Sunday, March 29, 2009
29 march
oh how i love people! i love them. i love the ones that are human and like spring and summer, that run smooth on stable sunshine and fear not to fizz over. i love unknowing and then knowing and unknotted conversation and unconversation, unknotted unconscious being. there is such a fantastic goodness in just being, in simply together existing. it is right, like a well-done sum; it is filling. i love them, and the insurmountability of their smiling, and that no amount of fog can damp the goodness of our pluralness. (until, of course, your sour note was struck into the chord; for where did you come from and why? and static hardened in the air like an ugly carbonate and everything went dead, because they knew, of course; and you, for all your magnificent vitality, are yet to me (as you always were) the deadener.)
Saturday, March 28, 2009
28 march
this is what it took for resurrection: my first cold sea slap of regretting, of loving and letting it go. it took that.
there is an ugly lump of scar tissue and i survive by detaching myself from it, for i cannot stand anything to be hard or unattractive. all those things i did to Someone Else and threw to the winds with so much apathy come ricocheting down upon my head in some kind of divine justice or morbid sort of poetic irony. but there is a certain healing to hysteria; to being hacked to pieces by ones own flaws.
(remember at the front office that day, and we were so derisive of his dullness? and you remarked what i had done, what i'd implied: "not even, 'there's someone else that i prefer', but 'i prefer nothing. i'd rather be alone than be with you.'". and now-- and now! the lots fall back to me; all that apathy falls back onto my head like so many cinderblocks. for now it is me; and you are the one who would rather be alone.)
it took that liquid state of pain, of thick unthinking unaligned pain, to unseat me from the dull banal throb of my own unchangeable circumstance. there is no benefit to pity, and this is good: there is nothing healthy in excusing oneself by such. no matter what the circumstances are, one is still expected to turn oneself inside out to the world and be Better, Better, Better; to breathe lightning and spit sparks.
when one is knocked over, one may choose to harden and ball up into oneself, suckling scar tissue; or one may choose to bounce, now wizened, and return to original shape. yes, you made me happy, made me very, very happy, but obviously you didn't want to stick around-- so i learned from you.
it took all those blue volts of inadequacy for me to return to being alive.
there is an ugly lump of scar tissue and i survive by detaching myself from it, for i cannot stand anything to be hard or unattractive. all those things i did to Someone Else and threw to the winds with so much apathy come ricocheting down upon my head in some kind of divine justice or morbid sort of poetic irony. but there is a certain healing to hysteria; to being hacked to pieces by ones own flaws.
(remember at the front office that day, and we were so derisive of his dullness? and you remarked what i had done, what i'd implied: "not even, 'there's someone else that i prefer', but 'i prefer nothing. i'd rather be alone than be with you.'". and now-- and now! the lots fall back to me; all that apathy falls back onto my head like so many cinderblocks. for now it is me; and you are the one who would rather be alone.)
it took that liquid state of pain, of thick unthinking unaligned pain, to unseat me from the dull banal throb of my own unchangeable circumstance. there is no benefit to pity, and this is good: there is nothing healthy in excusing oneself by such. no matter what the circumstances are, one is still expected to turn oneself inside out to the world and be Better, Better, Better; to breathe lightning and spit sparks.
when one is knocked over, one may choose to harden and ball up into oneself, suckling scar tissue; or one may choose to bounce, now wizened, and return to original shape. yes, you made me happy, made me very, very happy, but obviously you didn't want to stick around-- so i learned from you.
it took all those blue volts of inadequacy for me to return to being alive.
Friday, March 27, 2009
27 march
It almost disturbs me how much calculated satisfaction i have from today being 03-27-09: three nine times is twenty-seven! and it rains today, thick and clear; cleaning the grime from the concrete. it was bound to be a better day.
Oh, i have gotten so much better. The edges unrawing, filing down; God has filled up the inside gaps thick and blue. the only thing is that: i miss the friendship. i wish it hadn't have died so stunted and part-way grown; it could have been good if we had let it be anything else than embryonic. but we were always on different levels of consciousness, and you saw that as impediment rather than enrichment. it didn't hit me until AC told shaz to invite Us to their party, not knowing that we were now only we, no longer Us-- and i thought, yes, that would have been grand, wouldn't it? i would be right now carbonatedly happy; i see now, so much more attached than you would have been. But that Is Not and Will Not Be, it is a Might Have Been which has been demolished; and instead i am only peacefully content-- and there is really something to be said for tediously stable contentment.
And gracious, how much more of the world there is than you! how many more people to love! You deadened, what affection you had went stale and slid into pieces; and what should have gone gangrene in me instead shot off in all directions like Fourth-of-July fireworks. One does not do oneself any good by lazy silence, the world intrinsically will wander away. that's what you taught me: that silence is selfish. that humans are selfish, yes; and not to be trusted; but that to sequester oneself is only an act of lazyness. So now i blossom back into what i was: not the comfortably apathetic girl that you grew bored of, but the other, of whom you occasionally caught glimpses; the One that i actually enjoy being. Oh, irony! But now of course you could not, cannot have me anymore.
Oh, i have gotten so much better. The edges unrawing, filing down; God has filled up the inside gaps thick and blue. the only thing is that: i miss the friendship. i wish it hadn't have died so stunted and part-way grown; it could have been good if we had let it be anything else than embryonic. but we were always on different levels of consciousness, and you saw that as impediment rather than enrichment. it didn't hit me until AC told shaz to invite Us to their party, not knowing that we were now only we, no longer Us-- and i thought, yes, that would have been grand, wouldn't it? i would be right now carbonatedly happy; i see now, so much more attached than you would have been. But that Is Not and Will Not Be, it is a Might Have Been which has been demolished; and instead i am only peacefully content-- and there is really something to be said for tediously stable contentment.
And gracious, how much more of the world there is than you! how many more people to love! You deadened, what affection you had went stale and slid into pieces; and what should have gone gangrene in me instead shot off in all directions like Fourth-of-July fireworks. One does not do oneself any good by lazy silence, the world intrinsically will wander away. that's what you taught me: that silence is selfish. that humans are selfish, yes; and not to be trusted; but that to sequester oneself is only an act of lazyness. So now i blossom back into what i was: not the comfortably apathetic girl that you grew bored of, but the other, of whom you occasionally caught glimpses; the One that i actually enjoy being. Oh, irony! But now of course you could not, cannot have me anymore.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
25 march
the world is different than when i left it: doors flung open to a secret backyard of raw untendable pain, the black-shadowed Back of humanity. i have never seen nor felt nor tasted this bitter Side of living. and it is me, but it is not only me, for all they sing is true-- always, all they sing is true!-- so many have been as bewildered as i am to have those doors flung open and clear painful Life roar in upon them. oh, i am disenchanted with the human race.
the Searing laps in stages, ripping and receding like a terrible tide. Yesterday a large cavern had been crudely and uncleanly detonated from my lungs. i could not breathe. sometimes i felt so giddy with hysteria that i could torpedo into mad laughter or tears. By last night, i was pretty much every second still thinking about you, but the heavy splintering starts to evaporate. Today-- today love starts to seep through the chinks; i do not think always & only of you and That that is; the sky darkens and i lighten. i am elastic; i shall always heal.
today i can breathe. today the Smell of you in concrete and department stores and clothing does not make me crumple. today i can look at you, and your eyes, and the Blue, for a few seconds and i do not suffocate.we are strangers now. only, only, only strangers; as, child, for all that time and all those Words which were always & only Words, i could not have known you and you could not have known me. they were two different people, the one you were enchanted by and the one you came to See, not because one faded into dust, but because you would not let her grow. She does not flail herself for all to see. perhaps soon she must. for it is true-- what impetus Is that is quite like being told that one is inadequate? i do not know that one exists.
the world seems clearer now-- as though a thin film of innocence has dried out and stripped away. je suis et toujours je deviens; i am and i become. there is nothing quite like pain to remind one that one is alive. and, perhaps, to remind one to live.
the Searing laps in stages, ripping and receding like a terrible tide. Yesterday a large cavern had been crudely and uncleanly detonated from my lungs. i could not breathe. sometimes i felt so giddy with hysteria that i could torpedo into mad laughter or tears. By last night, i was pretty much every second still thinking about you, but the heavy splintering starts to evaporate. Today-- today love starts to seep through the chinks; i do not think always & only of you and That that is; the sky darkens and i lighten. i am elastic; i shall always heal.
today i can breathe. today the Smell of you in concrete and department stores and clothing does not make me crumple. today i can look at you, and your eyes, and the Blue, for a few seconds and i do not suffocate.we are strangers now. only, only, only strangers; as, child, for all that time and all those Words which were always & only Words, i could not have known you and you could not have known me. they were two different people, the one you were enchanted by and the one you came to See, not because one faded into dust, but because you would not let her grow. She does not flail herself for all to see. perhaps soon she must. for it is true-- what impetus Is that is quite like being told that one is inadequate? i do not know that one exists.
the world seems clearer now-- as though a thin film of innocence has dried out and stripped away. je suis et toujours je deviens; i am and i become. there is nothing quite like pain to remind one that one is alive. and, perhaps, to remind one to live.
lost in translation
love is too dangerous for me. I remember
everything to me remembers
smell everything as him, everything seems as him, reminds me to the
impossible fingers.
because really, they are impossible
I cannot have them, as I have them before this death.
and this disarranges me; always it disarranges me. smells disarrange me
the most. it dements me
madness, madness of love, impenetrable sadness to love, all this
dements me, he unbreathes me
always he eats inside me and I am, and I am not and
from time to time I exist, and then I do not exist
a cavern is blown of me and edges are made rusty.
i am exposed and i am cracked,
oh i am elastic
but the most important: it is that:
I am (and always I am); even I cannot demolish me nor can you,
I must continue to breathe
always
always still I embody I love
I breathe still
and me, I exist,
I am
everything to me remembers
smell everything as him, everything seems as him, reminds me to the
impossible fingers.
because really, they are impossible
I cannot have them, as I have them before this death.
and this disarranges me; always it disarranges me. smells disarrange me
the most. it dements me
madness, madness of love, impenetrable sadness to love, all this
dements me, he unbreathes me
always he eats inside me and I am, and I am not and
from time to time I exist, and then I do not exist
a cavern is blown of me and edges are made rusty.
i am exposed and i am cracked,
oh i am elastic
but the most important: it is that:
I am (and always I am); even I cannot demolish me nor can you,
I must continue to breathe
always
always still I embody I love
I breathe still
and me, I exist,
I am
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
24 march
l'amour est trop dangereux pour moi. je me rappelle
toujours je me rappelle
tout sentent comme lui, semble comme lui, tout me rappelle aux doigts impossibles.
parce que vraiment, ils sont impossibles
je ne peux pas les avoir, comme je les ai avant cette mort
.
et ça me dérange ; toujours il me dérange . les odeurs me dérange
le plus. il me dérange
la folie, la folie d'amour, la tristesse impénétrable d'adorer, tout ça me dérange, il me mange
toujours il me mange, et je suis et je ne suis pas, et
de temps en temps j'existe, et puis je n'existe pas
une caverne est explosée de moi et les bords sont rouillé .
je suis exposé et je suis écrasé
ben, je suis élastique
mais le plus important: c'est que:
je suis (et toujours je suis); même je ne peux pas me démolir et toi non plus,
je dois continuer respirer
toujours
toujours j'incarne
j'adore, je respire
et moi, j'existe,
je suis
toujours je me rappelle
tout sentent comme lui, semble comme lui, tout me rappelle aux doigts impossibles.
parce que vraiment, ils sont impossibles
je ne peux pas les avoir, comme je les ai avant cette mort
.
et ça me dérange ; toujours il me dérange . les odeurs me dérange
le plus. il me dérange
la folie, la folie d'amour, la tristesse impénétrable d'adorer, tout ça me dérange, il me mange
toujours il me mange, et je suis et je ne suis pas, et
de temps en temps j'existe, et puis je n'existe pas
une caverne est explosée de moi et les bords sont rouillé .
je suis exposé et je suis écrasé
ben, je suis élastique
mais le plus important: c'est que:
je suis (et toujours je suis); même je ne peux pas me démolir et toi non plus,
je dois continuer respirer
toujours
toujours j'incarne
j'adore, je respire
et moi, j'existe,
je suis
Monday, March 23, 2009
the strange part is, all those Taylor Swift songs make perfect sense now
i got kissed in this dress and i got dumped in this dress.
it was also my first black article of clothing. irony?
here is exactly what i did wrong
(i, and not you, for it was me):
1. i have all these years been not pursuer, not the caught, but Professionally Pursued. and you have been not one who catches but one who Pursues. and there was no work to insert yourself between the cracks of me; you appeared out of the blue as a pinprick of light into what happened at the moment to be black and smashed and scattered. something inside me latched on like a clam, and the answering point inside you shriveled in Obligation.
2. Silence. And the silence drooped because it was not the silence of Mysteriousness, or the silence of Reverence; it was not even the silence of Silence; it was my own silence, looming black and fearful over your cheerfulness like a noxious cloud.
3. in that one night of weakness when i told you all that, when i spilled all my dirty water all over your conscience, i morphed from Enigma to Obligation. THAT was the fatal mistake.
oh, i am resilient. and i am Different. but i am after all a high school girl.
Your affection deflated to the vague empathy one carries for a complete stranger. And so mine hardens and is burred. But one always tends to survive, does one not?
it was also my first black article of clothing. irony?
here is exactly what i did wrong
(i, and not you, for it was me):
1. i have all these years been not pursuer, not the caught, but Professionally Pursued. and you have been not one who catches but one who Pursues. and there was no work to insert yourself between the cracks of me; you appeared out of the blue as a pinprick of light into what happened at the moment to be black and smashed and scattered. something inside me latched on like a clam, and the answering point inside you shriveled in Obligation.
2. Silence. And the silence drooped because it was not the silence of Mysteriousness, or the silence of Reverence; it was not even the silence of Silence; it was my own silence, looming black and fearful over your cheerfulness like a noxious cloud.
3. in that one night of weakness when i told you all that, when i spilled all my dirty water all over your conscience, i morphed from Enigma to Obligation. THAT was the fatal mistake.
oh, i am resilient. and i am Different. but i am after all a high school girl.
Your affection deflated to the vague empathy one carries for a complete stranger. And so mine hardens and is burred. But one always tends to survive, does one not?
Sunday, March 22, 2009
22 march
Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
look full in His wonderful face;
and the things of Earth will grow strangely dim
in the light of His glory and grace.
The blackness comes always & only when He isn't first. Anything that isn't built on Him will collapse. We know this. But sometimes we get all carried away on the goodness of the thing that He's given us and we start unconsciously hammering away at that foundation, stuffing pieces of ourselves in instead, without realizing that with magnificently flawful Us as the foundation it will wobble and fall. We protectively close our fists on the thing He has given us, and somehow forget that a closed fist is lonely and dark.
Sometimes, if we are partcularly stubborn, God has to pry our fingers apart in order to let the blackness out. Sometimes it takes a real whack to the foundation before we realize our unqualifications and let God build what He wants built.
How ecclesiastical and proverbial "we" sounds; I don't know why I say "we"; i really mean Me.
It haunts me, kills me, that there isn't any return on human love. There doesn't seem to be an interest any longer in loving for loving's sake, just straight unadulterated love. People like to put films on it, looking at it through one screen or another, without just using it the way it is. Why is it that we have calloused ourselves against that natural Human warmth, of senseless loving? That now love must be worked at, earned? I've never thought about it, i've always just loved. And so when asked to work for it, i do not know what to do. This is why relationships frighten me. I am trapped squirming in the parallax of loving people and hating relationships.
But we are not only human, we are the children of God. And he loves us painfully, senselessly. Just straight unadulterated love. He gives us people to love, sometimes magnificent marvelous people to love, but these people are fallible and they will not always love us back with that senseless untangled love. But God loves us; and honestly, if God has decided to love me than i do not need to worry about being after all that work worthless after all. And so, the black subsides, and solid ground returns beneath my feet.
look full in His wonderful face;
and the things of Earth will grow strangely dim
in the light of His glory and grace.
The blackness comes always & only when He isn't first. Anything that isn't built on Him will collapse. We know this. But sometimes we get all carried away on the goodness of the thing that He's given us and we start unconsciously hammering away at that foundation, stuffing pieces of ourselves in instead, without realizing that with magnificently flawful Us as the foundation it will wobble and fall. We protectively close our fists on the thing He has given us, and somehow forget that a closed fist is lonely and dark.
Sometimes, if we are partcularly stubborn, God has to pry our fingers apart in order to let the blackness out. Sometimes it takes a real whack to the foundation before we realize our unqualifications and let God build what He wants built.
How ecclesiastical and proverbial "we" sounds; I don't know why I say "we"; i really mean Me.
It haunts me, kills me, that there isn't any return on human love. There doesn't seem to be an interest any longer in loving for loving's sake, just straight unadulterated love. People like to put films on it, looking at it through one screen or another, without just using it the way it is. Why is it that we have calloused ourselves against that natural Human warmth, of senseless loving? That now love must be worked at, earned? I've never thought about it, i've always just loved. And so when asked to work for it, i do not know what to do. This is why relationships frighten me. I am trapped squirming in the parallax of loving people and hating relationships.
But we are not only human, we are the children of God. And he loves us painfully, senselessly. Just straight unadulterated love. He gives us people to love, sometimes magnificent marvelous people to love, but these people are fallible and they will not always love us back with that senseless untangled love. But God loves us; and honestly, if God has decided to love me than i do not need to worry about being after all that work worthless after all. And so, the black subsides, and solid ground returns beneath my feet.
Friday, March 20, 2009
20 march
maybe, father, you were right. the Universe shrinks to a single point and there is blackness and only Swallowing blackness and an answering point in my own body shrieks and surrenders in terror. maybe all that time i thought you were Wrong and you thought i was Mad, all that time i felt so holy and relieved that i had noticed my own desecration before it was too late, all that time i tried to re-educate myself, rearrange myself around what i thought was Good and Whole and Right, i was wrong. i was prepared to be a lunatic, but under no circumstances was i prepared to be wrong.
i think i am falling apart
i think i am falling apart
19 march
Transfer trucks have always terrified me. One time her friend Sandy, says my mother, was driving beside a transfer truck, and the wheel blew out; and the hard metal center went whizzing out of the tire just with a crack and flew right through the side of Sandy's car and into her torso. I can't imagine what it would be like, to be one moment alone in one's personal parallax, and the next thing, crack! and a five inch blue tube of metal comes screaming in through the window and blows your brains to bits. Light's out! Game's over. All those years of little victories knocked down. I think it must be the most horrible thing in the world.
Driving today, the outside scrub of uniform blue and grey rattling by like an infinite series of uninteresting hallucinations; and my hair so rambunctiously curly & brown and my eyes so wide-set that today i resemble some sort of terrier; and Unsleep reaching numb, malicious fingers through the base of the skull; and love hovering black and silent above my head like a noxious balloon-- only now do i see the future lined up before me in neat little rows, wherever i turn neat little rows of pins for me to check off and knock down.
Just now, as soon as i've accustomed myself to the small square of Earth on which i've been planted, i must rip and unravel myself and jump from pole to pole, ticking off pins as i flick them to the ground. What is so inferior about the place i am now, the people whom i now love? Is it not impenatrably everywhere, any place i might climb toward, the struggle of loving and wanting and falling and fighting and giving and never having enough? Wherever you go, it is the same few feet of sky, and it rolling off you to dilute into others.
And i thought of them, all these beautifully fallible people whom i love, with all those pins lined up in front of them, and i wondered which ones they would keep and which they would knock down. It must be very silly of me, i thought, to feel so wadded-up and so alone when i have all these pins in front of me, all these careful rows of opportunities spread out and plastered across the skyline. Only i do not want them-- i want to be be loved and lie down. I want to surrender; to again to feel swallowed by the bigness of life, rather than sleepy and nauseous and numb; purple and rotting as a piece of banged-about fruit.
A blue-and-white transfer truck pulled up beside us and i stared at the grease-coated wheelcap whizzing feverishly around its circular track. Woodenness replaced me with a whoosh, and very suddenly it did not matter all that much whether i died or stayed alive; whether those pretentious pins ever got checked off and knocked down. Rot, i told them. Sit stagnate and mold over. I sat very still and i stared at the window as hard as i could, but i still had all those pins lined up in front of me, and it still seemed like the same three feet of sky.
Driving today, the outside scrub of uniform blue and grey rattling by like an infinite series of uninteresting hallucinations; and my hair so rambunctiously curly & brown and my eyes so wide-set that today i resemble some sort of terrier; and Unsleep reaching numb, malicious fingers through the base of the skull; and love hovering black and silent above my head like a noxious balloon-- only now do i see the future lined up before me in neat little rows, wherever i turn neat little rows of pins for me to check off and knock down.
Just now, as soon as i've accustomed myself to the small square of Earth on which i've been planted, i must rip and unravel myself and jump from pole to pole, ticking off pins as i flick them to the ground. What is so inferior about the place i am now, the people whom i now love? Is it not impenatrably everywhere, any place i might climb toward, the struggle of loving and wanting and falling and fighting and giving and never having enough? Wherever you go, it is the same few feet of sky, and it rolling off you to dilute into others.
And i thought of them, all these beautifully fallible people whom i love, with all those pins lined up in front of them, and i wondered which ones they would keep and which they would knock down. It must be very silly of me, i thought, to feel so wadded-up and so alone when i have all these pins in front of me, all these careful rows of opportunities spread out and plastered across the skyline. Only i do not want them-- i want to be be loved and lie down. I want to surrender; to again to feel swallowed by the bigness of life, rather than sleepy and nauseous and numb; purple and rotting as a piece of banged-about fruit.
A blue-and-white transfer truck pulled up beside us and i stared at the grease-coated wheelcap whizzing feverishly around its circular track. Woodenness replaced me with a whoosh, and very suddenly it did not matter all that much whether i died or stayed alive; whether those pretentious pins ever got checked off and knocked down. Rot, i told them. Sit stagnate and mold over. I sat very still and i stared at the window as hard as i could, but i still had all those pins lined up in front of me, and it still seemed like the same three feet of sky.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
dissolution
i hang between
our hearts a bald-faced
moon
of silence
and of stars
to balm the scalding
blankness of your
unprescence.
love, having loosed
every white-faced saint into
the sea,
crumples at the shoreline,
gathering starlight to pool
in the hem of her dress.
our hearts a bald-faced
moon
of silence
and of stars
to balm the scalding
blankness of your
unprescence.
love, having loosed
every white-faced saint into
the sea,
crumples at the shoreline,
gathering starlight to pool
in the hem of her dress.
fontis lux
love-light i sing into the
unprotected current of newness
and green.
bees bloom from their caskets;
an inside queen wobbles and un-yellows,
re-composes; yawns,
where she once complained,
"i raise a slow stink."
fingers uncurl from the sky to rub circles
of blue blood into gelatinous limbs.
there is a tomb to uncase
of dust-frocked apathy:
a new sun to swallow,
blank-faced god of lust and light,
an embalming
to be unfolded from.
bliss wallows in
smoke-curls through the blue:
the poppies smile.
they smell the spring.
unprotected current of newness
and green.
bees bloom from their caskets;
an inside queen wobbles and un-yellows,
re-composes; yawns,
where she once complained,
"i raise a slow stink."
fingers uncurl from the sky to rub circles
of blue blood into gelatinous limbs.
there is a tomb to uncase
of dust-frocked apathy:
a new sun to swallow,
blank-faced god of lust and light,
an embalming
to be unfolded from.
bliss wallows in
smoke-curls through the blue:
the poppies smile.
they smell the spring.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
15 march
For all the ACTs, for all the college visits and grand scholarship plans, i am still in the quiver. Subconscious wraps tight arms around itself: there must be a starting-off place before the arrow flies, before it lands. Before i am swallowed by the great engulfing freedom of Belmont or Samford or Emory or Auburn i've got to find someplace where i'm at to dig my heels in and call Home. For all the beige carpeting and Kashi bars, i'm sure as the dickens not there yet.
I am peeling off layers of consciousness and healing; detaching myself from the girl pressed beneath my father's godthumb and raising myself under surrogate guardianship. Oh, you do not know it, all of you, but you are my fathers; every single one. You are Adam and Eve and my Mother and Father. I am learning that the line is infinitesimal, so very small, between great loving and great hate.
The future squints a cold improbable fisheye at me and refuses to be anything but a vague and unintelligible blur. For all the meticulous planning, what can we see past our noses but a beecloud of untranslated godspeak? The past shuts up tight like a clam. I am left with: now and the next few seconds. What a flimsy and disconcerting thing, to live paper-thin and godlike in the slack waltzing drumbeat of the present.
I am peeling off layers of consciousness and healing; detaching myself from the girl pressed beneath my father's godthumb and raising myself under surrogate guardianship. Oh, you do not know it, all of you, but you are my fathers; every single one. You are Adam and Eve and my Mother and Father. I am learning that the line is infinitesimal, so very small, between great loving and great hate.
The future squints a cold improbable fisheye at me and refuses to be anything but a vague and unintelligible blur. For all the meticulous planning, what can we see past our noses but a beecloud of untranslated godspeak? The past shuts up tight like a clam. I am left with: now and the next few seconds. What a flimsy and disconcerting thing, to live paper-thin and godlike in the slack waltzing drumbeat of the present.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
a few favorite poems
some are very famously good poems. some are not.
all are marvelous.
1. Aubade by Louis MacNeice
http://opalrune.blogspot.com/2006/01/aubade.html
2. Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath
http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/madgirl.html
3. After Auschwitz by Anne Sexton
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/after-auschwitz/
4. Morning Song by Sylvia Plath
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15293
5. may i feel said he by e.e cummings
http://plagiarist.com/poetry/303/
6. Ariel by Sylvia Plath
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/ariel/
7. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by TS Eliot
http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html
all are marvelous.
1. Aubade by Louis MacNeice
http://opalrune.blogspot.com/2006/01/aubade.html
2. Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath
http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/madgirl.html
3. After Auschwitz by Anne Sexton
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/after-auschwitz/
4. Morning Song by Sylvia Plath
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15293
5. may i feel said he by e.e cummings
http://plagiarist.com/poetry/303/
6. Ariel by Sylvia Plath
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/ariel/
7. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by TS Eliot
http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html
resurrection
having chosen (as we have)
an imprecise dawn to a meek
and sallow twilight
of moth-eaten gods
and slick bruised fruit
having wakened (as we have)
to the still fire of extinction
and the silence
but regenerated, sum by sum
as a lizard's bloody stump
becomes a tail--
what is left but to raise our hopeful brows
to the bagel in the toaster
and another bloody egg-yolk sunrise?
an imprecise dawn to a meek
and sallow twilight
of moth-eaten gods
and slick bruised fruit
having wakened (as we have)
to the still fire of extinction
and the silence
but regenerated, sum by sum
as a lizard's bloody stump
becomes a tail--
what is left but to raise our hopeful brows
to the bagel in the toaster
and another bloody egg-yolk sunrise?
14 march
Today my fingernails are painted yellow, to match my worn-out cotton mary-janes; and i bought a betsey johnson prom dress that i'm particularly proud of. Oh-- and as of Starbucks this afternoon i am no longer single.
Should i feel different? I do not feel any different. I always thought that the day would come like firecrackers, shooting off in all directions, and i would wake up in a new skin, with a film over my eyes, and be suddenly very wise and very worldly. But rather it was pleasantly serene, no foreign gods were born: rather, only, what already was has been stuck with a nametag. The heavens did not dismantle. I am only very, very happy.
Should i feel different? I do not feel any different. I always thought that the day would come like firecrackers, shooting off in all directions, and i would wake up in a new skin, with a film over my eyes, and be suddenly very wise and very worldly. But rather it was pleasantly serene, no foreign gods were born: rather, only, what already was has been stuck with a nametag. The heavens did not dismantle. I am only very, very happy.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
12 march
beauty is helpless in the face of adversity. what good is beauty to the self-sufficient? it is some kind of sign that says: "Protect Me. Help."
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
11 march
...but he is translucent and that is so novel. there is no mud, i can see right into and through him like a clear plastic bottle; my feet can touch the bottom. there is so much of him, but it isn't pocketed away in folds of consciousness: it's like a map, spread hands up and inside-out at the universe. you were sealed off so tight that i couldn't see you, couldn't really love you: i've got to know you too much or not at all; i've got to fall down deep inside of somebody and figure out how the fluids flow, how the blod clots.
if i were an ironist i would say: "translucence covers a multitude of sins."
today Dr. Brower caught us holding hands in the lobby and said, disapprovingly, something to the effect of: "jacob, please find another lap to hold both of your hands." such an odd feeling, reprimand. i have never been reproved like that before. i have never done any grand thing wrong. it's a kind of masochistic refreshment that comes quick and rarely, like a slick new cut, coolly welling blood; kind of morbidly liberating: i do not have to be perfect the rest of my life. i'll want to remember these things when i'm thirty.
if i were an ironist i would say: "translucence covers a multitude of sins."
today Dr. Brower caught us holding hands in the lobby and said, disapprovingly, something to the effect of: "jacob, please find another lap to hold both of your hands." such an odd feeling, reprimand. i have never been reproved like that before. i have never done any grand thing wrong. it's a kind of masochistic refreshment that comes quick and rarely, like a slick new cut, coolly welling blood; kind of morbidly liberating: i do not have to be perfect the rest of my life. i'll want to remember these things when i'm thirty.
Monday, March 9, 2009
10 march
so this is what they sing about. how queer to hold that strange indomitable uncageable Thing in one's hands, that blissful fragile impossible Thing that can be severed from no one and for no purposes: and discover that all those things they sing are true. i can feel my insides stretching and expanding in a thousand different directions (no, literally; i think i pulled a muscle in my abdomen. but that's not to what i refer.) it's like standing on the top of a high-rise and scraping the sky with your fingertips, and waving to the pedestrians below; wondering how you managed to be so small and ant-like before you got here, before you got to Know. how strange i feel.
9 march
Perfection is dead. It is by nature embalmed and atrophied, cold clean and hard as a military cadaver. This is why i could not have loved you. I needed unperfection, a Beautiful of flawed brilliance and not perfect unpocked staleness. There is a softness and whiteness to undiagrammed defectiveness that you cannot, cannot embody; a harmonious dissonance to too many colors and too many sounds. I do not wish for what i have been trained to embrace: not of spite or of fear but of pure unadulterated preference. This is why, O Great Looming Other, i could never, ever have loved you.
twoness
warmth made whole
and commanded to be--
the great
shell-shock bliss
of animal ecstasy
deflowers Gaia
and unshrivels gods.
i have an inside queen to quiet;
unbreathed, digested by
ecstasy and emerged.
there is no way but
twoness, unomnipotence
to being fully human.
unchecked winds digress,
electric squalor:
singing in
a resurrected language,
each to each.
in static, submerged and arrived:
consciousness splinters
and slides from my side.
and commanded to be--
the great
shell-shock bliss
of animal ecstasy
deflowers Gaia
and unshrivels gods.
i have an inside queen to quiet;
unbreathed, digested by
ecstasy and emerged.
there is no way but
twoness, unomnipotence
to being fully human.
unchecked winds digress,
electric squalor:
singing in
a resurrected language,
each to each.
in static, submerged and arrived:
consciousness splinters
and slides from my side.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
8 march
Hallelujah. the sun raises its ungodly head to silence with unvirtue the cold chastity of winter. I don't think i could have taken the celibacy much longer. the world wakes up and rubs blood back through its limbs.
The evermore's played at first pres today, sunday. that church is so frustrating-- the youth are fun, yes; but the adults seem to have the religious zeal of a refrigerator. it's like singing to a sanctuary full of refrigerators. but i can live with that; what bothers me is that i can't feel God in their faces, they're clean as a slate. i feel like a sham, singing to a sanctuary full of blank-faced shams. they won't allow themselves to feel and be felt. how can one by overwhelmed by the bigness of God if one is cut cold and sealed shut?
this is what i am learning: says God: "learn to love me more than anything else; and that you really do not need anything else." He makes me learn these things by strangling me with that blackness of being tired and very alone, "like the eye of a tornado, moving dully along in the midst of the surrounding hullaballoo"; the grabbing vainly for hands which vaporize as soon as one ceases to be novel. says God: "everyone else will always disappoint you. I will never disappoint you. learn to love me and come to me when you are happy or angry or drowning; when you cease to be lovable I still want you. I'm on your side."
i make no claims to knowing what love is. i am not in love and i have never been in love. i can only think of about five people that i really, really love; not with that vague vaporous love that blankets humanity and acquaintences, but that loyal reciprocated love that roots so deep in you that you can't shake it off. sometimes that is healthy and bouyant, thank you Mother, thank you Emily; sometimes it mutates into something horrible. sometimes the Deepness of the love changes into hate of the same great depth; a three-inch-deep papercut that constantly infects and swells and swells. those roots aren't easily extracted. but me, i can't hate like he hates, like she hates, i don't know how-- so i just keep on loving. painfully, scarfully loving.
what a terrible, terrible thing; to love and love and love.
The evermore's played at first pres today, sunday. that church is so frustrating-- the youth are fun, yes; but the adults seem to have the religious zeal of a refrigerator. it's like singing to a sanctuary full of refrigerators. but i can live with that; what bothers me is that i can't feel God in their faces, they're clean as a slate. i feel like a sham, singing to a sanctuary full of blank-faced shams. they won't allow themselves to feel and be felt. how can one by overwhelmed by the bigness of God if one is cut cold and sealed shut?
this is what i am learning: says God: "learn to love me more than anything else; and that you really do not need anything else." He makes me learn these things by strangling me with that blackness of being tired and very alone, "like the eye of a tornado, moving dully along in the midst of the surrounding hullaballoo"; the grabbing vainly for hands which vaporize as soon as one ceases to be novel. says God: "everyone else will always disappoint you. I will never disappoint you. learn to love me and come to me when you are happy or angry or drowning; when you cease to be lovable I still want you. I'm on your side."
i make no claims to knowing what love is. i am not in love and i have never been in love. i can only think of about five people that i really, really love; not with that vague vaporous love that blankets humanity and acquaintences, but that loyal reciprocated love that roots so deep in you that you can't shake it off. sometimes that is healthy and bouyant, thank you Mother, thank you Emily; sometimes it mutates into something horrible. sometimes the Deepness of the love changes into hate of the same great depth; a three-inch-deep papercut that constantly infects and swells and swells. those roots aren't easily extracted. but me, i can't hate like he hates, like she hates, i don't know how-- so i just keep on loving. painfully, scarfully loving.
what a terrible, terrible thing; to love and love and love.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Unlove, and Fish
It was the librarian’s loafers that did it—grotesque, mustard-colored things; the tips protruding from under the library desk like two fingertips sticking out from a band-aid. They had to be the most unattractive shoes that Polly had ever seen. She stared at them silently for a good five minutes before it arrived in her brain: I do not love this woman. I do not, do not love her; I cannot possibly love anyone with such hideous loafers. The librarian scraped her chair across the floor and began arranging dictionaries on the third shelf of the wall. An unfamiliar hatred swelled in her throat, uncaged at its birth with a hiss. Polly collected her books and stalked from the library, feeling suddenly and unnaturally dead.
It was then that Polly decided to willfully see things as they actually were.
The sky slithered by, identical twins on identical slices of concrete: trees grew mold at the tips, reaching dully toward the infinitely lusterless blue. A boy sat cross-legged on the pavement, eyes lowered toward the pen-marks of a study notebook: red craters dotted his face in a spiritless toile, his hair frizzed with the nine AM dew. No, she thought deadly, I cannot love him either.
“I am made out of metal,” she announced, mounting the concrete steps of the school building. “I am made out of metal. A fish. A metal fish. I cannot feel anything.” Several people looked up and apathetically away. Polly sauntered stiffly through the warmness of the hallway, sometimes tilting precariously and onto the wall for support, feeling with numb approval the new metal bones of her hands. They were pink and cold, and they worked.
“Hello, Polly,” Annie said cheerfully. Polly stared for a moment without recognition at the softly brownish contours of her cheekbones, neither particularly beautiful nor plain, and a quick clean judgment formed in her mind like a small nut, or a tumor.
“Hello, Annie,” she said without feeling, and walked quickly in the opposite direction.
There is a cold, calculated sort of comfort to numbness—so arrogant and dead—so atrophyingly secure. Up is never sideways; the spider bite will swell; green is always and only blue-plus-yellow. What a morbidly pleasurable thing, thought Polly, to reduce life into bits of faceless concrete, into cold impartial lumps of time and space. What malignant satisfaction, to be sometimes no more than one red brick in the building. To reduce tangles and tangles of consciousness into silent rows of impersonal grey; to be sometimes clean and sharp and dead as a military corpse rather than one big heap of love colliding.
A face swam wan and languageless before her. “Hello, Polly,” said Emily worriedly, “you look sick today.”
“I think that I am dead,” she remarked, narrowing her eyes in an attempt to look fierce. “I cannot feel anything. I don’t think that I can love any longer. I think I could kill somebody, if I wanted.”
Polly searched the freckles of Emily’s eyes for alarm and was rewarded by the widening of her thick black eyes.
“Think of your mother,” she advised. “You love your mother, surely.”
Polly pictured Esther—for she could no longer stand to call her Mother; such a fallibly empty term of endearment—on her feet in the kitchen, her minor girth tucked and pocketed into the fabric of her best blue linen dress. She peeled the skin off the tops of the potatoes, just so, humming something intolerable—oh, say, The Battle Hymn of the Republic— the hair curlers philandering her blonde head into a veritable homespun Medusa. The saccharineness of it made Polly’s fists harden: she opened her eyes again, stone-cold.
“No, that didn’t seem to have worked,” she declared, opening her palms. A strange sort of warmth emanated from Emily’s fingers: they must have been a foot away from Polly’s, but still she caught in them a scent of the humanness bubbling in her, the incomparable human scent of warmth. A part of her shriveled, shrunk in trepidation into the cold safe confines of Self; but another half of her was gathering forces, gaining momentum: reaching timidly forward into the soft brutal warmness of Emily.
“What about David,” Emily ventured, fingering the hem of her raincoat. “Have you seen David? He’s all the time just about to be flying to pieces for happiness. You cannot help but love David.” Dear Emily, thought Polly, dear warm loving unsafe Emily, trying to flay me back into normalcy.
“No,” Polly said, “I have not.”
“I’ll send him after you,” Emily said warmly, “and then you won’t feel dead anymore.” Emily turned on her heel and Polly watched her click, one shoe at a time, down the hallway.
This is what Hell smells like, Polly thought. It is remembering Heaven, and the warm white linen smell of Heaven, but having struck the wrong chord on the Harp and lost it all. It is cold and unmoving, soaked with the smell of piss and too many strawberries. It is unlove, a lie, a half-life that reeks of fear and gasoline.
She twisted her hands together and stretched for the door, as though a creeping blackness lurked inches behind her and was in danger of overtaking her at any moment. Outside and quite alone, she slumped into a cold, eternal mostly-harmless ball against the concrete.
Mostly harmless, my foot; she thought. Humans are dangerous, dangerous creatures.
I am a tragedy, thought Polly. All these years of teachers and preachers and salespersons in black pin-stripes suits trying to tell you how not to be a tragedy, and here I am, cold and dead and ungrateful after all. How to forgive the world for its beauty, for its beauty and its blundering apathy? I am a tragedy. What the hell is a tragedy? I am.
She pulled the sleeves of her coat over her fingertips, feeling very wise and very miserable. For you see, she thought, we will always in the end turn to ourselves, and only ourselves, from the difficultness and the danger and the apathy of love; and steel ourselves to face the estrangement, or, even worse, the utter indifference, of the people we live with and think that we love. Steel ourselves so that we cannot be touched.
He would be looking for her inside, blue eyes grazing innocent across aisles and aisles of facelessness: while she shriveled boldly outside, a thousand tinny magnets flown together inside her and ripping her organs to ribbons. But no—she did not feel worthy of that sort of violence. She had not martyred herself into virginal flames, nor disintegrated into a violent heap of ash. She had simply stopped loving and died. Cold hard cadaver, jostling stiffly along the nameless warm flesh of the living.
What secrets the sky keeps, she thought, watching with new intensity the cool, detached mystery of the blue: splintered, swollen, cracked blood-red from cheek to cheek as though someone or something has been crying. Is this not what we hide from? The fear: that after all that work, we are still unworthy after all? That it will be discovered that we are not in fact a human, but a sham? That we are not an enigma but a void?
I am the opposite of whole, she thought numbly; the opposite of falling face-first into love. But rather I am being peeled open and turned inside out, drunk and digested by a thick plural blackness: I am heavy, like solid gold, a frozen solid-gold casket, poured into, filled with, death.
An icy sense of blackness crawled lupine through her limbs, blooming gangrene bruises all along the inside of her skin.
“Help,” she said.
The sky began to fuzz and grey over, dripping fat pellets of water onto the concrete. Cars lulled mechanically by, raindrops smacking cleanly against their fat chrome bottoms.
From the blur she felt a hand rest its warmth upon her head.
“Hello, Polly,” said David, sliding his back against the wall to sit next to her on the concrete. “My, your hands are like ice! What could you be thinking, out here in the rain like this?”
A warm alarm shot into her skin, a quick red welting of awareness, of not oneness but twoness. Polly clutched at the hand in her hand greedily, rooting deep into the wealth of his skin like mushroom spores, like an umbilical cord. As if singularly, our blood cannot feed: but plural, together, some new blood is born, clean blood, and it feeds. She felt newness burn into her palms, the strange unsafe Newness of un-apathy, shooting spores of redness into her stony stillborn grey. Is there a third place, she wondered, between comic and tragic? Of neither hysterical goodness nor badness, only Right? Only warmth, and un-apathy, and Right?
It was then that the world flew to pieces, black and white jumping back into realness, the warm humanness of hands gluing the pieces together in order, just so, like a well-done sum. She felt the dankness slide from her side, the universe propping itself up in its place without as much as a greeting or explanation.
“I am thinking,” Polly crowed, “that I was wrong.” She wriggled her fingers into David’s palm, feeling humanity once again embed itself under her skin. Tapping the tip of his nose with her finger, she said:
“This is what I see: that it is worth being conscious, after all, to love and feel love. I have felt with my own hands that it is cold and hard and barren to be dead.”
“I see,” David said.
There is oneness, Polly thought, but there is not only oneness. It is not good for one to be alone. How closely one is guarded by the fear: that upon loving someone, our true selves will burst through, and our muddiness will seep out with our love, erupting quick and irrepressible like unfortunate cat vomit, and they will turn away in disgust. Only love never quite works like that—rather—our water is never as dirty as we imagine it to be; and how free we are when we break open the bottle, and allow ourselves to love and feel love.
Eyes tidied and unparceled, she watched the cars file by: nameless, but with faces; small chinks off the great clay-lump of humanity, each harboring the common candle of humanness somewhere inside. Somehow, Polly thought, that gives me hope.
It was then that Polly decided to willfully see things as they actually were.
The sky slithered by, identical twins on identical slices of concrete: trees grew mold at the tips, reaching dully toward the infinitely lusterless blue. A boy sat cross-legged on the pavement, eyes lowered toward the pen-marks of a study notebook: red craters dotted his face in a spiritless toile, his hair frizzed with the nine AM dew. No, she thought deadly, I cannot love him either.
“I am made out of metal,” she announced, mounting the concrete steps of the school building. “I am made out of metal. A fish. A metal fish. I cannot feel anything.” Several people looked up and apathetically away. Polly sauntered stiffly through the warmness of the hallway, sometimes tilting precariously and onto the wall for support, feeling with numb approval the new metal bones of her hands. They were pink and cold, and they worked.
“Hello, Polly,” Annie said cheerfully. Polly stared for a moment without recognition at the softly brownish contours of her cheekbones, neither particularly beautiful nor plain, and a quick clean judgment formed in her mind like a small nut, or a tumor.
“Hello, Annie,” she said without feeling, and walked quickly in the opposite direction.
There is a cold, calculated sort of comfort to numbness—so arrogant and dead—so atrophyingly secure. Up is never sideways; the spider bite will swell; green is always and only blue-plus-yellow. What a morbidly pleasurable thing, thought Polly, to reduce life into bits of faceless concrete, into cold impartial lumps of time and space. What malignant satisfaction, to be sometimes no more than one red brick in the building. To reduce tangles and tangles of consciousness into silent rows of impersonal grey; to be sometimes clean and sharp and dead as a military corpse rather than one big heap of love colliding.
A face swam wan and languageless before her. “Hello, Polly,” said Emily worriedly, “you look sick today.”
“I think that I am dead,” she remarked, narrowing her eyes in an attempt to look fierce. “I cannot feel anything. I don’t think that I can love any longer. I think I could kill somebody, if I wanted.”
Polly searched the freckles of Emily’s eyes for alarm and was rewarded by the widening of her thick black eyes.
“Think of your mother,” she advised. “You love your mother, surely.”
Polly pictured Esther—for she could no longer stand to call her Mother; such a fallibly empty term of endearment—on her feet in the kitchen, her minor girth tucked and pocketed into the fabric of her best blue linen dress. She peeled the skin off the tops of the potatoes, just so, humming something intolerable—oh, say, The Battle Hymn of the Republic— the hair curlers philandering her blonde head into a veritable homespun Medusa. The saccharineness of it made Polly’s fists harden: she opened her eyes again, stone-cold.
“No, that didn’t seem to have worked,” she declared, opening her palms. A strange sort of warmth emanated from Emily’s fingers: they must have been a foot away from Polly’s, but still she caught in them a scent of the humanness bubbling in her, the incomparable human scent of warmth. A part of her shriveled, shrunk in trepidation into the cold safe confines of Self; but another half of her was gathering forces, gaining momentum: reaching timidly forward into the soft brutal warmness of Emily.
“What about David,” Emily ventured, fingering the hem of her raincoat. “Have you seen David? He’s all the time just about to be flying to pieces for happiness. You cannot help but love David.” Dear Emily, thought Polly, dear warm loving unsafe Emily, trying to flay me back into normalcy.
“No,” Polly said, “I have not.”
“I’ll send him after you,” Emily said warmly, “and then you won’t feel dead anymore.” Emily turned on her heel and Polly watched her click, one shoe at a time, down the hallway.
This is what Hell smells like, Polly thought. It is remembering Heaven, and the warm white linen smell of Heaven, but having struck the wrong chord on the Harp and lost it all. It is cold and unmoving, soaked with the smell of piss and too many strawberries. It is unlove, a lie, a half-life that reeks of fear and gasoline.
She twisted her hands together and stretched for the door, as though a creeping blackness lurked inches behind her and was in danger of overtaking her at any moment. Outside and quite alone, she slumped into a cold, eternal mostly-harmless ball against the concrete.
Mostly harmless, my foot; she thought. Humans are dangerous, dangerous creatures.
I am a tragedy, thought Polly. All these years of teachers and preachers and salespersons in black pin-stripes suits trying to tell you how not to be a tragedy, and here I am, cold and dead and ungrateful after all. How to forgive the world for its beauty, for its beauty and its blundering apathy? I am a tragedy. What the hell is a tragedy? I am.
She pulled the sleeves of her coat over her fingertips, feeling very wise and very miserable. For you see, she thought, we will always in the end turn to ourselves, and only ourselves, from the difficultness and the danger and the apathy of love; and steel ourselves to face the estrangement, or, even worse, the utter indifference, of the people we live with and think that we love. Steel ourselves so that we cannot be touched.
He would be looking for her inside, blue eyes grazing innocent across aisles and aisles of facelessness: while she shriveled boldly outside, a thousand tinny magnets flown together inside her and ripping her organs to ribbons. But no—she did not feel worthy of that sort of violence. She had not martyred herself into virginal flames, nor disintegrated into a violent heap of ash. She had simply stopped loving and died. Cold hard cadaver, jostling stiffly along the nameless warm flesh of the living.
What secrets the sky keeps, she thought, watching with new intensity the cool, detached mystery of the blue: splintered, swollen, cracked blood-red from cheek to cheek as though someone or something has been crying. Is this not what we hide from? The fear: that after all that work, we are still unworthy after all? That it will be discovered that we are not in fact a human, but a sham? That we are not an enigma but a void?
I am the opposite of whole, she thought numbly; the opposite of falling face-first into love. But rather I am being peeled open and turned inside out, drunk and digested by a thick plural blackness: I am heavy, like solid gold, a frozen solid-gold casket, poured into, filled with, death.
An icy sense of blackness crawled lupine through her limbs, blooming gangrene bruises all along the inside of her skin.
“Help,” she said.
The sky began to fuzz and grey over, dripping fat pellets of water onto the concrete. Cars lulled mechanically by, raindrops smacking cleanly against their fat chrome bottoms.
From the blur she felt a hand rest its warmth upon her head.
“Hello, Polly,” said David, sliding his back against the wall to sit next to her on the concrete. “My, your hands are like ice! What could you be thinking, out here in the rain like this?”
A warm alarm shot into her skin, a quick red welting of awareness, of not oneness but twoness. Polly clutched at the hand in her hand greedily, rooting deep into the wealth of his skin like mushroom spores, like an umbilical cord. As if singularly, our blood cannot feed: but plural, together, some new blood is born, clean blood, and it feeds. She felt newness burn into her palms, the strange unsafe Newness of un-apathy, shooting spores of redness into her stony stillborn grey. Is there a third place, she wondered, between comic and tragic? Of neither hysterical goodness nor badness, only Right? Only warmth, and un-apathy, and Right?
It was then that the world flew to pieces, black and white jumping back into realness, the warm humanness of hands gluing the pieces together in order, just so, like a well-done sum. She felt the dankness slide from her side, the universe propping itself up in its place without as much as a greeting or explanation.
“I am thinking,” Polly crowed, “that I was wrong.” She wriggled her fingers into David’s palm, feeling humanity once again embed itself under her skin. Tapping the tip of his nose with her finger, she said:
“This is what I see: that it is worth being conscious, after all, to love and feel love. I have felt with my own hands that it is cold and hard and barren to be dead.”
“I see,” David said.
There is oneness, Polly thought, but there is not only oneness. It is not good for one to be alone. How closely one is guarded by the fear: that upon loving someone, our true selves will burst through, and our muddiness will seep out with our love, erupting quick and irrepressible like unfortunate cat vomit, and they will turn away in disgust. Only love never quite works like that—rather—our water is never as dirty as we imagine it to be; and how free we are when we break open the bottle, and allow ourselves to love and feel love.
Eyes tidied and unparceled, she watched the cars file by: nameless, but with faces; small chinks off the great clay-lump of humanity, each harboring the common candle of humanness somewhere inside. Somehow, Polly thought, that gives me hope.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Wintering
a small crucifixion by
starlight--
bloodsoaked
on the moon-patched sand,
the will,
martyr of love;
silver carcass worshipping
a gold one.
wintering, weathering
drying out like salt and growing dim:
thickly bloated
as though too long submerged
or underwater.
coming up from earth and spitting sand.
love cannot carry us, we have grown
too large.
i am and only am the
stasis to your waltzing stars.
nonbeing of winter:
splices of quartz crusting over.
in the wake of your petaling, plaster.
starlight--
bloodsoaked
on the moon-patched sand,
the will,
martyr of love;
silver carcass worshipping
a gold one.
wintering, weathering
drying out like salt and growing dim:
thickly bloated
as though too long submerged
or underwater.
coming up from earth and spitting sand.
love cannot carry us, we have grown
too large.
i am and only am the
stasis to your waltzing stars.
nonbeing of winter:
splices of quartz crusting over.
in the wake of your petaling, plaster.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
1 march
what the hell is tragedy? I am.
......for you see, we will always in the end turn to ourselves, and only ourselves; and steel ourselves to face the estrangement, or, even worse, utter indifference, of the people we live with, and think that we love.
......for you see, we will always in the end turn to ourselves, and only ourselves; and steel ourselves to face the estrangement, or, even worse, utter indifference, of the people we live with, and think that we love.
28 february
This is it, this waiting for spring, that strangles. March and warmth and substance stand flagrantly out of sight, waiting, while dull wet winter sits out its nun-penitence, silent and unmoving as a giant stillborn baby. I cannot endure the sitting and waiting and the giant aloneness. Warm aloneness is far preferable to cold aloneness after all, and spring sets an itch under my skin to reinstate myself in the land of the living. It is dark now, and at the end of my dark bouts of Selfness sit always the warm pink of Faces, warm other Islands to whom i reciprocate roots, reaching, each to each, like mushroom spores; umbilical cords. As if singular the blood can't feed but somehow Together some new blood is born, and it feeds; as if somehow we can justify our being alive that way.
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