Ken Trimble #53 Peace on earth

I love the idea of pilgrimage not being defined or coined  by using the word spiritual because I haven't a clue what that word means. We compartmentalise everything, I'm a poet, bricklayer, priest, this or that, language is a bundle of letters made to confuse us like some giant conspiracy.  When I was a lot younger than I am now I went to St. Stephens Green in Dublin carrying Portrait of the artist as a young man. I went looking for something but all I got was a wet arse freezing my balls off during an Irish winter.  A few years passed and I went to the Soviet Union, geographically speaking I had crossed into that country a thousand kilometres back but it didn't mean a thing, only when I went to Red Square at midnight to watch the changing of the guard did I know I had arrived.  Standing there I felt a  charge of electricity  surge through my veins. It was October 1917 comrades. Then came San Francisco and my love affair with the Beats. I stayed uptown in a backpacker joint in Isadora Duncan lane but that didn't do it for me so I rambled over to North Beach and the Green Tortoise on Broadway. It was close to my church, City Lights, and I used the bar Vesuvio as my confessional. When I first went to India I went for no other reason than it was cheap. In Delhi I went to pay my respects at the tomb of Gandhi. Among the stinking heat and marigolds surrounded by an army of flies something happened. Time and space no longer existed , it just was. From there I landed in a hotel full of junkies, alcoholics, misfits, and some dude who played the saxophone. By the time I got there those bloody vultures had stripped me clean of any perceptions I had of myself . Those vultures tore away the last vestiges of my bullshit and so my hotel was the perfect place for prayer. I got down on my knees and cursed God calling IT a motherfucker and every other word from Shakespeare I could think of. Under my door came smoke pouring into my room enveloping me, stroking me, annihilating  every sense of paradise I  had ever imagined. In that darkness, in that sewer of life John Coltrane decided to pay me a visit. He played like he was a God and so he was. In that storm God was.  To go on pilgrimage you gotta ride the tiger but be warned its dangerous, after all life isn't Disneyland or is it?