Category Archives: poetry

🔥🦂🔥:::WordsJustCameOutWrong:::🔥🦂🔥
(AfterFace of volume 6)

I like to say Words are Worlds......Words are also Wounds and Wounds are Worlds....and if we are perfectly honest, All Worlds are Wounds. And I am unraveling my World as I unravel my Wounds. I have been Wound so tightly around a core of Intensity, and overwhelming personal psychic interrogation for my entire life, that I have produced a ridiculous amount of Words in various forms, either to Cover over the Wounds or to Unwind the Covers. I am unsure which. A bit of both. But In diving back into the World Contained in this Tome of descent…..I have been reliving the emotions and confusions and I am emerging from this ritual as if from a Tomb. Yes, Words are Also Wombs.

My Words are often the result of entering the Portal of Some Other, either in the waking world or in the vast internal realms I inhabited. I have always lived mostly inwardly, with a rich and sometimes disastrous inner life. Some of these poems are written from the perspective of the many battling inner realities within me, with no mirror in the physical world. I have always been submerged in what I call 'Bleedthru-s of Other Lives'……Psychic fragments and scars and
emotions from Characters I have played before in other timelines, seeping right through my seams. My inner realities have always been more solid and real than my outer reality. Some of the poems are written from my own witnessing of friends dramas etc, and writing from the perspective of the players in those games. Some are archetypal expulsions of raw material suffocating me endlessly. But most are mirrors of some outer reality. My protean obsessions and compulsions always dragging me one way or another. The repetition of the theme of Love and Pain and Misery and Darkness and bitterness. The depth of my own emotional life was never expressed to any person in those years, in fact, that theme has held for my whole life. I have always turned my psychic and emotional disintegration into Art. Not because I don't trust people. But, I believe, I learned way back then…and find it still true today…that most people do not feel as deeply. Are not so completely consumed by passing moods or inner landscapes and are not so tangibly sculpted like putty by their inner reality. Those who are, have left behind all the great Art and Writing and Inventions of our Collective World Stage. Or they have drowned themselves in addictions because there was no way to silence the Demon, and there was no leap from the abyss to follow the Daimon into Alchemy, instead of suffering the excesses that Demons love so much. Or they have been given any number of psychiatric labels and then pharmaceutically numbed out of life or locked away instead of facing the abyss head-on. Or they have simply, chosen Death head first.

"Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness / transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death-and I refuse suicide."   (Albert Camus)

Mostly, people try to commiserate, if I actually let out some of the depth of what I am perceiving or feeling or living, or what I am making flesh. I have often responded, that if they felt and saw and bore what I bear, relentlessly, they would be, like me, forced to alchemize it in some way or to destroy themselves. The kind of charge, the voltage of energy I am talking about, constantly pressing in upon me, is not the kind of fire or electricity that can be safely tucked away behind a netflix series, or a bottle of wine, or endless shopping, or endless socializing, or even hobbies.
It cannot be stored in a back room and allowed out when appropriate. It cannot just 'wait til a better time' to make itself known. If someone is able to
'basically get on with their life' by drowning out the voices in any number of ways, they are not in the heat of the kind of flames I am talking about here. One may say that it is the human condition. Yes, in many ways it is. But it is a particular condition that only some people choose to incarnate into here in the Playground. It is a particular wiring, a certain blueprint. And they either learn to dance with it, and create great beauty or alchemize it in some way, or they destroy themselves and others completely. I do not believe there is any middle ground. Not for this initiation. Nothing about this kind of intensity allows for a 'normal life'. 

We don't know that when we are young, however. We think if we just condemn ourselves enough for our Inner Fire, we will eventually settle into some typical way of relating to Self, in a controllable world of other people doing people-y things. We think if we just stop doing A, B, or C, or if we just Try Harder to be setted and content within our skin, we will alter the program. If we just make up a bunch of rules for ourSelf and stick within them, or follow someone else's rules of virtue, we will be free. But I have learned over and over, that there is something innate to certain people that will never allow for that. There is an inner prod that has no care for our human proclivities or our body's limits. It will not let us rest. Every moment is lived in absolute Intensity, whether that be the heights of the Manias we find ourselves in, when the blood is quickened within and we are a tornado of exuberance and god-like arrogance behind a bright and radiant smile of possibility. Filled with endless ideas that stream out like a broken water pipe and saturating everything and everyone in the vicinity. Or when Icarus' waxen wings melt and he falls from the sky in a dramatic display of descent back to Saturn's humus, humbled by the tumble from the lofty perch of our own ideals and effulgence.

What else but absolute obsession can make a person spend hours upon hours upon hours of days upon days upon days upon weeks and months and years focused on bringing to life some particular little nuance of their perception and participation in AllOfit. The Daimon drives us. And not All of our Daimons are playing the same game. And I have, after 44 years in the Playground, found a way to dance with that realization. It no longer destroys me and everyone in its path. I know a great many people afraid of being hurt, in Love. I am bass ackwards. I am not afraid of being hurt. I am incredibly reluctant at this point, to allow another to be hurt by me. I saw these patterns even back to this earliest poetry and was aware of the various warring selves within me. The Fire warms but also burns. It lights up a room but also sucks all the oxygen out of the air. Not all things and beings can handle the heat and intensity of a Being who is able to exist only at full throttle. At least not in close proximity for any length of time. 

I have learned to create vast amounts of Space for myself, and vast amounts of Time for myself, to make of my life a sanctuary where I am fully aware of my strengths and weaknesses, and thus able to now use my gifts in Service, and minimize any fallout from my own perpetual emotional instability....(which all things considering, is very mild compared to the bulk of the prior 30 years).

A testament, these 600+ poems are, to the desperate restlessness of an unfolding psyche, that could only vaguely intuit, at the time, what lay right around the corner. It was only one full year later that the major confrontation with Self and the dissolution of everything I had begun to believe was me, was to take place. (See Volume 5)

I see in these poems all the foreshadowings that came to delineate the myths of my life, in germinal form. I have simply unfolded the tapestry through time. And now, as a ritual release, and as a precursor to Drawing My Stories on the Skin of this World, these Words Made Flesh are the final recapitulation of a long Poetic journey that has led me to this point in time. And I am casting off the garments of the old life, again, this time to be born anew without carrying the weight of these juicy nuggets of my Living Experience screaming into my psyche constantly, to be birthed into Flesh. Word Made Flesh. So Blessed. This Journey.

"Every time I tried to tell you, the words just came out wrong, so I'll have to say I love you in a song" 

I'll have to Spell it out in Rouge, the Red from the blood thatl bled as birthed myself anew

"There's something that I just gotta say, I knew you'd understand…...”

Charleen Johnston 3-6-2025

"Words are like pillows: if put correctly they ease pain."        

(James Hillman, Inter Views)🫀🙌🫀