Tomorrows Words are Blessed
Posted on | March 22, 2012 | 4 Comments
Tomorrows Words are Blessed
You have your words locked up by
years of lack, I know, of confidence,
bound tight across the pregnant
bulge, desire’s forge, hot need pounded
flat and folded back and burned again
until cruelly sharp is tempered in
a hotter blood.
I know my words come out aslant,
impressive that, at first blush, but
for me, many blushes past yet not so
long ago the gate of heart did part,
or more like stoppered bottle
burst with sputtering, hissing words
tumbling out between my fingers
to clean the whiteness from the
page, knocking against each other
until the corners rub off and rounded
smooth they roll away and leave those
few who’ve come to stay.
When I see the temples built of
worded thought and temperament
and gilded cupolas like breasts
pour forth a froth of buttered tea,
and molasses sweet with sticky
metaphor intent that wears
the cracking brown cement till
nothing but a ruin lies beneath
the hot and sparking skies I cling
to crumbly walls of lies while
women dressed in black scuttle
along the crack whip tail hung
high with glistening sting poised
to strike and strike again.
So plunge I deep into the past
escape I think but doesn’t last
for swimming in that ocean deep
I strain to train my schools of
thought to keep ordered time and
waltz in tune to my unmetered
beat but dark emotions hide in
cleft and weft of coraled labyrinth
all needled teeth and moray head
those rabid underwater dogs
whose bite is worse than frothy
breath in thrall to life’s sharp
sacrament they wake the silence with
their din, deliver justice in blind dark
for paltry crimes and petty sin.
I lie exhausted on the beach as high
as wordy tide can reach and
contemplate the storm-wracked shore
with sussing wave I take my rest
for I know tomorrows words are best
tomorrows words are blessed.
— Please comment, don’t leave me hanging in the poet void!
I Know the Darkness Well
Posted on | March 5, 2012 | No Comments
I Know the Darkness Well
Out there in the world, the nitty-
gritty, dirt ridden world where
disappointment and misery share
the same addresses, not on a single
street, or block, or quarter but in
all quarters even where the wealthy
build their walls to keep it out they
just keep it in playful gardens and
kitchen nooks like a black stone hearth
god buried in ashes to be resurrected
and polished on irrational holidays,
put into service to be worshiped
with pain and mockery and fear.
They are just people who do not know
the truth any better than I do so they
step over corpses of starved to death
as I did once in a place where starving
was the all-consuming pastime and
disappointment and misery were just the
wealthy currency in the river of despair
where hope might sit cross-legged and
beneficent somewhere near the source but
who has the energy to swim against that
loathsome torrent.
The fear that god is dead or never was
is as common as dirt in the hearts of
atheist and fervent alike as easily
found in temples or the steamy kitchens
in which I worked or on the top of
the monumental towers where I also
labored computing the complexities
by which wealth was disbursed in
orderly, allocated piles so large that
their shadows fell on the frequent
emptiness where most of us dwell.
I’ve reveled in the squalid romance
where poets squealed and bombast artists
descried the sorry state of art in this country,
in smoky bars in minor keys of crying
songs by turn sexy hormone-laced heartbeat
dances and again angry outrage clashing
into dim boozecan ears stashed in
concrete warehouse against the day
they might feel wanted or needed again
while the tired asses of prostitutes rested
on the stoop of my dreams of colors
too vivid to survive the grind of daily
bread.
I’ve been these places and more with
my Diogenes lamp held high, and I admit,
at times extinguished in dark diversions
where my blinded, groping heart embraced
a conflagration of distraction meant
to ward the teeming desperation that
I thought would eat the world of unhappy
people and dogs and trees and unmapped
avenues where baskets full of emptiness
were infinitely divided among all the
leaderless followers.
I know the darkness well and tailored
it to fit my soul where it ignored
my sensitive tears and unwieldy moments
of brightness fueled by the fumes of
an empty tank.
I know the darkness well.
But… there were smiles as well even
in those places where sustenance was
scarce, where no nutrients graced the
boiling froth, and again in places that
know no lack of anything but that smile,
it would still peek out of shy faces and
children’s mouths and I would be held
to a families breast and suckled
on love when they’d nothing else to give.
I walked into a desert of silence sweating out,
cold and hot, the fevered dreams of have not,
want not, know not and in that noiseless void,
bereft of innocence and naivete, the shroud
of fear I’d clung to ripped bleeding from
my tired hands and light poured in through
the tear, the void was full of it to spare
and while I still know nothing it is a nothing
full of light, the darkness abolished simply
because it is no thing but an absence
created by shutting your eyes.
I still weep as sparkling diamond
tears well up onto my squinting eyes
which like too many deaths and births
of cave born fish, had lost their sight
of glittering stalagmites, alone in an
eternal night, as my raw senses burning
bright, inverted, tuned to rising light.
I knew the darkness well.
I am new to poetry and would very much appreciate any comments/clarity a reader could provide.
The Silence Grows
Posted on | March 4, 2012 | 2 Comments
The Silence Grows
I don’t know the poetry rules
I’ll get no certificate for that knowing
I just have a barnyard chicken squabble
of memories, forty years old, fast fading
where bound by classroom mates and walls
I was censured for reading too much, my only
escape, by a bearded and bored English
teacher who (it was rumored, was a draft dodger
and you’d think that would be cool and
brave, but it wasn’t) who, it was rumored,
had it off with the French teacher, cool raven-haired
and desirable, from an unreachable distance.
Both scandalously married, they would go off
together in her battered Pinto.
Bound by the 140 character limit of a
twitter tweet I find my pen and work
within those boundaries, though they are big
enough for a Haiku, really, which I had to look up to
discover its 5/7/5 traditional rules, and with a
surprise thrown in to make a slant of it,
morphed into some new, yet related idea.
I kind of liked those rules well enough, although
it was a rhythm I rarely found myself in
tune with, but anyway, they’ve thrown out
that rule book, at least the 5/7/5 part, but
I think they still want you to surprise them.
I’d always had trouble with words and
rules and language which so arbitrarily
defines by imposing limits on ideas,
things, concepts which anyone knows
are limitless.
So I turned to wordless image though
it seems a bureaucracy of limits applies
even there bound by four-corners and
even if you make a canvas round it still
has edges where you fall off the world
of my design, the paint refuses to float
past them into the amorphous spaces,
the fundamental ambiguousness remains
stuck in my brain despite the fact
that I’m dealing in two-dimensional
illusions anyway I still try to fit
another in but I cannot get the wet paint
and dry gesso to admit to more than
three of space and three of time and
maybe three of allusion, give or take.
Now I’ve traveled a long road of dishes
washed and strangers met and bare feet
on desert highways hot enough to cook
an egg if you were foolish enough to drop one.
All the jobs I did and time donated to
worthy causes and wasted because I
had not learned to love so that I fell
into a hole a decade deep and only managed
to climb back out because someone else
loved me.
Now I find myself back with words,
wrapped with words, rendering my
speechlessness into words because after all that
I was baptized in poetry, dipped in that hot
sea of words, blistering my tongue as I
spit back out those scalding words for
I have learned that they can somehow
shift boundaries, that between the limited
lines meanings can creep in that were
never meant for words escaping past
the ear and eye and even the brain
homed into the heart cool enough by then,
just an ember that gently warms it to a
cogent temperature.
This is a love poem, of course, because
aren’t`t all poems love poems, even if
it is about what you love to hate or
loving to wallow in a joyful misery for
even thoughts of death evoke life in
antithetical paroxysms of endless
meaningful interdependence making the
lust for death an inverse of lust for
impregnating life whose unconscious
consciousness creates the universe where
abounding love fills every space,
holding the stars apart, the galaxies and
universes suspended in its permeated
timeless embrace.
In this way my mute speechlessness
is broken even as the silence grows.
The Joy of Discovering You
Posted on | February 28, 2012 | No Comments
So I start trying out this poetry thing on twitter a couple of months ago and almost immediately it captures me for it is so much like painting by which I mean its ability to express all those wordless things that are what is true and meaningful and significant and to which the normal, humdrum background noise of conversation and prose can only communicate if both you and the other possess or are possessed by more than a modicum of mutual empathy or telepathy or a kind of vibrational resonance and passion for essential concepts so that my faltering attempts become a journal not only of my attempts to grasp this form framed by 140 characters, just as my paintings must always be infinitely compressed in a frame too small for the endless spirit that braids itself, it seems, into every thought and sense so that no matter what form of expression you use, whether it is a poetic structure, or paint on canvas, they are all always too small anyway.
In my recent awakening to a greater sense that transcendence is viable I discover this new way of packaging great gulps of information, translated glimpses of a beauty so massive it weighs as much as the world, or the galaxy with all the stars and the dark matter attached and somehow I discover you in my twitter stream, the equally massive beauty of those words which take me joyfully weeping out of mere mind for glorious timeless instants and I am led to buying the first book of poetry I’ve acquired in ten or fifteen years there there I discover a poet interview speaking to the very issues consuming me like a recursive timeslip paradox where the questions, or some of the many questions that I am exploring today are addressed in that gone past time unreachable except by the ink that then captured her thoughts and survived to be discovered by the accident of my assiduous pursuit to embrace a larger comprehension of my own process there in a book buried in a secondhand bin.
I am a quarter of the way through the book and I see this dark askance glanced portrait which, like your poetry speaks to so much more than a simple image of a person, capturing an entire realm of thought and consideration and I think it must be a tenuous thread of paper and ink stretching across time and slyly slipping into my consciousness, powering my awareness in the midst of many other poems in the book I thought unnecessarily obtuse, that percentage of the book, like the larger percentage of all books which, in reflecting the cosmos is perforce more dark matter than not was a bright star speaking of a constellation of experience and because I am ever in that place where I don’t know, or at least I don’t know much although the inextricability of content to context rings a cogent bell yet even with a gun to my head, that ultimate choice enforcer I still have trouble with the whole concept of a favorite thing I love every color on my palette indiscriminately and to address it as a constellation rather than the common tapestry allusion which for all its threads and complex weaving forms a tight coherent order and that flies in the face of my own perception where you draw your own lines from stellar points in your life and create images of mythic import of heroic dimensions which some part of that I inportunately now apply to you, a stranger, that you now partake of in some part of my own consciousness and which relegates you to an arms-length existence from my regard as heroes do though the continent between us is a more practical impediment.
I do not know if this stream of consciousness first into the rules for such things, which rules I am in any case unaware of and don’t really know if there even are any but I am nonetheless grateful to you who unaware inspired it even though I am generally an advocate of a plainer and more accessible speaking but it is an enjoyable context for content that would have a much different sense if expressed otherwise and I hope it is amusing and useful and in some way beneficial at some level of consciousness even if you might read it dutifully just because it was written for you, if not specifically then just because you are the audience but don’t worry about taking it too seriously as it is really just a way of saying thank you out of the joy of discovering you.
If you enjoyed this, or if you did not, please comment.
On the Edge
Posted on | February 5, 2012 | 5 Comments
On the Edge
There is a certain number of people always on the edge, and there are many edges. Many are on the edge of starvation, many are at the end of their ropes, which is another way of saying on the edge. There are geniuses poised at the edge of what is know, normally placed at the forefront, and brilliant engineers ready to implement what genius discovers. Some people are at the edge of reason, which may include some of the fore-mentioned, especially the ones with ropes.
There is another edge where dwell the artist and poets, prophets and messiahs, culture-makers of all kinds, singing and dancing, swearing passionately in a chaotic cacophony. This edge is often called “The Lunatic Fringe”, and the name is often apt.
Species evolve and adapt in many ways, physically, mentally and so on, but socially, spiritually and culturally as well. The species, as a whole, has little concern for the individual in this evolutionary process, its focus seems to lie on mass survival. To pursue this goal it tries out different ideas and strategies, expressed as individuals, genetically or socially, willing to allow the creation of non-viable monstrosities. We are not discussing the blue-eyed, green-eyed, brown-eyed hothouse varieties, benign and ultimately inconsequential. We are talking about the physical and metaphorical two-headed snakes.
Where these poor creatures end up is mostly, I think, in the lunatic fringe, generally ostracized, exiled to a leper colony of the socially unfit. They have trouble fitting into even the strange and often outrageously flexible definitions of social normality and conformity. Even so, there are probably many, unknowing, immersed in this mainstream who properly belong on the fringe and vice-versa. They are vouchsafed their places, whether in or out of society, by such things as careful disguise, degrees of success, size of bank accounts, or just not giving a damn.
Most of the fringe die off sooner or later, having made no perceptible difference in terms of species viability. Some may turn malignant, dragging many other healthier individuals with them into whatever messy demise they devise for themselves. A kind of Jonestown effect. Then there are those who turn out to be more useful, more viable, who carry their meta-genetics and cultural memes through various feedback mechanisms into the body of humanity as a whole
Sanity, as I understand it, for management purposes , seems to revolve around ideas of social functionality, conformity and mediocrity. All in all a very dull sort of place. Some may argue that, while it too ignores the individual, this insistence ensures species survival. Personally I think such an argument ignores memes such as war, starvation due to divisions of wealth and land ownership, potential annihilation due to eco-disaster or nuclear detonation. For example. I don’t know the potential outcomes for all the memes running around. Huge numbers of bacteria occupy our bodies, not just benign, but essential to life, as we have developed a symbiosis with them. Yet some are dangerous and malignant. So too do memes seem to interact with society.
But if we do annihilate ourselves, nature will not be too discomfited. Just chalk us off the slate and find some other species to uplift. No big deal.
My thesis is that, in the game of species survival, the action is out on the edges. It may be more dangerous, for the majority of people on the edge live desperate lives, and it is only a very tiny percentage of them that actually feed back productive memes. Chances are very slim that I would be one of those few. However, for every meme-maker, there are hundreds, thousands, or more meme propagators, those who embrace and disseminate them.
Those meme-makers who, through genius, intuition or who simply meet the pre-conditions for lucky accident (through passion, open-mindedness and a penchant for thinking just a little differently). I do not have to be a meme-maker to joyously embrace these qualities. It is all just so much more interesting. Having to live warily next to potentially infections madness seems a small price to pay for a journey that might eventually lead to some kind of illumination or enlightenment.
I do believe in enlightenment. That it is rare I have no doubt. Nor can I tell you exactly what it is, for I am not enlightened. My ego is alive and well and still thinks it is me. I do, after long and considered thought, put my faith in it. By choice. We all believe in a great many things, some of which are demonstratively false. I choose to believe in something that offers potential transcendence.
That is just me, my own chosen peculiarity. The edge exists on the shores of possibilities, of a great ocean of the unknown. Edgers fish in these waters, reeling in strange beasts that, as often as not, die on the beach, or are wiggle away, too slippery to grasp. Sometimes these creatures grow legs and stalk forward into the great mundaneaty, reality rippling at the edges, often taking generations to percolate their way into mass consciousness.
I am not organizing a membership drive, it does not work that way, anyway. Generally speaking society has limited patience or tolerance for the fringe, so the numbers must remain small enough to escape much notice, but there are probably a few spots open if you are interested. Or interesting.
Remember, you may be closer to the edge than you think.
Please comment. I don’t want to live in a vacuum, it is hard to breath.
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