First published in  Lonely Goat Print Magazine Volume II - #7

Goat's Gallery-July 1999

The Philosopher's Stoned, For Terence - a poem by J.D. Edwards

Disjointed pastures crack into wastelands of needles and haystacks. Soon the inhabitants of the Gaian planetary alliance shall gyrate in ecstasy. Soon they will welcome into their multitude the soul of the great interpreter, the pioneer of inner postulation who divulged the deity's deepest guarded secrets to these diseased and fur fettered carcasses of competitiveness. Esteemed by dreamers, feared by its keepers for not tempering the truth with stipulations, disclaimers, he examined the matrix of the space time continuum once thought impenetrable and translated the ineffable in to colloquial English for the rest of us to palate in digestible tidbits.

And among remote river villages en route to the Eden at La Chorrera where the Amazonian rainforest becomes more than just foreign territory, each mile comprises millennial strides into the planet's past pride, (though the origin of which species remains for you to decide.) There he was hammered to the totem of suspicion and crucified by cultural differences. There he battled dysentery, dementia and parasitic leeches, beheld magic, telekinesis and contact from the nether regions. And now those shores spot red with the blood of an adventurer felled by ambition, an explorer whose mission was not to plunder but to understand archaic custom as a tribesman with the wisdom of shamanic elders. Soon that lost language, the unpronounceable glossolalia of words and phrases, he pursued to its practical summation will find a fitting place in the lexicon of fact and formal information as more than mere myth of fanaticized raving. the first to invite the jaundiced eyepiece of scientific scrutiny to invade the dreamstate, calling the laws of physics into pure imagination, quantifying intangibles with infallible diction, he twirled the pinwheel of all expression on the tip of his tongue and then shared it with everyone.

And now so many assertions that always seemed so right, sanctified by self-determination and the rebuking of lies and as unprovable and irrefutable as the ideology of Christ, are viewed in a whole new light. Truth and enlightenment seem as far from our sight as when we first grasped hold of the vines. Now around the sentient campfire ayahuasqueros shed their cancer-encrusted monkey corpses in the droning hypnosis of vocal vibrato and percussion sepulchers. They draw one unified sign of uncertainty as fractal elves busy themselves preparing for eternity. The cauldron bubbles with a frothy concoction, the thick pulp condenses to a sanguine sludge for their continued consumption. But the tsunami of sight that swallows all conscious tributaries of thought will break apart in its own forming tonight. For the seer who spotted the spacecraft sputtering through our neural responses and the spore as the answer to the failure of modernism now waits to change planes and delve deeper inside to dissect the manifolds of Eleusian delight and no longer speak of these insights.

This poem is written in tribute to Terence McKenna, noted author, lecturer and inventor of the Novelty Theory branch of fractal dynamics. He was diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor earlier this year and has recently completed a gamma-knife procedure to freeze the tumor at its present size. His attitude is very positive and he continues to study and work in Hawaii. The outlook is, however, terminal and all efforts are focused on prolonging a comfortable life as long as possible. He is also pursuing any new treatments with the hopes that he will be the 1 in 1000 who responds to a new discovery. It's not cheap, and insurance does not cover the alternative solutions. If you are familiar with McKenna's work and want to help, tax-deductible contributions can be sent to:
Patti White
c/o COPS/Wellness Institute of Technology
POB 3287
LaJolla, CA 92038
Donations should be made payable to the Terence McKenna Research Foundation.