From the Selected Works of Lord David, here's one for the Monkey.
(I love me some Monkey Shines, yes I do...)

PHONE MESSAGE

Perhaps endless night
is not a bad place
where we drink champagne
and tickle each other
from the inside.
Riding in ancient automobiles,
we laugh out loud until
we have sodden our under clothes,
and casting them backwards
onto the windshield of Mother’s taxi,
she waggles her finger at us in shame.
In an ideal world we would all be lovers.
Instead, we wear strategically placed
vibrating beepers and mail each other
prosthetic genitalia at post office boxes.
Although, when I kissed the needle in God’s arm,
he caught me in his headlights,
out by the bleachers on highway 61.
All I could tell him is that
I don’t want to be a cowboy anymore.
He told me that in this day and age
you must be really careful wearing
taps on your shoes.
I went line dancing during
heart attack season and
wound up behind a lady
that smoked cigars and
thought that Grand Jury
meant the pearls her mother left her.
Then a thin fluid ran quivering
down out of her dress.
Those shoes really do get slippery.
Finally, I realized we were fucking and
just pretending we were dancing,
but couldn’t face the truth.
So she pulled out her camera
and took pictures of my mouth
while I was talking,
to be deciphered at a later time.

A year ago today, on la Dios de la Muerto, The Dead came to my window. They appeared to be several hundred strong, and they gathered in the street below my loft windows, singing songs, beating drums, chanting my name and demanding solace in the form of drink.

Not being unaquainted with this form of solace, and impressed by so many of The Dead knowing my name and whereabouts, I capitulated with cocktails and beer, speaking to them out my window like some Dark Pope, and finally waved them on to Flanagan's Bar, where dead people are always welcome, if only due to the Irish name. We all know that the Irish love both the drink & the dead, so it seemed like the right thing to do.

I hope they come back again tonight. I rather like The Dead, not only because of their fashionable black outfits and over sized skull heads (anyone knowing me is familiar with my constant black attire and big head), but because they make us Who We Are.

Everything we have going for us as Humans came from Dead People, unless it comes from people who are about to be dead. Someday, anyway.
But the stuff we take for granted, the New World, fire, television, rum and of course cooking school, all came to us by way of people now long dead. So there's that. And the afore mentioned Irish and their Dark Poets, who romanced Death, even before they did it. Those wacky poets.

What might not be as obvious is what death does for us now, on a daily basis, for free. All by just being there, if we'd only pay attention. Death is a punctuation point at which our lives, as we know them, anyway, end.
There's much discussion about what's next, but that has nothing to do with Death. It may have a great deal to do with how we approach the subject, but that's for another day.

Today is la Dios de la Muerto, the Day of the Dead, and I want to offer up my respect to those who have gone before, and the message they seem to be leaving, at least, when they show up at one's window, chanting your name and demanding cocktails.

We Are All Going To Die.

See how simple that is? It doesn't take much study to understand. The problem is that folks just don't like to think about it. They spin off in to theological discussions about Next Worlds, and stories about lost family or loved ones, or make video tapes depicting horrifying car crashes, or write bound-for-DVD scripts about sexy teens on forbidden islands getting picked off one by one...

Anyway, I think you see my point. It takes quite a bit of moxie to stand in front of your mirror and say to yourself, "I'm going to die." In fact, it may happen anytime in this crazy world. Anytime at all. We take measures to ensure our health and safety, as well as the health and safety of those around us, but that's not enough.
The best thing to do is much simpler; Live.

I figured out the message that The Dead bring to my window. Not that one must give demanding neighbors free drinks, although that's a very interesting subject for another column, but that we must Live Now.

May your morning bowl of cereal be perfect, crispy and cool, if that's what you desire. May your work, at whatever task you have in front of you, be the best that you can do. May you tell that lovely man or woman you've just met (you know who you are) that you think they are lovely and would like to know them better.

Sing out loud when joy finds it's way to your lips, laugh louder when confronted by ridiculous circumstance. Cry openly at the loss of love and lovers, in your favorite movie or in your life. Smile at complete strangers and feel the glow of that smile returned. Do something amazing with your life, if only for an instant, and take the time to be amazed by the actions of others.

Above all things, find your place on this earth of ours, to experience the breath and blood of living, to celebrate YOUR life, as it's the one thing you truly own. Find others to join in this celebration, to sing with you, and when necessary, to rise up and protect your right to that life.

I am blessed in that I have found my place, and therein, friends abound.
To night, I shall celebrate my life, and the living of it, here in my beloved New Orleans, when my friends, The Dead, pass by my window.

Thanks to The Dead, for showing me the meaning and truth of Life.
I may never have done it without you.

Lord David
Pirate & Artist
Skull Club
New Orleans

The Open Mind was awake.

 

It was everywhere, and everything, all at once.

 

 It had either been there for ever & ever, or it had just started to be. It didn't really matter which, since things like Time and Memory were all part of it, so any way you went about it, things all led back to the same place.

 

I know that sounds a bit dicey, and there are very smart people who have formulas to prove one thing or another or a bunch of stuff in between, but they and their thoughts and mathematics and matter and measures and history were all part of it, too, so figuring it out was like herding cats. As pointless as it is impossible.

 

 So, anyway, the Open Mind was awake. And it was everything and everywhere all at once.

 

Almost…

 

 Contained in the fabric of Everywhere were some impenetrable areas like little round ball bubbles. Some were quiet and smooth. Some were almost ethereal, as though they would become part of the Open Mind at anytime, dissolving in to the Entire Fabric with a refreshing breath of release, satisfying some certain longing that only the Open Mind could understand and appreciate. Of course, since everything is part of the Open Mind, there was certainly enough refreshment to go around.

 

 Some of the little ball bubbles were hot beds of irritation, red and scratchy to look at or feel, and seemed almost to boil inside, like some festering thing, ready to explode.

 

 These were all part of the Open Mind, but separate somehow. While everything was part of the Open Mind, not all of it was under control by the same thought processes. The areas inside these little ball bubbles were special.

 

They contained something called Free Will.

 

 The Open Mind could go and look around inside these ball bubbles by looking out through the eyes of any one of billions and billions of facets of itself that lived inside of many of these ball bubbles. It had to be careful doing this, because if it looked out the eyes of any one of these for more then what seemed like an instant, the others seemed to know, and act differently towards the one it looked through. The facet whose eyes it used would most certainly start acting funny. This could prove to be difficult and defeat the entire purpose of Free Will altogether, so the Open Mind would sort just peek around at specifics a little bit, from time to time, and occupy itself with being Everything All The Time, which is pretty much a full time job. Of course, any one of those billions and billions of facets could turn around and look out at the Open Mind, and watch Everything All The Time, too, but they hardly ever did. Go figure.

 

 Many of these ball bubbles grew like seeds, gestating at their own rate, developing according to their own basic guidelines, until they became one of those refreshing breaths of release, blending in to the Entire Fabric, further quenching the longing of the Open Mind, or they went the other way. They became so involved in their own inner festering, that they just burned away until they were but a hard and crispy little crust, which of course, couldn't flow with the Entire Fabric, so they eventually just disintegrated back in to the Open Mind to be redeveloped at a later time.  The Open Mind was used to this, as Every Part of Everything That Would Ever Happen was part of it, too. It came with the territory.

 

 So, anyway, during one of these occasional specific peeks inside one of the more troubled ball bubbles, the Open Mind saw that there had developed a New Facet, just within the last moment or so. The called themselves people, and they lived on a tiny speck in remote corner of this particular ball bubble, which they called The Universe.

 

They thought that Everything In Existence was right there inside their particular ball bubble, and that the inside of this ball was actually the outside of everything else. As ridiculous as that may seem, they believed it, for the most part, and these people weren't very accepting about new ideas. They even thought that the Open Mind lived entirely inside this tiny little ball bubble, The Universe, which was really so small that the Open Mind didn't really give it much thought, except in an Open Mind Everything All The Time sort of way. They also had given the Open Mind a series of pet names, in a wide variety of languages, some of them even claiming that the Open Mind had a beard and robes. Being well groomed in Everything and wearing whatever it imagined All The Time, the Open Mind paid little attention to such vivid descriptions, knowing that these people were only seeing the Open Mind in terms they could understand; as themselves.

 

 The Open Mind loved all parts of itself equally, which is considered healthy, even those parts with Free Will that became irritated by themselves, sometimes. So it had a look inside this particular ball bubble to see what these momentary people were up too. Peering way down into that distant corner, deep inside the space within this tiny fragment of a ball bubble, the Open Mind could focus on the little sliver they called a Galaxy. There, just about where you'd expect, was their little solar system, and spinning around really fast, was their tiny blue ball of a world.

 

 Now, these people, as they've decided to call themselves, were mostly limited to just a few languages, some of them only one, which was disappointing, but even worse, they had decided not to trust too many of each other who looked and talked differently then whoever was doing the looking and listening.  They had, in fact, divided up their tiny blue ball in to areas which were restricted to certain groups alone, and others had to ask permission to go there at all. Why anyone would want to visit such a place is too big a question to deal with here.

 

 Most unpleasant was the fighting they did with each other. It seemed to go on and on and on, destroying huge portions of their Blue Ball, and killing off vast numbers of these strange beings who had only moments ago been created and crawled out of holes in the rocks. What was really unbelievable was why they were doing it.

 

 Their use of the gift of Free Will was to claim that certain people had windows through which they could look and see the Open Mind. They said they 'talked to it' and that it 'had a plan for them'. This was just plain silly, of course, as the Open Mind had created all of this to exercise Free Will in the first place, and these people used Free Will to take it away. Free Will, that is.

 

 So anyway, these momentary people would point at their own windows, calling them by various names and in a multitude of languages, and claim them to be the Only Window. This seemed to be what a great deal of the fighting was about. There was also a lot of trouble over stuff. Some people wanted more than they needed, and they hid it away to rot, while others got none. Not being a very nice way to get along, the Open Mind would have frowned on this, as it spread itself pretty equally

Everywhere Forever, but that's what Free Will is all about.

 

 At the moment, the Open Mind is waiting to see if this particular ball bubble with the littlest galaxy and the tiny blue ball will turn it's momentary people around and begin to nourish their fellow creatures, habitat and future, eventually becoming a refreshing breath of release, and joining the rest of the Open Mind, or if it will just irritate itself into a crispy little crust and fade back into the Open Mind, for redevelopment at another time.

 

The word on this is not yet in….