Or the one you said you'd hold on to for dear life.

It's early--not early as it could be.

It's early like 7:30 early, I've been up since 4:45 Sam texted at 5:15 to bring my laptop in so she could play me new music.  There is weather coming no doubt, the water told me so.  It wont be much though the birds are still crying and yesterday there were squirrels running through the dead woods.  Tyler is here, Sam, me.  He hasn't slept since last night, fresh home from Bmore as of a half hour ago he rolls hard like I like to, we're talking TV series she's defending Lost, he The Wire and there is music on my laptop which I am taking in like gulps of air.  I had no comprehension of how cut-off I'd be from the Muse when she went down--my laptop that is.  No music that I love, no poetry no links no blogrolling and most of all, no room for Kel fast as I can to spondown and get it all out.  The journals, they're full, but nothing to fill me back up with no music.  It's a process.  Reciprocation.  I HAD No IDEA.  I sat on the bed for three hours just listening to Pandora and my ITunes, feeling the life come back on deep inside me.  The poems finally emerged then, I spondown'd on here then pulled out the leather back journal Erika overnighted (with her most recent adv copy Hem's Girl which I can't put down--word!!!!) that was waiting on my doorstep yesterday afternoon and I wrote a full, whole poem in that.  I am re-setting my ways as result of not having this my core sustenance.  I have learned something yet again the necessity of filling up, and the absolute non-negotiable:  having a place to fill with the words, a place that remains the same.

Sam played me her man's music he is Philly local soon enough I played her Josh just one song an old one it's the first time I'd done that in a very very long time and that was enough.  We work together Sam and me long hours ten hours at a time and so she is on to me as me to her: we hold the other's stories already, having known each other less than a month.  Some of them anyway, a single bone or two but skeletal-enough. So that with sparing details or so many that they come out in mouthfuls a few bursts at a time we know what flesh were giving the other, which bone on which to hang this part. This was a new twist.  This had new gold.  Little light flecks on the skin.  Long shadows from underfoot aura big as the aururaborelias in the western sky.

I'm seeing my friend Laura Walsh tonight I told her, I play her Walsh's music.

And soon enough there is the response, I feel the throes of the words from somewhere inside my chest and had to get on here it was a matter of health.  Sam and Ty humor me, roll silver and we small talk and cut sidemouth cracks on one another especially about me on the clock.  Here it is the skeleton I am yearning for the one o holy loss the lac of which leaves me with out structure or faith, and happy enough to deny that even a boneyard exists.   How Charles Simic said.  Who can not howl will not find his pack.

I am sick.  Being packless sucks.

On Poems, & the Writing Nuts

My new pal Mike, this writer-buddy from here in Easton and self-proclaimed lover of running (Mike I had to edit that bc instead of writing running I originally wrote "funning"!), long-boarding and his kids and fam, who also is re-discovering his voice and source-creativity-power in motion of song and poetry and light, just wrote this post about the first poet that ever turned him on.

Sandburg. It's a great post read it. The poem he posted is a dream all charge charge gogogo.

Who was yours?

For me it was Emerson, tho, & as I should of paid attention to all the way back then, it was his prose/ethics that first stood out:

from Nature
To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds will separate between him and what he touches....

I remember, sure as anything, the moment, dropping on to my desk my own handwrote wilted journal of softback poems with a soft thwush of its pages as it landed because my teacher, who had a funny long name I no longer remember, mentioned the Transcendental Eye. Holy hell I thought in wonder and looked at her dazed, mystical, like she'd just woken me from a dream and here I am surprised as I was to find that I was in reality. I never did my homework it was my junior year so her lesson was all new to me, my first AP class and mostly I was consumed with having gotten arrested over the weekend bc one of the upperclassmen girls in the class had ratted on me at the party after I left blowin up my spot. Yea it was me that left the seen of that hit and run. (It was a parked, empty car that I took the bumper off of, not some poor shmoe left to wail in the street...)

Here, here! this teacher telling about the Universalism's and Transcendentalism and for the first time, here, here is some work that gets my attention, here are some writers I can get my hands on and I want you to know I read him, and Thoreau that whole afternoon in the back of the locker room and later, instead of religion class with Ms. Bo.

Next of course it was Ginsberg and the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...which would come to me and come to me later as I taught in the jail and needed to show these young street savy black men how fierce, how true, how real Poetry could get it on. I still remember the ache and sizzle reading it aloud in that cold, dark and stale windowless room. The eyes and nods and caught breath, the looks on all their faces....

It was Snyder that helped me cross the threshold, tho. Now we're in college, I am clean, my brain for the first time harnessing and focusing and making real connections through and through. The Bath. I wrote a 10-page paper on it in three hours flat and it was the only A+ I ever got with not one mark or yea, but...feedback. It blew my mind, and my prof's, too. Read it. Read it out loud like Mooney taught me to do. Pay good attention to the comas, the indents, the natural pauses until the rhythm gets in to you, melds with you, the poem and you are it and become you, and bigger than you, too.

In other writerly news, I want you also to stop by Erika's post today for a little bit of communion. God, this girl. I totally feel her, remember nodding out behind the cash register at Play It Again Sam's my senior year of college because I was working on my first and only fiction novel and was up all night long three, four nights, whole weeks in a row. Coffee infusions and lots of cigarettes. Sitting up out of dead drenched sleep with lines charging through me head. I cant wait to see where she ends up....

Happy weekend, friends. It's sunny out here on the ol EC, again! O sunshine my true and hope-full friend.

Fall, oh splendid Fall

I don't know what it's like where you live right now but where we are, on Maryland's Eastern Shore, on farmland and surrounded by fields and fields of dead dry corn, it is breezy and light and the mornings are cool and require soft cotton long sleeves and cause me deep and lustful intermittent aches for fall....

That's not to say that by the afternoon there isn't the glare of sweat and furrow on my brow, but I gotta tell ya, our first First Harvest Jam back on the 9th ushered in a glory of sweet cool air and long shadows, a sense that the sky was growing and stretching to send the sun back nigh to the furthest ends of the horizon almost to the all the way below...and I am amazed at this! My heart buzzing, how close and real the actual seasons are following the old marks of season's treads on cell memory in our blood currents and primal memory in our hearts and in our souls. We discussed this at our potluck the week past, how cool the night was, sweater weather and how we all remembered (except for Dykeman, who disagreed, but he was in general in contention w Sam that night, and besides, for all us humans isn't memory just a turn away from imagination anyway...) that it used to be when we were kids that the cricket air at night in August chilled us on our neck and put shivers down our back when we were done with hide and seek or private clubhouses next to the swing set or whatever. And this is true, the seasons did used to be so much more of a mild rolling, near enough that our generation of Xers on the corner of Y can still remember...

A return to this and yet a swift reminder for me: the toxic details are still all around. Dead corn, only harvestable this year are bushels of 70 or so a stand, far less than last years average of 120 and our drought last year was awful-bad. (The mild season's return hasn't done a damn thing for our lac of rain.)

(Anyhow.) The new moon is coming this weekend--the full in Leo sun was two weekends ago and this is strong strong time of year. Subtle discontent is actually your soul's way of seeking harmony, listen to the message the deep tune in you is trying to send, actually surrender to the flow of discord. Or to the glory and grace in moments of solitude right now--these are the guideposts singing to you of the unity, these are reminders to know gratitude for the cycle of all that is.

My first harvest full moon on the 16th was wowed by me--that week I returned again to quiet time and have ever since seen the physical details--material level, you dig--of my life easily and seamlessly clicked right in to place. New job etc. Harvest time, as it should be. At once too is the calm cool of seeking peace within myself again--giving over to the realm of KellyLove inside me, the only grace I'll ever need that power deep within my soul...

I feel so good to connect once again to the cycles of our earth. And happy at the little coincidences that affirm and push this connection along....Check out my new blogfriend Tim at This Being Human, I love the new techno version of sage counsel--how it comes from linking and linking and random comments to strangers to help the flow of what seems right.

Anyhow Autumn Equinox is fast coming. Reminder that all things pass us by. Connect to yourself now, get outside. Go, Be, still.

And also, check out my new favorite song which is playing on livestream right now, BenFolds and Regina Spector duet "You Don't Know Me"....

Kat's Wedding, Time w LDubb

WOW.

I am borderline freaking out right now. I just wrote this post, full w tons of links, about kesey and the merry pranksters and tripped out theories yadayada...and somehow just deleted the whole thing.

ughghh i feel sick.

Here are shots/thoughts from katherine's wedding festivities instead.

Kat, at the Bachelorette Party, officially

"sashed".

Ummmm, yes, so these red shirts say "Enjoy Katherine & Jacob, An American Tradition since August 16, 2008" Coca-Cola Classic Lettering, what could be more Americana than that?!

Awwww, lovely Kat. She is wedded in this pic, no more dragging rehearsals lasting hours or Southern-style toasts that kept us all up and weepy with laughter and light at the end of an already long day, well after dinner was served....

Wow, look at Laura Walsh and I. She doesn't wear anything, ever, but jeans and fitted t-shirts. How illustrious she is, how sleek and elegant and so otherwise hiding of her power-full powerfull ways....

So, the morn of the actual wedding, Laura and I were together at the Bridal Luncheon on this large historic estate on a creek that opened to the mouth of the River and gave a direct view of the vast horizon of the Chesapeake Bay. At meals end, we addled aimleslly about on the lawn, or the "green" perhaps I should say more fittingly, and found ourselves wandering through a tunnel cut in some hedges, English garden style. The tunnel led on to a peer which stuck out in the center of a dead-end finger of Langford Creek. It was all edged by hunched over tress with hangy vines in the limbs and lots of breathing greenery and the creek was brown and brought you to mind of the Mississippi and truly, it all really was a magical divergence of old country south and hints of English-style roots all in one. True divergence, as myth ought to be.... We sat there, sort of etherically lingering in the white sun while schools of fish splashed under us, talking deep talks shot through w our irreverant jokes and laughter, which is the way we do. And I prodded Laura at the end of it all, about how would we ever figure a way to get a big estate of our own. "Our very own Bohemian Estate, for all us artists to live authentic and surrounded by beauty. All Boho and walking around with parasols."

So which was better, Laura's shot of laughter at the irony of my vision, or the fact that later that day when we got to the wedding reception, held on Katherine's parent's estate edged by a space of water historically named Comegy's Bite, they actually handed out parasols...!

Dinner of course was exceptional--gazpacho w crab followed by the tenderest slices of juicy rare filet. But the best part, captured below (again in the ethos)...was the haunting experience LWalsh brought to the whole affair...

Yes, Epic. Mark another one down for my records of the Sutras...my archives of the Tribe of Us....