The Last Conversation

Porcupine:  Where are you?


Jim:  Out here... in the darkness...


Porcupine:  Alone?
None beside you?


Jim: None beside...
None before and none after...


Porcupine: Just you?


Jim:  None below and none above...
None within and none around...

No one...


Porcupine:  But you are here.
Someone is there.

Who is it, that is there?


Jim:  God...


Porcupine:  But with speaking words, curled grey snakes
Of dust gathered on paper; words, thick words,
Stalky vines rambling through the black of night.
I eat of your words and you of mine;
How call yourself the mouth and ears of our god?


Jim:  All these words, from all my soul and all my heart,
All my mind and all my might, are His.
All these words, from all my ends, are His.

These words, lumped worms in the mineral stench
Of my dark caverns and passages are mild Angels
Singing in the halls of the House of the Lord.


Porcupine:  But you let my words through the door.
With muddy feet they soil your clean entrance.


Jim:  Your words are from all your soul and all your heart,
All your mind and all your might;
From all your ends they come.

Your words are His words too...
And thus I Love you as I would Love myself.


Porcupine:  But words are only sounds.
A shared belief in patterns.


Jim:  Whatever you place through your mouth,
Only that will go through as it is supposed to do...

Bread or water, beast or vegetable,
Fruit or herb, air or poison...
Whatever passes by your lips, only that
Shall pronounce its’ culture as it vanishes
Into the place you believe it should go.

It may leave you as slow, perplexing colours,
Great inward turns of gravity, visions of strength,
Illusions of reflex, piles of debris,
Or thick seas of ease...

It’s just a... simple matter of what we... call things...
As they... pass through us...

When we are fed by the Way of the Lord,
Then His Way shall pass through us.


Porcupine:  But what of the time when you were hungry?
First there was a lack and last there was a filling.


Jim:  The first to the last and the... last to the first
Does not involve a time of turning.

It is meant that all are equal and all are One.

Time never separated us, nor made better or worse,
Empty or full...


Porcupine:  But I am still here. You still doubt;
Death. The end of the world.
It must come.

Am I not the dark side?


Jim:   When I hear only Truth from my neighbour’s mouth,
And from my mouth he hears Truth also,
Then It will happen...

When It happens, at the End,
Then the dark side is crossed.

This is the purpose of things...

I am the only one I know...
You’re the only one you’ll ever know...

The End that you desire, is the End that will become.
There is no choice here.


Porcupine:   Have you seen the future? The way things end?
The crossing of the dark side?

Are you a prophet? What is your name?


Jim:  If a name is what you desire...
Then a name is what you’ll get...

I am a disciple of the prophet Jonah...

I am wicked and twisted in dark robes...
I hold my words as jewels
In the locked chambers of my chest...

Though I am to take no heed
Of what I wear or eat, hear or say,
I still hold to commonplace plots and fences...

Mediocrity is the dragon of my fear...

I am told by the Lord that His Sign
Is Here and has always Been,
But I still search for another... it is my... Fate...

And thus I must find my hardest place,
A desert of insanity, bowel of hell,
For three days and three nights,
Where the savagery of doubt will mingle
In the mind until it fades, as a dark cloud
Blends into the sky, revealing beneath,
A new sun at the end of night...

Though I must preserve an upright face
Through the journeys of my fast,
That I may look on you and you on me
And See the same... though I should, I cannot...

My fast will be in sore limbs and sackcloth,
Drowned in filth, alone with great wailings...
Agony shall bleed from my teeth...

Boredom, wind and rain shall chew me apart...
I will swear in my forty days to be fed by His Way,
But in the end, madness will envision the world
As nourishment, and of it, I will be choked.

Everyone will see a greed-shriveled monster
Emerge from the wilderness.

And I will Save no one...

I will hide in pleasant fields and houses of empire...
My act will be a hollow illusion
As great riches fill mine lap...
I will spread my words and leave...

In a desert again I will flee, remember fear,
And be imprisoned to halls of blindness...

But I will return again... spread my words farther...
Drive my demonstration through the earth...
Mountains will sink suddenly,
Horizons flatten and unfold...

I will preach confusion in my days of strength...
And in a valley of silence, deep in the ancient hills,
One will come with fire, force and thunder
To Return me to the Kingdom of the Lord.

This is my End...
This Fate is a hell,
For It happens when I wish It not to...

But It is the only Heaven I know,
The Way of the Lord,
The only One I know...

And I am a false prophet,
Here to deceive you with my words...


Porcupine:  But this is terrible!
You must be a demon to preach of demons.

Jim:  These demons I carry from all my heart.
When they reach the height of air
With the wings of my voice,
Then they are still demons.

But if I be a demon myself, then by my words
I would divide, empty and be nothing.

For as words leave you,
So too does their being empty from you...

I am always something... as are you...
The Voice of the Lord can never empty...


Porcupine:  But with deception?
Our lord would never deceive us.


Jim:  Maybe my deception means something...
Maybe by our mouths the Lord is teaching us...
Telling us to... think another way...

To think the Right Way...

If I do not deceive you,
Then you will not punish me.
I will not change my ways
And I will never be Rewarded.

If you are not deceived,
Then you will never change as well...
Your ways will not be improved
And you will never Return
To the Place you were meant to Be...

We must use the wrong words
To see first their very falsity.

When we learn to Speak by the Lord,
His Word shall uncover all blunders
And replenish them with Truth.

This is why I allure you with visions of paradise...
A gnarled tree of wisdom
In the marble courts of knowledge...

And with these strokes of ink,
I have attached a mild absurdity
To the branching pattern on its’ leaves...

I shall call upon terrible fires and black clouds,
Dark caverns and the breathing dead...
They’ll come out and torture you for amusement,
Scorch the pleasant scene...

I will show you the dark side,
But hem no bridge to cross it...

You will hear a rattle in the evening bushes...
With your timid hand you’ll reach to see what is there...
And a viper will jump out...
Its’ fangs will pierce your wrist...

It is a poison keeping you from It... you'll never know...
In the End it was a hallucination, these words...


Let me tell you, old friend, a story...

I wandered off one day
To this strange, tempestuous land...

Out there, there were no signs, no words...
Only colours neatly proceeding from my eyes.

I went past many seas and plains,
Hills and woods... I was near the end of it all...

All things once real and part of the landscape
Were now only beliefs, old leaves in the wind...
They scattered... I could not collect them...

I sat one day in hard, empty sacks
Reading a Book of my elders...

I would read It as a hunt,
And the Truth would be my prey...
I would snare It for my feast of victory
At the birth of night...

Great words were hid in this Book...
They lifted the muscles in my void...
I felt flying, though I held a still space...

Then I... accepted these words...
They went on, past the body...
They told of rules, of orders, of nasty troubles...
And the... Way the world would End.

On a barren hill I did not move...
Confusion was all that moved.

Didn’t know if I would... ever return...
If things would... ever... be the same...
I went on surviving... a day of life was the...
Only thing that happened, that could happen.

My prayer was invisible... it had no words but was...
Known anyway and was always There...

Each time I conceived of It, a shell of delusion
Would press a pillow to my skull...
I would sleep but never die.

I learned through my sleepy trade,
To harness the red and golden mares
That once trampled over my limbs
On the grasses, in that dark and silent land.

I was bigger now... I kept them in stables
While I... slunk into the frosty meadows,
Under the moon and simple stars.

But something must have snuck in
When I... opened the gate to leave one night...

For when I returned the... gate was open...
And... they were... gone.

My smile vanished and my... eyes mirrored fear...
It was like my head was... being held by a... hand...
Rabbits appeared everywhere... they would not move...
Only blink and... chew...

The sky thickened into a forest,
The roots began to peel and crawl
Out from the ground... Coyote was around...

All I saw... were Coyote’s ears...
A tail... a nose... a paw...
All here but... never fully there...

Old Crow circled above me and I...
I heard the wing-beat...

Old Crow was calling from every place I didn’t look to.

I heard my horses,
Their grunts and rustles in the near shadows...

Great Bear arose before me...
I sang to her majesty old songs
I... remembered from the... Book...

I danced marvelously to her honour...
Great Bear sniffed and went on...

But then Little-Bear-With-Worms came by...
I could not sing or dance for him...
He was too sick and ugly...

Little-Bear-With-Worms took me down...
And I was eaten, gnawed apart.


My eyes seemed to close and open...

I was on a wooden floor in a glazed, amber hall...
I could not tell if my sight kept repeating what it saw.

There were people all around... it was...
Warm and... glasses clinked...
Merry chatter filled the sound...

The conversations seemed as a being...
A floating... soft ghost of melody,
Reaching to the dark-paneled walls.

But they were all monsters...

Their faces were distorted...
Fangs and whiskers dripped from their cheeks...
Scales and weird wrinkles clothed their skulls...

They would laugh and wave their hands at me...
They would just stare and say nothing...
My will to leave... was with them...

They knew everything about me... they kept me...
I must have been as a baby on the floor again...

I noticed on a wall this wood engraving...

It was a Totem...
But an... animal had... replaced the... God...

I knew then I could never leave...

Windows were just colours...
Black squares in the still warmth...
I didn’t understand what was beyond them...

When I closed my eyes, everything kept getting bigger,
Old times were reappearing... causing confusion...
I couldn’t remember what anything meant...
I couldn’t stop seeing...

There was no escape... only the past...


Porcupine:  What does all this mean?


Jim:  It means that my words became the world...
The only escape was childhood...

The Book to the child is not sacred or meaningful...
The words are only pretty shapes on a white surface...
The Totem is no more than a wondrous carving...

We are looking for change...
But will not change ourselves...

Gravity will never go away if you stay in your body...
It would be more of an illusion otherwise...

If you want a different gravity... a new-sized horizon...
Then you’ll... need to... look beyond yourself...

You’ll need to... change...
Become a... new creature...

Old nature was only meant to be by certain ways.

We were not meant to search for another face
In the mirror of the sea we cross upon the morn
Of every first breakfast after every last supper.

No, a different body in the same Mind is made
From a tongue of Silence and eyes of Peace.

Pretend you aren’t an animal but... pretend you’ve...
Never learned a single word... this is the Change.


Porcupine:  But I do not want to change.
I would disappear from others if I did.

They would worry, see death of another,
And then see death for themselves too.


Jim:  Then you would have to teach them to...
See one Face among many strange...

Ah, whatever!


Porcupine:  So there Jim, this is it.
It is getting late and we are coming to an end.
We cannot talk about the same things forever.

Tell me this one last time: What is it all about?


Jim:  Porcupine, porcupine... It’s all about...

A mind will always be a mind and a...
Porcupine will always be a porcupine...

As we are one, I am you and you are me...

The child is a mother and a father...
And the parents are the children themselves...
We are both within, man and woman...

There is no time of age to distinguish us...
We are the Children of God.

Once you’ve eaten the fruit of this bowl,
Its’ curling figure will wrangle through your soul
Until it is wasted by the flapping folds of flesh
Into the dark and swirling breeze...

This is It, this Trip...
The land is no longer unknown...

It is now yours... under your command...
All the knowledge gathers as a tiny garden
In the midst of a darkened forest...

And this is where we are tempted.
Remember what was Said.





Audio Recording:
https://soundcloud.com/jim-nut-roarin/the-last-conversation-demonjnr-jc-luff-remix-version