Queen: an opening mouth

More than what you are Los Angeles;
you, like every small god, are
a brilliant metaphor, clammed
and cool. You take your place in line.
You herald your own coming.
You chomp your stainless jaws robotically,
waiting for the ventriloquist.
But I will not be this, for you.
Oh queen, oh giant thing on whom
my mind has found its parasitic life,
quit blubbering like a thin-boned
hollywood broad, and climb the thin stroke
of my body; I have cleared a place for
you. I had myself beheaded, for you,
sweet Lady Blue, vulgur with voided eyes,
delicate vulture, whose fingers stretch, red and white,
down the freeways every night.
A pestilent creature has opened
its groin with your name, but
I will steal it away. I have taken up
the habit of dragging the desert
in my teeth.
I desire your beauty, Los Angeles.

Melodrama of the Moon

Sometimes the night is overlong; we wait
with eyes upon the moon's slow course across
the stretching sky. It barely seems to move -
it snags on every star it meets, lingering,
nosing every red or blue-smeared galaxy.
A snail, gigantic; sphere of spiraled-bone,
leaving in its milky-wake a sparkling veil,
tattered by the periodic hail of shooting stars.
Without fail, it will reach the other side
of the night sky's vast expanse, we know,
but in the quiet vacuum of a single moment
it seems to be frozen into place - the face
of Lot's wife, surprised, and caught mid-stride.
Luckily, the crickets and the barnowl
regale us with their songs, curing our impatience,
adding music to the melodrama of the moon.

Taming Your Journals

It's okay to lift your pen away
from the flat white paper-face of
what-have-you. Probably
an emotionally needy diary
of some sort. Like wide-mouthed
hatchlings whining for a morsel,
they beg, and we, like sway-backed slaves
consent to labor, hefting heavy words in.
But its okay to let them go hungry.
Okay even to let them starve,
for a time, till their ribs show through
their dustjackets. Wait, I say, past
their desperate grimaces, past
even their final gasps. They will
inflate finally, in the fashion of the movies,
exhale dramatically and falter back,
keeping one eye always on you,
watching to see if you are watching.
Do not watch. Wait, and when
your empty notebooks, now
with tight stomachs and sharp jaw lines,
stand and dust their hands on their pants
and say "Fine then!" - then pounce,
and pin them down, whip out your pen,
tatoo them all over once again.

Barn Swallow Sonnet

The swallows dipped into the shallow pond
and scooped 1/2 teaspoon gulps of glossy blue
but didn't swallow. Instead, they ricocheted
back to the sky like feathered balls bounced off
a marble floor. Physics grinned, and as a prize
he pulled the droplets down each throated sluice
to tiny red translucent sacs. Yes, Light
passed through all parts of these iridescent
blue chips of wind-flint flung through summer air -
broken strips of stain glass window spun like discs
above the heads of wheat, lensing rainbows,
diamond-shaped, smooth. Even that tiny ball
of hydrogen glowed inside each swallow core
with a fierce and smoky sapphire light.

Coal

All men live in dim mines of coal.
The sun pulls in elastic strands
through cracks in the cavern walls
and men mostly dance about
in the dark, frantically heaping,
hoping to amount to something.
I am one of the misinformed breed
who sit in thin sun-shafts, pressing
one black lump between patient hands.
"As much a fool as Noah," the say.
"No, wait, watch," we reply
and we press, and hold, and wait.

Artist Temperment

All of my injuries come within an hour of commencing some new dangerous undertaking. Often less than an hour. There was kitchen duty at camp, and quad errands with my brother. Today it was table-sawing hard wood floor panels. Never done anything like that before - it was new and interesting. So was the 2 inch rota-gash I tore in the pad of my thumb.
I suppose being a poet, full of that tremulous artist temperment, I am prone to feelings of anxiety concerning my capacity to engage this world in a normal fashion.
Cutting my thumb, losing a days work, and general worry over money and relationships, makes me realize that I havent had any sort of plan of attack, you know, method, to my approach to societal success. I have floundered, as I once said, like a fish in a barrel of light. Even that metaphor is a sort of floundering - images splattered over a problem.
Ingenuity and dedication to a single problem is needed for success.
I don't know why I am writing these words.

We all want to air out our souls every once in awhile. This hasn't always been my goal in writing. My goal before, at times, was much more modern - you know, articulate some important truth to the masses.
I guess I am still aiming towards that. But tonight, through a feeling of anxiety, I am standing naked again in the field of the world, without any weapons, without any signs telling me where I might at least find some clothing. Feelings of security really change ones attitude toward ones place in the world. I remember times when I felt successful and secure, and it is so much easier to be confident about metaphysical ideas. Belief affected by mood, as it has been said.
I don't care for success in this world. I just want to feel secure - no, to know I am secure. I don't think I can feel it unless I know it - at least I hope I can't. And if faith can truly give that to me, despite how poor I am and what parts of my body I am currently tearing up, then I will cling to the gospel of the incarnate God, in Jesus Christ - I know we are spinning in the worlds bright darkness. I know that we all want this security. We all remember from our youth that we are going to die. We never forget it. We all know deep in are unspoken thoughts that at some point we are going to rota-drill a little too much flesh, and it will spell our end. Success is a pleasureable slap on the seat of your pants, and it leaves marks in the history books, yes, but we are going to die and be forgotten.

Life enternal. Been reading the psalms and in ecclesiates, and they treat death as an end. As if they will exist only nominally; no thought or consciousness. No sentience. Sinking down into sheol, where apparently everything is taken from a man. I realized when cutting my finger how okay with death I am - that is, when my heart is safe on the rock of the gospel.

I can't, obviously, continue in this constant rehashing of the problem. Lord have mercy on those whom you are calling to be men and women after your own heart.

So Many Things

We are creatures of flesh and blood. We have muscles, and tendons, and skin. Hair. We can move. We consume organic material, i.e. plants and other creatures, for the transference of energy into ourselves from this material.
I was working in Dufur, Oregon all week. Here is a picture.















Beautiful, no? My soul found rest. My body found good hard work. My mind stayed quiet, and hummed to itself.
Been thinking (yeah, my mind never really stays quiet for long) about politics, and how a person can enter in to such a large, corrupt, dramatic, bureaucratic world when one is a small spatio/temporally confined creature. When one is not omnipotent or omniscient. Oh, it is like believing in anything; fighting for anything. It is never easy. It always demands faith and a clear-head. It always requires humility, and confidence, and a certain inexorable love of the world and its beauty - of wisdom.
If I ever find a way to say a single word concerning our nation, and the governing of our nation, and the proper ways of representing the different peoples of our nation, it will not be because someone puked their imprecise passions into my throat, and I have regurgitated it.
It will be because it has sprung up naturally in the field of my body as I have walked the narrow road.

"All of us who are concerned for peace and triumph of reason and justice must be keenly aware how small an influence reason and honest good will exert upon events in the political field." ~Albert Einstein

I am suddenly faced with the question: am I conservative? Am I trying to conserve the old ideas? Yes, I suppose, in so far as they partake in wisdom. Am I liberal? Am I open to new ideas and in-so-far as I am able to be, free from bigotry? Yes, I am open to new articulations of wisdom, and to being free myself from my own blindness.

Politics is the managing of the state, which is the union of a people and the representation of these people - a government for the people and by the people. And people are people - they are creatures of flesh and blood and bone and sinew, and they have minds - sentient, intelligent, and souled. Therefore, wisdom.

I love America, because she loves these ideas, or did, and was founded on principles which were made of these ideas. Is America a fat blind obnoxious beast now? Maybe. But in her youth she was strong and clear-headed and wise.

God, we humble ourselves before you, not thinking more highly of ourselves and our ideas than we know to be wise. If Bush is a wise man, then we have some sort of semblence of safety until his term is completed. If he is not a wise man, lets find a wise man and replace him. We are clever, no? We can find a way.

What is wisdom? I hear the question buzzing about my ears. Dang - I thought you'd ask that. If you dont know I cant tell you. Come to me in 40 years. I'll tell you the same thing, but more emphatically.

The Hidden Thing Revealed

I always knew that it was there
so that when I suddenly stumbled upon it
in the middle of the sidewalk
I nearly tripped and broke my teeth
all out. Nearly bit my tongue in half.

Nearly tipped my head back
to release all the laughs
I’d been holding hostage.

“Is this then the ransom I’ve requested?”
I posed to the air above the spot, and
the laughs all crowded up to teeth
to peer through with me down to see
if indeed we’d found the thing
we always knew was there, and hiding.

“Is this the hidden thing, now in view?”
I flung the question out finely, like a philosopher,
like Demosthenes with his mouth chock full of
crystallized and quivering marbles
of pure joy. Trembling before the anticipated hatch.

“Shall we hatch then, damnit?!” I cried out for my comrades
now rolling madly about inside my mouth,
frenzied beasts in a zoo-cage riot.

Then, All the laughter in my mouth
got real quiet. I closed my eyes tight as clamshells,
keeping precious pearls safe - avoiding, if possible, unrequited
humor. Then craned my neck downward. Then
focused to my inner core. Then
with a planned and pregnant gesture of near Shakespearian melodrama

opened slowly to see the sidewalk,
and nothing more.

Naturally, I gaped,
shocked to find I had not found
the thing I’d planned on finding all along,

and naturally, when I gaped wide
the orbs sprung out in concert from inside my head
and bounced around the sidewalk
like brilliant rubber balls - red, green, violet -
each one the word
each one the song.

Birdcage Sonnet

I've meant to own a bird since I was ten;
small-boned, chestnut red, bright-golden-beaked. Instead,
I bought the cage. Its resting empty now
upon my shelf: flat-backed, byzantine-domed;
like a minature cathedral, with black wire frame
instead of stone. No angelic warbling echoes
from its lower mesh, no clang of bird-bell bursts
from thin rafters. Its empty. Completely.
Except this morning as I watched, the light
flew in the open blinds and quickly came
to the cages side: it paused, and peeked its bright
gold beak inside. Breathed once. Then, with joy,
pressed sunspark feathers against the bars, splitting,
slipping through, a thousand luminous fragments, filling.

The Need to Grow

Sometimes two plants will spring from the soil
simultaneously - held under for various unrelated
reasons. Always a reason to it. But, now, sprung
seemingly, together, in the juvesence of the year
at the heels of the Tiger-Christ prowling through the garden.
He sinks on his haunches, pauses, then leaps
and you and I caught the motion from beneath
the shallow lids of our graves. Caught the breath,
and leapt up, tipping tiny pallid green tongues
out into the Light timidly. Soon, though, the Light commands
us forth from our graves, and we slowly wriggle
from cadaverous sheaths, shaking off the death-rags
gladly, though with a bit of timidity, a little trepidation -
fear & trembling, as it says. It was right.
But the Light shouts "Come forth, damnit!"
Which snaps the last frail bone of fear,
and the sky opens up so large and clear
above us that we cannot help but cry out in mad laughter
and burst from the ground like dead men rising,
all green and lively, ruddy flavor licking back
into shoddy limbs, new green shoots darting out in the place
of rotten, missing fingertips. Must we die our whole lives?
No - there is a chance for new light always.
We know this in our bones - and poetry
spoken from the marbled lips of God on High
shakes us constantly, flinging out old cataracted eyes
so that hard pearlescent stones can roll out, brilliant
with new light, spawned not in the heart of any man,
but masterfully forged by the Spirit of God himself
within the husk of these very heads, these shaggy
red-brown heads, splotched and knobbed, that he Has given us.
This of course, since we have sprung together
close-alinged, is where I lean to kiss you, and why.

The Poets Purpose

Recently a friend asked me why I write. "What need does it fill?" He asked.
All of my years have passed in relative quietness. I have never had a life of burning and pillaging; of running out into the street and taking what is mine. I have never been one to stir up, by force, the bitter soup. I have never been extremely articulate - my metaphors have never been precise, like knife-tips, poking readers through new holes in the fabric of understanding. We all stand about, including myself, with hands limp at our sides, wondering at the gravity, beauty, and simplicity of life. I have made a few small ticks of the pencil in my journals about such things. I have forgotten them all in time.
Why am I here now, in a coffee shop, pressing my spirit outward to that distant island shore - over many waters that most wont even acknowledge as existent? Can some men exist solely to be beautiful to a few? For beauties sake? Must all beautiful fruit have a bite, have a poison center, that shakes the lover into death throes of pleasure? I don't want to kill or to die quite so hotly. "Rage, rage, against the dying of the light"? Why? Can a man who trusts God simply enjoy a few people - kiss the foreheads of a few people, throw a few homing pigeons into the evening sky, and try not to let the blink of fear cloud his faith in the light?
Why am I here? Why have I spent the last few hours writing and reading poetry? Poetry says what I say "The world is beautiful, and we are all going to die". This is the song of poetry. I feel it now in my stomach, in my eyes, in my groin. It is joy and pain.
Christ says "Come follow me, all you who are weary of flailing about in the dark, looking for light. For my yoke is easy. My burden is light - pure beams of evening light, cut, swathed in white fabric, lifted lightly onto his shoulders by the red birds of faith.
All of my poetry is spilling into these paragraphs that no one might read.
Is it okay? Lord, show us hopelessness, again, and show us the brightness of the hope that you've offered to us.
Find us, as Ezekiel says, flailing in our own blood, and teach us to grow.

A poem written while watching...

... a group of highschool dudes at a starbucks coffee shop.

----

Do not be deceived -
we will not live long.
The little demon choir
assigned to herald our end
is already clearing their throat
for the song. I hear them at night
like fieldmice barking
at the blue moon.
Don't assume much else
than this: death, and
a few bright moments of bliss.
There is a choir, as well, for this.
They, however, have been singing all along,
and sometimes, sometimes,
we wriggle from the life vest
of deception long enough
to swim, for a moment,
in the radiant chorus of their song.

What is here and what is not

----

The day is really here friend.
The words have bowed in acquiescence
to the day, for she is really here.
The words, where are they then?,
flitting around like insubstantial sparrows
of the night. Flitting around
like balls of unseen electrical light.
They have no place to land otherwise.
But the day is here, before us,
pooled out, and floated with
a million bobbing bits & creatures;
paper, bone, petals, and a squirrel.
The squirrel floats past on a raft
of walnut shells, barks gallantly,
and the words flit and flit with new fury,
finding their only perch on the day,
because it alone is here.

---

Where is everything else?
The unnamed, unplaced creatures
pull at my pant legs. Yes, I know
you, little one, I know that if
you were given a space in the day
you would become hard and bright
as a pearl. I know that if one man
would crawl on hands and knees
all day, pushing you into holes
to find the place that you become
a key, many doors would open
that would not open otherwise.
A new fantastic corner of the day would
open to his eyes. Perhaps no one else would see.
Is it worth it? Would it be worth it?
So many beings inside of me
do not have a place in the day.
What else can I do, but reassert
that the day alone is here, and there
are many things inside me that are not of this day.
Shall we keep these other creatures in the cold?
Shall we watch them fade, like accidental
pencil marks being erased?
I will not – I will fashion them sweaters
from the songs that their flitting stirs inside of me.

All of A Sudden

What a great little cluster of words: "All of a sudden." From the latin "subre": to approach stealthily. You're zoned out, loping along merrily, and bam! all of sudden:

You realize that somehow you've become the person you've been waiting to become. And it feels eerie - it feels like all things feel when they are actual, when they have found a niche in the room of place and time . With its own skin, withs its own corners, with the detail that cg artists vainly stetch their digital pens out toward, and artificial-intelligence engineers only dream about.
No, not perfect, no Ideal Man, Renaissance Man, the Third Adam, now complete with goodness, truth, and beauty.
I mean, come full circle on Dantes dark downhill road. I mean, being circumsized of ones intellectual dependence on certainty - as distinct from an intellectual giving up of it. I mean clambering up the river Lethe on the otherside of the world, and feeling strangely unlike any superhero. Have you felt how Dante felt when he first arrived to Purgatory? Oh, dang, so, I'm not in Heaven? My my, what a steep and pretty hill...

I mean, realizing you are not a child. Realizing you have a mind; one that has been given over first by a gift to you, then by faith, then by sword. Am I afraid to call out to the creator in the world of ones and zeros? No, I am not. Great God of the red-wing blackbird, and the peacock, and the black bugs that kept sticking to our shirts as we walked today: here I am. I am myself.

Push me across the fields of flax and corn
but push me equally

push me up and over the blue hills, into the break of morning
let me roll down the slopes, pick up speed
but do not let one part lead, of me, and one part follow

do not let all my pushing be hollow

but push me in such a way that I gather earth
about my shoulders, thick and even, time and girth

and then when I roll down into the city
and then when I roll down to the sea

smacking roadsigns with solidified speed
hitting that pier and launching out over lashing green

I will have meaning, and I will have me.

Cherry Blossoms & Robin Songs

I relearned the spring call of the Robin. I'm not actually sure if it is indeed the Spring call, and not the generic "Hey, I'm a robin" call, but I hear it in the spring, or, it reaches my conciousness in the Spring. It reached my mind's eye, and ear, yesterday again. Immediately I recognized and loved it - yes, you are one of my friends. You there, song, and your russet-vested friend. Robins are almost always portrayed as female in cartoons, but I see them as distinctly male. Oh, and canadian geese. Those dudes are dudes. Gentlemen, really - awkward & bumbling, yet kind and dignified old British gentlemen you might find at clubs, you know, where they sit in big leather chairs and smoke pipes and get red in the face over pish-posh and all that with a dry & clever wit. I can see geese doing that.
My sister and I saw one today, black neck in the air, trumpeting a series of evening honks. I think it was a love song. Some female goose (wherever they are) I hope was extremely taken by it, because I thought it was mostly humorous. But then, maybe girl geese list "sense of humor" high on the attractive-qualities list.
It's so awkwardly beautiful to think of all of these animals all around me thinking urgent Spring thoughts - hooking up with the females, going out on dates to parks. Songs, swoons, bright tail feathers erect and waggling.
"Hey everybody!" I want to shout "Lets have a meeting here in the grassy patch tomorrow about this whole Spring mating fuss - lets figure all this out - lets approach this rationally" Next thing I know, I'm up on a tree branch, yodeling & sporting a new Italia Sport jacket.

To what shall I compare thee?

My dear dear long-blue-legged
beast, or woman, or man.
City? That is the pretty name
we have chosen to call thee - no?
I sit absorbing microwaves
in your blue suburban glow.
I am your child. I feel
the deep deep planting
of a seed within the twist
of my intestines. Vine and wire
have combined to climb the spire
of my spine. You ask me
how I am feeling, if I am not feeling
well, and why should I speak
freakishly, hellishly, if I am
feeling well? And so I reply,
Yes, Yes, quite fine. I have what I need.
Your have given me much
from the blue cornacopia
of your bosom. I have taken
what you didn't give.

Now dear woman. Man.
Beast or thing: to what shall I compare thee?
No one has ever stood before me
so seductively, so completely,
so namelessly
as you.

News

Big News: you might get
a horrible international plague
and die. A chicken walked out
into the road in Germany today
and burst into a festered heap
of rotten bones and flesh.
This could happen to you.
Big News: People are dying
in Columbia of a virulent condition.
Her name is Operation Hurricane
Madonna, and she is currently downloading
viruses onto the cell phone
silently radiating
inches from your reproductive organs.
It happened in Beijing.
Its coming. Its coming.
Take out a multi-million dollar
life insurance policy.
Wear a wonderbra. Subscribe
to Hot Sex Unlimited
and scoop red coals into the folds
of your gunny sack. You only have so long.
You, my slick suburban friend
of flimsy flesh and bone,
only have so long.

Circle of Surprise

Life is a continuous circle
of surprise. You say, “I have
been here before” and you have
and yet still you startle back
in surprise as you round
the familiar corner. Life proceeds
in patterns: perfect, regular,
and entirely unpredictable.
A poem? you say, “A, B,
A, B, …A?” and your hands
spontaneously clap
like an epiphany, like
thunder on a clear day,
and your knees wobble
with the surge of chemical interplay
in your veins, and you come upon
the same word
you came upon yesterday,
and the day before, and the
day before, and still
you shout
“Eureka!”

Guy Fawkes

I have taken to wearing Guy Fawkes masks, or, I changed the look of this blog. This is how it happened - I thought, "Hm, this blog is ugly." Then I thought, "I have power." Then I thought "Plus, I have a sweet looking old board." Which, out of neccesity, I photographed.
Then, armed only with my 60 watt witts, I proceeded to spelunk into the dark caverns of the open code that Blogger provides. I found a way. In the darkness, I found a way. Light of Galadriel or something, I bet.
Do you like it. Yes, I do.

More Dr. Seuss

Speaking of Seuss, I've just been looking through some of his political cartoons from the second world war. What a different attitude toward war than the one that the contemporary American intelligentsia has adopted.
Click here for more of Seuss' political cartoons.