Good Night.

I'm usually exhausted by this time of night, my mental state reduced to a lump of melting wax. I thought my transitory insomnia had dissipated for good, but it strikes again, playing its hand in spades. The mountains of my dreams are skull-capped in white, the trees garlanded with carnation lays, the birds decorating each with the wreaths, singing sweetly. The pond frogs hum the cadence of the morning, bagpipes, yes, that will do nicely. The grey sky drizzles its tears over the valley bowl, tears washing the feet of God, gently perfumed with the redolence of pine and floral exuberance.
Drink in this incense prayer, for mine are none so pretty, none so pretty indeed.
Singing, strumming at this guitar, staring down the flickering candle, wishing my voice wasn't drier than chalky beef jerky with a side of desert sand, raspy as those frogs might be, not in dreams. Ah, my idealism says my flats are just sharps from below, a piquancy of music, perhaps. Judge not my music, prithee, lay your hardness aside and your hearts before, and let's sing. Sing the songs of mountains, hills, deer, love, breeze between the leaves, dewdrops on flower petals, snowflakes on the rabbit's nose, hibernating bear, leaping fish in sunset's last green explosion, lunar eclipse on a night of naked joy, racing faster than every heartbeat. Let's sing, and remember what's good, and what's good night.



Discussions were good, this night. Enneagram conversations; psychology and competition discussions; dialogues over whether pumpkin, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, and apple-cider might mix into something tasty, or disastrous; people discussions. I think I'm fairly consistently learning how full of holes my psyche is. We walked through some patterns of psychological taxonomy, and I found myself nailed on almost every parameter, consistent even to the disregard of classification, the grave weakness shared by this psychological collection, the triumphs and hopes of this diagnosed individual. Yes, stuff me in a box, staple it closed, lock me in an attic, neat and disposed. But while I understood most of these things concerning myself, I have gleaned a few tidbits that were interesting. I'd explain what these were, but, unfortunately, my classification tends to secrete this sort of information away, and I cannot break free of this box...

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?