a panther in the snow

Signs Of Spring

2010-03-09T07:27:00.001-08:00

Little moth, faint chartreuse
Beat the red-breast to herald change.
The word "visit" was invented for them.
It clung to my night's window.
Made itself seen.
I killed the outer lights
And burning bulb above the stove,
All the false beacons, to juice the moon.
Like a ginko leaf its shape remained
Hardly visible in my dark reflection.
At some point all that I wish for
Becomes my imagination.

Offering

2010-02-27T04:34:00.000-08:00

Golden hair, sun gold, all levels of the day
she lowered her mug, smiled, said
you can always stay with me.

Shade pulling long, summer noises, moon
half-painted over the faraway copse,
I gripped rough grass in ten fingers.

We haven't spoken for months.
Memento of my green years, she said
time takes forever to pass, surprise.

Vacant spiderweb hammocks, empty tent
caterpillar clouds, acorn caps full of dust.
A waterless existence, and yet.

It doesn't have to be, she sighed.
Cloy of the crush of plants filling gaps,
filtering star fields, in orderly rows beneath.

Freedom, virgin sister of a natural death,
I am ever homeward drawn to you.
Red feather, young oak, endless lake.

Come back to me, she said.
We hung up our chairs, dishes for morning,
door just ajar so the moths could escape.

The Rambler, Midsummer

2010-01-20T06:12:00.000-08:00

When his legs won't let him sleep, he gets up with the first light and packs his bag. They won't know that he is gone until they rise to breakfast, and then they'll talk about him over eggs and sausages. He will already be a mile down the road, walking at a leisurely pace, the grass still cold with dew, the day heating up one songbird at a time. Tiny frogs will dive out of the road ahead of him, or crickets, or early grasshoppers. There is no radio music, just silence broken by his footsteps on the crumbling shoulder, or the occasional chorusing milieu of life in the reeds of a drainage ditch, smelling of rot mixed with fresh wildflowers. Not much in his bag, really. Just a couple reminders of events falling behind him, girls he has loved, and temporary homes.

"Affection" by Jonathan Richman

2009-11-01T05:21:00.000-08:00

Download

Well, people all over the world, people all over the world, people all over the world are starvin' just for affection.
Well, but to me this ain't funny
To me this is real
So I thought I'd tell everybody
How I feel
About affection
I said affection.
Now, you guys, you all know that your friend Jonathan likes to eat food a lot. And I like to do other things, I like to run around, jump, but affection is the most important thing to me. I'd trade everything else in a minute...
You know, I used to starve for affection
I blamed the world, and it could be the world's fault, I suppose
But I was a star of the type who said, "I don't have time for them,"
And the type who says, "I have nothing in common with those."
But then I relaxed a little
And I met more folks who liked me
And they helped me to reach out and give
And that helped me to get more of affection
And that helped me to live.
So I say that people all over the world are good,
People all over the world ain't bad,
But if they keep bein' snobs about it,
They ain't gonna get what they wish they had
And that's affection
Affection.

Well, there's telephones, televisions, and cars, yes
And there's records and books and magazines for you.
But poor affection sits there standing in the corner,
Saying to itself, "I wish someone would give me something to do."
Well, I know it takes nerve to reach out and give affection
To folks who seem to want your touch but you can't tell.
Cause they can laugh at you, and that's rejection,
And you probably won't like that so well.
But I say that people all over the world are good.
People all over the world ain't bad.
But if they keep on chickenin' out,
They won't get what they wish they had
Affection
That's affection
I know they want affection
I know they want affection.

Cataract

2009-10-01T21:23:00.000-07:00

I am proud to announce that my second collection of poems is now available at Lulu.com

He Makes Me Laugh

2009-09-29T19:40:00.000-07:00

My preoccupation with making Photoshop art continues...

Since Sliced Bread

2009-09-16T08:48:00.000-07:00

I woke up with
metal wheels at every joint,
pipe bones to clang on the bedstead,
a metal bucket head and boots,
left hand lost and gentle pincers as a substitute,
a scoop for the right, and a tick-tock heart.
I never imagined a fresh new
start would involve real spark plugs,
but better this bot
than a bug.
Hey, I should download that book...

Inscription

2009-08-12T22:39:00.000-07:00

I've posted this photo once before, in my Livejournal. Awhile ago I ordered a used copy of a "A Stone, A Leaf, A Door: Poems" by Thomas Wolfe, and when it arrived by mail I opened it and found this inscription. It asks so many questions--are Edward and Harry (Harriet? Harold?) still around? What sort of person would pass something like this off to a used bookstore? Whatever the story, I would love to know it. It's almost too intimate to display, but at the same time, it's so beautiful I want to immortalize it, share it to the eyes of the world. This is a record of someone's life changing--don't we all long for someone to have such an effect upon us?

Husk

2009-08-12T22:30:00.000-07:00

We went to the Mihsihkinaahkwa pow wow last weekend, camped at the park in the heat and humidity. Sunday morning I got up early and went wandering with the camera. Saw this... thing... on the side of the road, which turned out to be a roasted ear of corn someone had lost or discarded. I might use this for a book cover in the near future, just something about it...

Door

2009-08-12T22:22:00.000-07:00

I've been doing a lot of Photoshop art lately (well, I flatter myself that it's art, anyway). I don't have the full program, just Elements, but it's pretty versatile nonetheless.

I Know Why The Caged Bee Stings

2009-07-20T04:15:00.001-07:00

The power in these lines
I cannot tap without burning my fingertips

Liquids and lightning
Seeking their own level

Pink is for girls, blue: a boy’s best friend
And fishing nets and city maps
Can both be worn, don’t count for clothing

Charged, you turned your glass eye skyward
Full of tears devoid of artifice

I saw your live wire masquerade
To your hidden hum I wrote these lyrics

Buildings Of Night

2009-07-20T04:14:00.001-07:00

Hundreds of miles east,
Moments before I can see them
The setting sun kisses the evening sky
With his flame, in your eyes.

We are just the same as I watch them
Tussle from my front porch,
Two drunk lovers
Folding into a darkened alley,
A purse dropped onto still-wet bricks.

Arcana

2009-07-20T04:12:00.001-07:00

Fan your bad hand
palm down before you—

hard yellow demons
displace the tarot

and tell uncertain chances:
tea leaf bruises,

the tale of the Empress
inverted like a bat

ill-dignified
by no fault of her own,

swallowed
but scaling the tongue.

Update After An Absence

2009-06-21T21:37:00.000-07:00

Just to let everyone know (who might be interested) I have not vanished. In fact, I've begun drawing again, and will try to start posting my efforts here for your viewing pleasure. Tonight I'm working on a poetry assignment of sorts--my good, good friend SaraEve and I exchanged three photographs each to be used as prompts. It feels good to be creative again.

Check out my newest link under "In The Forest", called Auld Manhattoe. I found this blog when I was looking for information about an old tale I read back in elementary school, about a fisherman's daughter tasked with appearing before the king under a set of paradoxical requirements--neither riding nor walking, neither clothed nor nude, etc. I don't think it has any single title that everyone would know it by, but the story is sort of archetypical.

While On The Warm And Faraway

2009-05-18T12:06:00.000-07:00

Enough of absence becomes a presence.
The void of your voiceless days
Becomes a pulse in the wrist, after a time
A throb in the wind in a bottleneck.
Broken green glass in chiming chips on the blacktop
Settles into the imagination
Like rain upon a parched garden,
And all the little million wriggling
Words surface to fit themselves together.

Photo Albums

2009-04-23T15:32:00.001-07:00

Our ghosts are biding
in the photo albums of strangers.
We are background to life:
Douglas fir, canyon rail,
a concession stand,
your face or mine.
Somewhere I am holding a soda
staring off into the distance
while in the fore a beautiful man
is kissing a beautiful unknowable woman.

Job

2009-04-12T22:12:00.000-07:00

It could be one cold interview at the end
And maybe that is why we get buried in suits
A gin and tonic and a sinner’s cigar
Dry-cleaning ticket taped to a security deposit

My uncle gave me Elvis, “now I’m dead, now I’m dead”
And I made an excuse for that rhythm
It could be one chair and a stern fatherly stare
At the end, or it could be sex with someone’s mother

Better list all your strengths and boyhood pranks
In the margins where a careful heart could see them
On the cover, dead center, an olive branch
And a decent guess of your worth

Between The Hours Of Cat & Bat

2009-04-12T22:11:00.000-07:00

I.

blue-black wing thrashing
a thrush in the night

so my mammal goes unfed
the worm too far along by dawn

those subways of a vein
aflow with burning novels

the fruitivore in a field of nicked ears
who sees by screaming

in my sleeping eye
peaches bobbing on a river

and the raft of feathers
threaded dry through the rafters

II.

a pocketful of tokens for ferries
in a country I'll never get back to

gold hair spilling over the forearm
of the unwritten chapter

long thin bony arm
long dark empty night
thoughts flung far back into the lost

sunlight unexpected in the raindrops
spinning her back
the way the spinning top rebounded

I've been sick she said
crushed into a man attempting to hold
his planet in place with love

years and years hence the phrase
search forevermore
rings in the downy ears of a cat

heading to the window for entrance
and is tranced

III.

somnambulating in a blanket
a marionette in a coat of dust
never reaches the front door
but cocks ear to muffled birds
at dawn at the front window song

Windjammer 2.0

2009-04-12T19:27:00.000-07:00

I spoke with my uncle again on Thursday night regarding the re-booting of Windjammer Press. We are talking about using blogging software to re-build the site. Going this route should allow us to get better exposure and more traffic. I'm looking to add a forum where contributors and visitors can start discussions, so it's not just a silent art gallery.

One thing he suggested, and I've been mulling over for a few days now, is finding a way to specialize the site a bit more, so that it's not classified generically as a poetry journal. Midwest poets? Online poets? Something like that--something more defined and thus more apt to come up in specific searches, where the competition to be the top link is less crowded. If anyone has a good thought about this, by all means, toss some phrases out there... I don't intend to drop anyone I've already got archived on the site, but looking ahead I may narrow the submission requirements a bit to fit a theme.

Anyhow, the actual re-launching of the site would probably not be occurring until later in the year, as this is really a side project for both my uncle and myself, and he has actual paying customers who need his talent and attention. But the literary magazine (or whatever it may become in this next iteration) is something both of us need to do, I think, for our own reasons. Because we're both artists at heart.

And that... is really cool.

I Have To Do Something

2009-04-09T08:51:00.001-07:00

Windjammer Press needs to come back. Last year, I allowed one bitter message board moderator to convince me that the site didn't hold merit, that it wasn't doing anyone any favors. And while it's true that my site will more than likely never be a stepping stone to anyone's literary career--well, if you're only in it for the money then you're doing it wrong. Call me a Socialist, whatever. If I have to bill the site as a personally curated museum of wonders, then that will have to do the trick.

One thing it does need is a board of its own--some way for visitors and contributors to interact, discuss the writing showcased on the site. If I build it, maybe they will come.

I'm off to go see when my renewal is due; tonight I'll speak with my uncle about giving the pages a facelift (something he's expressed interest in already). Maybe if I can keep this boulder rolling I'll start feeling more like a poet again.

A Living Fossil

2009-04-02T04:17:00.000-07:00

The danger is not in sudden change,
a fault blown wide, a bolt out of heaven.

It's the reptiles.
Moving so gradually one day to the next

you wake to ribbed walls, tongue-runner hallways
and the same sad view beyond a porthole.

If it never moves
you never think to run away.

Until the second skin fits so snug
you become watertight, you are become death.

They say if that mouth is pink
you're a goner.

The Birds of North America

2009-04-02T04:11:00.001-07:00

How soon did the birds
learn to line our live wires
as if that were how things had always been done?

Privileged with endless linear distance
they arrange themselves so peacefully
our lights never flicker at all.

Prelude

2009-03-14T12:12:00.000-07:00

Page one. Pen cap picked off like the head of a black flower. A new sun, which does not mean a sun that is not visible, the way a new moon denotes an abscess. No, I mean a freshborn sun that has shaken off the slough of winter necrosis. There are crocuses and lilies in my thoughts, blossoms bulging with bloated bees--not bloated in a bad manner, but ripe with nectar they have pulled from this willing pen.

Start again. Start again. Every rusted gear has to scream at the outset. Atrophied muscle chews its nerves in protest, but still I whip it onward, unseen red masses ready to purloin pulsars into an orbit. Nebulous arms of thought snake outward, they are ink poured onto a spinning record, reaching by force for the outermost stainables. Black ink, white paper, page one.

"The Bren Livejournal Idol" writing contest

2009-01-22T04:43:00.001-08:00

The following vignettes and poems were composed as entries for a Livejournal writing contest. Each week we were given a theme and pretty much free reign to write from there. From a field of about 50 initial competitors, after seventeen weekly eliminations by popular vote, I came in second.

"The Journey"

2009-01-22T04:40:00.000-08:00

She stuffs necessary and unnecessary things into a brown leather backpack in the dark, while her father lies unconscious in the basement with his mistress, a woman he smoked at the strip-joint downtown and crushed out later in his bedsheets. Issa cries to herself as quietly as possible, grabbing another pair of panties, a book, and the chef's knife from the kitchen. This last memento she holds in her hand a moment, looking at the faint moonglow reflection, before replacing the plastic blade-guard and hiding the implement in her pack. As a final insult Issa stands on a kitchen chair to reach the old cigar box her father stows atop the cupboards, above the fridge. His primary stash of weed; she carefully empties the contents into the toilet tank; quietly puts the porcelain cover back on; places her acerbic note into the cigar box; returns the box to its hiding place. Issa never cracks a smile, but the tears have stopped. The decrepit porch creaks treacherously as she sneaks out the front door, but it's too late now. Here comes auburn Angela around the corner, her familiar green Passat purring, and she slows down while Issa jumps in, and then—they are away.

* * *
"I told my mother we're going to a midnight showing of Pulp Fiction," Angela explains, replying to an unasked question. "Where am I really taking you?"

"You know that you are the best friend I have ever had, right?" Issa says as she swipes at her reddened eyes. "You know that, right?"

"Aw, you know I love you, baby," the red-haired girl answers, giving her passenger a playful, mock-groping squeeze on the knee. "I've loved you since we were six. I would drive you to Arizona tonight if you asked me. Seriously, Issa. Anywhere. Now where are we going, should I turn left or—?"

"Right," Issa directs, a brief sound of laughter clearing out the remainder of her sadness. "Get on the bypass, head toward Waverton."

"Waver—oh my God, Issa, you're eloping with Jack, aren't you?"

Issa sinks down lower into the passenger seat, pulling her denim coat tightly closed. The spring night air is still chilly with the ghost of winter. She lowers her chin, and a mass of dark brown ringlets hides most of her pale face. She nods, then: "Yes," she says.

"I am completely jealous. Do you guys know where you're going yet?" Angela asks, reaching a hand out to turn up the thermostat. "You'd have to leave town pretty much forever—your dad will murder you if he sees you."

"I know," Issa replies flatly, nudging the overstuffed backpack at her feet with one sneaker-clad foot. "Especially when he goes to check his stash."

"Issa, you didn't..."

"Totally. He's lucky I didn't neuter him before I left."

They both laugh, but for Issa the mirth ends with her eyes.

* * *
Half-an-hour later Angela runs red fingernails through her short mop of auburn and checks the rearview mirror. Issa sits looking out the side window, her mood oddly grave for someone who has just tossed off the shackles of an abusive father, a mother who emotionally blackmails her in weekly telephone calls, and a duplicitous, conspiratorial social scene which rates her well below the acceptable limits of promiscuity (a reputation which, to be honest, she had resolutely begun to shed from the moment she met Jack). Angela herself is a casualty of that scene, and often fantasizes about burning their high school to the foundations, the way one might wish to plant a firecracker in a hornet's nest. But Angela is afraid of getting stung, whereas Issa seems to possess some secret leaden aegis. Which is, of course, why Angela has loved her since childhood, when the neighborhood bullies learned to cower before Issa's devil-may-care claws.

They have been off the highway for half an hour and now, as the Passat slinks through a lifeless district of abandoned houses and motionless industrial parks, Issa guides them to a sleeping rail yard where retired boxcars molder, dinosaur carcasses in the primeval dark.

"Here? Really?" Angela says, doubtful.

But Issa is already gathering up her backpack and looking anxiously out the windows. "He said he'd be here; go toward that big building ahead, there should be a little road that goes around back."

"You've been here before?" The string of Angela's incredulousness is unbroken.

"Once we—" Issa begins to answer, then stops short and changes directions. "Yes, I've been here before... Anyway. Wait—I think I see his car."

The tail of a cherry red Mustang is clearly visible where the driver has pulled into the black, dusty mouth of a disused service garage. As the Passat's headlights splash across it the brake lights flare and it backs out slowly, pulling up alongside them. With the motor idling, its driver climbs out and walks around to Issa's door.

Angela has seen Jack only three times since he began dating Issa three months ago. He is handsome, owner of a five o’clock shadow, and possesses the rumpled yet profoundly capable appearance of one who works on machines, has mastered their metal savagery; a sort of urban Greystoke just a month shy of his diploma. Issa had seemed to be madly taken with him immediately. It had been a foregone conclusion, in Angela's mind, that they would attend the senior prom together in a few weeks, despite Jack going to school in another county. Now it would be a different story: Issa and Jack will disappear, small waves will roll and die quickly on the tongues of the community, and then the whole thing will be forgotten by the end of the summer. The romance of what is about to occur suddenly starts to falter in Angela’s eyes.

"Issa," Angela begins, and feels her heart slam hard as it realizes the question on her lips can only have a painful answer. "Am I ever going to see you again? I mean… ever?"

And Issa freezes with her hand on the door handle, the backpack slung over one shoulder. Jack is leaning against his car, arms crossed, patiently looking into the distance. She turns back to Angela, her expression giving everything away. Then, in one swift movement, Issa leans and kisses her. The shock is immediate, and weepingly desperate. Angela's mind races to make sense of this, and at the same time her lips are responding; her tongue is responding. This is crazy. Why now, why this? If she feels...? But Jack...? Confusion and exultation twist Angela into a dizzying paralysis. Love (but what sort? All so fast!) raises Angela's hands and pulls Issa into an embrace, and they simply hold onto each other for a few moments, breathing hard, Issa's face buried in her neck, and Angela looking out the passenger window and seeing—but not registering—Jack's continued, ever-patient presence. This is too much understanding to be given at the end of things, Angela thinks, and astounding herself she speaks it aloud.

"This is too much understanding to be given at the end of things," Angela whispers; only needs to whisper, because Issa's ear is there, waiting.

And Issa pulls back, wiping fresh tears, smiling in such a tortured way that it causes Angela to grimace in sympathy.

"That's the thing," Issa whispers in reply. "You don't understand any of it. But you don't have to. It's not your journey."

For months, years after Issa is gone, Angela will replay those parting words in her sleep, in her daydreams, in moments at work as she stares off into space, suddenly returned to that kiss and the strange night which framed it. At first she will think of the words as cold, hurtful, insulting. She will hate Issa for a very long time, and then one day she will play it all over again and there, in Issa's tone, in the expression on her face, a hint of something else surfaces. Five years later, Angela will believe she knows this much: That Issa saved her from something that night, though she cannot explain how. And then, a few months after this epiphany, as Angela dwells alone in her New York City apartment, there arrives an October evening with an unexpected knock at the door.

* * *
“Hold on, I’m coming,” Angela calls, and opens the door with the expectation of finding a neighbor, or a friend. The moment she breaks the seal an odor sweeps in, foul like rotting meat. But the inertia of habit is too swift, and the aperture widens in greeting before she can change her mind.

Her first fleeting impression is that a homeless man has somehow gotten past the doorman and wandered onto her floor. In the instant before he attacks, other details assail her: the yellow tinge of his flesh, the viperous jaw, the small knots of horn or bone jutting from his temples, linking the thickened ridge of his brow like glass shards set into concrete; and behind that, a wild, oily chaos of black hair. Now the thing’s eyes flare, bright red (like the tail lights of a Mustang) as the fanged mouth unhinges and comes for her. Angela’s arms rise instinctively, presenting her wrists. She has not had time to cry out yet; the impossible details of the thing standing before her only barely registered on the subconscious level. What appeared to be threadbare, ragged clothes are some kind of patchwork armor, beaten and scarred by the trials of a horrible existence, and the wickedly familiar blade in his hand comes whistling forth, burying itself to the hilt in Angela’s side, robbing her of the breath to scream.

There is no time for a mind so shocked to register things like doubt or disbelief, yet there is no reference in Angela’s mind for this plateau of pain, or for the body of the thing now looming over her, slowing drawing its knife out of her flesh as it salivates and prepares to deal the next, fatal cut. She tries to scream. Only life comes burbling out.

But now, as sounds grow distant and vision blurs, another form shimmers into life before her, swims into reality behind the yellow-skinned horror and its claw full of hate. The thing spins on its heel suddenly, cloven toes splayed, screaming in a language that sounds absurdly like a garbage disposal. Then the newcomer utters one ringing note, sings it high and sweet as the apartment is engulfed by light. Angela sees her attacker in cameo, coming apart at the seams, fingers and forearms trailing like windblown sand. As the blinding glow fades, so does Angela, and from miles above, out of a dark internal sky, the echo of a familiar voice murmurs down to her.

“I was wrong… you were part of the journey…”

One final, thudding beat of sound registers in Angela’s brain, and the world recedes altogether.

* * *
It’s the sound nobody wants to hear upon waking. Machines. The steady, low rhythm of beeps that signal one is attached to a monitor, meaning one was recently pressing the bounds of mortality. “…treated for a stab wound,” someone says. “I think she’s waking up. Angela? Can you hear me?”

Mmm… hmm…

“Angela, I am Dr. Patel. You’re in the ER at St. Bethany’s Hospital. Do you remember what happened to you?”

No. Yes. Maybe.

“You were stabbed in the abdomen by an 8-inch chef’s knife. Your friends called the paramedics. They saved your life tonight. Corporal Eddings here is hoping you can tell him what the person who did this looked like.”

My... friends?

“Hey, baby,” says Issa quietly, as if words spoken too loudly could further the injuries.

Power words. Kill words. Blinding light.

“I’m sorry, what was that?” says another male voice, and Angela opens her eyes. Issa and Jack huddle together by her right shoulder, gravest concern marking their faces. An older police officer, uniformed, gun-belted, stands off to the left. His eyes look on kindly from above a thick mustache. At the foot of the bed a young Indian man in a white coat holds a clipboard beneath his arm; his other hand rests in his pocket. It was Jack who spoke.

Nothing. I don’t remember… what it looked like. He. It. Listen… can I go back to sleep?

Angela does not bother to wait for their reply.

* * *
Sunlight on a hospital bed; a tray of uneaten food in neat little compartments; a muted television showing “The Price Is Right” with Bob Barker. It’s only Issa this morning, and a private room. The medication is dampening the pain to a low banshee’s wail. Angela’s fingers twine with Issa’s. She is wearing several new rings, Angela notices. Some of them have gems. Her dark ringlets have been chopped back into short curlicues. Otherwise, it’s the same Issa who still haunts Angela’s lips whenever she kisses anybody else.

“It wasn’t human,” Angela is telling her, “but I can’t say that to them. But I saw it die, so it’s alright. It can’t get me now.”

Then she looks into Issa’s eyes.

“It’s not dead, is it?” she infers. “Issa, how do you know what it is? Where did you and Jack go when you left me?”

Beside the sunlit hospital bed, a young woman with curly brown hair and vibrant green eyes sits stroking the hand of the love of her life. There are volumes to explain, and no time, but she takes her time anyway. It’s a journey, she explains. Not everyone matters, as difficult as that is to hear. The few who do, the players, the dramatis personae… they can live forever. Jack has been on the journey for over a hundred years, and the moment he met Issa there was no doubt that she was written into its fateful weave. There is magic in the weave, Issa tells her love, and there are devils attempting to rip it apart, stealing pieces of the tale and twisting it upon itself; thus, the long knife. What neither Jack nor Issa understood until too late was that Angela truly belongs to the story. She is no shadow scenery, no vague pawn, but a wryghder like they are. A wryghder—a being who is like the thread of a seam, holding the worlds together. A traveler of stories. The burden of proof is voided, now that Angela has seen the face of an Adversary. Now that she has heard the word of banishment in her true love’s mouth. Now that she has seen the light.

“I left with Jack because he knew, because he could teach me,” Issa explains with tears in her eyes. “And I could never bear to tell you that you were merely a dream. But as the story unfolded we learned differently, I was wrong, Jack was wrong… sweet Goddess of the earth, we were both so blessedly wrong. And I will never leave your side again, Angela.”

The silence that follows carries the scent of tenuous realities; it verges on breaking, dallies with the precarious chance of failure. Belief crosses and meanders upon Angela’s face, and in the end it’s the gentle fingers woven into her own that heal the wounded faith.

“You’ll protect me?” Angela asks.

“I’ll protect you,” Issa whispers.

“You’ll stay with me?” Angela asks.

Issa leans over, and this time the soft kiss imparts no uncertainties.

“Until the end.”

"The Chute"

2009-01-22T04:37:00.000-08:00

But I have a white stone with a new name written on the stone, the word which no one knows except him who receives it.
– Hal Duncan, from his work “violent eRa”

I sit with Stephen on the beach, holding his stone in my hand, the white stone now bloodied and Stephen unconscious on the sand beside me. It feels as though I have been here a thousand times before, in a thousand different guises: a nude unconscious girl and her drugged drink in my class-ringed hand; an unconscious war veteran and in my hand the vintage grenade which made him cry in hoarse terror as vicious flashbacks cracked his whittled mind. A red-robed wizard on a field of death, staring up into a shaft of his God’s unwavering light, defending the choice to cut down His chosen ones. The “why” becomes the same for each of these seething visions—to assert the basest freedom by bucking the laws of a narrative world. To spit in the eye of my captor.

Up the beach an out-of-shape woman in a heavy coat is running for her car, looking over her shoulder to witness the killer’s face one more time, the better perhaps to give a description over the phone when she calls the authorities. Her little dog keeps up easily, thinking it all a game, and maybe it is. Celestial fingers could even now be checking off this series of events, an invisible smile turned up at the corners in pleasure at seeing the narrative sequence fulfilled, but ah… fuck it. I really think not—I think this time I’ve really jumped the rails; tied them into Tex Avery knots, like bows on a Christmas package, and right now His oh-so-omnipotent fingers are busily fussing with the strands, trying to figure out where to go with me next. He trusted me; I was one of his creations. Every second he spends fiddling with the briar I have wrought allows me another few free lungfulls of air on this chilly autumn beach, a few unregulated thoughts and the peace that comes with them. These passing minutes where He casts about for a plot are my green garden of leisure, and if Stephen had to die for them, well, call it my cost of rewriting.

Have you considered… that God does not merely wish us to execute His will, but that He utterly depends upon it? There are strange maroon amoebas in the sand between Stephen and I where the blood splatters have soaked up the silicate granules. His half-naked chest flares and gutters in rapid, shallow blue breaths. His veins stand out strongly beneath his pale white skin. I turn his stone over, the one he handed to me moments ago, the same one I used to bludgeon his skull without a word of explanation. All my life these words have been haunting my existence, pinned to me by my behavior: kind, loving, friendly, gentle, trustworthy, honest, sincere. These adjectival spectres spoke to me over time, and I realized that in order to shake His watchful gaze I would need to move beyond every single one of them. To dodge His omniscience I could not be fully aware of this plan, yet it lived inside me for years, until a few minutes ago on this beach. Stephen handed me that stone and I knew—I knew—in this perfect act of trust I would find my opening.

“Here, Adam—you’ll like this one,” I heard his sweet voice say. “Keep it for your collection.”

“Thanks,” I replied. Gently. Friendly. Trustworthy. And in the space of a few synaptic firings I had wheeled about and brought the solid object smashing against his temple. I felt the giving flesh and in the same instant I felt the shocked giving way of divine providence. Stephen fell and God dropped me in horror. With His cosmic stupefaction I came loose upon the torrent of reality and for the first time in my young life took a breath that was not by design. Or so I thought. So surely I thought.

But now… now I sit here in the sound of surf, turning over this chalk-white artifact, Stephen’s stone, perfectly smooth and fitted to my palm, and I see carved into the underside a word, engraved upon it somehow, one word that causes my whole body to quake until the stone falls from my hand and shatters a blood amoeba. Like a painter’s signature, like a trademark stamp, like the cordite cough marking a pistol’s ejaculatory revelation, I witness the word on the back of the stone and feel the jailor’s cosmic fingers twist an eternal key in the lock: BETRAYER, it says. Nothing left to chance.

"The Booth"

2009-01-22T04:36:00.000-08:00

I came to inside the booth; this tiny, dim booth with a chair and a table and a pair of headphones jacked into the wall. A torn-off scrap of ruled notebook paper, folded in half once, perched on the table like a place setting. It said "Put the headphones on.”

I picked up the paper—the handwriting was my own—and crumpled it up with five fingers as I slowly turned a full circle. No door. A flat, yellow, circular light fixture eight inches above my head glowed wanly. And beyond the table a plexiglass window, tinted and only darkness beyond. I saw my vague reflection in it; I looked like myself.

No door. How does one get into a room with no door and a sealed window?

Rather than panic, I put the headphones on my head—they were big, made of aged, beige plastic. A dingy white spiral cord ran away from their bulbous cups. The ear pads were a little chewed with time and wear. The hum of an open line met me, not static precisely, just a yawning sonic chasm. And then...

A heartbeat. Slow, steady, insistent, joined suddenly by another, higher pitched, more rapid, very strong. This went on for a long time, and it lulled me into a stupor. I hung slackly in the chair, listening to the dueling thump-thumps. Suddenly, there was a low tone, the sort that tells you to buckle your seatbelt before landing. Maybe it was a hearing test—maybe I should have been raising my right hand. On the heels of that sound came a soft, calm woman's voice. "9.3 months" it stated simply.

Then I convulsed and flopped out of the chair in shock as an infant's first shrieking wail filled my ears. The headphones fell off but I still heard it bawling, a hitching tinny scream several feet away. After a few minutes it subsided and sounds too quiet to discern from a distance muttered from the speakers. I tentatively placed the phones on my head once more.

It was my mother’s voice, but clearer and sharper than I had ever heard it before. She sounded young and cautiously triumphant—she was telling someone how beautiful he was.

The calm woman returned. “2.1 years” she said. The inflection might have been used to say “fourth floor.”

The sounds now were strange. Clacking, rattling noises. Hollow plastic thuds. Small pieces of wood thunking into each other. Something like broken glass that caught my attention immediately and slammed a memory association into place: Legos, the fat ones made for children still young enough to see with their mouths. More of these noises followed, including the various burblings of a small child. Then abruptly there came a louder crash, and the child began screaming. I was somewhat ready for it that time, so although I jerked in my seat I did not fall down again. Pounding footsteps grew near and I heard my father’s voice sag from angry to sympathetic in the course of a few syllables. I touched the scar on my chin.

That is when I took the headphones off and set them down on the table; slowly pushed myself away until the back of the chair met the back of the booth, eliciting an involuntary yelp from me. My body shook. No one could possess these sounds, for they had only been recorded in a single place, by a singular listener. They were only in my head. Hearing them replicated and played back this way created an exhilarating harmony the likes of which I thought should be impossible. It scared me. And yet… I went back to them.

The calm woman returned several times, bringing me through my childhood, my pre-adolescence. I heard myself terrified the first time I watched “Jaws.” I heard the rapid breaths that accompanied my first foray into masturbation. I heard old cartoons, dead relatives of whom I had no recollection until that moment; school lessons; school buses; and snippets of popular radio caught in passing. I heard myself talking to myself, in private, telling myself truths and mistruths and the inexperienced rationalizations only children can conjure for themselves. All of it began to hurt, but I kept listening.

“16.9 years” the calm woman said eventually, and I heard Opal’s long lost voice in my ear. She told me it was alright, and I heard her sigh. Our first time together; my suppressed groan as I turned away from her, pulled out because the heat was too intense and we were innocently unprotected. The music that filled the next few hours was an elixir of the most potent recollections—whole albums played through my mind not once or twice but a dozen times each, every time a different situation. Sometimes the sound of a car engine rumbled under the melody, sometimes just the wind buffeting curtains in an open window. Opal and I were singing together through many of them. I cried.

Time seemed to have lost meaning. I neither ate nor slept, nor felt any bodily urges except the intense curiosity and desire to keep listening. The gaps between episodes grew smaller and smaller until the headphones were playing a continuous stream of auditory memories, lapsing only during those times when I must have been asleep. I heard relationships begun and ended, heard myself in yelling contests, heard myself laughing in a room full of family. I drifted forward through my late teens, my early twenties—my marriage, all of its trials and passions, its stupid arguments and agonizing reconciliations—until finally the calm woman said “30.00183 years.”

Then I heard the train’s horn blare, the horrible roar of the engine, and the sound of my tires screeching across rain-soaked asphalt. The sound of collision was mercifully brief, and the crunch at the end I did not recognize immediately: it was my skull caving in. I stared at my white-knuckled fists on the table, unmarked and unbroken. I bent my hearing down into a new aural abyss that was now filling up the headphones’ soundscape. Thoughts coalesced for me—I was dead, and all that remained was dead tape. But then, before my stunned hands could remove the whispering static, a fresh set of voices began to fill the space.

It was not hard to grasp; I was listening to my funeral. A priest was speaking the name of my brother. And I paused with my hands resting on the phones, the mystic monkey’s hear-no-evil pose. And I asked myself, as my brother cleared his throat at the pulpit: Was this mine to hear? Should I listen?

Would you?

"The Eighth Wonder of the World"

2009-01-22T04:34:00.000-08:00

Twilight, the auditorium after the audience
shuffled out to stark cold cars.

Chill as those cars—dim as that stage
that turned over and took the red covers with it.

The frozen yard became the apron
where unmasked players sat in smoked breath.

I wandered without a cue, no mark
watching dark-fingered trees pull down pillows.

In the twilight, proof against the nocturnes
and pill against the dawn. Empty chains.

The velvet seats folded up like our knees,
losing heat rapidly, waiting for the gels to die.

The dust roosted, the janitorial staff
rose in the manner of streetlamps coming on.

‘Twas November twilight that killed the beast.
We struck the set at midnight.
Called time of death.
Went home.

"Utopia"

2009-01-22T04:33:00.001-08:00

The horizon is pink. There… wasn’t a horizon before.

With maybe, maybe, maybe ten minutes left I find myself in a place of utter perfection. Listen—there are no other voices, no traffic, no wild birds spinning irregular songs all over the goddamn evening trees. There are no trees, either, only the wood of the box.

I am Law, unto myself. Anything I wish to do, I do it, and there is no outcry. If I want to move my ankle four inches to the left, the electric pulse splashes down my nervous net and there, see, it has moved. Nobody has a war about it, nobody screams the injustice of it to the stone face of a city hall. If I want to blink, I blink with impunity. That I won’t be able to breathe soon is no injustice; it is a fact of the world.

I swear there was no horizon before, but it gets brighter with each passing second, and I think there are silhouettes against it, walking.

Would you like to expand your lungs and take in the stiff cloud of carbon dioxide yes—yes, I would, and I will. Certainly I will accept the erection; it presses painfully against the lid, but all remains peaceful. No woman comments upon it, no man sneers lewd. They cannot cuff me any longer, not in this country.

I am isolated by a vast ocean of soil, on all sides, and my stratosphere is lined with grass I imagine. Pink grass, maybe, caught in the pink of sunset. The smell of blood is mine, a free thing, unrestricted by amendments or court orders. Yes the broken fingernails hang loosely; they are as free as children crossing a deserted street, utterly unaware of the roaring milk trucks just… over… the horizon…

Not even Farneman can wreck his dictatorship upon me now. This is my valley of lilies, and in my valley of lilies there is one single law: peace. Whatever you choose to do, God is with you in that choice, and the only government that runs runs silently from behind a silken curtain. If I want to flail my limbs wildly against the confines of the box, snap a toe, or
beat!
my!
forehead!
bloody! then I am free to commit such silly exertions without the faintest fear of persecution. There are no Jesus Christ’s here, and all the wood (world) wood is on the outside, so nobody could make a cross anyhow.

It seems really silly, now, that I let Farneman’s decision bother me at all. That was back in a place full of rules and consequences, and oxygen; the rule was easy, SHE IS HIS, NO YOU MAY NOT LOVE HER, and the consequences burn in my gut right now. Maybe, maybe five minutes tops.

But wonder of wonders, signs and portents! Look at me now. Fucking-A, my friend. Here comes the pink horizon, and those are not screaming horses or a clash of ballistae or clarion trumpets brassily in the light but only, only, only my people. Serenity. If I want to look at the glowing face of my watch, and ignore the hot spears in my chest, I may do so without passing a motion or lobbying for the majority vote. We don’t need that kind of thing here on the horizon.

I will sew a flag, lastly. The colors will be of blood, and shit, and radium. I’ll raise it to the stillness, the eye-popping stillness, the throat-squelching silence. The pink nether-sun light shall stream through it, make it glow with calm, something to watch through the night, through the bombs bursting in flight, the… rocket-red hair… the… something… still there… proof…

Oh Silvia. I love you. Please dig me up.

"Spirits"

2009-01-22T04:32:00.001-08:00

She mixes a good drink. I line the bottles up on the bar, tallest to shortest, like I did that very first night in this apartment. The glass gets five ice cubes--consistency, ritual. Are witch doctors so precise? I have to be, because unlike a shaman shaking rattles around a fire, I lack the soul to run by feeling alone. I have no tradition of this. Just the remembrance of that first night, and all its recreations thereafter.

I pull off my tie; cross the room; touch the needle to the record; recline on the sofa with a week-weary arm tossed over my eyes. Sure, I have an iPod, but she doesn't like that. I tried it, on the third week, and she stayed away. Or stayed quiet. I suspect she never actually leaves.

My eyes close under the spell of Nina Simone singing "Wild Is The Wind." Halfway through the song I smell a now-familiar perfume, faintly, almost a timid scent. I keep my eyes covered, a game of hide and seek. When the song reaches its climax I open my eyes and the glass is full, the bottles slightly emptier than before. On the second week, I had peeked early, peering through laced eyelashes, and the bottles never moved. The glass simply filled, slow like honey.

The song ends. Her perfume grows stronger, and then more—an accompaniment rises, notes of real human flesh, suggestions of breath. An invisible hand on my cheek. I go to the bar, stand there and drink, and feel the kisses along my jaw, the nape of my neck. A warm arm snakes around my waist, holds me upright. She tips the glass higher, coaxes every last drop, and briefly the ice clinks to rest on my lips.

I setup a different assortment of bottles, place a fresh tumbler on a dry paper napkin. Lie down again. We do this all evening, all Friday night. "Wild Is The Wind" over and over and over. As each drink settles into me the room gets dimmer; the light from the lamps turns softer; objects once solid grow more malleable. I begin to see the outline of her, the long hair, the slink of a dress; and through it, beneath it, loose limbs that move like honey.

Every weekend I go another shade further. I believe tonight I will stumble into the bedroom after three easy, holding onto the nearly-tangible. There will be eyes of colorless glass searching my own. My sheets will conform to the curves of her hard thighs, will resist her small breasts, will belie the whole sweet volume of her. I will wonder, as always, why the lottery of fates has placed me on this floor, in this apartment, at this time. I will be ready for her to love me—or at least whisper a name. I will play this drowning game.

And then I will blackout.

"The Golden Rule"

2009-01-22T04:30:00.000-08:00

There were three lines handwritten into the front of the little Bible, in pencil:

dew hon 2 udders
asp yew wood half
Dem due hunter U

Susan smiled to herself—she knew he thought himself clever. That did nothing for her faith, however, and she pulled off her choir robe lost in the thought. The bedroom's sanctuary breathed around her without a soul.

Weeks ago, she and Bryan had escaped the eyes of the world long enough to answer a year's worth of questioning; and in that small, dark window Susan found what the book in her hands had never offered: an identity entirely her own.

"Dah-da, dah-da, dah-da... crimson and clover..." she whispered tunefully as she folded the robe, remembering the song that greeted them when the car started again. Bryan had passed trembling fingers through her long, red hair, and crowned her beautiful.

But that was afterward. Half an hour before, he had been tentative and tacit. Her face had been aglow with the eldritch light of the moon, and he spoke of his disbeliefs: that they were here, now, in such intimate circumstances, in such violation of the laws of their lives.

"You're lucky," she'd replied, striking a tone that had never before left her lips. It took him aback, she remembered, and a sudden doubt had crossed his eyes.

Susan closed the dresser drawer, completely forgetting to stow the robe inside; the satiny garment lay folded atop it, careless as an abandoned water glass, leaving its own sort of ring in the surface of the day. She sighed, leaning against the wall, and stared into the thick, vague images of her memory.

Vague, but volatile.

Vague, but vital--things one dares not let go.

"You are not taking me home until I'm good and ready," she had breathed into his ear, and already condensation had blotted the moonlight. Bryan had started to move away from her then, but Susan would have none of it, grappling with him instead, long enough for resistance to weaken, for resolve to fade. Long enough, she thought, to falter and fall.

Just then, a knock at the door pulled her out of her reverie; Susan's mother stuck her head into the room. The small crucifix hanging above the door rattled slightly, as it always did.

"Honey? Are you not dressed yet? We're having supper in about five minutes. Do you want some?"

"Um, sure. I'll be down in a few."

"I think your jeans are in the dryer, do you need me to bring you a pair?"

"No, I'm just going to wear these," she replied, grabbing a rumpled pair of flannel pants from the bedside.

"Okay.”

The door clicked shut, and the new sense of self—wary as a kitten—crept back into Susan’s room. It carried in its mouth the words once wicked to her, now spoken so easily and without any genuine shame. It rubbed against her, the first inklings of instinct saying this is my territory, this body is mine. She thought of Bryan’s skin, and the unseen muscles moving beneath it all.

“…as I would have you do unto me,” she whispered, drifting to earth, and prayed her mother would not look in a second time.

"We don't see Things--we see where Things are."

2009-01-22T04:28:00.000-08:00

Two ancient atoms of the sun
by chance, by law, crushed into one:
thus was my lover’s face begun.

A sea of waves of light
that rolled millions of miles last night,
that reached us, always reaching us
on the run:
bathing all and saving none.

And when that sun-tide struck her cheek
it turned to leave, ricocheted, it spun:
honey-colored lengths of light
like braided hair undone.

They fled her cheek and came to me,
weightless strands invisibly,
until my widened iris took them
in as refugees:
caught them in the cones and keys,
deciphered all their beauty.

O reticent and mirrored mores
revealed in windows of the soul:
my heart sends forth its softest soldiers
there to guide you home.

* * *

If ever I speak dark of love
only moonshine knows whereof.

"9-5"

2009-01-22T04:19:00.000-08:00

There exists a time of night—in unassuming cities, in high suites—when the glass windows are black, and the cool fluorescent light from fifteen feet above takes away all sense of time passing, and everything aches with the glow. It gets deeply silent. You realize you are in a pocket of something… not so warm as eternity, not so grand as forever. Maybe just the opposite; maybe there is a set of hands on the back of the clock. That time of night, there might never be another morning. There might never have even been a dusk. The world becomes fully contained in the vast subway car of the room, with its green velvet couch and flat surfaces, and squares. You find yourself reminded of semi-formed childhood memories, incidents when you were still tiny enough to be carted around on your mother’s shoulder, maybe some random night—there was a telephone call, she had to pick him up, she couldn’t leave you alone. And so she popped the cotton cap over your soft head, grabbed her keys and drove to some office where your father had been working overtime plus. Car dealership lights; that’s what these are, fifteen feet over my head. And it must be nearing two-ay-em, but it feels like this night is never, ever going to cease.

The hangover is not a hangover. It is not the coke sputtering out, either; I rode that particular wave down before midnight. Maybe it’s the blood loss? Oh, you think? A lagoon has formed on the tiles, which are off-white and black. And red all over. But no, no… He made damned sure I was active before he left, or at least tracking toward transformation.

I had a wife, once. How many losers and psychopaths have milked that little factoid about their lives? There is no life to this town—we are all morticians, and the floor-to-ceiling windows let you look the corpse over. There are so few lights to see…

Nothing bad happened to my wife, by the way; she packed the dog when the drug moved in, and left when the entourage arrived. That was the crowning achievement of my 1986, and one year later I am essentially dead. Hold the lilies and luncheons, though. This is only my first step to recovery.

The v—the devil who bandaged my canary’s wing goes by the name of Tobias Lofton, president and founder of SolTech Industries. He has a Spanish air about him, by which I mean he hails from Madrid. My corporation officially sold itself into his loving, tender care four months ago; my corporation, which he proceeded to suck dry of all its former identity, used to manufacture mirrors for General Motors. Anytime you looked behind you, we were there, closer than we appeared. Ha.

Then Lofton swooped down in that ghost-white Learjet, with his hypnotizing accent and Shakespearean goatee. He partied with us, brought his entourage along, sharing the spoils of his international war on Other People’s Profits. Papers were signed, strippers were paid, and mid-grade cabernet flowed like tokens from the loosest slots in Vegas.

Right now, as I gaze across myself sprawled on the counter here, sitting awkwardly, half-in the kitchenette sink, it still makes the same sort of perfect sense that earned my CEO’s signature on the death warrant. Did we know we were cattle? Do you think cattle know that they’re cattle? And this… tick… on our ear, this tick that turned out to be a monster from the underworld, how long did he stalk us? How much due diligence would have satisfied him, this being who leaves nothing up to chance, who has nothing left to fear and no watch to wind any longer? I wish he had at least explained that to me. My corporation was probably just a midnight snack, but hey—he set me up for life, so maybe I should quit my crying.

My shredded chest and splintered sternum are putting themselves back together again. I wish I could videotape this; give a copy to my doctor as a farewell present. My health insurer, too. They’ll never see another dime of mine. In about… oh, another hour… my eyeteeth will fall out, and the new ones will grow in, the retractable ones. Lofton said to prepare myself for the first time I use the bathroom—what I see in the mirror won’t be what everyone else is seeing. He emphasized that I should keep a photograph of myself somewhere secure, like in a safe deposit box. Many copies, he said, in many different boxes. Then he said, with the most haunted facial expression I have ever seen, that he wishes someone had invented cameras when he was young. From the way he spoke, I guess I reminded him of himself, or at least of what he can remember.

Despite my earlier ruminations, there are no hands on the back of the clock. Lofton said swaddling myself in enough blankets and sheets ought to hold me until sundown, until I can make better arrangements. Then he will return, with his entourage, and we will speak of the future in the language of sharks.

I wish my ex-wife could see me now. She will, soon, probably on television. I never imagined I would have a “rise to fame”, but he swears it will come, and not just as a face. Real power. I am climbing the Jacob’s ladder—or at least walking the rungs of its shadow. They are leading me toward seven figures. Do you hear me? Seven figures! And I am going to make partner, baby, if it’s the last thing I do.

2009: Here's hoping!

2008-12-31T10:39:00.000-08:00

For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we'll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

Everyone ready?

Yuletide

2008-12-09T19:12:00.000-08:00

I was raised in a forest of Christianity,
weaned from a wolf of God.
Had I known a heath: been a heathen.
An olive grove: a luminous paganus.
Who cares who hijacked whose holy days,
in dark Decembers I know candles and souls.
There was no snow in Bethlehem.
There was far more blood in the firelit hills.
Give me this tempered concoction of belief,
smelling of pine, warm as fleece.
I wear it like an animal skin, heavy with horns.
I pray for a birth from the biting cold.
Where science shrugs to foist human dreaming
up against the icy rote
I will meditate, crown and thorn
buried in virginity, beloved by both.

Spiritual Darwinism

2008-12-09T08:45:00.000-08:00

A world of things that I pinned my identity to, a host of stories and personal mythologies, now feel distant and untouchable. If who we are and what we root ourselves in can shift so dramatically--if things we once said we would die for (meaning it or not) are now things we remember fondly but fail to seek--then who or what are we?

My scope of focus is narrower. I am putting effort into my occupation, into little projects here and there. A year, two years ago I was reading poetry into a microphone, reading my well-worn copy of Rexroth's poems all the time, the same way some people would read a bible. I love these things no less, but... I'm not reaching for them.

And it's very possible that this is completely what human beings are always supposed to do. We inhabit an identity for months or years and then it evolves--which only means survival of the fittest, not survival of that which we choose to believe is most dear. As I've told myself before, somehow the tomorrow's keep coming, one after another, and I'm still here. So I must be doing something right.

Winter has set into the region. Today it's cold rain, last week snow. The leaves are all down. It's going to be four months of bare branches and gray curbs, just like every year. I don't feel heartbroken that the greenery is gone, or that I didn't get outside more often during the summer. I would have, a year or two years ago.

New Year's resolution: Grow lungs and legs. Leave the cold, gray ocean. Learn to fly.

Prop 8: The Musical

2008-12-03T15:17:00.001-08:00

Okay, I've converted this from the mini-player to just a link because the anal-retentive side of me can't stand that it was overlapping my archive list. Yes, I realize the irony in that statement. Ahem. As you were.

Watch Video

From a letter to a friend

2008-11-24T04:42:00.000-08:00

If you're going to allow others to read your work; if you want it to have even the remotest chance of surviving beyond you; one has to let go of trepidation. Your words are pieces of you--replenishing fragments, pheromones loosed on the wind. A lot of times, nothing will come back. Sometimes it will come back twisted, and yes, you'll have to defend yourself. You must want those rare and beautiful instances of true reciprocation badly enough to not be afraid of all the other possibilities.

We are lucky to be remembered at all, and one-in-a-million gets to become a legend that sticks in the world’s consciousness through the ages; considering that, to fret about exactly how one will be remembered seems almost greedy. If my choices are nameless, meaningless dust, versus scorn and notoriety for "corrupting the youth" (we're looking at you, Socrates) I still believe I would rather go down in the history books as something. Even if entire nations don't understand or agree with me, a solitary college student who happens upon my work and feels a moment of clarity, or sympathy, or curiosity from having read my words is enough reason for me to press onward.

Rip

2008-10-31T20:59:00.000-07:00

I remember, on television once, I saw a strongman tear a deck of cards in half with his bare hands. He said it was actually more difficult than tearing a phone book in half, because a phone book is wider and allows more leverage. I wonder what that man is doing now. I hope it's something epic, like wrangling dragons on Mars, or wrestling Architeuthis on the ocean floor. If he is moldering sad in a rusted trailer, surrounded by decapitated jacks and queens, then there is not much point in writing novels, or anything. I hope he at least brings in a good salary, and that someone remembers he existed. Anyone.

Barack Obama / Joe Biden 2008

2008-10-27T07:19:00.001-07:00

On November 4th, please help me vote some intelligence and rationality back into the White House. There is no such thing as a sure thing--if you support this movement, please don't sit home and assume everyone else will take care of it. Come out. Vote.

From the archives...

2008-10-09T20:45:00.000-07:00

This dates back to about 2002, maybe 2003. And oldie but goodie (I think). Fans of Greek mythology may realize this came from reading Edith Hamilton's book over and over and over. What I like about myths is exploring the lesser-known characters, those that played pivotal roles or filled out a pantheon, yet have remained obscure because so few stories focused on them. Like this man here... his name is pronounced "SEE-icks" or just "SEEKS", depending where you look...to my knowledge, he is only involved in a single myth--and not even his own myth, really, but his wife Alcyone's (from whose name the Halcyon Days derive). The myth says that Ceyx married Alcyone, the daughter of the King of the Wind, and that they were completely, happily in love with each other. But something, which is never named, begins to trouble Ceyx, and he insists on leaving his wife to consult an oracle, even though Alcyone is terribly worried that something bad will befall him. Which, of course, it does. And so the question kept coming back to me: what could possibly have been so dire that he would risk losing such a perfect life? What drives anyone to forsake all of their common sense and good fortune for a dangerous pursuit? Why gamble it all away when your instinct tells you to stay put...?

Ceyx

Beside her in bed—
You held the daughter of the wind,
Even in sleep she bore you aloft
And when she lay awake
Your heart was cradled in the silk
Of a vernal breeze.
Everyone saw the devotion,
The storm-winds attended
As dawn’s light gave her away.
She weighed nothing upon you, and you
Were the unseen element
Holding up the air.
What could have troubled,
Ceyx, what were the various matters
Pinning your heart to earth so firm
That love could be eschewed
For an answer?
Perish it. Did you love the answer?
What better future could oracles speak
Than what lay beside you,
What salve administer to your wounded
Spirit that could not pour
From the lips of Alcyone?
Money, the trifle, no.
Politics, the worry-stone, no.
The fate of your art—
Though what art beyond her love—
No. None of these things.
Did the mouths of ages lie to your joy,
Did your hearts tremble in the frame of time?
Did you doubt?
Perhaps you sought her eyes’
Truth in the eyes of the oracle
Or, perish it, loved the seer?
Did you love the answer?
We will never know,
But in the wake of your choosing
The sea lies still, fourteen days.
And while some call it a mercy,
I know it means the placation of one
Whose questions owned his day.

Autumn is a verb...

2008-10-02T15:08:00.001-07:00

...and I tell you, the sky is falling.

Strawberry Swing

2008-09-26T20:46:00.000-07:00

The shadows on the streets thin with the autumn. I never realized I noticed this before, but all summer we drive through solid, black shadows and in autumn, it flickers and sparkles through the windshield. And later, in winter, when we need every blessed photon more and more, the trees sit kindly unobtrusive, bare. They have not a single thought about us; these are only incidental benefits; they made us as much as we made them.

I stood by the river under a tree with thin leaves--are there willows that don't weep? These looked like willow leaves, but I am a novice at naming trees. The sound of them falling through the branches, ticking and gently rasping against each other, the bark, and those yet to fall, took me back to her suddenly. The river, filthy with pride, took the leaves. A light wind started it again and again.

Fall begins today. I found out I can still feel that way.

Taps

2008-09-24T08:10:00.000-07:00

I found a delete key in a crack in the earth. When depressed, it clicked against the nothingness between stars. I tapped at it like a parakeet at the mirror. I waited for my latest blog to fizzle and blink away. Half-expected a different diagnosis, a different new hire, the Mary Celeste of my heart to re-appear. For a year (it seemed) I pecked that button. Waiting for failed jokes to recoil in my mouth, for Galveston reconstituted like resurrection fern. All the hurtful things I said replaced by harmless air. I beat the button like I had a bid, like I had the question to their answer. Nothing buzzed with the sound of edits. The fissure's floor filled up with dust. Then I remembered the crucial discerning difference between the backspace key and that which I pushed now. The backspace rolls up the world behind it. Delete keys only kill ahead.

Meditating On The Catwalk

2008-09-22T21:07:00.000-07:00

I understand, now, why some adults fall to searching desperately for inner peace. The quietness—the focused stillness—that existed in me when I was a child, an adolescent, a twenty-one-year-old… the capacity to experience that kind of inner calm seems to be losing… losing against the adult world of existential assumptions, societal concerns, the identity of being an American in Indiana who works in an office and pays his taxes (hold the Mr. Anderson jokes, please). But what are these things, really? When did I start caring—am I caring, or just going through the motions because that's "how it goes"?

Although I still reflect, it seems so much harder to attain a clear view. I've grown more and more complicated within, full of new worries about people and things, more fear of losing them than I ever had before; more apt to suppress my impulses and tell myself it's nothing, really, I'm as free as I ever was. I've grown… riddled. So much is taken for granted in the name of this rat race. Existence itself is taken for granted, as if we’re all just so very certain what the world is that we have the time to complain about poor service at the drive-thru.

There is a difference between questioning and wondering at. I question a lot of things--but the sense of wonder is tougher to summon back, and it's an important sense, make no mistake. There is a feeling I have of flagging wisdom; that I’ve gained experience and intelligence, at the cost of my appreciation. Mastering the mundane details while the big, ethereal picture fades away. Anyone who knows me is aware that I’m not very religious, but I have always borne a species of faith in the souls of living things—and my soul feels more vague today than it once did, in part because the route back to its origins is less clear. Maybe it’s time to get into that box of mementos in the basement again...

There was a morning, in November of 1997. The love of my life was away at school; I was alone, recently reborn--having been hollowed out by a potent crash course in philosophy the spring previous. All my ideas about the world were shaky at best; I didn't trust what I thought I knew. I was attending IUSB, taking my first college courses (I remember the first class, the first day, the first thing we were assigned to read: the epic of Gilgamesh, perhaps the first great tale humanity ever wrote down). And on this particular early morning I was making the drive to class, listening to Dave Matthews Band's Live at Red Rocks, which had just been released a couple weeks ago. And the first light snow of the new winter was starting to drift down as I rode to class.

The city is so gray at that time of year, but it's not yet the tired, wearying gray that comes later in the season. It's that pre-Christmas gray, where the cold air still feels like a refreshing contrast to the seasons just passed. It's a virginal chill that only emphasizes the warmth of the living body, the shell of heat you make inside a heavy coat that has slept for the last seven months. The traffic signals stand out so brightly, red and green, and the weightless white flakes look lost and countable, drifting as they are with plenty of air between them, falling any which way but straight down. #36 came on as I was nearing the school, and I ended up sitting in the parking lot a little longer than I would have otherwise, listening. Hani, Hani... come and dance with me...

That morning, it felt like I'd settled gently down into a perfect, lonely sort of heaven. In my Rilkean solitude I felt such immense peace inside. A few years later, someone managed to capture the moment perfectly in a song lyric:

My car became the church
and I the worshipper of silence there.
In a moment peace rolled over me
and the one who was beating my heart appeared.

- Ed Kowalczyk

O Fiona, Where Art Thou?

2008-09-21T20:08:00.000-07:00

This will have to tide me over, I guess.

Listen

the song

2008-09-19T08:43:00.000-07:00

moving cells in a drop of blood
bodies made of, caked with mud
voices lowing across the plains
wind in hair and water in veins
all these elements speak the same
tomorrow we may find our names

spinning webs in a shaking tree
sunlight flees from a mountain’s lee
axioms set with ink and lead
carving marble to raise our dead
sketching out where the last stars went
clasping hands for the prayers not sent

turning leaves with a hint of snow
wondering how the end will go
tiny creatures beneath our skins
writing laws to invent our sins
we consume what we need to live
comet tails must the sun forgive

falling red frozen mercury
pale white fish with no eyes to see
crystal virus in a velvet lung
passing biases to our young
churning butter in an ancient barn
surely God can do no harm

bent umbrellas in torrential rain
stabbing children to numb their pain
mantis colored to match her land
canyons patterned in flesh of hand
if our math fails on blackboard slates
find the words to deny all fates

Ranting Again

2008-09-09T19:33:00.001-07:00

You know what, screw this country. Our political system is not just broken, it's become a perversion of something that was actually once workable, maybe even admirable. Even when the two parties aim for "bipartisanship" it's only to make their own parties look better. I think it's possible--possible--that Barack Obama actually cares where the country is headed, but just knowing that there's even a chance he could lose the race over some one-off sound-byte at the last moment--just knowing such a thing is possible in this country--sucks all the "hope" right out of me. We're maimed, wracked with self-serving political in-fighting, and the media only fuels that fire by emblazoning every ridiculous "did not!" "did too!" argument across the internet, in the headlines, or on a scrawl at the bottom of the television screen. The people who report it, and the politicians who originate it, act as though these trivialities actually matter; and so, consequently, the idiot masses who believe that if "everyone's saying it, it must be true" (these are the same masses who can't discern an obviously Photoshop-ed image in an email forward, and thus send it onto all their friends accompanied by messages of amazement and awe, or vague outrage) let the tit-for-tat muckraking sway them, at which point, sick though it may be, the bullshit becomes validated, in that it actually effects people's choices. Then, seeing that a result has been got, the politicians and media push even more of this refuse down the pipe, and the whole cycle just reinforces itself.

I just... don't want to care anymore. I'm really starting to be convinced that we're getting sick beyond repair here, that the good eggs are doomed to be subsumed in a sea of busted rotten ones. I kinda want to move. But damn it, I love my corn fields, my raucous crows, and my oak trees... I love the top floor of the Schurz library, and hearing the symphony play at the Morris once in a blue moon, and driving up to New Buffalo in the summer to get a cheeseburger at Redamak's. There was a time when I "followed politics", when I kept myself abreast of world news and events. Now? About the only news source that doesn't disturb me is NPR. It feels like there's a glimmer of sanity there, at least. And there are a couple decent writers for Newsweek that I don't mind reading. But every time I go to check my email, and Yahoo! pops up their inane version of a headline, I cringe. Because I know some people click that link and think they're going to learn something from it. And by some, I mean... lots.

Maybe I'm simply having a bad night. Yes, that's the ticket. That will get me through until morning. And maybe when I wake up tomorrow, something meaningful will meet me. I think it might. I hope so.

LeRoi Moore 1961-2008

2008-08-20T08:28:00.000-07:00

Sax, flute, penny whistle--
he was the breath of DMB.

No one can replace him.
They can only hope to disguise the void.

Rest in peace, Roi.
Thank you for the beauty.

Curfews

2008-08-11T21:04:00.000-07:00

The tornado came down directly upon the cemetery where Aura Hay was buried in 1886, and that means something to me. There was only one witness to its formation; his name was John, he was fourteen, and he had been living with his mother and two brothers in a dilapidated shack in the woods. As it happened there was a clear view across a nearby field to the cemetery hill, and after that black vortex touched down it plowed straight toward John’s family’s shack. He said he felt like a mouse in front of a stampeding elephant, and as trees began to rise out of the earth and fly about his family threw themselves flat to the floorboards. They were completely engulfed in the heart of the funnel (it sound liked a train was coming, John said) but it left their wretched shack intact, and moved on to cause greater damage to the rural subdivisions to the east. It was when John and his brothers wandered in that direction the next morning—to gawk at the horror—that a local news meteorologist stopped and interviewed them; and that man’s subsequent reporting on the evening news is how I found out about the whole thing.

Eel River, Indiana is not what you would call a bustling city. Once upon a time the military built enormous war machines in the factories here—those towering mechanized landwalkers known as Crollhorses, which won the Second World War for Amerika, if you believe the history books—but that era had long since past and now, today, Eel River was the absolute last target on any army’s map. There was nothing anyone wanted here, just people, and commercial development, and a struggling artists’ community in the heart of town. Even the river had ceased being important; where once there were annual, massive log jams from the lumberjack camps down south, now there were only the occasional sport fishermen or kayakers. One positive thing could be said for the Eel, however, and that was its purity. No river in Amerika was so clean, and you can bet there were some courageous government officials laying down the mandates to keep it that way. It had become a source of local pride after the factories shutdown, but it didn’t bring any real money into town.

The ghosts brought in more money than the river did, and they were, officially and on the books: “an unconfirmed phenomena, generally believed to be a localized hysteria of the indigenous populace, popularized by common lore of the region.”

Any given person on the street, however, might be able to recount seeing just such a phenomenon, and sometimes under greatly unsettling circumstances. When people talked about the ghost town of Gnaw Bone forty-one miles southwest of Eel River, they honestly meant the specters implied by that phrase, not simply the long-dead boomtown it was in truth. There were missing persons, strange murders, all manner of unsolved crimes around the county. There was even a cryptozoological mystery known informally as the Crumstown Slayer, to which several cattle mutilations, two dead dogs in a tree, and one bled-dry horse were attributed. No one had ever seen or photographed it, just the gruesome things that they believed was its handiwork. The complete lack of any tracks, spoor, or left-behind fur or feathers created rumors that something dark and intangible from Gnaw Bone had gotten bored waiting around for lost tourists to wander into its range, and had gone out a-hunting. I was fifteen and my folks still made me keep to a nine o’clock curfew if I was going to be anywhere west of Peach Road or south of Kern, even when nothing unexplained had happened for two summers running.

But then the tornado came, just like Aura (dead at twenty-two) told me it would, that day on Crumstown Highway, when the corn was six-foot high. And I set my own curfew a little earlier: indoors by dusk, and prayers said before midnight.

Etymology

2008-08-07T08:56:00.000-07:00

Someone help me define "antrobelphic".

Proofs

2008-08-06T15:07:00.000-07:00

In the afternoon I reach a point, many days, when I have to lock my computer up, push the chair back from the desk, exit the cube and the building and go to the river. It's only across the street.

Today I walked along the riverwalk. There were tall, small-blossomed magenta colored flowers growing up from the water level, with large spiderwebs strung in-between. There was the submerged shopping cart, the same one that's been there for years, looking like an Atlantic wreck, minus the blind fishes of crush-depth.

I wandered by the huge tree I don't know the name of--leaves look like aspen but I don't know about that. The bark is impossibly craggy and thick, like the kind of rough ironwork you see in museums that speaks of tonnes. Huge black ants clambered up and down the exterior, not doing anything apparent, maybe guarding, maybe on their lunch break.

Underneath the bridge, where I always look upward and remember scenes from The Host, there was nothing but girders and shadows. I leaned on the concrete wall for a moment, looking down at the unhealthy water, remembering how it almost covered this wall at flood stage.

I ambled back, sweating. The sun is such a presence in August, like someone in the room who has finally stopped tapping their foot and approached you, grabbed you by the jaw and forced you to acknowledge their jurisdiction. That's when I stopped and looked over at the grapevine tendrils bobbing in the breeze, hanging off the trees that are hanging off the embankment.

Some kind of insect eggs had warbled and curled and ruined the smaller leaves. Interesting. I could see the orange and black of some small beetle hiding just inside one of the curls. Interesting. And then...

In between the tiniest of the tendrils there were spiderwebs again, two of them, except so tiny as to be almost invisible, and yet exactly in the style of the big ones. And in the center of each web: a spider like a dust mote, sitting, waiting.

I may be the first and last person to witness those particular creatures living their simple, intense, microcosmic lives. Both of them had eyes, and some miniscule matrix of a mind organizing the movement of their atoms into a purpose. And both would have lived, hunted, mated, and died completely unknown to us, completely unwitnessed, their effect upon the universe unfelt but actual, unnoticed but irreplaceable.

Cymbals

2008-08-06T15:03:00.000-07:00

My true home is banked inside
such melodious thunderstorms.

Someday I'll turn you onto them
and "sky" will carry more blue.

Meanwhile, the red of your eyes
is a lightning I need words for:

Cumulonimbus pulmonary clouds.
In my world, you can buy back virginity

but no one seems to need it.

Slipping

2008-08-03T20:31:00.000-07:00

Jeans slipping down a moon like a thigh

A moon like a thigh slipping out of the night sky

The night sky slipping down a raccoon highway

My highway is green mists of night slipping by

Green moons, white thighs, a slip of time

The death’s head hawkmoth spreading wide

Orbs of eye in the head lights tonight

Black masks, blindfolds, a luna moth in flight

Joss Whedon, Super Genius

2008-07-17T14:34:00.001-07:00

Day 10,807

2008-07-16T20:01:00.000-07:00

Still don't know why I'm here, what I am, or what this place actually is metaphysically-speaking.

I just like to remind myself of those facts once in a while. Then I get on with the excitement of going to see The Dark Knight on Friday. Woooooooo!

Travelogue

2008-07-06T20:56:00.000-07:00

Port of origin: Parts unknown.

To be alone
as all living things are alone
secluded, if not in placement
then in soul.

To bear a mind-sewn quilt
stitched in the steady and unsteady
hand of the senses.

To wear a mantle
of inseparable flesh
and know someday you will be parted.

To fight with intangible why,
run with, to, or from intangible
why and watch it endless elude.

The plot of the weave
of a fabric softener sheet
and the fractal arms of a spiral galaxy
equal in mystery.

The incoming birdsong,
the rabbit's movements in the overgrown yard,
the unexpected chemical burn of love
equally out of control.

I did not puncture the window screen.
I did not make the screen.
I did not make the air and light
passing through the puncture.
I did not even make this eye,
or the ink, or the language.

To inherit all the world from past
and dwell in a body of luck.

To crew this shell of compounded fortunes
appointed by chance, fated to choose.

To send forth ships like leaf skeletons
and wait for word of other shores.

To grow drowsy with the effort
of such metaphysic alchemy.

To put the pen down
with nothing resolved.

The Rand McNally Blues

2008-07-03T20:06:00.000-07:00

I was searching the lines of a book for answers when the car entered a new state. The name of the state was Summer, and we were cruising through it for several miles before I finally looked up. Like Iowa and Georgia before, the landscape was hardly any different. I should have recognized it immediately from dozens of road trips past, the ramshackle snow cone stands and rusted gas station oases, grass longer than a mother's hair, swifts and swallows skimming the erupted roots. Yet too much had changed: someone built a silver skyscraper on a distant ridge, the dust was less flavorful, and inside my head the clockwork cogs had been swapped out for a pulsing atom of quartz. To be honest, I felt comforted that I could burn the book anytime, let its ashes trail out the passenger window without a care. But that book was our atlas, and the roads aren't well marked, and lately I think all the compasses point inward. A fork is inevitable, but for now it's Red Arrow Highway all day.

Staple Back Into Place This Mortal Coil...

2008-06-23T04:24:00.000-07:00

Tim Russert.
Stan Winston.
George Carlin.

Enough with the dying already! We can't take much more of this! We needed these people, you know? Hell, Carlin alone was among the great pillars of reality. Now who's going to keep us in check?

Jon Stewart, I'm looking at you.

R.I.P., guys. You will be missed.

Dearly Departed

2008-06-20T20:45:00.000-07:00

He was gone, just like that.
Not even a note.
No smiling geisha with an armful
of cryptic cue cards slowly revealed.
The skywriters held no clues.
We looked into the spinning of spiders
and only found unconnected webs.
The radiation blast
did not capture his shadow.
He was a phantom almost overnight.
Gone, just gone.
The court reporter read it back:
It wasn’t anything we said.
He was just gone.
So why was that purple tabby all a-grin?
I bet it had something
to do with that blonde girl
and all her colored gemstone baubles.
Drink us, they said
but his blood samples were all
clean as the bib of an old sleeping nun
in the shadow of a peach tree.
He must be chasing after the tail of summer.
Must be.
It’s the only conclusion that
makes no sense.

It Doesn't Hang Together

2008-06-19T15:39:00.000-07:00

Regretting the last line just long enough
to cross it

that acute sensation of existence

(featherweight heartthrob)

a life of choice given but unchosen,
unspecified warrant for animation

served, you are
imperceptibly raped by your own soul

soft pet caged in a sunbeam,
cars faulting by the open window

a cheater’s peace
of crushed greens

Commonplace, commonplace and desperate

to shell and fuck,
a stem with interesting leaves

the first and foremost crack in the foundation.

Note To Future Mark

2008-06-17T14:33:00.000-07:00

Dude,

Today's weather was as good as it gets around here. The sunlight was perfect, the wind was perfect, and the temperature was made for walking. If you ever find that time machine and decide to come back, today would be an excellent destination. After you've gone back to the 50's and talked to Rexroth, of course. But immediately after that--you totally have to come back to June 17th, 2008. Heck, bring him with you. Remember, though, that as cool it might be to see real, live dinosaurs, you'll probably just get yourself eaten. So skip it.

- You

p.s. September 11th. 1995.

Signs And Wonders

2008-06-12T08:18:00.000-07:00

Finished with threshing the mowers sit dead in the pit of this cochlear on-ramp; concentric circles like alien fields blaze with the heat of a June sun at noon. And what scant meanings could attach the image from retina to hypothalamus and back? It’s just municipal trivialities, yet wrings recollection from the sponging cortices. Fifty-seconds later a green arrow still ticks, forgotten for these words. I rush in, jot and expand the thought into a red-tailed hawk unfolded by wind. Cool fall air, crisp blue sky. My how time passes in the mind…

Bush who...?

2008-06-11T08:55:00.000-07:00

Oh, we still have a sitting president... I almost forgot.

Absence Before And After

2008-06-10T19:18:00.000-07:00

The lime-bright spaces of being when you’re here
and adjoining darknesses to follow
stack together the ricket-wood structure that seems
to hover under every insubstantial observation
I lay down like floorboards and call my current thought.

Hook ‘round, fall back, veer nearer my vicinity,
my invisible allocation of intentional warmth
which you know, my superlative, the waxing majority
blows waves in the wheat of you, gusting adoring
with the draft of a nest your blue egg never forfeits.

I sit here, the surgeon with a surfeit of patients,
a stethoscope’s bell pressed firm to his aegis
reaching forth to stenograph the slightest murmur of a life;
long lost painter with a palette of embers,
you must remember, I am your knife.

Peeve

2008-05-30T06:47:00.001-07:00

Today's peeve is brought to you by the letter "Y".

As in, "Y-Y-Y do they do this!"

Executives who skim their emails. When you take the time and care to address all possible questions in your reply, only to get a reflexive email shot back at you asking about something already covered in your message.

Nothing says "I didn't bother to read it" like one of those off-the-cuff, frantic replies to your own, well-composed email.

I gotta get out of the office more...

May This Time

2008-05-28T18:38:00.001-07:00

The sun repeats its course. Exactly ten or eleven years to the day, more like than not, this shade of orange gold wrapped around the building fronts and shadowing underpasses. The grass was this high, crazy high, ecstatic wild but not crawling, not yet. It’s still too cool.

The sun repeats its course. Autumn and spring feel like the same thing if you all-of-a-sudden wake up in the middle of one, like regaining consciousness in the in-between light. Dawn? Dusk? Does your body feel when it comes out of the west?

The sun repeats its course. Exactly ten or eleven or so years ago, more than likely, this particular wavelength of sunset radiated off the deep dark windows in the closed-up stores, the shells of factories. And people were driving around, paying much too little for gas.

The sun repeats its course, exactly enough to turn the crescent-handled deadbolted doors on memories stored eleven to twelve distant years ago. The same dim spot in the lee of Bamber’s Superette. But now there are gilded weeds straining in that abandoned parking lot. You know it maybe, the chain-fenced one across from Raco?

The sun repeats its course. Maybe not to the micron, but to the aging eyes. Close enough for me to weave a random weedy vine through my back fence, in the dim of the lee of Alvin’s garage. The bare fields like bald spots edged in wild green hair, the highest plants catching light like eleven and twelve and thirteen years before.

This shade of orange gold… I know it so well. I want to disappear into it, with it. There are so many green strawberries, so many more white blossoms, on my in-laws planted rows. We both want the same thing: summer.

The sun repeats its course. I repeat an oath under my breath as I walk down the office hallway, in the last hour of my day. This was earlier. I find that if I say the first line, I am compelled to say the rest. Something like Franny and her automatic prayer. It’s the oath of someone who is trying to be good. I repeat it. The sun grows lower,

and cottonwood fluff hits the Saint Joseph River, until its like caramel and dust.

Accidental Birth

2008-05-20T18:41:00.001-07:00

She said, "All I did
was exhale into a picture frame.
I fogged the glass
and someone slapped a back on it,
wired it for hanging.
And all it really is
was a sigh of surrender
and they caught it like you might catch
a spider's web,
with a can of spray paint
and some construction paper."

The Claws Insist

2008-05-16T21:32:00.000-07:00

They try to sell me disappointment
this ragged legion of ochlocrats
but I have hidden my purse from the herds’ hands
and pay out love to the worthy cats

I think they hunted the Florida panthers
and culled their numbers in greed and spite
until the mythical skunk apes packed up
leaving behind them only the night

For certain sometimes I speak to be listening
painting ribbons on the timeworn stage
a sudden truth like a bursting spotlight
illuminating an empty cage

There is a loudmouthed cat here
who grooms himself with a shiv and tongue
where beats the heart like a Spanish guitar
collecting quarters in the sun

There is a rhythmic séance
inducing tremors by loops divine
felicitous and so frightful lovely
it carries weapons of a gentler kind

Pfilip of Everywhere Conquers The Moon - Part I.

2008-05-09T17:06:00.000-07:00

Pfilip was not an old wizard by any stretch of the imagination. An old wizard would have, for instance, a flowing white beard and knobby-knuckled hands tipped with fingernails that had reached geologic proportions. However, Pfilip was not young. There were lines around his eyes and a shadow of grimness about his mouth. A better explanation might be to say that Pfilip had the sort of face one could observe and, without too much effort, visualize what it would look like in another twenty years, yelling at children to stay off the lawn. His wispy brown hair was showing a few streaks of gray already, mostly hidden beneath a gaudy, misshapen hat that resembled a chef’s toque, except the hatter had given it a warped brim and topped the whole mess off with a sort of squashed mushroom cap, the edge of which was festooned with many small charms. Overall the shape of it suggested a spool of thread plunked down atop the wizard's head; and the top of the hat had been collecting fallen seedpods and burrs all day long. There is little point in asking what color it was—the hatter, apparently, could not make up his mind.

Crouched beside Pfilip was a boy of perhaps sixteen or seventeen years of age, with (as they say) a clear brow and eyes aflame. He had blue eyes, blue as a robin’s egg, and silvery hair that fell to his cheekbones. A fierceness played about his features, and his smile showed a lot of teeth, but then he reached up to pull his hair away from his eyes, and in this movement there was undeniable gentleness. He pulled a small, steel knife from its scabbard and flipped it around his fingers, fidgeting.

“Who were my real parents?” the boy asked idly. He and his mentor were hidden in the undergrowth, watching smoke rise from the chimney of a secluded cabin.

“I told you,” Pfilip whispered, never taking his eyes from the smoke, “you were an Elven prince who was stolen from his kingdom by a beautiful wizardress and given to me for safekeeping.”

A moment of silence followed, in which the intermittent sounds of the forest testified to the sublime serenity all around them.

“Why won’t you ever give me a real answer?” Baffin sighed, though he made sure to keep his voice low. It should be noted that the cabin in the clearing was, proportionately, like unto a castle. Whoever dwelt there was large enough to turn a doorknob five feet in diameter, and thirty-six feet off the ground. The serene smoke rising from the chimney was a bonfire’s plume.

Pfilip turned toward the younger man, though his eyes still watched the smoke. He pursed his lips thoughtfully, then shook his head. “Alright. You don’t have parents. A stork dropped you in a cabbage patch. Can we focus on the task at hand, please? You might have to actively avoid dying at any given time.”

“Lessons for life,” Baffin muttered, and re-sheathed the knife. He shifted on his haunches, stretched a bit, prepared for a run.

“Now, you do remember what to look for, yes?”

“It will be tiny, smaller than my hand,” Baffin replied, speaking from rote memory. “Probably hidden among the gemstones of the hearth, pressed into the wood there. A small… orange… glass… moon.”

“With a drowsy smile and heavy-lidded eyes,” corrected Pfilip. He flexed his fingers as though preparing to snatch the object out of the thin air in front of him.

Baffin looked at his mentor with incredulity. “Really, how many different glass moons do you think she’s going to have in there?”

“If it were me trying to hide the thing? Hundreds. Literally, hundreds.”

“Great. I can see you’re going to be trucks of fun once this is done. It’s really that valuable?”

Pfilip reached out and tousled the boy’s hair, simply because he realized he was older, and believed he could do that sort of thing now. It was probably the first time in his entire life that he had ever tousled anybody’s hair. It was a fraternal sort of action. And he was somewhat amused when the boy knocked his hand away and slugged him not-too-gently in the arm.

“Baffin, if we get the moon back, you won’t believe the places we’ll go."

* * *

They watched the cabin in silence awhile longer, until suddenly a puff of sparks blew from the chimney, and the smoke died down.

“That’s it,” Pfilip whispered, “she’s finished cooking her spell. Now she’ll leave the cabin and head toward the standing stones. If she isn’t around the corner and out of earshot by the time the door latches, we wait until tomorrow and either try again or seek another plan.”

“I wish we didn’t have to speak the chant aloud,” mused Baffin. His mentor smiled.

“Well, you have to—that’s why it’s called a chant. From the Latin canere, ‘to sing’.”

“You and your Latin…”

Pfilip’s smile broadened, not at the boy, but at the prospect of finally laying claim (again) to the elusive artifact hidden within the witch’s abode. “Someday we’ll visit that facet of the Gem, and I’ll get you a book on it. Watch, now. The door opens…”

[To be continued...]

The William Tell Overture vs. The 1812 Overture

2008-05-03T06:33:00.000-07:00

Not. The same. Thing.

I must apologize for accidentally spreading misinformation about this fact. Rachel, for the record, the 1812 Overture is what they play during the fireworks.

The William Tell Overture is what the Lone Ranger rides around listening to.

Yeesh... but then, nobody else caught it either. You can thank my wife for this sudden tidbit of enlightenment & clarification.

Happy Saturday, all.

Crosshair

2008-05-02T09:18:00.000-07:00

Chamber a word—
thumb “confluence” into line
and before it, “our mortal”
the hammer shot forward
with the force of “My lips require. . .”

Then stand there
blindfold slipping from one eye,
and be my William Tell overture.

As spent syllables
fall and roll
a golden bullet caught in your teeth.

That is how you do it.
That is how to take me down.

Afterword

2008-04-30T14:18:00.000-07:00

I will wait just inside the door to the underworld for you. That gray-black stone tile thick with dust, just before the sudden descent (rollercoaster angle) is where I will crouch and breathe on my hands for warmth. I will wait for you, so that we will go down together, to introduce each other as a good man and a good woman among the milling souls of the recently dead. I think they will greet us as people always do when thrust together into a situation strange, worrisome, but calm enough and free enough from signs of peril that panic does not seem a natural response. I think they will welcome us, and ask us what we think, and if we have any news from the world above. And they will already know the answer before it leaves our lips: No, sorry, it doesn't look like the government's going to send relief anytime soon. The living world, like a howling blizzard, will cease to seem like a thing to return to, and we'll all begin exploring the uncharted lanes of what comes next. We will move down the subterranean mountain (whose mountain? I've heard this before) carrying the coals of a future hearth to where existence opens, the plains of the waiting flowers.

But I digress...

2008-04-10T20:43:00.000-07:00

Any previous statements I may have made about not turning this into another chock-full-of-poetry journal should be summarily trashed. I know I won't be able to make it to Chicory tomorrow, but I do have a poem to share:

Cryptozoology by Mark Sniadecki

You were such a delicate
creature - deer come down
to the tranquil pondside
glade

- carried poetry
in gold strands of spider-
web laced in your
womanly antlers.

You left behind
evidence like bedded down
tufts of grass
and odd shed skins -

Then one day
I accidentally dressed
in huntsman's gear
- crashed aloud,
clumsy in the cattails -

and now I hold only
this tintype
of slender legs dis-
appearing between
trees I cannot uproot.

The Seal

2008-04-06T06:16:00.000-07:00

I have the original graphic (slightly larger/sharper) if anyone wants a copy.

The Ballad of Allison Loan

2008-04-02T14:41:00.001-07:00

She was some kind of regent
like an orphanage queen;
her blessings had been overcast.
They took her away
in a wagon ash-gray
and a janitor emptied her past.

For seventeen years
she amassed birthday candles
until on a midsummer's night:
a god with a hammer
and one eye for cold steel
layed her out with a peregrine light.

I met her in Texas
in bars rimmed with salt;
I nursed back her last dying coal.
There were tinfoil stars
in the heavenly vault
but none of them paid at the pole.

Where Thursday's wind took her
I know second-hand;
where the alley dogs hunch in the rain.
Some stone carver paying
his granddaughter's rent
will chip out her final refrain.

Fallen

2008-03-31T08:17:00.000-07:00

For K, and S, and sometimes Y

Castaway from a heavenly court
You pulled aside a shielded wing
To reveal the darkness
That pulsed through you first, last
When your Maker insisted
Your desires are not worth the Creation.

It is easy for me to advise rebellion.
She is not my mother.
I am not chained in blood.
Still, hear and heed as now I say:
The sin of the tree
Does not rule the apple.
You have sweetness untold.
You are yet a queen of autumn.

Night Visitor (slightly revised)

2008-03-29T22:50:00.000-07:00

It was a silverfish on the wall.
In the cone-glow of a lampshade.

They elicit
bad dreams of housedeeps.

A spider, you think a loner.
Execution, then forget it.

A neatly-folded moth, narrow squared
wings is a grandmother's attic.

It's that fishy name,
you think of how they must teem.

In the dark walls
their movements a chaos of crossings
under and over.

Schoolcraft. Skittery hexes.
Lousy with legs.

Having seen one sprint
its wending way down textured paint,
silver-flash
you don't want to take your eyes off.

I hate them.
Please, deliver us from the creeps.

Springtime, all I want to see
are ladybug orgies in the woodwork.

They make you dream
of vaulted ceilings you cannot reach.

Of Absence

2008-03-28T22:17:00.000-07:00

Nothing is different beyond the window save the absence of sunlight, and the accompanying cool that goes with that territory. Our behavior has shifted, yes--the sound of cars comes less often. Thinking about how many billions of repetitions of this coming and going of light.

No, that wasn't a grammatically correct sentence.

The walls of the house create the illusion of so much more separation and safety than they truly provide. At this moment there are things, mammalian predators, snakes, lightning bolts, that could be my accidental end and they are on the same playing field, just separated by miles, or cages, or aquarium tanks. A cough in someone's chest in Botswana.

Is that even a country anymore?

But enough of this dire rumination. The fact is I am in a place of relative safety. All things considered, there's no finer place on earth. And the night is quiet--I haven't even got any music playing. Ten years ago I'd have popped on the radio immediately. Which sounds like a very good idea.

"Hotel California", 1976. The Eagles. This could be Heaven, or this could be Hell.

I've been reminiscing this evening. Googling the names of ghosts, happening upon an old blog, remembering, remembering. We haven't had that spirit here since 1969. I haven't embarked on a serious work of fiction in a long time. Something completely dark and indulgent, vampires and sex and obscene language. Twisted ideas and whorled morals. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Ain't that the truth?

Well, I for one hope it is.

Got big plans on haunting Rush Road someday, freaking out teenagers, drunken farmer's daughters, making the eyes of raccoons glow. Being confused with the moonlit mist, being mistaken for a rustle in the wet corn leaves. The music never receding like it does in the studio, but simply continuing on, forever, like that mythical cut of "Hey Jude" that never, ever ends.

I'm drifting a bit, under no influence whatsoever, except the release of pressure--the decompression of a boy shoved into a man-suit shoved into the presence of the Vice President of Finance who, to say true, is really a pretty cool guy... but that's a bit more of "the life" than I ever want to pack on my back.

Still, those rumored days of "things getting better" have not yet come to pass as prophesied, and so I've continued to work the extra hours and buy the extra time and deal (poorly) with the extra stress, all the time aching to unload the whole persona, the whole bloody routine, and return to the things I love like a freaking swallow to Capistrano on speed.

And on that note, the room is quiet. The lacy edge of sunlight racing over the planet towards me is a few hours closer than it was before. Had I a letter, I would seal it. Had I an auditorium, I'd douse the house lights. All I have is myself, and down come the eyelids, on cue.

Buenos noches.

Dearest Friend

2008-03-18T04:18:00.000-07:00

Last night, I dreamt of an afternoon horizon full of moons--it was beautiful. Eight of them, at least, all full and enormous. I couldn't tell which one was the real one, I only knew that the rest of them were reflections and echoes. An old ghost riding next to me (he pops up in my dreams now and then) made a comment that suggested they portended some spectacular new moon in the coming days. Yes, that's right... a new moon, the one you cannot see. He said we would have to be sure to check it out.

For Caesar, they say, the Ides of March were full of dark portents.

For you, born three days hence, they have filled my mind with a bright vision of wonder.

Happy birthday, Sara Eve. :)

Whiling

2008-03-15T07:44:00.001-07:00

I sit in the grass
making chains of adverbs
to lay atop your proverbial crown.
Necks of daisies bend back
for my gangliest laurels.
When a small early locust lands
on your thigh, with yellow-green legs
you smile spritely.
Expertly.
Aboriginally.
It is like you are the base state of glory
the world returns to
after every war.

The Adversary

2008-03-14T03:32:00.001-07:00

This is something I wrote awhile ago, a couple years ago at least. Right after reading Stephen King's The Stand, which got me to thinking about a character who has been my own Randall Flagg, my own Crimson King. Believe it or not I used to write fiction all the time. Tons of it. I've got hundreds of pages of unfinished business. Worlds on pause. The question I hit myself up with all the time is, when are you going to wake them up again?

Ozihael had learned the lesson. Evil—that which seeks to destroy all which wishes to create—must work alone. The singular flaw of evil was its self-consuming nature, its tendency to spin out of control with the force of its own malice. To have minions, to build intricate plans with pawns and armies—that was where evil built-in its own downfall. Ozihael, therefore, sought no allies. He made himself strong, smart, and most of all careful—and he did his work alone. He did not plan—he maneuvered his way among the plans of others, smashing the cogs as he went. He did not raise an army—he was the army.

Minions could turn on you. They could have sudden attacks of conscience or sanity, or be bought by your adversaries. They were a wild card. A risk.

And who doesn’t know the old adage about the best-laid plans? Going into a world with a plan for how to destroy it was foolhardy at best. Instead, Ozihael slipped into pre-existing plans as fluidly as he walked between the worlds. He looked, saw what was being created, sought the lynchpin, and pulled it out.

Sometimes he set himself up as a dictator. This worked well in worlds where nobody knew much magic, or where the weapons were primitive. He looked for lives that could be torn apart. He looked for beauty that could be tortured into ruin. And always he kept an eye open for a reaction.

How long would the Creator allow such atrocities to go on? The answer seemed to be indefinitely. And that pained Ozihael all the more, because as much as he wanted to face down his maker, he wanted that Being to prove more kind than himself. What kind of Creator would sit back and let Ozihael take Its creations to pieces? Was It a coward? He wanted to see a thick vein of hypocrisy pulsing in his maker’s mind—who would create such wonderful realities, all with such loving attention to detail, and yet only look on impotently as one among them stood up and challenged, spilling blood and raining fire as he waited? It had supposedly given Ozihael and all the other souls of the worlds this unlimited freedom, this Will to do as they pleased, but how could It? How could It possibly, when they were all trapped within It? What Ozihael wanted was to see the Creator make a slip, tip Its hand, show Its true desire—that all of Its creations should play by Its rules. Let It force my hand, Ozihael thought. And I will show It just what free will means...

Thus far, although a trail of dead and dying worlds littered his history, Ozihael had not been able to draw even a disapproving glance from his Creator. Except....

There was that young man, Pfilip. His once-friend, Pfilip. And that little tart that traveled with him, Hestia, with the amethyst eyes and dark green hair. He had known them, been in their presence, looked them over. They were no different than he, yet perhaps they were the Creator’s pawns, Its pitiful operatives. Killing them might be the act to push things over the edge, but hunting them seemed... a waste. A Creator that cared more about two dewy-eyed lovers than the burning of an entire world was such a ridiculous thought that Ozihael rarely entertained it. When he did give this consideration, the day often ended with a thrashing or a slaughter, and a rant directed at the sky.

Ozihael knew his maker could manifest Itself anywhere, possibly inside his own mind, but yelling into a mirror was too much like madness...

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2008-03-03T21:44:00.000-08:00

Artists Among Us

2008-02-14T20:05:00.000-08:00

I remember once, a long time ago, my youngest uncle (still in college or maybe even high school at the time) speculated that his perfect job would be to work as a hired observer. What you would do is follow one of these high-powered, too-busy-to-notice-life executive types around throughout their day, and at the end of the day report to them the little things they didn't notice: the sparrow building a nest in the big letter "A" of a merchandise store; or the little child walking down the street holding its mother's hand, a three-scoop ice cream cone leaning precariously toward disaster; or the missing button on a secretary's jacket; or the reflection of a crowd in the window of an idling taxi.

This occupation does exist, but it doesn't pay well.

Quick Look

2008-02-13T12:24:00.001-08:00

I forgot it could be blue up there,
that when clouds
move aside, even in winter
it's electric blue.

Those crows
still holstered in the trees
now appear
conspicuous black
instead of blending like shadows.

The dosed year
shows signs of icy petals slipping
apart, barely
in the afternoon sunlight.

Sunlight in winter strikes,
an alluring stranger
who knows she is out afterhours
and cares.

Ink On Snow

2008-02-11T12:35:00.001-08:00

A murder of crows took up residence outside our building for the day. From the corner of my eye I've caught their black shapes swooping up high to the rooftop or down from the vine-wound trees. We worked until late night last night, Sunday night. We were at it again this morning, numbers and data, data, data. Eventually I felt I had earned a few minutes of nothingness, so I went to refill my water cup and stood at the wide metal blinds, looking out at the crows. They walk, did you ever notice that? Robins hop and grackles stalk but crows just sort of saunter. They were looking for food. I started remembering every time I needed to draw an illustration of a crow, and the pieces of them I could not recall well--shape of the head, shape of the tail, proportions... It's not a good life they have, exactly. How bleak and desperate frigid these last few days have been, and imagine no shelter, anywhere, and only scraps and bits of carrion to keep you warm. Then again, nobody imposes a structure upon their lives--or more precisely, they impose no structure upon themselves other than the daily cycle of surviving. If they have politics then it's something immediate, brash, and quickly resolved. If they have order then it's without a mission statement or employee handbook. They meet no greater quotas than the needs of their bodies. The only repetitive thing they do is caw, caw, caw. And I would rather listen to that free, coarse music than hear their fingers rattling tiny keys.

Wind Chills and Wax Museums

2008-01-30T12:10:00.000-08:00

I escaped a cube only to be caught in a bubble. The bubble, at least, has a door. It is still somewhat cube-shaped, however. The predominant color is gray, which may or not technically be a color. At least it's warm. In another universe, a somewhat damaged version of myself is toiling outdoors in this subzero madness, coming home chapped in the evenings to a solitary domicile wherein he makes art, more art, and after that, art. In another universe, a somewhat pitiful version of myself is driving back from a retail job and still writing incessantly about a high school dreamscape. In another universe, things are better than they are now, but it's the sheer "how" of it that escapes me. Escapes all of us, I think.

The next several days are going to be arduous in the extreme. Not back-breaking, which I could respect, or emotionally draining, which (in the words of one fictional lawyer) "could be understood, if not condoned." Simply numbing, frustrating, and drawn-out. The rumor among the prisoners is: there's a light at the end of the tunnel, and we're digging for that light right now. The rumor among the prisoners is also: that tunnel is gonna collapse, just before we reach it. Nobody knows. They're all walking in those alternate universes, down those myriad optional roads, under optional suns and moons. Yet somehow everyone comes crashing down square into the center of the present, and they land together, grudgingly or happily. I am simply waiting for the bubble to pop. If my life is one of numbers now, then hear this--the number of things more important than a society-sanctioned occupation are limitless. The rules of existence are ours to follow or flaunt, and mostly we good-naturedly carry on for the sake of a peaceful chance at the end.

But sometimes, sometimes... don't you just want to dash it all to pieces, strike the set, raid the costume closet again? Maybe that's only me. Maybe it's the work of jesters.

Trite

2008-01-23T17:51:00.000-08:00

I sat downstairs eating kisses all evening watching Stephen Fry's Q.I. and letting the day's weights slip off my shoulders, and now I've come upstairs and checked out ninetynights.com and my email for signs of life, and thinking about the fast-writes that Julie Frayer assigned to us that great semester of creative writing, when it was Eli and Paul and me and Mayor McCheese, and times were different, for one thing I didn't say things like "times were different", because I knew perfectly well that people have always, always been people. So here I am trying the fast-write thing again, non-stop tappety-tap-tap on the keys, dragging in whatever stimulus presents itself, not deleting if at all possible, the jars of sand on the computer desk brought to me from Hawaii, the empty Pepsi bottle, the Feathers McGraw keychain, and what this makes me remember is, yeah, that class again—I was so thick into my fantasy worlds then, building societies and wildernesses, lifting up characters I wanted to watch on screen, if only someone would make my movie—and I could never write a script, really, the one time I tried was at IUSB and they roped in a couple drama students to read it aloud (not just me, everyone else's too) and I must have been firetruck red, and now my concentration is being interrupted by some loud woman erupting from my wife's computer's speakers—some little piece of "news" that's circulating today, apparently—and anyway where did I leave off? Right, right, the play, the play's the thing and boy, hasn't—

—back, had to bring the dog inside from our wonderful arctic wonderland, ever seen an abominable snowman flip out when three dozen balloons of cocaine burst inside him? Okay, if you haven't seen that episode of Robot Chicken you're severely worried about me, but that's alright, fortunately my bro has the same sense of humor and we laugh when nobody in their right mind probably would. Yeah, that's him working his tail off in the warehouse where they only promote family members and screw the rest every chance they get, but enough biography let's talk about your chances in the cosmic race where you've slipped on your diamond running shoes and found you've got a soul, a rather nice one shining and looking for a reason, any reason really not to fly the coop at the first opportunity, and lucky for you you ol' boondoggle horny toad there are oodles of reasons around every bend, not the least of which is spring who even now turns restless in her bed, ready to rise and tie on the green dress one more time again, but until then, better keep your shirt on, Peggy. It's cold. Real cold.

Too Soon, Way Too Soon

2008-01-22T15:23:00.000-08:00

In Memoriam

Heath Andrew Ledger

April 4, 1979 - January 22, 2008

Christening (first revision)

2008-01-14T20:55:00.000-08:00

I.

Call it ritual send-off,
call it amulet for the soul—

the smearing
cleansing a past of fault

—breaking an innocence
at the outset, in the hope
a smashing god won't try again.

II.

Vessels shatter—
a brow whets,
lonely waves afflict the prow.

A poet is launched—
transparent love
the glass crashed without ceremony.

III.

Ships, which are always spoken of
as women, and for that matter
so is the sea.

Cheshire Smile

2008-01-09T17:52:00.000-08:00

Imagine stepping into Alice's Wonderland, among the mad people. Condense down the stress of trying to keep fifty kittens neatly corralled in a circle of chalk. Boil frustration until it gets real sludgy, then use it to fill a quagmire the size of Rhode Island. Walk down into that mess with nothing but an English degree and some poignant high school memories to protect you. Your words transubstantiate into little lead pellets, and in exasperation you chuck them wildly into the tar. Following the teachings of Homer, you try to extract your words with your hands, and then extract your hands with your teeth. Gets hard to breathe, doesn't it? And the whole time—every minute—you hope to Joe Pesci that nobody notices you are completely naked. This would make a fantastic nightmare, if only it weren't a metaphor. The best thing I saw all day was a river in flood, ignoring every human boundary with gleeful abandon. Cold January air tastes so good...

Put that on your Excel spreadsheet and smoke it, world.

Darja, Winter

2007-12-21T05:19:00.000-08:00

My voice is cold asleep.
Down-to-your-bones naked
you stretch white legs and
darken eyes ever earlier.
The flowstone fields where
cars freeze to nothing harden
beyond what we are willing
to believe. I mound up heatless
bits of word and suck your
crystal fingers, tongue-stuck
and waiting for clear roads.
I shovel your hair from my
alley mouth; you roll over
sigh, and steal the covers.

When Flying Pigs Freeze Over

2007-12-19T18:02:00.001-08:00

All evidence to the contrary, I have neither:

(a) died, nor
(b) dropped off the face of the planet

Happy Holidays, Everyone! The great beast of an office isn't through with me yet, but I braved tonsils and scaled the larynx just to pop in and say "hello."

Hello.

There will be many New Year's resolutions, up to and including:

#1 - Increasing my presence in social circles & decreasing my presence in business meetings
#2 - Reconnecting with all of my online friends
#3 - Making more artwork in general, be it drawings or paintings
#4 - Attending writers' meetings regularly (and getting Charmi's book back to her!)
#5 - Using more images on my blog, now that I've refreshed myself on the HTML syntax

And showing up at Chicory for readings again. This last time I skipped-out to attend my family's holiday function--totally selfish, right? ;)

Now, I'm off to Livejournal to spread holiday cheer and further evidence of my continuing warm-blooded existence. Fa-la-la-la-la!

Later.

Captain Sellout and the Film of Tomorrow

2007-11-18T07:00:00.001-08:00

Last night, I forsook an opportunity to read poetry in favor of viewing a major Hollywood motion picture that took copious liberties with a hallmark of the English language. I'm now sitting alone in my office, waiting for the men in black coats with patches on the elbows to arrive and strip me of my English degree. But I'm still smiling.

Alright, perhaps the smile is a bit forced, but I really had a great time last night. My wife and I made a spontaneous decision to drive more than an hour to Portage, IN because it's the closest IMAX movie screen around here. I used to work in a movie theatre--I have tasted of that dark knowledge, the double-oil popcorn batch--and let me tell you, I haven't seen a place jumping this much since 1996. People streamed in and out of the doors, there was neon everywhere; it was so lively that I couldn't help thinking of our own, lonely local 16-screen cineplex and how amazingly dead it seemed by comparison. I pinched myself--yep, I was still in Indiana.

The great blazing light that drew me to the theatre and away from an intellectually fulfilling experience at the local coffeehouse was none other than Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf, in glorious 3-D on a screen whose height is measured in stories rather than feet.

The film was surprisingly true to the events of the epic poem, though they embellished it with a backstory which imparted, I believe, an "agreeable symmetry." All the major plot points and characters were there, from King Hrothgar's gregarious lot, to the great dragon which threatens Beowulf's people in his final days. But it was Grendel, first and foremost, that bought my attention and sealed my favor of the film. I won't try to describe it, but our introduction to the beast was chillingly perfect.

I keep seeing this in movie reviews, and I'll echo it here--if you get the chance, see it on an IMAX screen, in 3-D. It's worth it, at least if you're in love with movies. My wife and I have been, ever since we served time together in that box office, O so long ago.

Rare & Required

2007-11-02T14:23:00.000-07:00

I want comments on this one. What are some recordings that, when you listen to them, you just can't get over how incredible they make you feel? I'm talking musical genius--to your ears, anyway. Not necessarily musical perfection, because I haven't a lick of technical knowledge to back that up. I mean those awe-inspiring recordings that you would play for anyone as proof of what music can be, how deeply it can reach. Or how about some obscure gem that you think might blow my mind, some underappreciated classic? Post about it, and here are a few of mine to start things off:

1. The Beatles' I Am The Walrus as performed by Oasis at the Glasgow Cathouse in June 1994, a recording which was included as a b-side on the Wonderwall cd single (the import version, anyway). It's just insane.

2. The song Some Devil by Dave Matthews, off the album of the same name. Minimalistic and haunted, just an incredible recording all around.

3. California Dreamin' by The Mamas & The Papas. No one could ever re-record that song and capture that atmosphere, it's just absolutely tight from start to finish.

4. Wild Is The Wind by Nina Simone. I first heard a portion of this on YouTube, playing over an innocuous scene taken from the film Scarlet Diva. I picked up the track at the first opportunity--her voice just floors me, and the song itself is fantastic.

5. Country Feedback by R.E.M. Another one of those songs where it just feels like so many factors collided so perfectly that they could never be repeated or improved upon. There's such heat and loneliness and aching in this track.

Directives To Self

2007-10-30T21:15:00.000-07:00

In the spring--next time it comes around--go to the pond one bright midday and look for the swarms of new tadpoles, the ones that are like loose commas or spattered ink blots just beneath the surface of the water. You used to do this as a child, you remember the muck-smell and the impossibly gentle touch of twenty or thirty wriggling bodies in your palm, the cool water, the smells of life and death. When was the last time you did this? Feels like forever.

Then, it's been forever.

You also need to lay down in the grass before the snow gets here. Just fall onto the grass and let the earth clutch you as it spins. Feel the orbit, the almost unimaginable sweep of rotation, in your soul, the awesome faint rushing that is like being born across the snowfield on your father's back, or in your mother's arms, or pulled in the sled with your infant brother toward your grandparents' old home at twilight.

These are requirements. You cannot continue forward until you go this far back. At last you've reached the age where there are things you have not done in recent memory. The age where you find what you forgot you had.

A Graduation of Sorts

2007-10-19T13:06:00.000-07:00

Today, I officially become the senior employee in my department. The last person who had been here when I started the occupation has now left for another job with another company. It was harder to watch her go than I expected, harder because nothing that happens here is supposed to really matter to me (my own rule, not theirs). But I liked this woman, a lot, not because she handled part of the load, but because she was such a good person. Nowadays everyone comes to me with their questions, and nowadays I seem to be full of answers. I was dragged kicking and screaming all the way, but after four years I have become an expert at my job--the English major who chronically skipped his classes has become a billing coordinator with over a hundred hours of unused vacation time.

Still, if you peel back the cover, or if you wait until nightfall downwind of the den, I promise, there is an artist who will emerge. He is always, always there.

Spiritual Volcanism

2007-10-15T05:40:00.001-07:00

I exploded this weekend. My Adam's apple went sailing over the wall. Hair flew like ticker tape. A pair of lungs--I guess they were mine--inflated to the size of zepplins and burst. Ribs showered the football field, two states away. All of the smoke and ash that had been jacking up the pressure rose into the stratosphere, a dark column of confusion. My funny bone zinged across the parking lot, skidded to a halt in the shadow of a Tacoma's tire, spun there, spun and sputtered out like a firework flower. In the center of a charred circle of pavement my translucent ghost swayed and wavered, a little shell-shocked but so relieved. Now it's Monday; the flesh comes back like footage of detonated sandcastles played in reverse, and this time, I hope, there will only be little eruptions, or better yet, sound seismic doldrums prevailing beneath the sleepy desert.

Summer Is Dead

2007-10-10T09:32:00.000-07:00

Finally, the weather shifts. I love October--only in this month do cold, gray skies and rain seem appropriate. Now I can feel justified driving to Martins and picking up a gallon of cider (Kercher's October Gold is the best). The enormous pumpkins on the front porch have stopped sweating. The trees behind my office are green and gold; not gold trees and green trees but both colors on the same branch, evenly mixed, evoking the clothes of a jester, something carnival anyway.

Rejoice. Autumn has risen. From here on out the days will grow garish and crisp, and then into the leaden dusks we'll slide...

The Rant

2007-10-08T05:49:00.000-07:00

This is nothing new to anyone who has had even the remotest contact with the internet, but I'm moved this morning to proclaim just how much I loathe email forwards that supposedly contain outrageous or fascinating "facts". Almost invariably they're a mishmash of exaggerations, skewed statistics, or outright fabrications that have been circulating the internet for the past ten or fifteen years. The gall of these inflammatory lies is irritating... There is always a vague yet recognizable "source" named (CNBC, Oprah, or my personal favorite, "scientists") followed by some hokum editorial statement such as "You won't believe this but it's completely true!" Morons receive these emails and, lacking any natural defenses, quickly become infected, swelling with uninformed emotions until they burst and release duplicate copies of the virus to everyone in their address book, at which point the disease finds a few suckers more and circulates again. If you're unfortunate enough to be in the address books of more than one of the infected, you can have your inbox bombarded with the same ridiculousness two, three, four times a day. Perhaps even worse than the pseudoscience are the email forwards stuffed to capacity with hyper-religious content or patriotic sentiments so grossly intolerant and perverse they'd make Dubya blush (I've been involuntarily subjected to a number of email "stories" that end with a message which can be approximated as "learn how to speak English and love Jesus or else stay out of my country!").

Okay, that's my rant.