Moon Phases

panning for gold in driveway gravel, an industrious escape from the mind. A glimmer, false hope, what did I expect to mine? sifting stones as memories, these pebbles are more than pearls, than precious jewels.  the sandbox of my spirit, shifting - entropy crumbles mountains to rubble, but cannot destroy what it finds. Moon rides high, tonight, pulling hearts like tides and dragging silver trails behind on its wedding night. The moon in its futility races west to east, but looks like east to west. I'm sifting pebbles from my pile of gold, is the moon's existence mine?

I can only hope to reflect light so bright, hopefully with more consistency. 

It's a limbo I feel, a between time. Like I have five minutes until an appointment, but nothing I can finish, or start, in those five minutes. I'm tractionless, racing forward-backward like the moon, and doing so in circles. How, after Eden, could Adam and Eve settle for less? No choice, there was no choosing perfection, anymore. I see what, to my eyes, was close, but beyond reach. 

Oh, such tiny arms and lofty dreams.

A plan, then? Or destiny?

I'll sigh until you hold me high

Love? Or I'm deceived.

Broken glass between each toe

shark's teeth and barnacles

chances in a mantis hold

No, this is what it means

carpet rides on starry nights

daisies on a bed

of downy grass and reading

poems sweetly singing

of mountaintops and raspberries tasting

moonlight in your hands gossamer

as gliding swans

tiptoeing across ponds 

silver, holy night

slipping into a shell to see 

the sea tides whisper gently

press your hand to mine

and jarred awake, a dream

an electricity.

in beginnings a death

in ends: retreat

opportunity or perfect impossibility

love's broken like the moon

Now, every puzzle piece fits poorly, inadequate. Something always wrong, and standing out like a thorn in the thumb, scarlet stains on white cloth, oil on the ocean, burn patches on the ground, barrow in a field of flowers, vulture in a flock of doves, weeds in fields of corn. But even perfect blue eyes sparkle with flecks of gold, flowers grow in street cracks, and in the darkness there's a moon, sometimes.

Candle

candle

match struck, then a burst of flame, 

will this candle chase why away? 

a riddle at night, now 

a morning mystery, 

I see how this ends

in week disarray. 

when you are west, east is far; 

moving north, the south I'm missing 

disappears. winter: warmth removes, 

summer sun's no closer. 

flicker, please, vanilla star -
wish this distance near.

dreams just tiny highways

ideas our little cars

drive with me awhile.
wind rustles your beautiful 

hair, touches your lovely

grey-sky eyes I'll never see

voice your love

songs, the radio plays 

hand me your heart-

felt emotions. I'll listen, listen

as we are one

distant dream.

NaNoWriMo

Entrance the Doctor

“Doctor!”

The doctor was not sleeping; he never slept these days. But waking? That was another trial entirely, and he felt his days. And his nights were plagued with dreams.

“Doctor!” the voice shouted again, banging loudly against the front door.

                Who could it be at this hour of the morning? The doctor grumbled and rolled into a sitting position. And where was his butler?

                “Who’s there?”

                “Simon Temple,” the voice called. “There’s an emergency at the central dome. You’ve been summoned!”

                Simon Temple? Who was that? That new guy in town, was it? What was he being summoned for – how could he help in an emergency? What time was it?

                “I’ll be right down,” the doctor called, groaning and rubbing at his eyes. He picked up a slice of the tree-fruit he’d left at his bedside, cure for aching limbs. Though his limbs did not ache, he felt they should, and took the necessary precautions. Age thrived more in his head than his flesh.

                If they needed a doctor, then the prophetic utterance had held true. A murder then, two.  

                Lighting a candle in the saucer near his bedside, the doctor slipped on his slippers. Shadows danced against the wall in the flickering flame, turning ghoulish simple shapes, and inane items into nightmares.

A perfect garden with a poisoned pool; an unblemished faun dying, suddenly, from some uncaught sickness; an eternal lush field, flower-full and yellow-green with luxurious grasses, suddenly bursting into flame, a volcanic maw opening and gorging on the meadow.

The stuff of dreams danced along the walls in sinister shadows, and the doctor sat motionless as a mouse struck by the screeching owl, muscles deaf to motion.

“Doctor? Are you coming?”

                “I’ll be there shortly. Run on ahead and let them know I’ll be coming. I need to collect a few things first.”

                The doctor rummaged through his closet, picking out his whites and surgeon’s mask. 

This is actually a passage that I'm not writing. So it won't actually be in the story. 

Inspector

What so false as truth is,

False to thee?

Where the serpent's tooth is

Shun the tree---

Where the apple reddens

Never pry---

Lest we lose our Edens,

Eve and I.

~Robert Browning - A Woman's Last Word

The city bled an efflorescence, golden on the blur of night - a phoenix death, embers until the resurrection of morn, where new creation begins, and begins again. It was a strange thing, a death in undying lands, and the city's edenic appearance burned with a burr of color, a drop of poison dye in crystal water.

The inspector rolled into the city on a stagecoach hearse-black in the funereal palette of night. A land of shadows, everything flickering in surreal beauty: even in darkness the city emit an elegance, a face of perfection.  But the inspector was locked deep in thought, irregular in his introspective ignorance of the passing scene: dewy, white limestone streets; glass and rose-chalcedony architecture, purple saffron exuding a metallic honey scent. 

What were his thoughts, then, the dark-clad man in the long cloak and navy wool scarf, bundled, despite the balmy morning – what were his thoughts? He took a deep drag on a thin-brown cigarette, a relic of the distant past, and considered.

I haven't written a story for some weeks, and certainly not a longer story for some time. I'm excited to get back into the swing of things. I just finished the last of the Sylvia Plath I was given: Ariel. She's quite astounding, and I truly wish I could write half so well - a third so well. I started and finished one of Mary Oliver's poetry books, and wow! She's amazing, too! I guess there's a reason she won the pulitzer, huh? Maybe if I live to be as old, I could write such fascinating things. 



Shell
Still the ships passing, seas overhead
Here I hear no waves
Whine of whales, clamp of clams
Sunlight bleeds the deep sea red
Swim near, rescue me
I'm a man, not an oyster
Believe.
Bolstered are my emotions when
Strange though it seemed
Divers dove down closer
Rescue, rescue me!
I'm in truth a man, you see.
Their gentle hands brushed the sands
Lifting me from the deeps
Oh, you've come, I'm saved, I'm saved!
But lifting me from the sea,
they pried my mouth I'd clammed up tight
wresting, divesting my pride
lobbed me back into the deeps
I don't mind, though
my soul they keep
As long as they left
my humanity.

Composition

Why the mountains beneath the sea? They are birds in a cave, in a cage, was the sky not made for thee? I'm worried, reaching into a hive of bees, looting nectar from venus' barbed maw. Well? I'm a flying hawk who cannot land, cannot see, legs broken, heavy beneath, but with the wind brushing my hair? I don't care, really I don't care, tell me not to care. The beautiful hair, I cannot run. Nothing for to run no more. I'm flying.

Today my reading was all over the literary sphere. I read poetry by Sylvia Plath (so incredibly talented, so intensely macabre); a long essay regarding ADHD and educational differences; Jane Kenyon poetry; a little fantasy novel, some mystery/sci-fi; some comedy; some news. Mostly poetry. I'm fairly certain my technique for learning poetry is flawed in nature, but for a beginning it is a fascinating endeavor. I'm simply gorging on poetry, consuming entire novels of poetry in hours, or less, and writing all my favorite lines and images.
It is a gluttonous abuse of reading speed that ill-considers the delicate work spent in craft. My apologies, artists. I must consume. I constantly feel as though I'm running shy on time, as though I must capture every adventure, every moment, and drag them deep into my soul.
I have a friend who learned countless orchestral instruments, hoping to compose. He said that most, many of the greatest composers died young, and he understood why. It is the same with me. I understand the drag of perfection, the standard against which I compete and never shall beat. And I understand how far I must travel. I'm running a race where every other entrant started hours before me. How will I ever catch up? I'll never stop.
Everyone might write better yet, might think, see, intuit, understand better now. But not forever, not for long. It is almost my time to compose.

Story Writing Mode = Less Blogging I Suppose

Well, what is there? Again and again they ask questions of time, and I've no response. Time is slippery as shadows, as sure as blood in water - stop it, slow, if you may, you'll only gain bloodied hands. And you? Share your heart and I'll shed mine. Emotions, doctor, is it cancer then, this fire within? Only burning sin, killing your insides out. May it never continue so, but on I go, on I go, my breadbin into hell. What gains he who sells his very soul for a pittance of fool's gold? Nothing.
Please, distance as wind to wind, opposite walls of solitary prison. I can hear you think but not breathe, love but not sing, dream but not speak. If we shed these skins and skim the sky, fly not so high, dear, we're on Icarus wings. If must we fly so high, take me, and let's fall as one. How, how such wide eyes, Eckleburg? Green, then? Green as the american dream? Or dollars? Or icy green, on pine tree leaves, frozen in the frost of morning?

I cheated today. I finished some of my first chapter of NaNoWriMo. I didn't want the restriction of NaNoWriMo, but wanted the motivation. I longed to write a story, but not within the exclusive bounds of November, and I got a bit overexcited for the beginning of this one. This one is also different in that I'm co-authoring the endeavor. I'm already feeling the strain on my other writing and reading. It can't be helped, can it? Time to return to story writing mode...

urbanity

A chaos of our own devices, devising, a congested scene. What senses left can assuage this assault? When kissing, often couples close their eyes. Is it a deeper delving into the euphoria of touch? Or a deflection of sensory overload? So too am I now. Closing my eyes and feeling: the earth pounding beneath my feet, stifled and asphyxiated; shapes passing within inches, closer, unemotionally scraping; a lost wind, whirling about the plaza in directionless anxiety; honking, screeching, pained impatient, boisterous, agitated, metallic bodies whir only paces beside with reckless speed. Voices, voices, the distant river sloshing into the sea, creaking of concrete and overhanging roadways - even the birds, the ravens, are strangulated, singing simpering songs and clashing pieces of trash in their beaks.  Rook to pawn, check, cities as sanity's chess game, internalized, slow, and deliberate.

Faces, faces, here and there, passion, distance, creative flair, drowned in the dizzying, everywhere

Ravens wheedles through the sky

landing by

Pauper home, no fields his own

rook to pawn

Down the street clattering near 

churches here

horses

steaming breathe in dawn sunlight

bishop knight 

And night doth fall, shadows tall

Over sculpted monument,
an ancient lord whom men afford

little notice such aged things

long dead kings

the queen of time a deadly crime

check

blithe people milling 'round

lost or found

a mated death, check, king's last step

taken, then he falls 

Driving into the Valley

Turning on my brights, descending down the Shins road, this light only accentuates an eerie twilight splendor. Another world we've entered here, shadow shapes in charcoal replace what daytime placed before - robust pines are hefty arrowheads, rolling hills are timeless, cresting waves, milky moonlight falls over a maple explosion, captured and frozen in a moment of firework display, and houses pleasant during sunlight droop into witch hovels, strobed in the lightning of my headlights. It is a spectacularly fae land, celtic and mysterious, that bowls this gentle valley of home. Mists burbling over the hilltops and sliding over bald peak are a breath caress against the window of night. I've never, may never, know such love.
Crawling, creeping, clawing, time comes with clandestine fervor, covert against the clamor of daily motion. Stop and breathe, please, or in brief steps, breathe in this living day, love this beautiful clay of people. An extravagance, then, this life. The first great grey in a season-wide eternity of such. Gun-metal skies swallowing this year, and crying tears mourning the lost clothing of trees.

Wind Chimes

November sidles up in a ghastly affair. Soon all is muddled, missing beneath the misting mornings, a hallowed eve on winter's frostbit hearth with ice crackling as the bones of autumn, and the trees shiver as chimes. The sun's false facade a saccharine sweetness, etching warm memories onto frozen hearts. A ghost town, ghost town, echoes in my head. Ghost town, lights down, I'm going, gone away. Watch ye the birds, veering south it seems. A warning? A mirror of nighttime dreams? None, the difference, between raven and writing desk, as night transcends, descends, and November names them now as one.
What is one day's difference? Dreams demarcate the day, a beautiful boundary. A sky so clear, a miracle blue. Oh, those clever birds, pie-wedged and pointed south. What if I might see everything tween the sky and I? Each molecule drifting, whisked and borne on the breeze; each bacteria and virus, dastardly nomads; each seed and fleck of dust, each blue-winged bird, whirligig pod, scarlet leaf - might I join the sacred dance of sky and sweeping wind?
Where art thee in this hallowed hunt so hollow? Into light all things must fall, glad at last to have fallen. (Jane Kenyon). Chime, chime, gallant graceful hills, trees - a valley sings surprise and beckon. Hither come when lost: grassy knolls and evergreens are ever green against the pumpkin patch palette of undecided deciduous leaves, and silver clouds blanket, the rook of heavens folds its wide wings around this earthly egg.
When weary footsteps plod along alone, unfound, follow these ancient trails, snaking along rivers, against mountains, home is where heart leads.
Who is it who asks me to find language for the sound a sheep's hoof makes when it strikes a stone? (Jane Kenyon)
Time approaches, recedes, with whimsy's grace and no trace of solemnity. Regal pretext, no forbearance accords the king of draining moments, seconds seeping from that shattered hourglass. Alice, dear, what's that you dream? If, when, you descend, clasping at roots and stony outcrops, the rabbit hole, I promise, promise, I'll catch you where you fall.

If one hand by yours be clasped, Father
What then is t'other for?
Breath of fire, cloud by light
Beggar me with brilliance, Lord
Blind me with keen sight
Bless, begin, bestow upon
Break beyond a fight

NaNoWriMo

I love testing my mettle, or, indeed, my mental metal. I used to despise games without competitors, for where was the comparison? Where was the proof that my motivation and dedication might succede beyond that of my fellows? Truly, I say fellows, and not opposition, or opponents, or "the enemy players", for that is what I intend. Only recently have I discovered the greatest opponent I have is myself. How can I become a better follower of Christ? With Christ's help against myself. How will my writing improve? Practice against my apathy or busyness. How can I be, in my day-to-day, a better person? I must model and remodel myself in the likeness of Yeshua.

It is these battles which captivate me, for they are timed. And I either lose, or I must set rules that allow victory. Consider an instance. Let's say you are addicted to a drug - morphine or something. As part of the scenario, you must carry a quantity of the drug with you at all times, and it must be accessible at any juncture for immediate use. How long can you pit yourself against that, when everything within rages to utilize that resource? This is an extreme example, but the idea is simple enough: if the ability to fail is consistently tempting you, like cookies you are not supposed to eat, sitting on your desk all day, how long can you hold out? These are the trials of the self. Motivation to avoid lying, to avoid pride, to avoid anger, and bitterness and cynicism and perniciousness. These tools lay at your disposal all the time. Motivating the self to not only avoid them, but actively seek good things - reading scripture, growing in faith, praying, loving, honesty. It is a titanic battle waged within. 

Then there are external battles as well. Motivation regarding writing and journaling and maintaining a social life throughout all these things when November comes around. This is my current skirmish. I know I'm about to disappear from the social sphere. I won't have as much time for journaling, for blogging, for writing poetry, for reading everything, for friends, for anything except novel writing and the extra writing I've assigned myself. It's a bit intimidating. It's time.

I'm frightened, sitting in the middle of perfect possibility

~Jane Kenyon

My spirit battles storming waves

drifting long at sea

Aqua eyes the catalyst

On a night smelling of jasmine tea

and snowflakes

Warmth in blankets, lamps alight

Pens inked and prepped
I write

This next month is going to pick up steam. I'm fighting the balancing act of novel writing, poetry writing, reading, friends, and work. Let the games begin.

Juniper Hills and a Sagely Brush

When you build your house on babel, before long, all your friends are gone. And none spoke your language anymore. Then, whether mystery or history come knocking at your door, open. To a world most musical at dusks and dawns, alighting and rising as the butterfly's song. Quick, silver as mercurial pools, your eyes flicker and flit in lovely apprehension. Touch, and you'll ripple the lake-heart of calm, pierce the surface tension. Dainty the dawn, dulcet the dusk, halcyon the heavens between. Patient the whisper, shy as the fawn, the susurrus of wind new life brings.


Driving into the mountains last friday, the sun began to set. The steep cones of central oregon appear as shadow jaws against the horizon, and the ghastly remnants of trees are ashen memories of forest fires, crowding the hills like whispering ghosts, dull-eyed and plaintive. Charcoal lines of distant slopes form a sinister skyline underneath the golden moon, low and heavy over the treetops. The grasping trees stoop over the road, and I feel both protected or assaulted by their leaning limbs.
A chill on the air smells of winter, carrying a biting breathlessness and a hint of juniper, intoxicating as gin on the wind, greeting our entrance into Bend, the high desert.
Where man began and nature ends, I know not. Perhaps man's is a tentative hold on that sagebrush land, rugged lovely standoff against those volcanic sisters whose tempers may erupt on a slight. Patience, I'll linger not long. I'll miss the leaves and trees of my land, though this sweet juice of juniper pacifies my soul and imparts its wisdom - a brush with sage.

Turn my glass soul upside-down, gentle snow comes falling down
a bus, a school, a one house town
a child skips 'long an empty street,
snow builds high around his feet
before a while my crystal soul, is silent
silent
and winter full
place me down and soon I'll be, a dust reminder of frozen things
timeless attic memories, a photo treasure
misplaced mysteries

Weekend in Bend

I'm not particularly a fan of purchasing things. The only thing worse than buying things, is buying things for myself. Unfortunately, I dropped my laptop this weekend. It was almost 4 years in living, and,well, I'm sad it's gone, but things happen. I went to Bend, Oregon this weekend, and it was beautiful.


Fall flowers blooming on trees
in shapes of leaves, falling
Penciled shadows pantomime
a skyline, a mountain, the shadow lines
of a forest ash-white, ember scathed
rigid peaks are fossils of fire forgot
toothsome and proud,
a looming, jagged shark's maw
open onto plains of juniper,
sagebrush greens and desert browns
sisters sinister three, grinning dang'rously

I'm super exhausted. I broke my laptop, played board games all weekend with marvelous guys, ate too many silly, salty snacks, slept less than ten hours (it doesn't help when everyone goes to bed at 3 and you wake at 7. Or earlier), drove into the mountains and out, and probably will not have the opportunity to see A this weekend as hoped. On top of that, J and S got engaged (hooray!), NaNoWriMo approaches, tomorrow is work without a lappy. The ice is thin heading into this week, as a turbulence of emotions patters my emotional shields in devastating volleys. But it's a good sort of emotional barrage.

Oh, how my fight fails me now. I've run on endorphins long enough, and my hope-adrenaline drops like a rock from heaven, burning and crashing its way towards a salty ocean. Hopefully someone gets a wish out of this, if not me.

I fell in love with the distance

I fell in love with the distance,
of far off planes and places -
the honey beneath a dusking horizon,
wine wisdom wry in deep pools.
Lavender mountains like frozen fountains
frosted and wrapped in clouds.
fly fast, free birds,
witness the tides in the skies
join the ocean;
follow the sun-dive west,
or the full moon crest from sickle seas.
the heavens fill with sheep, lions, serpents -
orion hunting each.
behold the beryls of the night
watch they now our far-off plight
and slumber merry still.

Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty

What is beautiful? You are. The most beautiful.

I read, once, about how in China for a long time (almost a thousand years), culture valued the smallness of feet as standard for beauty.  At a young age, the girl's feet were bound, and toes were frequently broken in an attempt at inhibiting growth. The whole process is quite gruesome, and wikipedia discusses it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_binding) in miserable detail. All delicate attraction was tiny feet.
I have naturally small feet - not a benchmark of beauty in America - and I don't believe my beauty, or the beauty of anyone, is wholly reliant upon the the size of feet, the symmetry of face, stars in the eyes, in cheekbones high and prominent, chest, legs, or hairy heads. Of course I believe in a beauty of the heart, the spirit, the mind - or want to believe. Well, at the end of the day, at least you are beautiful.
I'm a perfectionist. I'm not perfect. What is beautiful? Sometimes I catch myself thinking beauty is everything in a bubble around me, exclusive.

no sound falls from the morning sky
no sound wrinkles the evening pool
~ Maya Angelou

There is so much that needs doing. Loving, living so tightly bound, around our hearts, ours and mine. A diffidence of difference, where's the line? The eager ember golden coin of sunlight burrows through these blinds, today's surprise, I suppose. Where are the grey skies? The writing weather, wherefore art thou, Raineo?
I'm trekking into the center of Oregon, tomorrow and this weekend. I've made posts nearly every day for a long while. It's strange to be missing some. Maybe I'll sneak some in.

rose petals falling
beneath an autumn red moon
will not adorn your unmarked graves
~ Maya Angelou

I'm full to bursting with life and everything. Struggling to learn things that I'm naturally lousy at, and suffuse them through my livelihood, and then pulling off the balance act of community that ever threatens to tip one way or the other. There's a gray pallor over the heart, a fractal of cumulus clouds with rains and sun-breaks. The ventricles central still hammer the same, the anvil forge beating a rhythm of being, crimson beneath skies of slate, and blue oceans of spent life-rivers, trudging the waterways. Full to bursting, my lungs say, but it's a contented burgeoning, a joy contained that ticks time behind a cage. Beat along, beat alone, beat a tone of silent survival beneath the dingy day. For twilight, well, may steal your breath away.

Life is a broken-winged bird ~ Hughes

Today was Maya Angelou day. As a poet (though I'm not one yet), I appreciate the visceral roots from which her poetry derives. She's fiery, angry, ardent, singing, and screaming loud as a caged bird for the plight of her people and others similarly caged. Other times, she's passionate with the power of love.

the free bird thinks of another breeze / and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees

but a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams 

his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream 

his wings are clipped and his feet are tied

so he opens his throat to sing

we grow despite the horror that we feed on our own tomorrow

poignant as rolled eyes, sad as summer parasols in a hurricane

I also read some more cummings. I can understand the countless years of study and practice of poetry. I'm impatient, so I'm reading hundreds, maybe a thousand poems a day (slight embellishment. I think I actually read ~200-300 today at least), and although I rarely linger long on any single one, for analysis or careful dissection, just now, I'm learning what I sought.

Today, I noticed a trend of birdsong in my reading of poetry. Maya Angelou frequently references birdsong as a motif of freedom; cummings in a similar fashion; Wendell Berry often as a naturalistic leaning or as a chord in the agrarian song-life; Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda and Emily Dickinson all include birdsong in quite a number of their poems as well, from what I recall. Those in the city view it as freedom from it; though in the country as their lot and pride - an exemplar of their chosen life. Sometimes, it is even contrasted with more obnoxious bird calls, such as the crows cawing. 

What to write today?

You cannot drop what's never held. The sleep-silent window mirrors - if the future, it won't tell - but leaves insipid tastes. The past's present, present's past, and heaven's hammer strikes the tolling bell, persistent as the permanence of time. Truly, when gazing into the sun, shadows fall behind. Upon a vitrine, framed to dusty fate, does it still beat? Mornings, when eastern sun streaks through yon window, even abandoned glass shines, reflecting grainy lines, beating light against the wall. Then, scraping open this grumpy display, wiping away the grime of time, you're perched on the mantle now, heart of mine, or under. Pulse with the rhythm of fire. 

The beginning of writing stories is upon me. I'm not sure to what capacity this writing, here, will be accomplished in the coming month. But we'll see. I made a bet with myself, so I shall continue. I always win, and lose, against myself. This will be no different. Back to reading Maya Angelou to close the night. 

Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

~ Langston Hughes

Sometimes

Who am I? Sometimes

While magnolia tides shimmer with the smiles of the sea

A scimitar moon sings with the power of wheat;

tiny boats like snowdrops through the ocean drift

cupped in the mighty waves

the sky's eyes breathe fire and my heart's kindling -

jaguar of my spirit stirs 

and leaps

into the running water seams of these twilight weaves

whose wolf howls and owls hoot thrice

wherefore art thou now, oh brother, oh love?

quick, before too long

locking dried petals into a walnut box

redolent of east autumn sunrise

and dizzying honeyed saffron

treasure of memories, gift to the lady of waters

this burden is heavier floating free

Today was Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda day. I admit a fascination and love for Pablo Neruda, and an indifference towards Walt Whitman. Oh, Whitman definitely possesses a turn of phrase and a knack for vital, almost blood-thirsty writing that lacks in my own. But somehow he manages to make poetry long-winded, almost tedious. There is something impatient in the reading, or too patient in the writing. Maybe I read too nearly to Pablo Neruda, whose writing inspired me greatly.

Some lines I wrote down as I read them:

cold flower heads are raining over my heart

ay, love is a journey through waters and stars, through suffocating air, sharp tempests of grain

carnal apple, woman filled, burning moon, dark smell of seaweed, crush of mud and light

full of the voltage of the sea's movements

...to that form that love carved in the guitar

so that the waves can complete themselves in the sky

It seems like every poem is charged with their own "voltage" like the sea's motions.  Again I wish that I could read the original works and understand the nuance of his language. I understand enough Spanish to know that I know too little. 

It's been a day of distance, of separation. I can't remember if I've ever suffered a headache, but what I sometimes experience is strange nauseating "distance vision". Everything, from the pen in my hand to the doorknob only paces away or the book I hold in my hand, everything appears as though it were far, far away, well beyond reach.  That's what today has felt like, as though seeing things, I could not interact with them. Difficult days (S: looking at you), unusual environment, unsolvable problems, confusing imagery, brokenness of people, losing - I can't seem to win, or even compete in the game, sometimes. None of these are my problems, and I can't seem to help with them. It is a devastating separation. This is such a day (when the chinks in my legerdemain make clear the smoke and mirror).

What do I do on such days? I've no solutions. Sometimes, I write until the pages bleed through and, closing my eyes, I wait until my blindness dissipates. Sometimes, I stare at my hands and wonder if they are mine, or if that changes things. Sometimes, I wish. Sometimes I win anyway.

Wherein I write embarrassing poems in my sleep...

... and make up for it by finishing with legitimate poetry.

August is a fickle season, a human season. Summer simmers and winter shivers, and spring's a night owl in the morning. Fall is that troubled teen: graceful, violently shifting, whimsical, moody, a vibrant, fragile life. When the tears of trees trouble the earth in crimson sheets and cotton clouds sheepishly graze the sky, and the birds skedaddle south or wriggle deeper into their nests, the cork of fall from summer severs us, and our lives flare into a temper of pigments. We are a glass beauty, angelic, translucent, brittle as first frost beneath smoky stars. We are fall.


At some point in my life, I developed a habit of waking in the cradle of night for a bathroom break. During these instances, I write down whatever is on my mind, briefly, on my phone. At first, I was reluctant to own a smart phone. Given no choice, I've discovered some very attractive features (taking easy notes in the dark). Most often, my "stroke of genius" at 3 in the morning is not worth contemplating in the morning. Occasionally, I remember dreams, and those I frequently write down as inspiration, and avenues into my subconscious.


If you send a string, I'd follow its lead
where'er my heart it may bring
through a whisper, if a light
into darkness beyond night
seas a storm may rend asunder
yet tarry not the tides
for whose smile I climb
up mountains high
pluck
a flower from the gods
or swim up the styx
for a momentofyourtime
I'll surrender all of mine


About as raw a poem as could possibly be. Even as I transfer it from my phone into this blog, I yearn more than anything to edit and prettify the rawness. I probably will, eventually. But I don't often sleep write poetry. You know how it is when you've committed so much time into a practice, habit, activity that your dreams and thoughts are rife with that activity? Like putting a puzzle together so many hours that, even sleeping, you are clicking pieces together in your dreams. Or reading a book hour after hour or studying for a test, and as you lie in bed, your fingers are twitching as they highlight another line, pen another reminder, or your eyes scan left to right and invent new stories for your subconscious reading pleasure. Maybe I read too much poetry these last couple of days, and now my subconscious tries, desperately, to formulate imagery from the sanctums of sleeping story. If so, I hope it continues.

Eventually, I'll be capable of poetry (or some semblance thereof). Nothing's so poetic as the palette of autumn




Under the Harvest Moon

  by Carl Sandburg
   Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.

   Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.


And a little John Donne Holy Sonnet 14 (always a favorite):
Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

If day has to become night, this is a beautiful way (more cummings)

What if mountains filled the valleys into flatness eternal? No sunsets over the cresting hills from the rich troughs of the valley. Driving down the back roads and up hills towards distant learning, a didactic repose, the trees form a tunnel of red-yellows, and leaves layer the road in a carpet for kings, regal red. I'm not the king these trees shed into death for, nor he who resurrects green come spring.
I'm not a naturally forthright personality. Up through high school, I lived under the impression that all sympathy I'd experienced, outside my family, was counterfeit. Not just sympathy, but curiosity. When someone asked, "how are you doing?" I responded "I'm doing well", because it is the quickest, surest way to countermeasure interrogation missiles. And that's how I saw them. Not as loving queries or curiosity, but as time wasting inquiries of the vein, "it's really pouring outside, eh?" That's hardly even a question at all.
I started writing about the same time the fortress of my personality cracked as jericho from friends hooting and trumpeting about the walls. Even so, I still naturally conceal myself behind these characters. Even in my journal, my private writings, I don't allow my writing to expose my inner dialectics. This has changed, gradually, but what is there to fear so much from these things?
I was walking around today, touching the bark of the trees and running my fingers along the leaf-veins and needles: sugar maple, japanese maple, white fir, quaking aspen, dogwood, cherry, apple, hazelnut.  Mixed, the days are, uncertain of the season. Or maybe uncertainty is the season, from ghoulishly beautiful silver days of striated (nimbus) clouds and stormy popcorn (cumulus) clouds, or sunny cloudless skies wide as the eyes of eternity. A diffidence in days I mimic in my musings.

1. It dived like a fish, but climbed like a dream
2. Whatever we lose (like a you or a me), it's always ourselves we find in the sea
3. (and feeling:that if day  
has to become night  


this is a beautiful way) 
- ee cummings

I've been on an ee cummings frenzy lately. I went to the library and powells, and waltzed my way through as much poetry as I might manage: Frost, Cummings, Wendell Berry, Keats, Yeats, Carl Sandburg, Maya Angelou. I think my next free weekend I'll likely do the same. I'm dragging myself inch by inch into a poetic world, but my self fights every step. I don't interact with writing in an intuitive manner. I'm not an intuitive person, which inhibits my art a great deal. I'm a Bean, not an Ender.  If someone enters the room and leaves, I already cannot remember what they wore, what their hair color was. I'll remember everything they said, and the effects on my mentality of the gestures they made, even when I cannot remember the gestures. I'll remember each analysis of conversational pathing I invented as they spoke, each deft manipulation. I'd remember how often they smiled, but not whether they had braces or not, so intrinsic my disability.
Hence, my weakness with poetry and poetic inventiveness. You must integrate yourself in intuitive leaps and bounds into the world encompassing. You must spirit your mind away, and linger only with the heart sometimes. You must feel beyond the boundaries and fly into the dreams of colors and shapes, the very platonic forms behind reality. Poetry is phantasmagoria, shadow shapes on the wall - what do you see?

Closes and Opens

A spectre haunts my frailty, a ghost I've forged of devilry. With dreams, awake, entwined, cold as listless lies and lives, phantom echoes of ancient angers arrive and cruelly wave as passersby, then smile. The fellowship's shattered, into ashes thick in black winds. Every cat's tail of nine slicing through my mind leaves paw prints of crimson mysteries behind.  Nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals / the power of your intense fragility. Lovely letters, in the dark night storms of survival, when I've jettisoned my soul, and dreams die derelict on ocean's floor, while others simply shipwrecked float as flotsam food for fishes - can you hand me the rope? You are waiting for another, my bathybic apparition, no matter, dear. Watch me flounder here. Salty eyes flood unnoticed in the sea, married to my maritime eventuality. This is a sodden and sorrowful swan song, as your look lingers across another open ocean, not mine, with spring sky eyes and stolen time. There's love in those eyes, not for me, not for me. And it anchors deep within my veins.

There's gold in grey days and silver in the skies. The sunny rays are forsythia smiles and the trees marigold denials of icy chains. The purple gates of dawn blossom wide, and an old locomotive thunders across the heavens, leaving billowing trails in cumulus piles.  What if a much of a which of a wind. Here is the rain awaited by leaves with all their trees and by forests with all their mountains. People stopping and listening - when the sea's overhead and below, where to go?
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd sand
Listen, as the finches flit and sing, the newts wiggle beneath the drops of rain which plunk against the lake-drum. Pay close mind to the vessel cutting gently through the loose-leafed wine of this intoxicating inland sea, above which the hooting owl with offset eyes swoops into the underbrush with frightening speed, and the goats clopping up the hillside stones bah and bleat away this autumn squall. Nothing so beautiful as sunlight and rain tricking light into rainbows across the lake and between the trees. There's love here, quite as strong as the infinite, beating brisk and bright.





"Do you believe in dichotomy?"
"I do, and I don't."


somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
~ ee cummings

Books, Names, Things

I've encompassed myself with literature. I'm double stacking my bookshelves because, until I own a house, it makes little sense buying more bookcases without anywhere worth putting them. Actually, this is one of my favorite and least favorite aspects of Oregon. Powells is awesome. For the last several weekends, I've invested a little time in visiting the Beaverton branch and studying, reading, researching. Powells is a magnificent beast, though beast it is. With such a marvelous new and used bookstore stamping its colossal footprint into the valley, how can smaller bookstores compete? Countless customers flood into the Portland Powells every day, and, though quantitatively less, Beaverton Powells exhibits the same draw (without the intimidating city aspects of parking and entry/exit).
But in the surrounding cities and towns, the quantity and quality of everyday bookstores feels almost non-existent. This is one of the draws of Washington. Half-Price Books was nearly a second home for me, and the Redmond and Sammamish libraries offered vast collections of books for perusal, and an incredible system for inter-library requests in the greater King County region (Seattle, Redmond, Bellevue and a whole host of great libraries besides - though Seattle eventually decided to be lame). Where I am situated in Oregon, counties are bordering on all sides, and each neighboring town seems to claim its own library system. It makes for a miserable me when wanting access to all the vastness of literature immediately.

Erhem. Anyway...

I've little time left. November approaches in tumultuous bounds and my frozen fingers fret over story strings, but my rhythm's off-beat and my prose's pitch poorly sings - my muse's gut requires replacing and a fine-tuned vacation. The only reliable aspect is the metronome clicking in my head, reminding me that time ticks forward inexorably. It's the names, there are too many. Characters dreaming and flying in season, capturing a magic and the mystery of life unto their own. My creativity insufficiently breathes their dusty ink into life. Then the trees: the sugar maples and japanese hedge, the round-lobed leaves of oaks and gyro-copter seeds of maples, the rust hues of cedar and the deceptive camouflage of shaking aspens among the birch - how can I ever remember their names, Old Man Willow?
The flowers, oh so many flowers. Gallant sunflowers, fragile snowdrops, intrepid trilliums, dichotomous roses, delicate daises, gentle germaniums and fragrant violets, lurid and voluptuous tulips, splayed lilies. Would that I might taste with my toes like the butterflies, and see in so many colors that the flowers are a forest, a coral sea of colorful creativity, where each flower paints an invitation to sensory ecstasy.  Would I were a bumbling bee, capturing the world in ultraviolet, where whites are blues and nectar ambrosia is a visually euphoric entreaty of blooming delicacy.
And what of the stars stories and names? Of Cassiopeia vainly boasting in her chair, or ursa major, glancing at his cousins below, bafflingly bereft of tail, or Orion shaking his shield and sword, or bow, and hunting the with the likes of Nimrod. The wind shivers and drags us into the mountains whose names I cannot recall, their silvery peaks smiling as the gods teeth, as a fiery chariot drags that unnamed beacon across the blue vastness of the heavens.
I cannot even remember the animals: the black-tailed deer, the sly bobcat, the eager raccoon, sly as a burglar, the mountain jay and the vexatious starlings tunneling into roof slats, the cougar, the crafty coyote, the industrious beaver, the scampering squirrel, the chattering chipmunks, praying with their hands cutely clasped, the mantis, praying a different prayer of predatory efficiency, the dragonfly with rainbow wings.
Hopefully, if nothing else, I can remember the name of wisdom.

Adventures are coming, distant and many, and I'll be seeking the intricate naming of many things: the touch-smell of the grey wolves racing through alpine woods, the graceful wings of the nighttime sky on the tops of mountains, the coinage of the sun on the steppe, the shifting of the seas of crimson sands.
I'm full of half-thoughts, now and always.

Thoughtful Thursdays

Blossoms of bliss breeze into burgeoning mists, billowing the day away. The horizon's a sunset lei, all carnation floret and orchid violet, a concealed twilit sky - cosset me in, oh, blanket of grey. Jasmine and trillium score my dreams in musical white and gaudy greens. In the morning, only wisp tails remain, ghosts aghast at blooming dawns, and fleeing, fleeting as ballooning spiders on gossamer trails.

Thursdays, Thor's days, though  scarcely as galvanic or striking as lightning, occasionally not unlike lying between a god's hammer and anvil. Today's music was broken, dissonant, merely a noise of decibels ground out in hours and ticking time.  A pandora's box of living, a burning punishment for a theft of fire.

The mornings are chilly, though the sun still slants through the sky. Fall is more agreeable when enamored with the symbols than the inclement weather, and expecting chills that eventually transform blankets into the womb of dreams, a warmth I'd rather never leave. Waking in the mornings, greeted by a night still charged with darkness, where is diligence and motivation? My scrawlings in my journal tortured and illegible, like crow claws dragged through ink. Why is a raven like a writing desk? Nevermore.

Tomorrow is my little brother's birthday. Happy birthday, little fellow. I'm ever praying that you turn out greater than I, faithful and true, honest and kind, a gentleman and a scholar, a believer in great and good dreams. May your tomorrow and all your tomorrow's tomorrows possess an irrevocable destination without falter. When you misstep, learn still greater things from these than even your triumphs, for this is the human experience. Test boundaries, for many exist only in imagination, and beyond those fences, illumination resides. Be ever wise.

Here are a couple of quotes for thorough Thoreau Thursdays.
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.

What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.

I just wanted to write something worthwhile, and sleep isn't forthcoming. My muse is shivering and huddled near my heart, and my fingers are still typing. Sometimes, I just can't write anything I like. Tonight is such a night. I drank ginger beer (no alcohol... just ginger. who do you think I am?), ate stir fry, read, and sat before my computer, tabula rasa. I'm not thinking - am I,still? Oh, you silly sophist brain, sleep. Maybe tomorrow you can write.

Season of Senses

Sometimes the senses are strongest in the swinging seasons. When the earth slingshots around and a quickening growth or decline of sunlit hours describes the dreidel wobble of the earth. When the greens grow or crinkle, when rains drizzle down the branches into nutrient-rich earth, as chimneys spew smoke and pines music the air, as dogwoods die in crimson, sugar maples in orange-red, broad-leaf maples into yellow-orange, and japanese maples brush purple, while the larch trees transform into goldenrod yellow, painting the mountainsides in hearth-fire. The noxious fumes of city factories ripen in these seasons, bleeding into the stones beneath our feet.
Already, the morning condensation settles along the windows with an illusory icy sheen. Even as fall slowly settles, a wintry breeze promises cold, and not long waiting.

Which of us, in his ambitious moments, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical, without rhyme and without rhythm, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of the psyche, the prickings of consciousness?
~Charles Baudelaire

Willingly blinded, I minded not my senses, not my memories: the scented trees, autumn breeze, patterned paintings of passing time.  Beards of fire burden the trees, the pond cries reflected tree tears and broods on blue; a giant fowl sits over the sky, incubating, and its nest of branches and fog is a ghastly ghost nest, fledglings shivering beside fires. Glance away, and I remember not Fall's chai tie and patchy pumpkin sweaters, his shaggy hair and shredded trousers. A slate gatsby hat settles atop his head, and he limps, his disposition darker every day. I recall not, for my perception rests, and wakes only blind, now and again.

Meteor Shower?

Vulcanus burns in my gut, Mercury wings through my veins, Minerva crafts in my mind, Morpheus, control thy my dreams? The mountain's heart boils and beats, smoke rising in balloon plumes. Sandy crags melt into obsidian glass. The earth's gorge rises. Tempt me, tell me - drawing lines into circles without beginnings, endings, or only beginnings, endings? Inquiries without satisfaction: was the wind brisk enough today? Were the clouds sufficiently grey? Do turtles even enjoy child's play? Madness, elucidating smells only in colors, sculpting poetry of a headache, convincing whales they might fly, if God draws that square circle.
It is not, it is not what it is.

This night is a mad night, a sleepless night. Words tumble past mythologies past vagaries, sweeping into dust devils of thought, mirages. I imagine the northern lights, metallic, plasma dance in fickle pastels and galvanic, impatient, shimmering curtains, as thoughts, leaping across my mind like these meteors, streaking as searing lines across this night. But gone! gone! Clouds cover my conscious, and ideas are skipping stones bouncing into sand, never sinking into those silver patined clouds of architect. I suppose I'll watch the shooting stars instead, and wish just one more time.

Alabaster and Birch

If the world were etched in alabaster, tinged only as bleached bones, might I know the difference? Could I imagine colors if none such existed? Are there rainbows of reds, if only my eyes could distinguish those tiny stripes, dissecting each hue into a new dimension of flushes and shades and brushes beyond what my vision perceives. What of touch or smell? Smells of fear, love, sweat and must, salt and sulfur, metallic and rust - what layers doth my nose not pierce, my fingers not feel as I trace each digit across lightly grained wood and the ridges and tales seeping into stone like palm lines and annular rings, storying of fires and storms, sunny seasons and pressures of the earth and waters. Might I touch a stone and find my heart broken from its tragedies and travails. Might I unravel the dreams of trees?


http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20732

I was reading various artists of poetry this morning, and stumbled across this piece by Carl Sandburg. Honestly, I think this piece is a bit brilliant. The poetry embedded carefully in exquisite prose is a marvel, and his execution of color and imagery carries me deep into the forest, the wilderness itself.


A surreptitious delight shrouded in brilliant white, a calvacade of birch, upright and majestic, and slippered in lava leaves. Wind brushes along the path, sweeping ember sparks into the air, crinkling autumn stirred aloft for brief moments of twisting flight, as eddies of breeze whirlwind the fallen leaves from the path and deposit them besides. Promenade por Paradiso. Smells of birch and lichens blend with redolent tastes of pine and violets, and the sound-song sings of the crinkling leaves beneath yellowing maple trees. Is this a temple or a time, this chill forest fire, blazing burrs of Autumn rattling my bones. When the moon's yellowed as ancient parchment, the sky's denim blue covers these sanguine woods, fae light conceives a primal world, precious as eve's garden, and no less silent.

Phantasmagora #2

I'm a smoke machine behind a screen

what do you see?

Is it demons dancing devilish dreams?
Forgotten faces from maddening scenes?

It is the phantasmagora of your mind

what you see is what you'll find 

in me, and you, and you to me

I'm the geis of your crystal ball

Predicting your destiny

All mist and mirrors

I dreamed I missed my own birthday, and a month passed before I realized it. Everyone was shocked and subsequently upset at my lack of concern, and strove in convincing me that my neglect was appalling, and must be remedied immediately. I like birthdays, just not my own. Or, rather, there are aspects that I find tiring regarding my birthday, though I enjoy celebrating my friend's or family's birthdays. It is my little brother Sam's birthday this week - how he's grown since I left home. It's been almost 9 years since I last lived at home permanently, and he's moved from 3rd grade into his senior year of school. You can't tickle a senior in high school, or pick them up and swing them around as they giggle in glee. Senior boys don't giggle with glee much anymore. 

He's as tall as me, now, and I may be the shortest of the children before long. At least mother takes the cake on shortest in the family. There is some solace in that.
What I dislike about my own birthday is that it doesn't seem tailored to me, but tailored to a preconceived perception of what birthdays must entail. My mother asked me today what I wanted for Christmas. I said nothing, and she said, "you'll think of something by the time Christmas comes along." She loves giving, and can't understand that what I actually want, and have always wanted, was nothing. Au contraire, if I had my druthers, instead of receiving love on my birthday, I'd be sharing it. If there was a party, it would be my treat to all my friends. If there was a dinner, I'd cover all the expenses, just to gift everyone else. It seems such a strange thing, but this ideal is stapled into my psyche as the perfect birthday: the one where I bless everyone else who has suffered me a long time, and stuck with me through storm and sun.

It was a quiet day, today. The roommates were all busy, and it seemed no friends were available, which made for a day of rest. I ended up hanging out with friends anyway, but I did manage some rest first. This weekend has been quite fantastic. I got the rest I needed, hung out with friends, went to a wedding, ate delicious food, watched dazzling dancing, ran around outside, kicked around a soccer ball, treated a friend to dinner and discussed our lives, hopes, dreams, destinations. I got to read, write, drink tea, watch the purple-bellied clouds chase the sun out from on high, and a sherbet sunset in an apricot sky. I saw people I've missed, and talked to people I've not seen in some time. I wrote a letter, shared meals, listened to moving music, and talked with my mother and father (they both answered the phone at the same time. Quite cute) about the approaching seasons and times. I'm extraordinarily happy, so I wrote this melancholy poem stream-of-consciousness to represent my joy. It's quite terrible. I blame the macabre chapter of the book I was reading, but I know it isn't entirely to blame. Sometimes I write saddest poetry when at my most pleased. I understand myself better at these times. Or I'm hiding a sadness unknown to me. Probably both.

Lines in your hands reveal peach-pain webs
Spider of time, what anguish have weft
Patent divine, when choice is bereft
Our rivers of life, eddies and ebbs
Speak sister time, does love quite exist?
Palms gently shudder, an asp's poison lips
Fangs sinking deep, bleak destiny sips
Close nect'rine palm, a love hopeless fist
Faithless dear child, what melancholy this?
Confess empty silence, my peace have you cleft?
My only survival, now plainly theft
Sunder me now, from sentiment's kiss
Gently lay down this romance and mirth
Luckless I've found, nothing of worth

Kerberos

A cave of charred shadows and smoldering half-shapes writhing on the walls. Its lofty ceiling stretches beyond the heights of imagination and the darkness swallows it, and though the room is large, an overwhelming claustrophobic sensation passes through me in waves. The ground beneath my knees, where I kneel like he who scoops water in his hands, is a harsh, grey granite, unyielding and gravelly, biting into my legs wherever they meet. And though I would stand - oh, gods, I would do anything to stand - it is beyond my power.
Before me sits a monstrous creature, full of the monstrous hate of primal wolves, and the puissance of the gods. With three heads and imposing wolfish form, it blocks the exit, the bridge into hope, and snarls, growls, bares its teeth.

Dismal den of cerberus
Plaintive I beseech thee thus
Permit me pray to leave disgrace
To hopes past pains and fire's place

Ah, then riddle one must answer thee
To loose thee from Persephone
One snapped, one grins, one speaks plainly
Three the heads of Cerb'rus be

I accept, great and gracious one
Puzzle me quick and let's be done

Then cleared their throats now did the three
And spoke in chorus bass deeply

I journey only east to west
Always seeming to travel east
I come and go and without he
who flees when I at once arrive
You might never know to see me
Wherever my journeys take me
I'll always return full circle

....
Tiny houses you keep not clean
Without windows, rooms, kitchens, floors
No place for friends, family, pets
Only rest, without blankets, beds
......

Committing yourself to a schematic or verse inhibits change. Once you divert from the course you set in motion, the reader can feel jarred, like sleeping in the back of a pleasant car ride, and suddenly you are off-roading, and their lack of seatbelt jostles them all across the back seat. They are not going to be pleased. I'm leaving behind a slew of unfinished entries, and sometime I hope to return and finish them. I'm finding less time for full-scale blogging, and refuse to relinquish journaling time in lieu of online writings. Plus, life has been bipolar busy, and then not busy, and then busy again, in a roller coaster adventure that leaves me running around frantically, resting, then leaping into action once more.
It's a good life, but a hectic one, at times. I realize that sometimes my blogs experience their own little roller coasters of emotion. It's strange that sometimes when I'm happiest, I write sad blogs, and sometimes when I'm saddest, I write happy ones. I don't experience a great depth of sadness in much of my life. I tend to be relatively easy going, and simple peace and living and friends keep me joyful. I think sometimes that I understand sadness more fully on the outside, and happiness more completely when staring at it from the depths of the well. It is this external evaluation that permits me melancholy poetry in times of incredible joy, and a diligence to produce joyful poetry when the world turns upside-down and it seems everything leaves me behind, unnoticed. What a strange phenomenon, but it holds quite true in my writings, even in my more personal journal writings. I'm ever striving for joy, though I still wish to portray the entirety of emotional strata in my human experience. Sometimes, I can only do so when sitting on the other side of the valley. The grass isn't always greener on the other side, but sometimes you only notice it when you've moved past it.
Right now, I'm not moving anywhere. Kerberos is in my way, and my Daedelus wings will not save me now.

Icarus

This is your fault. Can you expect me to pine after you when we never met? No, foolish... You've stirred the waters, and I no longer see my reflection. But when the mud settles, again I'll see this face, again I'll ask all the painful questions. Did you save me. hurt me, ask me bitter questions, salt my open wounds? I'm invincible, invincible in my isolation. Not your fault, not mine. But I've realized the rivers eternal only slide though and past me, and I cannot alter the course.

So, goodbye, goodbye, fly free, in the chrysalis I built for me.
And when your butterflying high, I'll watch my love soar free and die.
Icarus, your sin is mine.
I flew in pride too high, too high, and the sun I loved set my wings afire,
chastised do I fall.

Regression

I was having a similar experience as yesterday until the just this evening: so many hurting friends, and nothing I seem capable of doing that helps. I'm going to steal his words, and hope he'll forgive me, for he succinctly stated what was stampeding across my feelings yesterday:
To those of you in pain and darkness (you know who you are), I just wanted to remind you of my love and care for you. If I could, I'd take us all away to some island with fresh fruit and clean waters where it is always sunny, and we could all rest and recover. For now, just remember that you are not alone.
~CB

Yesterday, I dreamed of a regression of time, where each of those I loved was losing years, dragged backwards in lifespan. I've never studied dream interpretations myself, though I find them an interesting insight into our psyche. Often times, we encode cultural symbology into our subconscious, and our dreams dredge them up in fascinating ways. What could regression of time mean? Often times it entails a pulling back, a retreating into self and a new start. It is like a self-autumn and winter, a crinkling, collapsing, dying, and hopeful rebirth - a metamorphosis.  I'm collapsing into myself like a caterpillar, praying that my next instance, I gain some wings.
The idea with the theme of regression is this concept of losing the current, losing the present and future. It's as if everything and everyone is leaving you behind, and you regress into yourself in a defensive gesture, and prepare for blooming a second time.

Spider imagery tends to indicate danger and manipulation. I'm not certain what my self-conscious implies here, but I suspect I wouldn't explain it if I knew.

The incorrect labels. I believe this is subconscious indication that I am looking at things incorrectly, that my perception of details in some aspects is wrong. The fact that the labels were placed there by opposing forces, invasive forces, indicates that I feel manipulated or deceived in some fashion. Also, the fact that I understand that these labels, stickers, signs on the trees are misguiding me represents that, maybe, I've always known they were incorrect, but allowed myself to be swayed. Interesting. Not a dream telling of my greatest days.

Garden themes: I had to look this one up, and I did look up the other ones as well because I find the study of dreams interesting, if sometimes suspicious. I sometimes despise such easy entries into my psyche. But here I am, prying these thoughts open and dissecting and classifying each one, giving my subconscious an identity. For garden, contains a sense of diligence. It's a dream and an actuation of belief, a realization of faith. The garden in my dreams was not defined, and could also imply a continued effort, a need to continue in care-taking, weeding, nurturing.

City

I'm a country child. I was born with a backyard, a garden, a large maple tree and a collection of birch trees, and all the space for running around an energetic boy needs. Eventually, we moved across the country, from mid-west chills and humid heats into precipitation and less cloying heat. We lived in a crazy house with an epic backyard, my favorite backyard of all time. We had a deck on stilts with stairs leading onto a hill that sloped down towards a creek. Then the backyard sloped steeply up towards a rickety wooden fence with planks missing (perfect for scampering out of the backyard as a shortcut to the high school soccer fields) The tiny creek was a boy's wonder: frogs, tiny waterfalls, chemical-orange colors, fizzing waters, eddies, salamanders, the smallest of fish, water-skippers. Because of the steep slope, my parents gardened in terraces, and my father built a series of descending levels on the sunlit side of the backyard. Much of the backyard was shaded by towering pines.
When I was twelve or so, we moved again, to my parent's current residence. The backyard is a forest and a creek meanders through there as well, though getting to it proves a worthy task (we were more stubborn than the brambles - we made paths). I've never lived in the city, in an actual city. I think there is something frightening about cities, and fascinating. The magnitude, the intoxicating and muddled scents that assault the senses, and the claustrophobic and unnatural meshed with the communal and industriousness. It is an ant colony with every ant its own queen, and other queens besides: queens of business, queens of religion and culture, queens of media and industry, queens of monetary value across the spectrum, and queens for each district and home.  How do you make sense of this chaos?
This is what today has been. A city. Friends suffering from hurts, panic, stress, fights, busyness, married life as introverts, changes of churches, difficult work partners, sickness, more sickness, tough job situations, shortages of money, frustrated bosses, hospital visits from fear, anger, frustration, impatience. I woke today and expected a day off, a day of peace, and I received a sensory overload of emotional angst from each friend I visited today, and worse things. It's like visiting a city and encountering a wall of smog that irritates your eyes and burns at your nostrils until you cry. You want to fix the industrial waste flooding the city, want to give life to the trees, blue to the sky and waters, vigor to the zombie-ant-workers shambling down the streets. A tsunami of hurt, and I felt dissected from it, as though I could not pierce the wall and help, only watch as an outsider.
When my friends hurt, I get nauseous. This is most particularly involving fights. When people fight, and my friends are hurt (emotionally, spiritually, physically etc) in the process - whether I am witness or not - my gut gorges on a city of its own, a city of chaos and visceral turmoil. I almost feel physically ill if the anguish is enough, and just lie in my bed praying. I have not felt so for a long time. But tonight, as friends suffer without sabbath at the mercy of endless bleeding days - does it come tonight? Will I sleep, or lay awake and stare at the window, listening to the thoughtless slapping of drops against the glass and screen.
And finally, just finally, the compelling news of the finish line, broken and reddened against the asphalt. I drew this, I think, and I knew this ended here. Too many things, too fast. I wanted one chance, I wanted to help. Is there any possible arc of time where winning was even a remote possibility?
What a night.


From space, the cities are stars, speckling the globe as candles. All these fireflies, street strobe lights -what stories these constellations? A global bioluminescence, transforming this marine world into a glowing jack-o'-lantern, an incensed thurible, a disco ball, spinning and dancing around the sun. I dreamed, last night, of a regression of time. That was my original topic.  These were the notes I wrote at 5 in the morning when I awakened from the dream:
dream: going back in time - everyone is going back in time
elms are labeled (even though they are maples)
tell dad to remind me of a quote I said: apparently my journals traveled through time?
(find the black spider of time)

Time to drink chamomile tea, curl up beneath the blankets, open the window, light a candle, read a book, and drink in the serenity of the world when everyone has retreated into themselves.


I was back home, the luscious greens of summer still wreathing the yard.  The garden clambered up the fences and sprawled across the walkways. But strangers had invaded our yard and placed stickers on everything, weird giant labels on trees, bushes, grass, garden, house, and somehow even the sky - even the clouds were labeled. I glanced at the giant maples towering over the yard, and the giant label read: "elm" in atrocious yellow and black. It was not an elm, it wasn't, it wasn't, I heard voices shouting inside my head. But I could not argue with the strangers - the label transformed the tree into an elm, and the beloved tree was a maple no more.
I didn't want an elm, I wanted a maple. Father came and walked around the yard with me, glancing at each peculiar sticker. Sam came running outside, and we knew something was wrong. He was getting younger. Somehow, we knew that each day, he was losing a year his life. Tomorrow, he would not remember this year, would have lost a year of his life. What would happen when he reached birth? We tried, each following day, to remind him of this, but it worried him so, and we gave up. Soon, he disappeared. Then I started getting younger. I could not stop the regression of time. I wrote things in my journal so that the next day I might remember them, but I forgot about my journal the following day. I thought up a crafty and hopeful phrase, and told my father to always remind me of it, each day until I was no more. I cannot remember the phrase now. It was a blessing, a faith, and a hope where none existed.
We found out, when I was but 10 years old, that a black spider was causing the time regression. My parents, too, now regressed in time. Every day, they lost years, and we only knew through the keeping of journals. We searched and searched, but could not find the black spider that was destroying us. I woke before I was undone, though I remember my parents getting younger faster and faster, almost surpassing me. A frightening vision into my psyche, I suspect, though I awakened with wonder. I remembered thinking that God had given me a phrase to keep me, even in the times where everything appeared inexorably in decline. I almost remember the phrase, the one I implored my father remind me of each day, but come morning I just could not quite recall it.

Where are you going?

It's a question I hear a lot lately, whether internally or from concerned friends. Not that my life's direction appears disastrous, but due to the uncertainty found in a definitive lack of roommates in the upcoming year. Will I stay in Oregon? Will I retreat into Washington, or explore the world, or find new roommates, or buy a house? Just because everyone will be married does not mean my friends have removed themselves from my life, nor I from theirs. But my location is in question.
Still, the quietude, an ambiance not unfamiliar, is daunting, frightful. Part of me greatly desires living alone, knowing that I might accomplish much on silent nights. Another part of me understands that it may destroy me. Where am I going? Where do I go?
I think these questions assault me on these nights with a chill and empty sky, covered with blank clouds, when no one is home and the house is full of dead noise and electronic burrs. Once, twice a week, when silence sounds the gongs inside the wasteland.

I'd live in a log cabin if I could, in a forest by a stream. I'd live in a tiny house with a loft, skylight singing in the rain. I'd live in an abbey on a mountain, a cloister on the river bend, a yurt in the forest, a homestead in the hills. I just want to be with those I love, I guess. For now, that's here I think. Though I would like to see the rest of the world. I suppose I even have the means.