Snow, & Poems

Poem for the day, which was inspired by Tom who is skiing and memories of Lindsey and Darby and growing up in the woods. In honor of the snow which 18 hours later is still REALLY coming down, & my deep great desire to go sledding with red cheeks and smiley open fun. With the exception of being 16, with Briana and I all punkrocked, waiting on Larry and Scott and Lindsey to get there and being so, soo sweetly stoned, this is definitely the best snow day I have ever known

HILLS

There were power lines where I grew up:
hills.

At the end of the street behind the cedar trees
and calf-level thickets of clover and thorns.

We went there in our shorts and short-sleeves
took the back-way around through the woods
down to where Gumbottom Creek bled out.
Brave days we would make what otherwise
was a winter climb.
The muscle movement of puberty leg flexors
and misery of sweat, the tripped over grass-clusters
and rotation of sky against top of hill-land and also
breath: in and out in and out, up and down.

I really don’t remember mosquitoes
puckering our arms & later, in the mildew spring

when the earth was wet
and the thicket mats flat
from the rails of our sleds

we would lay our blankets down, and the sun still felt
damp, and cold on our skin

On a creative witchy mind

I dont know, this might be hard to relate to, but a friend of mine told me once that I am a spiritual archivist not just my own but for all of our friends. I was thinking of this tonight when I uploaded some pics onto my computer: 150 shots from Thanksgiving through this weekend. I almost never, ever wait that long between events to unload shots, but life has been hectic and I am walking along inside of it, tired but not weary, just moment to moment and wow have my moments been full.

And I do, I do: I keep track of the cycles of my self, and everyone around me. I dont just mentally acknowledge things, I mean I have a literal requiem storehouse on those that I count as tribe members, close friends and Knectors to my soul. I can't articulate this circuit board that goes on, but I am always filtering in the details, hearing their stories, processing their tales, then processing back for them the current myth or tide they are riding. I dont even realize it it's just what I do. I mark passings, and everyone's peaks and tides, by various means of traditional and non-traditional poles. Like today, the new moon, most powerfull tide passing time of year. All over the place people I know are witnessing: they are starting brand new goals; or taking pause; or hitting pinnacles in current circumstances; this is how we do, how we rise, how we flow, how we pass, how we current ever so swiftly or softly along. Somehow in my head I always easily see others big pictures for how it all easily is weaving together.

I guess what got me thinking about this was uploading these pics tonight, in that it'd been so long since I'd done so. I immediately caught myself nodding: ahhh yes, a quickening just occurred, I went through three whole weeks of straight archiving rather than also organizing and cataloging. My lens backed up and resharpened: in that time the poetry and magic and words have been flowing through me like mad. I've even been penpal-ing with someone the whole time: all of it, all those examples of capturing what is happening all around. A quickening, a quickening of the tide.

And the wind here, when it gets blowing, has been blowing like crazy just like last year on the last day of the calendar year. Winds so high the Choptank River and Elliot Bay both looked like the ocean at high tide.

Dont think it's a joke the old saying winds of change. Folk lore is some of the wisest medicine we have, yes? Everything at all times around us always is eternal reality of creative present moment. Our fates whisper in the wind sure as on the radio or in the trees.

Wild whipping winds tonight on the Eastern Shore.

Winter Solstice is coming: get it guys? Monday it all peaks, right before our closed--or if you're brave and learning to fight for it--at least half-opened eyes... What changes will come what changes are already half on their way?

Poetry vs poetry and First thought, best thought

Ever since the little river started or since I surrendered anyhow and agreed to jump in I haven't been sleeping well. As alluded to before, that can trip me out cuz for someone such as me who has psycho-mania in her catalogue not sleeping can be a dangerous thing. But it's not, not now, and that is the cool thing--I am awake at 4, or 2, or not sleeping at all--or only for two hours or so this week when I get home from what all week were 12 hour days and I'm like whatever, I'm going with it. It's like Bobby Ray the shaman said once years ago, it's only your fear that will keep you sick...

Anyhow since for me writing is Queen and blogging has become part of my practice, part of the discipline of my smithing away at this craft--in very much the first thought best thought style or what I've taken to calling spontaneous download--I thought I better jump on here and give some time to my practice. And then there's the act of writing poetry, different as I explained to a new writer friend just yesterday or no that was two days ago by now, than Poetry capital P which to me is an ethic, a tribe, or value--a state of not just being touched by the madness but alluring and living in it all the same: the saying of the Holy Amen. But as a wordsmith, as a practitioner of art actually writing poetry is different than say the practice of just first thought best thought, and also different than memoir writing. It includes it, but becomes too a strange cohesion of like, sitting in my boat on the river but keeping too a mild hand at all times on the oar. But not using it for paddling, more as like a rutter, that with the slightest touch does indeed effect the trajectory of surface gliding, but only in as much as a pebble might effect a ripple, and the water and the boat--the whole experience of the trip ultimately is of the same...

I wrote poems yesterday so that is why I am thinking so to speak aloud. No, that was two days ago--in the morning, five good poems that remind me a lot of that November in 03 when I was in my little room off my studio apartment on Mt.Royal. The poems and momentum that started my litmag Cantalma and also was the beginning of Fishing Rock.

Ahhh, hello little river. You fucking ho! Careful what you wish for sometimes? I wouldn't change it tho, wouldn't change it at all not even in exchange for the world...

Mike Cades: A Decade of Music

My buddy Mike and I met in college.  He's a musician. We met in college, he was one of a handful of folks whose intellectualism marvelled and intimidated me, and later, whose artistic sense inspired and provoked me.

Mike and I worked together this summer on some creative ideas that may or may not manifest in time to come. In the meantime, he started this super cool project that I think all music lovers need to check out. A Decade of Music is Mike's blog, and invitation to anyone to create(from his first blogpost)a mix of music created from 2000 - 2009 that influenced you as an artist, if you're an artist, or that you just loved the fuck out of, if you're a geologist or something awesome like that. It should be in chronological order but from your perspective (ie. If you suddenly discovered Kid A in 2008, you should place is thusly in the mix, as opposed to placing in the year it was released, whenever that was... everyone knows Radiohead is a pretty silly band without much of a future).

Totally, totally check this blog out. Especially if you're a music-lover, or even just a mildly music-interested geologist or something.

Now look, I love this. What's always cracked me up about that crew from college is how compared to them I came ass-end in to things, foraging the world a bit before college and only coming in to myself, my intellectualism and creativity, towards the end. It's my identity as an intellectual and artist that I've always struggled with, that I've spent the years of college, and after, trying to integrate. The things of the world outside always came easy to me, natural. These pals, their smarts came easy and were never questioned. It was the world that, post-college, challenged them to enlist their creativity in order to associate. So of course their music is smart, eclectic, emotional, hugely ranging.

For facebook I recently put together a list of artists that inspired and changed me through out my teens. For the better part of the 2000's I wasn't taking much new music in. Mike's blog made me realize my illiteracy in this area--the last decade of music. It delights me to see the variety on his blog, makes me realize the great accessibility of the Internet and what this era has done for art. At first I was quick to jump on board with the claim that the great milieu of info and variety out there really only made for a flood of crap, no way to find the great stuff. But I realize now that new standards are cut precisely when a playing field gets leveled.
I think people talented as Mike are the ones who will cut those new prototypes.

Decademix.blogspot.com

Shampoo My Planet & call me X

You know, it's late and I put in over 10 hours today and have to be back it at 8 tmrw. But I've been up blog rolling and living in the cyber dream of future days when I have my little shack & it's all tribe and art and self-education and off the books schooling of new generations of tribe and calling and new fearless ethics and Poetry as Real Work and so on and yea, it's late, and this little river, and, well you know...I could go on and on.

Anyway. Serendipity!? I got in to all this meat on Friday in my memoir, wrote for 5 and a half hours at the Panera, then took a break for dinner and convo for about an hour and a half, then got back to it, writing til well past midnite. I was writing a lot about the 90's, riot grl, coming up, tribes, death, the duende, imagnation and it's doomed demise.

Read this post! Yes! Not so much for the Pumpkins myself, but damned if Friday I didn't spend an hour in urging longing wistfullness over the first Lolla, & Janes Addiction, 1991....