Poetry of Nick Masesso: Crashing into Bliss, Angel's in the Architecture, Crashing into Camelot, Happy Birthday, English Only, Iconoclast Direct from Hollywood Heaven, Hit by the Thunderbolt, Lessons for Jedi, Nietzsche's Paradox, Nothing really matters

Crashing into Bliss

My friend told me a story recently
about an airplane ride he took
from Spain back to his home in America
and the plane was crashing
yet he felt nothing but angst
from the unrequited love
that he was fleeing
and despite all the crying
and the screaming and the praying
by the other passengers
as the jet danced down to its end
his wounded heart
knew only
that life
was a single skip
for joy.

Angel's in the Architecture

On the way back from
Yuri's Night
we met a girl in passing
dressed like an angel
with the full length
white feathery wings
of an angel
she was just going to the Rave
and we
being old men
were leaving
but when my friend
remarked to the minx
that she was an angel
she stopped, faced us
and flipped a hidden switch
which caused her wings
to light up in a dozen multi-colored diodes.
Next year we'll go late
and stay later
in order to experience
the spectacle
of youth,
the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Crashing into Camelot

Cynicism is on the retreat.
Hope for change lifts.
We are American refugees,
witnesses to a generation assassinated,
murdered in its sleep.

Our history is testimony,
chronicled for a past sorrow
that may never be assuaged.
Yet in 2008,
after 40 years in exile,
lay an opportunity to resurrect hope,
discard fear, greed and war.

Movements require heroes.
Revolution demand martyrs.
The price for both has been paid.
We know their names.
We can see their faces.
Even after four decades
they are a part of our America vocabulary.
Their births and deaths
are our national holidays,
both of hope and of grief.

We are between theories.
The page is bare.
We are searching for Leaders
to take the positive direction from our past
and move it into our future.
Can we capture the zeitgeist of the 1960’s
and the lessons of her heroes and martyrs?

If so, we’ll have our path to a new American primacy
as great as the last one,
one with teachers, not torturers,
one based upon meritocracy,
not theocracy,
one that sends a Peace Corp to free the oppressed peoples of the world
and not the Marines Corp.

Happy Birthday

I woke up
in pieces
21,900 days
alive
60 winters
60 summers
What fresh hell is this?

Should have been dead
5 or 6 times
that I know about,
or damaged
at the least.
Yet now I’m strongest
at the broken places
at the top of my game.

Is this heaven?
The women loved.
It’s to those gentle ones
that my memory runs.

Or more likely somewhere
in-between
a purgatory
wrapped in a
Roman Carnival
with Barkers
on the Midway.

English Only

I pledge allegiance
to what the flag
use to mean.
Now, its
"English only
as the legislated
official
language",
rail the nativists.
They tell people
how they "must" speak
how they "must" dress
then, next surely,
how they "must" think.
The thought police
aren’t far behind.
Hell,
they’re here
now,
making
everyone the same
an insidious virus.
Where’ve
I seen that
kind of group think
before? Seig Heil.
Shut up and sing.
I pledge allegiance.
My country
right or wrong.
I pledge allegiance.
Love it or leave it.
I pledge allegiance
or the terrorists win.

Iconoclast Direct from Hollywood Heaven

Robert Altman is dead,
but Francis Coppola is still alive.
“They hit him with six shots
and he’s still alive.
Well that’s bad luck for me,
and bad luck for you,
If you don’t make that deal
with Sonny”.

Marty Scorsese is running down Mulberry Street
with a knife in his back. Death is chasing him
like a freight train
and he’s still dreaming of Italian Cinema.

Stanley Kubrick is floating in a space odyssey
with naked women like Norman Mailer’s somnambulist.
He sports an orange clock around his neck,
Public Enemy style.

Sam Pekinpaugh is riddling
Alfred Hitchcock’s bloated corpse
with silver bullets
while Sam whistles over
John Ford’s grave.

Robert Altman is dead
He’s hunting deer
with Michael Cimino and Dino de Laurentis,
unconventionally subverting the genre.

Robert Altman is dead.
He’s whispering
“suicide is painless”
while Arthur Penn
Is turning the crank
of a vintage Model-T
for Clyde Barrow.

Robert Altman is dead.
He’s stopping the bleeding in Korea,
singing on stage in Nashville
and slowing slipping away
chest deep in the western snows.

He deconstructs and demythologizes
our romantic visions
in non-heroic, breathtaking, masterpiece
while Leonard Cohen wails.

He watches as Oliver Stone
shows Jack Kennedy
what happened in Vietnam,
how the bullet
made his head
go back
and to the right,
made us all go back
and to the right.

Hit by the Thunderbolt

H.L. Mencken said that love,
was the triumph of imagination,
over intelligence.
I suppose he was just about right,
right up until the time you're in it,
heart-deep in the magic zone,
where the scent of her breath
intoxicates you like heavenly heroin
and sweet cocaine,
and you surrender.
And the mere fact
that this bizarre sight
is even possible
in the midst of all this madness,
truly is a triumph,
and you don't care
what kind.

Lessons for Jedi

Rejoice death for yours
that transform into the force.
Do not mourn or miss them.
Connect with them
in the evanescent realm.
Tap into your personal ancestral connection.

Like the Dog Soldiers
of the Mescalero Apache,
or the Maasai of Kenya,
or the Samurai of Japan,
the path for the Yogi,
the Yoda,
the transcendent ones,
the masters,
are all the same.

Train yourself to let go
of everything
that you fear
to lose.

Fear of loss
is the path
to the dark side.
Attachments lead to jealousy,
the shadow of greed.

Seek wisdom
and spiritual guidance from,
pay homage, respect and reverence to
your ancestry,
or hinder access
and passage
into your Force.

Nietzsche's Paradox

From Nietzsche to Gandhi,
Ali to Yoda,
the message is the same.
Do the hard thing
and transcend.

I no longer seek those
with answers,
but those
with questions.
Those in the mystery,
not those in the know.

If God is dead, and the superman is nigh,
beyond good and evil,
is this the prelude
to a philosophy of the future?

In this twilight of the Idols,
are we the Anti-Christ,
lusting after eternity,
voluntary beggars,
fire hounds,
seeking wretched contentment?
What a great nausea in this stillest hour.

Is the moral world order
a holy lie,
a final sin,
or just bad instincts?

Nothing really matters

In CA we live on the edge of the western continental shelf,
waiting
for the Big One.
Tick, tick, tick,
waiting,
unconsciously,
for a world on the edge
of the brink
to crack open
and swallow us whole.
We are held
waiting
by centrifugal force.
We are under pressure,
while the steam rises from the manholes in san Francisco
like the whole damn towns' about to blow.

Copyright 2009, Nick Masesso. © This work is protected under the U.S. copyright laws. It may not be reproduced, reprinted, reused, or altered without the expressed written permission of the author.