I seem to find the taste of this air
sour, the face of this plain
as his eyes
quick-changing as the wind
The tide moves in the same direction
home, flagging
and backwards it
never wins
Just keeps on going
on. I must practice caution
if poetry's come back to me
to be my friend.
~~
Good god isn't this always the way? These words they flow like rubble--I mean that, too--like little freakin pebbles out of me sometimes and it is such a struggle to just allow them the motion of letting go. Because--why? Because it hurts if, when, it ends? Like above. I'm walking out of the damn house on Friday to go the beach and they just start coming. I was fighting them, for sure, I knew once they started off I'd go and who knows where I'd get to or just when I'd be back. I've been fighting them a lot. I jotted down just enough, just what's above, got out just enough to let the surge pass so I could get out the door. Got those little bitches of words out like you might, I dont know, force up a long SoCo drenched Saturday night. Retchingly with sore ass knees. If you will...
Ugh I'm having such a bastard of a time committing to me. This is it, I guess, my last little stretch, my last little dusty basement catnap before I step out in to the sun. What I mean--well, here, Jung said it about people like me: "Perhaps alcoholics were people who had a greater thirst for the spirit than others, that perhaps alcoholism is a spiritual disorder, or better yet, a spiritual condition." Yes it's called ravage. Ravage hunger for life and rapture. Fucking poetry. You bitch-slap me every time.
Perhaps I am being vague. Apologies dear reader as you climb this my mental Jenga topple along with me in my head. (Metaphor tribute to Sarah over at Moleskin Dreams, thanks thanks thank you) What I am thinking about is this--as Jung saw it alcholism, addiction, is a sacred disease. We compelled by its claws either thirst too greatly for life and love and all its bawdy passion and beautiful hard parts and thus drink to settle this ache, or else drink to create it. Either way what a taileating snake are we. But Jung's greater, deeper implication of the disease is the aspect of recovery--finding deep within the wreckage of one's own mass calamity the very seeds with which to regrow. It is the case of he who knows the dark is who shall most value the light. And true true true to form this is my great medicine of Crow--the Value of Truth, or, to paraphrase Herman Hesse, how Everything is true including the Lie. The funny little dichotomy of tiptoe-ing or even outright booty dancing a while with fear, anger, laziness, obsession, dishonesty whatever....that the triumph over these parts is not just a full gaping swallow of the flaws of humanness, but at once the transcendent power deep within the human to overcome herself and her blocks through acceptance of herself and her blocks, when finally she stops fighting herself and sees it she herself causing all the pain. Ahhhh, that we might all bask in this eternal conflicting growth circle of beautiful fucking misery-laden joy...
!!!
Which brings me to poetry. How I live and die I swear to you at the end of the day it is sometimes the only thing that sees me through. And I think that this has everything to do with the actual ethics of poetry, which to me is a very real and personal thing. Ethics meaning the principle of it. Poetry to me is not just words on a page or even mystical deepwetfeelingurges that partly cause me to almost scream. Poetry is a lifestyle choice, a calling, a certain commitment to attitude of reverie and awe, a commitment to taking it all in with a big painful swallow, a commitment or a way to approach life. It is a belief, the truest one, in magic. It is the Art of self-creation. It is the Art of self-deception. It is, at the end of the day, the Art of Self, and Living.
So my last challenge, whenever I get this way wound-up--cuz oh, believe me, I been here before--is reckoning poetry with, to put it contextually, what I know of Jung. The ability, finally, to surrender to the final unknown. To say, okay the cord I am bent all the way around is actually the cord of me, and I need now to let go. I need, ahhhhh okay I'll say it, to let go of this control, or at least this illusion of being in control...
The final final softening that comes in a great gasp when I come down off myself and ask for help. The giving up. At my wits end and my final door, the final Demon guarding the gate is poetry, she just wont let me through. And how long will this dance go on, seeing as how I know it is she who will turn in to my Angel, too?
She's so glamorous with her whistles and her ribbons and her bows.
Ahhh, sacred hunger.
I hate this part....I always forget right here, this last step to the threshold, who I am and what I'm all about. Oh oh oh... "I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself." (Aldous Huxley) But you can't change by trying to force change. Ahhhhhhhhhh oh god I'm just about there, I swear I can feel it is this me beginning or just getting ready to almost begin....??
Anyhow. This post was inspired by a marvelous freakin piece over at The Curiosity Shop that had me up with wheels rolling last night. The writing is so fine, but the intelligence is clearly a craft in its self. If you're anything like me you might get why Kelly's post prompted this somewhat random response. And I swear I'm not propping her cuz she shouts me out. Or at least that's not the only reason why....
!
What I'm listening to: DeVotchka. These freaks are my freakin fave.
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