“Magic really speaks
in the mountains. From every
bird and evergreen.”

_____

Daily Haiku by Marshall Deerfield

Have a personal haiku sent to you through my Dream Poet For Hire service!

(source: marshalldeerfield.tumblr.com)

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The Syzygy Journal issue no. 2

Today some of my traveling haikus were published among the literary stars of the Syzygy Poetry Journal issue no. 2. This special collection has a theme of the eclipsing blood moon we just witnessed only last week. Perfect for an Aries warrior poet… You’ll find me in the constellation Lampyridaen. Enjoy!

Check out the collection here: https://syzygypoetryjournal2.wordpress.com/

In The End, There Are New Beginnings

In the end, I think my funeral will resemble that Truffaut film
That one where the playboy dies
And all of his past loves appear to see him off
Then the film retraces his life through their stories

In the end, all the women of my life will be there
Some will be crying in misery
Others won’t be able to hold back the urge to spit on my grave
They will be unsure of exactly why they even came
But something pulled them all together in this precious ballet
My mother will be there too
And she’ll be proud of how many friends I made
While I lived
Sharing a handkerchief with the one’s who I loved the most
As far as friends, I guess she is right
We were all friends at some point before I died.

Iin the end, they will all be surprised to see me go
They will all be surprised about who else is there
Their stories will reflect upon both my positive and negative attributes
But mostly how I left them wanting
Some will have wished to marry me
While others will have wished to watch me die
A thousand times.
And in the end, I don’t think any of them will feel satisfied.

In the end, I don’t think I will have really died
Instead, I think this will have been just a new beginning
All ties freshly cut and new horizons possible
With everything I have learned up until this point
Stuffed into my pockets
I think, in the end, I will be able to finally rebuild my life
The way I should have lived it all along.

And now, a love poem

Long golden locks
Collecting the sunlight in their amber
Curls I could get lost in
With my fingertips
Interweaving my life force with yours
Soft relaxed breath
Salutations of my heart
Beating against your backside
We drift to sleep
Complimenting each other’s personalities
Being impressed by what the other has done with their life
I dream the compliments continue empathetically
And through our skin so close we vibrate fondness
From the way your body rests wrapped up in mine
You say,
Thank you for being the being that you want to be
Your freshness emanates hope for the rest of us
And I hold you tighter to me saying,
Thank you for being the being that you are
Without you and all that you do
Things would fall apart
There being no hope to muse upon
We drift further into REM
Our bodies final ode
A simple chorus
Thank you for being.

Point of Departure

“At first I thought I was traveling through space and time. Then I realized space and time were all cyclical and I was only a small point in this grand departure.”

Photo of Feeling the Fall, an art installation at Plato’s Porno Cave: The Trial designed by Marshall James Kavanaugh and Augustus Depenbrock. Taken by Willow Zef.

City Life in the Summer

Took the train to Center City. Then bought a new pair of shoes to replace an old pair full of holes and covered in paint. Walked to Callowhill. Walked to Fairmount. Walked back to Northern Liberties. Walked up to Kensington. Walked in the daylight. Walked in the sun. Drank tea and walked further.

Saw the tired. Saw the homeless. Saw the crazed. Saw the 9 to 5ers and the unemployed. Saw people up all night and people just starting their day. Saw the soup kitchens. Saw the cafes. Saw the backyard barbecues. Saw the empty park benches. Saw the morning air fade. Felt my slanted nose with sudden pain and walked on further into the day.

I dreamt I was a simple man, walking in the woods. I imagined the skyscrapers to be giant mountains and the roadways little streams. Trees everywhere. People’s voices distant bird calls. And so much greenery. I thought what it would be like if every day I started with a walk, and instead of a city I had an endless wilderness to call all my own. I thought this and I continued my walk home.

Muse Poetry

an excerpt from a forthcoming book of love poems devoted to the inner muse

The muse floats in on a breeze set from far south.
A springtime celebration of all that is.
Satiate the writer with your arid flow.
On the opposite end of the dream is a new reality.
Crossing oceans. Crossing continents.
Bliss is a fail safe for the undramatic.
A king’s ecstasy in love for the one who created him years ago.
Passion. Satisfaction. Exactly what was meant to unfold.

The Little Death

an excerpt from the Dream Dialectic, The Little Death, released in March 2014. You can grab a copy either in person or by sending me an email. More information about the book is available here.

Sitting on top of an RV on top of a mountain outside of Brattleboro in southern Vermont I stare up at the night sky and become completely unnerved as stars swirl like galaxies above my tiny insignificant head. The feeling drops like a brick to my gut and I shiver with new found consciousness shocking light down my spinal cord in quick painful succession. The old ego dies. Its back breaks in two. I feel it. A quick snap and I am thrown through a wandering black hole of infinite nothingness heavy with the weight of a thousand stars. My hands legs and feet all fall out from beneath me. I tirelessly grapple with the sleeping bag trying to block out this insane vision of vivid reality. Sweat runs down my brow. I am cold sober and yet I am having the first purely hallucinogenic experience of this lifetime.

I am nothing. And therefore I am everything.

The Little Death often creeps up on the spectator like a ghost under frozen water. His density is the same as the blackest sun in the galaxy. His potency is as soluble and possibly more explosive than McKenna’s fabled “hero dose”. To some the Little Death is an actual life ender. To everyone a response of absolute fear is most likely. There are very many who exit this space of the mind insane and very few who come out with a full understanding of this wholly singular moment. But everyone who experiences the Little Death is forever changed.

In those stars I see my own insignificance. They are infinite and I am only one. I have never seen stars like those. So many. So pure. Eternal flames burning longer than time. Circling around each flame an even more infinite number of planets just like ours. Or drastically different. Life forms the human mind cannot comprehend. Life styles the human being was never meant to understand. Dimensions parallel and tangential. Everything is infinite. And I experience the ego shudder back in horror as it realizes its own lack of significance. It literally turns white with fear. A coward by nature. It sees its own death of importance and then goes on and actually dies. I an empty shell am left there for a multitude of moments without a single thought. No inner voice. Nothing.

And that is when the beauty starts.

The Little Death is the great life bringer. Out of the ash grows a truer soul. Once the ego is peeled back and discarded reality opens up like a flower. One experiences a connection with their own values and from this a better understanding for the workings surrounding them. For once they are allied with the earth the heavens and the hells in a counterbalance of various flat lines and linear meanings. They are no longer alone. They have infinite being in front of them. And behind them lies only more greener infinity. Past lives past traumas past confusions suddenly seem all that more wonderful in their dissolution. One and everything. The dreamer awakens and realizes his visions of extraordinary are finite and yet everlasting. One with everything. No other truer self than the self that stands allied with all that surrounds him.

In the dark the stars continue to swirl and a close by stream continues to trickle. Other than this there is absolute silence. The fear lies in the silence for at any moment something monstrous should come out and rip the boy to shreds. But it does not come. The boy lays there waiting and with each waking moment he feels lighter and lighter. With his own insignificance comes a release from all guilty delusion and bad tide. A final surrender to the flow that is his nature. He is nothing by pure calculation, and yet the ratio that briefs his untimely end is a golden ratio. He burns bright in the night like those innumerable stars. A star himself finding his own gravitation. For the first time everything is transparent. Nothing and everything. He shines brighter. The ego is long dead. The night consumes him. And he shines brighter.

We are all stars in a great sea of stars shining brighter than the universe ever saw possible.

Greetings Reading – A Recording

A couple weeks ago on Thursday, April 24th, I visited Brooklyn and helped ring in the start of the next installment of Jeffrey Joe Nelson’s Greetings Readings at Unnameable Books. The reading was recorded by the surrealist Jed Shahar and is now available for listening online here: http://greetingsreadings.org/Greetings_Readings/Marshall_James_Kavanaugh.html

You’ll want to take a gander at Jeffrey Joe’s introduction as well. It’s probably the strangest and most accurate summing up of my life here-to-now that I’ve encountered. As far as the reading, it is the usual slapstick meditation with brief moments of transcendence. It was a great chance to tell new and old friends the stories of my travels over the last two years. Afterwards, I was told I should look into a career in stand-up, to which I replied the Zen Lunatic is always standing up pausing only to catch his breath. You can find him always on top of his individual mountain with his head drifting through the clouds.

Welcome to the inside of my mind.

So on the magic day of 4/20 I held a Good Vibes Party at my house. Once inside the Dream Oven, I led people into an installation inside the middle room which I kept referring to as “My Mind”. This was perhaps the first actual dream exhibition that I have ever held as it featured a tv installation based on a dream I had while in Berlin. Previously the so-called dream exhibitions I have hosted have been more about creating a dream space that engages the audience member into having their own dream. Here was something different! Something new! The audience was entering my own dream!

Over the last year, I have been working towards transparency and openness and it was very exciting to bridge this pursuit with my art acting as tour guide and telling viewers “This is my mind, this is what it looks like in there, welcome! Let me tell you about a dream I had!”

Welcome to the inside of my mind! You can enter and enjoy the ambiance below: