Who am I

I am the contents that has no container.  A sinner when I do right and a saint when I do wrong.  I am the feeling that you’re not alone and the reminder that you are.  

There is the world we desire and the world we are in, and then there's the world we choose... only the third matters...

Some people make a living outta dyin' - i'm just dyin' to start livin'

And sometimes being lost long enough makes you more familiar with where you're not, than where you are.  That's when you know it's time to change where you're not, to where you should be....which is where you're least familiar.  And that's place is somewhere else altogether.

exists

Hairpin Turns through the Ages

I once held the whole of time in the tiniest hands of a child and then my hands grew.  But the abundance of time did not.  It is not the amount of time before us or behind us, it is simply the openness of a hand to hold what we have - now.

I traced lemniscates with my finger, following a mobile over my bed.  I marveled how a superball could bounce so high; how one man with an axe could take down a 60 year old tree.  Yet all the while – eternity was held there in the darkness like a headboard of hope.  I learned about arguing by listening to those closest to me, through the walls – I didn’t like it, so I grew up listening less and found that was the cause of even more arguments than my parents had.  Sex education didn’t exist outside of episodes of I Dream of Jeanie – as a high level thinking pre-adolescent, I toiled with explanations thereby minimizing a monumental sensation that has existed since the dawn of man.  I deferred understanding any of this through an emerging adolescent logic – faith had it in for me that one day, a girl would drop from the sky and land on the erection that first caused so much alarm.  It would all become clear then.   Everyone was tormented with the significance of a recent past because at such an age, we’d never fathomed the rest of our lives.

Yes, now my hand is large and calloused and holds but the tiniest remains of time. My palms are etched with age like the crystal of my grandfather’s watch.  Time is almost up, so why do I feel a mounting kinship with youth.  

Life’s little hairpin turns down the slippery slope of irony.

Moderation is Toleration

Love makes no compromises, it takes a direct path through the most austere environments - the undaunted trace of a shooting star through a field of obstacles. Perhaps the one we truly love steps into our light without hesitation - but only providing love illuminates parts, without receiving it to make it whole. When we love those who tolerate us, we love only as much as they can take...not as much as we can give and it seems love does not prefer to be dolled out in doses of glimmer.

I Gotta Lot Undoing to Do

Godsend

     When I was down, I got high  

     When life got in the way, I still got by

     There was nothing going ‘round that I didn’t go through

     But what you left undone between us, isn’t something that I want to do.

Seems we spend most our lives gettin' out of the way

Of a sun that's meant to shine on our darkest of days

Chased by our own shadows straight into the night

Lookin' back at what won’t work, when the future still might... (whatever)

Friends say I’ve mastered falling down to an art,

Building pretty little piles from what’s been torn apart.

But the pieces that you left are as much as you took,

And no one gets the whole story from reading half of the book.

     So when you were up, you put me down

     When I got in your way, you ran around

     I reaped hope from the furrows, where nothing ever grew

     but fixin' what you’re doin-is more than any man would want to do.

When I think back now what I wish I’d know then,

The same people fool me again and again.

They say hindsight’s 20/20, but to tell you the truth

While I can see through your lies, I'm still blind to the proof.

Yeh, your ghost seems to leap from one girl to the next

And while they keep gettin' better, I know what’s better ain’t best

If my senses come to find me, they’ll know where I am

I’m just one idea behind, where the thought of you ends.

     And when I get down, I still get high.

     When life gets in the way, well, I'll get by.

     In fact, there’s nothing [that] comes to mind, that I wouldn’t do

     So stop redoing what you undid, so it’s done, and I’ll be over you....

     Till then I’m chasing you down, 'cause when I’m down, at least I’m close to you.

The Creative Adult is the Child Who Survived (Yep-Sun Gazing)

Think about it; the most creative moments of your adult life were the moments you allowed the child in you to play. rsb.

Sad how growing older oft becomes the smothering of the innocent innovator - we are compelled to protect what's within by never letting it out.  And one day, we can't remember what we dreamt the night before.

Through the course of adulthood the surface of childhood is wounded and scarred, like tree bark around the sapling; well intended...but ill begotten in the end.

Creativity is the uncloaking of passion, that is otherwise imprisoned by the broad black lines in our coloring books, with the grown up instruction, "shush now, and color within the lines."  I'm reminded of a picture from Kent State during the war protest - a college girl is placing the stem of a flower in the barrel of a national guardsman's rifle.  Images like this are misconstrued as an almost ineffectual act of creativity, passion, and love.

The world can only be saved by the minds of adults and the hearts of children.  Of all the animal kingdom, the only species to not evolve is the child within a human.  And for this I'm grateful.

Tomorrow I will imagine the conference table as a sandbox, our coffee cups as pails, and my colleagues are children and playmates (not the adult kind of playmates, they'd be fully dressed.)

Now if you don't mind, I'm going to get my coffee and help my son build his Lego Ninjago toy.  I explained to the girl at the counter, that 41 years ago I used to play with Lego's - a whole barrel for 5 bucks...the half shoe box size set of Ninjago Legos were 84 bucks.  No one said, remaining a child was going to be cheap!

Jimmy Buffett sang, "I'm growing older but not up, my metabolic rate is pleasantly stuck, let the winds of time blow over my head, I'd rather die while I'm living than live while I'm dead..." (he also has a song, "Life is Just a Tire Swing.")

ON CLERGYMEN BUGGERING LITTLE BOYS

Benedict Groeschel, Reverend of the Franciscan Friars of Renewal, recently claimed in an interview with a Catholic news source it was often the case that priests were seduced by teenagers...I knew this guy...he was a real RILF, if ya know what I mean. Hm....I remember going through catechism and the priest's mocking disapproval, followed by a cheshire grin, when I said, "...and lead us not into TEMPTATION..." during the Lords Prayer. Priests are often teased like that. There was just something about much older, creepy, droopy men in cassocks that drove young boys wild - come on, the priest were practically asking for it! I tried seducing nuns, but the priest would say, "it's okay to try with nun, but just don't get into the HABIT...get it, HABIT?" (...whenever you're at a rave and a man with a funny colar, and a cross around his neck puts a wafer on your tongue saying, "...the body of Christ..." it's probably really ecstasy...)

EVANGELICAL RAVINGS

ON THE POPES "Encyclical Letter HUMANAE VITAE" (Pope Paul VI, 25 July 1968). Which establishes the "long-held and unwavering" position of the Church against the use of BIRTH CONTROL:

How does one go about obtaining such apparent empirical knowledge in order to write as compelling a letter as this? I have personally tr
aveled into the realm of evil via coitus interruptus and found enlightenment - I could not have written this with more clear instruction.

...and "the use of contraceptives cause men to forget their reverence for women!?" Seriously? So I've cheapened women (er, I mean "baby vessels") by not getting them pregnant. Well, now we know why the Taliban hate christians so much... contraception is clearly the impetus for islamic fundamentalistic values toward women. Why intervene with the stoning of women (which I read about in the old testament), just cut off the Taliban supply of contraceptives - or convert them to christianity...problem solved.

I guess, we will have to put warning labels on condoms, "The Catholic Church warns that the use of this product may promote pornographic fantasies about about women in socio-cultural bondage." And here I was thinking, it would prevent pregnancy, hackneyed abortions, and abandoned children that are spawned by sinners and single "reverent" mothers...that is if the moms survive the pregnancy (or sexually transmitted virus) to be reminded of the "more respectful" rapist who didn't wear a condom... (long winded I know).

How many women break from their ascetic ways and claim, "if you respect me, you'll get me pregnant and marry me in the morning..." I more often get the clear message that her "physical and emotional equilibrium" depends on passionate acts of love and caress...not shaking her hand and kissing her at church during the benediction. Lest she obtain her own "instrument of satisfaction," batteries included.

If there ever was a case for polygamy... you can only get the same woman pregnant once every 9.5 months (thereabouts - I had to change the gestation period because Arizona governor Jan Brewer, says that pregnancy begins two weeks before conception...still scratching my sinful head over that one)

When asked "why do you have so many children?", the man answered,

"because I like sex."

"...then why so many different women?" continued the flustered friar.

"simple - because they don't."

LATEST RAGES

ON MORMON FOUNDATIONS OF POLYGAMY:   When your religion is working for you anymore, don't retrace your historical context, just change your moral code! Which is why I brought up Jan Brewer - here is an example of where legislation wasn't achieving it's moral objective for medical rulings on "when a life begins" (which I already knows is after the age of 50) and so they decided to change biology.  (Brewer upholds that it begins two weeks before conception - huh?)

The best way to accommodate everyone in what is most certainly an ever changing future is to NOT learn anything too much - it will only be changed for us to learn again.

Shifting

Sitting heavily outside 

at the corner of Library and Market, 

the skin of my ass slightly stuck 

to the Italian wool fabric of my pants.

(shifting)

 - still stuck...underwear, 

then what’s the purpose?  

I’m reminded that the world I imagine 

is far bigger than the one I’m actually in…  

People smile at me

when I’m in this world

but they are saying to themselves,

“...mine’s bigger than his, he should get in…” 

There's not enough room on earth, 

for everyone to get the world they imagine...

if they do,

all but one of us will be pushed off the edge.

Her Poem

It’s okay to let me go

For a moment to journey alone

To bear the torment once again

but I promise I’ll come home.

I’ve no fear of going back

Just to reminisce

A fleeting glance, a word perchance

Or just an awkward kiss.

With all I’d note, I’d understand

that home is cradled in giving hands.

That all we’d ever hope to see

Is cloaked with self discovery.

That every mistake I’d ever made

was a star placed in the sky

patterns for the journey back

flickering in your eyes.

And though it seems I’ll walk away

It’s only then I’d see

All the tears I’d saved back then,

Had I seen you walking toward me.

Dance and the Dancer

Life lies in state beneath my fingertips,
Held at bay by the stay of my hand.
Poised in the breeze
As the weight on the keys,
Starts to tap out the song of a man.

That sparks a light in this torpid gray matter
Stirring an earth bound chance for
My soul to repose
And my pen to compose
A dance, for life as the dancer.

Get Offer Cheeze Mine

Priorities

Our true purpose lures most strongly from the shores, when we are caught in the clutching current of the routine. so go ahead, be late for that staff meeting...

is is as is

I'm uncertain of any connection between seasoned kelp and fugue.

...he is not

I looked at all the details, and I did not see the devil

regrets

The only regrets in life originate from poor spelling and picking up pennies heads down.

Mathematics of happiness:

The time spent regretting yesterday, is only balanced by a longing to change tomorrow.  Funny thing about life right now, is that it can seem only half fulfilled between what just happened and what will happen next.  Why are you smiling?  I fail to see the humor in that.   

Assuming a gaussian distribution, there is a high likelihood that the real answer is in the middle - the joy of the "now" depends on where you set the variance of the before and after. I mean to say,

...it's important to remain absolutely certain throughout your life...but one moment at a time.

Tears in the Thirsting Years

How intriguing to fathom the labors of love, 
Staring up from a fathomless well. 
As if happiness might lift the wings of a dove,
Clipped and weeping in the hollows of hell.

With great stealth it navigates the depths of doubt,
To overtake a torrent of tears.
A deluge of hope to quench the drought;
Precious seconds for the thirsting years.

art credited via www.emotionallyvague.com

SWEETLY AS ONE

Together we lower the moon and raise the sun,
An ocean apart, but sweetly as one.

This love is in the rhythm of earth’s revolution.
Whether it comes to rest
or forever spin without friction.

No living thing that stirs its surface
Will alter a second in time
The sound of your heart will only be heard
not by meteors or comets, but mine.

A fatherly sigh, of divine breath lifts us,
Like dust from the planet, so gently
As two souls collide out of billions who tried
Finding peace on this braided journey

Revolutions in swirl around a steadfast sun.
As two once lost beings come sweetly as one.

How to Make a Bad Dingo Regurgitate a Baby

Step by step now. 

1. Stick two fingers in dingos mouth. 

2. Press down on back of dingos tongue until dingo regurgitates. 

3. Catch and dry off baby. 

So no more excuses moms.

Quips for the Quipish (part 2)

I would rather be incised by Occam's razor in an act of mercy, than coddled by mis-intended sincerity.

I cannot suffer a man who deftly climbs the shoulders of idiots to vehemently purport his wisdom. For a wise man well versed in the ways of a fool, finds useful similarities for both, rather than useless differences for himself.

I've picked up many a stone, etched with words of encouragement...but none so fulfilling to me as those I've scribed and left behind

Lies are the salt pressed into the open wounds of truth...

I'm just a reluctant bon vivant with 10 unruly typing fingers who apparently conspire with the warped underworld of my mind.

One need not purge an experience that has let them down, in order to heal. There can be no regeneration of spirit, when the injury is discounted – hm, emotional “corpus delicti?” Or is it “esse causa doloris remedium esse?" Where's a lawyer when you need one?

Imagine cause and its effect like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich... One is too sweet, the other leaves you dry in the mouth – together, not so bad – especially with cold milk (unless you are lactose intolerant – then I recommend cherry Koolaide)

Everyone has a magnetic north - sometimes we just need to examine the metal filings left in the path of another to realize it..

Health care, health reform; my taxes, their taxes; 90%, 10%; constitutionality; bla-bla-higher, bla-bla-lower; yes, no; da, nyeht; Those who make up all the questions, make up all the answers.

I'm always confused by traffic...and nuclear physics. but i'm drippin wit "yo"

The weight of the beer in my hand became less stressful with each sip.

I love a good storm, whiny midwestern girls, bicycling witches, and spitball sized dogs name Toto....I've sealed and barricaded the doors with the children. It's all good.

Art by Ruby S. Bernardo

Faith is respite for those who brave the stormy sea of expectations. It's the answer in the wind, that fills a questioning sail...onward over the crests we go, urging us to reach our destination, long before we...arrive.

montepulciano

Consider the origin of being as seated firmly in the dark and pristine epicenter of the body – holding
every fleeting and persistent thought, fantasy, and raw reflex.

How close do you allow another to get to the core – what within can be shared, and what must be simply left
                             unheard, unseen, unfelt by another?

How is this gravity measured – in weird blackness?

Perhaps there is some element in the relationship between two that must be left still and alone...
                             within the depths of their individual being.

It is unfathomable and multihued – anything imaginable and it’s opposite are there
                             in the crackling shadows.

Somewhere, at some time, along the length of those released vines of energy, we allow some part of ourselves to intertwine and tangle with those of another.

But just as the tips of the sun dance warmly on our skin,
                                               so the source of these rays would sooner incinerate us.

The melding of cores as a union of one requires the destruction of two.

Protecting what you are seems at times to be the antithesis of cultivating what you’ll be with another.

But it is balance… from the black center to the many shades of gray.

Yes, Love springs forth from lips before they are kissed .

Black Wierdness

mi bicicleta es muy

                         NEGRO

mi bicicleta es muy negro

es muy negro

              mi bicicleta

mi bicicleta es muy negro

Sang-froid

Quietly sighs the dawn
long and languid through the hours
What’s to come about lies in wait
Per chance, to say
Something sagacious,
Something great.

Dreamers wide awake;
So erudite and perspicuous.
As if their dreaming
were to dream
Away the smothering Incubus

That sponges up the will to act
by the dour soul expecting
that fortune’s grin will find a heart
as effortlessly as their wanting.

Stock-still with llusions of mobility
Tipping teaspoons of emptiness
Into steaming cups of void
Sipped by the thirsty lips
that kiss the blarney stone
and speak their yearning with sang-froid.

just...dripping with "yo."

To Know Her

Napapanaginipan ko siya sa wari ay kawalan subalit kilala ko siya ng buong liwanag.

A Juxtaposition of Self

I never questioned the prognosis my own gallantry until taught the word bravery, I knew nothing about success until I experienced failure, I never feared death until I overlooked life, and I never knew a friend, until I was called one.

Fear and Love

Beneath an ocean of fear are the plunging depths of mantle and core – the root of all we are and that which clutches the mass of our being – the gravity of our ground, the Self.

The causal forces of emotion, lie both below the roots of fear – “fear of who we really are,” and above the tree line of hubris, “fear of who we’ll become.” Fear is self-effacing love – love which mistakes having no attachments nor serving as an accessory as a weakness. Pure fear is the perfect absence of love, and it stands to reason that it carries a certainty that is inversely proportional to the possibility of realized potential; potential to be who we are already destined to be, or to attain, or to love. Fear is a misperception that all we can ever have is all we can hold today – to a point where all we hold in the moment then exceeds all we’ll ever have in moments to come.

Fear is not “of” a ghost, it “is” the ghost; and the more I fear, the more certain I am “that” I’m destined to “be” – even more so than “what or whom” I’m destined to be or to attain or to love. Fear is a threat, disguised as a promise…part the ocean, strip the surface and you’ll see the truth.

Fear never begins, it never ends – it cannot be measured it is not greater than the sum of it’s parts, it is “other” than the sum of it’s parts. Its dissected meaning is as diminutive as the edge of a scalpel…to analyze our fear is to simply lose ourselves in the waning interstitial space of nothingness. It stands for nothing unless it stands in the foreground of our own awareness…and then it is only seen as a dark silhouette postured in the brilliance of destiny. If you cast light on fear, you’ll find it is simply love in the shadows of the unknown.

We all fear something – I feared my father until the day he died and even after. It made me stop and think that I’d rather love the departed as they fade to a point of light in their future, than fear the darkness of their growing memory in times gone by.

We simply turn our heads to look toward the direction we wish to go, not from whence we came – it’s alright…the importance of those who do not follow will be realized in the promise of those we’ve yet to meet. Imagine a translucent fear, and you’ll begin to see the core of yourself – perfect a transparent fear, you’ll find pure love.

Emoticons take up arms!

The Nearly American Dream

It was dinnertime and these guys were waiting on their truck-ride home. They caught me taking this photo – and we all shared in the amusing irony of the event. By the time the light had turned green, they’d loaded in and driven away, their work behind them. The dull torpor of middle income American expressionism cannot upstage these guys before 800 million Facebook viewers. These were the only strangers who really noticed me today....

The American Dream - a days-end reason to smile and the inalienable right to pop a cap off a bottle of cold beer. (or pop a cap in dat-ass)

What the Dead May Pray

Make us worthy in our passing, 

for what we could not achieve in our living. 

For Life subsumes death –

and while the evidence may show 

we had not fully lived the way we’d hoped, 

we have the right to hope

that what failed to thrive

has died and departed the memory of others; 

leaving us nothing but a clean slate 

in the continued journey. 

May all whom we’ve served and transgressed 

step aside and cheer us on – 

the race is never over.

The Talented Tragically Shattered

the tragically shattered can slip into blackness like an anvil through ether.  But they weren't pushed...they jumped.

Two Red Rockers

to thine own self be true
(photo by Phosphorimental)

Encouraged by promises I made

to myself,

Chased by memories of dreams

never come true.

Here in the maundering dereliction

of presence,

coffee brown moments

in blue.

Stones unturned, life kept

at bay,

swept back by aromas

and flavors

of a distant past beckoning

anew

awoken by the rattling

of sabers.

The silence hurts my ears, time to make my own noise!

Hear it?!

Love is the finest form of dying

There is a thin fine line between giving up on yourself and giving up on needing another…between striving for that spring green flexibility and tormenting ourselves when we bend in the slightest way, in the slightest breeze. The hollowing pain that rips through our torso like seething heavy balls shot from distant black pig iron cannons. Like when love unbridled goes careening into boundless plains, before it can be tamed…and yet how we hang on to it…until we become - the wild ones.

Love has a place – and that place is in our hearts where it stays and loops in lemniscates of infinity - it doesn’t go out to others, rather they enter into our hearts. Until it all becomes an indistinguishable melt within us. Still, like idiot savants, we squint and study and analyze our philosophies in dialectics with beautiful wayfarers and vigilant family, giving friends and torrid lovers – and we get confused and sad and then more sad – thriving on it, thumping like heart beats. Until sadness becomes as delicate and fragile as angel hair, like fine capillaries at the distant edge of tree roots. Not even those to anchor us anymore in the earth.

I am certain now that my love is not out there; even the hunch I once had that she was is gone. For she is already in me – as the pause in my pulse. So much entwined and in syncopation is she, that I cannot even distinguish her anymore – and so I shed my understanding of love, I give up the search, drop my implements and defenses, I will squander my love to others, as I have for so long and be happy that I can express at all. Spires of joy, dripping with tears. For now I know within, there is an endless supply – of both, love and tears.

Bring on the parade of mistakes and I will curse and scream out my love until I lose my voice…when I can be madly certain no one can hear me. Where my eyes next frost over with saline, and the last streak of glitter rolls to a stop on my cheek, and then I think I shall die.

just a box of fuck

fuck

Where Love Lives

Love is such a nostalgic condition, a candle in a familiar window I suppose… filled with this, passion and angst to be home in safe and familiar currents.  Love, a condition where we find peace in the blurring of what it really is about  - “home” that casts hues into our hearts, reflects light in our eyes, and catches rain from low mountain clouds stirred by the winds.  Your city which you ponder, tolls like the sinuous course of life – your allegory is apparent; the air pressed in our lungs by a soaring heart when our city falls away beneath the belly of a jet, and that acquiescing exhale as our home grounds pull us sweetly down in the benevolent current of gravity.  We run hither and yon, finding love everywhere, stuffing it in to our hearts and proudly poising as if we have finished a secret stew of sensationally felt ingredients. Yet I find it quaint that our hearts are eminently nourished through the very soils that sustain our ancestry and from which we sprung…home, the plains of the heart within, where it is said, love grows wild like grains from seeds planted very long ago. And it’s even more than where and what we love, but THAT we love that gives home, itself, meaning…perhaps even home has a home. This week I have been spending time “at home” (painful, tiring, itchy – as my brother and I remodel his house and care for our father…). Home leaves you quenched within - like thirst for water; and I believe as we are within, is how we are loved; especially by all those who know the direction - home.

We are born, we live, we die.... It was all out of control from very beginning and will be out of control when it ends. The paradox is that the only control we have is the choice to begin and the choice to end everything while living in between.

Timing

So, I'm walking out of the house this morning, carrying only a pair of underwear I need for after the gym later....and my neighbor walks up and introduces herself........

There are only two things you cannot be any more of than you already are... and that's dead or naked (or both, but that's just creepy).

Well, I ain't dead yet... so I say, get naked!

Coming into being is about as obvious as sea floor spreading...yet look how wide the Atlantic ocean is!  Amazing how an epiphany sneaks up on you and passes you right by.

...LEX PARISMONIAE: MIDLIFE IN SOLILOQUY

My dear and clear friends, I find it ironic that the easiest can be so difficult. I heard a sojourner at the rail sigh and say into his glass of ale, "...this proclivity for circumlocution and periphrasis has been a wonderful journey, but it's last call, and I really should be getting to the point now..."

"In the past 8 years, I could haven returned to school and been a doctor, a lawyer, both. I could have learned to fly jets or signed on to a vessel and sailed the world, and then have bought a boat. I could have run for office or be writing my next novel in the alps...sipping authentic swiss miss cocoa. I could have found the missing nukes or become a priest! Right now I could have been....

And YET, in the past 8 YEARS, one would think that NOT taking time to do ANY of these things, I could have come up with one good idea of what I plan to do for the NEXT 8 years... or at least given someone else an idea...

IN THE PAST 8 MINUTES - I could have...called my mother,

Nature Makes Us Ultimately Responsible

That perhaps our presence in the world is quite starkly a plaything belonging to our fundamental provenance. That happiness can be known through the joy of our being received, if only by a silent and benevolent godhead planet hurdling our lives into orbits upon orbits. Oh and love, happiness, peace…these are not bestowed upon us through right or ritual – these feelings are brilliant remains of a paradoxical failure to discover any reason why we should feel otherwise; even when we know reasons abound. 

Happiness in not taking too much heed in distinguishing a direction we are heading from whence we came – thus existing in a moment with an insignificant capacity to hold fear. Consider that fear of outcomes is an enlightening reminder, that we have the freedom to choose between disastrous and reparative courses of action; that we can make mistakes, and hence for us to make these mistakes, then we must certainly control our destiny in so far as making perfectly wrong choices or imperfectly right ones. I cannot claim immunity to the laws of nature no sooner than nature not finding fancy in nipping at the fleeing heels, and flowing hair of humans. 

Still, when I can no longer stand myself, nothing else will.

Existentially Bored

In my quest to understand the world, I am continually preempted by my own thought of what, in the meantime, I am to do in it.

What fails to express, is best understood in the next pure pause between a perfect feeling 

and wanting word

The Sentinel

To be a sentinel in the darkest

   silence, of your presence. 
Soft release, a mist of hope
   Inward drawn as essence.

So the breaths of lovers curl
   In moonlight, cast aglow 
Melodic dreams to blend and purl
   A sweet diminuendo.

Wrapped in night, as you sleep

   Soul stirs and comes untied

To lead your dreams to wander

   Far, my heart close by your side.

We can either resigns ourselves to continue to destruct, or concede defeat and rebuild.

…For some the meaning of life is murmured over dinner plates in silent torpor… it’s purpose, startled into realization between clinking wine glasses. For others, it is to see deeply into our present and to skirt the pulsing stars, to find beauty in momentum and embrace our presence in the amber-lit windows that frame the lives of others. Wherever we are heading, is kindly guided by the certainty of where we are now.



Photo: http://www.lostateminor.com/2011/03/08/surreal-storytelling-by-robert-and-shana-parkeharrison/

And I tell you, when you get there – it doesn’t flash like a light, no backlit Hollywood hero on horseback. It mellows in quickly and you feel it, you know? It’s, uh, it’s…well anyway. There’s nothing more important than knowing you can - than knowing what it’s like to give from the WHOLE person you realize you are. You know it the moment you know yourself. Hm. And however much magical beer you – um – drink, if you sprinkle pepper on a rock, it still tastes like a rock… just more peppery.

A Gold Dipped Metaphor

Were it not for a volcano exploding in Asia and shifting the earth for moment,

I’d not have caught my balance on a cliffs edge in North America.

So certain was I that plate tectonics was my guardian angel;
and why not, gravity has served me mercifully in the past.

I snuck behind her back to do battle with the daemons that she didn’t see hiding behind her angels.
Deep dumb blinking of trauma all around me.

Where the wounded go for comfort, to ruminate and heal, their “state of existence”
I’m not particularly dogmatic...I hybridize everything.

...and then I choose to spend a month writing on a beach.
For some reason, quality is an undertone felt more than seen. And we behave in undertones.

Jovial languages westernized for straight men. His was a plan to vanquish the human trade industry...I was a ploy. I don’t speak Chinese. But anyway, I have spent just a little time in a lot of places I didn’t want to go

and I kept quiet; there is no sense rushing a world war, right?

My grandparents were incredibly kind and generous. They have passed – dead – dead for their good deeds. They were cooks with equity in the casserole...

Standing before a great mountain skirted lake, steaming for photographers, is just a reminder of a perfect place for the fulcrum of Nirvana; one that balances the condition of living responsibly and loving uncontrollably.

I really don’t know anything at all actually!

Yes, three words in our feeble attempt to bottle the jeanie only seem to whisk it along as the world grows more tender beneath our feet.

Like philosophy seeks to destroy itself, I want a gold dipped metaphor for why NOT to write.

Ode to the Conquerer of Great Distance and Time

Prelude:  As We Arrive

Your love found me, as if two suns rose from the east and west at the same time.  Where their rays met would be indistinguishable, and why even understand it. What we feel in touch is not skin and when we kiss it is not your lips meeting mine; it is not our bodies intertwined, nor mere pulsing words landing softly in our ears...it is not the nostalgic aroma, or the groaning floorboards beneath our ambling feet.  None of this, for what meets at the nexus is the soulful intent of a love that traces back to the timeless depths of your being – a touch that connects an infinite past to an infinite future.  This which we hold dearly, is the untamed wind between us, inhaled in a moment as a prelude to a kiss –exchanged in the warm home of the others heart, and released anew in an effervescing exhale as our lips part. Embraced, our spirits slowly wrestle along the frontiers of unexplored human wilderness; twisting in confluence like eddies playing on the surface of a still night lake; braiding banyan vines cling gently to quell our shivering…our words are sighs of relinquishment to the desperation of loves inexpressible exclamations resonating within caverns of expectation, filled with pristine imaginings.

Interlude:  As We Go

Love is where we go, when we go, how we go and why we go…it’s anguish and rejoice in a timeless dance, spiraling out lingering memories that rain nourishment on as many weeds as colored flowers.  And our lives in this way, are forever sweetly tending to the astounding meaning of subtle acts.  There in a garden we’ll pull the weeds to feed the soil which gives them life and till the dirt that receives the rain to quench the roots.  And as dusk settles in, we’ll sift the flower bed; and we’ll build a breathtaking path of byzantine patterns from the extracted cobbles of an inconvenient past set in mortar mixed from a forever blooming love.

Postlude:  As We Part

That when you feel the cold steel of disquiet awkwardness and your breath has temporarily seized – I will draw in a breath to fill us both up.  …That when words fail you, I will solemnly circle in the swirling eddies of your soul and pluck soft petals of thought as parchment and scribe your poetry with many hues of understanding and kindness.  If your heart is weary and teetering in confusion, I promise to kiss the arcing sun and moon so that as they trade their places through cycles of the days and nights, you are left with both waking and lullaby dreams.  If the circling voices are deafeningly loud or silence becomes your enemy, I will take my post close by your side as your compassionate and soothing warrior, your agile shark…to stir gentle notes on melodies until a beautiful undulating dolphin shoots the waves over sky and moon.

The shelter within, is affixed with all you need to search and restore life, tended by the passion of your own true love, with green thatches to catch and divert the rain and smooth cobbles to line the path for when you are ready to take to the road again.

Destiny worries not for you, you should not worry destiny.  It does not stand in the distance and wait for you, you should spring headlong onto its runner of endless moments and create the trail of your art.  Go, and leave behind you the signs of all your happiness and I will find you.  And if you find yourself having little to leave behind for me to follow, then look up my precious love, because I’m standing right here before you.  Take my hand, I have enough signs to cast for both of us.

Refrain and Fade Out:

For all the love in the world you need
can be fit on the tip of a pin…
as vast as the bounty of earth, wind and sea,
it will sooner get under your skin.

All the Love in the World

All the love in the world we need
    can be fit on the tip of a pin
more than the bounty of earth, sky, and sea

    it would sooner get under our skin.

VALENTINES DAY DIALECTIC 2012

Haecceity

it is what is of what ---  it is that of what is


We always break it down to surrendering to our destiny, be that our compulsions to roll with its uncertain and vicarious plan for ALL of us – OR, in haecceity, to enthusiastically grab up our chattels and trek on in vigilance toward a quite specific future moment held firmly in our INDIVIDUAL perceptions. It would seem that we cannot surrender to destiny, but to only our choices. And for others, perhaps it’s just a bittersweet surrender to numb ourselves to the zeal of an evangelist, who’s destiny is to align toward themselves everything their path, like iron filings to a passing magnet. But then again, aren’t our choices made from the same "stuff" of destiny. 



There are infinite directions taken by infinite souls, each an individual ray of light emanating from the very center of a large translucent glass sphere; each inevitably intersects the glass at an infinite number of unique locations, in boundless patterns. The path within the sphere is variegated, streaked with diversity – a bittersweet chaos – the collective quiddity of life. The surface is a layer of self-other revelation, one encased future after another; the universe an atom. We leap like electrons to the next outer shell of realization...seeking stability, answers, or just engagement. And it is among those that travel farthest from the nucleus, those with the most energy, that best characterize their reactions with the world around them. It is ironic, yet fitting, that destiny seems to loosen it’s grip on us the further we journey from it's center; slipping "...the surly bonds of earth…" (no, not Ronald Reagan, but John Gillespie Magee's poem, "High Flight." Note that pilot officer Magee was killed in a midair collision 3 months after writing this, he was only 19 when he died. His poems were inspired by his only true and unrequited love for Elinor Lyon with whom he remained friends…he wrote of her, but chose another deeper relationship… but that is another subject altogether).

The victory in surrendering (to love, to pathos, to greatness, or whatever garb your destiny wears) is that of choosing another human, both for theirs and out of your unique essence, to exclusively share in its (loves) execution before the journey ends. But does it? It is said that love never wanes or ceases to spark from the core, it just persistently seeks to reach the surface – to be seen, to be shared, to be celebrated. 

Love travels in the deep hulls of a human being; and yet we are all quite unseaworthy vessels for such a precious cargo. Perhaps our pilot would agree for those who fly with love.

THE QUIDDITY, (George Herbert)

God, a verse is not a crown,

No point of honour, or gay suit,

No hawk, or banquet, or renown,

Nor a good sword, nor yet a lute.

It cannot vault, or dance, or play,

It never was in France or Spain,

Nor can it entertain the day,

With a great stable or domain.

It is no office, art, or news,

Nor the Exchange, or busy Hall,

But it is that which, while I use,

I am with Thee: and Most take all.

A Night in the Window

“Say that again,”  he said.

Interrupting her sip of beer, she replied,   “mm - say what?”

             “- Say whatever it was you said, because it made a perfect arc between our lips.” 

She just smiled, looking over the top to her bottle,

 “…and THIS is your prelude to a kiss?  And what if love fell like rain from the clouds?” 

He revealed a quick soft smile, for her question was as good as a kiss, and lifting his glass to his lips, he paused,

“…well, that would make you a six year old girl in a new dress and shoes walking down a street filled with mud puddles…”   

She understood.  “Yep, I’d jump in every one!”

The next morning he woke before her, brushed away a trestle of hair and kissed her softly on the cheek.  He rose and made his way to the computer and wrote this as a study of certainty vs. uncertainty in ascertaining the Meaning and Purpose of Life:

…I mused last night…on the meaning of life and what leaves me with the most certainty… that being both birth and death; as well as that which gives me the least certainty, the life that falls in between. And we unfurl parchments of love, like recipes conjured through charts and maps by wayfaring spirits in their navigation of uncertainty; with it’s pendulous swells and troughs, writhing storms to the curved horizon of placidity. In our ecstasy or agony, whichever compels us to reach to the heavens for answers, from the black firmament, rains down the white light of stars. Besotted with beauty, we invent our own answers – swinging angrily at our own words, despairing, disillusioned or disinterested. It is not what we hear, but that we listen – “purpose” is the captain of our ship. The journey is long, and the captain seeks only the safe passage of moments in the timeless sea of uncertainty. The meaning of our lives is unveiled through the examination of purpose in others...the mirror of meaning.

From my dinner table by the window I watched the ambling and noisy passerby’s – and I became deluded by my own idea that happiness is an infrequent preoccupation of life, a proverbial “comma” to a long-winded sentence; a quick paradise of dust kicked up by God stepping through the desert. I thought how a moment of happiness seems to pass so quickly and yet, how our disappointments seem to echo through deep valleys of consciousness. As life progresses there is this proclivity to toil with the recollection of our sadness, leaving us amidst a talus of strife. I asked myself, could it be that the altar of happiness is built on the ruins of sorrow? That the happiness we deserve is measured by the high mark of our grief – and oh how we labor the years to build those layers…

I sat still in the crossfire of clanking from silverware on china. I was peering out into the street through the window, compelled by the din of diners and their thick and expanding cacophony of uncertainty. I leaned closer to the glass, and with bleached out emotion, looked up at the clouds drifting en echelon. I can still make out their blushing in the moonlight, disappearing behind tall building rooftops. Mesmerizing…one wave after the other, lost.

There in the restaurant, something odd began to happen. A break in the mottled night parade of clouds reveals a chorus of stars fading into view until such clarity. Each winks in the implicit silence of heaven and the voices around me begin to rescind. All presence in the room dissipates into the shadows and my eyes fill with starlight as I clench the captains wheel. I could tell that life was about to deliver me into another moment of certainty in an ocean of doubt and I could feel my ship list in the wake while waves leap through the stanchions. Where is my beacon in this night – and how could I be lost in the promise of certainty at a moment like this. Holding fast, the winds whip the sheets and whistle through the halyards; all the while the stars wink on. I was at sea. The darkness hurling everything mystery could offer, I deflected peril with rationale, fought one fear with another greater fear. I leaned forward on the wheel, turning the bow into the wind - keeping my knees slightly bent for balance. The ocean heaves in slow motion like the rising and falling chest of Neptune deeply dreaming. The clanking of swivels and bolt-snaps against the mast tap out a persistent "mayday, mayday" – its slapdash beat is a sweet companion but I’m certain no one hears it but me. And I begin to wish for company even more so than for the seas to calm.

I’m shaking while the ships clamoring rises in chaos – there is no chance she’ll capsize I hear an imaginary voice say. I holler back, “I know! I know!” With my eyes clenched shut to the guiding stars, I pray fiercely as my own self-induced darkness starts to take it’s toll on my spirit. And amidst the rush I begin to make out the faint pulse of the dining room and their murmurs growling through the gusts. I can no longer bear it and my eyes and hands spring open, the wheel slips from my grip and spins furiously, the ship comes about quickly, and the room lurches. I shudder back to reality at the sound of a window rattling – a group of kids run off laughing, they were pounding on it to stir my attention. I was uncertain where I’d been and for how long.

Wincing my eyes to bring the street lamps into focus, I could almost hear their hum of electricity. From across the street, I could feel the amber glow coming from the inside the window at Café Montserrat. I’d returned. I‘d returned. I was here in the “now” with this elusive sense of enlightenment only hinted at by subtle signs of tiny flames lit and rising within my heart. And at that moment, “certainty” happened. Looking out, I saw her, in the window of the café, looking back at me. Transfixed in the moment, her eyes had been locked on mine, twin-cased stars glimmering through deep mahogany brown. In that moment, destiny unraveled in 15 meters and a split second. Gazing through the transparency of the pedestrians passing between our windows, we recognized each other through our journey and I looked up at the stars and then back to see her doing the same – and her eyes returned to mine, filled with tears, that fell as our smiles quivered like crying and laughing all at once.

…For some the meaning of life is spoken in silence over dinner plates… it’s purpose, clinked into realization between toasting wine glasses. For others, it is to see deeply into our present and to sail the pulsing stars, to find beauty in momentum and embrace our presence in the window to the lives of others. Wherever we are heading, is kindly guided by the certainty of where we are now.

...I cannot be removed from Being...

having endured the heat and pressure and time 

to become so crystalline and cardinal. 

Everything in conflux lights a distance - 

                                                yours and mine...

Monkey Love

Hm, the paradox of the monkey with his hand in a jelly bean jar, a fist clenched with so many jelly beans, but he cannot manage to get his hand out…unless he takes just one.  It’s not the pieces with which you alone build love, but about the wholeness of love assembled with one other.   Love’s labor is art, not toil…it evolves through action, reveals in small mysteries, some revealed, others hidden… You are not alone in the candy store.  Ideal love for me, is that light I use to see her always in all ways, integrating over time into understanding.  No matter how fantastic the instrument you use, if you study only a moment of a person, they’ll never animate in real life.  Which is why I do not simply select or unselect her, but allow her to reveal.   Try your penchant for opposites, select not one thing, and everything will reveal itself.  Perfect reason, over perfect choice.  Ideals, uncompromised.

the world is getting smaller in a big way

This has been on my mind lately – because they die. The passing of family and friends and loved ones...it's been on my mind. I read a post on Facebook by a dear friend. Not a monumental post – not one to garner the attention of the masses. No, it was a post that described the pointless death of a giraffe, a fucking giraffe, caused by someone's careless actions - not much different than the careless actions that cause the death of humans. The death of an animal does not earn much honor among humans; we found the death of this unfortunate giraffe, far less significant; after all, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time (there’s irony for you – he was in a zoo). in fact we made jokes about it...making the dead huge animal far less significant, than the idiotic actions of the zookeeper that allowed the animal to eat oleander leaves. If the zookeeper died the next day, even once enemies might be high fiving it, rejoicing in with the vindication. No, there is something paradigmatic deeply at work here - something about human awareness of human existence - awareness of nexus between "loss" and "who" it is that is lost and the perpetuity of their memory. As a self aware and intelligent man, I already no that this essay has just jumped the tracks of my readers comfort or even sound logical reasoning...

Humans continue to evolve and adapt physiologically over the course of evolutionary history, if you subscribe to that, but I am certain we are also evolving as emoting, bleating, impassioned, conscious, aware minds. And while over thousand generations it is impossible to see the retraction of the human tail to the useless coccyx, it seems I am witnessing the complete transformation of human psyche and metaphysics in my brief lifetime...there is an acceleration here and it disturbs me and enthralls me at the same time. Our metaphysical senses are expanding so much that, we are diluting the intensity...or at best "losing the bead" of focus...like attention deficit syndrome....we now have emotional deficit syndrome.

Perhaps this isn't cataclysmic evolution - perhaps it's been equally subtle as the evolution from ape to upright homo erectus. Perhaps social media via pervasive internet connectivity - the world wide web - may simply bring to the surface something that has always been there....passion. But I'm convinced that technology is as much a part of natural evolution as the mutation to an opposable thumb. In this analogy, it would stand to reason that there is an acceleration. I don't recall when it changed.... but it has. The fact that we are so "impassioned" to throw a bomb or sanction against anyone who bombs or sanctions another is so "broadcasted." We've lost touch with the importance of secluded microcosms - social media and broadcast news is so ubiquitous that I am now tempering my perceptions, values, emotions, and passions against a status quo that represents the "averaging" of every culture known to man. I'm aware of only one macrocosm now - and I beat my chest proudly at my new found "world citizenship." We are all indeed ONE human race...but I guess I didn't know the significance of that that until now. Now the death of a friends grandfather, mother, wife can be eclipsed by my worldly vision of a middle eastern man running out of his bombed out home with his mortally wounded child in his arms...or a dead giraffe. I miss my microcosm of human condition - I miss the "broadcasted" things that remind me of my grandfather or my childhood and the people in it. They are still alive - and if one were running out of his devastated home with an injured daughter in his arms - it would still remind me of the middle eastern man...and how the world macrocosm is so filled with horror and sorrow. I even share in the thrill of the kill of a morally deficient terrorist running across his bedroom more than I do in the image of my son running down the third base line for a heralding slide.

I still remember leaving my bike unlocked in my own little neighborhood...for days. I remember the death of friends being earth shattering events that changed the very fabric of that neighborhood...not a wrinkle in the fabric...but a new sheen. Now - I am aware of the strangeness of people with whom I know more of emotionally than I know otherwise...we bare our souls on Facebook so that anyone could see and share, but we cannot trust a stranger to watch our book bag while we run to the restroom.


Where are you with your blessed awareness...have you challenged it. Have you held it with reverence and delicacy - as if it had a hair trigger. I am a weighted down in the summer heat this evening - dining and drinking alfresco. Filtering out these unfamiliar but intensely "sensed" surroundings to allow the death of a friends wife, a friends mother, a friends grandfather to orbit around me...I want to go home, I want my children to understand "home" and I want to block their ears and eyes to all this nonsense...to turn their intense and electronically enabled awareness inward. God lives in my home town - he lives in this country...he may have a cousin in Egypt and to people in Egypt, God has a cousin here - it doesn't much matter to me. The human condition is to be aware, but awareness is compassion...