Dreamers 

Anonymous

We met in

room 1111 at 11PM.

There were 4 of us

in folding chairs.

Mine had several 

initials scratched

into the seat.

None of them

 mine.

A naked lightbulb

hung from a cord

like a suicide

of counterfeit light.

The instructor was female.

She called us inheritors.

Her voice was 

wholly masculine.

I took notes.

Dreams are a misnomer.

Dreams are tired.

We must never

call them dreams

and for God’s sake

never nightmares.

As above so below,

or in our case

as below so above.

You are a crossroads.

Think of your

days as horizontal,

your nights as vertical.

You are travelers

to a dimension

where no rules apply.

You are the crux.

You are here because

you have a talent

for abandonment.

You relinquish yourselves.

Your bodies are

vessels, airborne

and sea-worthy.

I am essentially

addressing

4 beached boats.

All that can remain

is memory,

and memory is

subject to 

cessation.

The instructor 

then presented

flash cards.

Toad. 

Pine cone.

Fairy. 

Stone.

Tooth. 

Grave.

Bird. 

Cloud.

She resorts

to mathematics.

If a bird

in the hand

is worth

two in the bush,

how much is

an egg worth?

No one 

dares say.

Again

she challenges

our associations.

Nothing we think

is right.

An artist never

resorts to blueprints.

On the contrary,

we are thieves

who can leave 

no prints.

Not where we’ve gone

or are going.

We are here

because we agree

each night

for the dark

to steal us away.

The question is

who or what is

having its way

with us?

Our beds are

a crucible.

Vulnerability, 

our only 

requirement.

For now, as we

are novices (ha!)

we lack stamina.

We are not 

in the saddle.

She loops

an imaginary rope

and casts it forward.

Later, she implies,

we will have

a newborn 

fortitude.

I am happy

to be a baby

again.

The pock-marked man

asks how can 

surrender

ever lead to

command

or personal 

jurisdiction?

An egg head,

I assume.

We can’t help 

but think.

A commander

knows how to

surrender,

she corrects.

Are we going

into battle,

I ask on the inside. 

She responds

as if she heard me.

You are all

your own

civil wars.

So what are we

fighting for, I ask.

All this war imagery,

really?

Mastery, she answers

bluntly.

To quote Blake,

You are 

the marriage

of heaven and hell.

There are no Gods,

nor are there devils.

No countries,

only nameless lands.

There is consciousness

and unconsciousness.

Asleep or awake.

If you hadn’t guessed

already, you are 

more asleep

in the day

and more awake

in the night.

That is why

you are here.

This is where

our work 

must begin.

Peter Valentyne

August 4th, 2020

Beatitude

“Within despair lies 

the joy of beatitude”

                ~anonymous

I remember Gide.

Gheeeed.

A time when

I was both real

and counterfeit.

Before I invented

myself as a reason 

to entwine 

my body

with another.

In the future

men were

both

crude and

insensitive.

I would be 

different.

Now

a single tree

can topple me.

A glass 

of wine

all that’s needed

to destroy

my separateness,

and sunlight 

the one thing

making me

still possible.

Peter Valentyne

August 3, 2020

A Circle of Two

(in memoriam for Bob Hock)

5/20/31 ~ 6/25/20

I remember thinking

What if this is

the last time I ever see him?

Bob had just come from the CVS

and was crossing 42nd street with

an un-customary grimace on his face

contorting into a crescent smile

the moment he saw

me closing in.

I could tell he was in pain

and he probably 

didn’t want me knowing it,

never wanting to draw attention

to his defects or what might

be ailing him

as he was trying so clumsily 

to be one of the living.

“Oh Bob,” he would scold himself

in the third person,

“Pull yourself together.”

But there we stood

on that perpetually windy corner,

Bob’s CVS bag bloated

with an addict’s spoils

and me gripping my backpack 

cross my shoulder,

chockfull of vague concern.

 “You’re the soul of determination”

I told him, trying to be

encouraging. 

I had heard he’d come round

in the last week

to Bingo and was looking much better.

They say he’d even been

seen gobbling down an ungainly sized

wedge of cake at the senior hour;

a grown man mimicking

a saucer-eyed child.

I can just see the theatrical face

he must have made, 

the actor in him 

ever ready to

return to the boards.

Bob would announce himself

with that funny gait of his,

a stride that, I felt sure, had been quite sexy

in youth, but now had evolved into

a kind of wounded affectation. I knew

he was in pain only because

we once spoke about 

the spaced out effects of pain pills

after an un-characteristic confession 

that his feet

had hurt him everyday

for a decade.

Still, he managed to smile.

“How are you feeling,” I asked.

“Oh, I’m soldiering on,” he said flippantly.

Bob would always leave room

for life to return to a comedia.

His own pratfalls had unfortunately 

become all too common.

Dressed in his plaid

flannel shirts and suspenders

and sporting Freud’s reading glasses

you’d be forgiven to think him

a sophisticated hayseed,

but of course, with an Ivy League education.

Bob’s quaintness was disarmingly

old school.

I once saw him talking

to a much younger man

that looked like the other end 

of himself.

I wondered whatever were

they telling each other.

Why is it so odd

to see the young interact with the old?

Maybe because there's only so many ways 

you can hide infirmity with a smile.

And yet, he was smiling.

“I keep to myself”, he once said. 

“Young people are from outer space.”

I laughed, convinced that it

was just his fatigue talking.

But who knows? Maybe we are

all only the stuff of stars

until we birth a soul.

My inner thoughts continued 

to square the circle.

What if we were cobbling

our souls together

all along

every time we dared to use

the imaginary tools

of childhood?

If that were true, 

what an arsenal

Bob had possessed.

I say “had” because

this gentle accomplished man

could no longer recall

his accomplishments.

If it comes to that,

maybe the truest thing

we can trust in

is the present moment

after all.

Bob had a fear of falling.

Life had become a balancing act,

each day passed in

a death-defying circus ring.

Of late, he’d taken to walking

around the block 

gripping tightly to his rollator,

daring someone

to meet his eyes.

More than that, he wanted

to be seen through 

to his very insides.

To meet that person

who could comprehend the

journey that was curling

around itself like a nucleus

at the heart of him,

as if recognition might

close the circle.

Was I that person?

  

In this last year Bob

had lived like a moon

ever on the wane,

slowly surrendering

it’s phases in the sky,

unable to remember

his life

in the spotlight,

his handsomeness

sunk beneath 

it's lunar surface, 

nevertheless he was

a man of an

astronomical inner beauty.

Now, here, amidst 

the unrelenting realism

of 10th and 43rd street,

a wind conspiring to 

blow us both away.

I hugged this 

tender comrade 

of a man

and for one 

indistinguishable moment

we were 

a circle of two.

Peter Valentyne

February 9th, 2019

The Carbuncle 

I haven’t told anybody but

I’ve had a carbuncle

ripening on the the back

of my head for weeks,

like a fetus poking

its finger through the skin

of a red balloon. 

I am that balloon

trying to pass a stone.

I guess I should be grateful

its not on my face for

the whole world to see.

I prefer my suffering

in silence,

hidden beneath my hair.

Besides, everyone would

sure to mistake it

for a wound,

when in fact

it is my art.

All my pain

has been coming

to a head.

At night

I use my bed pillow

as a compress

hoping for the Rorschach stain

to discharge

and leave its 

beautiful mark.

I feel

a ripening is coming

and I am 

running out of time.

My body strains to release

its mounting

sands

like grit to a pearl;

I am the hunchback

of my own private

Notre dame.

What will I do

if my sorrows

were to pass?

Who will or would I be?

My life is 

a sideways

hourglass,

clock without hands,

my heart steeped in prayer

inside a cathedral

of suspended animation.

Progress is now on foot

as I walk the desert sands

looking for something

tantamount to

a father

missing in action.

Every pearl begins

as just this sort of cyst,

pushing at the 4th wall

between night 

and the burgeoning

poem

of morning.

Today I woke up

weeping for the world.

What with this one’s death

and that one’s shame,

I put my art to use.

Peter Valentyne

July 19th, 2020

I Want My Art to Address 

the Mysteries of the Soul

I want my art to address the mysteries of the soul. When I say “my” art, I mean the art I resonate with, the cinema I watch, the books I read, the paintings I’m drawn to, the poetry I read and/or write. By “mystery” I’m referring to those things which are often demoted or promoted to the category of fantasy. The ghosts, the dreams, the poems, the simple acknowledgement of the meta-physicalities representing the greater scheme of life itself; the things we live on top of and take no notice or give much thought to until they act up and act out in a primal bid for our attention. Building our lives (houses and malls and highways) on the burial ground of ancient ways that occasionally bubble up through the cracks of “civilization” in sympathy ( and synchronicity) with the Gods. Psychologist James  Hillman reminds us that “soul enters only via symptoms, via outcast phenomena like the imagination of artists or alchemy or “primitives,” or of course, disguised as psychopathology.” That’s what Jung meant when he said the Gods have become diseases: the only way back for them in a Christian world is via the outcast.

I want an art that causes the invisible to overthrow my lazy reliance on the seen. I want insight! Eyes are not the only organs capable of seeing truth. The heart sees, the hands see, the nose sees, even the mind when toppled from its egoic throne is capable of seeing things it could not have foreseen. 

In our time we are living with an existential threat on a daily basis. Great swaths of the world are being infected by a global pandemic whose organic blueprint breeds without discrimination. Yes, some of us are more vulnerable than others. But the ones less vulnerable are being coopted as carriers (terrorists with a virus strapped to their breasts). The breath, which has long stood for the basis of life itself has been turned into the deliverer of disease and death. We live in a moment where the simple epithet “I can’t breathe” has taken on a plethora of meanings. None of them good. And I am encouraged to reach figuratively for higher ground. 

I offer that now is the time to ponder our human parameters in a new light. In other words, our chronic time-worn boundaries that may be keeping the once unthinkable, from becoming possible. If we were to know how much time we have, or the width of the island we find ourselves roaming, or the breadth of the dream we are invested in as if our bodies ended where the rest of the world began; would this not assist us in navigating our lives? I am not referring to any mundane measure of time but rather to a multi-dimensionality that we have hitherto excluded as being an invariable part of ourselves. Consider for a moment this maxim attributed to Plato: Do thy job and know thyself. I interpret this to mean that if we were to do our job we would surely see that our first priority is to know who we are and what is proper for us. Therefore it would be prudent for the knower of oneself to no longer take extraneous business for one’s own, but loving and cultivating oneself before anything else, refusing superfluous occupations and useless thoughts and projects. True folly would derive from getting what one wanted, yet never thinking one has obtained enough; so wisdom tells us we ought be always content with the present and never displeased with what is. This is not so much about closing doors, but about knowing a door when you see one. 

Where does my body end

and the world begin?

How is an island like a lifetime?

What vessel holds me

as if I were a flower?

Why is no souvenir 

of a dream possible?

If I hold a stone in my palm

all night, will I have

taken it with me? If so,

where will we have traveled?

What if my guardian angel

occupies the same space

as I do?

How shall I differentiate us?

POST UNDER CONSTRUCTION...

Amor Fati

(Love of One’s Fate)

I am an abalone diver.

If I don’t go down

to the depths,

I won’t come back

with anything.

Down there

I once found 

a dying man’s

treasure chest,

the kind

a child would

make out of 

a cigar box,

a blazing Phoenix

painted on it

no sea water

could extinguish.

What was inside

would surely

rock the world.

A scribbled note 

quoting Nietzsche’s 

last words:

“Mother, I am dumb.”

Dreams are how

I listen to myself.

One day I found

a stone and

took it to bed.

I woke up

on the floor

in mourning,

the mineral

still in my hand.

What have I

in common

with a stone,

that I should

live my life

married to

the earth

each night,

only to

part ways

at break

of day?

Peter Valentyne

July 6th, 2020