| an occasional poetry |
[Jan. 23rd, 2009|07:51 am] |
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Ducks in a row, all our lives. Ducks in a row, all these trembling little victories, all these soft, breathy sounds of defeat. All the bottles lined up in the mind, the check list of incompletion awaiting the pen stroke, the bright ring the bell to birth it. The lush multiplicity of existence, to be broken, to be beaten, to be without recourse, and yet to still feel the resonance of that fresh bell. The gilded victory chime that shapes fresh souls even as flowers wilt and flesh fails. That small comfort nested in this bouquet of small comforts, the fault line that split this life separate, distinct from many others. Fed, sheltered, with a warm bed and cool water, alive in this implicit ruin, watching the treasure of potential alight in the distance. Tomorrow coming though it can not ever be, today that artful sustain, the dissolution of happenstance and hope, that residual flavor time leaves lingering in the shop window of memory. In the train window of memory, all our reasons flashing past, along these long, always diminishing tracks.
These traces shine like moonlit rails, like the rows water droplets make upon the window of this unlit kitchen on a night caressed by rain. An aria sung as I am typing, the brief suspense of spell check, and then the song changes. Between what I wait for, and what will be. Between my plans and all the worlds staggering actions. Between the work of want and the trespass of wish, all of this happens. Nearly three weeks out of work, the driver who hit me might not have been insured, the money all but run out, no doctor, no lawyer, no Indian Chief. Just bourbon and music and the magic of letting go. A joyful ringing between the seams of this made up world of all these big tomorrows, the limpid fictions of law and country and finance tasting a little better despite the fact that maybe all of it is going to just miss me. Happy for this sea of strangers’ happiness, hopeful for their hopefulness, awash in these drizzles and aches.
It feels pointless, it feels as if my uselessness has finally come to a head, but something inside me knows I have felt this way before. Besides, there are still things to do. Animals to feed, lines to fill in on forms to fill out. Doctors to see and lawyers to seek, arguments full of latin candor and miserable invective. Books I have yet to read, nights I have yet to curse, fights I have yet to lose. Losing love, losing hope, losing the impulse to even try is not losing everything. It is a grubby, empty, miracle, this life. Fed by brutality and earnestness, and sacrifice-- and we ease the harm of these only by the statistical wisdom of our abhorrent good will. The work surpasses me, just as the urge to work, and the ability to work did years ago. But the work is here, this world, this moment. All the rain and discontent and imaginary tides contingent upon this conceit. That this moment is all there is, and the most must be made from something. This moment is as good as anything else that is or is not. Lined up, shot down, whichever trick takes, whichever hand is held, we play what is dealt. And when our turn comes up, we deal or fold. Whatever turn arises, in whatever game we think we play. |
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| depression |
[Dec. 21st, 2008|08:07 pm] |
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I move towards dawn despite the ghosts around the corners and the mop-water rain raising flecks and spittle. Sworn at more than sworn of I am more and more at risk. The night no longer loves me and the day never did. Only luck and blood reserve me any pity, and I can feel those begin to pass like any passion. Not yet an empty vessel, I seethe with writhing maggot and stinging nettle. Still I move towards dawn. It is all the direction I am left.
The clamor of my heart, the murmur of my blood, that demon truth and its bastard’s way of phrasing. The words turn upon me, their order so many flung caltrops to catch a mind in careless gallop. Such wounds that were there are reopened. The new ones are gnawed agape by these restless black teeth that reside inside. Perspective is lost while the mirror grows deeper. Each err an apocalypse, each splinter a pike: every Barabbas is after all the Christ upon his own cross.
I am sunk and I am sundered. Even the litany of my crime and fault, of my shame and failings is ground down. THe lack of feeling, of value, of talent, of wit, of understanding have played out. As I sipped from my coffee cup my voice inside mocked “You can’t even make decent coffee.” Forty two and I am worn through, dragging these chains, this wreck. The day breaks like a light fixture over my head, only in reverse. First stars, then the impact. The wound, then all that blinding shine. |
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| the purgatory line (or "I hate everyone who voted yes on 8 and their stupid made up religions") |
[Nov. 7th, 2008|05:40 am] |
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That moment’s joy runs cold, chilled by heartless, hateful news. The breath of sanctimony, of callous cruelty masquerading as morality, blows in on a glowing new day, tainting the promise of tomorrow with the fetid corpse of some cherished bigotry. Without anyone close to me that will lose this possibility, this ability to share a promise, to cherish through shards of glass or green clover, still I am stung with this loss. A handful of the wicked and the ignorant, this brood-swarm urge to contain and force conformity won the day here in California, denying equal status and equal protection to gay folk for no reason what so ever.
This evil victory, this crummy choice, so un-American and inhumane, leaves me with a withering tolerance and a taste for sanctified blood. I bite my tongue while they spit semitic myths as if they were rational policy statements, don’t draw their attention to the context of this tangle of fragments, this campfire ghost story gone astray. I nod and smile at their blank blessings and remind them that they may teach their children to contradict verifiable knowledge however they wish in their own home, their conscience and their souls constitutionally their own. They gnash their teeth and curse strangers to some extra-textual hell for doing anything they don’t like, as their abstinence only daughters continue to break the trend in teen pregnancy, reality confounding them time and time again. Their indifference to morality and adherence to dogma, their enslavement of Jesus' name and abandonment of his actions, their proud and empty romance with treating their neighbors with such contempt and brutality it would break them if returned in earnest: all of this rot and dreck overlooked to honor the plurality that is this nation’s great soul. No more.
I am no friend of my fellow countrymen, no fan of humanity in general. Mentally unstable, misanthropic, a lost red figure in the dense ledger of human accomplishment, there is little I claim to recommend my ethics or my conduct. I have been thug and thief, sinner and mope, a general outlier in the margins of the useless and the godless. We are animals, vying for status and for resources, copulating and devouring and generally making a mess on the carpet. Little can be expected but cruelty and self interest and tribalism. It is part of our breeding. It is in our blood. But even I do not embrace cruelty for cruelty’s sake, blood be damned.
The journey from band and tribe, to village and town, to country and nation has changed what is in our natures, favoring the co-operative over the covert. Favoring calling the cops instead of just killing the fucker yourself. We stop and stagger along the way, but the survival of the complex nation-state requires a degree of harmony with the different, tolerance of the unfamiliar, the unlocking and the expansion of that olden golden rule. Do unto others as you would have done, assholes. Live and let live, you selfish jerks. The idea that there are people who live and do different from you oughtn’t haunt you, if what they are doing isn’t stealing your supper or sticking a knife in your eye. Stop trying to smother every idea that scares or stupefies you in its cradle.
Despite these phony feelings of persecution, the secular world in much smaller than that the world of irrational belief in America. Godless types like me account for less than ten percent of us, so whatever ridiculous pyramid scheme you might part of, chances are that an American believes something close enough to your idiot myth system to be sympathetic, if not a genuine fellow traveler. The lack of an established state religion has meant a plethora of sects, cults, and sex scams have flourished here, without having to pay taxes on their glad tithings. But the free ride isn’t enough for some of these tin-haloed racketeers. The Mormons, the Scientologists (as the most made up of the monied interests that were at work on the Yes on 8 campaign), the Knights of Columbus (who celebrate the grand history of American Protestant scapegoating of Catholics by scapegoating others) and many and varied church and lay groups have to go out of their way to make sure that minority rights are not protected, or in California’s case taken away. A right that does not effect these fuckers in any way other than they don’t like it, as, apparently, it makes them have to talk to their awful, ought-to have been aborted kids. Thanks for continuing the ruining of America, you soulless, amoral douche-bags.
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| with apologies to Marcus Aurelius |
[Feb. 4th, 2008|10:30 am] |
I love the rain, I always have. I love the feel of an ordinary day awash in gray, the burbling of gutters, the reinvention of streams. I love vague ethereal showers, slow drifts of mist clinging to my skin. I love torrential down pours, the all enveloping hush of a storm beating on a roof. I love walking in the rain, the leveling sensibility of it falling as those with more sense than bravery pass by in their thoughtless cars and heavy buses. The mud and the gush and the breathless lift a sudden cloud burst grants my heart, watching it from windows and doorways, from front porches and out of tent flaps. The press of it upon a city sidewalk, the lilt of it in a redwood forest, the kiss of it drifting over the open ocean. I feel a little better when it rains. The weeks of rain that passed over California recently felt like a half hearted blessing, and it eased an edge of darkness that had been hunting me hard for awhile now. Now the skies have only the vaguest hints of clouds, bashful stars blinking numbly down upon my creepings and pacings. Now I hardly know how to feel.
My heart hasn’t been with me much of late. It has instead been following the flow of falling water, tracing the embrace of the steady wanderings of stars, lingering in wishes and memories of love hungered after and lost long ago. I have been pursued by all manner of ache and malady, lacking health insurance or the fiscal will to face down all my symptoms. Depression and general cussedness ground me into a wall of sweet inertia, and I scarcely managed to do the little I needed to each week to keep things afloat. I threw words at the blankness like sunflower seed shells spat into a neglected field. My heart pressed its nose against the window of every train that was leaving, of every dream that seemed even a little bit sweet.
My father died in 2006, and I haven’t quite regained equilibrium since. When my mother broke her hip on an evening in January of 2007, the very night I cut short a visit to escape the bedlam of family and all the related noise associated with that particular conspiracy, I found myself staying at her house four nights out of the week. My life flattened out even more, a series of poorly lit rooms and pointless tasks and walls to watch and watch. That summer I surrendered to my little concessions to guilt and exhaustion and moved into my mom’s house, intent on remaining there until she got her second surgery and worked through her recovery. I figured spending a couple of years I would have most likely wasted anyway was a reasonable gesture of Confucian devotion. After that, moving on would be my intended move.
They say if you want to make God laugh, let him know your plans. Other than having wasted a lot of time kicking guys in the crotch misguidedly vying for a divine chortle, my vague intentions have suffered some gravitational lensing due to happenstance and the inconvenience of other people. My mother decided against having the second operation, replacing a decades long ever deteriorating knee, giving her some semblance of a change for future mobility. Her ability to hobble around the house and manage some of her daily rituals has improved. She is a little stronger, if no steadier. But her decline is inevitable, made only steeper by her decision. I am left doing what I can to help maintain the life she chooses, serving as helpfully as I can, waiting to bear witness to that which will be. This sits okay with my sense of duty; it is my sense of self that bucks selfishly at the idea of living as I am without a time table. Petty resentments have been gnawing away at my wish bone for months now.
When I counsel the kids at work, I don’t rely on much in the way of any clinical model. Though our program, such as it is, is behavioral, I am a largely a pragmatist: I do whatever works to achieve the clients goals, and my goals towards them. I listen, I weigh, I call them on their bullshit, draw lines in the sand, offer them choices, show them the door. What I never do is tell them that by doing what we want them to do, they will get to have the life they long for. Instead I try to talk them through their options as realistically as I can, emphasizing what it is they might want and ways they can achieve these desires. I tend to rely a lot on the Stoics rather than on any school of psychology, because so many of these boys are looking for a way to be, caught up in the rage and frustration at how the world has failed them, hoping that fairness will find them and hold them tight. I tell them that they can not change other people, can’t make their mother stop chasing her high and start loving them, can’t alter the hearts of others by wanting change. All that you can control, I say, is what you do. Actions are all you really own, all anyone will ever know of your heart. Doing the right thing might not get you love or security or admiration. Bad things might keep on coming down upon your blameless head, your tears and prayers ringing hollow upon the roads and stones of the wide unfeeling world. But if you do what you know to be right, if you treat others with dignity and respect, take responsibility for your deeds and your mistakes, at least you will know you have done all that you can do. That is the only kingdom that I am certain is coming, and readiness, as ever, is all.
I can’t control the weather, I can not shame the sun or raise the rain with praise. All I can do is what work I can manage, choose a path towards my own particular end. So I out in for a transfer of position at work, two of the three which would put me back at full time, making me eligible for our crummy health plan again. Until then, I am working with the notion that my varied ills and ailments are due to my physical decline, and start doing more aerobic activities along with continuing to slowly increase the intensity of my work with free weights. The fundamental assumption being that it can’t hurt until it does, and that choosing something over nothing at least fills up time. I am still sore and sad and bloody, but these things happen. Routine is a strong stabilizing force for me, and more hours at work will ultimately aid me in caring for my mother, the time I am not around to watch her at least accruing income to better be able to aid her in the long run. I don’t pretend to feel much better. The wind that howls through me still howls cold and low, honing this deep lonesome, this sorry flight. For the moment, I move in hopes that my heart will follow, walking alone with the world that is. |
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| extinction |
[Feb. 1st, 2008|06:11 am] |
There are an awful lot of ways for the world to end. Even a serving of sample sized portions of end game scenarios will end up heaped over the edges of the most generous dish. Lots of current mythologies spend much of their wattage with curbside entreaties to repent, usually adding an or else straight from the lips of the deity or deities themselves. Other secular sources substitute the earth or nature for the divine machine, but the frame work is largely the same. We have done wrong, and if we do not change our ways, we shall reap the consequences of our misdeeds.
Much of the religious stuff is of a millenarian cast, where some sub-culture, feeling pressure from a larger group or belief scheme and sensing an end at hand to their way of life, begin espousing a narrative of cosmic change just around the corner. History is replete with these movements, whether the biblical examples of the Babylonian Exodus or the raising of the Temple in Jerusalem by a rightfully fed up Roman occupation, or the Ghost Dance religion of the nineteenth century Plains Indians and the even more tragic embracing of Mhalakaza’s prophecies that resulted in a terrible cattle slaughtering movement by South Africa’s Xhosa tribes. Short form being something like, God is mad, the world is about to end, we must change our ways so our enemies will be smited and we will be received into heaven. If you are a visionary, prophet, or other form of wing nut, it is this sort of frame work that will reveal the ending of the world.
If one takes various millenarian endings less literally, and end the world the way we humans typically mean it when we say that the world ends, there all sorts of more mundane sources of extinction than human sin and heavenly ire. The end of the world, in the big scheme scenarios tends to mean human extinction, and, on a smaller scale, the end of a culture or a people. The fall of Western Civilization into less noble hands, a la a defeat by murderous hordes, is a constant source of these more modern tensions, and from Plutarch on historians have framed this as a moral decline, a dwindling of blood lines by mingling with whatever the feared alien mongrel race of the moment might be, and an abandoning of the time honored principles of the revered and sagacious elders. From Yellow Peril to Red Scare to the Planet of the Apes to Lou Dobbs style illegal obsession all follow this model of cultural invasion and decline of standards, where the culture is consumed from the inside out, finally flickering its last gleamings in the slavering of a strange mouth and a foreign tongue. Whatever the hyperbole involved in describing them, these sorts of endings are inevitable if human kind is to continue. We must change to adapt to new circumstances, but we can hope that we will keep our canons broad and our options open.
Looking to the heavens for answers might be a good idea, if for decidedly less than divine reasons. The collision of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet with our local gas giant Jupiter helped to sway skeptics in the scientific community to begin to seriously consider the death from on high scenario of world endings. While, if the approximation of every 100 million years or so is accurate, we do not have to worry about an asteroid impact with a 10 kilometer wide asteroid producing something like 5 million times the energy released by the Hiroshima bomb for another 35 million years, the likelihood of a human culture altering 30 meter object striking us every hundred years or so is pretty good. Even with a 66% chance of an ocean impact, the potential for climate altering effects (due to tsunami or water vapor being rapidly introduced into the atmosphere) is all too real. Should we be unfortunate enough to witness an event like this in our lifetime, perhaps the most horrible effect that we would endure is one that has not been predicted by scientists: I have no doubt that all manner of religious-types would give their vengeful deities credit for it. As if getting wiped out wasn’t bad enough, having to die to bible verses seems a particularly insidious way to go.
Mass extinctions due to global climate change, global warming being the most heard from method, have replaced mankind’s diabolical self slaughter due to nuclear war as the dominant world ending worry. This still has the beauty of human beings dying as a result of our collective hubris, so it fits the moral frame work of just desserts endings, the worn out science fiction movie (though not so much science fiction book) warning of venturing into God’s domain. The climate change endings are a collusion of many varied causes and effects, including deforestation, over grazing of meat animals, pollution from carbon emissions, over fishing of the seas, and unseen collateral effects from the mass extinctions of our coevolutionary planet mates. Whatever the cause and outcome, massive climate change would be a threat of the sort that no human population as dense and specialized as ours has ever faced. Humanity as a whole might survive, but only after some pretty brutal squabbling over even scarcer resources. That a species with as deep a memory and as complex an ability to plan ahead may very well ignore salient information until it is too late is both tragic and so very completely human.
The growing complexity of human economies have staggered human perception further away from meaningful existence and towards a greater involvement in symbolic existence. This allows a flexibility that traditional societies often can not exhibit, one that our complex decision making structures often do not utilize. Too often we have developed some cultural significance toward a given symbol set that does not allow us to clearly utilize all of the rational options available. Bad choices made for cultural reasons have spelled the end of many seemingly stable and long standing societies, including ignoring environmental shifts that would conflict with cultural ideals. One hears a lot of concerned people arguing that environmentalism in the face of immediate human crises like third world starvation and disease is a sort of middle class tree hugging do-gooderty that ignores real world suffering. While there may or may not be some attitudinal reality there, the argument does ignore that many modern instances of war and genocide stem from underlying environmental reasons. Ethiopia one decade, Rwanda the next, and Somalia and the Sudan-- each instability or wave of starvation or genocide preceded by a population spike, then drought and famine. Worlds are ending all too often, and we haven’t seen nothing yet.
I am forty two years old this spring, and even if I hadn’t shortened my life through self abuse and neglect, have seen more than half of my likely years on this earth. I have no children, and other than a native biological neophilia, no special love for them. Still, I do believe in cleaning up one’s play area before going home, and we have done a damn poor job of tidying up. We leave behind a legacy of greed and rapine and sheer poisonous indifference, going to the trouble of inventing brand new ways unknown to chemistry to ruin the world in our wake. While I most likely won’t live long enough to see the end of humanity, if I stick around a few more decades global destabilization due to climate change is probably a pretty likely sight for these aged eyes to settle on at last glimpse. My personal favorite scenario is a collapse of global agribusiness due to the extinction of the European Honey Bee, a great poly-pollinator that we have come to rely on to a tremendous degree in modern agriculture, and whose passing might very well bring civilization to its collective knees. To have that sweetness that gathered us be our death knell in its absence seems perversely appropriate, like the common cold killing our Martian oppressors despite their cool death rays. If you want to have that honey, you got to stop killing all the bees. |
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| the loneliest poem |
[Dec. 26th, 2007|04:32 am] |
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The wavelength broadens at this end of the spectrum, ghosting on through the muddled galaxy. The signal obscures further everyday, even with the resin shine receptor turning into kindling, each fresh tomorrow a little closer to our epitaph. Our greatest works crumble, ancient wonders now devoured by time and gravel. Proof of our struggles are devoured by jungles, they are left lingering in landfills. Long lived isotopes and insidious dioxins most likely our greatest legacy. Save the radio signals. Save the Pioneers and the Voyagers.
What greater conceit, what greater act of hope claiming faith by the act itself. Firing these deep koans into the depths of space, towards distant stars and neighborhood galaxies that are fleeing faster as space hurtles on. A record player made to be played by strange endurers. Pictographs and diagrams, greetings and residual mathematics. Greetings from a lost world, from a distant, ancient prayer. The last of these fired thirty years ago, leaving the solar system.
Conservative estimates have the Voyager, without Star Trek-like collidings with alien artificial intelligence or the more likely generic cosmic debris, lasting maybe outwards of a billion years. Other than our ever widening, ever weakening radio trail, this will most likely be the longest enduring cultural artifact humankind will ever produce. And what is it more than a match lit upon the open ocean of midnight? A voice shouting down the darkness, the echo of the inevitably loneliness of consciousness. In a crowded world, this Who-worthy “we’re here” is so much the lonesomeness of the party. Sitting in a dark corner, looking out the blank window with a heart full of longing while every one around laughs and dances. The imagined future drizzling in.
There are fewer acts of technological skill so drenched in poetry as these gestures of exploration and invitation. It is a hope so much more distant than any imagined heaven, the breadth and emptiness of space so much emptier than the most forlorn human soul. The sheer intellectual will that cast these artifacts towards the distant stars, guessing at how to communicate with an entirely unknown actor. What prayer is so beautiful in its earnestness and likely failure? A species that looks away from this blue church and its red and green congregations, staring past heaven, and whispers to eternity we were here. |
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| inertia, and other myths of statics |
[Nov. 26th, 2007|04:02 am] |
The earth emanates fierce statics despite all its spin and motion. The trick is to turn into the slide. The trick is that there is a trick at all. The moon is held by filaments, it sticks to the breath that leaves in wisps and streamers, it is haloed, like us all, only as a result of atmospheric haze. Tread marks grease circles in the middle of the intersection, the streetlight drips its vague enthusiasms down upon them. Such secrets as there are have roosted for the evening, folded themselves in crisp wing and velvety carapace. Maybe they will sleep straight through the coming winter. Maybe they will take to the night like Bible locusts, taking us all for Pharaoh's fabled Egypt. I am an intersection of unseen fields and obvious forces, amounting mostly to balance. The squalid hosts of Heaven and Hell fortunately cancel one another out mathematically. At this hour, even the Devil has run out of things to say.
I feel faint tugs of other masses, I can feel the heat of misspent energy and the chill of settling material states. If I move, who knows what system I will glut with such abrupt and unheard of energy? If I sleep, what dreams may come? The grease paint of another week of small pretense and great indignation roars and roars, the crowd still smells. I never could see well when my tricks were lit for the stage. I always relied on rhythm, on memory, and that press of unmet expectations to keep these objects aloft. With empty hands and so little physical business, I fear I do not belong on the stage. The wonder of all the forces gathering in complicity and opposition is the central focus, the dense cyphering that we mostly ignore. I turn over, I stare at the ceiling, thinking about distant stars.
My eyes glaze, sifting through this stupor. The dolor like the poem said, a color, meaning a bandwidth, a resonance. It is the melancholy feel of this slice of existence, the social animal segregated by history and biology uncorrected by selection, corralled by ache and market forces to be most real when exposed to this sorrowful part of the human spectrum. Details abound, the trailings of three species of spiders, the sparkles imbued into the ceiling some 40 years ago, the slow heal of a cut on my ankle, fresh wounds on my knee and knuckles, warning signs that I notice only to ignore. Beneath the shimmer of the transcendent surface, the usual noise of want and rhetoric, the stirrings of words, the figments of thinking. I swallow coffee, and settle at the habitual ritual of keystrokes. Aimless, meaningless, and enduringly here. |
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| Writer's Block: Tasty Thanksgiving Treat |
[Nov. 22nd, 2007|06:27 pm] |
Without a doubt, my favorite dish on Thanksgiving is the versatile, stalwart, environmentally unsound paper plate. Cheers, katzenjammers. |
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| juvenilia |
[Nov. 21st, 2007|04:40 am] |
We are so young when poetry first escapes that we seldom learn how to capture it again. So we were wild with ideas and love and the newness of every little detail, and we railed at the heavens and the throne, never mind the heights or how heavy the head. We busted our knuckles against tooth and skull, not having learned where to place a punch, and the days streamed by beneath us, the earth rising with our restless tide. Oh, the mistakes I made. Oh, the things I said.
Now in a dull chill room I sort through typewritten pages, the scratchy initial stabs at poems I made when the few I had written got a little lively spin. Some are so dense and contrived that I can not make sense of them myself. Some are wistful and pretty, like the women I wrote them for. I see my recklessness and my self-regard, my head long leaps of intuition and my native dislike of editing. I see my wild nights and thoughtless days and endless reading. A calliope of motion and influence, painted brightly and moving too quickly to matter.
Some things haven’t changed. I still write falling forward, seldom looking back or making sense. I have developed a series of habits that stick to the words I spit, and often seem a little more skilled and polished. By the time I was seriously taking classes in college, I had a reputation as a fine writer, people who hadn’t read me telling me I was the best writer in the class or the department or whatever rumor was being spread at the time. And I had written so many papers for lazy students who handed me cash over the years before I returned to school, I was a machine built to grind out term papers. I didn’t write very much in the way of poetry over those years, sticking with academics and the dense and lyric journal writing that became the script for the style of my blogging. A little freedom, a little freefall, and no looking back, and you get a post like most of these.
Sometime early in my thirties I also stopped publishing, tired of the ridiculous ritual of submission, rejection, and occasional acceptance, with its ephemera of freshly typed poems and stamped envelopes addressed to myself. When I did get published, the best I got was contributor's copies and an invitation to read. The indifference didn’t push me to be better, and any acceptance or praise was stifled beneath the din of my own slippery, unyielding sense of under-achievement and self-contempt. Odd that ridiculous self-regard seems to be the flip-side of this equation. Blogging did something for the show-off in me, mostly reminding me of my submerged and largely silent ambitions. I am considering publishing again, and so found myself going through my old box of poems, reminding myself of all the absurd work that that entails. Also it helps to see that all that work that I was so passionate and arrogant about really wasn’t all that good.
Certainly there are bright spots. Poetry is often a young person’s game, being so much about passion and abandon, a short form where a lack of mastery can be ignored for a stretch. There are a few old poems that I still quite like, and can feel myself alive in those fragile words. Though I wrote stories and plays as well, I had a cocky abandon as to keeping much in the way of copies. The poems were the only thing I worked at trying to publish, and managed to get published, so they alone endured as a reference point. The bright spots aside, most of it is simple juvenilia. Abrupt, awkward, and as clumsy as the clever and dexterous kid I was. Now the earth is still, and the heavens have fallen, and words my last refuge. I pause between keystrokes, and begin falling towards the inevitable unattainable tomorrow. |
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| winter letter |
[Nov. 20th, 2007|03:03 am] |
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When the streets are finally swept clean of leaves and loiterers, when the smell of ozone and burning oak and fruitwoods are all that linger in the air, when headlights abut the collision of curb and rain, when all the chalked in games of summer are glazed over and erased, then will peace sleep amid these roofs and dreams. The cold blow of a distant wind, the sound of a fugitive bassline rattling trembling glass, the shadows that pool and gleam behind the eyes of every free greed and hunger, all of these shreds and remnants gather making our moods and memories. Baked bread memories, carpets of pine and shag, hopeful candles casting their shivering light upon the bluff monuments of shed clothes and ready flesh, everything seems to gather at once. This is the us that could be, gathered in the cold dusk beneath frosty stars. This is the kiss that lingers between us, the touch that endures the tumbling earth and insistent distance. The ethereal memento that will not let us part.
Surely by now your streets are crowded with snow, scraped with salt and plow. The fresh sheets fall across the early ice and mud, and some paths will hold the sheen of this freeze long after winter surrenders. The flocks have changed, and your sky takes on the blunt glamour of the reflected light below. In the morning your breath puffs and steams as your face is bitten, blushing with the cold. Hours melt as I imagine your journey from cold floor to warm shower, my fingers drifting through the drizzle of your wake in the world. Here in this tepid California fall, I hold still beneath a rising wind and a swarm of stars, feeling you lingering-- impossibly, invisibly near.
There is a waiting that imbues the spirit, it begins quietly inside and soon weathers the world from behind clear and open eyes, until the whole of the visible world resonates with these visceral expectations. From the depth of want, from the hidden reaches of wary emptiness, a longing may arise that is so vast it is difficult to recognize on a human scale. It is the distance that reveals it, the separation of familiar strangers, the false partitions between us that fall away and the magnitude of some unseen connection materializes. And so I crave for winter to touch me as it touches you, to watch my breath clot the air before me, to feel the season rising through the floorboards and falling from the sky. I endure the press of years and miles, waiting for the cold to claim me. Waiting to bear witness to your stride and your stroke. Waiting for the only warmth that endures. |
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| remission |
[Nov. 7th, 2007|03:11 am] |
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Inevitably things dwindle, matter gathers its disarray, energy scatters into heat and darkness, the once fresh coffee now down to grounds and burnt lingerings. There are gaps and lapses, pauses and punctuation. The candle melts, the game will play itself out. Our names, our faces, all the squandered love and misfiring hearts, all bound for dissolution. Forever is a word meant to measure how little we know of how much more is left.
I finish off the coffee without the least slip of a feel of accomplishment. My sore throat no better for having nothing to say, I slept through the hard little heart of the day, dreaming of mirrors and pistols, of the dead and disappeared. I awoke to a skimmed blue sky and that devastating ache of remembering who and where I am. Boxes of tissues, cold water and steaming soup. I spend a few hours tightening screws and changing light bulbs, following the distasteful wake of insufferable animals. I stare at the television until my eyes burn. The last of the coffee strips the veneer off of my throat, and the night is abrupt with starlight and cat-fights and the inexorable sounds of leaving. I watch the dark swallowing the yard for evidence, submitting to the thorns of the insynchronous, the sharp shards of a life without hope of remission.
How sad so many ordinary things-- our losses and our labors, our convictions and our acquittals, the dragons and tigers that feed in sips and dribbles on our sickly streaming lives. Even knowing how little I have lost, still alive and moving freely, without grave opposition or any major infirmity, the small slights still sting. The empty cup sits beside me, knowing that it will be full again. The empty that fills me only speaks in absolutes-- never, forever, finished, dead. That feeling, like the wind singing through the whipped trees and hollowed stones, like the bright bottles strung from the ancient yard oak howling away in the cultish clatter of midnight’s rise, like watching the moon sink into the ocean and knowing there are miles of wandering left of this night, it ignores all the previous liftings of spirits, every cooling cup of coffee freshened up. Tired of the story it is telling, it tries to write its way into an end. |
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| Townes Van Zandt |
[Jul. 9th, 2006|01:57 am] |
He was gaunt and tall, and even as a young man he looked as if life had dragged him around awhile. It had, or he ran hard with it whenever it had a wild notion and he had a wild hare. Sniffing glue and drinking hard and taking whatever drugs were around. Falling out windows and losing teeth and a course of electroshock therapy as a young man. What those runnings and fallings gave him, what they took away one can only imagine. He passed of a heart attack nearly ten years ago, a man scarcely in his fifties. What he left behind are memories and three children and the ghost of his rangy, mad man’s smile. He left friends and lovers who still miss him hard. Mostly he left us with songs, songs that are so lovely and lonesome and blue that you think he stole a feeling only you knew, and sang about it to a roomful of lucky strangers. He sang to that empty place that individuality leaves punched in all of our souls. He sang to the sweet side of life that our troubles learn us to squander. He lingers in these songs, a poet and a rounder, a picker and a sinner and a prophet of loss and strays. His songs linger in me, word for word and note for note.
“Pancho and Lefty” is playing now, with its specific images and vague mysteries. It is a sketch of a story, poignant and true and somehow still bafflingly distant. “They only let him go so wrong out of kindness I suppose,” plays past, and the song is so much about being as lost and driven as I was when I was hard after the bottle and had no reason worth slowing down. Yet it isn’t. It is about a pistolero and his partner, about outlaws being run down in the Mexican desert, about going wrong and being caught and surviving after your time has gone. Emmy Lou Harris covered it, as did Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard (Willie was Pancho and Merle was Lefty in their interpretation). Its depth is its breadth-- it touches our heads and our hearts. The need for myth and the love of the unknown. Townes’ song writing is like that-- intimate and aloof, friendly and cruel and funny all at once.
Townes could sing as if his heart was split or as if he was telling you some crazy thing that had happened to him the other night, He could do both at once, and listening to his recorded voice sing us a sweet love song or blues full of oblivion, I find myself smiling with tears welling in my eyes. He was stripped of all conceit and artifice, honest even when he lied and sawed at the truth some. When he covered a song, like his version of the Rolling Stones’ song “Dead Flowers” that plays at the end of The Big Lebowski, he savors not just the words but the very core of the song. Townes singing a Stones song brings out the blues roots of their writing, even when he is wailing a high lonesome anthem fit for the dying embers of a campfire as the whiskey runs low. Hearing him sing it is like he is measuring the distance to heaven after a hell of a fall.
It is the songs more than his singing that moves and mends me. Funny how something as simple as a handful of repeated words can act as an incantation, and ease a little of our sufferings, sway us in our lonely abandon, and temper our wounds with a little harsh and honest salt. Knowing that emptiness that only hard longing brings, where the want for things becomes the want of reason, so that the hunger lingers long after all appetites have passed. His songs “Nothing.” and “A Song For.” as well as this sorry blog’s namesake “The Highway Kind” all touch that bleak, gorgeous place where sorrow so empties us that we are burned down to our beautiful essences. The days so stretch and our arms fold and hang, singing becomes our only absolution. What we weather is what we are, and as “To Live Is To Fly” reminds us, “Everything is not enough, nothing is too much to bear.” As the verse ends “all you keep is the getting there.”
There is wonder in the things we favor-- our tastes and preferences often seem to arise out of the merest notions. Why like coffee black and not with cream and sugar? Why prefer chocolate to vanilla, or red to blue? Tastes in art and music are no doubt more complex, with hints of origin in childhood whim and grown up tempering: this does not make them any less remote or baffling. I like the Wu Tang Clan and Wes Anderson movies and Batman comics. The Yin Yang Twins and Stanley Kubrick films and Superman comics do not do much for me. There are reasons, but much of preference is simply a leaning in a particular direction. For Townes Van Zandt's songs, the attraction is clearer however. They touch the hearts of music and poetry, they are sacred and carnal and sad and funny and so much made from the blues. I hear a Townes Van Zandt song that I know, I want to sing along. Because these songs know me, and resonate with those of us that they so favor. It is the closest thing to immortality that we know this world offers, for our art to live in others. And when I sing “Two Girls” aloud somewhere in the night, I hope that somehow Townes is singing along. I hope, once in a blue moon, there is a little heaven on my breath. |
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| police helicopter |
[May. 12th, 2006|10:12 pm] |
The air is blended smoke and laughter, the night made of too little seeing and too much night. I settle into the deep cast shadow of my slim porch, a few yards away from the creeping traffic that spreads the thick leaves and urgent blossoms, that thread through the tangle of wisteria and four by four, as the weight of the moon presses against the clamber of lit windows, and the absence of clear intent. There are so many little crimes that blow through these gutters, so many little crimes caught upon the tires of parked cars and the disrepair of each winter fence and gate. The words sift through each abandoned breath, never even whispered before the weary glow of a white washed night. A police helicopter casts a sweeping pillar of brightness from the very heavens. Somewhere someone prays.
Each attempt at truth is both an evasion and an assertion, the choice made between obvious alternatives, the bled center all emotion and the forced perspective of the missed meaning or the stern proclamation. Either it is seeing and finding the missing words, or following the words towards the fleeting message of the secret missive of so many stars and locked doors. I have no sermons to shout from the mountain, no truths to proclaim from my dark heart, All there is to me is a human life and the flow of moments. I speak from beneath the cover of simple eaves and the washed out night time sky, spread thin between personal history and the wild tides of pop culture. If there is poetry, I pray that it finds me. If there are prayers, all of us ought to get to saying them.
I once thought that the poems I bleed would tinge me with poetry. I once hoped that the prayers I spit were more than wishing without the falling stars. This is the gift of language: even those of us who falter and stumble over meaning can find our redemption through the startling shine of poetry. The poet glows for a moment, lit from on high. But the light that falls moves on, spilling over rooftops and the tops of midnight trees. The searching continues, shining above us all. The words that we think will save us fall into the huddled shadows, crowding the streets and gutters of this life. Children are left staring at the sky, watching the light burn, never wondering where it wanders. |
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| two poems |
[Apr. 20th, 2006|11:34 pm] |
frailty
It is hot out here
by the grasping blue shadows
spread by the reach and sway
spring grants each tree.
When I last saw you
it was cool and I was drowning,
bright blue sky hollowing out
the spirit in the air between us,
your smile waning in slow profile,
turning and walking away.
Now dusk crows grease
the thick air with their whispering wings,
throats spilling oily mayhem.
Spirals of flies stain the door way and
the grass reaches for the creased driveway.
The phone poles lean, hung with black wire.
Miles wait, beneath the weight
that unsaid words lend a burning sky.
Fallen stars feather all the breaths between us,
this warm flesh inevitably weak.
Hateful
The devilish thing
I neither said or meant
crept up again behind
my crazy eyes and
many kindnesses.
That I do not say
ever that thing I think
is one of the thousand poisons
I sprinkle upon every
tender of affection and
mix into each sublime prayer.
I make no sense and
mend happiness with sword strokes.
This isn't working you say
and I laugh again. |
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| new poem |
[Apr. 15th, 2006|03:28 pm] |
Heartache
The ice cracks in the otherwise empty glass
waking you from daylight reverie,
startled by the way air speaks to water.
The melting seems like sinking and
you find some small lesson there.
Staring at the clock or the phone
you feel the moment break over
the skull of expectation, what is not
suddenly harder and heavier than
anything that is. This ache,
that settles like snow before winter,
that settles like air over ice,
bears the full weight of the arrhythmic
beating of blood stained wings,
the heart bludgeoning its own native tongue. |
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| narrative (2nd person) |
[Feb. 18th, 2006|08:10 am] |
So you thought the day could save you, gathered in the twin rags of dawn and dusk. So you thought you could know magic, shaved clean from the surly skins of things. This is the blind face of tomorrow, the last flight of the imagined swallow, diving above tower and below bridge, falling and rising and falling again, the tide of fortunes in feathers. You wait and wait and seethe in the seamless faith of your fallen gods and worn-through fellows. Nothing comes of it, but the ache of tooth and lip.
You have wished too long, staring up at the winnowing stars, gathering up ancient light in your bright-eyed youth, mistaking burning stone for birthday candles blown. Licking your lips; begging the sky. But it is only weather and wind, only sky and dark trough of star that you spit your spirit towards. Upon this ungainly slab of earth and foolish tears, prayer is only another way to abandon your cooling breath.
Alone in dust and crisp papers, alone in ache and the vast stack of hours, alone in the child’s hunger for folded arms of comfort, you write. And there is no reader, no proof, no suspect. There is no one to nod or to get your meaning right. Only the waste and wearying exhaustion. Only the scope of day that has been bled of all night.
Eyes weigh with lids made from leaden time, flickering towards sleep despite duty’s best hand. The dreams that come in fell sleep are fallow, following the crisp slip of her hip as she sways towards your appetite. She is like a silver trickle of cold, clean water across the busted brown of a heat choked earth, the focus of all hope and need. Her slender bones, her lilting breasts, her tiny lingering purpose that you would fill full of your commands and your ravenous bites. She sways, aloft in the distance. You would cup her in your open hands, crushing her to thieve her freedom. You close your eyes, miles and miles away from sleep. |
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| this writing life |
[Feb. 9th, 2006|07:16 am] |
A long-lost flame of mine recently told me of the wonders of publishing in Britain. She told me that people read more over there, and so publishers took more chances on new writers. She suggested that many writers emigrated to the U.K. to take advantage of this boom. Then she made the dreaded comment that had been telegraphed from the moment she mentioned writing. She asked if I had anything that might be ready to publish.
While I am sure it was a thoroughly innocent question (though justice would allow her malice towards me of a savagery that I shudder to imagine), it was the sort of question that shatters me like a cinder-block hurdling through brittle glass. I have been self-defined as a writer of one sort or another for over twenty years now. In that time I have written scores of poems, several plays, a handful of long lost short stories, maybe a dozen assorted chapters of various unrealized novels, academic papers for my self, as well as the many term papers for those with more money to spend than inclination to write. By my own judgment, I have written almost nothing worth remembering, and it seems in this, the world and I are in agreement. I had nothing even resembling a manuscript waiting in the wings, and mumbled as much to my friend. What I didn’t confess is my growing belief that I never will.
This isn’t some pessimism, or rejection of my own appellation-- I am a writer of sorts, and will be while I draw breath and spit words. It is more an awareness of what I am missing-- drive, ambition, passion-- that would be the way to will that first novel through. I am too lazy to find the novelist within myself, too sated to foment the dissent against the status quo of sluggardly living. Deadlines and dollar signs are most of what managed to get me writing final drafts of much of anything. Some sunny day when I will start pimping my finished manuscript is by far too far and away to move me off of the sofa and onto to the grindstone.
Without the fantasy of a writing life to look forward to, my days do begin to look pretty grim. At close to forty I made only a little over twenty thousand last year, and owe everyone and their pet monkey scads of Sacagaweas, and my prospects for lucre this year seem ever the less lucrative. A sad, over-educated loner toiling away at some dead-end job, reading books and watching movies in dust and squalor, and always alone. One look at me, and I understand why suicide seems so romantic.
One has to wonder if there is a writing life without all the paperwork. It isn’t as if I am posing as a writer to get any sort of immediate acclaim or attention-- I generally do not call attention to my peculiar calling unless backed in a corner, or trying to explain some particularly irrational nuance of my strange behavior. On the other hand, I do keep scribbling away, and posting these oblique confessionals onto my shockingly under-read blog site. That in and of itself is the conceit.
In the end, it is the conceit that I embrace. I write out of a habit of hope, easing these leavings onto page after blank page, needling these prayers for meaning in tattered furls. I write, as if it might matter. I write, as if someone might read it. Maybe it is futile and it may not come to any kind of fruition, but I write just the same. I share what I am and what I saw with the cold and empty air. Let oblivion take care of itself. |
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| sorry entertainer |
[Jan. 30th, 2006|03:16 pm] |
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The wind blows, and I am here, lingering beneath the pale gray sky and the stretch of bare limbs. The walls bend, and I am here, settling like dust upon shelf and sill. Just reading out loud word after word after empty word while the sticky fingers of time steal everything I ever loved. Just skinning faith for frying while my name becomes little more than spilled ink. These days have me by the throat. These days, they wear me like a shroud. |
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| "amputee" |
[Jan. 22nd, 2006|07:54 am] |
amputee
Cold toes wake me from abysmal sleep,
your absence an infinite sharpness haunting
the cluttered hallways of my bones and blood.
I walk to the bathroom barefoot,
the shallow spill of half a moon
threading my pendular steps together,
treading in the rhythms of your ghost.
Your essence sticks to coffee steam
the way footsteps stick to footprints
full of falling rain, your place
held then devoured, passing swiftly,
sand sifting after sand, a path
erased in creation, a map
made entirely of burnt history.
Cold nights when once you clung to me
now lay naked in plain electric light,
measuring my body and the icy air against
the still squalor of my quiet bed.
Gone so long, how can you be here,
a toothache buried in my heart?
How far can a shadow reach,
cast by a single flame? |
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| poem troubles the third |
[Jan. 14th, 2006|07:48 am] |
Chimera Obscura
We are a hard language made
whole by the drift of definition,
balanced thing and word after
thing and word broken,
feathered words spreading meaning
leaving objects solid, alone.
The child winds up piecework--
the mother’s eyes, the father’s nose,
grandmother’s hands, grandfather’s
easy way with bird and beast.
We see the stitchwork cleaving
the seams of the world and so
cannot help but pull at each loose thread.
Nothing remains itself too long
now that the symmetry between
name and named has faded,
each word a nomad sleeping upon the sand,
each item a rest stop for storied legions
leaving empty tracks to the wind.
Speak once, and the nested doll
opens, broken into tales woven:
tears to rain to piss to rivers
flowing like a fog, easing like
the dusk down upon a beloved horizon.
We stare hard into the eyes of our souls
seeing swarming words.
whether
Expecting a flood, I wasn’t ready for
the rain weighing the air with fishing line
shine and beaded divots
threading this fleeting rosary.
The gutters cackled and snored,
little rivers hiding the dwindling street.
Thinking deluge I never thought I’d wake
warm and dry in a dusty room,
listening to the feathery hush
water and glass only give the other.
Not dead, not drowned,
I rolled over and dreamt
that I was calm and clean,
a world away from the worries
a name could gather carried
long and poorly. I dreamt
a life where I didn’t have to die
to change, where crisis and opportunity
never shared a single character.
I awoke to rain and crows,
black and gray through
spotted and silty windows.
No end by flood, no end by fire,
I slip into the terror of another day. |
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