth is not something stolen, but let go of unnecessarily.
My generation got the full cup of life, and we’re dying hard.
I didn’t want to have to believe in magic, but my basement showed me reality flows out of our eyes, not into them.

The girl can’t help it, waiting for a miracle future.
Why shouldn’t she want everything? That’s what you get with 200 proof sugar and spice! Deep kisses in the dark-who ever gets enough? Stay real. Keep knocking on the door till closing time.
When your play runs its course, another begins in an energy field
of karmic quantum possibilities. We all become part of God again till we are each spit out to play new roles in this tragi-comedy being composed, for what reason we cannot know.

Gardens of our minds grow any psychodrama we tell them to. Unplug your 500 channels that nothing is on,
and get in your own driver seat, Captain Soul.
Everybody knows God is lazy, but It gets around to everything eventually. Get outta Dodge before the levee breaks and we return to cannibalism.

Get ready for gamma ray days. Civilization’s going out on three flat tires and a rim, so don’t count on salvation from culture.
Grow yer own! Know this: everyone is an artist.
Our train of changes is coming soon, in our lifetimes.
Big new troubles for awhile, and then new good times.

Your universal limousine awaits. Or, if you prefer,
we have a new Milky Way Lear Jet-do watch your head as you enter, please. Simply tell the pilot who you wish to be this time.
The story you tell yourself will become real,so make it a good one. Can you even see me through the cracks in your ego? Investigate everything but the chocolate Jesus that Tom Waits ate. There are no Things-only hard ghosts of our imaginings we cook up daily.

Our quest for reality defines the future, which is transhuman.
Already sapiens morphs into two opposed species: one reverting to predatory beasts in business suits, the other ascending beyond self. Relax. The real reality is stranger than you can even imagine, and it has already kicked the ass of Chaos lounging by the pool.

We’re flying united, wherever we’re headed. Myself, I’m in my best time travel ever. It’s been worse: ancient ziggurats, crenelated towers, bowls of sacrificial fire and incense everywhere- I was there, oh yeah. Long priestly robes under horned helmets, high stones. I remember me now, tons of my tribal human weight shoving me into the enemy, breaking my shield and sword, losing my dagger in some man’s heart, then the lance sliding deep in my aorta, then hearing the crack of my gold warrior’s necklace ripped from my neck. The iron taste of blood in my mouth as I’m stomped to sleep.

So: BOOM! and lights out, but the expected evaporation of myself did not occur. Rather, there was a breaking apart of all the moments of my life into tiny self-contained bubbles of picture-scenes with the volume turned down. Some were sad, some glad, some just funny. The infamous dissolution of ego had apparently begun, and I thought of the Tibetan Bardo Plane with its monsters (MY monster self-creations) that I might soon encounter for “weeks” before winning a place in the Light or falling back to the third dimension of objects and desire for more hard lessons. What to do? Become a good boy? Too late for that now! I saw children born I never knew I’d sired, felt myself walking in them. I saw people I’d inadvertently caused the death or success of. My life was not the pile of stories I’d constructed about myself, to be sure. However, once is enough for proof, so I’ll stop there for now, but I remember other lives, many.

Anyway, it’s a tax-free universe, zero-point energy simply playing with itself, trying to have fun sometimes. All the various parallel
worlds, jewels awaiting. It’s a long hall of mirrors where we see what we expect to see. So be beautiful, make it good.
Enter the entrance of Plato’s cave again-straight ahead there stands a goddess speaking strange tongues you don’t know, yet you do.
Oh, you do, indeed. You know . . . everything.
Only be still . . . and remember.

What are we, exactly? Soft machines, or some other thing?
There is no time for fear-our species is dying as we speak. An ice age, nuclear winter, greenhouse effect, or ozone depletion-take your pick. 65 million years ago, a billion dinosaurs died together, giving the Earth one lone century of light and a chance to Startrek terraform other planets so that civilized simians might survive. That opportunity we trashed on TV in the suburbs, Nintendo and football, Hummers and trucks with six tires.
So where does that leave us?

Soon the electric grid shuts down, and our lights will go out, leaving us a world lit again only by fire. It appears we had exactly one century as a window of opportunity, and we blew it.
Overpopulation is the mainspring driving all these other shortages-why is it no one has the guts to say so? Because that constant supply of new consumer units is the only thing propping this silly system up.

You are the biggest movie in the universe if you just let go of your Self.
A radiance of being shines from my eyes just eating out of God’s hand. Linked to the universe with soft trickles of electricity,
love means never leaving, except to the great beyond from all our broken toys on Earth, which never amused us more than awhile, anyway.
We are coming home to the whole universe from a vacation on Disney Earth. You were imagined before the beginning of time. So go ahead,
and just ask me “What for?”

This: we are unfinished gods, time machines to make impossibilities possible. That’s our day job, building a bridge to bliss that’s made to last. You’d better believe in magic, or it won’t believe in you. There is no after life-only more and more and more life. Tell yourself a beautiful story and it will come true. Everything is on time. Re-enchant yourself with the holographic mind of God. Now, exactly where was it you really wanted to go? Here, step in the limo; the Driver will be glad to take you there. Bon voyage!

Frank Russell
Copyright © 2008

(Frank Russell died in an auto accident January 25, 2008 near his home in South Florida two weeks after this poem was posted)

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