Joseph Voelbel

View Original

Dear LA: This is What Happened While I Was Away

Out-of-focus image of a sunrise with a hue of purple sky from within a forest of sparse green foliage.

Dear LA,

This is what happened while I was away:

I moved through this world like a tremendous ship that caused the waves to split at the hull of my trajectory, the watery surface wicked off of what is real. 

This worldview became a fulcrum for my disposition. Street lights bled when I blinked. Weather sucked in its chest at my behest. These acts were nothing in and of themselves. Such peaks simply caused the land below to blur and eventually disappear. 

A child peered out the rear window of an automobile that cut along the ventricles of middle america – corn split by tarmac. She followed the ascent of a balloon until it hurt to look anymore. 

Emmanuel Swedenborg conversed in the evenings with Angels and and other celestial folk. He found Jupitarians to be quite particular about the upkeep of their faces. They are most curious creatures, angels. They are very social beings and have a tendency to gather in crowds.  Their most trying circumstance is the result of human's ears being so stopped up; they haven't an audience, and have grown quite accustomed to enjoying themselves. They are especially zealous when human ears become unstopped, even if only for a little bit.

It was said that before a person dies she sees a white light. This is one of the few cracks in perception, where illumination floods in. The tunnel might be the distance the viewer was from itself. A self-designed distance, perhaps, an amount the knower travels to be known. 

Peaks serve as cable cars to fourth and fifth dimensional tunes. Dolphins appear wide-eyed. Elephants chant sub-aural hymns. Whales incubate their young in spheres of sound. Giraffes bend their heads to smell the earth. Ants build pyramids larger than the size of the great pyramid of Giza compared to man, in a day. These realities speak in refracted light, and bird call. Perhaps, the endless pitter patter of a humming bird's wings. Or the thunderous feeling of wind being pushed upon one's body by a silent murder of crows so vast they blot out night. 

We move as royalty. We float, chart, re-design. We expect as much. A cosmic game of telephone transpires when humans are the last ones in the circle - sky, mountain, river, lava, us, and it bubbles up like pure gobbledegook, gobbledegook. 

We feed strangers with smiles, and converse with infants. We listen biomorphic fields of supersonic light water. We prophesy a clean Mississippi, mightily flowing through America, a welcoming galactic center of light, play, and rest: choreographs from the dreams of children who learned from ellipses. 

The Jaguar is here. It slides round the trunks of amazon trees. It comes at night to your camp when embers glow in erratic patches. Once inside its belly you think of Jonah, speak of shaman, stare at stars...

The bringer of dreams will kiss you, there is no portal that cannot be opened, that's why humans, like plants, turn their heads to sun. 

Magic is between two or more people. Enlightenment, otherwise, a distant solitude. We move like wolves around a pine tree in pursuit of a meal. The food is manna. The spirit totem its dining table. This tree is now a magnetic source whirring about our transformation. We spin galactic pine cone rotary telephone - seven twirls -, a number we know by heart. "It must be enshrined." 

The African Miel bird leads humans to honey, but if you don't leave some beyond for them, the next time you follow it it bring you to a lion's den. This is our fork. Our locol-ecosystem less traveled. Symbiosis is the new outsourcing. 

Lets let go back to the days before vowels: