I am writing this week with loud music for part of it which I'm not used to being able to do. So far, so good. My Wednesday morning regular cancelled this morning and I had slept on the sofa because it would be easier to get up early. I like mornings that start like this, right off the couch like it's still yesterday and all I have to do is go change and fold blankets. Coffee will be ready by the time the screen is already open and gaping and that is a huge, weird turn-on. And then I am sitting and then I am finger tapping and time is disappearing behind me like road under tires. I don't get any of this. And writing feels like I am almost to my shoulders in the hot spring muscle soft waters. Every word I write I also see a dream splice, and it has been like this the last several days where I am walking in the middle of last night's dreamscape. It is funky to weave my thesis in with all this. My therapist's direction: follow the soul of the work.
What in the good love of fuck? I don't even know what that means either. I have never been so frustrated and so at peace in my life. I think of October 2011 living up north at the top of the state dirt redwood backroads and doing yoga under the green canopies. And in a forward bend and stopping on a choke feeling of glee because, ohhh my god, this space here on my back deck I could see this. Deep inside in places that always just felt like discontent, because that's yearning, I saw this land and this yoga here, that fog and that sun, the pine needle earth, these trees! Holy god. And that's what this is, yes. This little hobbit house window looking out the canyon, the heater on the floor the music and the sun deck for reading in the late sun hours. My god those moments in my past I remember now, misery so stuck inside cuz that I could see all this, too.
There's nothing worse, more whiney--than that. When?
I was writing a long spondown of poetic compulsion bc damn it there is a man on the east coast who still has me a little stunned. And what I was writing was sounding exactly like the song singing. Which I'd never heard, it was Po'girl. Mercy. I saw them in Easton at the Night Cat two different times back when there was still a scene there. I lived in the best ever apartment in Easton, with a wall length eight foot high book shelf and a bedroom I'd made my study for writing and meditation. My bed was in the living room which made it fun when guests stayed on the couch. I could sit on the roof at night there and look out over Goldsborough. And smoke cigarettes bc that's what I do.
There is the deepest hollowed out space beneath me that says only one thing, oh my god how am I 37 already? How?
It is the first time in a long time that I don't know how that's supposed to make me feel.
Showing posts with label poetry poetry poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry poetry poetry. Show all posts
January 14, 2015
January 9, 2015
Upon the screen.
I want to speak with authority but maybe I'm wrong--though this is my third winter being here so I ought to, if it feels right, be able to believe my ability to judge the seasons of this place & speak the earth speak like I so often do.
This said, it is like springtime here, or how we learn spring by the tide of April back east. I love it, the earth awakes, it rises my heart like a flock of doves sit beneath which maybe that's because it's true. The buoyancy, the fat bird-singing songs infused in the ascending green. I am not more than this: the live song.
It is, and I hope that readers who read me one time before for the poetry, get this--a time of waking myths. Activating our mythology is the charge of the day--and I mean this as base and re-rythmic as allowing your thoughts to settle in to your conscious choice of brand new words. New stories. I am writing, clearly, precisely, my own. By being the words. It has been so long. I think, I see my Self, honor, bare witness seem to choke just a tidbit, and say Could it really? Have been this long? And more, Is it true I actually came out here--here California--on a hunt for them? And yes, just there, the echo--yes that is true. I did.
It HAS been that long. And there the perplexity, Could it really be sure, true and simple as THIS? And that is what's most devastating to say. That when it's been since July of 2012 that you've had word activation you actually forget what it means. You forgot what it is like--no, you forget that it's possible to cowrite song. Aghast, even as I write this I stare at the screen--how is it possible to so unwittingly forget what it means to come back to my self?
I have no questions though…the years that ask, the years that answer…And so it is. All answers.(Even though questions are how they seem, you forgot this though the double vision cross-eyed grace.)
Even sure as I see it finally, visited by my hands that place it up upon the screen.
This said, it is like springtime here, or how we learn spring by the tide of April back east. I love it, the earth awakes, it rises my heart like a flock of doves sit beneath which maybe that's because it's true. The buoyancy, the fat bird-singing songs infused in the ascending green. I am not more than this: the live song.
It is, and I hope that readers who read me one time before for the poetry, get this--a time of waking myths. Activating our mythology is the charge of the day--and I mean this as base and re-rythmic as allowing your thoughts to settle in to your conscious choice of brand new words. New stories. I am writing, clearly, precisely, my own. By being the words. It has been so long. I think, I see my Self, honor, bare witness seem to choke just a tidbit, and say Could it really? Have been this long? And more, Is it true I actually came out here--here California--on a hunt for them? And yes, just there, the echo--yes that is true. I did.
It HAS been that long. And there the perplexity, Could it really be sure, true and simple as THIS? And that is what's most devastating to say. That when it's been since July of 2012 that you've had word activation you actually forget what it means. You forgot what it is like--no, you forget that it's possible to cowrite song. Aghast, even as I write this I stare at the screen--how is it possible to so unwittingly forget what it means to come back to my self?
I have no questions though…the years that ask, the years that answer…And so it is. All answers.(Even though questions are how they seem, you forgot this though the double vision cross-eyed grace.)
Even sure as I see it finally, visited by my hands that place it up upon the screen.
January 7, 2015
I was gone fifteen days.
Not really sure what happened other than I slept eight hours last night, almost to the exact minute, and felt clean and clear waking up in my bed in the loft in the canyon. In the California mythos of sunshine-wintertime.
I was gone fifteen days but the truth is it was way, way longer than that. On Friday Uncle Tim, who is my godfather by the soul way, called in the morning. It was Ocean Pines gray out which is its own special prison that keeps the winter folk away. The thing is with sock-in like that marsh gasses keep the soil tender-moist and smelling green. So we took a four mile tall tree walk on a path he tends for the Rec department and I cried those hot soul-cleanse tears that are meant only for God-ppl and wise women, which of course are the same thing. Helped me to take serious the karma I have between me and my own god-kids, too. Later I found out about Derynne's brother and couldn't see straight again.
So Konan came through winding us up at Cork Bar downtown which in a million different scenarios if I had to hand-pick that would be down towards 9 hundred ninety thousand on the list. But here's the thing, the Wild proclamation: you just never know you know? We wound up late night in WOC and that there was the only place in the world I needed to be, kicking it w his real home grls and seeing myself in them in a way I haven't seen me in Way. Too. Long a time.
The next day I stayed in pajamas til 7 pm and watched the Red Tent and ate the soup broth I'd made/been making since the first night at home. Witchy bitches make witchy brew. We watched the Ravens rock Pitt like we all knew was coming. WILD card that's Baltimore, that special Baltimore one-eyed medicine some mistake as bad (false-pride).
And that's what's up, tracking home, the special tendencies that run the soul of who you are cuz of the land peopled through of from-where-you-come. If you can read and track this, good for you. If you can't you need help dark-seeing which means between the lines. Linguistics. Can't be studied. Someone should tell Pacifica that.
Point is this all happened or started back the night I went to HB to meet Yasi and Konan started blowing me up--that's the thing about WILD, all cards eventually come a calling and that's the thing about one-eyed medicine. It's your duty to rise up when the reminder comes: you CAN see.
So now Humboldt makes sense, the long 101 journey home again to the earth and the tides that rise. I come living back to the canyon, no food in my hobbit dwelling just coffee and no phone charger to keep me tied to time and ties and all that hell. I write these words and The Light comes on which is Erin Mac back there in Baldamore making her next moves saying wutsup. She comes through as WILD does, like I useta say and always will, Poetry is my only religion.
That is what's up.
I know Who I am. I need little else than that.
Prayers that all ppl get right. Or Wild. Either or is the same. Go listen to some good music if you're dead!
I'm going for a swim.
I was gone fifteen days but the truth is it was way, way longer than that. On Friday Uncle Tim, who is my godfather by the soul way, called in the morning. It was Ocean Pines gray out which is its own special prison that keeps the winter folk away. The thing is with sock-in like that marsh gasses keep the soil tender-moist and smelling green. So we took a four mile tall tree walk on a path he tends for the Rec department and I cried those hot soul-cleanse tears that are meant only for God-ppl and wise women, which of course are the same thing. Helped me to take serious the karma I have between me and my own god-kids, too. Later I found out about Derynne's brother and couldn't see straight again.
So Konan came through winding us up at Cork Bar downtown which in a million different scenarios if I had to hand-pick that would be down towards 9 hundred ninety thousand on the list. But here's the thing, the Wild proclamation: you just never know you know? We wound up late night in WOC and that there was the only place in the world I needed to be, kicking it w his real home grls and seeing myself in them in a way I haven't seen me in Way. Too. Long a time.
The next day I stayed in pajamas til 7 pm and watched the Red Tent and ate the soup broth I'd made/been making since the first night at home. Witchy bitches make witchy brew. We watched the Ravens rock Pitt like we all knew was coming. WILD card that's Baltimore, that special Baltimore one-eyed medicine some mistake as bad (false-pride).
And that's what's up, tracking home, the special tendencies that run the soul of who you are cuz of the land peopled through of from-where-you-come. If you can read and track this, good for you. If you can't you need help dark-seeing which means between the lines. Linguistics. Can't be studied. Someone should tell Pacifica that.
Point is this all happened or started back the night I went to HB to meet Yasi and Konan started blowing me up--that's the thing about WILD, all cards eventually come a calling and that's the thing about one-eyed medicine. It's your duty to rise up when the reminder comes: you CAN see.
So now Humboldt makes sense, the long 101 journey home again to the earth and the tides that rise. I come living back to the canyon, no food in my hobbit dwelling just coffee and no phone charger to keep me tied to time and ties and all that hell. I write these words and The Light comes on which is Erin Mac back there in Baldamore making her next moves saying wutsup. She comes through as WILD does, like I useta say and always will, Poetry is my only religion.
That is what's up.
I know Who I am. I need little else than that.
Prayers that all ppl get right. Or Wild. Either or is the same. Go listen to some good music if you're dead!
I'm going for a swim.
December 3, 2014
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
Mostly I am on hear tonight to holla:
It feels so good, after three months watching the concentrated efforts, to see the ground work of the activists rallying in response to Eric Garner tonight.
My trip was so bitchen, but I am tired now and in need of quiet because I feel like I am settling a lot of things.
There is this project which makes me yearn and yumm. It's nice, restores a small elemental part of me, experiencing music seemingly somewhat worth the production..
Finally. Mostly I just want T.S. Elliot to speak for me.
from East Coker italics mine
III. O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant, The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters, The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers, Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees, Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark, And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors, And cold the sense and lost the motive of action. And we all go with them, into the silent funeral, Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury. I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre, The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness, And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away— Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about; Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing— I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning. The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry, The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony Of death and birth.
November 26, 2014
Translating to words the sea and tall-tree talk
In Rincon I thought for a sec about going to the beach. I had a conversation with Konan the night before about surf breaks and it only seemed right. Everything in me wanted tires on road though and already the 101 was making that certain kind of only-on-101-noise.
The gas station on the right was cheaper by a cent but the cashier in the other one had the night before won me over. An ESL student with a middle eastern way of averting his eyes which I knew was meant as a form of respect. The night before I'd asked do you carry tasty cakes and he said, "Excuse me, ma'am, I am only learning english, please repeat the question." We talked about his commitment to learning english and I authentically tried to assure him how successful he already was. His humility I could actually feel in my heart. Even though he worked, as he told me, graveyard shift, I still went back to his store in the morning for gas.
I knew there'd be grace then: walking out to my car, in my hand a jug of water and some rugged gloves that were only 2 bucks for later when I camped. Next to my car a van, the old hippy kind, with a Dead sticker on it. A guy my age-ish or a little younger came towards me then. He had the sparkle in his eye and was inside his heart. I relaxed and smiled big and warm, already had my wallet out…Think you could spare a few bucks he said and then, we're trying to get to San Diego by the night. I nodded and said a prayer and gave thanks for beneficent road blessings for us both and handed him some cash.
I took the 101north until I saw a sign for Morrow Bay then took that west. In Morrow Bay it led me down a little access road, it being the magic which by now was back and I had to let it ease through my body in a mild, sweet way a little at a time. But for sure it led me down this little road with beachfront motels and so I made note, Morrow Bay I will be back.
At the south end of Big Sur I found Sebastian's General Store just past the Piedras Blancas and the Lighthouse of the same name. Originally my plan had been to get warm lunch there then get north to Kirk Creek. But in the parking lot it was the feeling of noooo not yet in a soft movement that felt like gentle wind. So on I went.
I am glad I did that big stretch of the 1. Big Sur is the only stretch of California coastline on which I'd never travelled. But then as I got more north I realized wow that isn't true. In the 90's when my dad lived in San Jose he brought us down that route--me and Sean my brother. This was probably 1992.
I was saddened by Big Sur because of the invasive fragmite all over the sides of the hill. As an indicator of the ecosystem a parasite like that, among so much splotches of otherwise bald land, well it told me her health is not well. I was expecting so much more…green. Only in the center is there deep green quiet and that stretch lasts only a few miles or so. I thought more than once, well Kel you're spoiled because you lived on the Oregon coast. Then realized it's why people keep the magic up there such a secret, it's own private host. Kirk was all reserved and the other campsites too. I was deeply content already just with my drive and really wanted, needed big trees so anyhow so I turned right in Carmel--which means towards inland--and got a room for $50 when I got to Salinas.
Salinas is mostly Mexican which anyway next to the wealth of Carmel made me feel more at home. I got tacos and watched the Ravens win on cable. From there, next morning I got on 1 again and took it towards Santa Cruz. I got to Big Basin and lost my cell again, which made me happy because it was the final piece of grace towards the silence that I need.
This morning all I could see was no shower with the crisp yum of redwoods still in my hair and curled up some place with poetry and coffee. So I set out knowing that was it, magic vision flowing like it oughta or useta or is anyway again, and now on the other side of those coastal ranges I landed in the town of Saratoga in a wood floored cafe that roasts their own beans. I had the most blazin burrito for breakfast even though it was already close to noon. In this valley where around me the redwoods sing the sound you need absolute quiet to hear--well, yes. Cozy is the word.
Writing now and will scootch to the corner in a second for a over-stuffed couch and poems and the real work, which is translating to words the sea and tall-tree talk.
Humboldt in the morning, with soul-fam.
As it should be, for Giving Thanks.
The gas station on the right was cheaper by a cent but the cashier in the other one had the night before won me over. An ESL student with a middle eastern way of averting his eyes which I knew was meant as a form of respect. The night before I'd asked do you carry tasty cakes and he said, "Excuse me, ma'am, I am only learning english, please repeat the question." We talked about his commitment to learning english and I authentically tried to assure him how successful he already was. His humility I could actually feel in my heart. Even though he worked, as he told me, graveyard shift, I still went back to his store in the morning for gas.
I knew there'd be grace then: walking out to my car, in my hand a jug of water and some rugged gloves that were only 2 bucks for later when I camped. Next to my car a van, the old hippy kind, with a Dead sticker on it. A guy my age-ish or a little younger came towards me then. He had the sparkle in his eye and was inside his heart. I relaxed and smiled big and warm, already had my wallet out…Think you could spare a few bucks he said and then, we're trying to get to San Diego by the night. I nodded and said a prayer and gave thanks for beneficent road blessings for us both and handed him some cash.
I took the 101north until I saw a sign for Morrow Bay then took that west. In Morrow Bay it led me down a little access road, it being the magic which by now was back and I had to let it ease through my body in a mild, sweet way a little at a time. But for sure it led me down this little road with beachfront motels and so I made note, Morrow Bay I will be back.
At the south end of Big Sur I found Sebastian's General Store just past the Piedras Blancas and the Lighthouse of the same name. Originally my plan had been to get warm lunch there then get north to Kirk Creek. But in the parking lot it was the feeling of noooo not yet in a soft movement that felt like gentle wind. So on I went.
I am glad I did that big stretch of the 1. Big Sur is the only stretch of California coastline on which I'd never travelled. But then as I got more north I realized wow that isn't true. In the 90's when my dad lived in San Jose he brought us down that route--me and Sean my brother. This was probably 1992.
I was saddened by Big Sur because of the invasive fragmite all over the sides of the hill. As an indicator of the ecosystem a parasite like that, among so much splotches of otherwise bald land, well it told me her health is not well. I was expecting so much more…green. Only in the center is there deep green quiet and that stretch lasts only a few miles or so. I thought more than once, well Kel you're spoiled because you lived on the Oregon coast. Then realized it's why people keep the magic up there such a secret, it's own private host. Kirk was all reserved and the other campsites too. I was deeply content already just with my drive and really wanted, needed big trees so anyhow so I turned right in Carmel--which means towards inland--and got a room for $50 when I got to Salinas.
This morning all I could see was no shower with the crisp yum of redwoods still in my hair and curled up some place with poetry and coffee. So I set out knowing that was it, magic vision flowing like it oughta or useta or is anyway again, and now on the other side of those coastal ranges I landed in the town of Saratoga in a wood floored cafe that roasts their own beans. I had the most blazin burrito for breakfast even though it was already close to noon. In this valley where around me the redwoods sing the sound you need absolute quiet to hear--well, yes. Cozy is the word.
Writing now and will scootch to the corner in a second for a over-stuffed couch and poems and the real work, which is translating to words the sea and tall-tree talk.
Humboldt in the morning, with soul-fam.
As it should be, for Giving Thanks.
March 19, 2012
Your soulspeak companions
Lindsey, my dear sweet friend from way back then, confirmed that meeting in San Diego for the night wouldn't be feasible because her work load was so intense--she's been in town for five days but we couldn't make anything happen. After she texted I left the 99 cent store, where I seem to visit once weekly for creative accouterments to aid in teaching, and cruised home. The sun was burning the wildest poetic orange. The palm trees looked black against the nightening sky. I hit a left on Ellis from Brookhurst and whadya know, Ellis is the street that turns to Main which is where I live. This I did instinctively, body knowledge, and when I realized it sitting at the light I had the most satisfied ease. I have lived here going on four weeks. I have slowed down, given over unto myself, allowed for the creation of my own rounds. And so I begin to feel lovingly contented with my self, with this sweet little hand-crafted life I am whittling out piece by piece.
Laura and Clay eat dinner together every night, they were just finishing the ritual with their customary evening commentary on current events when I walked in the door. He was a dj on college radio in the late sixties and again in the mid-seventies so his musical sensibility when it comes to soul and in general roots music is unstoppable. Makes me wish my love Brooks was here because him and Clay would stay up musicing til well past the palms went black til well past them going blue in the moonlight all the way past, for sure, when they turn orange pink again in the earliest morning sun. That's what happened, unexpected, with us tonight, we got talking music and the conversation had me so lit up I was on spotify with the finest Ray Charles play list I believe I have ever heard, back and forth back and forth to the rocking boat rhythm of some of the sexiest music alive. Music that made my veins sweat on the inside, music that made me want to squat low on my haunches and let the very earth itself sway me side to side. Music that made me think of Brooks, of dancing like no one on the planet dances because that planet made of soul is invisible it's one you can only feel through your feet someplace cosmic where they brush on the floor of your shoes it's a planet you inhabit from within, this the planet where Brooks and I live, and so Clay brought him near and Laura too, who brought Erika near by telling me she channeled Fitzgerald while writing this afternoon.
All is right with the world when your housemates, decades ahead of you, bring to you your husband and wife of the creative element, your soulspeak companions three thousand miles away. When things are so aligned they meld that well to your inner atmosphere. I love my life. I love putting my energy in to exactly what I care about, exactly what turns me on. I do so and it feeds me back at me, in this power surge of soul music over dinner and Fitzgerald wander lust fettering in and out. I want to yell to Erika, yell to her a quarter-stretch across the globe The Duende The Duende it's alive it's well, but I don't need to because she is my sister my wife in this soul land so she already knows. Tomorrow I meet Derynne for the Huntington Beach Street Fair then we are going to an Equinox Bonfire also here in HB. She too one of this tribe... I danced the best fun dancing with sweet Wallace and his friends this weekend they actually helped themselves to taking over the dj stand, I wrote poems all day on Friday and read in bed most the day long yesterday. To feed the soul, any who would ever label this selfish how sad! How much they miss out, how this life by very design sees to it that we serve others just by serving our own true self, that we empower others from the genuine source power when this is what we do.
Ah and for me? This time, this quiet gentle precious time. It's been a long time coming. Life is good.
Laura and Clay eat dinner together every night, they were just finishing the ritual with their customary evening commentary on current events when I walked in the door. He was a dj on college radio in the late sixties and again in the mid-seventies so his musical sensibility when it comes to soul and in general roots music is unstoppable. Makes me wish my love Brooks was here because him and Clay would stay up musicing til well past the palms went black til well past them going blue in the moonlight all the way past, for sure, when they turn orange pink again in the earliest morning sun. That's what happened, unexpected, with us tonight, we got talking music and the conversation had me so lit up I was on spotify with the finest Ray Charles play list I believe I have ever heard, back and forth back and forth to the rocking boat rhythm of some of the sexiest music alive. Music that made my veins sweat on the inside, music that made me want to squat low on my haunches and let the very earth itself sway me side to side. Music that made me think of Brooks, of dancing like no one on the planet dances because that planet made of soul is invisible it's one you can only feel through your feet someplace cosmic where they brush on the floor of your shoes it's a planet you inhabit from within, this the planet where Brooks and I live, and so Clay brought him near and Laura too, who brought Erika near by telling me she channeled Fitzgerald while writing this afternoon.
All is right with the world when your housemates, decades ahead of you, bring to you your husband and wife of the creative element, your soulspeak companions three thousand miles away. When things are so aligned they meld that well to your inner atmosphere. I love my life. I love putting my energy in to exactly what I care about, exactly what turns me on. I do so and it feeds me back at me, in this power surge of soul music over dinner and Fitzgerald wander lust fettering in and out. I want to yell to Erika, yell to her a quarter-stretch across the globe The Duende The Duende it's alive it's well, but I don't need to because she is my sister my wife in this soul land so she already knows. Tomorrow I meet Derynne for the Huntington Beach Street Fair then we are going to an Equinox Bonfire also here in HB. She too one of this tribe... I danced the best fun dancing with sweet Wallace and his friends this weekend they actually helped themselves to taking over the dj stand, I wrote poems all day on Friday and read in bed most the day long yesterday. To feed the soul, any who would ever label this selfish how sad! How much they miss out, how this life by very design sees to it that we serve others just by serving our own true self, that we empower others from the genuine source power when this is what we do.
Ah and for me? This time, this quiet gentle precious time. It's been a long time coming. Life is good.
January 23, 2012
and the words start again
How a heart mends.
and life rewarms
March 17, 2011
Poem. Backwards.
Backwards
I was still in love with Josh.
In the fog-handled edges of the trees
in the photos
from most the pictures on the island
it tells me so
It’s the muted corners that blur
the edges
in to things that are one or the other
but not because the starts and ends
seem all the same
At that point eighteen months had passed
since we'd pained our presence
with physical remembering
But only two weeks since
we’d talked on the phone. I know
because in other pictures there
is the party at the beach
me up too late
with people half my age
me readying
to sleep with someone
way too young
Archiving photos now makes me wonder:
Is this the way we move on?
Travel far away with some new heart
reckless and beating in the hungry hand
walk for miles around and around
a same small plot of strange land.
Do we ritualize the expanding of limits
the exercising of what one is capable of?
And should that too fail us
is it a certainty,
we will tramp back over the path feckless
as animals in the barnyard
oblivious of the routes
we insist on
because as always they will return
us home?
I was still in love with Josh.
In the fog-handled edges of the trees
in the photos
from most the pictures on the island
it tells me so
It’s the muted corners that blur
the edges
in to things that are one or the other
but not because the starts and ends
seem all the same
At that point eighteen months had passed
since we'd pained our presence
with physical remembering
But only two weeks since
we’d talked on the phone. I know
because in other pictures there
is the party at the beach
me up too late
with people half my age
me readying
to sleep with someone
way too young
Archiving photos now makes me wonder:
Is this the way we move on?
Travel far away with some new heart
reckless and beating in the hungry hand
walk for miles around and around
a same small plot of strange land.
Do we ritualize the expanding of limits
the exercising of what one is capable of?
And should that too fail us
is it a certainty,
we will tramp back over the path feckless
as animals in the barnyard
oblivious of the routes
we insist on
because as always they will return
us home?
January 11, 2011
Give me a little corner.
It'd be nice if it were snowing is all I can think, warm and nestled bed and blankets around me deep and rounded as an acorn shell. Would they close the coffee shop if it were good and snowy out? Didn't I just fall asleep? It was 11:30 last night when I woke for just a sec to turn out the light Erika's book half across my chest and half-covered by my sheet. It's quarter past four now I've been awake a half hour could've fallen back to sleep but it would've been tough then, so tough to get out of bed when the alarm goes at 4:45.
When did this become my life? Dad asked what will you do Monday with your day off. I was laying on the sofa still in my softest pjs it was late in the afternoon on Sunday so late the sun was almost down I'd been there since pretty much the night before. 22 hours on my feet Friday and Saturday so tiiiiiiired.
Write I said back to him as if the answer duhhhh was summer and the question was what season do you prefer freezing cold winter with it's two hours of light or summer warm beaches and fresh air and swimming and 15 hours of daytime outside. I will write, oh yea that's what I'm doing here living for free at mom and dad's. Not making enough to pay rent anyway.
Ohhhhhhh here we are again. At least the bed at mom's is the most comfortable one I have ever slept in ever. It's my last thougt of the day also usually my waking one--ahhh god this bed is so amazing thank you so much. Yowza I so haaate being cold. Then I say a prayer for the people who are cold right now, hungry, sleeping on the frozen hardass street. Please please send them some tiny bit of ease. Thank you World for all the good and blessings in my life I choose to be open to you and the good and the blessings. I choose to wake with a happy heart just for today I choose to be gratitude in motion to show thanks for all the good in life I've got....Sometimes it's all I repeat again and again my mantra that leads me through the dark steepled house with the drafts and quiet in the corners and the floor that pads and creeks in all the same places each morning. Soon there will be smells of coffee beans and muffins baking and soon after that the pinking blush of sun over Ocean City on the horizon. The black marks of geese through the air.
Unless it snows, and then like yesterday it's me, happy. Me da um cantinho. Portuguese for Give me a little corner. I read that in Committed. And that is me, and the words and me. Maybe the book is not coming how it did but ohh give me a day to wake up and stay in my sweet bed and read all morning hot coffee nearby, literal stacks of books piled all around. Then writing for the rest of the day still propped up in my bed all the pillows my little village and my laptop and me and the words and me and getting out of bed just to shower or eat then put my softies on again and back in I go. Only other time I'm up is just to lay across my floor propped on pillows for a change of pace from leaning against the wall in bed. Poetry journals, litmags library books on and on. Atlas wide open. Imagination. Music on the I-tunes.
Facebook to take a break here and there.
Give me a little corner.
It's all I'll ever need.
When did this become my life? Dad asked what will you do Monday with your day off. I was laying on the sofa still in my softest pjs it was late in the afternoon on Sunday so late the sun was almost down I'd been there since pretty much the night before. 22 hours on my feet Friday and Saturday so tiiiiiiired.
Write I said back to him as if the answer duhhhh was summer and the question was what season do you prefer freezing cold winter with it's two hours of light or summer warm beaches and fresh air and swimming and 15 hours of daytime outside. I will write, oh yea that's what I'm doing here living for free at mom and dad's. Not making enough to pay rent anyway.
Ohhhhhhh here we are again. At least the bed at mom's is the most comfortable one I have ever slept in ever. It's my last thougt of the day also usually my waking one--ahhh god this bed is so amazing thank you so much. Yowza I so haaate being cold. Then I say a prayer for the people who are cold right now, hungry, sleeping on the frozen hardass street. Please please send them some tiny bit of ease. Thank you World for all the good and blessings in my life I choose to be open to you and the good and the blessings. I choose to wake with a happy heart just for today I choose to be gratitude in motion to show thanks for all the good in life I've got....Sometimes it's all I repeat again and again my mantra that leads me through the dark steepled house with the drafts and quiet in the corners and the floor that pads and creeks in all the same places each morning. Soon there will be smells of coffee beans and muffins baking and soon after that the pinking blush of sun over Ocean City on the horizon. The black marks of geese through the air.
Unless it snows, and then like yesterday it's me, happy. Me da um cantinho. Portuguese for Give me a little corner. I read that in Committed. And that is me, and the words and me. Maybe the book is not coming how it did but ohh give me a day to wake up and stay in my sweet bed and read all morning hot coffee nearby, literal stacks of books piled all around. Then writing for the rest of the day still propped up in my bed all the pillows my little village and my laptop and me and the words and me and getting out of bed just to shower or eat then put my softies on again and back in I go. Only other time I'm up is just to lay across my floor propped on pillows for a change of pace from leaning against the wall in bed. Poetry journals, litmags library books on and on. Atlas wide open. Imagination. Music on the I-tunes.
Facebook to take a break here and there.
Give me a little corner.
It's all I'll ever need.
November 1, 2010
WATCH THIS. The Divorce Papers Between Us...
Facebook users, go here. My God and if you haven't yet, check out Brave New Voices...I literally watched the semi-finals on HBO totally awe-struck. I have hope again bc of these youth...
October 1, 2010
On Craft: Ferlinghetti & The Real Work.
Glad for the discourse, the go between that happens in the mythic when I engage myself creatively. The serendipitous alignment that entrances Brooks and I...couldn't get five pages of my novel done the other night so I blog rolled for inspiration and discovered Mike's post about Icarus. Dead-on time for me, because so recently I was feeling so good about having the vision for my book locked-in, but not being able to write had me fighting myself in such a gnarly way my wings definitely felt burnt. I write a response back, and link to a post I wrote last year about the Duende, and that post eyeballs me with Liz Gilbert's whole piece about creativity being a dance.
My job, do the work. Write the words, period.
Not my job: to figure out why or why not, how or when the Presence, the great Muse or Duende or Genie or Impulse or whatever else I call it, will show up and visit and it will all feel right and with the flowwww...
My job, do the work. Continue to educate, to read. To read to read to read, and to cultivate fresh, open mind. This is The Real Work--remember that? Literally, show up. & too, the intriguing relationship between showing up and taking in new knowledge and doing so in a non- prejudiced way. Let's take apart that word: non-pre-judged...My application of Real Work, to show up to your own life in a active way, courageously taking yourself on. Finding where you are programmed to beliefs, ideas or behaviors that are not authentically your own. Unselecting them.
Cultivate dissidence and critical thinking. First thought may be worst thought. This is Lawrence Ferlinghetti in Poetry as Insurgent Art. I love this. It is saying just that to me: question everything, including the what-I-consider-sacred. First thought=Best thought? Well, this is extraordinary, yes. Spondown works for me because I believe in honesty, writing the truest sentence I know. Which means I just sit down and Gooooooo with the words to get it all out, come what may. BUT--what if the first ten thoughts are fear-riddled, are examples of me lying to myself because it happens that the subject matter arises insecurities, and insecurities for me taunt out old defenses I picked up as a kid or something. First thought=truth in that scenario, but only in so much as Herman Hesse would teach. Everything is true, including the opposite of the truth...
So for today's lesson, kiddies? I'll leave us with us this, also from Ferlinghetti:
Dont be so openminded that your brains fall out.
& yet (fine, subtle nuance, funny little dissident line where ever-present newness of this eternal creative moment lives....)
Become a new mind and make it newer.
My job, do the work. Write the words, period.
Not my job: to figure out why or why not, how or when the Presence, the great Muse or Duende or Genie or Impulse or whatever else I call it, will show up and visit and it will all feel right and with the flowwww...
My job, do the work. Continue to educate, to read. To read to read to read, and to cultivate fresh, open mind. This is The Real Work--remember that? Literally, show up. & too, the intriguing relationship between showing up and taking in new knowledge and doing so in a non- prejudiced way. Let's take apart that word: non-pre-judged...My application of Real Work, to show up to your own life in a active way, courageously taking yourself on. Finding where you are programmed to beliefs, ideas or behaviors that are not authentically your own. Unselecting them.
Cultivate dissidence and critical thinking. First thought may be worst thought. This is Lawrence Ferlinghetti in Poetry as Insurgent Art. I love this. It is saying just that to me: question everything, including the what-I-consider-sacred. First thought=Best thought? Well, this is extraordinary, yes. Spondown works for me because I believe in honesty, writing the truest sentence I know. Which means I just sit down and Gooooooo with the words to get it all out, come what may. BUT--what if the first ten thoughts are fear-riddled, are examples of me lying to myself because it happens that the subject matter arises insecurities, and insecurities for me taunt out old defenses I picked up as a kid or something. First thought=truth in that scenario, but only in so much as Herman Hesse would teach. Everything is true, including the opposite of the truth...
So for today's lesson, kiddies? I'll leave us with us this, also from Ferlinghetti:
Dont be so openminded that your brains fall out.
& yet (fine, subtle nuance, funny little dissident line where ever-present newness of this eternal creative moment lives....)
Become a new mind and make it newer.
September 27, 2010
What's Rad: Courier Knew
She was mad on my mind yesterday at work: I was lusting over Vogue and my imagination was getting so epically inspired... She lives in me because of poetry, because of poet-heart, because of the heart we therefor live within...
She keeps her own blog, it is snapshot style and concise, which is how she is. Close-fitting and circled-in which is what you get if you dictionary.com the word succinct for other words that mean the same. She frames things the right way with a quick glance, she is accurate each step that she goes and then she puts things together, later, frame by frame. Not like me who is one long spondown wind of abstraction trying to get to the final "right".
This is her blog, READ IT! or experience her snapshots rather, at Courier Knew.
Today is her birthday it turns out, of course it is...
We met in 2007 at Ben's, I guess. There are vague memories of going to his place for spaghetti one night after teaching ESL, me in my work clothes anyway. She was there, she was a blond no make-up ponytail girl which at the time was a tough road to tow around our allnaturalbeyourself (butonlyaslongasyourcool!) kind-of-friends. You know to not have a practiced paticularity about you or whatever. Sam and I danced tossy-style jitterbug together like we always did and also I looked at alot of Banjo magazines that night, if there is such a thing. I remember reading an article about the Clash.
Later, this probably would've been in the fall, we truly met the day I walked in to apply at the Blue Heron Cafe and go to work for Paul. Kirsten was vaccuming the floor.
I think of her every fall now, the way I think of diPrima and Libby, and what secrets are sitting in the trees. The way I think of trees.
That was the season I waited tables and wrote poems to Josh that were actually sign-markers to my self that I was trying to learn how to position, and hold. Poetry is like that, or can be, if you let it talk from your soul. Kir and I used to get over-caffeinated in the Blue Heron kitchen and talk and talk about art and poems and writing plays together and performing and mythic imagination and lying to your self and how this all happened and why did it happen and it did, anyhow, and it also helped the art and poetry to be internally conflicted and most of all, we talked about men. I was on the verge of myself in a new way that I had always wanted to be. In a way that scared me and instigated from me a flight-response that is classic Aries-Kelly of charging blindly ahead. Ramhearted as I am. She was getting her masters and on the verge of what next in career and all those weird creeks and spaces that that can cause. Her passion back then for fault lines and shifting ground. Most of all, also, there was nothing more in life that season than art and darkness and loving the art we were spiraling out of from that darkness within.
As said, I've always always had great love for her. This time last year I sent her an email at random after months of no contact to say hey why dont you come see Brandi Carlile play with me. We both needed Brandi, it turned out, I for coming to terms with moving on and she for the same: yes, always about the men. Brandi played at Rams Head Live and threw a pick in to the crowd and it bounced off Kir's broken heart and landed on the ground. All the lesbians battled for it but Kir just bent down put her hand in to the mass of feet and legs and retrieved the momento easily and handed it to me. A totem now, I keep it in my writing bag with all my USB's.
She is happy, in Canton now, with birds in her hair and our funny man hearts, wink wink Kir my dear friend. I check in on her energy when I quiet and pray or trance or meditate just like I do all my k-nnected friends. But she will always be above most the rest bc of the poetry in her, and memories of starting over in the fall. Starting over, how it comes from reflecting on the bounty of who and how and where and what you been as you root down to take hold and turn over fresh again.
She is friend, who makes me better at me. I am thinking of her today, today birthday today fall today collecting here collecting me collecting her today today today...Today, celebrating You! Gratitude gratefullness grace and space and place for this, poetry and hearts of the matter, Dear Friend...
July 1, 2010
Mash-up: Beach thoughts; and Yachats poems from the book where magical thinking goes
Living with my parents again. Who are living with each other, again. We communicate now.
We talk about it. "Communication."
When did that happen?
It's all so natural living here, I thought it would be so hard with Tim and Mary and my cousins gone, with this being our house, me mom and dad ours for the first time really since I was 12. But it's smooth, easy, and this has a lot to do with how much time I spent here last year, Thursday night through Monday morning every week through the summer and in to the fall, so long as there was sun. It's weird, why now, with my brother moving away?
---
yachats, oregon.
6.12.10.
there is only
the illusion of control
or surrender to the knowledge
of fear:
We have none
& are it, that is
we become what we resist
by thinking we are its master.
fear is the wild card inside
Great Reckoning:
coming to terms with this
---
The weather was so great today. I sat forever on the beach, floated forever on top of the sea. The water was blue-green, close as crystal for the Mid-Atlantic. There was a strong wind, it made the waves roll in peaks to the right, the peaks lifted and carried me. We played games, the water and me, hide and seek and peekaboo. Make-believe. I was smiley the wind was like its own kind of wave and the air and the sea lifted and tilted and rocked and carressed me.
Mom came she brought wraps from Southside Deli the shrimp salad there's the best around. The lifeguards are young and hot and more than once they checked me out. I'm too old for you I want to tell them but from that far away why bother, if they cant tell. Besides I'm lying anyway it feels great to also feel sexy and hot.
---
I sat on rocks in the bright sun
blue sky & sea, Yachats, Oregon, off coast 101.
The 804. Old highway leads to the rocky beach.
Mike gone last time I was here, I went close
to the gaping wide mouth of the sea, where she eats
rocks. There are birds bigger than three of my fists.
They are dark, are crows, are ready to eat
they caw at me & always are in three.
I forgot they were here.
---
The older we get
The older we get the more important imagination. The more we need imagination! The more we must shake loose convention! The more we must not shrink to seeming societal or other imaginary (get it--it goes both ways!) restriction. Imagination! The only place where the still small voice lives!
I dont tell him this, my dad, when he walks in from work tonight and sits down at his laptop and continues his already 60 hour work week at the kitchen table and simultaneously wants to have a talk. You never, ever know when this knew phenomena might arise and tonight I am trying to drink tea and write poems.
So Kel, what's the game plan? Are you going to get published now? I think he only asks because he's recently been around his brothers who like to oneup in the name of family pleasantness and looking out for each other, and I point out as much, my own coy defense, but still the truth far as I can see. Which means it's my opinion but still important, all the same.
I dont know dad? Hanging out til the fall. Then I'll see what's in my heart then. Travelling? I dont tell him I dont know dad I am writing poems. I am worshiping Nature and the cycles of life. I am listening to and connecting every day to the lightness in my spirit. All else will easily take care of itself....I have a calling to the Earth and to write a book about it but dad how am I supposed to know what that will look like?
Why dont I be your personal assistant pop? Put me on your payroll? This is followed by jokes from mom about being dad's lifecoach. It is a pretty funny thought. Deep warm fuzzies and motivational talks featuring dad and Kel.
He laughs and this trails him off. I feel the old residue of guilt for a minute but shake my head at it then watch it turn to dust. I blow it away.
---
These rocks are bed.
These rocks are a bed
made from the sea, left
over salt particles crystalize
underground turbine force solid oncemotion
of what once has been. Sea rocks big as chambers
in the jawlock grip of the sky. Sea rocks with sky eyes
hold jewels waterlocked inside. I sat on the rocks
my eyes made of shells.
Turbinado. Turbinado's a name for sugar.
Sugarmelt softener softens like clover petals
sweet but last bite stung on the tongue.
Sweet to melt, melt sparse words
of what is yet to come. What matters, a lot
when you look at it like that. When you look at it
like sand, melts on the tongue.
---
Now I do feel bad. What should I have said? I dont know dad, what do you want me to do with my life?
This by no measure can possibly even come close to the the level of bad I felt last summer. I used to just sit in the family room and cry. Cry to Tim and Mary, cry to Erin, cry to mom, cry to dad. So much letting it out. Meantime going deeper and deeper, back and back, further and further in the real work. Owning my old beliefs. Owning and naming the true real sources reasons behind my stuckness, behind my discontentedness, behind the always striving but-for-what? unseen ideas that were propelling me. The clawfanged perfectionism, the critic of me breathing down my own neck and for what? All those old beliefs, old world, old school. Old memories swirling beneath my mindscreen eager to fall out of my head. And sucking my true power, dis-abling me from being me.
From just being able to "be".
So much grief came with getting beyond all that.
In order to get to the place where I can just be. I barely know any one able to do that.
What fucking gives?
---
A couple sits, looks out at the waves.
The waves sound like waves, like handsaults
sommering on the sea. Summer-saults
instantaneous washboard the churning hellos
the tumble over ocean throws of 'you're looking at me
surprise, I can see' the sea. I am you, he thinks.
She laughs, the mirror-force look that is sweet.
His stomach pulses, hers. Her purse falls
at their feet. Lipstick offering to the sea
sea eats lips licks its lips on lipstick offering
made so crisp. She shakes a chain lock
he grimaces. They freeze.
I am alive. I am alive! You cry but do not
know you're looking at me. I sommersault
I gulp drink with lippy lips lipped jawwide
from the cup
of love
in the sea
sky. I love you friend. I will, til the end.
---
After the beach today I came home and sat on the back porch and read. I love the back porch of Ocean Pines, it's one of my very favorite places since I was a small little kid. The sun was shaking its light in little back and forth trails on the wall because of how it came through the trees. It made the wall look like a blurred screen.
The air was the softest, breathiest breeze.
I sat out there until it got too dark to see. My mom is hooked and always has been on So You Think You Can Dance and the truth is I like to watch, too, but wont unless someone else puts in on. We watched that when I came in and I did laundry, which just means my work uniforms, because I have three doubles in a row this weekend, happy holiday all you weekenders to the beach be sure you tip me well.
I love working there now. It's funny for me to have mind-scenes of memories: marsh grass before the condos went in and all the places we used to go and sneak beers that smelled like salt and wet wood. I love getting to work and look out at and feel the Bay and the sky all at the same time.
---
The only thing to gain is the reckoning~
give over fine illusion of the soul's control.
At the sea, by the large powerbreaker rock
big as a jet or the pumpkin turned carriage ride.
I walked to see. It was blue sky, blue sea.
The force of it frightened me.
I could try to wrangle it, or submit
& just let it be
We talk about it. "Communication."
When did that happen?
It's all so natural living here, I thought it would be so hard with Tim and Mary and my cousins gone, with this being our house, me mom and dad ours for the first time really since I was 12. But it's smooth, easy, and this has a lot to do with how much time I spent here last year, Thursday night through Monday morning every week through the summer and in to the fall, so long as there was sun. It's weird, why now, with my brother moving away?
---
yachats, oregon.
6.12.10.
there is only
the illusion of control
or surrender to the knowledge
of fear:
We have none
& are it, that is
we become what we resist
by thinking we are its master.
fear is the wild card inside
Great Reckoning:
coming to terms with this
---
The weather was so great today. I sat forever on the beach, floated forever on top of the sea. The water was blue-green, close as crystal for the Mid-Atlantic. There was a strong wind, it made the waves roll in peaks to the right, the peaks lifted and carried me. We played games, the water and me, hide and seek and peekaboo. Make-believe. I was smiley the wind was like its own kind of wave and the air and the sea lifted and tilted and rocked and carressed me.
Mom came she brought wraps from Southside Deli the shrimp salad there's the best around. The lifeguards are young and hot and more than once they checked me out. I'm too old for you I want to tell them but from that far away why bother, if they cant tell. Besides I'm lying anyway it feels great to also feel sexy and hot.
---
I sat on rocks in the bright sun
blue sky & sea, Yachats, Oregon, off coast 101.
The 804. Old highway leads to the rocky beach.
Mike gone last time I was here, I went close
to the gaping wide mouth of the sea, where she eats
rocks. There are birds bigger than three of my fists.
They are dark, are crows, are ready to eat
they caw at me & always are in three.
I forgot they were here.
---
The older we get
The older we get the more important imagination. The more we need imagination! The more we must shake loose convention! The more we must not shrink to seeming societal or other imaginary (get it--it goes both ways!) restriction. Imagination! The only place where the still small voice lives!
I dont tell him this, my dad, when he walks in from work tonight and sits down at his laptop and continues his already 60 hour work week at the kitchen table and simultaneously wants to have a talk. You never, ever know when this knew phenomena might arise and tonight I am trying to drink tea and write poems.
So Kel, what's the game plan? Are you going to get published now? I think he only asks because he's recently been around his brothers who like to oneup in the name of family pleasantness and looking out for each other, and I point out as much, my own coy defense, but still the truth far as I can see. Which means it's my opinion but still important, all the same.
I dont know dad? Hanging out til the fall. Then I'll see what's in my heart then. Travelling? I dont tell him I dont know dad I am writing poems. I am worshiping Nature and the cycles of life. I am listening to and connecting every day to the lightness in my spirit. All else will easily take care of itself....I have a calling to the Earth and to write a book about it but dad how am I supposed to know what that will look like?
Why dont I be your personal assistant pop? Put me on your payroll? This is followed by jokes from mom about being dad's lifecoach. It is a pretty funny thought. Deep warm fuzzies and motivational talks featuring dad and Kel.
He laughs and this trails him off. I feel the old residue of guilt for a minute but shake my head at it then watch it turn to dust. I blow it away.
---
These rocks are bed.
These rocks are a bed
made from the sea, left
over salt particles crystalize
underground turbine force solid oncemotion
of what once has been. Sea rocks big as chambers
in the jawlock grip of the sky. Sea rocks with sky eyes
hold jewels waterlocked inside. I sat on the rocks
my eyes made of shells.
Turbinado. Turbinado's a name for sugar.
Sugarmelt softener softens like clover petals
sweet but last bite stung on the tongue.
Sweet to melt, melt sparse words
of what is yet to come. What matters, a lot
when you look at it like that. When you look at it
like sand, melts on the tongue.
---
Now I do feel bad. What should I have said? I dont know dad, what do you want me to do with my life?
This by no measure can possibly even come close to the the level of bad I felt last summer. I used to just sit in the family room and cry. Cry to Tim and Mary, cry to Erin, cry to mom, cry to dad. So much letting it out. Meantime going deeper and deeper, back and back, further and further in the real work. Owning my old beliefs. Owning and naming the true real sources reasons behind my stuckness, behind my discontentedness, behind the always striving but-for-what? unseen ideas that were propelling me. The clawfanged perfectionism, the critic of me breathing down my own neck and for what? All those old beliefs, old world, old school. Old memories swirling beneath my mindscreen eager to fall out of my head. And sucking my true power, dis-abling me from being me.
From just being able to "be".
So much grief came with getting beyond all that.
In order to get to the place where I can just be. I barely know any one able to do that.
What fucking gives?
---
A couple sits, looks out at the waves.
The waves sound like waves, like handsaults
sommering on the sea. Summer-saults
instantaneous washboard the churning hellos
the tumble over ocean throws of 'you're looking at me
surprise, I can see' the sea. I am you, he thinks.
She laughs, the mirror-force look that is sweet.
His stomach pulses, hers. Her purse falls
at their feet. Lipstick offering to the sea
sea eats lips licks its lips on lipstick offering
made so crisp. She shakes a chain lock
he grimaces. They freeze.
I am alive. I am alive! You cry but do not
know you're looking at me. I sommersault
I gulp drink with lippy lips lipped jawwide
from the cup
of love
in the sea
sky. I love you friend. I will, til the end.
---
After the beach today I came home and sat on the back porch and read. I love the back porch of Ocean Pines, it's one of my very favorite places since I was a small little kid. The sun was shaking its light in little back and forth trails on the wall because of how it came through the trees. It made the wall look like a blurred screen.
The air was the softest, breathiest breeze.
I sat out there until it got too dark to see. My mom is hooked and always has been on So You Think You Can Dance and the truth is I like to watch, too, but wont unless someone else puts in on. We watched that when I came in and I did laundry, which just means my work uniforms, because I have three doubles in a row this weekend, happy holiday all you weekenders to the beach be sure you tip me well.
I love working there now. It's funny for me to have mind-scenes of memories: marsh grass before the condos went in and all the places we used to go and sneak beers that smelled like salt and wet wood. I love getting to work and look out at and feel the Bay and the sky all at the same time.
---
The only thing to gain is the reckoning~
give over fine illusion of the soul's control.
At the sea, by the large powerbreaker rock
big as a jet or the pumpkin turned carriage ride.
I walked to see. It was blue sky, blue sea.
The force of it frightened me.
I could try to wrangle it, or submit
& just let it be
April 7, 2010
Silly Download Poem for a month of Poetry...What I make of it
could be good, could be anything quick to crumble
or instamatic, like the way my coffee sputters and spurts
to bring life. It is all, it will be everything I need, in the morning
I sit and the window is open and the traffic is Russian all
communist cause of togetherness the rise and fall of mechanics
outside right through the screen sucking up and at witness
like me
of the resting soft miracle of the air. I dont know
what to say. That I have music at my fingertips
a neon clock soft sheets a remote control and a clean
place to live & in the morning, a choice
to sit here, should I so desire, and witness
the siege of brain matter on my own cherished air:
the ways I could or could not, just for today
burn. What shall I, who shall I
become. It is not a hard tale to tell
this challenging choking desire to rise
with life, like ending the trail at the parting
of valleys where the green lush of land
is carbohydrate in its feast and the sun
hush of the grass in arching aching cry of mercy
is sweet, is beckoning you to ahhh
just lay down a while here
the substance of surrender
just be.
And feet, humble as they are
will go or will come
not for lac of air or rise or meat
or togetherness or mechanics but because,
will too with their own little miraculous
nerve endings in great call of heroic victory
prop up on parted land-floor & too say
Sweeeeet
or instamatic, like the way my coffee sputters and spurts
to bring life. It is all, it will be everything I need, in the morning
I sit and the window is open and the traffic is Russian all
communist cause of togetherness the rise and fall of mechanics
outside right through the screen sucking up and at witness
like me
of the resting soft miracle of the air. I dont know
what to say. That I have music at my fingertips
a neon clock soft sheets a remote control and a clean
place to live & in the morning, a choice
to sit here, should I so desire, and witness
the siege of brain matter on my own cherished air:
the ways I could or could not, just for today
burn. What shall I, who shall I
become. It is not a hard tale to tell
this challenging choking desire to rise
with life, like ending the trail at the parting
of valleys where the green lush of land
is carbohydrate in its feast and the sun
hush of the grass in arching aching cry of mercy
is sweet, is beckoning you to ahhh
just lay down a while here
the substance of surrender
just be.
And feet, humble as they are
will go or will come
not for lac of air or rise or meat
or togetherness or mechanics but because,
will too with their own little miraculous
nerve endings in great call of heroic victory
prop up on parted land-floor & too say
Sweeeeet
February 5, 2010
Continued Comments, on What Makes a Poet Last
This is copied and pasted from a breif convo via comments over at Stoning the Devil.
Kelly said...
alright. the more i think about specifically what you were getting at here(in that i applied my own more loose context of doubling, as in having layered meaning rather than a secondary character-as-theme) and particular to the idea of impoverished contemporary poetry, and in thinking about my responses to the five questions of the most recent post: what consitutes good poetry?
1:28 PM
P.F.S. Post said...
Good question. There is no definitive answer.
How about answering the question with another question: why have the Romantic "Big Six" lasted?
What traces are in their poems that cannot be effaced?
Adam Fieled
And here is my response, since I felt a little indulgent leaving all this on his blog:
you poor stranger apologies in advance i process and better understand my own thinking/opinions/thoughts by writing, so do pardon this long long rambling response.
isn’t that just it? they were the voice of the undercurrent of their time. in other words not necessarily anti-industry but pro-nature. what the common folk were still about. wordsworth was a pagan for christ’s sake. lyricism was valued not necessarily bc of the eloquence of the soft language but bc it was pro-romance (romance defined here as a style, thus romance the vehicle, used symbolically: style that is anti "mechanics", words on a page symbolic in form of being different then all that is devout/stringent and therefore leading to mechanism/industry.) which makes them no different then the ex-pats in paris that spoke words of the undercurrent after the war, hem and his posse. later allen g and the boys will be huge, too, and lasting. five years ago who the frick was o’hara? but here come more and more of allen g’s stuff to the modern stream and brighter and brighter his posthumous light, longer and longer the shadow of he, and his pals, allure. for real, the ones that stick around are the ones who voice the words of the ppl in the streets. but more importantly they’re the ones with background enough (i’m talking education here, higher-ed, which makes this not a complete convo without talk then of money/classism) to have the connects to get in to the mainstream where the establishment can pick them up and apply aristocratic virtue to them. (here's where i go off on the absent voice of ethnicity in the revered language of contemporary art. the xenophobia and misogyny inherent in this remains then our final frontier--which leads somewhat in to some of my thoughts on your 5 questions…) yea the recession will breed innovation as it always does. but, deconstructionalist as i am, it will be modernism that will deliver us: the internet. where finally the Voice, the voice of all ppl, not just by and large the lasting voice of academic whites (like you and I---eeeeek forgive me, there I said it!!) will have equal-opportunity to level the playing field.
Thanks Adam for allowing that splurge...
Kelly said...
alright. the more i think about specifically what you were getting at here(in that i applied my own more loose context of doubling, as in having layered meaning rather than a secondary character-as-theme) and particular to the idea of impoverished contemporary poetry, and in thinking about my responses to the five questions of the most recent post: what consitutes good poetry?
1:28 PM
P.F.S. Post said...
Good question. There is no definitive answer.
How about answering the question with another question: why have the Romantic "Big Six" lasted?
What traces are in their poems that cannot be effaced?
Adam Fieled
And here is my response, since I felt a little indulgent leaving all this on his blog:
you poor stranger apologies in advance i process and better understand my own thinking/opinions/thoughts by writing, so do pardon this long long rambling response.
isn’t that just it? they were the voice of the undercurrent of their time. in other words not necessarily anti-industry but pro-nature. what the common folk were still about. wordsworth was a pagan for christ’s sake. lyricism was valued not necessarily bc of the eloquence of the soft language but bc it was pro-romance (romance defined here as a style, thus romance the vehicle, used symbolically: style that is anti "mechanics", words on a page symbolic in form of being different then all that is devout/stringent and therefore leading to mechanism/industry.) which makes them no different then the ex-pats in paris that spoke words of the undercurrent after the war, hem and his posse. later allen g and the boys will be huge, too, and lasting. five years ago who the frick was o’hara? but here come more and more of allen g’s stuff to the modern stream and brighter and brighter his posthumous light, longer and longer the shadow of he, and his pals, allure. for real, the ones that stick around are the ones who voice the words of the ppl in the streets. but more importantly they’re the ones with background enough (i’m talking education here, higher-ed, which makes this not a complete convo without talk then of money/classism) to have the connects to get in to the mainstream where the establishment can pick them up and apply aristocratic virtue to them. (here's where i go off on the absent voice of ethnicity in the revered language of contemporary art. the xenophobia and misogyny inherent in this remains then our final frontier--which leads somewhat in to some of my thoughts on your 5 questions…) yea the recession will breed innovation as it always does. but, deconstructionalist as i am, it will be modernism that will deliver us: the internet. where finally the Voice, the voice of all ppl, not just by and large the lasting voice of academic whites (like you and I---eeeeek forgive me, there I said it!!) will have equal-opportunity to level the playing field.
Thanks Adam for allowing that splurge...
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