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?

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.