Giovanni da Palestrina

Palestrina is a small town 23 miles east of Rome; ancient stone resting on a hilltop. Giovani Pierluigi was born in Palestrina during the 16th century - took it as part of his name - "da" meaning "from". First Question: why don't we do that anymore?
Palestrina was a medieval composer, pre-baroque, composing mainly polyphonic (intertwining harmonious melodies) religious chant. Most of his famous works are Masses, which traditionally consist of five parts: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei. You should be able to figure those out.
He has taken the place of Mozart as composer of the week. Sit down Mozart, were playing it old school now.
Apparently he composed Mass in and for St. Peter's for a large portion of his life, achieving great renown. Also, pertaining to his reputation, Bach's masterpiece Mass in B minor was inspired by Palestrina's Missa sine nomine.
My apartment bedroom sounds like a monastery.
I don't have a second question. Click on Palestrina's vague medieval smile to hear one of his compositions.

Intransitive Verbs and Mozart

Have you ever been a victim of unrequited love? - that insatiable longing, that sucking inconsolable desire, all heart and all mind aimed toward one specific being. It's like being half mad, where everything in all of life ends up bending back towards that one person, like a glaring red arrow, a grasping hand.
This (oh soul, take heed) is different than an intransitive verb. I was grading student summaries of Stanley Milgram's "Perils of Obedience" essay, when I came across the word "inquired" used without being followed by a preposition or a prepositional phrase, and it didnt seem right. I think it might be an INTRANSITIVE (!) verb. Someone correct the government paid english professor if he is wrong. He wants to know.
Regardless, an intransitive verb takes no object. For example, you couldn't say: Justin sleeps bed. "Sleep" is an intransitive verb; it has a subject performing its action, but does not have an object upon which it is performed.
Which, of course, brings us to Mozart. It is the last day of Mozart Week, and boy howdy, it has been a good week. But Mozarts music has not taken me as a direct object - in fact, it takes no object at all. Music, in general, does not take an object - has no end it is trying to effect through its action. Or something. I swear it ties together in my head.
And somehow a bleary-eyed heart calms a little, with the music of verbs and violins pointing skyward, shooting brilliantly just for the sake of lovely sound.

Purple Finch

I have never seen one of these, but it is lovely, no? Apparently, they are a local species; another Californian I haven't met. I was trying to find a green-bellied bird I saw yesterday, but this wine-drenched gent will have to suffice for now. He suffices well.
(Click on our local purple friend to hear his song.)

(No such bird) III

This often happened. His pen
rendered the paper still
beneath it's thought thing:
a bird, in flight. Each sounding
stone pulled across the page made
the repetition of the extended wing,
and it's curve, a reality. He
was careful. He was in earnest.

And as often, one
would blink into existence
over his shoulder - no bird, but
a known face, speaking words
in a manner of speaking, chiding,
"What, this again? My God
friend, it's time to grow up."

Lark Sparrow

This is a good picture for the local Lark Sparrow: he is seated on a native So Cal plant. I saw these birds in downtown Los Angeles often, when I spent my time there. Out here in the desert, where things are certainly different, (more smells, wild and herbal), this little sparrow seems very much at home.
(Click on his russet stripes to hear him sing. )

Wolfgand Amadeus Mozart

I've decided to learn a bit of music history while I am here at UC Irvine. This isn't a new decision - I originally began wanting to try during undergrad - but never had the chance to follow through. Meaning: didn't. But now....!
So, out of the names milling around in my head tagged with the label "Classical Composer", I chose Mozart first.
He was a composer of the Classical era, which is a name given to the distinctive era in music history generally recognized as beginning in the early 1700's and ending in the early 1800's. It seems that this era in music corresponded nicely to the developments in philosophy at the time. It was the Age of the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, in Europe, and philosphers were looking for clean logic-driven explanations of the world - new refined simplicity, order, science.
Mozart wrote lovely concerti, which were arrangements with the orchestra that highlighted one instrument, exploiting its individual characteristics and capabilities. I've been listening to the Violin Concerti numbers 3 and 5. Click on Mozart to hear the Adagio movement of Concerto #3.

(No such bird) II

They leaned in together, and
together clapped their hands
and he waited. They swung
their heads like strung balls,
prolonged pause on each outer edge,
and through this he waited.

He asked again, the same as he had
the first time: "Any such?"

and they launched back into it, balled
yolks rolling back and forth, together.

No such bird

A smudge of light, hole
in the leaf layers 50 feet away,
moved across the glass pane
as he pushed open the door.

Bells accompanied his coming
and the lady, bent over
at a mouse cage but alert,
leaned up and straightened
her shirt and smiled at him.

"Hello" she said, mouth pinched
into an arc.

"Hello" he replied, and shifted
his eyes around the busy room.
The smell he liked and so passed over
for the sound of crickets burrowing
into the sawdust.
Mice broke kernels apart.
Something licked its chops. A parrot
squawked obnoxiously, inches from his ear,

and he drew back, hesitated, then said "Do you have
a small-boned bird, chestnut-red,
with a bright golden beak?"

She paused long enough for the light
reflected from a passing car outside the glass to move
across her face.

"There is no such bird."

The People, Yes

This is an audio clip of Carl Sandburg reading an excerpt from his masterpiece, The People, Yes. (103 poems long).
Click on his photo to hear him reading.

Black Phoebe

I see these little gentlemen in my field. They perch on the chain-link fence that surrounds a garden on the northern end of the field.
(Click on the picture to hear his song.)

Yellow Warbler

Just too lovely. Now if I could find the local birds.

More Blog Changes

So, I'm trying to figure out how to make all of this work for all browsers. Apparently my banner wasn't showing on any browers other than Internet Explorer, which is a little pathetic. I am embarrased. Not that it looks much better now, but at least it looks like I intend it to look.

Ah, so, in order to refresh ourselves after that little bit of madness, lets consider the Swainson's Thrush. Click on the picture to here his song.

Another Sighting

I was walking through my field, attention turned inward to thoughts, syphoning then upward into the sky (it was a lovely day today), only vaguely aware of the crunch of cut wild grass stalks and the stirring of peripheral plantlife, when a commanding squawk exploded on my right. I turned, and there behind a chain-link fence a Roadrunner was proudly waiting for me to be aware of his presence.
He stayed motionless for a moment, pointed like a weapon. I found respect for him. His crest was smaller than his cartoon counterpart's, his body mostly mottled-brown, and his legs very much bird-legs, but thicker, stronger looking - somewhere between a chicken's fat taloned limbs and a songbird's delicate twig-legs.
He began to move - it was very quick, but all seemed graceful and purposeful. His movement was not reckless. Up and over the fence in a flash, then down onto the dust and mown grass floor, he started performing the famous run from which he earned half his name. It was entrancing. It was not wild; not two churning propellors whirring madly at his sides. It was like a slow-motion dance, that somehow happened to burn across the landscape. I see where they got the stopping-on-a-dime thing, and the sudden-cloud-of-smoke departure. Wile E., you have a worthy adversary.

Cafe Rant

Yes, Gather ye Suburbanites
round cafe' tables smartly
with your perfect cups of coffee
which ye, in all your wisdom,
shall toss into the heap
that is growing and becoming
and will soon wake from it's sleep.

Irvine Post-Wild Flowers

They are known as Firewheels.

Creatures

So, I was on the path that leads me through various fields, frat house mazes, and parking lots, to the heart of campus, to the grassy ring called Aldrich Park, to the Humanities building, where I will spend a great deal of time in the next few years; and I happened to be looking for a red flower I'd seen the day before, and intended to pick today; and suddenly I saw creature movement out the corner of my eye (top left corner). Before I continue, let me say that I love creature movement - that blurred black or brown swoosh as you round a corner, or pass beneath a branch. That crack and rustle in the tall grass.

These stayed for a moment, to my great pleasure. Two long-legged, ten inch tall birds, with blue-marked cheeks, mottled brown bodies, and little fan-crests on the tops of their heads. Male and female. Yes, they were Roadrunners.

How cool is that?! The creatures live here too. Rabbits and crickets and roadrunners and yellow warblers and lizards - even here in Irvine, my friends, the creatures live.

A Lesson taught to the Self

Soul, be awake. Break away
from pedantic landscape - stop
trying to say something soul.
You don't have a single particle
caught in your clasp
other than words.
Open your hand! Let the words
blow and scatter away.
From what inspired fountain
do they arise? Ah, yes,
the deep mind, the deep well
beneath the meticulous streets
that we know so well, that we
walk daily, leashed in necktie
language. Arise, deep words:
I will let you go. I will let you pluck
away from my pimpled hide,
I will let the wind gain force
and carry you high above
my pathetic reach. This is
of course a battle against the
Gods of Egypt, who sway on milky
coils, who say, "The Nile is mine.
I have made it for myself."
It is a battle against the philosopher
in me. Oh, don't worry,
he will melt in the levity of
unchained, unleashed words
barking gleefully down the street, yes,
like a pack of rubber-jowled bulldogs,
howling with rabid joy.

No Need To Rage

In the last days you will grow tired
and your eyes will close mid-day -
having had tasks removed
from your fumbling grip, you gasped
deep existential breaths, and then
gave up. Let go. Found a quiet table
on the patio. It's okay - whether you
have hope beyond this flesh or don't,
there's no need to rage, rage. All of it
will end in the same moment anyway:
soft stares into nowhere sky, and
wrinkled eyelids that slowly sigh, and close.

Bluegrass

Go on, old men,
playing around with wooden boxes
strung tight across with cat gut.
Dodge in and out of
cherry-lacquered fence-posts;
ramble and sing late into evening -
the coda will wrap you back eventually.
But now, crow on, gentlemen; tonight
a certain heart could use
a bit of bluegrass light.

Can you sense the limpness of my limbs?
Pry back these cedar slats,
and show me into what dark basement
my heart has slipped, like a cold and fleshy coin.
Do you see it Charlie? Shine
your violin right there.

Let Go You Soul

Let go, soul; you who would
have control over every situation.
Lose your pinch on the loose ends, here
in the spotlights red wash over
felt hats and dog-wag wrists;
where no one can keep his own mind
straight from the others.
Tumble along to the rag-tag beat; Let it creep,
tip-tap toe-shoe, up your widening
bloodstream; let it gleam in
that usually uninhabited left
corner of your eye. Don't
cross out lines as you tend to do,
hoping to keep them sober and sane;
dont try and keep them out
of the sugar cane. These lines are sheep
that you don't own. Scratch their hides
& feed them fat & let them
find their own way home.

Things to Think

by Robert Bly

Think in ways you've never thought before
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you've ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wonded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about
To give you something large: to tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

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.

Anapestic Tetrameter

My guess is that there are very few in these United States who haven't been touched by the rhythmical eloquence of the late Theodor Seuss Geisel-- that is, of course, Dr. Seuss. One wonders how any mere man could create such a bevy of magically enchanting sing-song stories. I'll go ahead and tell you: Anapestic Tetrameter.

I've been learning a great deal about meter in the past few weeks, and therefore this little bit of information excites me. An anapest is a tri-syllabic metrical "foot", a section of meter with three syllables, and tetrameter simply denotes four-footed meter, which makes it then four three-syllable sections on each line. English verse relies on syllable stresses to define the metrical feet. Thus, an anapest in English is two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable: "dum dum DUM", if you will.

Anapestic Tetrameter is much like a series of Seussian four-footed creatures -- long gangly legs, fat slanted eyes, and shaggy blue fur. Each foot has three toes, the last toe being a big toe, perhaps with a claw. And the creature is loping along a Seussian landscape, rolling hills and tall tufted trees, at a gallop.

Here are two lines, for illustration, from "If I ran the Zoo" (notice how the first foot only has two syllables; dropping a syllable here or there is a common practice in any sort of meter):

"the world's biggest bird from the island of Gwark,
who eats only pine trees, and spits out the bark."

Imagination, meet Perfect Rhythm. Copulate. Make children.

Classically, this form wasn't used much for, you know, serious poetry, since it does roll along rather comedically and joyfully. Lord Byron, however, gave it a go and wrote "The Destruction of Sennacherib" in anapestic tetrameter. Honestly, messieur Byron, you're good, but you're not the Seuss.

The Destruction of Sennacherib

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride;
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

On Feeling A Little Ashamed

SO, I have just gone back through my archives and read some of my earlier more lively more articulate posts, and felt rather ashamed. I feel sort of scared as well, you know, considering the dreadful things that happened to Wordsworth in his old age such as, and we must say it in hushed tones, LOSING HIS MUSE.

I have never called out to a muse. Even Milton called out to a muse, but I never have. I suppose the Queen of Los Angeles, the imaginary figure in my mind, was at one time my muse. She did often spread her glowing faery wings in my heart and cause many a song to rise like glorious indigestion.

But here I am now, toying with the idea of scooting back down south and employing myself with the study of the Great Song, and I am terribly frightened of the dryness in my heart. And of my exceptionally poor sentence structure. I think of Henry Higgins and his ode to the uneduacted masses.

I think of dry things. Like saltine crackers after a run. And I am a little ashamed.

Kai-Zen

________________________________














So, this is Kai-Zen, the place I am living right now
with a few guys. Kai Zen is a Japanese phrase which
translates, roughly, "one percent better everyday."

University of Washington

This afternoon I am tucked into a corner of a small cafe in the center of Seattle - well, not quite the center, but the right-of-center bulge called UW. I am tending my oolong tea, and thinking oolong thoughts.

I didn't get into University of Washington's graduate creative writing program. After walking around the campus just now - I dont know what to say. The neo-classical architecture towering above gnarled and blossomed courtyards is ... precisely the sort of setting I want to study in. But, I didnt get into University of Washington.

I, instead, received a phone call from James McMichael last Friday morning. He told me he liked my work. He told me that they had a place for me at UCI.

Where? Back into your heart my dear Los Angeles. Back into the lower tropics of your abdomen. How can a man write poetry in such a place? I demand the answer.

I called him back promptly yesterday morning and accepted the offer. I will be teaching (TA position) undergraduate composition next year. I will be writing poetry under one of America's best poets.

I will be in Southern California. After being here today, seeing the alternately delicate and stone-heavy beauty of the University of Washington, I dont know what to say. The large quietness is growing, yes you, child of quietness - growing in my stomach. I made promises to Los Angeles, and apparently someone is seeing to it that I carry them out.

Ghazal - an amendment

So, after Mike's comment, and doing some of my own research, I have found that Robert Bly, the great poet, was wrong in his descriptions of ghazals. And therefore I was wrong. I apologize. But - this is good news - I think our way is better.
So a correct ghazal is a poetic collection of Shers. A Sher is a two line poem, with an exact meter called Beher . A Ghazal then is a series of two line poems, and each end with the same word or set of words.
But it only required a cursory examination of the couplet Ghazal to see that two lines was one too few. The problem of the repeated words becoming monotonous was already lingering when I considered the 3 line ghazal, but when words and rhythm was carefully constructed it was avoided. But the 2 line ghazal becomes ALL ABOUT those repeated words. They drum a bit too heavily in the head, like over exaggerated rhymes in a ballad.
Therefore; I was wrong, but I still think I was right.
What do you think Mike?

A Ghazal

Robert Bly has begun writing in a Sufi Muslim form, called a Ghazal.
A ghazal consists of 5 to 26 stanza's of three lines, And generally you repeat the same group of words at the end of every stanza. I haven't in this one. Since this form mostly manifested as an oral tradition, another standard practice was to mention your name in the last stanza.
The last rule was that each stanza must change subjects entirely.
-----

I stand with one finger on my lips. This posture
is the only expression of the heavy sorrow
that has taken root. I wait and hold. Thus life begins.

She leaned forward with the long funnel of white
fuming delicately at her lip. She leaned forward
with no words. Coughed. Looked up.

This paint is special, of course, he said – fast-drying
and if one leaves it alone for even a short moment,
it is too late. No amount of solvent will thin it.

“I will come later,” he declared, and they partied
in a frenzy with one eye each cocked side-ways toward the door
knowing he would not come. When the last had left, then he came.

There was a knock at the door in the evening.
I jumped, let the sweat bead, the slowly crept over
and cupped my ear to the oak. Outside, Death breathed.

Justin, where is this music coming from? A song
that consists of no sound. The birds have stopped singing,
All sound has stopped, and yet music. Thus, life begins?

A moment of wonder

My life, wether it be work or play or mindless dissipation, is punctuated by these moments of wonder. Perhaps light falls across my path. Perhaps words, ideas, collide like V's of geese in the clear blue sky, exploding into a cloud of feathers and confetti, softly falling on the grass near my feet, dissolving.
I look up at the window, begging within to find a hint of light on the nearby oak, and it is there, and suddenly all of the ideas held within the invisble globe inside my head receive their missing link, harmonies to ancient melancholy melodies.
I am afraid and reluctant to describe these moments. I feel like they are powerful beyond my control. I taste the fierce joy that they promise.
Perhaps in describing this to myself, I am only painting a picture of a lost 20 something American male who doesnt know what he wants or how to believe, very well, in anything, and so is wistful and melancholy, and sort of hates his job. There are, as Robert Bly says, any number of men inside of me - too many.
One of them - the one I am leaning into, trying to become - speaks latin to himself in his sleep. He rises early, with the first light, and is patient in silence. He prepares himself. He gathers himself and says one word, clean mouth to the morning sky. Perhaps a song. It is not his own name, but a liturgy, a creed, a submission. He is fully himself, having fully submitted.
Chesterton's "Man Alive" comes to mind.
I pray across these electronic lines, holding disbelief in my hand like a baby crow, I pray to the living God that I and my family will honor him with our joy. That I will surrender to the joy that has always gripped me - the joy that is not by my power, but by the power of the Creator. Jesus Christ, light and reason of this lovely and terrible world, by faith I honor you.

Secular Humanism

I have a friend who claims to be a secular humanist. He subscribes to a weekly journal that expounds upon this topic. He has, upon his living room wall, a framed document that reads across the top: The Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles.

I have somewhere within my soul compelling arguments in opposition to some of these affirmations. Such as the contradiction between the first two points:
A. We are commited to the application of reason and science to the understanding of the world... and B. We deplore efforts ... to explain the world in supernatural terms...

Along the looping way of my life I picked up the knowledge that knowledge is contingent. Knowledge cannot happen in a worldview vacuum. Nor can science. Science requires supernatural terms to even begin to be a useful tool. Why?
Because of the assumptions science makes about the world. These assumptions are very different that the assumptions of a strict materialist ; which is what you call anyone who "deplores efforts to explain in supernatural terms". Materialism assumes that the world is what it is, and there was no cause except material, and there is nothing but material - matter in motion.
Whereas Science, oh you great glittering snake, you require something very interesting to be your stealthly self. You require Order. It is a slippery concept, so one must watch it carefully as it slithers through the mind; if something is explainable, constructed in such a way as to be possible for one to understand, then this something has an order to it.
Okay, I really need to go do laundry. But lets get this expressed.

One would not seek to understand or explain a world where every thing happened by chance. In a world of matter in motion only, there are no laws, just the appearance of laws. One cannot investigate that which has no rhyme or reason. This is precisely why we dont prosecute Insane people for murder. They didnt do it for any reason. We dont try to figure out motive.
If the world is Insane, matter from matter, flinging around, accidentally creating strong creatures, that is clumps of matter that exist in close proximity and create the appearance of a singular being, that beat out other weak creatures; in this world there is no reason to investigate. There is no beginning or end to understanding. You cannot figure out why such and such happened; there was no reason why - it just did. It was an accident.

Science is exploration. Science assumes that if one tests something once, it should work the same next time. Science assumes the knowability of the world. This is a supernatural concept. Nature on its own does not create knowability.

I'm trying to articulate. Pardon my repetition.

So, for days
songs spun easily out.
The clouds
opened up
for days
and rain
welcomed itself
down.

The temptation
on an arid afternoon
is to think that inspiration
is ninety percent
chemical.

What is that Einstein said?
Or was it Ben Franklin?

I have still have songs,
you know, on the quiet ends
of the cycle -

cumulus, cirrus, clear sky -

but they sit cheerfully silent
like a dog who loves you too much
to run and get the bone
you've thrown for it.

Morning Walk with thoughts

A gaggle of geese
careening in from morning sky
looks and sounds exactly like
a Scotsman falling down a flight
of stairs, bagpipes in hand.
-
Monsieur Heron,
I will walk a wide circle for you.
-
This is true:
Everytime I hear the electronic
soundbyte of a red-wing blackbird
from a store-shelf plush toy
it is always the same three vacuous
alarm clock chirps.
I have never heard this bird
make such empty noise.
A few songs, but mostly
the lovely 4-octave melody
they are belting out now
each from his own alder top.

On a drive to the shoe store

Today on the road
I received three blown
kisses from an old woman

with a strawberry red
wig sitting slightly askew
on her titlting brow.

She had been waiting
to fit like a pin
into the close-knit weave

of traffic. I slowed
and gave her the two-finger
sideways bow. She erupted

into an explosion of strawberry
gladness, screeching out
and sending the blown kisses through

her blue-glazed windows
to me.

Ex Cathedra VI

The summer of my 25th year,
when the soul's ghost was busy
within turning the notched gear
to the quarter century mark,

the genie granted me my three wishes.
I stood up on my chair and demanded
he tell me who he was. It was still dark
and he opened his mouth in the darkness

and a glow began emanating up
from the back of his smoky throat, slowly, before my eyes,
warming to a deep crimson, until I saw
the thin line of vibrating light rolling

up into sight over his wet tongue.
I shook with pleasure, and it woke me.
Surprise! it was only the sun rising. Morning! with stiff limbs.
Some of us, I found out later, did not ask

receiving the gifts with simple gladness.

I will try, in the lilting amble
of my little life,
to learn all the languages
in the world.

First: my mother tongue.
The one I wield now,
like a blunted gun
hacking through a dark wood.

Second: zee romance.
La langue belle, e la lingua
piu bella; an ordinary fellow
like me needs all the help
he can get.

Third: The Nobles:
et tu Brute? they will inquire
and I will reply, "No, no,
sum ego."

Fourth? One for the Africans?
Someone will have to love me
enough in this case, to move
my tongue to the right place
in my mouth. Not in the french sense,
mind you. This is Africa, where
we share bodies like we share the air.

This is how it will be.
I can see myself now,
easily conversing behind the pearly gates
with the Asian proselyte
whose banging language grates
like a dishwasher fulll of diamonds.

Robert Bridges Reprise

Once again, I must say that my respect and love of Testament Of Beauty grows with each reading. It is a beautiful work, and I wonder at the way that it has been ostensibly wiped from literary rememberance - I have no knowlege as to its real elimination, but from my vantage point - as a young suburban male in middle class Oregon who has never had any real literary training - it is effectively non-existent.
I love didactic poetry. From the soft romantic didacticism of Whitman and Berry to the pronounced and philosophical didacticism of Dante and Bridges -

Don't we see that art is not a game? a volley of sentiments? a feather to tickle the higher senses?
I say this partly with a play in mind that I recently saw; one which made a profound statement (Timberlake Wertenberger's "Love of a Nightingale"); one from which the audience was able to rise quickly, apparently, from their seats and begin again the discussions of preoccupied corporate americans.

I could not rise, and wipe the slate clean. This is called a play, but it is not ... play. It is not a game. It is real men and women phrasing the question in song, profoundly, stunningly. We can eat drink and be merry, yes, but we cannot turn away as if this were not saying something that is specifically applicable to us, now, at this moment, here in the theater.

It was the myth of Philomela, the girl whose tongue was cut out, the girl who was turned to a swallow. This incarnation of the myth turned her, in place of her sister, to a nightingale.

She sang to young Istis. He put questions to her, like pilate to Christ, and she, instead of answering, sang.

Ex Cathedra VI -not really.

Note: these poems are written without much premeditation. I have had these dark religious symbols of death and birth congregating solemnly withing my heart for years now. Obviously I am relying heavily on Dante's Divine Comedy imagery.

I am not attempting to write good poetry, but rather to write poetry on a regular basis, online, with that strangely warming and inspiring knowledge that there is the possibility that others are watching.

I am looking for life. I am looking, in my poetry, to find humility and repentance. Poetry is always in the pursuit of knowledge.

I will, of course, try to say this in a poem.
Right now. Here we go.

---

Bly, you are my brother.
And Stafford, we share blood.

And therefore I must straighten your collars
as I pat your backs. Because I see
that your poems are fields of velvet-furred
lemmings, marching, upward.
You care for each lemming
as I care for my birds - you carress
as you let go of each. Saying
"Go, and do the magic dance once more"

which they cheerfully do, shaking hind legs
in rhythm to their boisterous barking.
You see, they are always going somewhere.
You cannot release a creature of the wild
and think he will not go somewhere.
It is only the disease of man to sit.

Up the gleaming hillsides they stream
in rivers of bright eyes and oily almond hair -
almost romantically fair, except for the fact
that they are rodents - there is humor in that.

You wait, I wait, for that moment beyond the humor.
When they come to the hill-top, beneath the very sun itself,
and come to the end of themselves, the end of the thought,
where our genius careens downward suddenly.
But the words, our dear Lemmings, dont know any better.
They keep marching. We wait to see what will happen,
you and I, and I know, my brothers, this is the moment
that poetry is brightest - when they have suddenly pause in air
before the wide-eyed tumble down to the sea of our unknowing.

They are most beautiful in that moment.
I know. I have held them in my arms in that moment.

But, Bly, Stafford - they fall.
They do not redeem us at all.

I know you have considered this -
I know I'm not the first.

But it is my holy curse
to make a creature
who bends his little leg - who stops before reaching
the beauty of the death of a mind
trying to see the sun itself -
a field of awkward little rodents, shining,
kneeling. Waiting on the world's edge.

Ex Cathedra, V

Two Roads Diverged

Two roads diverged in a darkened wood
and sorry I could not travel both
with any certainty. Long I stood

and looked down one as far as I could
to where it stopped in the undergrowth
abruptly, violently, a wall of tangled roots. I licked my lips

and turned my dripping head-housed eyes
to the east, where a wan morning light
was glimmering under the steel lid of cloud.

Was this an option, a road, this sky
that drew my eye upward? Not now
but later - soon - so plunged into the dark

where no path went. So dug a hole downward
like a mole, a rodent, frantic for hibernation,
frantic to find the dead loved one, entombed,

so made a sign, writ with my own jittery hand
"Abandon all hope ye who would find
a hope. Forsake your life, ye who would find it"

Ex Cathedra, IV

Gravity

If only the Pope could have told me.
If the old powdered man
could have leaned his wobbling head down

and kissed me with the holy kiss of foresight.
I would have tumbled with less illumination.
I would have tiptoed down the mountain.

I would certainly not have come like Moses
throwing Gods words around.
"Righteousness" like a glass, shattering.

My mind turns inward upon itself
with the question, now, always with
the question. The dark wood spreads

before me, wet with the waters of the Lethe,
twisted branches lifting in one area, allowing me
entrance. But most importantly,

the Wood is downhill, gravity my ownly
power toward movement. Shall I accept
the extended cup? I wait, knowing the ship

of Death is a day away. Oh Beauty,
my light, Oh person of true being,
I cannot climb Jerusalem's steep walls.

For a friend in the new year

Friend,
you will know who you are
by the end of this poem.

I refuse to give you dishonest words -
I refuse to mend the holes in our cloth
with nylon string, though it might be strong
though it might make things last long
drawn up into a stiff smile.

You know me - I am a silkworm
to the bitter last, and if I can't spin the
thread from a bright worm heart,
no matter how small, I wont
spin the thread at all.

You are not always concerned with me.
But you are the kind who keeps a hand
on the fabric of your life, feeling for worn parts,
always ready to re-sew, to make new,
and so you know of my silence.

What shall I do?
Shall I lie to you?
No, I will instead
keep my mouth closed
like a tomb.

Maybe the dead will rise,
but, God knows, they usually don't.

May the God of peace keep your heart
strong and warm and free from dark.

Ex Cathedra, III

Confession

Father forgive me, for I have
woken from the deep sleep of men.
My eyes have been opened

Just as the glittering snake foretold.
And what has been revealed to me?
Good & Evil? No, but the stunning beauty of the world.

The bright blood of the fruit
was still wet on my lower lip
even as words were materializing

like figures in a dark room
as the morning light slowly
appears, atom by atom - one here, one there.

Drought is coming. A dry wind blows.
The light has reversed its atomic process.
Father, forgive me - I chose to wake.

Ex Cathedra, II

Dark Wood

In the middle part of the year
I came upon a dark wood.

My mother had packed me a lunch.
She opened her mouth
And gave to me bread & meat.

I had stopped for the meal
And my bones had knit themselves
Fiercely together.

I existed with clarity.
And as a mountain stream descends
With jubilant purity

I tumbled downward willfully
Like a drop of water
Reflecting the whole world.

At the foot of the mountain
I came to a dark wood.

Ex Cathedra, I

Ex nihilo

A man will collapse upward
Gasping, from sleep,
In his early twenties.

The way God pulled Adam
From the mud, heaving
Like a hooked trout

Finger of spectral light
Burning the nerve-glutted
Underside of the blood-red gill.

A man will gasp up
In his bed from a pool
Of seminal slime

Into a silent world of light.
With wide cataracted eyes
Blinking like a newborn,

Full of the knowledge of his will:
To walk back down the stairs
Toward the light.

It was his choice to rise from the dead.
Darwin’s fish has not yet realized
What a fool he was to take that step.

Robert Bly

I have a new found love for Robert Bly's poetry. Here is the first one I could find on the internet, which, by the way, happens to mention this blog's namesake.
---

Dawn

Some love to watch the sea bushes appearing at dawn,
To see night fall from the goose wings, and to hear
The conversations the night sea has with the dawn.

If we can't find Heaven, there are always bluejays.
Now you know why I spent my twenties crying.
Cries are required from those who wake disturbed at dawn.

Adam was called in to name the Red-Winged
Blackbirds, the Diamond Rattlers, and the Ring-Tailed
Raccoons washing God in the streams at dawn.

Centuries later, the Mesopotamian gods,
All curls and ears, showed up; behind them the
Generals With their blue-coated sons who will die at dawn.

Those grasshopper-eating hermits were so good
To stay all day in the cave; but it is also sweet
To see the fenceposts gradually appear at dawn.

People in love with the setting stars are right
To adore the baby who smells of the stable, but we know
That even the setting stars will disappear at dawn.

The year of...?

We wait to see what the new year brings.
Impatiently sometimes, with paper hats
kazoo's, confetti, but when it comes, finally,
the old year having suddenly vanished from sight,

our blushed faces, corporately, go white
and our breath streams out, long and thin,
for that one stunning moment when the new year is
walking in. In that confusing hubbub that arises,
in that No Year, when the old has slunk
like the snake that he was out the back door
and the new year is creating an uproar in the entryway,
there is a blank second, a moment to turn
to someone standing next to you
and say something, a word, any word
free from the giant weight of time.
Squeek it out just then - don't fumble
for the right word, don't go looking for a pen
or camera to immortalize

but look right in their eyes and say
something, perhaps only a name for the new year,
(a name could keep him, if spoken in that
eternal moment, from being your master,
could teach you the inward holiness required
to keep a foot on the neck of time)

and when you do, a music will begin
between the two of you, and spin its light and airy
way out into the crowds of paper-hatted folk
blaring horns and breaking glass.

They will not know, and neither will you
except for a sudden resonating hum
that will thrum inside your mouth,
in every word you say from that day
until the next Dec 31st.

Whay am I getting at?
There should be a thirst
inside your souls throat
from a moment like this
and words like this
and music
and hope
like this.

Between Birds & I

No longer does a spirit extend
between myself and the roadside
birds. Before, flames of light
licked out from a hawk's
sudden form, and blue music
gripped me with fresh hands
when a heron stood upright
on a swell of grass within sight
of my hunched position at the wheel.
That was the way it was.
Sparrows flitting in liquid mass
were charged with the pathos
of a rainbow, or a lover.

Now, I still see, but
the record hand pulls the wrong way
clicking over the cocentric circles outward,
not making the infinite music of rhythm with
the world's wise, but instead the dry notch
of foot on plank, of conscious eyes clicking
in unmoistened sockets, walking towards an ocean
of silence.

Therefore

Therefore, we must pay much close attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. I am an example of this Hebrews. I have drifted in spirit, though I used to fight passionately to pay attention. Perhaps I fought in the wrong way, perhaps I was destined to fail, but regardless, I am now drifting. Whether nearer or further, it is a matter of perspective.
But I fear, and no longer rejoice, that what the angels declared to us has proved and will prove reliable, and that every transgression and disobediance will be punished with a just retribution. How shall I escape since if I continue to neglect so great a salvation? It was declared to us by the Lord, and attested to us by many people who lived so long ago, who we believe heard the lord speaking in the dusty courtyards of Jerusalem, and if that wasn't enough, God Himself also bore witness to us through signs and wonders and various miracles, and gifts of the spirit distributed according to His will. These gifts of the spirit might bear witness today as well, if we lived in the spirit. If I lived in the spirit of Christ, and not in the spirit of Drifting Away.
For it was not to the angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking, for which we long even as we drift. It has been testified somewhere, some time long ago,

What is man that you are mindful of him?
The son of man that you care for him?
You made him a little while lower than the angels.
You have crowned Him with honor and glory,
and have put everything in subjection under his feet.

In putting everything under subjection to him, he left nothing outside of his control. At present, we do not see everything in subjection to him. At present, we see everything drifting and breaking and dying, haunted with a living light that cannot be attained. At present.
At present? Lord we long for Your light to fill our limbs, so that by the power of grace through faith in the Spirit of Christ, we might become righteous men and women, holy men and women - men and women who are able to stand in a living world of flesh and spit and feathers and dirt, and smile and shout "Hallelujah! The Lord is good!"

But all we see, all we can see, is Him, the ancient picture of Him,

who for a little while was made lower than the angels, who was forsaken by his friends, kissed by his enemies, who touched the dead and diseased with tenderness and care and whose body was broken, whose side was rammed with a roman spear, who was crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death,
so that by the grace of God he might taste the thin, foul, dark flavor of death
for everyone.

Who is this King of Glory?

How shall I know Him?

The Long Way

If I am traveling in the rain toward
a distant black nexus on the underbelly
of a stormcloud, the lightning
always beats me there.

The lightning flashes again and again
reinflaming the swelling mass of black cloud-tissue
with radiating volts the color of plumflesh.

I watch, and walk.

A blue rain issues out of the cloud, suddenly,
released, a torrent, then ebbing
waxing, spattering down to a few drops.

Then a break of light, bright orange and warm
through the broken cloud and my point of destination
is wholly new, and horses thunder the ground around me
misting my goal with their sweat and smoke.

A hawk hangs in the air, just there.

All cloud is swept away and flowers open beneath
with bright mandarin petals, heavy with pollen.
The air is dried to the point of static.
A clarity of sense and sight of all creatures
hums, buzzes.

And it stays overlong. Till the point of an over-repeated song,
and your eyes stray, yet
you stay on course.

You stay on the long way
through the transformation of the thing
you thought you knew by sight.

When along, perhaps, it was only
an abstract point
in the matrix of light.

Kierkegaard

This morning Kierkegaard
lit my cigarette.
I leapt up from the cafe table
exclaiming,
"This present age!
We have neither passion nor reflection!
We are like lukewarm boneless
chicken breasts thawing slowly
in the microwave, on low!"
When I landed back into my seat
I looked immediately at Kierkegaard & saw
the black point of a devilish grin begin
high up beneath the cheek bone on the left side of his face
then slowly stretch & slither across the gaunt terrain
to the darkened arc of the other side, until
with a shuffle & a slurp of spit, it collapsed
down to the "o" around his own cigarette
which he also lit.

Some Further Words

by Wendell Berry

Let me be plain with you, dear reader.

I am an old-fashioned man. I like
the world of nature despite its mortal
dangers. I like the domestic world
of humans, so long as it pays its debts
to the natural world, and keeps its bounds.
I like the promise of Heaven. My purpose
is a language that can repay just thanks
and honor for those gifts, a tongue
set free from fashionable lies.

Neither this world nor any of its places
is an "environment." And a house
for sale is not a "home." Economics
is not "science," nor "information" knowledge.
A knave with a degree is a knave. A fool
in a public office is not a "leader."
A rich thief is a thief. And the ghost
of Arthur Moore, who taught me Chaucer,
returns in the night to say again:
"Let me tell you something, boy.
An intellectual whore is a whore."

The world is babbled to pieces after
the divorce of things from their names.
Ceaseless preparation for war
is not peace. Health is not procured
by sale of medication, or purity
by the addition of poison. Science
at the bidding of the corporations
is knowledge reduced to merchandise;
it is a whoredom of the mind,
and so is the art that calls this "progress."
So is the cowardice that calls it "inevitable."

I think the issues of "identity" mostly
are poppycock. We are what we have done,
which includes our promises, includes
our hopes, but promises first. I know
a "fetus" is a human child.
I loved my children from the time
they were conceived, having loved
their mother, who loved them
from the time they were conceived
and before. Who are we to say
the world did not begin in love?

I would like to die in love as I was born,
and as myself of life impoverished go
into the love all flesh begins
and ends in. I don't like machines,
which are neither mortal nor immortal,
though I am constrained to use them.
(Thus the age perfects its clench.)
Some day they will be gone, and that
will be a glad and a holy day.
I mean the dire machines that run
by burning the world's body and
its breath. When I see an airplane
fuming through the once-pure sky
or a vehicle of the outer space
with its little inner space
imitating a star at night, I say,
"Get out of there!" as I would speak
to a fox or a thief in the henhouse.
When I hear the stock market has fallen,
I say, "Long live gravity! Long live
stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces
of fantasy capitalism!" I think
an economy should be based on thrift,
on taking care of things, not on theft,
usury, seduction, waste, and ruin.

My purpose is a language that can make us whole,
though mortal, ignorant, and small.
The world is whole beyond human knowing.
The body's life is its own, untouched
by the little clockwork of explanation.
I approve of death, when it comes in time
to the old. I don't want to five
on mortal terms forever, or survive
an hour as a cooling stew of pieces
of other people. I don't believe that life
or knowledge can be given by machines.
The machine economy has set afire
the household of the human soul,
and all the creatures are burning within it

"Intellectual property" names
the deed by which the mind is bought
and sold, the world enslaved. We
who do not own ourselves, being free,
own by theft what belongs to God,
to the living world, and equally
to us all. Or how can we own a part
of what we only can possess
entirely? Life is a gift we have
only by giving it back again.
Let us agree: "the laborer is worthy
of his hire," but he cannot own what he knows,
which must be freely told, or labor
dies with the laborer. The farmer
is worthy of the harvest made
in time, but he must leave the light
by which he planted, grew, and reaped,
the seed immortal in mortality,
freely to the time to come. The land
too he keeps by giving it up,
as the thinker receives and gives a thought,
as the singer sings in the common air.

I don't believe that "scientific genius"
in its naive assertions of power
is equal either to nature or
to human culture. Its thoughtless invasions
of the nuclei of atoms and cells
and this world's every habitation
have not brought us to the light
but sent us wandering farther through
the dark. Nor do I believe
.artistic genius" is the possession
of any artist. No one has made
the art by which one makes the works
of art. Each one who speaks speaks
as a convocation. We live as councils
of ghosts. It is not "human genius"
that makes us human, but an old love,
an old intelligence of the heart
we gather to us from the world,
from the creatures, from the angels
of inspiration, from the dead--
an intelligence merely nonexistent
to those who do not have it, but --
to those who have it more dear than life.

And just as tenderly to be known
are the affections that make a woman and a man
their household and their homeland one.
These too, though known, cannot be told
to those who do not know them, and fewer
of us learn them, year by year.
These affections are leaving the world
like the colors of extinct birds,
like the songs of a dead language.

Think of the genius of the animals,
every one truly what it is:
gnat, fox, minnow, swallow, each made
of light and luminous within itself.
They know (better than we do) how
to live in the places where they live.
And so I would like to be a true
human being, dear reader-a choice
not altogether possible now.
But this is what I'm for, the side
I'm on. And this is what you should
expect of me, as I expect it of
myself, though for realization we
may wait a thousand or a million years.

May-August, 2001

Didactic Poetry

I recently picked up Wendell Berry's new book of poetry Given. Within it is a poem called "Some Further Words". It is, more so than any poem I have read outside of the Biblical poetry, what one might call "didactic".
That is, Berry takes one thumb and loops it through his suspender strap, and the other farm-calloused hand he extends and firmly places on your shoulder. He tells you something. He believes something about the world - about the relationship between human-beings, trees, beasts and the clouds over his head - and he explains this to you.
In an age where belief in any kind of universal knowledge is mocked, didactic poetry is little more than a joke. I am sure that many see Berry as a quaint old farmer prattling on harmlessly.
Poe wasn't the first to attack didactic poetry, I'm sure, but he surely did so in a vivid manner. "Heresy" he called it, in his essay The Poetic Principle. His scathing condescension for anyone foolish enough to give credibility to didactic poetry hinges upon the belief that truth, and its explication, has no home within the pathos-charged field of poetry.
That is where he differs from the snickering intellectuals of today's literary world. They know something he did not; that no such thing as truth exists. We are, suffice to say, chemical, and poetry is little more than chemical.
"Literary despair" is what Carver Yu famously called it, and the intellectuals of today have taken this for granted. They have become quite used to the huge aching vacuum in poetry where Truth used to have residence. Poetry has become either trite mystical descriptions and half-prophecies unbelieved in or, as Berry puts it, "one long note of woe."

Berry is interested in life. He is interested in humanity. His interest is seen in his lifestyle, and not in his words. His words spring out of his lifestyle. His life and words teach each other.

He is a good man, full of wisdom. I am honored that he would take me by the shoulder look me in the eye and say (as quoted in an interview with Mr. Berry in 1999):

"Well, be a little steady now. No, you can't quit, you're not finished yet."

Suburban Soliloquy #6

Upon the blacktop street
with steam rising slightly
from each drummed raindrop
I stood - at the epicenter
of Suburbia,
and I stopped
my breath
with a word
too large
to fit up the narrow pipe
that rose erect, plastic, perfect
though the particle-board corridor
of my neck.

The transient ghosts who came and went
in streaks of blue and silver-gleam
always carefully following
the yellow-dashed line -
they rubbernecked endlessly,
fleshlessly, oh so disney-happily.

And the rain began to overflow
because it would not drain
because I could not know
a way to let go
of the word suburbia
would not let rise or sink
in my throat.

It pooled about my feet
and the yellow jackets
having fininshed weaving their attic nests
each came and filled his heaving thorax
with a drink.

Ideas are like Christmas Ornaments

Autumn is here again - what a happiness to find that the year has gone through its cycle of life and come to the same conclusion. Like a dog turning circles before he lays down to sleep, slow & methodical, the year plods out its course and nuzzles back into that same cold & cozy slumber.
Today the rain came. Today the boys down south called to tell me they were finally moving out - finally closing the door for the last time. Oooohh lolly, talk about neurosis. My heart is doing this rollercoaster to hell thing.
We are serving an "Autumn Turkey" salad at McMenamins Grand Lodge in Forest Grove.
And ideas are like Christmas Ornaments, glittering magically at the the ends of our dark organic brain stems, hung there for old reasons and meanings the knowledge of which was lost generations ago.

Thoughts born in a small hotel room in Italy.

Knowledge is a relationship;
certainty is a feeling.

Knowledge is a name for the correspondence between a thinking mind and an actual world. Certainty is a name for the conviction within the being of the thinking mind of the exactitude or beauty of the relationship between mind and world. To know with cartesian certainty, as they call it in honor of the solitary frenchman, is to be certain of knowledge's correctness (compliance of mind-image with world-existence) with perfect justification. But what does it mean to be justified. Is it a reality of perception or of actual existence? I mean, to be justified must a conscious being say we are so (either ourselves or others) or can we be so by existence. If knowledge is a relationship, than justification would mean "right-placement" - or the correct position of mind to world. It would be discussing an actual relationship between objects. But I think that in the age old "justified true belief" definition it is being said that it is a perceptual/subjective occurance in the mind of a being - you aren't justified till I or you feel that you are, till we feel that in order to prove the rightness of your knowledge, your mind's relationship to real world (and to other real minds), you have used every reasonable proof and made every abstract and physical experiment to demonstrate that it could be no other way. Of course this is folly - it would never happen - never can. Therefore: "I think" is the only justified true belief. And it is only justified to yourself.
We do not live in a world of certainty - we live in a world of time and space. Knowledge and belief are completely different kinds of creatures. Knowledge describes the mirroring of a world inside a mind, and belief describes a feeling of rightness of a certain kind of feelings about perception of knowledge. Belief is a complicated occurance. And yet here we are, living by it every moment.

Science is a name for the tool by which knowledge can be modified by the sensing bodies connected to our minds - the sensual communication of the thinking mind's body to the world, and lingual communication between minds about this sensual communication with the world. Because we believe in God (who would like to try and restate this?) we beleive that the world is actually present outside of our minds, that knowledge is not an illusion, and that we may build, through language, correct knowledges about the world throughout many lifespans. Students using science say "look, I can touch and see the world outside of my mind using my body - want me to prove it, that my perceptions are real? See, watch."

We watch and believe our perceptions of his sensual communication with a real world. That is, we have feelings that our intellections of his actual presence and communication with a real world are justified - or correctly reflecting actual object to object relationship.

Knowledge is a relationship between our minds and a real world. True knowledge is a correct realtionship between our minds and a real world. Certainty is a feeling we have about the correctness our knowledge.

(intellectualization of our perceptions of a real world)

Faith

Faith is conviction towards action upon incomplete knowledge. Therefore, faith is an emotion, a passion, siphoned toward some active end that would seemingly require knowledge, but where full knowledge is unavailable. This directing of passion, according to a hope, is not solely religious, but it is always intellectual.
I watch the squirrels jump in the poplars outside my parents home, (where I am still welcome, thank you Lord), and they jump sensing that they will land. It is not a perfect sense - sometimes they miss and scrabble down the bark a bit (I've never seen one completely fall) - but most of the time they have perfect precision and grace; their senses of space come upon them and they act perfectly. But this is not a faith they have in their actions. It is sensation and reaction.
They do not hope that tomorrow they will be able to make the jump. Tomorrow comes and they sense the space and they make it or they don't, depending upon their bodies ability to correctly sense and react. As they age, I assume they stop being able to correctly sense and react. My assumption is largely based on my experience with other animals, one dog in particular, named Major, who is pratically dead, lanky, skeleton white, with black eyes smearing down to his nose. He huffs about in circles with confusion hanging in his face, bumping into end tables.
Humans deal in sensation and reaction as well - we become hungry, and we eat. We see a obstacle and we move. We sense pain, and we distract, avoid, cover over in words. We feel good in a moment of happiness, and we laugh.
Faith begins with intellect, and not sensation. I say "begins", because I grant to all human beings an equal sensation of the world - a sensation of self, though perhaps without cognizance, a sensation of world, and the divine nature inherent in the world - all not necessarily with awareness (because many die before awareness of the world is achieved through language). I use "divine nature" based on english translations of Romans chapter 1, but could also say "otherness" or "supernatural qualities".
From these sensations, we begin the examination. For this examination and interior rearticulation, we must use our intellect. Metaphysical reality is an intrinsic assumption of this act.
Faith is born from this intellectualization of the world, and intuitive thoeries drawn where complete knowledge is not had. A aesthetic incarnation should be favored in evidence.
Um, I've got to go to work.

"Come down, my pride;
stand back my passions;
for I am wicked & I wait
for the Lord."

Home

Suburban Soliloquy #5

Out from the people I slipped
intending to think my way
through colored concrete squares
of pink and wine.

Hundreds within footsteps hunched
and clicked or watched the slick surface of the
screen flicker images, as I do now,
so then, I walked unseen

holding my mind aloft like a light.
There is no condescension in this movement
amongst the dead who are not dead,
but stealing their songs.

"Forgetfullness" says the ancient King,
"And I am going the way of the world."

But as I walked to the beat of the silence,
feet meeting concrete slabs in soft-soled soliloquy,
I came upon a place missed by mistake -
but for their sake, I will allow for the chance of
purpose.

A breathing space, formed by four misdrawn corners,
the blank box left ajar:

and the world's song, full and wild,
rich and wet, was winnowing up into suburban sky
like a series of glittering fish.

Suburban Soliloquy #4

O citizen,
press your ear to the fresh paved road
to hear how close the coming herd of gleaming chrome
has now approached.
They will be hungry when they arrive.

O citizen, to be alive upon the road
that splits the knowing fields of cultivated wheat
from the gods of chaos flinging by
toward bread & bluelight,

is to be divided, o citizen,
in half. For even I, the Self and Voice,
cannot decide which world to condemn
as one world ralleys forth with flags of righteousness
to pull like blankets out over the
breathing parts of the other.

O citizen, here is a bare spot,
come quickly and place your ear
here, as well. Learn the song of breath
before we decide otherwise.

Suburban Soliloquy #3

Signicantly, the shanty shacks of urban sprawl -
the tall, baby blue-beige or salmon stalls of sterile pleasure -
can be lifted from the suburbs of los angeles
to the urban curbs of new hampshire
and not suffer any crisis of identity.
So featureless! So perfectly blank!
Ah dearly beloved,
we are gathered here today
to totter about in nylon shirts
and designer shades.

Suburban Soliloquy #2

A hundred of you are hunched
tonight, masked in the blue-light
of the post atomic age.
What age is this?
A hundred of you have opened your eyes
like two holes for the electric blue eels of information
to slide in.
Your teeth glitter the news
when you smile.

I used to think that people who watched television
had no souls, but now I believe they do, and did
all along - my vision of beauty was just not strong
enough to see through the white noise.

A hundred of you tonight are singing
the songs of the dead from your sofa chairs.
In a million part harmony, disconnect.
When did the living learn the songs of the dead?
And with such youthful gusto they sing them!

Suburban Soliloquy #1

The people, yes,
and their cell-phones, yes,
raised at arms length,
up.
The people, glittering in nylon
twice upon the strong neck of
invisble money. Turning upward,
thinking, twisting upon
the trunk of industry,
craning their necks upward.
The internet cables connecting
tissue to tissue. Music rushing in with wind.

Wait. Listen.
The streets & the new roads &
the million acres of mirror-image
suburban boxes are raising
their hands to ask a question.
Who can answer them?
Who has the wisdom to parent
these children who cannot recollect
the scattered letters of their own name?
Scattered by wind, cemented over.

I held my hand out the window
at 45 miles an hour to catch the light while
O'Reilley's piano poured rainbows,
wet & bright, into my silvers car's interior.
I gulped & in that moment I knew what to tell
those children, young in bone
although immobile in the impossible
plastic safety-suit of the suburbs,
but then I blinked, a moment later,
and completely forgot.

McMenamin's Pubs

Mike McMenamin had this crazy idea: buy up a bunch of antique/quirky buildings in the Great Northwest and turn 'em into pubs. He started brewin' his own beer (the famed Hammerhead Amber Ale and the legendary Terminator Stout) roastin his own coffee, distillin' his Hogshead Whiskey, and grilling up a variety of mouth-watering barbeque burgers.
The Grand Lodge is an old Masonic Lodge which he and his cronies have converted into a Pub/Hotel. They hired a bunch of young scruffy monkeys to run the place. I am a scruffy monkey - willing to subject myself to the ignominy for a penny or two. Temporarily.
Always Temporarily.
My brother and I, in the meantime, have started a little business of mural painting. We've done 1 so far, but we are well on our way to 2. I promise. The 3rd job is out there beyond the horizon - I can feel it.
My mind is transitioning back into Think Phase. Note: it must take a lifetime to really understand oneself and the cyclical patterns of one's being. But in this postulated Think Phase, due to increased Thinkageness, I begin to once again ruminate words and concepts rather than images and ideas. (I just made a semantic division between concepts and ideas that I am too apathetic to make certain - I would only use dictionary.com anyway.)
The spirit of my imagination fluctuates between these two worlds. The creative engine of my art is sometimes lingual and sometimes experiential, imagistic - and it almost depends on this mood, or temperature, of the soul. Which in turn really depends on how good I am feeling about current experience - I am happy, awake, and hopeful? Or does that depend as well on this soul-temperature? What influences what - thats the question. Chicken or the egg. What is the first cause of the changes within me? Chemical? Can I know - can it be specified?
I sat in the dimming evening light back behind the Yardhouse Grill at the Grand Lodge and ate my BBQ Chicken Sandwhich, while ideas hovered like fireflies in the dark of my unverbalized and tired mind.