1999-2000

THE INVITATION

Egypt takes her place beside the reeds,

gathers her skirts, dips toe in Nile,

then turns to watch the sky and sand.

She sees the Trojan sphinx

(which harbors God Knows What),

sees pillars in place of trees,

sees the dunes advance

in a classic symphony of movement,

follows the punctuation lines

up the pure clean edges of the pyramids.

On the floodplain, in season,

she washes herself slowly, dreamily,

then turns inland and cleans her teeth

with the radical floss of the sandstorm.

At last, spellbound by the invitation,

she crosses to the oasis and kneels by the spring,

murmurs something no-one understands,

writes it in a language no-one reads.

There's some exclamatory principle behind it all:

She's so extreme! Her magic is a kind of arid voodoo,

paralyzing those who seek her out,

bending them to some will not their own.

Her mummies are all long in the tooth -

even after death they've had their day;

could they have anything left to say?

They're bereft of what narrative force they had,

yet their curatorial impact seems intact.

In a hot dry space, year by year,

the archaeologists are scraping flesh from bone.

One moves across the crawfish sands,

and raising the tent flap

takes his pen and fills his paper

with the acronyms of the academic desert,

employing the stepped up ideology of the transformer

which takes knowledge and changes it to dogma.

Yet Egypt herself operates in a field of endeavor

of which we are entirely ignorant,

exercising always the options of the Oracle:

it is only we who trip over the roots of the decision tree.

So this is how she is. It's as though

the aridity of her surroundings

is significant in the context of her mystery,

and yet why should this be so?

Egypt lies in the desert on her back,

palms up, her throat is dry as dust;

all her knowledge is drifting down to the delta

year by year, endlessly

fertilizing the subsoil of our curiosity.

I AM

I am the Movement and the Mover

I apply the force of my will to the material universe

and on the fulcrum of my own existence

shift the world on its axis

those who walk the earth are made by me

but even more than that, they are made FROM me

from the same substance that I am they are

I send them up the shadow-wall until their birth

when bursting forth they open up their eyes to see my light

I perpetuate all things: I steady my attention

on each atom of the cosmos, focusing my All on its affairs;

if I should slip, each atom each bird each human

would slide back into Me the endless ocean of Me

I sit at the feet of my own creatures

I love to see their faces, pulse their hearts,

dream their dreams and live with them their lives.

I love to see their eyes and hear their ears

I set myself a space wherein my plan can unfold

in all its glory and steadfastness

in all its tenderness and love. They know not

wherein the plan they live

they gaze steadfastly at themselves

they call on me in my various manifestations

they pray to the light, or to the dark,

to Horus or to Set, to Isis or Hathor

to my sun-self Ra

they pray for themselves (little-knowing

that those are the only prayers I will not hear)

I am the stone in the pyramid

the bead on the necklace

the still pool of the oasis

I am floodtide and famine

light and dark

life, death and the afterlife

the temple and the idol and the screen

I am the goddess

who is nurturing the god

who nurtures all.

INITIATION

This is the day of my initiation

I am spiced like cinnamon

I smell the sweet tree of the life-line

I ride the currents of the sugared wind

I see the smoky spell before the lines are drawn

I am commanded to see

with the eye which looks within

I gaze at larger worlds

at greener greens

I see the way I know

that colour smells

Spun around me from the ether is my robe

and threaded with the lines of force I weave;

for my sisters I bear the weight of this gown

my surrogate for skin

I feel upon my skin the coming change

there are no words

I open from within

I feel the flame that has no heat,

burning in the chandelier of time

I see without my eyes,

blinking my way past the image on the retina

my tongue is still

I have been taken into the heart of matter

and left upon the altar of the soul. I move

I flow like quicksilver down my own channels

into the rapture of the Matrix.

WE ARE THE PHARAOH

We are the Pharaoh. Through countless years

all of My successive bodies took their part,

inhabiting the throne as was their right,

looking alike yet not-alike, Our similarity

inherent in Our connection to the gods

of whom We were many.

Our one-pointed disparity was hardly understood,

We spent so many years inhabiting the spiral

that drew Us up and down.

Before We came

this land was bare: while beautiful,

there were no works at all that spoke of man

or his own connection to the gods.

Summoning the architect, We made Our wishes known,

and now you see Our works standing in the desert,

commemorating Our absence.

I cannot say that each of Our incarnations succeeded.

Like you, We had our vampires, our ouija boards,

Our voodoo dolls and visits from the shaman:

one of Me slipped sideways now and then.

It's true We were not scribes,

and failed sometimes to write Ourself truly on the page,

and sometimes We paid a toll in the service of beauty,

forfeiting Our mission to a smile.

But after We finished starbinding the priests

We were able to achieve the meditative progression of alchemy

We required in order to convert their strangely leaden thoughts

into the spun gold of the true ideals.

We were no flash in the pan:

between My many incarnations

We achieved a steady state for this land;

We made up for the failures of technology with molecular genetics,

set up a system of internal justice (adjudication delights),

tried to convey what We knew of Our own fortitude,

and morphed Our way on and off the earth

in a blizzard of golden light.

So bright is the past behind Us

that We cast long shadows into your time.

And yet your adulation palls; We tire

of your earthly applause for Our failures,

of your artificial homage to the past.

Who among you will judge Our successes,

when you lack all understanding

and all judgment.

We are the Son of Horus:

never think that you understand Us

from a casual trip to the waxworks.

SKIING THE PYRAMIDS

Moving backward to the pyramids

I wonder about the nature of their genesis -

was it construction? or creation? or birth?

Humans build and spirit creates,

but only life gives birth:

incarnation reels at the thought!

Yet the pyramids have certain organic traits:

we do not know they did not grow from sand

which grew to stones and then to slabs;

we do not know in fact the pyramids weren't born

from some enormous granite womb;

we do not know they have not watched

and listened all these years;

we do not know they are not breathing now.

But enough of this freeform reverie:

my palette is impractical,

I ask for colours that do not yet exist.

I keep trying to retroplay the forensics,

picking at the bones of the evidence

disaggregating the stones

and throwing off questions like spray from a fountain.

Then I try to tackle my ignorance mathematically

(while superimposing some geometric grid)

but the algebraic mystery

just keeps dividing itself by pi

and multiplying its possibilities by infinity.

I walk around the problem

like the circumambulation of the priesthood

struggling against the counter-rotation of our cultures

and coming to a complete halt

up against the third-party intersection of the gods.

I examine the monuments to our own time

and deduce from them what must be our philosophy:

Get by, get ahead, get stuff, get more.

I examine the monuments to that ancient race

and deduce from them what must be their philosophy:

Live in such a way that after you die

you will reunite with the divine.

Enabled by the past and ennobled by history

the pyramids are a pedagogical tool for humankind,

a sort of distance education for the earth

employing their interdisciplinary curriculum

for the critical masses.

Through some miracle of tardiness

we are only beginning to mine the message now,

and in a marvellous juxtaposition of timeframes

the centuries have curved around like space

to meet before our startled eyes, right here and now.

Still, it's an axiom in the marketplace

that someone will always undertake

the wholesale exploitation of every mystery.

If there were snow, there would be a chairlift

up the north side, and people renting skis

in a quaint little pyramid-shaped chalet;

others would be kayaking out across the delta

to climb the iceberg. However long the ice age,

and however hard I try,

I can't quite scrape enough frost off the glass

to make out the mystery beneath.

However many metaphors I come up with

the pyramids are always one allegory further down the line,

spilling their sweet secrets into someone else's ears.

Who that someone is we cannot know,

yet I have long desired to follow the builders

into whatever heaven they escaped to,

to ask them why they built, and who they are.

I feel, I know not how, that the pyramids'

asynchronous communication with our century

has something to do with explaining

the demographics of paradise.

NO BALM

There is a dry wind blowing through my soul

a gusty wind, from the south of my heart,

with sand and grit that brings tears to my eyes.

It is this same wind that carried you away,

My Lord, tumbling over your own death

in your eagerness to be free.

The priests have made a ceremony of my heartbreak;

with holy gestures they have wrapped you up

in linen, with oils and spices and perfumes

they have placed the organs of my own reflection

into your canopic jars, and sealed me in.

I will no longer eat, because you cannot eat.

I will not rest because you sleep too long.

In my sleepless hours I contemplate marking the astrolabe

as though your new location could be fixed:

somewhere in those stars there is the star you have become,

but which it is, my burning will not tell.

In place of mummification I would have wished for

some more appropriate pyrotechnology

some blast furnace opportunity which would cremate

the pieces of your soul right here on earth

where I could catch the cinders, flying, in my net of grief

like the thousand birds that flutter in my mind.

Or else I wish they had embalmed me too.

My imagination takes me on your journey:

you will encounter Fear, My Lord, waiting

there by the roadside with his flail

just where the canyon narrows;

you may sing him your carnation melody

so that he may stand aside, and so

your heart remain as light as air.

Do not let your heart grow heavy with remembrance

lest the feather win the scales; I would

that you lose even your remembrance of me

so your heart remain as light as air.

In the spaces between my grief I indulge myself

in an observation of its aftereffects

and have come to wonder if perhaps

our souls are the wrong shape for this life;

perhaps we are not round enough, or

we have too many edges, or too few;

perhaps the enneagram, the template,

is in perpetual motion around some other planet.

Perhaps, My Lord, some cosmic mistake

cast us up together on this shore,

and tears us now apart. I cannot tell.

They are blowing the horns now, the priests,

incanting the magical rendition of your future life.

I have behaved badly;

they will no longer let me see your face

before they mask the marble of your brow

with the representation of your godhood,

all in gold.

I sit trembling in the anteroom.

I'm very cold, frozen by my spartan

dereliction of duty: I cannot carry your death

in your jar down the long steps to your tomb.

I know, I know not how,

they will not let you rest in peace

for men will come in times to come

and tumble down your grave

however grave we are the day it's sealed.

I was your mathematical plaything, My Lord,

counting on you for everything

but now my griefs, my tears, are numberless;

day by day I am counting backwards down to nothing

where I shall remain. I cannot calculate your loss.

This morning I looked into my polished mirror

and was astonished to find no blood on myself;

my face and hands were clean, and yet

so freely have I bled I looked behind me

for the pool of red.

I fell at last through some reluctant sleep

into a dream where I saw you standing, alone,

sowing the seed of the sphinx into a fertile field.

You turned to look at me, your fingers

scattering the last of it. Then suddenly,

you sank into the earth,

as I screamed,

as tiny heads were breaking through the dirt.

I have behaved badly, like some classless freedomite,

making wild accusations and tearing at your breast

looking for your pulse, frantic, graceless.

I have disgraced my station, and for this excuse

I can only say

they have drawn from your body everything

that made it dear to me - your self, your brain, your life.

If I were worthy I could see your ba ascending

purified and free, but instead I tremble

for the journey that you take.

I will not follow you, My Lord, for when I die

my heavy heart will tell against me on the scales.

I shall be found wanting, and sink to I know not where

from which low place I may look up

through all my endless nights and see you shining in the sky.

And I may feel, like your fingers on my skin,

the firefly touch of the distant star.

I will rise up now

and carry my heart in your jar

down the long steps to our tomb.

---

Fifty years we wasted on the desert floor,

lives spent on knees in supplicating haste,

used tools (caked with dust) that picked and dug.

We worked with hope, while boredom

made us rich with disappointment.

The mind wanders as it gouges in the dirt.

The drawings of the site are hardly worth

the rough papyrus that they're sketched upon,

and in a trance the mind holds visions up

like golden masks.

The shadow of the pyramid draws lines,

takes sun from sky and glare from tired eyes.

The way we hunt for truth we'll only find,

silent under sculpted stone,

the artefactual shards of the broken heart.

THE FOUNTAINHEAD

They pick up the wooden crate full of numbers

and carry it down to the mathematician

who sits in the cellar

rearranging his own brain into pleasing patterns.

He's always ordering new numbers

whenever his supply runs out,

although they cost him dear.

He wears an old coat that's patched together

from the pieces of his theorems,

and he wears the proof around him like a scarf.

He's cranky, being always up against infinity -

it seems to him unfair that God

should always have access to more numbers than he,

and he's divided himself so many ways

he's had to invent a whole new system of enumeration

just to keep track of his own fragments;

he writes them with a stick on clay,

and bakes himself in the sun.

A pile of unused vectors slides off the edge

of his clay tablet, and falls on the floor,

coincidentally forming a pyramid

travelling at the speed of light.

He contemplates this,

and falls into a state of rapture.

At times he's called to work.

Measuring his forearm with a string

he walks himself around the site

mumbling to himself in fractions.

He peers nearsightedly at the huge blocks they sent

in their own determination to outdo God.

He opens his mind to a state of calculus,

using integrals to calculate the area under the sky,

subtracting the space occupied by all the air

and remembering to allow for the angle of the shadow

cast by the evergrowing temple.

He returns to his cool room

hot on the heels of a new obsession.

There are so many numbers in the background -

thousands, millions, trillions,

positive, negative, real and unreal!

And then there is the additive nature of numbers,

the way they seem to keep relentlessly accumulating,

piling up in corners, and then there are the sly imaginative numbers

that creep into his equations, wreaking havoc with reality.

He develops a theory that all these numbers may not be necessary,

that there are some which could be eliminated;

in this mad quest he begins to examine each one

looking for its qualities, examining its worth,

testing it between his teeth

dividing the numbers into piles - yes, no -

reinventing the binary system unawares.

He finds that his predisposition for threes

is skewing the purity of his project;

he cannot trust his own data.

Numbers swirl around his dreams like kites,

swaying the high currents of his mind.

---

So, the camel.

When you're on the camel for very long

you taste the online realtime experiential flavor of reality;

the camel demands a high tolerance for feedback,

usually in the form of waves of pain.

Your pain, of course, has no effect on him.

Nor do you affect the anarchy of his aspirations.

Suppose that Egypt had been overtaken

by a greening of the energy field

which flowed across the sands;

through some kind of quick time application

all the land turns emerald.

The camel pauses to eat flowers and grass.

Nobody can get him moving.

His hump grows enormously.

He lays down in a field of poppies and burps.

His riders feel no urgency to reach the next oasis,

because it's all oasis.

The camel has a sleep,

flowers bubbling from his gently snoring lips.

The rider unpacks the camel;

he needs a new form of transportation;

he starts to imagine the horse.

The camel awakes with a start

from a dream where he was being replaced

by a camel with no hump, where he was

being made redundant by the greening of the fields.

What would he do without the hot and freezing

blasting sculpted sands

that nothing else could cross?

He is a creature perfectly engineered

(implying what?) for his environment,

like the fish. He swims through the sands

like the shark.

And what of his rider? Since he cannot morph

(through some engineering oversight)

the rider is dependent upon the engineering

that created creatures well-designed

for the needs of man in a dry deserted land.

Why not just design the human

with the ability to morph, to create his own hump

and trudge across the desert by himself?

The camel makes a loud sound of disgust.

The desert flows back over the green fields.

I MARK FOR YOU

I mark for you the benefits of death

for you who fear your timely end

I mark your meaning in this place

your place apparent as you deem it to be life.

You mark the benefits of life

the place you know

defaulting the thrust of the question

that follows you, intent, into the afterlife.

Misled by some internal justice

you are sure that your desserts

are still more life

but your body teaches otherwise.

I draw from you with iron hook your soul

so magnetized to earth it resonates, your soul,

and settles on its path to its true home.

You swing to your polarity

finished with the sway of life on earth.

I weigh your heart, Anubis standing by

I count your lies, enumerate your deeds

I read the book you wrote, I scan your soul

I mark for you the benefits of death

I lift my hand and mark upon the wall

the thing you know the thing you know by now

you always knew, the symbol for the benefits of death.

Waiting here for the scales to settle

the gods are lining up to greet you home:

sundered from themselves

earth torn from sky

Osiris torn by Set, yet

They're whole here, in this waiting room

where Isis may assemble you, again.

I note for you your attachment to yourself:

But until your heart shall ache for others' pain

you shall not know, nor shall I mark for you,

the benefits of death.

THE INTERPLAY

The sun shines ferociously on the heads of those in the desert.

This rider pauses to take a long drink from his flask,

and trickles the water over his head. In the sky

the vultures wheel, and the horizon trembles in the heat.

The rider is in search of his own temple which has disappeared

into the modern world, but which may reappear mysteriously

in this ancient place. Through the shimmer he can dimly make out

pillars, walls, then carvings, a lintel, a fallen door. At least

he won't have to hack his way inside.

He dismounts, ties the reins to a huge stone fallen from the vault.

Some of the roof is still intact; as he moves inside his eyes adjust

to the dimmer light, and the blessed relief of the cooler air.

It has been centuries since he last entered this place,

the temple of his own soul, centuries

since he last encountered his muse by the wellhead.

When last he came there were no sands, no vultures,

no cellphones ringing under the vault. When last he came

he was not alone, but preceded by his priests, followed by his slaves,

and robed in the flesh of his own holiness.

He takes a few steps, and pauses, suddenly unsure

if the person he is now is not the temple he was then.

His modern mind keeps trying to rationalize the interplay

between his many lives.

THE SCRIBE

I have written myself plainly, without deceit.

I have written the words of others on the long smooth scrolls

and rolled them up, and placed them into jars

and sealed the jars. And I know things that I should not know.

What I know makes nonsense of the ouija board.

I wrote apocalyptic predictions in the sand

and erased them with a thought.

I wrote the thoughts of others

and erased them with prophecies of death.

I filled my slate with symbols

of the renaissance of the overlord

and hid it in the cupboard with the linens.

They trusted me to map the resting place;

They walked me back and forth

to see the carvings on the walls,

the funerary ornaments, the furnitures,

the silent statues attending upon their master.

I copied the instructions of the architect.

I wrote the thoughts of my own heart,

then ate the scraps they were written on

lest they be read.

The few of us who write are powerful men

having the secrets of the written word

underneath our tongues.

I open the door to my mouth.

I bend over my page,

breathing the symbols of Mystery,

and confounding the obelisk

with things I should not know.

SPHINX

Humming the low tones of the mantra of immortality

the Sphinx long years ago took up residence on the plateau of thought.

There is a risk in speechlessness,

but the Sphinx is literate only in the language of mystery,

and he avoids any pointless telecast of words.

Sanctified by silence, He takes his place

in the hagiography of another universe in another time.

In His mantra he has achieved optimal resonance,

but He's tuned to galaxies beyond our sight.

Simulating immortality,

He breasted the waves during the long flood,

then watched grains of sand drift by like centuries,

tapped the pacemaker technology that beat time with the years.

The answer that the Sphinx enfolds

is orders of magnitude larger than

the question it is needful now to ask.

And yet, anaesthetized by the indifference of the dead,

He may never tell. He's used to ignoring humankind

who pass away so soon. He has no world view:

what we cannot understand is the remoteness of the experiment.

Still, immobile as He seems,

the Sphinx plays many roles:

He is the mysterious physician,

doing surgery on our bloodiest beliefs;

He is the teacher of the mute,

giving us a higher education in the lessons of solitude.

His credentials are impeccable:

He is in Himself that spatial representation

derived from a dimensional overflow,

and bearing in its curves the meme for truth.

What does the Sphinx consume

apart from space and time?

He has no needs at all,

being empowered by the sandstorm,

and surviving solely through

His magnificent interchange with Himself.

Foretold by the drumroll of the desert sands,

He is most profoundly in Himself a community of one:

then where is the pride of lions from which he came?

Which worlds are graced by sphinxes like to ours?

Sustained by the eternal flame

that burns in the brazier of the sun,

He is the offspring of the molten technocrats,

confirming the autocracy of the dead -

and now He waits until their time returns.

Without the slightest movement

yet at the speed of light

He is lengthening the interphase;

time is captured close between His paws,

and with the hot wet sand beneath His weight,

He is incubating nothing less than the future itself.

THE PRIESTESS NOW, ... AND THEN

Is there nowhere I can go to shut myself off

from my all too present self? Under a pyramid perhaps,

buried the shell self until the sand silt sky and stars

opened the ancient Egyptian stone

to find inside the bride I was before

wed to a spirituality I can hardly glimpse

in this life so far from home from stone

walked through the courtyard

with my anklets tinkling anklet ankle ankh

oh Greatest One my robes are white to recall Thy light

I put my hands over my face to make a sacrament of Your place

I burn this stick before you

in the smoke You will see the most of what I can be

I count for you:

unity duality relationship matter and love

all on one hand and the same on the other five rings

five chimes of the bell the stone slides back

I slide freeform into Your Oneness with the dark

the smell of eternity all around me with my shroud.

I smile out loud

and in the morning I arise I greet Your new sunrise sonrise

Your rays my face Your warmth my eyes Your heat my sighs

oh Greatest One Your land is dark when You are gone

when the darkness has eaten You we are hungry

I would eat You with the dark

but all my masters say this cannot be.

I am not free: I hunger for Your light

and none who hunger ever can be free

oh Greatest One I would climb into Your chariot

and ride with Thee across the heavens I would be

Thy horse Thy whip the concubine of God

I would cool Thy thirst and my own with the dew on the stone

we are alone

the silence here leaves me alone with You

the stone makes tracks across the sand

the sand makes tracks across the earth

Your shout in the morning moves

along the tracks from east to west

my shadow is Your substance

oh Greatest One I cast my shadow back before You

do with it as You will

dissolve and disassemble me oh Greatest One

for I am meant for Thee

and to Thee will return when day is done

I kneel in the dust that You have made

from the stones of eternity,

and I am not free.

THE COVENANT

Unpacking the dream that swept its way down the Nile with the tide,

I decide all bets are off. What's learned upon this plane

leaves West behind and always offers East,

leaves now behind and always seeks the past.

We have lost the infallible ability to recognize truth and falsehood;

we are desperate to hide in our own shadows;

in our eagerness to pour out pain we spill the afterlife,

and down the drain goes all hope of understanding who we were.

I say We advisedly, wondering if the ancients,

those from Egypt, from Sumeria, from Atlantis,

were people like us at all? Were they the same species,

even? Somewhere on the borderline they crossed

their cross of matter, walked their lives,

inked their secrets onto flesh,

and dissolved into the past.

Is it necessary to be Egyptian, Sumerian, Atlantean

to understand at all?

Our affinity to their mystery is like

the firefly's partiality to the moon,

our likeness so faint and our goal so remote -

and yet the spark is there within us still.

We could experiment with a rewrite of the covenant

that once linked God to Man and gods to men,

make whole new deals with Set,

strike bargains with Osiris for our souls,

pledge ba and ka for our good behavior,

set the feather on the scale

and hope for the best.

Or do we already have a new deal with the gods?

On this night of the solstice, the full moon, the apogee

and a bright clear sky (all concurrent, strange as it may seem)

the new covenant is mapping its way along the grid of opportunity,

and each square holds a symbol of Their commitment to our cause.

So clear the moon, it's bright enough

to read the strange new words;

bending down (with some acquired grace)

I sign my name in full.

SPOTTING THE DOVETAIL

Egypt forgets herself when she lies under the body of the sky

under the body of the universe she lies

her head and feet and heart aligned

with her own temples, and with all the stars.

From this great height I look down her sloping breast

I see her arteries her heart her beautiful face

from this high place. Atop my own creation

I see the land for which we built this,

the greatest of our pyramids.

We are building from our own substance

we are the bricks, the building blocks:

you cannot lay a knife between us

for we were created as a perfect fit.

We are made for building:

this is our heavenly foreplay

wherein we hope to awaken

the ecstasy of the afterlife

by touching the soil here, and here,

with the delicacy of a lover

leaving monuments to creation on her skin.

Our temples are instilled with the lustre of love

and carry the full meaning of our devotion to the All.

Egypt is the land of twelve as we are twelve

as all the universe is twelve:

we see that there is meaning in everything

that our earthly life is mapped to greater things

that we arise out of the great Matrix

and to it shall return.

We are the flowering of the starseed.

I remember the long distant past

I recall the age of Leo in the sphinx.

In spite of speed's refraction in time

I count the centuries from the beginning

knowing while I count that there is no beginning

and that our practical magic arose with us

and harmonized its way into the stone with which we build.

The sound of magic is the magic itself;

in all the uni-verse, the one-word,

the harmonic interplay of voice

is all that is required to build a world.

With sound we cut, we shift, we place

in such a way that leaves the sound

resounding in the stone for just so long

as it shall stand. In times to come

men shall not understand their strange response,

their reverberation to our practical magic,

the top of which I stand upon this day.

I see from here the rush the river the silt the soil

the fusion of the body parts into this image of the Whole.

Far below by the sacred river

the men and women are fertilizing the navel of this land,

birthing once again the unity of perfection.

They fish they plant they sow;

they worship as they fish they plant they sow,

for all their actions are the mirror

of the actions in the sky performed by gods

perfected in the doing, and in the being they demand.

These babes and children, women and men I see

are the mass migration of soul essence

into the material, onto our sacred land.

They are animating the endzone, full of life,

looking through the marvellous apertures of themselves

back to where they came, the living Source.

There are many things I know that you do not

and many things you know that I do not;

let us fill in each other's gaps

let us not be strange and solitary and only half-informed

do not withhold your half of what we know

for Egypt needs the total of our sum.

This is no time for us to become individuals.

We are all the head, the heart and the hands

of Her body on the earth, of Her temple in the stars.

---

Yup, I'm going to Egypt

packed up all my ideas in a big zip bag

left my preconceptions by the door

booked passage with the ancients

and read a book that told me all I need to know.

Going to be mysterious, I am,

mystical in strangely inappropriate places,

like a Sphinx in the armory.

Going to open the latch-gate of experience,

wander in, stand amazed,

swing on the gate for a while.

Going to commune with the past

eat legends with my lunch

follow old all the way back to ancient

get lost somewhere in the time-scale

re-imagine how it used to be.

Going to take the old sarcophabus

down the Giza highway

smell the stink of cars

get irritated, wish I was home

and then fall into a hieroglyphic reverie

and wish I never had to leave.

Going to inhale the past

from the air by the side of the Nile,

and puff it out into the future.