One Ounce

........

The Sadness enters from the top and descends. Then I hear, why didn't you just say that it came down like a curtain? Because there is no one way for a curtain to come down, and don't most curtains close from the sides in? No, silly, people will think of the theatre curtains! No they won't because hardly anyone goes to the theater and sees that happen. It's a cliché that means almost nothing now, so when I say “the Sadness comes upon me”, an experience that I sense as happening from the top of my head on down, I want to say it in a way that is perhaps at least a bit enigmatic. If I say it falls upon me like a curtain, your mind just blinks it out and you no longer think about it. I don't want this to be just like every other thing, even though it is, and even if it wasn't, it would be almost instantaneously replaced.

The dry smiles the translucent teeth the everything looks around and accepts statistic, I can't get my head around what it is that means anything. I am so disillusioned, I no longer want to be anything at all. One thing does not mean anything more than another, it merely is, like everything else. Would it be different if I was lying in a ditch or a gutter than standing proud and full of myself on some stage somewhere? It would for me in the moments as they happen, but they fleet and epheme. There is no last and there is no matters. I just keep doing things. I can't help but care about my world, even as I know that it has no real meaning even to me. It appears to have meaning, and seems to invite a sort of drama of passion, but there is nothing about me or my life that is the same from one moment to the next, nor different than any other. There is a continual subtle shift and shout of one thing or the next to one thing or another. I generally do the same things it seems though I do not, and there is no same and there is no different. There is just a set of stuff like a box of toys that sometimes are out on the floor and sometimes are broken and sometimes lost and sometimes just neat and tidy in a box that is never the same box from day to day which is the same and cannot be the same, even through the sameness of days. The mind filters out the differences in an attempt to reach what could be called the self. It says things like, “I am like this. This is what I do. This is who I like. This is mine.”

It's like birds chirping on the vines outside the window, or crickets. Can we tell the difference between the singers year to year, day to day? It is “birdsong” or “crickets”. It is beautiful or annoying. Or it's not there at all. I can't tell, or rather, sometimes I think I can tell and sometimes I don't think about it at all. It's what The Sadness feels like when it comes from the top and permeates the perception of the self.

Couldn’t You Get Me

Couldn't face the long walk until the glass
Couldn't tell the world before the dock
Couldn't say the work was all unveiled
or the trees that talk in the bird

Reaching for the daylight's broken half
and starting out as the best of shots
Releasing tea starved bringing in the cold
and the border is blurred by the reed

Couldn't you get me coming through between
Couldn't you wonder at the hush of ice
the steamed breath and cooked degrees
Couldn't you agree there is no end

Remember the dark that broke apart
or sheer loft eagles that dangle there
Reaching for the caught off guard of hill
before the frown and buried god

The Back Of

My hand is like a face rich with the smart smack of diorama mini figures reach for guns action drama in places the cracks ache against rivers that spread barriers open that drive across broad shoulders with question mark numbers brooding and intent to weigh choices she talks about winter and icebreak and heartfrost as if the beginning was resting easily in an open palm frond or the color of understanding could flutter like a shadow bird she wants her desire to be handheld and light that breaches the tinted pane fractures against whatever can be believed in facts that dangle of chains and wonder within sworls and ridges enmeshed in battle hurling at first meaning divined without that sharp report of moving on easily from scar to tear to hear what my face says my hand would wear here as plain but between what you know are mine what you know but that I know as mine and can't call anything else but your insistence that virtue is knowing the back of holds on tightly for clarity out of fear

Edges

The space
without meaningful edges
dissolving from my edges
out beyond myself
the deep silence beneath
the shouting
the jumping
the argue
eyebrows
around the edges late
out corners
no appointment
running
this 'to be'
we have running from
arms of lovers
hope and regret
poverty of accomplishment

The Door

I'm quiet like a cigarette
The door a rap within its frame
Against the weighted wind that plays
Beneath my bare misshapen name.

Aiming at what I think is true
I'll miss the mark of solid place
And break apart from edges out
Collapse the noise of human taste.

And you
Remain
A fix, a hat
Upon
A hook
Until at last
The door
The frame
The good
Bye shrug
Accepts
The wind
But not
The past.

To Fall

Forget about the night before
Already the ashes have blown away
The coins have dropped
Beneath the vent
The birds coast by
The leaves won't stay.

To Love

To love the season as if it were love
of life caught in a foot-hold trap
as much to shine with the sun of green
wings folding as touch the sea within

A violent love of angles, degrees pending
my love holds up her hands, a barricade
of wishes shaped like leaves, toss of tree head
her life another cycle about to turn around

To love as much as the ripe berry
that falls away from home so readily
in its prime, good for teeth and acid
good for having lived and died for me

To love closes in around the faded
and holds it in green song and promise
where just before a robin pulled at the ground
and the brief connection was all there was

Lift Up My Eyes

No matter what I tried today, it has come out badly, and now, instead of sleep, I have strange hours. All day, I have done what I did not want to do, always thinking that it was just doing what another wanted, wanting to give up the self for the good of the all. Now, for the first time, I am sleepless in my house again, not who I want to be, failing to please another at the cost of what I know to be true within me.

Can I hear the voice of the other; can I still find what has been lost again and keep the new gains? I can't presume to know the mind of God, but I am going to question the wisdom of one thing over another. I can't keep going with what I don't know, and yet there is no way that I can do anything else. I am back up the tree again and I don't know how to get out without scratching all my skin off, and if not mine then who other's?

I only know what I can know, and what I have known so far has led me in the course allowed to my life. Where else this can go, where, when strong I am shorn and when weak I am abandoned? Where, oh silly God, are you? Your children despise me again, and I am tested near the end of my strength. I know that You will come to my aid if I but utter my cry for help, yet I remain mute as You have asked. I stay away from You, and I don't interfere with Your children in Your name. But these tests have crossed out my name from Your book, and I still don't know what annihilated means. I am still raw and uncovered, still unable to say Your name aloud. My fingers leave the lines untraced, and their love for me goes unfelt. I am a thief again, unable to grow beyond my nature; a player who always plays the card that lets them win.

And I know the voice that leads me to You and I am trying to listen to the stars as they call from their hidden passages. I want to follow You through the skies and be strong. When is my throat going to sing again? When will the sunrise bring me the solace of the light that is You? How am I going to know that the last boat is leaving, Lord? How will I know the difference between my end and what is required of me?

The heat comes from the inside, and it is not strange that it is so. This is the way that it has been and the way that it must be. All I can do is wonder still. All I can do is keep the faith that has sustained me thus far. The questions put in my head, the odd, torn leaf and the faint, cold trail would not be visible to me if You did not mean for me to follow, but I am lost with where this can go! What prey gained, if it were to play out any other way, is the true prize? What unhappiness can be found within the forest of darkness that I am lead upon? Through what distance does the questioning bring relief?

This is the sitting that bleeds me, and yet, sustains my credibility beyond what I am able to express with this voice and these words. This is the tower that keeps falling over and burning with such madness and such grief. How can I open myself again further beyond what has already been taken from me? If You send another emissary, how will I stop from killing again with my small mind in attack and my dropped heart shackled, helpless and alone? How I long to protect and cannot! The oath sworn shown to my face by the tears of my own head!

Grief is the swallow. Grief is the smallest thought that gives the taste to the whole. Grief is the basis for separation and the voice of the preacher whose head is plattered in silver, the cost to be born by the generations marked in Your blood. Grief is waiting in the long harbor as the boat pulls out. Grief is the quiet that deepens across the water calling in the fog of burden. It is what they cannot understand that seems most explained to You, and what I cannot become without the whole of the abandoned lifted without Your hand. I am not asking that we go back to that day. I am not asking that we hide again the knowledge of You, nor bury the brute force of ignorance again in my breast, though I know again that I must go. Grief, for the answer, finally breaks though, and in my vulnerability, You have tricked me again.

I am cold and in the dark, the lamp lay beside me broken and the angry flame asleep. More lay about in the color of the sea, and the jubilant voice of the swimmer is silent just out past the tide. This time there were no takers for the offer of a savior. This time the cries go unheeded and the sleeper continues to dream, and the mark left on the sand has no one who can read it; washes away inch by inch until, yet again, we wake into ourselves as if we were not listening.

Who did I say I was on that day? Who did I long to be when I found that path? How many had to have what they had taken away by me in my greed to know? You have made me a grand and skillful thief to have been there with You, and You knew me and looked at me with such burning and such love! Though I had lived in filth and crept among such vanity, my body craving bodies and filling up with lies. I listened to those who had only themselves in mind and I wanted to be like them. I made myself over and over of the mud. When You found me naked in the copse, hiding like a torn puppy of slaughter, when I heard you coming and I covered myself in the ground, when I saw Your feet and I knew and yet You did not speak, when I broke apart in the dirt and wanted to be less than that, when You turned and I felt You leaving, when I tore up my roots and ran after You, when I got lost in myself again and again and again and You stopped and waited for me, when I knew where to find You and I lay down to sleep.

What makes a poem bad?

Bly: I thought of four things.
1. A lifeless popular language.
2. The writer's own prosaic nature.
3. A writer's obsession with fact.
4. And the tendency we all have to lie about ourselves.

So most poems that are written are bad. Many of my poems are bad for the same reason. Especially the latter one, the tendency to lie about yourself.

The idea is that your life is going to be ruined by your greedy soul, unless you pay attention to it. ... One of the purposes of marriages is to make it clear how big your greedy soul is. That's why marriage is painful.

The Watchmaker’s Code

Them all be askin' thet ol' question, "Wut 'n tarnation's agoin' on heah?" Maybe you do it with a Southern type of phrasing or mebe ya don't. It's all in the colah, the scheme o' things.

So now I'm sittin' heah, tryin' ta think of some sort of feelin' I might be having. Maybe I'm having feelings. I get those sometimes. This is the sturdy talkin' of reglar folk, some a 'em my own kin. Now, there is a certain feeling that sometimes comes up in a sort of surprise attack, a kablewie of a kablam, more like a focus or a lexicon than the sun. Ya see, it wants to be known, but like how ya sometimes see that somethin' out the corner o' yer eye, but then ya go n look an there ain't nothin' there but the same thing in the corner o' yer eye but just in a different place? Ya never can seem to quite git up on what that somethin' is cuz ya can't just look at it, ya know. So anyway, that's kinda like what the feelin' I been tryin' to get at is. It's a lot like that and then it's also not anything like it. It's both. Or neither, but it is something or it must be or I wouldn't know anything about it, I could just switch tense and voicing to well darn nigh any ol' thang now cou'n't I? Yes I could! Yes I could! (in the interest of my reader, I would like to add this stage direction: this last should be enthusiastically rendered in the speaker's finest, most ridiculous baby/puppy voice)

Ok, now that I've got you this far, I would like to insert the secret part of the test, in which, instead of just providing the testing free of charge yet in the guise of nonsense, I will now begin to extract my toll from you in the form of tedium of message. That is, I would like to be revealing an important secret and therefore, I am, in fact, doing so, but I don't really believe I'm doing it, thereby negating the service in the usual cloud of doubt seasoned with regret for learning to ever read, so it would seem to be another scoreless inning. The pitching was great, but all you can say to the casual hearker on the corner is the score, which at this point, is still nil/nil, but there is some hope still in the upper bleachers where they have been drinking for six innings now and are liking the prospects of the home team despite the futility of the batsmen. You know the game is not going to end in a tie. You know there is no writing without a message. You know that there are always pieces of the author and the reader mingling in a rare space called "this moment" and that if you could just go back to when you had the answer but before you decided again to forget because it was raining ever so hard and then theah was this great roarin' of the hailstones strikin' the roof n everthing n it was so loud and it was like there was this opening, an apology from the sky which had been trying all day to reach me while I was so tumbling along in the great cloud and racket, the leaving and the coming and the feeling, the one I was just talking about, it just takes me. It just takes me and I go. And I have all the other feelings, but the one I can't seem to know other than around it or by the named feeling's edges as a description of where they are superseded by the unnamed one. It's a lot like everything, maybe it is. I want to feel it more than the others. It's love but it's way more and it's hate but it's way different, it's fear but it's a part of the whole like ice and it's empathy without knowing anything at all. There you go, rascal, horsethief, there you go off across the landscape of my sight to the nether reaches of the far corner where the red lives in its great Jupiter's eye that you know is there but can't see without science and technology and a few courses in basic operation of the human condition (site TBD). My mind wants to know why it can't know you. My stomach just keeps laughing.

Thirteenth Gambol

You could say that I have popped my head out of the big hole I have been in lately. I always feel better on strange days. It's the regular monotony of a "satisfying" life that gives me such depression. Maybe it's the lack of change that seems to kill me. All of this is probably only the best explanation I can attempt. "Jigsaw Falling into Place" comes on the radio unexpectedly. It seems odd that I smile at that.

I have spent the last week trying to deal with the emotions of a birthday and my son's imminent departure and a move into a vast empty place from a cocoon of friends I needed to break out of. Leaving that place was like leaving a perfectly lovely situation that was smothering me. I need not to be satisfied. I won't change the necessary things if I am too comfortable, and I feel impelled to respond somehow to the forces that seem to be negatively affecting the world my children and yours will inherit. I cannot accept that the apparent mess is just how it's going to be. What exactly I can do about it is still unknown to me, but I trust the forces that are at work. I don't always like it, but with a faith like mine, I persevere. I know I personally do not have the strength to deal with what's on my plate, but the strength is there nonetheless. It comes from somewhere. Thankfully, I do not need to understand where it comes from to benefit.

( )

Wanting to make meaning happen
caught in the grill, wings fluttered, hope
again takes apart the cause of wind

Without the boy's eyes, another cigarette
another bright eyed flame begins to chew
through the miles oblivious in song

So home without, so colored, weighted
she becomes the science she knows
nothing about nor cares for but drinks

Of religion without a head to sneer
wasted upon the rock with the name
emblazoned by sun after sun

His bellicose pain, his wry bravery
comes upon the front of movement
quickly, appearing as if from fear

You make the smile of burning spread
across bedsheet after bedsheet, Dak
you make the woman shake her head free

A Glance of Sea

He has such great armor
that token of guilt inside
reaching for the empty bottle
She keeps filling his vessel
with ideas for boys
who believe in oar's treasure
In the quarter-light of purpose
he catches a beam
and recognizes the kind of motion
that sails by disarmed
Her hair
His eyes
The way wind looks at fallers
When he disembarks
the stiffness from his mistakes
propels her to turn
into a different water
the kind of drowning
that breathes beyond reach
that distant ache of land
They will not touch again

That Pasture

I haven't exactly been writing lately, which is a good thing. With Spring comes the going of the outside. But I have also had a series of events coincide that has put me in a good humor. One of the great things that happened to me yesterday was my brakes went out in my car, so I got to drive through our little town on high alert in low gear with my hand on the ebrake. I know this sounds like a bad thing, but it is an adventure. My mind in that car was pristine and focused. I could only be a pilot.

But the real upshot is that I have to ride my bike. I love my bike. I love being the motor, but every Spring I have to be tricked or coerced into getting started. I should be riding it everyday, but that force that keeps us attached to the way things are had to be broken, and my car obliged.

I'm moving out of my safety web as well. I had been looking for the right place and getting a bit worn out with it, when I saw an ad and felt direction tell me to call this number. Perfect. Lovely. Ginormous. I'm going from one room to too many and I love it. I was initially nervous about how the news of my departure would be taken, but everything went swimmingly. Just moving across town is all. It's so the right thing to do. Funny, too, that my son is going to Colorado to see his mom for the summer, so the largeness of my new abode will echo all summer.

And there is time. That balm of all aches. Some things don't easily get over themselves. Some things need the space of time to sort themselves out. We are resilient. We adapt. Even to the things we wish would have gone differently. Perhaps enough time has passed that I simply find myself here, happy enough with what I have. Now it comes time that I turn my mind back out to the pasture of us all. How can I serve? I have more than enough and my table (it's still invisible) wants to be useful.

Our god

Strange how all my life I have been this way, but that it has come to my attention recently from friends that I am quite intimidating. This is because I defend the language and fight for understanding. I got into it with a couple of close friends recently. Beer was flowing, and one of my friends was declaiming about a Christian song he was into. He liked the simplicity of the song. This is the now famous modern Christian anthem "Our God is an Awesome God". I pointed out that I have always had a hard time with that song because contained in the first two words is the implication that there is some god other than our god. My friend tried to shut me down saying that he and probably most others never thought that; that they merely considered the phrase to refer to God whom we are with. I agreed, but nevertheless, because I can understand it to mean "our god" as opposed to "their god", or "our god among the pantheon of gods" I argue that whether you understand it or not the message is contained within and sows the seeds of war and dissension; sets up another variation of the us/them dichotomy that causes such endless problems in the world. This is language, and as precise as we can get is better than sloppily hanging meanings all over the place. I know it is fun to cause confusion and ignore convention, but I have always felt that it is not enough merely to choose our meaning as we see fit, but to understand the meanings of words as given by tradition and then altering the meanings if they no longer fit or require expansion. Not so much when people are drinking beer, but the guys I hang out with are always trying to outsmart each other and they had strayed into my area. I fought them with the relentlessness of the correct position and the high ground, which I held. I know pricks like me are irritating, but there has to be a reason why we feel passion for the things we feel passion for, and I happen to feel it for language. I don't always know what I am hunting for in this world, but I sure as hell know what I won't put up with. My prey is invisible most of the time and is made of nothing but ideas. Everything changes and dies, but my little life can be considered a part of all the rest of the larger output of the planet we loosely call "life". My experiences and ideas come from and go to something much more inclusive than culture typically allows. And yeah, I pay a heavy price. I am frequently misunderstood and shunned as too intellectual. The part of me that is very much like every other human feels lonely and frustrated and confused much of the time, though I just can't shake the idea that there is a greater goal we are collectively aimed at. How we behave informs the unknowable. Language is understanding across bodies in time. Some of us have to watch the door.

Runs Like My Heart

This is it.
I'm dreamy in the face, full of knowing.
I am at a curious peace.
I feel my heart swell. I open and expand.
I have been living in the ache and echo apart.
Old words rise to me, have been pervading me.

They are better for having known me.
I see relationships:
Thing to thing to person to person.
I synthesize.
It's a quiet process that runs like my heart.

There has been no failure.
We do our work where we are called,
then we move back out for the others.

Fix

The puzzled ones, the Americans, go through their lives
Buying what they are told to buy,
Pursuing their love affairs with the automobile,

Baseball and football, romance and beauty,
Enthusiastic as trained seals, going into debt, struggling —
True believers in liberty, and also security,

And of course sex — cheating on each other
For the most part only a little, mostly avoiding violence
Except at a vast blue distance, as between bombsight and earth,

Or on the violent screen, which they adore.
Those who are not Americans think Americans are happy
Because they are so filthy rich, but not so.

They are mostly puzzled and at a loss
As if someone pulled the floor out from under them,
They'd like to believe in God, or something, and they do try.

You can see it in their white faces at the supermarket and the gas station —
Not the immigrant faces, they know what they want,
Not the blacks, whose faces are hurt and proud —

The white faces, lipsticked, shaven, we do try
To keep smiling, for when we're smiling, the whole world
Smiles with us, but we feel we've lost

That loving feeling. Clouds ride by above us,
Rivers flow, toilets work, traffic lights work, barring floods, fires
And earthquakes, houses and streets appear stable

So what is it, this moon-shaped blankness?
What the hell is it? America is perplexed.
We would fix it if we knew what was broken.

~Alicia Suskin Ostriker

breath

we all want something
we are all wanted as well
but for now
tip over and spill out
lose screws and socks
remember them
lying on the floor
with blocks for hands
and the saffron sound
we most want to know
the smiling silver charm
of their laughter

What color flag do I wave?

My God, but this is hard today. My son's been sick the last couple of days. I am the most horrible father...even though it is the whole and extent of my social life. I'm not having a great Spring. For those of you keeping track at home, I concede the fight. I see no way to win. I'm uncool and remarkably stubborn about accepting help. Yet I am such a wretched dad. Yes, I know, I should leave here. I should go to where there is help. Maybe Colorado. The family could get together again. I could upgrade my parenting duties to include two children, and then be expected to "contribute". She calls a couple of times a week telling me how great it would be. Always with a new plan that appears to include me. She's not evil. My sister thinks she just lives in her own world. How many times have I said "I can't, it doesn't make sense for me in any way, no." But she doesn't accept it. Just keeps saying think about it. I tell her I have thought so much that my synapse is going to pop. I've written essays and flow charts and diagrams. The math does not go well. Even if I wanted to go, this is like the guy who finally gets out of jail only to be lured back in because it gets tough. I worked hard to be what I am, which is nothing but it's my nothing. I don't try to make my life seem exciting or glamorous, so it always pales in comparison to what M has for sale, which is everything. Come back to hell, please. You must have forgotten what it's like...it's warm and there are lovely shades and cool interesting people.. Here's to K. She got me out of the pit with M, though she doesn't think that. She did the right thing ditching my sorry ass. All I am is a father, and I suck at it. I really do. God send me some help, please.

For With

And so we wait
How many are like us?
For the time when all
we have been practicing for
becomes necessary
is right for its time
blooms in harmony
for the eye
of the one whose life
changes just so
because we did.

Be Lost

I don’t want
be lost
in pages in
you or curl away
Who, really
is you, me?


I don’t
want be lost
of pages of
looking up
lame with ground
ghost eyed

I don’t want
be lost
if pages in
order lay
mountain you sea
(all that between)

No haunt!
No be lost!
Page into page
a ribbon
on wind day
come loose

It’s windy and I’m thinking of Allen Ginsberg

Maybe I’ve gone over my quota of words today. Maybe I already put down all the words I had. All these words are left over and odd. I want to reach through them. No longer satisfied with a clever turn of phrase or nuanced association, or demonstration of knowledge of forms and colors of perception, how do I get through?

I’m satisfied with the many descriptions. None of them work without the what of it. I wouldn’t even know if they did or didn’t without that. I feel my mortality. I feel its fragility, its robustness, its ache to be. In move and be move. His athletic voice, pursuing the ends of understanding propels him. Her elastic meanings so different, charmed.

When he said howl he did to be carried. Of his he made a chariot. The sun made fog all day while I looked the devil in the eye. Legs of combat mounted for embrace. I’ve been saying yes, and there is a growing roar. I’m not in this to find my comfort here.

What no is where I need to add? Which bridge will char? He suffers and there is no cure. He was it long before his voice called out. With these words, the clatter is shuffled. Dropping its leaves means for you, it is now Spring.

And for us—a kite never thinks it needs the string.

I smell good today

No one is going to tell me this, but it’s Monday and I do.
Thank me.
I’m welcome.
Am I trying a new cologne?
No, it’s my hair product!
Tell me what it is so I, too, can smell nice for myself!
What have I done for me lately?
I haven’t bitched at me all morning!
That’s fantastic!
Yes it is, myself, yes it is.

Slowly, It Does Come Back

One of these days, I’m going to find myself completely naked on the page. The being naked and writing naked are the same, only tangents of the same premise. I look into myself and I see that there are a lot of naughty thoughts. A host, a contingent. Legion. I know these are not mine alone but freely pass in and out of all the body known as human. Yet I am timid. I feel like I want to be alone, but why then be among so many as well as have a son and a longing for company? I can truly have the alone any time I want it. I believe that is a strong candidate for what may lie on the other side. I cannot truly want it, even as it feels like it is the best thing for everyone. I might want to go into a chrysalis.

I have a sense like a spider with a foot on a web as it lies in hiding that there is a big moment, an understanding that will bring the weave of my life into focus just moments away. I have this uneasiness that moves through my emotions searching for a voice, meaning.

There is ice on the river that breaks up then gathers on various things like trees fallen and eroded bank. It was ice dams that flooded the Capital. Streams lead to rivers from many and differing places from far away sources and hidden springs, but when they have to all converge to get where they need to get to and there is all this transparent, individually dividable mess of entanglement, very little gets to where it needs to get to for a while.

What’s the hold up? All this stuff is easy. It’s nothing. Oh.

If it were easy to talk about I would already be flowing, not holding back, peeping over a frozen dam brimming with myself.

I am breaking like the hold of winter. You’re damn right I’m afraid.

I don’t have an honest thing I can say after that. It just is really that way. No cure. No apology.

A fat robin appears with a flutter on a branch across the road. The sun shines. This is how I feel. The signs are all here. The snow is diminished. Soon the body I love and miss so will lie naked beneath me, stretching for me, beckoning me to believe in the only promise there is. But now, there seems to be some trouble with the path ahead. Some obstacles that won’t go away, that demand time and understanding and patience (which seems so frayed and worn). A lot of the snow is crushed into massive sheets. Only the persistence of the sun will persuade it to give up its stubborn ways, loosen up, flow. And only as fast as it will go.

Notes from the Surround

I learned this morning that our receptionist position at work is opening up again. This means that yet again, I will become the temporary receptionist.

I’ve noted before that there are two indicators to my mental state. I tend to purchase two things consistently: books and music. When I purchase books I am searching (read: unhappy). When I purchase music I am surging forward (or happy). Lately I have been acquiring books.

Despite my addiction to watching basketball on tv, and the near constant presence of games on tv at this time of the year, I continue to plow through books at a clip of two or three a week. I cannot quite grasp how this can be. When am I reading?

I got an invitation to a symposium of poetry in August. Usually I can track where these come from, but I don’t know who got me this one.

I feel about as desirable as the flu. Nonetheless, two days ago I had a young, pretty girl ask me quite boldly if I wanted to hook up. I laughed and walked away. Later, I lay alone in my room and felt intensely lonely. I don’t understand a goddamned thing.

A Structured Settlement

Brite Silver Morning, I can’t make you copper
nor fill you with birds if you don’t want to fly
nor cause cloudcover, nor possess you, nor try

I can call you something other than what shines
I can make up rules for you to abide by
I can decide that morning is a night robber

shut my eyes and ask for any other kind of light
or demand only late afternoon slants from you
or remain in my covers ’til I get my hue

I can dive in my dreams in oceans of blue
I can swim there alone anyway I want to
I can take it all in without dawn, without fight

Brite Silver Morning, you don’t even try
to be what I want, or light me up proper
I can bury my face in the rag of desire
or open a window for you to come through

Pay to play

It was a lively band night. Not sure what the difference is. There is an eminent sense of freedom in the swooping interaction between all the parts. We covered all the emotions. Soaring and screaming. We got nasty and we got simple. It was greater than fun. It meant something to meet these men on this plane. There was no fear, and clearly we had all been practicing on our own. It was like trysting with a lover who knows your body that you were convinced there was no future with anymore and fooling around and finding your light split open and exploding in delight. We played in a continual string with only brief breaks. We wore out. We smashed through our barriers and found each other on the other side.

My son was out riding his board for awhile early in the evening. He's been listening to the band for two years. He skated up to me during a break and gestured for me to bend my head down. Then he murmured, "Now you guys sound like a real band."

At one point, Jon was showing me a progression he wanted to work with and the garage door opened and there were suddenly 10 people standing in our space gawking and smiling. We played on after a brief scramble of senses. One of the women who was with the group likes me and had brought a friend. I'd chatted with her on one of my excursions to the house. She has designs. Still, I'm emblazoned with task. I want more of myself than surfing from distraction to hope. I don't need anyone to think I should be or do anything. I've got life work on my mind. I've got a black notebook in my pocket filled with sketches. I've got black keys in my fingers filled with longing. I've got a black voice in my mouth smoky to lay across the melody.

All the pain of life and love. Failed endeavors and misunderstanding. Hope and fear and sex and dreams. How long have I controlled my passions in trade for someone else's security when there is none? I turned my face to the ache. I know the names of my heart. I call them out in my work with a moan and a slur. I lure her, tempt her with the sweetest of siren songs, muse of my longing, voice of my soul. My ear bends to know every note of your song.

Oh, Andy

I continue to compile books in my head. I'm reading at a great clip from multiple sources, simultaneously studying seemingly everything. I don't know how much interested I am in the topics as the way the ideas are presented. I don't know what I am looking for. Everything, maybe.

Pudding. What is it with this stuff? It's like snot that tastes really good. I adore pudding. I feel like I'm slumming when I eat it. I love the dirtiness I feel with the little cups and the spoon. One day they are going to crack down on this stuff. Why doesn't it need to be refrigerated again?

I used to watch a lot of monster movies. Then I figured out that the monster was always my hero and I associated the destruction with what I would do if I wasn't always under someone's thumb. This led to the inevitable examination of my psyche and caused me to become prematurely enlightened, which causes swelling and tenderness. Once I recovered from that, I resumed watching monster movies again, this time adding pudding. So far, so good.

So I read a lot and while I read I frequently day dream. Sometimes I am attacking Tokyo while I read about physics, but just as often I attack random futuristic cities that are obviously models. Yesterday I was laying on the couch reading about Raymond Chandler's homophobia while I sensuously made love to a velvety soft spoonful of chocolate goo. Ooh it melted on my tongue as the discussion raged about why he would marry a woman so much older than himself. Later I looked at some pictures of pudding.

Who else is tired of the Fibonacci sequence? Hey look, a flower…does it remind me of a vagina, or does it make me want to get out a calculator? For some there is no difference. I'm just going to say that I'm not one of those people. I'm pretty sure I can tell the difference. They aren't spelled the same, and one of them is never where it's supposed to be. While neither of them needs refrigeration, only one of them feels like pudding on my tongue. If there was a woman here right now, I would get her to show me her calculator.

I don't read a lot of humor. I don't find things to be particularly funny when all around us raging monsters are tearing up cities by the roots and shaking their rubberized tails to neo-modern disco. That music is just not that funny. It wasn't funny when the BeeGee's were snorting coke and it's still not funny. I cried when Andy died. Curled right up on a couch with a four pack of chocolate/vanilla swirl and read about Simon Bolivar slowly dying in a sodden shithole town that no respecting monster would deign invade. The music died with Marvin, but Andy was special. I can still see him hosting Star Search in his leather unitard with his package jutting precariously out at the audience. He came and he gave without taking and we sent him away. Oh Andy.

Years ago I had a nymphomaniac dominatrix girlfriend who informed me that I'm a stimulant freak. One night we were just driving around in my old van and she was prattling on about one thing or another. She was an honor's student at Berkley so I figured she had to talk about something interesting sooner or later. Most of her psychology training was learned in the dungeon making guys eat her poo. We never got that intimate; she used to light me up in other ways. But she was right. I do love stimulants. My favorite form is the plastic coffee you get at gas stations. If only they put caffeine in pudding and I could pull off the sudden road and skip away from whoever I'm riding with and fill a slow cup with lovely snot textured, chocolate flavored, high octane gel, my life would somehow be different. Maybe then the golden ratio would be the size of the city being tormented divided by the anger of the monster bent on its destruction. Maybe then we could come to our senses about the truth of the number zero and the things that can or can't be divided by it's absence.

A Bit of Floatsam

You know how a digital picture can be blown up to the point of pixelation and what used to be a fine piece of lovely optic stimulation becomes bits of color that don't make a whole lot of sense unless you are a fan of dots? I'm feeling this in my life. There are so many bits that make up the altogether, but I am having a very tough time reeling out far enough to see what kind of image appears. I don't feel out of focus, but I do feel that I am too close in.

I see the dot that is the part of you I want to be different. I see the blip that confounds me. I see the lightning blocks that energize me, the swath that I can no longer touch, the spot of you that wants my spot. This is the angle of the part of your body I love the most. This is the point that keeps coming up that I wish wouldn't. This is the period that says the sentence is over.

Caught up in the drag race, is there anything other than the road? I know that within you and I there is another, more comprehensive meaning than either you or I, but that the design is intentionally mismanaged. Ah, safety. Crack open any self-help book. This is the advice you have been looking for. The answer is yes and sometimes no.

Meanwhile, I keep having to open the door. I keep shutting it. Then I pull the blinds, which I then discover I have done and open up again with a huff. I'm open to all, but not to you. You are totally open to me, just not now. Oh, you want in? I just locked the door and I don't have the key. You have the key but the lock only works from this side.

I don't like the tangent we are on, but I've totally forgotten what we were talking about before. It seemed important and I meant to come back to it, but so many conversations have happened since then. With all this wind and weather, I could use an anchor, an angel, even an argument. Forget the big eaters. Let them consume it all and we'll live well. We'll change what we can when we can.

From this close in, it could be an abyss, but it started because I wanted to get so dear to you while you slept I became the breath of you. Now we are floating as dust in the sun.

A story with pictures

Here is the story about how there is so much condensed into each moment, and here is the picture of how snappy so many decisions about so much information looks, so blurred around the edges, so lost in the lines of fast. It takes a while to get what we are looking at.

Looks more like the camera has some smear on it or like the picture spent some time underwater. I'm a go man and a stop. I put places on the map and send the map to Venus. I've been sleeping in my mind clothes and I have the aroma of sharp sleep in need of a rouse.

And then there is you. You who have stepped in and modified. You who have turned on all the lights and endured my grouse. Put feathers on its trail and called in the authorities. Left bits of dust in the air on your way out.

All these books with all these word mountains. I have send miners in and built cities with the gold. My erection was defiant. I laid waste to all comers. I hid my momentum in deep valleys. There was so much I wanted.

But I noticed the king was absent. There were very few who knew. The guards were fooling around with each other's ex. They were busy fixing their teeth and posing for the cameras they knew were everywhere.

The baker had replaced his pride with profit and was planning to move away. The secretary wanted to run the gears, the mechanic became a vegetarian. The plants wanted locomotion. The miners were too busy getting laid. The phone lines only propelled questions anymore.

The past was mixed in with the slaughter of the present. Mandates were doled out from the thinnest. An impatient captain knew he was better looking and moved into the center and made speeches while the books held silent vigil. There was no correction.

This is the latest picture I have from just after the king's return. That just looks like blood. Forget how ravaged everything appears. The astronaut had the greatest news. Kept saying to look beyond this little operation. Kept shouting it over and over.

The smack of fruity goodness

I actually have an apple and an orange on my desk today, so I'm comparing them. We've all heard that little cliché about how this is supposed to be a paradigm for error. I should be gasping in horror at what I am about to do. You should immediately stop reading and report me to the authorities.

Assuming that you have done that, I will take what remaining time I have to continue to gaze at the two objects on my desk and note their similarities and their differences. This is my understanding of what comparing is. I feel repulsed, yet drawn to attempt the forbidden. Will my mind bend in ways from which there is no return? I thought the same thing the first time I dropped acid. Is this action the last sane decision that I make? Not that I would know. This is like wondering if the 1000lb bomb that you have failed to disarm is going to hurt you when it goes off. Does vapor have a consciousness?

I often wonder at the ability of the mind to perceive time. I was talking with my son about time distortion. You know how when you are at the carnival and you are there for hours and yet time seems to go by so fast (when you are a kid and not filled with dread about all the hidden terrors of large spinning equipment and spooky carnies and what the hell did I just eat?) as compared with when you are stuck in a meeting you keep wondering what you are there for, or in the case of my son, stuck in math, time does not go by very fast at all. It's the same amount of time that passes, but it passes quick or slow depending on your engagement.

Apple. Orange. These can stand for so many things, but if we reel back out in our perception a ways, they are both round fruit. Go out far enough and they both become little dots. We can go the other way as well. Move in on your perception to the atomic level and they are both extremely large fields of whirling electrons. It is only at the general human level that their differences overcome their similarities. My orange is smaller and oranger than my apple, but they are both sitting on my desk. I'll inevitably eat one before I eat the other, but I will eat them both. Eventually they will both become part of me for a while. I will have stewardship over their electrons; they will become part of my experience. I will throw parts of each of them toward my trash can. I'll prefer one to the other.

It's possible that one or the other will thrill me enough so that I go out into the wide world as an emissary for my chosen preference. This happens a lot to people. Someone will take up smoking and find themselves so thrilled with the taste of a Camel Light that they use the little points on the pack to collect t-shirts and hats so they can advertise. Some people do this with beer, clothing lines and sports teams. Will I be an apple guy or an orange guy? Can I buy products that extol one while disparaging the other? Will I make decisions about someone when I find out they prefer the same food as I do? Does one align me more closely with a political party and therefor influence my presidential vote?

What if I don't choose to eat either one of them, instead preferring to let them rot on my desk while I go back to the vending machine and select a bar of chocolate? This is not an unheard of scenario. Mmm. Chocolate tastes good. It compares favorably to the flavor of fruit, but there is the hidden swirl of energy that my body can use that I have also been contemplating lately. Chocolate has it's own influence, but I have found that I don't prefer it to the energy that fruit releases within me. I like the flavor of chocolate more than the fruit, but I would rather have eaten the fruit than the chocolate. Experience has taught me some things that I can use. I like that I can time travel now, even if it is only for a few moments.

Clouds swirl about on the unseen levels of which we are made. I think about impermanence and entropy. I think about the real difference between my apple and my orange. I think about sex because I am a guy and it's been seven minutes. Energy courses through me and I direct it as a practice. Attention, perception and direction. When I eat my fruit, baby, I'm gonna eat it like I mean it, and my pleasure will be beyond compare.

Saturday

I'm sitting again in my room, watching the snow continue to pile up over my windows. I'm not writing to anyone, so the thoughts in my head are nimble and hard to catch. Part of me wants to aim this at someone, part of me wants to just let it all go and let it all be.

I wrote a long letter to my ex-wife last night. I was pretty honest and pretty open. I haven't deleted it yet, but I haven't sent it either. Some part in the back of my head wants to warn me that honesty and openness, while the ultimate goal, may not be what I need to send her. It's hard wanting to make things between us more solid so that we can reunite the family and raise our children together while knowing that she is in direct contradiction to what I want in my life right now. Raising kids is a noble goal; continuing to be with someone who cannot feed my soul is not. As much as I love her, I need to be with people who have a broader view.

I sent a letter to my last girlfriend this week as well. More of a 'hi' letter, I felt a sudden and urgent need to send something out to her. Strange how delicate every word felt. How measured and deliberate. I wanted her to know that she is still with me without conveying anything unnecessary. No expectations, no grief. How happy I was when she wrote back!

As I sit, I wonder at how a period of time gets borders and seals off and then fades back into time. My childhood memories are still photos, the same as the months I spent with Kelly. The same as last weekend in Cape Cod. They happen and then are gone and it's the residue and how I feel about them that stay in the same time with me. And no matter if these memories are delightful or scary or full of regret, they cannot be altered. I can think about them from different angles and reinterpret what I think they mean, but they are unable to manifest themselves as now reality.

This makes it difficult for me to consider the future with any authority. There are things I could do, places I could go, levels of happiness I could achieve, depths of despair I could plumb, exotic locales, beautiful people. I could start a business, drop out completely again into the deep woods, walk across America and beyond. I could build a spaceship, a submarine, a kit car or a fortune. Some of these I expect I will do, and yet, knowing that everything has a beginning, middle and end, I can also see that everything that I will do will also appear in my rear view window as a memory that has no real bearing on anything I would know currently. What I look forward to I will also remember. This is the wonder of contemplating a creature in amber.

Here is where there is room for all the thoughts of suicide and despair. And yet here is also where there is a great deal of laughter and freedom. I think the point is that all of it is impermanent. This makes it more about living as close to the bone as possible. There are deep regrets that have pestered me. There is great love that flows through me. We are part of a stream that is made up of the same kinds of things but always in different combinations. The water passing by is not the same water though it is all water. Each drop is unique and endlessly combining with other unique drops. Same same always, and yet never the same.

This is me as well. I may look the same, and my interactions with my life make patterns that seem to define me, but I am made up of endlessly changing combinations of events and feelings and relationships and environments. I am never the same, though I think of myself as unchanging, though others see me the same year after year.

On the Floor

First, it is that which makes itself felt.
What is the impression that follows the impulse?
Why question?

There is always a design.
"I would give up everything for your touch."
I have been up for hours.
"Now I'm walking with the sun in my mouth."

Let's talk about promises. I'm not closed.
Who is? Sure, I know I am.
I have a standard for desire.
All lies. It's a calico's what it is.

Music loud and pen in hand.
This is a standard I have established here,
which is more than elsewhere,
though it could be.

I want to get up and dance around now.
Some very good things often get lost,
overshadowed by unfulfilled desire.
I am studying it. I'm writing it all down.

Colored Pictures

Moments away from release, that space between
was and will be that is, the snow drop hangs
in the air, white in contemplation

A photograph of a summer woman
gathered in leather riding away
the shadow cropped out

As the words unfold, the meaning
is interrupted by a cloud of gnats
that rise up for attention

Time in time, frozen in bits
lips parted before the pose
ignore the hand reaching out

My eyes are closed in this one captured
just after the last storm passed
just before I broke into a smile

White and Red

What love is this that clings to me
though the bed is long cold on her side
through my bravery and strong words
through my fallen sheets of snow

When I mumble in my red dreams
and keep the flame hidden from them
through the alley I find his torpor
and rest my hand on her absence

Why come into the body so weighted
already broken and without spirit
just to give another chance to sing
no matter how sad the song belongs

What love is this that hunts for her
though the door stands open
through the wind I sift for a scent
through the sky I break open again

out of the air

afraid in the beginning, like it was
the beginning, churning and looking
through close eyes for the bird of you

and soft through the crowd you rose
to the floor and my eyes soothed my
heart from flutter to wings in full

how to touch what was lost found
lost again and again and found
free again to the rhythm of wings?

how do I hold the cold close to me
walking back without you, without
your heat and your wings unfolding?

I would for you make folds in the gather
of clouds above me to feel you once
again inside the embrace of my breath

foolish with Spring bursting into flight
your body awash with the last notes
ringing inside you, your gentle heart

settled in the arms of my branches
your head cradled and your rhythm
slowing from the surge of soaring

Another Tao

After Reading T'ao Ch'ing, I wander Untethered Through the Short Grass

Dry spring, no rain for five weeks.
Already the lush green begins to bow its head and sink to its
knees.

Already the plucked stalks and thyroid weeds like insects
Fly up and trouble my line of sight.

I stand inside the word here
As that word stands in its sentence,
Unshadowy, half at ease.

Religion's been in a ruin for over a thousand years.
Why shouldn't the sky be tatters,
lost notes to forgotten songs?

I inhabit who I am, as T'ao Ch'ing says, and walk about
Under the mindless clouds.
When it ends, it ends. What else?

One morning I'll leave home and never find my way back—
My story and I will disappear together, just like this.

-Charles Wright


I like to get up early and sit and write. I'm not very talky in the morning. I like to let the day show me what it is before I get lost to the day to day bustle of stayin' alive, stayin' alive (inner city bakin' and everybody shakin').

If you look at the above poem, there are several things going on. (Forgive me if I come across as insulting, but I want to bring you in on some of the secrets that turn in the inner mindspring that is me.) The T'ao Ch'ing is a very old piece of writing that lays out some of the basics of Chinese Philosophy. If you haven't read it I will lend you one of my several copies. "The Tao that can be told is not the Eternal Tao." Very simple yet often opposing ideas rest next to each other in the same sentences. Paradox is very important. There is the surface and then there is the whole. Another way to say it is: "The god that can be understood is not God." The only way to truly know something is to give up trying to know it and accept that the mystery is safely beyond human comprehension.

Notice in the title the capitalization of the word "Untethered". The Tao will do this to you. You have to get comfortable with the lack of permanence to be unconnected and really notice what the world is without our subjective identification to meaning. This opens you up to what can come next. It allows you to really see what you are stepping on.

Notice the relative simplicity of the ideas. There are a few tough ideas...what are "thyroid weed"?..but generally all very clear and simple words. There is trouble here, but the idea of impermanence allows the author (and hopefully you and I) to come to what is generally thought of as a terrifying idea - death - with a kind of nobility. There is no mention of safety. There is no safety. He knows as did the writers of the Tao that we are here now and at no other time, and when we cast our thought out to beyond here, the ultimate reality is that all things will become what we cannot know. I love the way he brings this home with the last line.

This is an ideal for me. I am more than any other descriptor, a Taoist. There is no religion, no formula, no dogma. There just is what it is, though it is not what it may appear. There is in me the strong identification with what the world constantly tells us to think.

I want you to always feel comfortable with the idea that I want you really to be what you already are. I don't want you to think that I want to change you into something else, even if those kinds of words will sometimes tumble out of my mouth. I want in my life to be more at home with my dis-ease. I have a chronic condition which is terminal (life), and I want to enjoy the sensations that I have while I have them. This is why, when you want me to declare something, I always pause. It is in that pause, that expectation, that between what-has-been-asked and what-is-then-said that the universe reveals itself for what it is to me.

Pornfunk

Last night we had another in a series of quasi-fruitful band rehearsals. The whole band has not gotten together since before Christmas, and there are many reasonable explanations for this. Seems the lot of us have been going through relationship issues that we needed to devote a level of mental time to, and there has been a definite lack of cohesiveness in the band and where we think we are going. Since I have been living with the reality of a collapsed relationship, I sort of got on my soapbox and took to analyzing where we are as a band as if we were all in a relationship together. I think the metaphor helped us look at ourselves in a different light, and hopefully, by looking at it in new ways, we can see what the next step is. In the beginning, of course, it was awesome. Whatever we played together clicked and we were all filled with the vitality that we were going to go far and long together and make music that meant something to us and was technically good. Of course we noted where it was going to need a lot of work, but the proof was in the energy that we had after we played. Purely sexual. When you hit it together and each part harmonizes and radiates off each other, you lose yourself and become the music itself, and when you stop, there is the buzz and a certain happiness knowing that you are going to do this again and again and it is only going to get better. And this is what happens. Sometimes when one of us had an idea that we wanted to get across, a kind of feel, or a progression that we wanted to explore, we would get caught up in labels and issues and inhibitions, and there was difficulty and we got uncomfortable, but we also understood that whatever we talked about today, even if we disagreed, was going to get worked though tomorrow. We all just wanted to play and get better together and continue to discover what was special about playing the kind of music we wanted to make. Our library of songs grew until we thought we had barely enough to play the local bar, and then we went out and played there. If I remember right, there were very few people there, and none of them were much interested in hearing music that they did not know. We are not a cover band, so no one could have known our music. That and the band's pornographic name have always been known issues, and though we regularly discuss changing both, we are what we are, and we wanted to be known for that. I have very little interest in making music that does not move people in a new way. I never want to be in the background musically, something that sounds like what you expect and already know. There is too much out there not to dare to show what you hear that is unique. This is my opinion, and not all members of the band share it. This is an area we disagree on. But last night, being in a mood to dig all the way to the core if need be to try to get at what we need, I kept turning the conversation from you want he wants I want to what we want. As a unit. As a band. Where are we going; what are the band hangups? Do we need to change personnel; am I the weak link? We all seem to agree that we need to get on stage, but what that's going to take is an issue. I would go on stage with no material and make it all up if need be. I would play all our old songs. I would even play covers, although I would make sure that I did them all my way. Some of the others only want to go on stage when we have reached a certain polish and have a certain number of songs that we thoroughly know. Again, I have to ask, can we get there through these differences? Like a relationship, despite what we know we don't have, do we think we can get what we need and do we think that we will all be better for it? How much am I willing to give up of what I want personally so that the greater whole can take us to the next level? Because it is about the next level. The band reached our apex in the months that we were playing at the bar, culminating in a live off-the-board recording that went on to a cd that many of our friends have received and probably forgotten by now. There is much dissension about whether this is a "complete" product, but, based on what we have done since then, it is surely the best that we have put out so far. In the Spring we decided as a band that we were not going to put any more energy into playing the local dive and we were going to focus on venues with audiences perhaps more receptive to alternative music. We continually refined our sound and explored our relationships musically in the studio, and the music that we made in those days began to suggest that we were much better and tighter than we were used to thinking we were. We have astonishing recordings of moments where we reached heights of musical communion, and buried in hours of tape are many songs that could become focused into compositions, but we were all charged with the exploration, and every rehearsal was another night of free love. We thought we could come back and work out the details contained in the jams, but we also dearly loved what we were making. But being on the cusp, some of our insecurities began to show through, and instead of trust with one another's visions, we felt as if we weren't measuring up to the expectations that we sensed the others were looking for. We tried to talk about it, but the dynamics of the individuals seemed to doom reasonable progress. Others variables included one of our members getting married and moving a considerable distance away, another member moving a fiancé from Philly, and other personal matters of that sort. We also had another musician join us and spent a lot of time bringing him up to speed with our music before he left, suddenly, to do something else. The result was a sort of stasis where we were making really good music, but we were unable to feel the band's progress toward a unified goal. We dragged through the summer and into the fall, until we got to where we are now: a group of talented musicians that hasn't played together for months. Some of us are actively looking for new bands. I asked last night, unafraid of the answer, if this band was going to go on? Do I want to go on with this band? And I do. This is the band I have. This is the band that I believe in. Could I express myself better in another setting? Certainly that is attractive. Considering the energy that I can bring, and my penchant for performance, a new relationship could be quite explosive, but I also know that it was this way in the beginning with the band I am in now, and though it is not what I want it to be, and I am, in fact, quite dissatisfied with what it is now, I believe what we can do in the very near future can surpass what we have accomplished so far. That we all have to believe is the issue. I can't make it happen without them. Unless we all believe, we have nothing. We are just marking time and dreaming of the unknown, puffing ourselves up to look like it's not us that is the problem. Blaming and trying to control situations beyond our power drains the spirit and takes the spontaneity and fun out of our time together. We begin to avoid it and when we do show up, we only give a little and try to protect ourselves from criticism that may not even exist. We no longer need to hear from others about our deficiencies, we anticipate them and create them by ourselves. I mentioned last night that we should probably be having this conversation with a therapist in the room. A moment of humor ensued. And we played a little. I have been going out of my comfort zone to learn a little of a new instrument, and we messed around with the sound. And it wasn't great sex, but it was nurturing attention, and for the moment, we were just a few guys who loved music, working out with what we had and laughing. As to the future of the band, we just can't know this. All anyone ever has is now, as tenuous as this may seem. We can talk about what we want to have happen and we can work toward it, but both of these things happen in the moment, and merely provide the impetus to give or not give the next time we are in the now together. The real question becomes: "Do I have the courage within me to bring my best to a situation that may not work out how I want it to?" See you on stage.

That Circus Shine

How often I forget who I am. I get lost
So easily. To step outside for awhile. To
Suddenly see the moon as itself as it
Always is. It's never been my lover or friend.
It's just a light that changes shape from
Bright to gone. It reminds me of when
I first saw the beauty of a face and knew
That I wanted to look and look, knew that
I would fall asleep and wake to absence.

And absence has been my memory alone.
Not as real as the love showing as shadow
On the lawn, so long unseen by design
And hurry and desire. The little crooked
Smile grows deeper in his bed. Not where
I am anymore, nor can return nor would.

How easily I lose the certain glow of change,
It's power forgotten in daylight's intensity.
Step outside for awhile. The quiet is now
And there is no one who will believe
That circus shine is not meant for you and me
Unless we sleep. Unless we sleep, love grows
Beyond whatever we wanted, and around its
Strange adventure of forgetting, goes on.

Scribe

Tonight I feel a little lost. It's ok, because I have been a traveler my whole life and I am used to it. I know the terrain well, and even though I don't know exactly where I am, I know that I am looked after. I know that I am loved. I have this impulse to write that has been neglected in the last few months, and I have been posting on this and on the mirror. I can't stop. I feel like I have a fountain of words in my head and I have to let them out or go crazy. Writing has always been my therapist, and I am always saner when I let it out. Some of you may have read most of the poems I have been posting already, but I find it so strange to come back to them and see that they are still me. The test of a good poem is if it speaks to you even when it was written long ago. Something that was written by a different person about different circumstance (really still me, just back in the sea of time, or rather swimming in a now as memory) still calls out with truth. I wrote the last one about the moon, but, because something on the order of 90% of all poems ever written are about the moon, I tried to find what it was about the shape and the shadow that was unique. Somehow it became a paean to life in the lost lane, a plane that I have been dancing on for a few days now. I was struck anew by it's poignancy, and how much like it I felt today. It's so hard to accept truth when it is not what you thought it was, and when you have been thinking of yourself as part of something, it is wretched to realize that you are back to the beginning again and you are alone. I believe with my whole heart that the only thing left to do is to love more. When my mother died, I grieved deeply, but I didn't let go of the love I had for her. I loved her more. When my intimate relationships have broken down and it becomes obvious that we are no longer a couple, I say goodbye, and then I love them more. Of course, I can't love them in the same way. I can't touch them with the intimacy that I once did, but I can still believe in them. I loved them. Once they were my world. Would I really rather forget them and let my world contract, or would I rather keep that love, nurture it, forgive, and accept them so that there is more love? This is the personal philosophy that I take the most heat for. Most just don't seem to understand. Usually, I am thought of as still being "in love" with my ex-lovers. Sometimes I get mistreated by those I continue to love because they know that I love them beyond what they do. For my legion of flaws, (which, taken all together, make the perfect self) this is not one of them. Each time I love, I grow stronger. Each person that I have loved stays with me in their most beautiful state. The forgetting is for the bad times, the misunderstanding, the fights. Forgetting is for how I feel when deep in loss. I honor my love by loving, and when I feel lost, like tonight, I remember how my heart felt the first time I saw her face, the first time I held him in my arms, the first time I gazed into my mother's eyes and saw in them myself as love.

Mourning

On Saturday, my relationship with a fine woman came crashing to an end. Well, I feel like I was in a crash, but the actual breakup was pretty reasonable. We had a mutual understanding that there was no longer enough spark between us to continue with all the detailed arrangements that we had to make to be together. I have a son, she has sons. Blended families are hard enough. I am now in the vacuum of post relationship. For the last several months, we have been in constant contact with each other at work and home. Now that is gone, and though it is good to know what it really is, I miss her. No more instant messages. No more pictures. No more emails. No more contact. Harsh reality. Where once she and hers were mine, now they are not. It's Tuesday today, but it feels like Monday again. And I am happy in many ways, and optimistic. It was a good relationship to have, and I am glad I had it. We tried hard enough to make it work and it didn't. I can live with this. But the mind, still used to it's habits, spins out the questions. They keep me up at night, and there is a deep sadness in the shadows of my life. Yes, Time, I know you will cure me. Meanwhile, the dance goes on. Work and son, friends and music. The issues I had before I met her are still with me. What is the point of my art? What am I really going to do about the issues I feel passionately about? How am I going to break out of the musical funk that I have been in with my band since Fall? How am I going to be the best Dad for my son? I stare at the screen. Outside, the sky is gray. This is the feeling of freedom. The familiar feeling that the wind can come up at anytime and up I'll go. And I remain intent on seeking the deepest of me I can find. This is the constant. I know so much, and there is so much more to know, and my mind does not stop. Undisciplined mind. I love you, but you gotta give me a little break here. Accept, finally, what is before me. I am a big fan of being here now, but I am in the past. Remembering, loving and feeling the love, even as it releases me, grow. This is part of my mandate. No matter the hurt, I live in it so that I know it's power. I open to it as honestly as I can so that I can learn Love's true nature, so that I can open out and release it back into the world. To bring more light where there is so much darkness. I can do this.

Three if by Sky

In the air
as if solid I leave her
behind miles of clouds
and the telephone of her voice
her world enclosed between
ancient elevations that become
meaningless in the drone.

I am heading from the last woman
who knew me to the first, searching
for the part of love that resists me.
I am hidden inside the flashing eyes
of what I have become.

Somewhere
below is a body that hunts for mine
with perfumed breasts and loneliness.
Her eyes will watch for me all night
but her silence is what I will always
put my finger to as if the heat
of what I don't know causes me
to appear only to her
only to the sound
of something moving just beyond her reach.

The Other’s Breath

Skin bursting through skin—
In the morning, am I without?
Bedclothes twisted about my body
From turning after my beloved—
Where is the one who has touched me
In the dark? Arched back,
Slope of thigh, parting red sea—
The dense odor of two desires
Rises and slowly dissipates—
Burning away, as the sun becomes
My lover's vital mouth.

We are caught in the old web
Of saying the spinner is dead
Because the husk of its body
Has been eaten by the young—
But every night the legs interweave
With something that has more life.
Something near us in the dark
Whispers with an urgent voice—
Quickens with the other's breath.
Something beyond our own urges—
A lover beyond what we can see.

He Comes Home

Being from here and returning, a thief
Recognizes the structure through change
And complies, stealing quietly about

Among our houses and lawns, courting
The old gods with supplications
Dragging his lamed leg, his face

Shiny coming through the bushes.
He intends to get back in.
The child has left the window open.

Raft

I would love to lie right now, about how I can take it.
I would love to have hope with me on my shoulder.
I would love to believe, in this moment, that all I have is exactly what I need.

But they have come, and into my being they desire
My eyes and what I see, my mind and what I think,
My heart and who I love, my hands and what they do.

My raft bobs on the sea and carries me too far out
To be loved by one heart. The fog has taken my view
Of your face from me and your voice is lost in the wind.

And these are yours, which are mine, too. And the words
Trail after the shoulders of time; too complex,
Too complicated. Too much like what you already know.

Alive in me, their wings fold in when I wanted them open.
"Don't cover me! Don't come for me! Let me sleep
In my lover's arms." Their hearts roar with love!

What I felt as my raft is become the next stage,
The one I have been shouting about is come
As a hand on my face, turning it toward the ache.

At Dawn All Night

Always with this sword it is change that brings the night
out of the day and puts the word against the curve
with a kind of wind that is hot within the breath

with a quick flash of rose across the cheek of interest
that starts at the end and moves to smooth hope
again to die, at last to breathe it in and keep

the passionate victories at bay with quelling
and an ointment made of metal shavings and blood
stuffed in whatever break in the dam that should appear

because the nature of alive is drawing in
and the war is always me and what I own against
what I have only wanted as the truth of who you are

that this sword deep in the fist and singing
has a word etched beneath the crimson shine
and the night will bring its velvet cloak to dawn

Words Aimed With a Strange Precision Like the Burning Toward Relief

It is with the rain on down that come
the senses of change must adorned
in hollow drum of course and run

and where is the tin ally who requires
the ear to balance along the eave and hang
ballasts governed by wit begun

A shallow blackness nothing more
said or anything that leaps up-stream
can hide from one who lay beside
the music of no one's hand but God

as patient and relentless to dreams
not yet born but come, but come

How Do I Say

As if it were the very meaning of it all
against the light of others who mean
to let their cats fight all night long
and just get a new dog in the morning
because the money is good
and they forgot to fret about the meaning
or the meaning was enough
and they let the money come and go

But it was you I wanted to impress
with the madness of my spins
through the empty parking lot
at the old college of before now
it was you I always looked for in the thin
crowd I wouldn't command without
and they danced and I made out
like the feeling of this and the edge
held anything more than lost hours

And I got a little bit down at the corners
and tucked in where I was asked
and brought out the dust and the sighs
and lost out behind the desks of day

Where there was no darkness
and pain was something that forgave
and asked again anew if there was
anything I kept trying to forget

And I said with my face in a curl
I am this box scratched from the inside
and one of your cats is not going to live
and the money you sent is only paper
drawn on with a child's hope
and if I get another chance to go on
with the wine and the laughter and the dance
what has changed will be the music
of how broken means more more more

Rare Earth

I am so full of strange appreciation for what my life has become since coming to Randolph. This little town has been great balm to me. I have had a lot of help, and most of it seems to come from some sort of just-out-of-consciousness place. I came here trying to recover from a failed relationship that had managed to strand me high on the rocks for a very long time. I had to leave to salvage what was left of me. But it wasn't as if the bonds were broken. They were merely stretched a longer way. And I survived and rejected the impulse to return when I got so very lonely for what I once had. Ever the question: what is it I want? And what I want became what I had as I peeled back the lamina of heartstains. And as time continued to pass, gradually I began to understand. Gradually I began to remember. I am as flawed and beautiful as I can be in this human skein, and the stories I tell to become who I am are honest in their moment, but remain just stories. But that's the deal here. This is what we have. I am what is, and what I love becomes me. Doubt undoes the laces of love's shoes, but though it can be made to seem to stumble, this love was here before, and will remain long after the memory of falling down. This is the love that brings to you what and who you need as if rare earth. But much of the time, we spend trying to control our world according to our accumulated stories of it. We compare our stories with others and see if they see the same plots as we do; we doubt what we feel when our stories don't follow the ones we were telling before. We listen to tales of romance or woe, and we wish our stories were so or not so. And we have to decide. As long as we believe in our stories as real, and we try to control the characters instead of letting them be what they want to be, we will be in hell. Every time I try to write the plot for me and another, there is anxiety when the inevitable twists come, and it takes great effort to remember to let the story tell itself—just be true to the moment, for really, that is what we have.

The Dark Secret of the Gods

"Beyond the sighing billowed pasture Instead of yellow or white he finds A haze of bluing smoke approaches And no protection from the minds" The dark secret of the gods—who come out of the imagination of the poets and whose power is uncontested until the name of the god is known. There are people who are so visible in their lives, they have names and are regularly found where you look for them. Their names are familiar and their voices are known. These are parent people, and I am supposed to be one of them. This is what sets me in strange lines at angles and odds; it makes me sad and strong and causes some when they think of it to become sad and some others when they think about it to become angry. I see these, but I am not one of them, nor do I want to be like them nor do I seek them out. They and their satellites orbit in universes far away from mine. But I search for that which is not like the others while still having the same set of known in my arsenal. He comes in. Blows around the room trumpets a riff he just heard and gauges my reaction,,, roles away back through the door, causes me to blow up and out the same door when he stamp walks shuffles across the hard wood floor and I blow out a huff not this. Pot separates me from him and me from certain states and me from. It is the separator. This is the separator. I am caught between the thought and the action. How to tell the story and be the story and disappear into the stream…becoming comma chapped and jay branched and out the windowed and next to the road between the house and the field. How I live in the brain and the mind is the wind. How I lose in the fray but get back all the minutes that wasted on wallpaper in a flash of torpor and smoke. Drive him away with out the exclamation. It's a give an out where thirst is covered by the what if of alloy and play gives the soft rolling hill without the form of familiar blue moves. Without an anchor, I am as the chaff in the wind and the wind itself in tow. And yes it is the holiday but books about Christmas do nothing for me. They stack up on the shelves and piles and towers unstable and mock at me in the way the volume of synonyms do. I give up, and come to my place on the top of the bed. You can, too. Because I want to make you happy in the way an unexpected yellow flower cup on a brown forest floor surprises the thought of walking by yourself where you belong. Along the river and through the colors that should be covered in white by now, should not be me strolling this way or yellow to make someone as smile as that. What surprise and happy. Where you go because I. Where I am because you. What all forgetting does to the mouth and the taste of freedom shouted into a microphone. Without hope and without awareness. As a string without the rounded impression of the young woman's ass that my hands were seeking all night in dreams, you have to know that you were meant to slide in that way with the joke and though it is not understood as it was sent out must be carried through with as a new undertone and a place along the going path. And there is where you see your hat. How it got in the stream is where we will have to come back to in the way things are gotten to. I cannot conform. Not to what I think I should conform to, nor to anyone's idea of what should be. I cannot conform. I will it to not. This is my internal mandate. This is the prime directive. This is the internal monologue that cannot be shut off. A constant virtual scan of what is normally done is instituted and applied, with variations and the piece of itself that will has or is. It wants what it is; it is what it wills. This is what is operating as my god. This is the god in place of the one that could have me in its center. This is the law I am unto and why I must for the things that can the least be understood readily, why the color has a hue on the edge where it can hardly be seen, and why the normal party is not the congregation of the most stupid of the society against that which will only isolate itself away from by any means available. Moving into the world this way, I am not disappearing so much as I am reassembling myself into what I think of things. This is the picture my mind wants to take and the manipulation of the physical that has itself for its want and for its desire. Unto itself, as itself in the capacity of what it is. What it is is what I long to leave imprinted, though only virtually on the consciousness of itself. This is the commandant dream and the onus of its own weight. I am this which is written, in the place of the writer now and having been there in no position to ever be erased, even if erased. Listening through the back of the sound, by being, as it is without outside, behind and between as a moment when there is only one. Only you and I am not. I am was and am not am, but behind and upbetween where the two edges overlap and blur and mean two things and neither thing…where the dinosaurs go when I am with them and where the deal is met with the dark beings of the other side. And I wanted there to be us there and I wanted you to have the movement and the wind and there were enough coffins already where the souls were burning and you could slip in and out there right there along the walls. Find yourself without any reason to stop and the lines move together and form the swimming vision of what is always right there but has no image that can settle with the language that there is available. Swims on and out with or without us and I am and You, the horned one and the savior whose birth had a fall to knock the taste out of the mouth of stars and the cattle cars and the iron bound gesture. The waiting there is no without with. No further out than that or that and no further. I don't expect to find numbers here of anything or a blender that mixes what you want with what I am, because we already are this amount of us and all in circles and order now not so much and less now gone and you say is it really that easy? Without the constant sound, without the chatter of the long ago outmoded addiction, what rushes in is the night with its images of the absolutely known in the forms of contiguations of stars and the space that we jump through to get beyond. We are the space of mostly not. Where time fills in the missing information and the feeling of grass growing so close to our faces wants chatter, wants forgiveness, the kind of forgiveness that has no end and no beginning, that stretches into the ink of the between stars and makes the maze so impassable. Just looking up is the forgiveness, just walking toward the end of the day in the gloaming, thinking of all the words that mean nothing how the collide of wind and breath and the solid sounding names of the houses and the people passing within them. We are the outside of rivers misnamed flowing beneath the empty tolerance of the bridge. The dance of the fireflies is long ago and will not be coaxed back until it is time. When the time is crossing the same bridge on the other side at the same time as this one, what is it that is negated? What motion is it that hides from our knowing wet and makes it live in the arms of old lovers the same? The fireflies, and the cans of empty beer and the stubborn toothbrush of our quick passing childhood, now mottled and shared among a certain number of others, wanting order, forgetting passage beneath as if it didn't happen every day that way. That we didn't pass this one in our truck only two days ago, when the sign was still posted and before the last of the paint fell from the randy birch. Oh melon of smashed besides, still uneaten in the pastures and snow unbidden though won't come, and the piece in the lilacs buried still in the memory of the back yard, throw the redness into the abyss and come over with me. Come over with me now without the edge to your voice. Come over with me, I have crossed so many times already with this basket and this brazier, my smoke convincing in its palaces and knights. I would weigh without the candles how my felt head wood pull into pages of passing, rough gloved and true enough to bring the guardian down and face the webs of sleep without challenge; haunt the refuge until there was a valley of unmet corn in shallow rows. From within I would hurl toward the fast moving future the ears of my childhood as they listen for you in the distance of the last whine almost completely gone now, almost completely gone. But out and over, the story walks down across the river and between the schools and while the soft steps tap past the porch of women they lull just a bit and you can feel the attention briefly, like a bite of an apple or the taste of grapefruit on the sides of your tongue. Make him wait any longer and you will have to run all the way to the end and back and your story doesn't have you moving in here until several more as yet undisclosed events have been tweaked into existence by you. Master of carnivals leaving in the night, master of songs song from the bottom of a well. It eases beyond the interest of one and as the story becomes so does it come out of itself, to do the instances it would, have its hunger recognized and the gain was the leaky pail kicked over in a Jimmy Stewart western, where the action stopped and there was no where else to go, the line so distinct and so crossed over, the paleness of her face you see from the sides but never from straight on. That's what I wanted to get at before; the straight on is what, a confluence of the intended, the expected, the known and accepted? The question with the answer you just don't notice when you got it as a sing song in your breastbone and the slaughter of the daughters firing faster fingered bullets through the softness of her mouth.

Happy to work for it

Strange the many ways that events can be labelled. I had a fitful night's sleep. Brainpan was overflowing with charge. I had dreams of visitations from beings that were so compassionate and so overwhelming. I don't usually dream like that, but there have been many parts of my life calling out to me. I was feeling a little powerless. When I woke my son, he complained that he had been awakened three times by the color 'red', and I certainly remembered how red these beings were. I don't put a lot of stock in the world usually unseen by us, but it regularly interacts with me. Another way to put this is that I have a lot of impulses that I can follow or not. Not following leads to restlessness. Following them brings me strange energy. I have allowed myself to be consumed by the world, and I am a sad and misaligned creature when I am in this way. But something always rouses me from my slumber. I can't manage to stay awake on my own, but I have a lot more help than I usually admit. Awakeness is happiness, and unhappy things can be going on all around me, but when I am in line with my true being, I see them as a play that I have joined. My part is really to enjoy the show. Harder than it sounds. I really get into my roles sometimes. The role of "Dad" is a heavy one for me when I sleepwalk through it. I get all caught up in the right thing, and trying to raise a good little human. I forget that soon enough he won't be little, and I forget what Dads look like to little kids. He spilled some mystery liquid into my computer keyboard and now the letters stick. He wouldn't admit he did it and I found myself getting very upset and gearing up for another lecture, and he started to cringe, and though I rarely spank him, it is the nuclear option for me and he knows it. And I saw him cringing and I could feel his fear, and I told him, "No one is going to hit anyone over this. But I am mad and I want you to know how I feel." He totally relaxed and I felt like he heard me. This little bit did a lot more for me. I felt the power of control surge through me. I felt the compassion of deeper knowing. Another role that is challenging for me is "Boyfriend", sometimes known as "Mate", "Partner" or "Husband" among others. This role has such power. The art of sexual gratification, the sharing of simple things together. The promise of carrying ideas and goals forward with another beautiful human. But the dark side is that it is so easy to lose sight of what brought you together in the first place. Like trying to do things for yourself, seeing another for what they are takes a lesser priority to the bells and clanging of the rest of the world. As it slips in priority, so it slips in its power. Instead of little everyday maintanence, I find myself taken aback by what I have allowed to idle without my breath. It has been my habit to sleep heavily when I most need to be alert. This is a lesson I have had such trouble learning, and so I have to keep auditioning. Fate always brings me what I need, and I always want to practice learning to love more. There is an endless supply of love that just needs to be acknowledged for all obstacles to fall away. But that's getting out of the role. That's the next level, and though I know it is right here right now with me, I have to stay awake for it. I have to know it is there and live it. Which is where I am now. "Trouble, it is not true that I know you..." Not denial of all the complications and challenges, but a willingness to see them for what they are and work to make the powerful world inside me stay visable that it can benefit those I love. Just this knowing that I am cared for beyond my understanding invites me to turn to those I have loved and make of it more light, more love, more forgiving, more compassionate, as those who love me keep showing me.