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...

Cheap White Wine and Oreos

Cheap white wine and Oreos

A life like this, it comes and goes.

And in the end it’s not what’s up,

But went well, and what just sucked.

Oh, no point trying play it back,

Your remote’s always been out of whack.

And even if the damned thing worked

You’d just end up being twice the jerk.

See when done is done, it’s just too late

To re-record the past

And the moment you realize that you can’t

That moment is your last.

On writing

click click...
When you know yourself - I mean truly know the skin and sinew, the creases in the folded chits of memories, the dogeared emotions...when you know what ails you and you stop selling it as fodder for attention... then, you learn to be loved.

Love me to pieces and back together again.  Love me for my incompleteness.  Love like you're the missing puzzle piece in my identity.  What we don't know of ourselves we find in the love of another...

But when we know ourselves, we love like a feather dropped into the wilderness from a bird in flight.  We love with eyes, born to do nothing but gaze...we love to behold another.   Yes, it's eager like first sight of a calving glacier.

Then comes the love of another.  And when another, so aware of themselves - as if they are a solid mass of diamond...having endured the heat and pressure and time to become so crystalline and cardinal.

When two immovable, completely self aware lovers encounter each other...  there is nothing love does, nothing it has to do.  When we know ourselves that well, it is time to know another; it is time to do, for that very purpose, the same you did for yourself all these years...  At some point, we fall into wilderness and we forget what we are, and lose all sensation of what we are not.  Love inside, to love outside....

You gotta get in to get out,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwTMmBoah3o&feature=fvwrel

Follow you, follow me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9zj11gf9Qk

My friend Michael and I caught up today.  and Michael loves Howard.  Oh, and Michael is a girl; not that it would matter anyway.  This discussion prompted this, along with my own situations...

I remember seeing a glistening peak in the wooded mountains and walked along a beautiful trail to get there.  I took note of the surroundings, the sounds and verdant canopy and embracing dampness, the softness of pine needles on the path and the game of redlight I played with scurrying animals.  I fell in love with this hike and walked on to my summit with a renewed sense to celebrate.  As I climbed the last few scores of steps, another peak, this one higher, started to appear through the pines.  I thought about deeply about this feeling that welling up…I was in love on the trail behind me with the whole journey to this one rejoiceful summit….but now I find that this same path, I thought would finish on this summit, continues to yet another.  Should I not rejoice? Should I claim victory and sit for a while before turning back? Or had this trail of happiness been a disillusion?

Love is like this.  It’s not a graduation, it’s not a goal or a place to arrive after a deserved journey.  It’s not a respite from the efforts and activity it took to achieve it.  It is perpetually one beautiful peak after another…your choice is to see the onward path as a joyous journey or just more effort and sweat draining toil you didn’t anticipate.  There is always peak before you, and each should be celebrated…loves objective is to always find it’s next motivation to grow. You deserve love, it deserves you.  You are in love because everything you feel is best described that way. Love IS what it DOES…when it does no more, DO something different.

Michael described the ups and downs and toils…and then made literal descriptions of what she loves about Howard.  She see’s him 3 to 4 times a week and they spend much time at each others home.  Her kids are older and off (she’s 44), his boys are 8 and 9 and he’s 42.  They ponder marriage, but live in the now and that is cool.   They argue stupidly over stupid stuff and it’s the stupid stuff that expands…into stupidly talked about serious stuff.  Funny how that happens.   I offered her this analogy:

“You can derail a train with a ton of gold stacked on the tracks…or you can derail it with a thin penny on a single rail…it’s not about the size of the issue, it’s that you’d set it in your path and misjudge it’s significance.  Fact is, the same train that could plow unscathed right through a ton of gold, could come off the tracks with one misplaced coin…”  

You can get mad and hate your “boyfriend” or “husband” or “father,”  but don’t confuse him with the “man” you first loved.  There may be a difference, and it may be only one by title, not by nature.

Mike, so in love with Howard, described how they moved through their issues and idiosyncrasies and phobias.   And I thought about this….I thought about "love takes work" and how many things seemingly insurmountable, well, just aren’t.  After a moment of quietly thinking about this as she went on, I said, “it’s not these symptoms I worry about…it’s the cause.”  A mentally ill person and a temporarily angered “sane” person will behave the same way…  It’s a different love that navigates through each.  I have simply chosen sanity for the color my true love wears.  But there may be deep causes for "issues" that I am simply not able to help with…and many an ounce of prevention was dragged down into the abyss forever because it was attached to a pound of curable ailment.  And besides, the cure is always inside of the inflicted.

We often mistake the cure to someone or something as a changing of one’s identity in order to accommodate the ailment, to force the good and bad to “meet half way.”  Love is a tricky fickle savior – there is no half-way process, even if there might only be a half-way result.  If you fail, fail with gusto. I can better love a cure into someone, if I were with another for whom I built a twin-shared and impenetrable reserve of love from which to partly draw my kindness.  I’m better for others when I’m with people as “good as me” (not better than me).

Hm…I’d rather brilliantly and passionately run aground against a rocky coast, then sail forever in an endless ocean of unfulfilled possibilities.

Giving.  She is a giver.  I’m a giver and I decided I am just going to role with that.  One does not change someone who only knows now to take, by no longer giving to them.   It's against our nature to go with another's nature.  We are who we are…when allowed the option, it’s best to follow nature than habit; passion than custom. There is a modicum of balance of course, but in general, I can only truly understand the value of receiving something when I learn its value through giving it to someone else.

He has kids and Michael embraces them.   A child will grow out of nothing, unless there is something to grow into.  If you try to beat the devil out of child, you’ll only succeed in snuffing out their flame, they need that.  But you can pour in the love; even the devil isn’t big enough to leave out room for a little love.  Love and strife are forever destined to share the same place in mens’ souls.

I have gone to Best Buy to buy cool gadget gifts for another.  Buying them something I’d not thought of or didn’t feel was financially prudent to buy for myself even if I wanted it.  But as I picked out the gift and imagined it’s utility for them, how it would make them happy, how cool it would be for me to this from someone else…and I realized that had I not thought to get this for someone else, I’d never had considered what it would mean to me.  So I bought two.


(interesting post note:  Michael offered this unprompted – she talks A LOT...she and Howard felt the love before they spoke it.  One day at an airport, he was on the phone with her.  He was running down a litany of things he was doing and the logistics of the travel and at the end of this pedestrian information this happened, “...and I’ll then catch a taxi to the hotel – oh and yeh, I love you.”  That was the first time he said it...  She said, they say it now so “matter of factly,”  and that is what sent me on my discourse that there is nothing matter of fact about love IF we consider it as something we create with one person over and over again.  It’s the whole sunset thing...  I never so beautiful a sunset that I didn’t show up the same time the next day to see it even more beautifully.  

Breakfast with a Writer

Softly I'll land
wherever you land,
slide over the lee of your wake
I'll drift on your breath
and fly on stirred winds
to wherever your wings will take

I'll break my fast
with steel cut oats
and sip the steam of splendid tea
and dip my bread
in the yolk of love
and you'll adore the dawn
with me.

10 Pound Poem on an Ounce of Paper

Harvesting thoughts
With a scythe and sickle,
Burying the furrows
Like a paradox popsicle.

The literary farmer
Sows fertile periphrasis,
Lamenting fraught seedlings
Twisting taffy off the pages.

While carmine dust-devils
Stir desert air,
Cochineal insects
Sip prickly pear.

Gather and dry

then pulverize
into bitter sweet colors
of pomegranate dyes.

Gravity is not dangerous, it’s just another variable in their calculation….because in a cats mind everything, EVERYTHING, is accessible. And until they get it, their world nearby is abundant with equally happy and achievable alternatives. This is probably all that distinguishes them from humans.

Beneath these clothes, and flesh and sinew... is a universe trying to get out.  And if I languish to a halt, and weather to dust, I'm only expanding; to be found again, in the dream dust of another.





Image from: http://tinypoems.blogspot.com/

Now (again)

I’m living in the now for all ages to come!

Grey Goodbyes

Morning stirs - a dull grey mist,
clouding memories of your tender kiss
And where the angels once gamboled upon my heart
Now there’s just lonely wreckage as the storm departs

I remember when - we laughed in sighs
And we walked through the sands, under the seaside skies
Kicking up fragments - of mother of pearl
And making roads of color into another world.

And where stars blink on, as I close my eyes
And waves curl over, and a heron flies
Where the coast goes dark
From a crimson sky
Its there my cobalt blue
Turns to grey goodbyes.

There’s thunder in your heart and it beats like mine
And when you breathed out a promise I would breath in mine
But while the angels played music on fragile strings
You lost my voice in the lines that another sings.

You were there beside me, when I was alone
But it wasn’t really me that you were waiting on
And we kept paying love no matter what the cost
But love can’t return the time that we’d have lost.

And where stars blink on, as I close my eyes
And waves curl over, and a heron flies
Where the coast goes dark
From a crimson sky
Its there my cobalt blue
Turns to grey goodbyes.

There are oceans and mountains that I’ve yet to cross
And a sun that might rise and melt this painful frost
But somewhere in the distance, of this cold dark night
Is a last angel singing with my guiding light.

And where stars blink on, as I close my eyes
And waves curl over, and a heron flies
Where the coast goes dark
From a crimson sky
Its there my cobalt blue
Turns to grey goodbyes.

Pat McGee Band - Fine
Great Song - Has nothing to do with mine, not really.

Bathing Angels

Were the angels here to gambol upon your heart

And laugh like sighs beneath seaside skies

Where stars blink on, as I close my eyes

And waves curl over, and a heron flies

Where a crimson coast goes dark.

Were you here beside me, when I thought I was alone

Running barefoot as the thermals cross

And took no heed if the time was lost

Never stopped sharing no matter what the cost

I’d have promised if I’d known.

We both ambled in the surf for driftwood down the beach

Speaking of dreams we forgot it seems

While angels plucked on fragile strings

Fretting memories and failing schemes

Of things all along within our reach.

Epilogue:

Over thunder at sea,

When we’re oceans apart.

And were I there

She’d sail off to sleep

To rise

With breaths like her

That…and vanquish.

At the window, I hear the thunder

Your heart beats like mine

And your exhale sounds like mine

We’ve had oceans to cross

With wounds and

Mountains between us.

Quips for the Quipish

1.  It seems I am only misunderstood for trying to have people understand me for something I am not.  Why is something so easy to understand, then so difficult.

2.  You’ll never please everyone being yourself, least of all yourself if pleasing everyone is your objective.

3.  Being anything other than yourself, is akin to offering your weaknesses with blind compassion, rather than your strengths, with glowing passion.

4.  If you meet a shoe-Less person on the street, taking yours off to be like them is not Nearly as compassionate as keeping yours on and carrying them.

5.  And finally, simple mathematic progression: 

“If 10 people true unto themselves enter into a room, and remain that way, there are 55 different relationships.  If each of those 10 behaves like another to appease their relation, then there are 765 possible relationships.  If 2 just focus on each other, there’s just 1.”

Rose of Honesty

When I hand you the rose of honesty, please be aware of the thorns.  I've already pricked my hands many times carrying it around on my own.