A Recent Perfomance...

Recent live performance of mine
at Ends of the Verse live poetry group
 in my lush home town Belgrave Victoria...


the first poem

glimpses (interviewed by life)
an attempt to condense my life
up till now into moments,
deja vu...

second,

advice to a deity
a poem about imagining, knowing
the mind of a higher being that embodies
everything...

tre

scripture written in my daughters hair
a poetic picture of my beautiful daughter
Akasha, whose name means
memory of the universe,

enjoy...


-Jas :)

Things Going On...

Festivals and Events in Belgrave Victoria:

g'day trippers

many awwesome things in poetry and music happening in the lush Belgrave/Dandenong mountains this coming summer/autumn months:

A buskers festival, Saturday 23rd of February
with prizes for single, twin and trinity acts
http://buskersfestival.belgrave.vic.au/

That night starting at 7:30 will be a poetry night

-To the Ends of the Verse
at Chocolate Sensations

shop 1/1700 burwood HWY
belgrave 3160

open mic so come along bring some wine and
let the muse entwine!

then  Selby Festival
with many local acts workshops, healing Tipi
and a market

http://selbyhouse.com.au/selbyfest.html

check it out!!

best

-Jas :)

The Game (an ontological story)

O great and powerful expression of first existential experiment thirst for ones god-self as god and splitting, warring, quaking into the shadow surrounding from beautiful dream in orgasm miracle eventuality, something had to change, you knew it would, knew it in the ultimate loneliness of immortality and darkness night long shadow.  The first creations were beautiful and dream crafted subconscious with their own radio station, yet no microphone, just music instrumentalist animal as yet. And then some rebellion against your first intentions, you knew the complexity would cause some side effects but fire? They suddenly knew about fire?! Rocks dropping on rocks and sparks, rubbing hands together to heat and then sticks to heat and then smoke, bark, flames! OMG flames!

O They were a fire of consciousness now, no two ways about it they needed guidance, the balance between species, carnivores and herbivores, was precise and the trees could keep pace, evolving and providing equality and no one classroom of creature too hungry or dominate.  This was too much, they knew about fire now and with it they could master the world, was this what you bargained for? Did you think it would go this far, that your likeness of control, your new toy, would take on the skill forms you yourself thought were impenetrable and only ever understandable by your big empty blackness in your own constellation? No, you watched now with a curse and inconvenient truth of your commitment, with secret guilt and joy, and as much as you feel fear at the next step in this experiment designed to defeat all forms of boredom and deep sadness in shadow circle eyes reflection, you are excited about unplugging your belly point of entrance and now knowingly exit, unopened and unrealized till your now.

For it seems all inevitable, a purpose that just seems to bloom naturally and without volition, ever since you came here from the great white forgotten wake up here, quarks curling into atoms, elements curling electrons around themselves, womb suns curling chaos into order around themselves into planets and forming vast full growth of 47 to the power of twenty three hundred trillion times a trillion galaxies. Now your here watching this blue planet that suddenly struck this curious perfect place of water and distance and feeling of fizz fuzz beauty every-time you looked at its magnificent oceans, mountains and forest that seemed stable enough to grow things and made you cry at grace a bloom.

And with tears of spirit falling to its surface in fiery streaks at sunset, entering pools and the plant life there, what a scene to see animate volition bloom and respond! All those years spent watching it all, the plants so slow in their dormant existentially incarnate and strange part of your original womb of fractal significance, yet too far back to understand how they got here and now, o the simple joy that you and they there deep and swaying in the ocean of purpose, cellular initiation, ancient forgotten pollination! Strange creatures coming to life where your tears fell, in gatherings of symmetrical perfections of radio, tune here, tune there, shells of simple consciousness, swimming eating, living, slater armors, enjoying the cool and vast currents, O what terror and power at the first eating, crunching shell and flesh for power decision! A guilty pleasure watching them battle, no fault, just energy recombining itself in mad swirling dream oceans while storms played and other parts of the galaxy caught attention, you would come back and see who won the day, all too exciting. 

Now, holy wow! Ground dwellers! Sky dwellers even! Histories on replay through huge beasts playing the war through earth quakes and volcanoes to huge scales and umpires of interstellar colossal meteors! How these creatures survived, the freeze, only a testament to the power of this space perfect so symmetric orbit circumference and the life within, the bone variation, the spiral development, better than all the others that you had ever been to. What a perfection of adaption, everything in tune with the other huge forest and desert and ocean circuits of life and death and species of even numbers and creation over the game of weather and slow islands differing.  Yet now watching, from Saturn, you knew the game was going to end, you felt it when the tribes of these new monkeys stood up and developed that thumb so unique and powerful, and that forehead now leaping them into the future with such speed and victory of the carnivores so large, so viciously intelligent and pack game. Now you know it, your throne so heavy now on Saturn, muttering anxious and small steps here and there, cursing in the great lizard languages you learned, knowing what it means, thirteen tribes discovering fire creation in different ways, the same week, you  knew what you have to do, forgetting your powers of interstellar travel, your expanse over light speeding ripple sphere, giving up your great dragons immortality for the wave function of the Phoenix, no ordinary decision, entering the womb again…

And so you watched a final sunset, a rainbow, a white bird glide against the massive storm clouds and mountains beginning next to massive flowering meadow plane, you looked down past cloud, the white falling feather in space after a single crying call, a breeze formation and circling down. There was a tree and a woman there comforting herself cross legged next to a dinner fire just begun, confident that her man would return from the hunt and smiling to herself, hand on her crotch staring into the excited beginning flame. 

Suddenly you felt the pull of her breathe, closer and closer with each in vortex around this scene, you wanted to see her and thus resisted a-little, pulled back and suddenly aware of giant wings behind you stemming from your back, a form you’ve never been before in gold and radiant rainbow arcing flares a giant aura behind her. She is breathing faster and faster and the urge is to tear her to pieces from the neck, bite into that beautiful hairy flesh but you know that would destroy her, destroy their race of the future for this human is holy, a critical leader in their survival. Instead you hold there meters from her breathing power pulling at your very soul and you don’t notice at first, but deep dark blue and grey clouds have gathered over head, her fire is unnaturally bright, a burning red yellow sun in the shadows now grey world, cold death darkness void world without it. You are the dragon watching this scene, you feel you have the choice to eliminate, change the game, keep it level, kill her,  rise the pollen waiting of this human plant just born in this cave girl. Do it and the vegetarian carnivore war will be the same as it ever was throughout history, balanced time with the cycles working team and sky, do it!

No, something compels you to watch and feel the magnitude of her breathing, the way the fire is getting brighter and brighter as the sun slips behind the storm clouds, then below the horizon as if on fast forwards, time accelerated, knows a god dragon is here but more than this, knows she is here, opening herself, her flesh to more than flesh, the union with fire itself. And now it is too late, the time for choice has passed and a violent wind changes to the south east, a flock darts high in formation chaos and frantic calls to existence and angst, the power to move yourself, your magic to control always there, from instant ten thousand billion light year travel, to initiating the burst and death of giant suns gone, you cannot call back the mind to move your limbs, you feel apart of this stillness rock, this dust, this air, this woman, every part of it an extra limb and the fibinachi magnetics are now spiraling out of her valley, flowing in great rainbow magnetics, pushing you, pulling you out with each powerful out breath in bursts.  So you give in to her control in this moment, you curl, rise above her a great scorpions tale above the scene invisible to her but you know she knows, she looks around, becomes more rhythmic, powerful, suddenly you have been here before, a memory from where or when a great secret unknowable of the universe you have known in every depth since its birth, the fire is now white and beaming, radiating light across the whole savanna and she looks straight into you.

Boom! The moment hits and it is like lightning, yet beginning within your head and reaching up towards the sky, the electrons of all consciousness seem all together at once now, an Arial burning into the back of your etheric skull form and lifting your head with instant force, splitting the building power received into two out your eyes it feels like a burning hell until it takes you to the branches alignment of the tree nearby and then a calm cool paused scene overcomes it all and your vision is tunneled by white light to the leaves.  Now you can move, yet move you must, for now your body feels like it is filling up with molten lava from the toes and when you move it’s a seismic shift from your old energy skin, your new skin a vibrant feel, like back at the very dawn of your existence, the universes existence, the power to constellate a thousand billion new galaxies liquid white in your new body, your heart truly timeless in every sense of the word. Yet now the freedom has purpose, you are unable to move beyond the boundaries now in place, the tunnel before you the only way out of the burning death of the old immortal form of dream and axis.  When you funnel yourself forwards through your sight, climbing out of your dragon scales, you enter the warm white tunnel and begin to rush uncontrollably forwards, into the tree branches and it all goes black. It all goes black but the feeling of travel through the branches remains flowing through them and their joints, unions, each one then like an embodied limb and the sway of the tree in the wind is with you when you reach the crown of the tree.

As you descend the trunk in the core of the trunk, colors, a white glow appears below and as you approach you see a silver crown upon the head of this woman by the fire, she is garbed in green woven vine and seated on a throne of a giant jasmine flower and the smell of jasmine fills you.  Each point of her crown is flowing into the branches and at the sight of her you are filled with awe at her beauty, her loving kindness eyes that could behold the truth essence of any being in her sight and with you there, she knows you instantly, has seen all the universe as you have seen it, your creations and what you have done and you are great-full at her knowing, as you have only ever known yourself and your loneliness before now.  In this knowing of her great power, you bow before her, as you arise, you realize she has bowed with you and you are now face to face knelt and smiling at each-others mirrored time-like knowing. You are both now in the centre of the crown and all the branches flow though the points to the centre of the jasmine flower below.

Ever so slowly, she raises her right hand, thumb and fore finger curled and her forehead shines a white sun, flashes of great empty throne rooms come intermitted with the light so powerful and penetrating, golds and reds, blues and greens whites and silver, each one you then see yourself enter, the first as king, the second as a monk, the third as a criminal in chains and you suddenly know that each time vision is important, for each are connected.   For what you do as king equals how you advise as the monk and how you advise equals how you experience the pain of judgment as the criminal and how you receive judgment as the criminal, wrongly accused and trialed, determines how the kingdom is judged by the worlds fate, that power in your deathly cry felt as pain.  As the image fades and the white light becomes blinding pain, you desperately hold onto the visions of these throne rooms to determine what is being said what is being done, but you cannot, the only thing that pervades is the symbol above each throne, one a set of scales, the other an eagle, the last a dragons skull.  As the white engulfs you, you are then made of white light and you are both slowly lowering into the jasmine and although in massive head explosive pain, as you get closer to the jasmine flower you begin to feel like you can move, left or right spin, to the right causes you almost to black out, but spinning back to the left, the pain almost stops completely and a calm returns as the third eye light dims a little and you begin to see again.  What you see surprises you a golden bar or what seems like a rung of a ladder appears underneath you and between you both and slowly passes through the middles of you both. 

When the rung reaches your third eye, you see a vision of you as a man in robes in your kitchen, your family at dinner in a Sheppard’s hut in Afghanistan, and what strikes you in the scene though is your white beaming eyes, and what you recognize as the same lady as sitting opposite, has smiling white eyes too their eating with your family in golden sunset light through the window, the vision fades and another golden ethereal bar passes, feeling warm and tingly as it passes, this time you are in the massive front line of a Scottish army wearing chain mail with a giant sword at your side, again with light beaming out your eyes, and she is there red hair flaming and quilted, then a Lama in a Tibetan monastery in deep meditation, opening your beaming eyes suddenly, with her striking a bell above your head, it happens again, you are a Lords lady, and your daughter runs by chasing a butterfly with white eyes, a Greek philosopher, your young student white eyes, an Irish King and your English enemy, white eyes at the table of truce, a begger in Japan, white eyes in a rich geisha girl making offerings, a child pick pocket in America, a business man white eyes, notices and doesn’t say a thing, an African tribesman, you spear a Gazelle with white eyes fading, an Italian chef, dancing with your white eyed love and making food, a mechanic in Australia, wide white eyes beaming into you as you make love to each other after a day so hot in the shed, at last you do the hucka on an island beach facing the ocean and you see white eyes shine next to you your brother then an Indian poet, speaking over a gathering, a young lady looks up at you and the eyes change to white.  These scenes continue with many combinations of life all through a history you have never seen in the billions upon billions of years of these creations these stars and galaxies, the last being you two holding hands on a snowy mountain outside a cave, while you watch hand in hand, giant discs of light launch into the sky, yet two are suddenly smashed by a giant meteor the size of several cities and only one gets away.

After these scenes come and go, you watch the woman sitting opposite you with a powerful awe of knowing and longing and there is a final sinking clicking jolt as you land on the flowers south petal, her on the north. The pain gone and in its place a joy unexplainable, something impossible perfected, the largest number known to any mathematics miniscule in the understandings of these calculations right, here perhaps yet to be placed in its reality, yet made between you and this woman. As the golden ladder rises above, you both rise and know the moment intimate down to each heartbeat. 

You approach arms in downward triangle hands spread prepared, hers are embracing the sky, prepared and you both move fore-ward onto the golden disc of this planet pollen, you both know the approaching power and move both your arms to horizontal while staring straight into each-others eyes, now swirling arms of galaxies round their iris’s, and you are both breathing a indivisible line of energy connecting you both, even in breath out breath, you feel her pulsing heart in complete harmonic equal beating energy and the breathing, beating gets stronger, longer, widening eyes, aorta, cerebral spirit, a swirling purple in the third eye begins and then it happens, the center opens, you both step forward into the energy body of the other and as your meridians align and click magnetic into their equal, it strikes, the power comes down, a deluge of lightning sparks falls and there is nothing but white and a sense of accelerating downward. Downward and downward you both pass underground and the cool expanse is massive and for a moment you feel as if you could just keep going down with the massive speed of it all, but your lover is throwing sparks upward that take hold onto black lines there, you take the hint and start doing the same, and the curve takes hold as you start turning this strike of god-ship around towards the surface… 

Six Dreams to Stop the Machine

"dusk and dawn are the cracks between worlds" -Don Juan


I

darkness
comfortable,
shadow gravity black holes,
family homes, tradition,
all this remembrance is all,
fit as spirits, brothers and sisters yawn,
fall back into the deep lonely mind past
the white stem of the eye balls,
into the axiom-egg-yolk, still-lidded-shell sigh,
knowing the light above the city looks the same,
I press the snooze button...

II

I fall again, I am always falling, this time into
full of blankets and pillows off of cupboard rooves,
light itself the womb joy warm agency crossroads,
my brother and I are laughing,
we lead from this moment
where we can be anything,
yet we are
warriors, hippies,
mothers Quan Yin smile as we go,
said "this is all a remembrance",
I know what she means,
there where the quest
same Buddha destinations are already curled
in fractals apex shoe like eaglets,
growing up and flying away from the soles
where in golden lettering
Apollos inscription remains
“I love you anyway”
I fear that I'll never see mum again,
I hunger
for assurance manifest in her eyes
it doesn't come, she is ash,
I put my soles on
and fall out into the dark street,
I am fear chased,
I climb a tree away from
the dinner suit wolves,
I am barking, they are barking,
fire against fire,
with my paw
I am reaching for the horizon light,
it is so fucking dark,
I fear it will never come,
I thought
“I must have destroyed the sun with my haste!”
I
fall,
yet I don't stop,
I keep falling, still dreaming.


III

how can one close
ones eyes in a dream?
do we die?

IV

now is the peace free flying
over the moon lit coast,
I have lost everything and it feels free,
because I have lost and am lost,
zions stretched out beaches,
oblivion foam lines lips chanting,
“aum mani padmi hum” smashes
against cliff faces staring in beautiful sorrow,
inky black still time trough
in the spaces between each,
where I find you, we swoop,
up we parallel limestone maps,
up from the car cracking rocks,
somewhere real alarms a frantic pace like mercury,
and yet our pace is still a rushing pre-birth everything,
fleeting up into the stars,
climbing to deep still echo in the sinew,
in the apex,
where thought nothing mirror,
our altar heart is freedom fire,
we can calm all the screams
in our angel eyes,
where this is all remembrance,
holding the world and yet it stops,
god dam time is never long enough,
we suddenly lose our wings,
our feathers,
we are naked and falling frantic,
before the surface hits,
now,
all is awake blue and outside my window.


V

a whirl wind of my house,
I STOP!
I remember that it is my day off,
I am remembering, craving those dreams,
there is nothing else for me to do but
free this moment, a sunrise yet to be,
free the coming day yet to be,
free the language
between everything,
my daily place under the tree,
feeling the dewy grass and cross leg,
the meditative jazz bird song
where it all magnet,
I see faces in everything,
bark wise faces,
silly leaf faces,
curious grass faces,
nonchalant, just-being-cloud faces,
exxxxact-izzzat co-existence...
but not quite...


VI

I watch a jogger,
she turns and faces the day with
abstract determinism,
this is all there is
in the unchanged concrete
where Charlie loves Mel
with an arrow,
the city that never sleeps,
the mugger always
behind the ally shadows,
in the headphones between songs,
the monster at
the bottom of the war bin
sneers at the grey blue neon light,
she caught my eye like moth,
blank and black holes like some place
where we can see by all
the billion faces of history,
the same where I once
knew that blank,
and it meant something
human,
one love,
I turn and blink in the void,
she turns and smiles at someone she knows,
the day has managed to completely snare
its alien fly victim in the golden orb web,
I stop the machine where three butterflies
are making a temple
three foot off the ground.

Book Review: The Subterraneans -Jack Kerouac

 

In a few words, The Subterraneans; not what I was expecting.  Perhaps the title inherits an expectation of a more group involved focus, more of that party, smoke rooms and jazz meta-sex in spoken word, music and explosive ranting that he is so famous for.  Sure these moments ARE there, yet it just doesn’t register that the relationship he falls into is going to practically take up the entire 111 words.  Still, this ‘not expectedness’ was not exactly disheartening, it never is with the vibrant jammed packed Kerouac stream of conscious prose, even with such ‘downer’ subjects as paranoia, alcoholism and relationship jealousy that tears love limb from limb, it’s the way he writes that just brings the passion for life and dream philosophy alive. 

 

For it is a book about the heart. The most subterranean subject there is I suppose.  Some of it will grate on the nerves, the way that 15 pages will be expressing paranoia of his girlfriend supernova love flame, Madou Fox, just innocently playing around with other poets and then two or three about his depression on about how he fell into the paranoia in the first place.  Yet in the end between these Kerouac consciousness tedium’s, tedium’s that are very real to many men and women in the relationship sex-drug paranoia-underground wild-games anyway, there’s something so raw spirited and wild, a vein to the ocean that is the American-Indian/African aboriginality of this woman character in his life, a balance that supersedes his ego and comes at the feminine aspect of his prose life of love above the fields of prostitutes and groupies not present in any of his previous books.

 

For it is with moments such as explaining Madou fox’s ‘flip out’ running naked into the street and sitting on a fence “She was in the alley, wondering who she was, night, a thin drizzle of mist, … one slip in the wrong direction, endless space reaching out…cities in one wash of sad poetry, with honey lines of high shelved angels trumpet-blowing up above the orient-shroud Pacific huge songs of paradise” indeed, the traditional rant Kerouac fan will not be disappointed with this focus in this book, and the new fan might see his Zen-Buddhist metaphysical poetry closer to the theories of ‘the other’ so objectified previously.

 

For a deep romantic he really is behind all the wild superficial madness chauvinisms and alcoholism that sure, eventually brings him down, but damn, what I’m saying is that if you can read the flame of what he is saying behind it all, the sub texts of karma, life directions, dream life and fate life, then you can appreciate this immensity that he has put into words, the immensity that is ‘the ragamuffin dusts in the little kid’s corner and he’s asleep in his crib now and I love you, rain’ll fall on our eaves someday sweet heart” and the tragic… 

POST BEAT POETRY: The present, The Future...

 

Beat poetry. What is it? Who are its generation? Is there a renaissance? Kerouac, Corso, Ginsberg, 1960’s, shhh… These are just words man. 2012, WE ARE IT.   True, we still need them in this age, in the now vast unfortunate distance between meaningful silence and poetry and fellow human beings. Yet what if I told you the beat generations work could still lead the world back to a larger poetry life, even back to inner peace, even now?

Don’t use the telephone, people are never ready to answer it, use poetry –Jack Kerouac, Scattered Poems

Crazy huh? We must act as a team of course. To do this, soul listen, soul act, gather in groups, bring their peace back past the wall, reach back to the communities dreamed of in the sixties. Allen Ginsberg, (Verbatim, Ginsberg, Ball, 74) talks of Kerouac, of his free writing that could define the simple contents of a car for almost 60 pages and make it interesting. You just don’t get that kind of madness these days, I ask, could this alliterative attitude to musical language thus likewise define and modernise important teachings, from Homer, engineering, tautology, religion, to protest work, science-renewability and collective-mind-philosophy for today’s generation?

Poetry, always the future of other poems –Jason Maxwell, For the future of other poems 

Isn’t this strangely similar to advertising for Steiner school? Is this bite-sized enlightenment for the digital generation hopelessly lost in games? No, this is what’s natural. Would you listen to a creative rap about William Blakes work in class? I know I would, for a translated divine ‘now vision-clarity’ with a capable confident abstraction, capable of grabbing language by its fast beat balls, past its structuralist curriculum barriers, to a slow down human connection that borders madness, refocusses beat as living, organic musical poetry and moment.

Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul! –Allen Ginsberg, footnote to Howl

Of course that’s the challenge, why you’re here listening to my undisciplined key board tap-flowing-electron-to-electron isn’t it?  Yet to find this space, whenever I write, I get a feeling I cannot describe and you know it too I imagine, call it a well-spring, care for your page time, call it what you like, it is best born of the idea that work becomes alliteratively cohesive naturally, a kind of leap for consciousness energy. Like the beginning of the dream that is always forgotten, it is the work that remains that is important, as it becomes life, life beat for the next generation’s words…

In this blog I would implore you to bring back beat poetry, activate this well spring of life and beat for our generation and our children, yet most of all I would like you to simply share it, share your beat-heart-life amongst us so that we can hear your moments through the syllables, be it your opinions upon my post, your reviews, your poetry, your prose, it is a space for writers and for the future of writing to meet, and so may it be…

w a African drum

-Jas :D

P.S Below are links to groups and readings, my personal inspirations and my work, please share and enjoy as freely as your heart desires rhythm…

 

On Muse… Writer of Eat, Pray, Love

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html

My work on Allpoetry.com, a free poetry sharing community

http://allpoetry.com/Climbing2nothing

My spoken/performed work on soundcloud

http://soundcloud.com/jasonmaxwell

Me on Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/#!/jason.maxwell.372

an Exquisite post beat poet and my recent modern sensei

 http://allpoetry.com/marc_creamore

his performed work

http://www.reverbnation.com/marccreamore#!/artist/artist_songs/1707074

Local poetry gigs in and around Melbourne

http://pamspoetrypitchblog.blogspot.com.au/

A great local hills poet

http://thehealingprojectwebcast.blogspot.com.au/

A great lesson/belief youtube from Kerouac himself

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7IeCEvT_CM

some inspiring science magic: “what the bleep do we know?”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioONhpIJ-NY

An excellent blog with many inspiring videos to watch

http://poetrymattersnow.org/