The Writing Life. A ramble. Onward.

I will do what I always do, I will write it out out out I will write it all the way out...

Truth is visionary, that makes it mutable.

This is scribbled sideways in the hardbacked spiral book Erika gave me for my birthday. My favorite kind of book the kind I use for poetry when I am writing longhand spontaneous download or Duende poems. I was driving to the beach on Saturday in the afternoon, it was gorgeous out blue sky and green sunny fields on the Eastern Shore and the words were coming and I was content to drive 62 in the right-hand lane of Gateway 50 and periodically even 58 alone on my side of the highway in order just to jot down the words. A story came together that was supposed to go on here, on the blog. A story of one of the first times I understood about friends and how everything passes, a story from back then and Crofton and loving a boy called Mudd.

Then I got behind some kid in a old beater Pontiac going 55 in the passing lane and chomping on a gnarly huge cigar. As soon as I got behind him and saw the silhouetted outlines of the map that he was looking at from behind the wheel like a great big story book there goes the tape in my head: Oh sure you come down here to the Eastern Shore to drive around and see all the quaint little people in the quaint little towns that history made-up you sure of yourself hungover got the world by the balls fuck Well we have lives too we have places to get to you know, we use the passing lane too for Christsake and I am off, adrenaline going and the second that happened I admittedly was a little appalled at myself for such pure white judgement, and I sped up, passed his fedora wearing cigar chomping beater driving hipster ass and then got myself back to the right lane, content not to go a minute over 60 in a painfully and also unabashedly aware of myself way of being surrendered to not taking myself so fucking seriously.

The story and the words that were coming were gone though. Later, maybe twenty minutes down the highway, one more seemingly unrelated line came out. Truth is visionary, which makes it mutable. This had nothing to do with Easter Sunday almost 15 years ago, the time I met Mudd's mom for the first time in his front yard on her knees digging in the fresh April green, nothing to do with sameness and differences and where they merge and with understanding roots and how all things pass but also somehow in different forms come again. Or did it?

This morning at work I read some info in an email from the state and just started crying. I have exactly one month, as of today, left at that job, at that job that I've been prostrating to and demonizing then laying down again and again before and on the behalf of for the last eight years. And when, about five or six weeks ago, the tears came like my spirit was an overused sponge not capable of soaking one more droplet off water--tears literally for three days fell from my eyes with out so much as a sob or whimper from my chest, with out so much as a blink or gasp or any form for that matter of automatic physical seizure that otherwise would cause tears--I knew then that something deep, something fundamental in me was shifting. That I was full, my cup was literally soaked with burden, and it was time to empty. At the end of that week I quit my job. Those tears they came again today, without warning, without the trite rhyme, without the trite soul of any sort of reason.

Just an email forward from the state. And I called Gretchen, who is wise woman to me, and I wept on my drive home because I barely had the strength to get in the car that's how spirit-ed the tears were. Wow I sort of barely thought to myself, this really is bad.

You cant change it Kelly she said and then the sobs really came and I knew it was the same thing that was going on five or six weeks ago, the same source of all these today real to me tears. And we hung up and every instinct in me was to pack my shit and walk in the sun down here to a lovely safe corner in the coffee shop window and write and write, and somehow I knew it'd be peaceful here. And when Rudy and KJ showed up I sighed because they are part of it, for some reason lately I've been able to talk to them and so soon enough I was saying it out loud. Because it is huge and important to me not to have it witnessed by another so much as to have someone witness me witnessing it and I felt silly when I said it aloud: I really thought I could change it. I thought I could change the fucked up shit of the world. This is my idealism breaking, this is life is unfair and me finally willing to let go and finally willing and getting it, this is me understanding there is so much you can not change.

Rudy who they call Satva started in on me the way I do on most people most of the times and it felt good to be on the receiving end of some treatment. He went on about his approach to life and he is someone who has good stories and good experiences to pull from and most of all he is like I told him once before a bone collector--he gets peoples true parts. Could just be a flip of a switch in perspective Kel is all he said.

O yea right, I tried to change the world but found the only thing one is capable of changing is them self. Again.

Please Gretchen help me not have to learn this one over.

The World Truth is mutable dependant on the self truth. selfTruth/Selftruth. Yes, visionary. Yes spirit's mutability. Yes to the writing life, the one and only true steps I only ever for sure for sure know is the right step on my path to helping me see.

O my god...

Read this.

A Poet's Date, & Jealousy

I am jealous of him, and I miss him, in both the way a needy girlfriend craves attention and in the way you miss tossing your hair over your shoulder when it gets cut off or miss the outline between the trees of sky when suddenly the winter's gone. The way it is with that old cliche about not knowing how much you love respect appreciate etc something until you lose it--that is how I feel this week about him and I tell him this. Over text message, cuz it's the only way I can. You'll only have the number of real, true friends in your life that you can count on one hand is a line I was raised on, heard again again and again and so I value so strongly the connections I have with folks and understand what a brave and great gift it is to be "friend." If this exact axiom is true or not I dont know tho, it hasn't been my whole life yet or at least I hope not, but it is true that there are to me legit qualifiers for true friends. And so as men go, he qualifies, really currently he is only one of two men who do. My bro is the other one.

He texts about getting lunch and I agree because I know he is on Artist's Retreat and still was willing to reach out to the needy-girlfriend part in me. He's not my boyfriend we are not at all romantic we long ago discussed and then established that, it's just that he's filled such a huge role and taught me to trust again so maybe there's some of my possessiveness. We go to the Market where we always almost every Thursday go and standing in line I ask him to tell me about how it's going and that is when I realize I am jealous. When he talks about the songs he's completed, the songs he's writing, the songs he's going to record. When he starts talking about getting up at 8 and working all day.

What will it look like for me? Working all day? I found this quote from Rilke this morning.

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them. Consider yourself and your feeling right every time with regard to every such argumentation, discussion or introduction; if you are wrong after all, the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly and with time to other insights. Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything. Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life: in understanding as in creating.

This confirmed for me what I am struggling to maintain belief in because nowhere, practically nowhere in the daytoday grind do I see this valued: the inner life, the spirit and surrendering to the rhythms of me again, the tides of my own soul. I am on an Poet's Date with me right now, and I stuck to it today as it was pencilled in. 3 o'clock Poet's Date with You. Which means time uncharted with nothing to do but follow inside of me what I yearn for. I am writing, I just read Neruda and got transfixed on the spanish differences in assumption that can be made versus the english tranlation. y que la edad escribe letras/con agua y piedra para nadie,/para que nadie sepa donde,/para que nadie entienda nada again and again until it rolled like washed pebbles with gemstones inside over and over on my tongue. Until the words confused me, the words confused themselves, the translation was one thing the words something else the sound they made too its own thing the heartfusionmomentofactiontransaction on the tongue a total other. The time to do this--to be brave and foolish and quiet and sighing long enough to raise and then honor the song. No place to go but here, with me, alight alight alive and in the moment with my spirit and its wants and its needs. I think of Oregon, I picture it in my minds eye and sometimes I am on retreat and it is just reading long books in bed, stopping trailside to write down the words, laying on my back on the hot sand the sun marking me and the combination brine and green buoyant sea smell of the Coast. But sometimes it is, it is writing all day. And to me both kinds of work, the action kind and the priming honoring the tides and spirit of me are equally important.

We are so sick with the lac of it.

We are so sick with the need for it.

I saw it, wordless in his eye today and want that, that fire that transpires to speak greater languages than I currently can, that writes itself on my skin with its words that makes it so I dont even need to speak them because it speaks for me so great from in my soul. I saw it in him today and made myself be happy for him We're in this together remember he reminded me last week so I chose to be happy and let my jealousy go.

Afterall I had a date with me today and here I am now and am swept whole in that clean deep sigh inside glisten way from listening listening and submitting to the rhythms and tides so he's right, and back I go....

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

O woman, o woman o woman O

The Language of the Brag
by Sharon Olds

I have wanted excellence in the knife-throw,
I have wanted to use my exceptionally strong and accurate arms
and my straight posture and quick electric muscles
to achieve something at the centre of a crowd,
the blade piercing the bark deep,
the haft slowly and heavily vibrating like the cock.

I have wanted some epic use for my excellent body,
some heroism, some American achievement
beyond the ordinary for my extraordinary self,
magnetic and tensile, I have stood by the sandlot
and watched the boys play.

I have wanted courage, I have thought about fire
and the crossing of waterfalls, I have dragged around

belly big with cowardice and safety,
stool charcoal from the iron pills,
huge breasts leaking colostrum,
legs swelling, hands swelling,
face swelling and reddening, hair
falling out, inner sex
stabbed again and again with pain like a knife.
I have lain down.

I have lain down and sweated and shaken
and passed blood and shit and water and
slowly alone in the centre of a circle I have
passed the new person out
and they have lifted the new person free of the act
and wiped the new person free of that
language of blood like praise all over the body.

I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,
Allen Ginsberg, I have done this thing,
I and the other women this exceptional
act with the exceptional heroic body,
this giving birth, this glistening verb,
and I am putting my proud American boast
right here with the others.


Happy National Poetry Month