Little Wordlings

Journals from Years 11&12

2009-07-14T18:36:00.000-07:00

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Journals

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Topographically Drunk Hedgehogs and Badgers About in the Space Hanger

2009-07-09T20:54:00.000-07:00

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Please go here to see this blog:

Badgers

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a desert beetle, caught

2009-07-08T21:09:00.001-07:00

a desert beetle, caught

in a drain pipe somewhere

in a large star-cluster city,

dreams of dust, sage bellies

against sage bellies,

Your mesquite bones.

Videos from my Poetry Reading

2009-07-07T21:24:00.000-07:00

Well, I had my first reading in the City last night. A friend of mine was kind enough to record the reading for me.

The reading series is called The Inspired Word Reading Series and is held in Forrest Hill, Queens, NY at Tierra Sana Restaurant. The series was started by Michael Geffner. You can find his blog, HERE

I had to divide the videos up to post them on You Tube. I'll post them in order. Thanks for watching!

Algorithms and Superposition, Hidden Under Skirts of Despair

2009-07-01T23:33:00.001-07:00

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Please view this post, here: Algorithms

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33 Variations on a Waltz, leaving the self for the second self

2009-06-30T16:52:00.001-07:00

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Please view here: 33 Variations

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Entanglement on the www, Knots & I Converse with a Friend

2009-06-25T23:28:00.001-07:00

To record. To record a thing. A thing that loses weight when you look at it, when you try and ponder its measurement, it shrinks. Something as elusive as dust on a chapel bell, as scripted as a North wind off a lighthouse that only pours light, not mystery.

To record. I try to speak a language of knots and nothing ends up happening but confusion. Nothing happens but an ache. And this ache keeps me anchored to the cause, keeps me in touch with carpet bugs, on my knees, searching for the equation between two sentences that were spoken before I was born.

I breathe forward into inches. There’s a light in the doorway. To record this light, photons or the electricity between a bulb and its current.

Today, for instance, I had a conversation with a friend of mine. How my brain needs shine! And so we set aside the computer screen’s work for each other’s thoughts. How, I asked, do we represent each other? My friend types answers and his voice, the memory and representation of his voice, gathers into neuronal circuits and fires. I read his text as though in his voice. Can we break through the walls of representation and actually know anyone?

The knots have been on my thoughts lately. I tell him so. Look at these equations, I say. He says, look at these wallabies in Australia, he says—they get high on poppies and make crop circles.

Somehow, this ties into the philosophical conversation. And the knots sit in the back behind me at the desk, waiting for a leap into my thoughts.

But I tell the knots, look! There’s a theory inside us all and I’m trying to uncover the dots, to gather the thought-geraniums so as to understand the grasses between one another, our thoughts, our desires, and our other-worldly-being-ness.

The knots are dragging today. I woke up in a mood. Worries down my back again, and will I have enough money for the autumn season? Plastic as it sounds, the worry of living is constant. But from my desk at work, I see an ocean. And my friend types words to me. We communicate from one desk to another 10,000 miles apart. Isn’t this amazing? My mood lifts when I type. I type of wonders. And wait for the answer.

I’d rather be outside, I think. I’d rather enjoy the sunshine. I’d rather unravel mysteries by walking in Union Square, searching strangers for their knots. But in front of us, a whole wonder waiting to be discovered. And my wonder is my friend, who talks to me of mysteries while we are at work.

Wonder at conversation! And conversation on the internet! The net that casts over all our lives. A net what leaves us connected or so estranged from another that the wandering in the world wide web can leave us hunting touch.

The knots are restless today. The tower today stands 2792 knots tall. Bundles, even. And some sit in the back corner, reflected in the computer screen as I type my longings into streams 10,000 miles away. The best thing about online communication is instant replies.

Me: it hit me the other day
mathematics (which I always hated) is like creativity and philosophy, it's working with abstractions
to try and explain things

Friend: yeah, when you get high enough in anything, it becomes abstract

Me: and when I look at it that way, I no longer hate math
I like theoretical anything
but I like to pull it back down somehow
like with a magical string
like theories are kites
and I'm trying to pull them closer to my body

Friend: and you have to ground them to dissect them

Me: yes
so they are like butterflies then, and you have to net them to put them behind glass
and when you look close enough at a butterfly, their patterns are way beyond what you expected.
one color leads into another color, but in zigzag
and how to define that line, you can't
like chaos theory

Friend: you have to break it down into small pieces, and that won't give you the whole picture

Me: exactly

Friend: crazy
this is awesome

Me: like those high kangaroos or whatever they were
the lines they made

Friend: I know!

Me: crazy

Friend: no one could have predicted that
but the anchor for all this is logic
it's pretty clear crop circles aren't created by aliens
therefore, it must be something else
but more complex than that
it's MANY things
and that's where chaos comes in

Me: yes

Friend: some are pranks; some might be weird wind patterns
in this case, high wallabies

Me: the weed

Friend: lol
the opium

Friend: poppies

Me: oh
opium
oh yeah
poppies
like in Wizard of Oz

Friend: hehe
yes
man, the book of that is about a billion times better than the movie
I did not expect to have this conversation today
chaos theory!

Me: I know, right?
amazing
chaos theory is insanely interesting
it is overwhelming
I feel like I'm flying just reading about it
did you see the pictures of the knots?
love those

Friend: yes
I love the III kind
that's such a cool pattern

Me: you know, perhaps we make our very own patterns each day and we don't even know it
like actual patterns in some sort of air
when you type
maybe
or walk each day

Friend: hmmm

Me: and it affects the things around
around
like we're always painting something into being and we don't know it

Friend: well I know we affect air currents when we walk past them, or they have to blow
that's an idea I’ve long had
the things we do create... something

Me: expand on that
your idea
that you had
creating things
what did you think?

Friend: well
I went beyond just movement
the physical world and the mental world combined
let's say I say something mean to someone
and it puts them in a bad mood
and they take it out by slamming the front door
which knocks over their vase
which they throw away

Me: interconnectivity

Friend: you create these things
I call them demons for lack of a better term

Me: what physicists (the more metaphysical ones) are calling "The Field"
the idea of locality versus entanglement
Einstein didn't believe theory of entanglement was true
but we've proved it
we've been able to view the burning out of electrons, a proton and electron separated and the daughter protons are effected by the "mother," no matter at what distance
BUT
it's only after WE observe
that anything comes into being

Friend: before that it's Schrödinger’s electron

Me: Schrödinger’s Cat.
someone said to me the other day on gchat
"sorry I was invisible"
and I thought about that time you said it
and how I wrote that note about status updates and the new lingo and how we all sound like science fiction novels and we don't even know it
in our minds, we're invisible, sometimes
because we "are"
and we say we "are"
even if it's only on gchat
like your half man-half fish superhero
reflection
if we reflect "nothing"

Friend: no, the lack of reflection
yes!

Me: then where is that "nothing"
is the nothing something only when we "reflect" it?
like Schrödinger’s cat!

Friend: it is
for that moment, you did not know if I existed or not
wow
applied to everyday life

Me: and your voice when you type as it's represented in my head when I read your font
I hear your font in your voice in my brain. how my brain recollects your voice

Friend: Electronic data and it's philosophical implications…
I hadn't given your opinion on AI the consideration it deserved, because instead of basing the amount of consideration on your perceived intelligence (or creativity, or capacity) like I should have done, I based it on your technical knowledge

Me: that's understandable

Friend: I guess when you spend 7 years telling people how to work a computer, you assume no one knows anything about them.
and that's just wrong
it's a scale
it causes problems
drives wedges into conversation
creates demons

Me: creates breakdowns. Our representations of people need to be broken down before we can really communicate
It’s interesting that we create someone before we know them

Friend: yes
it's a tricky thing
knowing someone
you walk a balance of open-mindedness and ... something else.

End conversation. To record. End. And the knots are sparkling. Inside their bodies: the known. The unknown casts things down occasionally, but in dots. Later in the day, the conversation from the afternoon on the computer, the conversation that happened over text, will be imprinted in my mind and replayed via representation when I read Heschel’s words….

“When the ultimate awareness comes, it is like a flash, arriving all at once. To meditative minds the ineffable is cryptic, inarticulate: dots, marks of secret meaning, scattered hints, to be gathered, deciphered and formed into evidence.”

And, earlier that day, on the computer screen, my friend said:

“you have to break it down into small pieces, and that won't give you the whole picture.”

Which I remember, as I read further into Heschel’s words:

"It comes when, drifting in the wilderness, having gone astray, we suddenly behold the immutable polar star. Out of endless anxiety, out of denial and despair, the soul bursts out in speechless crying.”

To record. I read these lines, interconnected with earlier recollections of a conversation on computer screens, and while I read, in my bed, the knots nestled by the lamp, wriggling into a sway, I listen to my iPod. The iPod lands on Laura Marling. The song bleeds into the web. And exactly as I read about speechless crying into the heart of the wilderness to find that God between the breastplate and dreaming, the song sings the words:

“You sat alone under billowing sky. If I feel God….but I fell into the water and now I’m free.”

Pressed into the sides are the knots, now weighing 4920 worth, sat on my chest, which breaks, as I cry. Something about this. About alignment and chaos. To record this. And the known in the belly of knots have a brief communication with the unknown. Three words, and a black out. Joy! Joy! Joy!

R-matrix theory, n=8, or: what keeps me from sleep

2009-06-24T23:21:00.000-07:00

How do I expect to settle into stillness when the vibrations tumble out of my drier each morning? When I stumble over the peaks of things like jetting rocks down the stairs?

When I wake, there’s a melody waiting for me in a hidden place. I haven’t called on her yet. The known is speaking to the unknown in another language in my dreams. Until I smooth the length of worries down my back, I’ll keep buzzing around, disturbing any chance that stillness will nest next to me.

The known are in knots and my body contains many of them. Like a tower, I stand 29740 knots tall, give or take a few. Sometimes, when I hike a hill, one will topple into the soil. And if I crawled against a carpet, a couple might try taking root there, bedding up with the carpet bugs.

The known hangs on inside the belly of the knots, which sometimes circle my head. When one knot passes or beds up in the carpet or hops down the street while I walk in a crowd, another one will wait by the lamp to talk to me. The unknown are like stars and stare down into the belly of the knots, trying to converse with them.

The language is strange. Catch one or two words, sometimes, yes. But this is rare.

Stay in a corner. Listen for a movement inside like a melody.

The drier tumbles the known into the unknown. A melody stills into twists, vibrates then quiets, waits for 29740 knots, give or take, to listen from within me.

This Blog has Moved

2009-06-23T20:40:00.000-07:00

This blog has a new home at Wordpress.

Please follow me here: CLICK

2:00 am on 6/23

2009-06-22T22:49:00.000-07:00

I wanted to read something to comfort me before sleep. Something about circling around again and finding the self in a tree branch.

How even in a dark room there's a memory of reaching for a hand.

Searching, it was late. My eyes hurt from reading.

The knots said, come nearer.

I always knew they were vibrating orbs in numerical bodies, but I refused to look so many nights. Come closer, they said.

Look, and I create their lives. Look away, and they pass, almost as though lightning bugs were their other shells.

Entanglement, I thought, weighs more than a spirit, much more. And so I turned out the light.

2009-06-22T22:35:00.001-07:00

..no such thing as baby pigeons in the city; perhaps they hide in crevices of buildings as chicklings, waiting to birth wings, sing into smog...

2:52 am on 6/21

2009-06-20T23:33:00.000-07:00

The stone is given its existence; it need not fight for being what it is--a stone in the field. Man has to be himself in spite of unfavorable circumstances; that means he has to make his own existence at every single moment. He is given the abstract possibility of existing, but not the reality. This he has to conquer hour after hour. Man must earn his life, not only economically but metaphysically. -- Ortega.

I was reading this on the train. Or maybe it was the subway.

Maybe I had already gotten down to 14th street. Maybe I was listening to Brahms, it doesn't matter. What matters is that I felt like I was turning a corner on my eyelid and pulling it out, methodically, like when I was a child. So much to hold onto, in one eyelash.

When I feel like coming to the center of something, almost like jumping in front of god-knows-what, or falling from the last thing hunger made you do.

I could have been reading something else, but I wasn't. It could have been

raining, raining, raining, raining, raining, raining, raining, raining

in the desert. And I could have had to pitch an A-frame tent. And I could have spent the last 25 hours lying beside a water-trail, waiting for animals to pass before seeing my chest rise up and down. I could have been leaving bruises on my shins.

Burning a cigarette into the arm to see what it felt like.

I could have been learning to make a fire from wood and stone.

But at this time in my life, I was just reading on the train, listening to Brahms.

I don't have to know why I run from learning stillness. Stillness is learning me.

And circling inside this, what I said I loved before, and forgot.

1:00 AM on 6/17

2009-06-16T21:54:00.000-07:00

Once, I wrote some diary entries in the voice of a divorced man who liked to drink bourbon, so I'd drink bourbon at night at my apartment on my porch, and then write his diary.

I still think about him.

More of this later. Perhaps I'll even tear out an old entry or two, post it on a wall somewhere or at the Public Announcements board at the courthouse, if I can find a courthouse around here.

from: M-theory and Other Such Tales

2009-06-16T17:10:00.000-07:00

10. Knots:

tie one sailor to another--
see this field? all points merge
without ever touching, he said.
I think: so if my heart
is comprised of five orgasms
that never happened, the thought
of it happening, once, could
create quakes separate
from itself? a whole
universe of pigeons in flight,
carrying messages between
the trenches, in this field,
however small, there is no count
for size-- what is there but
one moment, then the next,
and besides, perhaps we
already loved one another
long before continental drifts,
time's hallows sunk your eyes, or
we sat down to breakfast.

7:20 on 6/16

2009-06-16T16:17:00.000-07:00

Hydrographically, tops
of things have something
hidden--I intend to find
what they wish to say to You.

whistle by its tail

2009-06-15T18:17:00.000-07:00

I have, for the first time, attempted to sing on a track of poetry.

Once, a long time ago, I used to sit on the corner part of the roof, above my little brother's room in the house I grew up in, writing to imaginary beings, and watch the sun go down over West Texas. When the pink was kissing orange, when I was barely able to write in the blue-haze of dusk, I'd put down my pen and hum. As a kid, nothing was not sacred. As a kid, the ineffable was where I put my hand against my thigh or forehead, in the beat of my heart, which I assumed was really remnants of my wings I had before I descended. And there, across the dust-sky, in the heat of August or cool crisp of autumn, whispered my other-soul, freely flying about above me. Wait! I'd say. Remember me? And on I'd talk until the dusk grew heavier and darker on my back, wait for childhood crickets to crackle a reply, an invitation to leave the roof and lie somewhere below on the grass among the trees my father planted. In West Texas, stars are giving and abundant, much like my heart, willing to believe in that-thing-beyond. As a kid, my humming glittered just the same. And perhaps it will, again. As where we begin is where we arrive, someday.

And so, like my inner kid, I let myself sing some words to something. Maybe a hum because I miss home. Or home misses me. Either way, even if it has nothing to do with what I just said, I have a new wordling out there. Check it out, here: Shannon Hardwick Poetry.

P.S. this gorgeous photo which I chose to go along with the poem is by my lovely, talented friend, Becky McMath. It's titled: Bird, Sleepy.

4:40 on 6/15

2009-06-15T13:37:00.000-07:00

Because the window cannot contain thunder,
the body of sound passes through it.

Because I cannot spend 30 days in the wilderness
in silence, I listen.

This was handed to me, in a note, in the sound
of your voice, once, asleep,

having had nothing to eat all day but doubts;
so slim, ribs broke, gutters

opened, in the sound of your voice, in a note
handed through a window

doubts, so slim, asleep--
body of silence, gut open.

4:44

2009-06-10T22:14:00.001-07:00

its 4:44; a light
rumbles, calls in strange
tongues outside
the door; a well
somewhere echoes--
your destiny is in love
with you.

Neuroplasticity, or the Importance of Having Creative People Chat with You Online

2009-06-09T21:43:00.000-07:00

So I’m reading this book about neuroplasticity, because, for some odd reason, I’ve become obsessed with the brain since last year. I scan bookshelves for anything about nuerology, preferably ones that bring in the psychologists and philosophers. Maybe one day, they will have a poet in there somewhere. It is quite possible. For example, I find a lot of neurology books have epilogues before each chapter, and more often than not, a poet is quoted. Yes, that’s right, a poet. Nine times out of ten, if the writer of the neurology book is British, the poetry epilogues will be even more frequent. Just tonight, I was reading a chapter on Network Remodeling and Milton’s Paradise Lost was quoted: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heaven of hell”

Neuroscience and Milton! Well, my bath couldn’t have gotten any better, no, no. It was bliss right then and there.

Mixing things up, together, swirling them around. Doesn’t the day seem odd when it’s the routine of this and that, of work and TV, of Facebook and stalking things to their tiny little core bodies? Doesn’t it get old, treading the old path, day in, day out?

I stay secluded a lot. Mostly, I try to get on a fixed schedule and keep such and such in order. However, as I find in my layman’s study of neuroscience, the brain just isn’t functioning properly if we tread the same path each day. Someone said that if the world was a room, most people stay in a tiny corner their whole lives, and if the brain was a forest, we’d be a dog, walking in the same circle, pushing the same ol’ rock. Or, at least, I feel I would be like that dog, getting very little real estate in the vast amount of space the brain inhabits.

The brain gets in ruts just by our mental lives as well. Not just our routines dull our day, but our mental life as well, unless we look for pathways outside the circle, something to do other than pushing that rock. The actual foundation and mapping of our brain shifts, when we decide to stand on one leg, instead of two…

In The Mind & Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force, Jeffery M. Schwartz writes:

“The brains response to messages from its environment is shaped by its experiences—experiences not only during gestation and infancy, as most neuroscientists were prepared to accept, but by our experiences throughout life. The life we live, in other words, shapes the brain we develop.”

I was sitting at my desk this morning, woken up by thunder and lightning. CRACK! My power strips flickered. The lightbulb gave a sigh. I sat there, dazed. If the lightning had not cracked, would I have felt my body this way, in this moment? I don’t know why I had this thought, but it was this thought that brought to mind a friend of mine and how he represents that “kick” out of the everyday that I experience while at work.

I sit at my desk, a lot. If I’m not working, I’m trying to write, or I’m just passively cruising the internet, wondering why I’m even online at all…wasting my day. Online. Which line? Not sure. So, I’m at my desk a lot. Usually, I’m working and though I love my new job, of course I’d rather be eating strawberries or something watching Wimbledon or reading George Herbert. (What, is it weird that someone ENJOYS reading George Herbert?) Anyway, so he pops up daily on gchat. And the thing is, I never know what we’ll talk about. Today, he told me about a Russian Villian Mythological character. A whole interwoven idea of a short story based on a painting, and why, exactly, folklore employs witches as wise sages. If it’s not this, then it’s how he’s actively contemplating the logistics of how to craft a laptop casing out of wood. Not only this, but the basic outline of the engeneering of why laptop casings are plastic, how the flow of heat works and dissipates, etc. Sorry, he says, am I boring you? NO! Not at all. Here I was, feeling sorry for myself that I’m stuck in my office, and now I’m learning about Russian Folklore and artistic computer casing matters.

See where the brain takes you when you let other people in?

And this is a running theme with this friend of mine. I’ll be feeling sad, and he sends me a picture of some strange looking animal he just happens to be researching on the side, or a funny comic, or how and why computers could never form “creative thoughts” and thus become AI. I disagreed. I thought, since God created man in his own image, perhaps now humans are becoming God and creating computers in their own image, which will thus turn around and destroy us, (assuming we create AI robots who then turn on us). And the cycle will begin again once God steps in and repairs the damage man and machine have done…Big Bang…perhaps that was simply the last human race blowing themselves up.

But what I mean is, this train of thought would never have been ingaged without his help. And links. And amazingly witty status updates.

There’s the thing. The “thing.” The New Thing about Today. The lingo. Status updates. Who would have thought we’d talk about such things as “status updates?” Sounds like something out of a science fiction novel, doesn’t it?

Just today, my friend said “Sorry, I was temporarily invisible.” And I had to laugh.

But here’s the thing. Neurologically, friends like this are beneficial.

My paths from day to day, are pretty much the same, once I get on a routine. I don’t often think about things “outside my realm” unless they are on my own terms. And, as I have been reading, this is bad for my neuronal circuts. They get bored thinking about the same things. Taking the same steps. Listening to the same thoughts inside the same head.

And so, everyone should have a brilliant, creative friend on gchat who will go into very fine detail on all sorts of topics.

Because, when you allow yourself to converse with others, I’m sure the brain is appreaciative.

I mean, who would have thought I’d hear a hypothetical way to build a wooden case?

The rain was pouring. I was drinking coffee, wondering if I’d write anything later on, after work. And my friends voice jumps in, describes his newest project:

i would have to built the trunk from scratch
and i am just a little too lazy to do that when i can buy one prebuilt for a reasonable cost
so all i need to do is move heat out of the case faster than it accumulates (or at the same rate)
9:36 AM for this i need two things
1. ventillation
2. a heat conducting material
the ventillation will obviously be fans
and for heat conduction i will use small copper pipe, which is cheap and plentiful at the hardware store
9:37 AM since hot air rises, i will put the larger exhaust fan at the top and run the pipes near it, and it will pull the heat off them at that end
9:38 AM that causes a temperature difference in the copper, which means they will try to equalize, which means heat will travel toward the exhaust fan, which in turn means the copper will absorb heat from the surrounding air
9:41 AM etc, etc, &co, ad nauseum

Indeed. Whole lives open up, whole new worlds, when we look beyond our own brain, and invite other’s to join in conversation.

Chirp

2009-06-07T22:42:00.001-07:00

Can't sleep. Chirp. What is there but always a knock. On the inside of the chest like something has a hankering for a talk. All the time, a talk. About the skylights, about how it feels to sit for hours in silence. Chirp. Not a hello, not a good day, but a tap, a chirp. And it's one more second until the next, until you can scrape the knees on a rock-face somewhere, kneeling for the sake of kneeling. For the sake of seeing yourself differently. For calling on that chirp. What is there but this knock.

Yesterday should have called. There were two days before this one. And the same chirp in my chest as in yours. Ignore the social constructs. I should. Perhaps I should take hold of Your t-shirt sleeves, press my ear to your chest and listen.

Kind of like sleep. Coming back. Coming to the place of noticing the chip, hankering for a talk and a bit of peanut butter. Mind, mind at all if I call this second? Knock, you said, I'm already on the other side.

Newness via Radio Waves

2009-06-05T21:50:00.000-07:00

So, I have three new tracks up. YAY. The New York rain will not get me down. I'll stay huddled in my attic room with an ocean view and mess around with recording strange things that find me starting at them from the edge of my bed. Strange things with shakey bodies and nervous conditions. AKA, my words.

Let me know what you think.

I also wanted to add that most of the photos on the songs are taken by my younger sister, who's a great photographer!

check them out here: Shannon Hardwick Poetry

June Bug Song 1 and 2 are the same but the pt. 2 has layers. Like numerous voices in the head. Or a Saturday night, in my case.

Thought Diary, cont.

2009-06-04T10:51:00.001-07:00

31 May 2009:

3:19 PM:

It is up to us to actualize the divine potential in the world.

3:20 PM:

Morning passages begins.

3:25 PM:

Waiting for train,
wind.

3:27 PM:

Too much movement to jump,
to stop, step out of the swirl.
In one breath,
thousands of unrealized poems.

3:33 PM:

Kabbalah confirms this thought,
since I was a child.

3:37 PM:

On train; “Something She Has to Do.”

3:38 PM:

One fly in the bathroom lantern,
golden belly-globe, body
against the side of my ear drum, stuck.

3:45 PM:

In a trance by passing trees.
How glitter is made
between branches, drunk
swimming my eyelid.

3:47 PM:

Now, graveyard passes
train tracks. Bones
clink, steel boards.

June 1, 2009:

2:56 PM:

Union Square subway station:
woman with a pamphlet under her arm:
What Happens After Death, a scientific perspective.

2:57 PM:

Women handing out pamphlets:
PRAYER: WE WANT TO PRAY WITH YOU!
We believe prayer changes things.

7:00 PM:

“...and verily, it is not truth that rules the world, but illusions." --Kierkegaard

June 2, 2009:

11:25 AM:

train running 75 minutes late;
someone had the waves take them
over, jumped--between
the grind and the breeze.

12:52 PM:

Oblivion--"Happy is one
whose eyes shine
from this secret in the world
and the world that is coming." Emerson

1:02 PM:

The node of being as it begins to emerge
from nothingness into existence is called faith.

4:04 PM:

Confessions, cellos,
jumping into the above
begins in terror, at the tip, terror.
Pencil skirts make it harder
to concentrate on the task of dissolving completely
apart from materials
such as dodge trucks and fundraising events,
begins with the thought:
each realm loses credibility.

4:10 PM:

D Minor Trio warm up.
Life whirls into a strangeness
unrecognizable but so much at home;
the lifting is home,
the swirling is the doorstep,
that essential beginning,
traces of original threatened joy,
disalarmed by what will come,
continue coming.

2009-06-01T05:27:00.000-07:00

7:39 PM on the Metro North--"All existence is the body of God" --Abraham Isaac Kook. Still, at 1:47 AM I have forgotten this 1923291 times out of 293402132458 thoughts since then.

On Answering a Friend

2009-05-28T21:18:00.000-07:00

My eyes saw a man, torn apart by days, smiling.
I was stuck on a train, wanted to reach out, but kept moving.
Another man's face, older, about 60, had eyes that joy can't help
but reside in, like a light, like angels took shelter when too much
wasn't enough for the god in us all. He smiled, too.
And at once I was lifted to something other than my dwelling,
something more like ours.
As a landscape of One thing. For a moment,
I wasn't down like when I woke, how sad I was.
For a second all that dribbled onto tracks,
into the passerby's shoelaces and God was the warbler
calling for its lost mate. It called. I waited
for the train. It frantically paced, couldn't even fly.
Even in the small engines of life sadness soaks its body.
The bird called to nothing. To station-house beams housing
blown apart nests. Nothing there, I thought. Nothing. But
the weight of my heart would crush its beak. Nothing. And still
that man, walked past me, our shoelaces geometric
jolts in time speaking in tongues to each other, listen.
The warbler vanished. Trains come, one and then another.
Blurred. As when, sitting in the bath, crying, it could be yesterday
as much as today. Small engines carry even the heaviest
weight when God lives.

2009-05-27T21:49:00.000-07:00

"Realize that nothing is impossible for you; recognize that you too are immortal and that you can embrace all things in your mind; find your home in the heart of every living creature; bring all opposites inside yourself and reconcile them; understand that you are everywhere; that you are young, that you are old, that you are dead, that you are in the world beyond the grave; hold all this in your mind, all times and places, all substances and all qualities and magnitudes; then you can perceive God.

Wanting to know God is the road that leads to God. God will meet you everywhere, he will appear to you everywhere, at times and places when you don't expect it, while you are awake and while you are asleep, while you are speaking and while you are silent; for there is nothing in which God does not exist. And don't think God is invisible. Who is more evident than God? That is why he made all things, so that through all things you can see him." --Hermetic Writings (3rd cent.)

Five knocks inside the stomach. Bathtub hugs water, as though it's inside an ocean, but singular, stoic, hands hanging off the edges. Five knocks.

Stravisnky would lift the corners of my roof. If hope is lost, do this, he'd say; play God into being-- whether bitter or joyous, let air decide.

And foxes will navigate thoughts into thieves.

When the thought to paint bruises across your thigh hands herself to you, love her.

Stravinsky knew, a long road to spring meant burning through a page, getting caught among the wires in a field, twisting the shoulder out of socket to taste wild onions.

The barbed wire fence cuts, yes. But inside the bone, silk, cotton-webs.

Five knocks inside the stomach.

Foxes navigate thieves into thoughts.

Love them for the path they chew, for holiness stuck in the teeth of devilish things.

Amazing

2009-05-27T10:17:00.000-07:00

Please check out Kim-Leng Hills video: Memo: a still frame animation. It's wonderful

Interview

2009-05-26T15:39:00.000-07:00

Check out my interview with Thunk.

Variation on Vision, Harlem 125th

2009-05-24T18:45:00.000-07:00

Tell me, what light bends
off the brownstones, curves
bracelets of God round
my wrists, clattering?
--ajar, maple leaves.

Variation on Vision, Re: Fields

2009-05-23T22:13:00.000-07:00

Reading about the concept of a Zero Point Field on a AA flight to New York. Sitting in an isle seat while the orange rim creates its own coastline outside the windows. Telling myself to trust what fabrics days weave. How, standing in a Barnes and Noble, the weight of my feet seem lighter because, surely, there is a reason for the tingling in my fingers, the underlying feeling of breaking open.

Dread, in the Kierkegaard sense, taps it's words against my collar bone.

If particles are always moving, uncertainty is certain and God has a favorite number, I'm sure.

Someone asks if I'm feeling alright. Did a bad feeling pass through me? No, I say. I'm fine.

But longer things live in corners, bundled like a snake-coil in their own mistrust of themselves. So, leaning forward in an airplane seat, 33,000 feet above You, I'll let it out that it feels like Dread, unraveling the mistakes I've made, containing myself this way.

I will write:

A field is a region of influence.

Standing aloft above the second, the feeling of seeing beyond what is normally seen.

Messages of other worlds move into the Self. Flashes reveal moments of great weight and importance to ones projected action--that is, one's future. For the field of projection is already in motion (one's future vibrates in spacetime) and so there exist moments where something unexplainable is able to reach past the deaf walls contemporary concepts of time have built around the psyche, and, at once, projections and lines of projection into the "future" are in the same plane as Now, circling the Self in swirls of energy.

Messages can come through. One feels dazed by a sort of emptiness and connectedness, both present, passing away and eternal--both fixed in a destiny and multi-dimensional in possibility. How open one is to the field determines recognition or simply a queer feeling of malaise and momentary confusion from what has been imprinted in one's mind as "reality."

After writing this, my blackberry hums with a message from Prince Edward's Island, picture in JPEG form, attached:

"I'm hiking here tomorrow. The formation on the end is scoured by intense current. How it looks almost like stone henge. The rock is basalt so it's very hard. As you can see from tree on cliff top, the cliff is 200 ft plus. Every year or two "somebody" gets too curious and topples over the edge."

There's a section of my brain that stores images like this. Each sentence is a new born world, opening JPEGs.

I'd tie a rope to each end of a language of stones. Islands are themselves because of the surrounding water.

Energies are fields best bet we're even here at all.

Someone asks if I'm feeling alright. Did a bad feeling pass through me? No, I say. I'm fine.

2009-05-18T21:04:00.000-07:00

How, among a hall of chandeliers, does one firefly spin into darkness, twirling as a drunk who's opened the door to weightlessness?

I feel I'm struggling to hold onto the vision of things. I am an impatient wheel, distracted.

You are in my thoughts. You're not a light that is going out, but one that is reaching further beyond where you thought you would--so the fireflies feel strained, but their only growing in their influence.

Hold on-- the door to weightlessness only seems ages into the dark.

What the brain takes in, it can only transcribe--you think doors or the weight of bodies / thoughts are petticoats to the brain? No, the transcription is a letter the brain hands itself in the dark, having forgotten what was written.

Variation on Vision, No. 41

2009-05-13T22:05:00.000-07:00

Time isn’t written
on a bathroom mirror, but
questioning itself

in a photo-booth.

God angered the street sweepers;
they have nothing but
moon-candy in their pockets.

Gould / Bach / Einstein & a Brif Variation on Vision No. 44

2009-05-13T21:23:00.000-07:00

Glenn Gould / Bach / Einstein

Tomorrow is Einstein's birthday.

Or, rather, according to New York time, TODAY is his birthday.

I was listening to Glenn Gould this evening, wondering what was going through my mind, wanting something tangible to wrap my excitement around, kiss, but lacking the proper shoes, I didn't walk out by the waves. I am lucky, however, because when Gould quiets, the waves from Long Island Sound can be heard outside my bedroom window.

44:

Once, a young woman poured over her journal pages because she was sick of gardening. Once, even if the clouds hid the constellations, a lawyer's son dreamed of charting the stars. The young woman had nothing in her hands but clots of dirt from too many pansies. The lawyer's son hooked things on his ceiling each night, trying to get signs out of his head.

And when the young woman gave writing over to her body, leaning somewhere in two worlds but neither holding herself or a plot of land, something in her brain boarded up windows.

And when the lawyer's son tore the plaster off the walls, numbers knocked on his forehead. There, even walking among the hallways at college, equations wrapped up parcels of percentages and sprung numbers about his feet.

Walking, life swirls around the waist, letting all that was in ones head come up slowly--first, in the tiny bones in the feet, then, the hips get a feel for what-happens-beyond-expectation; finally, the bits of what-one-thought-was-forgotten reaches the forehead like the falling numbers off plaster, and, ignoring this brings a heavier weight than any previous anxiety.

And now, for Glenn's piece that gave me what I wanted but left me feeling distant, even still--

Variation on Vision, No. 42

2009-05-12T22:28:00.000-07:00

Under floor boards, a hatchling,
unwinds string, knots
from its back, a prayer.

Above floor boards, a light-bulb
hums variations, symphonies
from a half-believing god.

In-between, laughter--
what is this, the still
new world?

Dread and Loathing the 3 a.m. Duckling that Never Turned into A Video Blog

2009-05-10T23:05:00.000-07:00

I had all of these notes typed out earlier today for a video blog. But then, I started to record and I just couldn't do it. It's ironic, because the blog topic was / is on dread. And I will record it, soon. I will.

How dread can both hinder and help us along in our creative process. Or any process which requires a deep-searching, a chance for truth.

I got the idea from

a) feeling anxious about performing my monologue tomorrow

b) a conversation with a friend about being anxious in general about both stepping out of my creative comfort zone added to the pre-existing writing struggle

and

c) just like always, some hand of Fate or Coincidence had me reading a book on Wittgenstein on the train the other day. But specifically the section of the book pertaining to Heidegger and Kierkegaard's writings on Dread. "Dread is the possibility of freedom." How a man must strip himself of all socially re-enforced pretensions and illusions he harbors about himself. "Learning to dread is an adventure"...how we must free ourselves from the comforting reassurance from the crowd.

Now, why Dread? Dread is that deep-searching. The springboard for it. And the dread of ourselves, our power. Of failure (which must lead to success if we allow it) and other such things one can face before creating and recreating oneself. The binoculars for truth, or something of the sort.

I also got a bit into Gregory Bateson, the usual stock of writers, waiting to chime in when I am feeling down.

I kept scribbling these notes, knowing that I should have been preparing for my monologue...knowing the Dread is dancing with newly painted shoes. Knowing my body wasn't just a lump of something, but a entire circuit board, waiting to be lit up by dread.

And so, I bring in a poet, too. Two poets. Rilke and Muriel Rukeyser. Oh, my usual crowd of books. Sitting at my computer, I can hear people way back in the peanut gallery of the bookshelf, saying:

Shannon! No one has original ideas! Let us help you find what you want to say!

Even Dante* needed Virgil

*Sidenote. I recently read that Dante may or may not have had some sort of seizure disorder. Either that or he was just mildly psychotic. Love them poets! Love the neuroscience books that tell me such things!

So, yes. Rilke.

What could he throw into the conversation?

I chose this, among his other chimings, specifically because he uses the word "dread."

"I realize with a sense of dread that one grows numb with regard to even the most wonderful things when they become part of one's daily interactions and surroundings"

My notes after this quote read:

--Shock us out of the everyday, not in strangeness, but in newness, in that cracking electric feeling that makes up the edges of things when a novel, often strange and uneasy sense passes through. Like ghosts from a world we've forgotten, dread is a gift that we don't quite have the eyes to see or the neurons to understand.

And so we need this in the realm of the unfamiliar--but with that comes apprehension, naturally.--

What I mean, and what I hope to show is that this need for the unfamiliar is exactly what that "Dread" provides.

As far as Rukeyser, I was able to gather a few tidbits from her book "The Life of Poetry"--

"The fear that cuts is off poetry is profound: it plunges us deep....

Then, for the first time you wonder: what should I be feeling? instead of what am I feeling?"

(The second statement particularly parallels well with Kierkegaard and Heidegger's Dread in that the fear of the dread "causes us to be cut off from large parts of ourselves and we believe ourselves less and less." (Rukeyser) )

Dread breaks those defenses down. Breaks us until we are able to once again ask, not the socially appropriate "what should I feel" but, rather, the independent, Dread abiding "what AM I feeling?"

Rukeyser continues:

(Keep in mind, there's a difference between fear and dread, at least according to the examples given by Heidegger and Kierkegaard)

"What is the fear of poetry? To a great extent it is a fear produced by a mask, by the protective structure society builds around each conflict." (Life of Poetry)

The mask is our social-norm-mentality. Dread forces us to move past this. To, as the previous example said: "free ourselves from the comforting reassurance from the crowd" (Kierkegaard)

So, my fear of Dread has been keeping me in a holding pattern. Dread swoops in and gets to the root of things, doesn't it? A painful getting-to-know the self by, ironically, forgetting the ego. Who do you write for, someone keeps asking me in my head of heads. Who, not the New York Times, not even my lovely professors, but for me, for you, You. That's a scary thing. Not that one refuses suggestion, exploration, learning...but that one strives to be accountable to the highest of standards....the Truth of the Self.

So, the dread is allowing the self to be the self. The dread calls for this. Honestly? If performance is for the "crowd" then the mask never need be taken off.

Dread keeps me up at 3 am writing this. Is there a purpose?

I read this, before sleep, which compelled me to write all of the above....

"Uneasy, uneasy, uneasy--
Why?
Because--when opportunity gives you the obligation to create, you are content to meet the demands of the moment, from one day to the next.
Because--anxious for the good opinion of others, and jealous of the possibility that they may become "famous," you have lowered yourself to wondering what will happen in the end to what you have done and been. How dead can a man be behind a facade of great ability, loyalty, and ambition! Bless your uneasyness as a sign that there is still life in you." (Dag Hammarskjold, Markings)

Uneasyness = Dread.

Dread, such a brown little ducking, waddling around like it's a swan...perhaps, soon, it will be your most beautiful fowl. (Ha! did I just create a pun?)

Brahms

2009-05-10T07:12:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine sent me this in response to my Brahms poem. I woke up this morning, it's a bit grey outside, my heart feels odd. Odd in that I feel restrained. Restrained because I want to have a set of infinite arms to reach out among fields, loved ones, crop planes, truck stops, cafes, towers, farms, etc and take everything in. But how limited, I thought, waking up this monring. I dreamed of an opening up, a warmer light than what we all stand under, empty handed. But one where, yes, heartache exits, suffering exists, because what else pushes us back into compassion, into appreciating a love for things? But if only I could...and then, I thought, I can. Opening, embracing--sometimes to push through our ego is difficult. But to lean against that old wooden door, to move the pete moss from under its pathway, kick up the roots that shut it closed, to use the whole weight of our body and swing, crack the bones of the hinges back--perspective! I can feel my way through any day or trial in love, even if I catch my teeth on gnarled sorrow or anger.

And somehow, this made me feel as though the above was possible this morning:

I close my eyes when I listen to Brahms, or sometimes, if I'm on the train, I look into people's faces.

haiku

2009-05-08T10:17:00.000-07:00

an attempt: (but I am probably doing it wrong)

Look, birds chattering
in tree tops--what is hidden
has a crush on you.

two poems for today

2009-05-07T21:30:00.000-07:00

Poem 1:

Brahms in the drum of the bedroom,
piano prays to ceiling-beams.
It's just now 11 AM
And you're crying?

Hair clutters more sinks
than you realize. It's OK,
wash the body; thousands of red things
turn on themselves in the dark.

To want to wash clean
in a stoneless river, to want nothing,
not even Brahms, think:
drains would be less your star-dust, skin.

It's OK, it's just now 11 PM.

Poem 2:

The essential thing has been stolen.
A monk crawls into night,
Worships a moon
in secret. He knows
You are missing.

The field awoke
in him a tree, hope-
birds wet, tangled,
out of nest. He forgets
how to bar the door with his whole weight.

nonesense that I'm not afriad of

2009-05-06T22:19:00.001-07:00

nonsense that I'm not afraid of

If I were a beetle, I'd be almost invisible, making a home in a corner somewhere, having things for dinner like lint and dust-bunnies.

If I caught course syllables, I'd iron them in summer heat against my beetle back.

And if I carried things on the outside, the inside would turn into a whirl of beetle-tongue.

Sometimes the ticking you hear is me, whistling about God, waiting for crumbs.

In You is my Other Eyelid

2009-05-04T22:28:00.000-07:00

Later:

I slip back into solitude like skin of bathwater.

The importance of coming back to the center of things, like a small curling inward, a soft flutter.

Because isn't my heart broken each time I walk out the door each morning? Having left my sleep. The echoes inside a brain as in a cavern.

There is a song I'm listening to: "I forget myself when I'm not with you."

Seems funny. It's the opposite with me. Unless the you is You.

God / I am the center. Synonymous

with myself, having a touch-stone into my ribs.

Rilke seemed to get it.

"Think of the world you carry inside you--be attentive to that which rises up in you...What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love; you must somehow keep working at it...Only the individual that who is solitary is like a thing placed...

So it is again. A cycle.

I leave and come back, shift. How else would I wander out into the distance, gathering things on the hem, skirting like a wild, and lost man ray?

Jellyfish of the mind, a blue-drift,

as though aimless. But even a clown fish, unanchored to a reef, cannot drift, not really, in that purely aimless way--the tide has its hand in things.

As does the cosmos have its hand on me, though I think I'm wherever a map has been shredded.

God, I would love to break through one of those geological maps, or the cartographer's graft. Just to prove my point.

"For do you not see how everything that happens keeps on being a beginning, and could it not be His beginning, since beginning is in itself so beautiful?"

I look back and think I've had more gathered in my arms than I do now. Perhaps that's not a bad thing--emptying is necessary to take in newer dust-babies / dustlings.

My older ones glisten. Glitter stuck to backs -- it does not fall, the dust from the other world.

The bliss of this moment. Body warm from the bath, books like yellow boxes, lit up,

ready at my side--Just this. Where I am alive,

no matter what point in which cycle I'm in, isn't it still generous?

Even the deepest sadness that keeps me far from realizing joy. Even then, when I'm sunk in a self-deceptive blue, even then.

How that is necessary--to feel, reach out to You.

Do you know I love that in you is my other eyelid, closing? And somewhere, in me, a hive of Yours and yours.

So I ponder the cycles, or accept them and

embrace the body and restless mind, wandering jellyfish that it is.

The bliss.

I will write, will be under white space,

looking up, again.

Dream and a Poem

2009-05-01T10:45:00.001-07:00

Dream and a Poem

I had a dream. This was it. And no, I am not writing, just moving through what passes in my mind, without thought.

My dream: in two parts:

1.a god told me in a dream to pull a string from a bundle of sticks...but only when the moon is red and women let down their hair, dancing...then, words will come to you, spinning in on themselves, creating light.

2. the god came back: it said, talk to the voices in your head, they will tell you more of their story. write that down. sleep in the grass after it rains. listen, all the gods have stars inside their bones.

And now, a poem by a wonderful poet, George Santayana

The Power of Art

NOT human art, but living gods alone
Can fashion beauties that by changing live,--
Her buds to spring, his fruits to autumn give,
To earth her fountains in her heart of stone;
But these in their begetting are o'erthrown,
Nor may the sentenced minutes find reprieve;
And summer in the blush of joy must grieve
To shed his flaunting crown of petals blown.
We to our works may not impart our breath,
Nor them with shifting light of life array;
We show but what one happy moment saith;
Yet may our hands immortalize the day
When life was sweet, and save from utter death
The sacred past that should not pass away.

-George Santayana

2009-04-27T13:06:00.000-07:00

Stop Writing

So, I haven't actually written a blog, blog in a long time, but I guess today is as good a day as any to start. I keep hearing the voice in the back of my head saying "blogs are for self-obsessed people" and why would you want a "diary" online?"

So, the blog is about how I'm going to stop writing for a while.

This is how it is.

Listen to music, now. Actually listen.

Read something without a thought of regurgitation.

Enjoy the day without analysis.

Divorce my need for validation via writing.

Why is the ego so wrapped up in it?

Why did Rothke repaint the same picture over and over again.

I was told I was writing the same thing over and over again.

True.

Same form, same images, same ideas.

I'm a broken mixed tape.

I found a form and now it's overdone. My form is a cliche. I need to break out.

I don't even know what any of that means.

Perhaps it's because I have begun to hate writing.

Perhaps it's called being burnt out.

If I don't have a novel, stacks of pages, by the time I'm 26, I'll certainly throw myself out the window.

Or, that's what you'd think by how much I have become dependent on work.

So, I'm going to try and STOP writing.

No more attempts at poems.

No more attempts at blogs.

No more attempts at weighing my day's productiveness on the page.

But I'm scared.

What am I supposed to do now?

Find a new form, she said. Break out. I've overused my current form.

What does that even mean?

Jackson Pollock, essentially, painted the same thing over and over again.

Why can't I write the same poem?

It's done.

I'm done. Need to see a movie or read.

No, reading is off limits. Too much in the mind.

I need to get out of the mind.

We'll see how long this lasts.

2009-04-27T06:07:00.001-07:00

I woke up this morning and thought,

I should be excited about the day. I should walk as though I'm only here now.

Something reminded me about the idea I read in "One Year to Live" which said,

Practice "dead days." Walk around as though you've already died. Accept and see your reactions to the idea that everything moves after your death.

Everything moves. Is this comforting? I feel an anxiety smog through the door at this idea. Anxiety married to my desire to leave something here. Place something on the hallway buffet table. Words, works.

But something tells me this is just the ego.

So I will wash my hair and, in the mirror I will repeat the serenity prayer and tell myself to love others, to consciously live today in love.

Though all I really want is to read John Cassian in the library.

A Girl Wants

2009-04-26T20:12:00.000-07:00

Last week, to the man I’ve never met, I sent a text:

I don’t know…what I have to
say, who’s it to? I’m still trying
to figure it out. We write into
each other.

Later, the man I’m sleeping with leaves a sticky note on my car,
One word, blinking in my face:

Brilliant.

The next morning, I text the man
I’ve never met, again:

What can I do?
I don’t want to be here.

He responds:

OK. If not here, then where?

I text:

Where? Nowhere.

He responds:

There is no nowhere.

I think of the nowhere where there are long baths, and sound.
Where nothing is eaten like honey on a spoon.

The man I’m sleeping with tells me it’s ok to cry and not talk as he’s listening on the other end of the phone.

A dog howls in the neighborhood while I’m sitting in cold bathwater.

The howl seems to come from the deepest part, so deep I do not want to listen, but I am sitting in the water, not wanting to move, ripple things, so I listen.

A girl wakes, crawls out, shudders.

She’s been roaming for days,
I thought, inside.

Shut me away,
I plead.

Go back inside, shut up, stop
howling, I can’t make my arms be her arms.

As my friend read her poetry to an audience, I dug my nails into my forearm.
I want nowhere.

Still, now,
As I write this, a girl wants blood.

Still, the howling,
Hanging in the air, in the heat,
Missing a fan, sanity.

I called the voice in my head.

There’s a train out now. The dog’s
Not howling anymore. There’s still
The heat pressing on me.

The voice says

Fuck the poets. Why write for anyone?

So I text the man I’m sleeping with after he reads this poem and says

It’s good.

I reply:

It’s shit. And I have no fan. And
My landlord won’t get it out of
The attic. And I’m going to
Fucking throw my phone out
The window.

Then, an ex professor sends me an email:

I always considered writing to be the “unnatural” equivalent of a hard on.

While the man I’m sleeping with sends me the serenity prayer,

I write:

A girl wants blood.

2009-04-23T05:31:00.001-07:00

Actually, to be honest with you,

Sometimes I wake up with so much doubt, I don't want to get out of bed.

The boulder won't move.

And on into an ocean I go,

Words drowned out by waves,

As they will be by an energy

Bigger than me, lasting.

To be honest with you,

I don't know why I'm here at all

But to be one long praise.

Under a Rock Face

2009-04-22T21:13:00.001-07:00

Found Under A Rock-Face

Something occurred to me in the gym shower today. Yes, I was surfing the highs of endorphins and thought, I know what will help me push through this word-hurry, this undefinable silence.

I will come back to you.

When I was working the 8-5, finding my way through the excess, I fell back on speaking to you.

Who are you? A you that I know but have never seen.

And I've missed speaking directly to you.

Help me, help me gather my thoughts. Where did you go today, for instance? What were the paths you walked?

Did you notice how your body felt, reawakening into the world this morning?

I laughed, once, so hard in sleep that it woke me up into night. It felt like a beautiful shock. A shock sweetened by joy. Have you ever woken to laughter, as though some voice inside passed their hand along your belly, like a smoothing stone or as your parent did to put you to some calmer state?

Lovers do that, too.

As does the grass.

I wondered, if I stopped writing you, would you fade? Would the tree-house we climbed together, crumble?

Wait! You think,

We never met at a tree-house,

but we did. Or maybe under a rock-face.

Watch me, I say, jump off the dock into the lake!

Oh, I remember an evening near to a voice,

near a skimmed lake.

And you never stopped, faded,

And even, I remember, today I called your name.

It was raining and the grass reminded me of England.

It was raining and the smell of pine drifted me to New Mexico,

It was raining and the wet is the wet the voice tells me about sometimes,

How, underneath a rock-face or in a tree-house,

What was uttered once will be uttered again,

Even in the words we use to undo each other,

In the text messages and emails,

In the little notes I write to myself, on place mats,

On the back of someones hand, on a lamp-post,

Or the pillow where things unsaid tremble against the weight of my body.

I will come back to you, laughing, high up in a tree-house or under a rock-face.

Rambling off Into a Morning Sky

2009-04-22T04:51:00.000-07:00

Thinking about my ghosts.

What / Who speaks to me--

How do I move through these voices, do I stop and listen, really?

Kierkegaard has something on double-mindedness.

"Is it not double-mindedness: to be ill, to put oneself under the physician's treatment, and yet not be willing to trust the physician, but arbitarily to break off treatment."

I need more focus--faith, patience, silence.

___

No words this morning. I do not even remember my dreams--but if I wake and start the day writing, perhaps that will help.

So, I try and examine this pull, need.

Do not explain me! It wants to say.

But it breaks me. Sometimes, I wake and it has walked into the morning, silent. I sit and stare for hours, abandoning the stillness by panic.

Don't tell me I am erratic! Don't tell me I am wild for myself.

Yes, OK, for myself, for something out there that holds myself.

The voices are inside, somewhere, teasing me.

They are standing on a cliff, somewhere, holding my heart-creature above their heads, in their hands, threatening to hurl it into greater silence.

If I move wrong into this day, will my heart-creature be another month in silence?

I was going to say, don't tell me I work hard enough,

But why waste energy worrying what others think,

It is the door, against my forehead,

that will not open, that I worry will never bang

on its hinges. Don't tell me to stop kneeling here,

Go on, I don't want anything but this door and

The voices to step closer, my heart-creature in their hands, unharmed,

Rambling off into a morning sky.

2009-04-21T14:33:00.001-07:00

Dear,

When I try to grip the world and fight against my ego,

That's when I come closest to loving

Only myself.

So I thought I'd jot this down on the back of my hand,

Thought I'd walk for a while in God's spit,

Watch it wash away, say,

Hey,

Forgive me,

But in order to keep my words true,

I have to stop writing for a while,

And in order to live more fully,

I need to be dead for a couple days.

Solomon,

Yeah, I need a little bit more of you...

More from the man who calls me Hannah,

More of the days where I'd walk in God's spit, singing.

Does he know how long Hannah waited?

I don't mind,

really--

When I was having an anxiety attack

Last night, when I was punching my forehead

To feel a sting, he said, Think of something

calm, beautiful,

I thought about the time I rode my horse for six hours,

Got lost in a storm,

Called out to no one, held on to her mane--

Waited.

Low Sunday

2009-04-19T20:28:00.001-07:00

When I watched her smell the tulips on the way to church,

I wanted something to hold on to, write down.

Later, we walked around the city, worried

About not writing poems, then decided

To live was a better choice—

Get lost, browse books and skirts

Instead of the right words.

the Other-than-Myself (Stage of Becoming)

2009-04-17T12:31:00.000-07:00

This post was inspired, partly, by this video.

In the stage of becoming

I have been thinking a lot lately of the ties and relations between my spiritual faith / journey and my faith (and lack there of at times) in writing and the journey I am on as a writer.

There are times where I am on top of the world. The words come easy, the muses are by my side….and then. And then.

It’s as though something has left through the back door. I cannot write anything that remotely sounds like my voice. Each time this happens, I despair and assume I will never write again. However, somewhere in a tiny cell with one candle lit, sits the part of me, whispering, “you will write again, have faith. Be patient.”

What quiets her? Fear. Fear and perhaps pride.

Pride because my body is useless without the walk-through of thoughts. Fear because my pride hangs on the hook of brain waves that conjure the words into the air, through the skull-cap and into my belly. From the belly, I hope it rises, again, through the chest and up toward the skull again. There, I pray it reverberates and sounds its song until I record it.

But when all is silent, I am left with nothing but my worrying thoughts.

I believe very much in cycles. Nature has taught me this. So have my notebooks.

Years and years, I’ve kept record of my thoughts. From a small girl questioning God to a teenager questioning herself, her writing, her worth…and one exceptional gift that that recording has given me is the chance to see the cycles, the patterns, the wading in and out of hope, despair, fruitfulness, mini-deserts and long grasslands—the great expanses of time that hold out its hand as though to embrace and I only see what’s immediately missing or immediately available, but not appreciated.

And so I’d read and re-read my old worries. My depression, sadness, my dancing and holding grip of joys that seem now only like shifting sand that I only faintly recall now, here, at a desk in New York.

Worry. Up, around, inside the gut. Writing, not writing, torn between singing and violently silencing myself.

And so I’d say, Look, obviously you’ve been through this before. Look, it will turn out, it will open up again, the words will fill the belly and float to the top, again, again, like seasons.

Easy, isn’t it? To study patterns, make prediction, calculate when and where and how it all ends.

But no matter how many times the girl inside the cell whispers “this too shall pass” I tremble in fear that perhaps THIS TIME it’s different and I won’t write again, I won’t fall in love or feel a burst of joy walking from my car, singing in the shower, crawling off the treadmill and onto back to breathe.

Faith, sometimes, is something altogether unknown.

So, I go back to the stillness that I fear. The exact quiet that makes me afraid.

Reading the journals, I see myself doubting the universe, which is myself.

But where do I turn when I recognize the very place that holds me here is the place I call my own heart? The hand that writes this sentence?

I have been reading a lot about the movement and seasons of Faith, of voice. Of the Voice. Of my Voice…and it has brought me back, again, to my writing life. Or perhaps my writing life is informing my spiritual life, I don’t know.

But in the chamber of doubt and suffering, I try and remind myself to listen to the whispering. Sometimes, I cannot hear her at all. Sometimes, I sit on my floor and cry for hours, not knowing why I am so desperate and sad. There are no reasons. But both joy and desperation can lift the spirit to something other than its self.

Within the doubt is a gift, too. It keeps me going back again to the desk. Back again to the journal. Back again to the little girl who said to Angels, FRIENDS! Speak to me, I am listening!

And I’d record even that.

As an adult, I block their voices. I say, I must be my own poet, must climb toward an adult way of writing, of singing, of keeping record.

And so I lean too much on a mirage of self. A mirage of perfection that I try so hard to keep controlled.

I go to the gym.

I read at the library.

I expect results.

So when the silence happens, when the writing abandons me,

I bang on my own chest.

Perhaps if I tell myself I’m failing, I’ll find some outer force to punish me back to writing again. Back to production and output and perfection.

What do I deserve if that’s the case? And still, I do it.

Instead of embracing the pause, the silence, I spit in its face. Never mind Faith. Never mind trust. Never mind the cycles.

Of course, this is all part of the cycle, the rejection of the cycle is part of it, too.

March 24
“Hate myself for being lazy. For writing crap. But I read Emerson, who said:

‘To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, -- that is genius.’

Still, I judge myself too harshly, against what others think and most of all, what I myself think. What I wish for myself. What, exactly, am I doing? I have nothing, know nothing, and if God…I cannot say that, I cannot.”

March 25:
Reading Emerson. He keeps going on and on about self-reliance and trusting the movement within ourselves.
Have been desparate for something to emerge. This tug of war gets me nowhere—then the self-doubt comes in and, slowly, the anger. And I try to write myself out of it, but that fails and makes the cycles even wore.
I need to remind myself that it’s OK if I don’t produce. It’s OK if I write nothing but whiney journal entries. Someday, the words will come back to me—they always do. It will not abandon me. I must keep that faith tucked away inside me, lean back a little more, berathe. Know that my destiny is already written, that I have little control, that the control I do have is to keep heart, to continue growing my passion and stay true to my love—faith in muses, that my brain is always working.

And so, I kept on. Though, the doubt still bites. And what was happening here other than the pouring in of words through the skull-cap and down into the belly. And silence came, yes, it did. But in that silence, in the struggle, was a tilling of the words in the belly, was a tearing away of old ground and a getting-ready for a new under-world of churning words, their bodies growing and vibrating inside.

What is the anxiety, the heat, other than the new words pushing through the soul, ready to pass up through the chest and into the skull—ready to make the trip the room where I would feel their whole strength, once they were ready. And through the skull, eventually, they will leave me again and out into the wide-world. On they will fly to find their way into some other body—where they will wait to germinate in the belly of another.

This is the conversation between us.

To trust the exchange is to open our whole body up to being receptive. To have faith in something bigger, more far reaching, than our body.

And so I will write:

March 26

I should sit in silence. Allow this. Sit in faith. Maybe then my words will ring truer, as I will have allowed moments to pass through me. If I can relax in the knowledge that what has come will return, then the confidence will then being to grow—not overbaring but humbly, and nestled in its place.
To have faith in the wholly other—as my works are said to be, risen out of a dirt that is not my ground, not my making.
And why not communicate with others? Would I always keep my words from them? No. My words are just as much theirs.
Why can’t I trust this, why so anxious?

So it never ends. Never, never ends. Walking back and forth between remembering my Faith and abandoning it. Between hearing the whispers and drowning in white-noise.

But, like today, when I climbed out of bed and into the sun, when I read of the desert fathers and their patience, when I lashed out at a loved one, when I felt humbled, when I remembered the kind smile of the pine trees….

Between the moments, a breath. And then another. And I’ll re-read lines from a journal. And I’ll scour my body for light. I’ll turn up with hands full of ash. And perhaps, for once, I’ll remember Faith, I’ll remember the cycles and I’ll take the ash, smear it on my face, and dance.

Perhaps. I'll remember the Other-than-myself.

And then. Perhaps.

Good Morning, Morning

2009-04-15T05:10:00.001-07:00

I woke up this morning.

Read in a book "today is a good day to die, because it's here. I'm here. Now let go."

Let go.

Of the idea that the ego rests in accomplishment,

Of how small we are, in this world,

But how our spirits are, in fact, the whole universe.

I love your shell, he said.

And everytime he says that, I smile,

because I told him, once, that I read a meditation about how the body is simply a shell,

And when we pass through, our Easter eggs break open,

On into a lighter place,

where a cell is a galaxy,

and atoms are light years apart.

In me, a galaxy, I said, as I woke up, dreaming

about a horn through the skull.

Good morning, I said, to the morning,

teach me this is all that is promised to me.

So, I let go into the current, walked out the door.

If I see you, how my chest wants to sing, to embrace you and say,

We're here!

Keeps Me Here

2009-04-14T18:25:00.001-07:00

I have been sitting at a desk.

I am sitting at a desk thinking about my body.

My body, which rose with me this morning and is settled with me now.

But nothing escapes into another realm,

even when my mind takes to the field

or folds its body into a corner

or jumps into a wide canyon

or laughs into a starless oblivion,

my body stays put

even if I'm stirring to escape myself.

So, I am sitting in a desk, trying to breathe into a space,

wanting to think about sex, not wanting to think about sex

and how I miss my silent space,

my long spine, or book, sliding into a yield,

a yield where I wrote about God

and dust, about you and how I miss your emails!

So, I'm sitting at a desk, reading essays by Roethke,

wondering about my contemporaries

and how the man I've never met, texted me that he felt separated

from what? I texted back

from God, he texted. From you.

But we've never met but I know what he means,

I know what it means to want to be a bit lighter,

just a tad, just a lifting off the window

or a sliding about the edge.

How my brain works and doesn't work

even when I sit for hours in a bath and tell myself

"but you couldn't sleep with women"

No, I can't sleep with women, but I sleep with voices,

like when I was a child in a bunk bed and in my head the kitchen sang out.

It sang out and I felt lighter, I felt power within like a source where God stood and said, Yes, Child, I have spoken to you.

And there wasn't a doubt, and if I walked to the kitchen, there would be angels.

I wonder why God has to be in a business suit.

No, really, he's in a business suit.

Last week, a man was doing Tai Chi in the middle of Grand Central, his suitcase against the wall. I had to stand there for four minutes and watch him, because I didn't believe it.

There's another man I've never met who wrote me an email, just now, about how, when hope fades, maybe the intellect is a threat.

Maybe, then, it's most dangerous when we know there's an exit.

An exit as is Glenn Gould's piano was an exit.

As though a lover's curved side is an exit

and the pull on my mid-section when I see the red dessert in pictures, when Utah is a drive away,

but, the man doing tai chi created an exit in grand central.

And if I don't weep, right now, at my desk at work, books around me as though God is found in its words, as if my center lies in their spine--

if I don't weep right now, I'll pull at my body in fear of breaking,

I'll scream in the car, driving home,

because I watched a video of Gerald Stern, I watched him dance through his words a kinder man for his honesty,

and what's keeping me from weeping but the world of the body,

not the spirit. Not the spirit. It's not the spirit that keeps me here.

I See Math Problems Floating Around

2009-04-14T13:43:00.001-07:00

I See Math Problems Floating Around

Why, when I entered the mental hospital, did I finally feel sane?

I remember they took away my shoelaces. My favorite American Eagle sweater is now missing its hoodie drawstrings.

You can’t write with a pen. Here, use this, the nurse said.

I was sitting by the bay window after they had taken away all of my
shoelaces and various other objects deemed dangerous in my bag.

I looked down at the stubby pencil, missing an eraser, dull, rounded at the tip.

How am I supposed to write with this? I thought.

We can’t have erasers, a girl sitting by the other bay window said. See that boy over there?

She pointed to a boy, hunkered down into his knees, shaking his feet side to side, shuffling in place, curled into a ball.

He’s a burner. We used to have erasers until he decided to rub them
into his skin. Stupid. I don’t get it. Now I can’t fucking erase
anything. Hey. My names Sarah, by the way. What are you here for? Took
pills? You look like a pill taker, she said, smiling.

What am I here for?

No, no I’m here because I cut myself, I guess. I said.

You guess? Well, do you or not? I took a lot of pills, but you know,
that wasn’t the real problem, I mean, I just drink a lot. And don't
eat. Oh, I mean, I used to drink a lot. We have to practice seeing
ourselves as someone who doesn’t drink or whatever, she said, putting
ellipsis up around “used to” “doesn’t drink” and “whatever.”

Sighing, she stood up and walked down the hall into what I supposed was her room.

Keep the door open all the way, Sarah, said a nurse by the fichus.

Do I or not?

I looked down at my last effort. They had bandaged it when I checked
in. At this point, I’d usually take the band-aide off, keep it from
scabbing.

But I knew I had to keep it on.

What am I doing here?

At night, for an hour, family members could call us.

Hey sweetie. Is everything all right? My dad said into the phone.

Is everything all right? He knows he’s calling me at then mental hospital, right?

Hey. Well, I guess it’s getting better, I said.

I….uh.

My dad continued to make sounds….

Uh….

I shifted from one foot to the other. My tennis shoes looked silly without shoestrings.

I just don’t understand why you’d want to hurt yourself, sweetie, he finally said.

Well, I said, why did you drink, Dad?

What do you mean?

Why did you drink, when you used to drink?

I didn’t expect a response, so into the silent pause, I continued.

It’s my coping mechanism, I said.

I see. Well, I’m glad you’re getting help.

Thanks, Dad.

Why are you smiling? The girl in the blue hoodie said later that night.

I don’t know, I said, looking up from my journal.

This isn’t the kind of place where people go around smiling, she said.

How old are you? I asked.

Eleven, why? She said, trying to look taller.

No reason, I said.

Why aren’t you in the adult program, she asked?

I don’t know. I’m seventeen. I guess you have to be eighteen to be in the adult program.

God. I know, I’ll be eighteen in two weeks. TWO WEEKS! And I’m stuck
here, said another girl who looked like she hadn’t washed her hair in a
while. She sat down next to us and started pulling out her hair. She
looked up again and said,

I mean, fuck. You know, they get to have smoke breaks and shit. I’m fucking dying for a smoke!

If I hear you curse again, Sarah, you’ll have to leave the common room! A nurse pointed her finger at Sarah and continued,

And stop pulling out your hair…I could write this down, and you know what that means.

The nurse spun around and walked toward the front desk.

Fuck, Sarah said, whispering.

What does that mean? What happens if she writes that down? I said.

It means, the eleven year old said, that she’ll get free time taken away and have to go an hour longer in therapy.

The food here blows, said Sarah.

Like you’d care! Said a boy, sitting down across from us.

Fuck off! Sarah yelled, throwing a pillow at him.

I noticed her frame was tiny.

I could break her in two, I thought. Suddenly, I had the urge to throw up.

The boy caught the pillow, laughed. He had burns spotted over his arms. He stood up, walked away.

What are you doing? Said the eleven year old.

Writing, I said.

I see things, she said.

You do?

Yeah. That’s why I’m here. I see math problems floating around. Give me a math problem! I’ll solve it!

I’m not very good at math, I said.

She’s fucking lying, said Sarah, still pulling at her hair. She’s just got behavioral problems.

The eleven year old looked down at her hands, picked up a pencil and started drawing on a piece of paper.

I can see things, she said, under her breath.

The calm came into the room like a buzzing hive. Around me, the lights
started going in and out, breathing like starfish and gold flakes,
coming down.

Perhaps I’m seeing things, I thought.

I wanted to tell her that I used to see things, too, but I caught myself.

You don’t say things like that in the hospital unless you want to stay longer.

Maybe I do want to stay longer, I thought, smiling.

Later that night, a nurse came in every hour to take my blood pressure.

It’s ok dear. I’m just checking in on you. We have to do this every hour. You’ll get used to it.

The light outside the window seemed neon. The cinder blocks poured into my eyes like a holding pattern.

The nurse took my blood. I watched in a sleepy daze as the red went up the wire.

I’ll only do this at the beginning of the night, she said.

Strange, I thought, that this is so comforting.

I wanted to cry because I was happy she was there, sitting by my bed.

I’m OK. I thought, and went back to sleep.

The showers were cold.

No hot water.

I have to stay here while you shower, said another nurse in the morning.

I’ll stand outside while you dress, she said.

I lied down on the tiles. The cold felt good.

The lines stretch on forever, I thought.

Later that morning, after cereal and orange juice,

No fucking coffee. No cigarettes and no coffee, said Sarah, her razored-hips pushing past me to the cafeteria table,

Later that morning, after cereal and orange juice,

Eleven year old sat next to me on the couch in the common room. We watched the adults stand outside on their cigarette breaks.

I see butterflies, too, she said, so quietly I could barely hear her.

I know, I said.

You see them, too?

No, I said, but that doesn’t mean you don’t.

She looked up, cheeks wet from the tears I didn’t notice.

I don’t want to leave, she said, grabbing hold of my hand.

Me either.

Later that week, at the family therapy session, before they let me go:

Shannon, what do you think you’ll be able to do now, instead of fall back on your old coping mechanism?

The therapist leaned back.

I listed off the usual responses, but secretly I had no idea.

What do you think you’ll do now?

Seven years ago, I would have gone into the bathroom and

Sweetie,

Why do you hurt yourself?

Not that the lines go on forever, but that they don’t.

This morning, I woke up and held a pair of tweezers to my palm.

Pushed in.

No, read something, I said aloud to myself at 7 AM.

So, I chose Thomas Kempis:

“When you rise in the morning, think that you will not see evening; and
when evening comes, do not be too certain that you will rise in the
morning….Wise and blessed is he who, during life, strives to be what he
would like to be when death finds him.”

I got down on my hands. I breathed the carpet bugs into my lungs. I said:

No one is this blessed.

I thought about the girl in the hospital, seven years ago, who saw things.

Gather around her, I said. Gather the grass around her and be something solid.

I am something solid, I said, thanks to this.

I pointed into my chest, a pen.

I pointed it into my chest, just a bit more.

The tip almost called out to me.

It almost said, “stop!”

But I knew not to go too far.

I knew to feel through the spirit, not the body.

Sweetie,

Why do you hurt yourself?

Sometimes, passing through me, a list of things.

And the lines go on forever.

That’s the point.

Forever, they go on, and through me.

I drove to campus and lost myself in worry.

Why haven’t I written anything?

I texted the man I've never met:

I see visions but don’t even know it.

What visions? He texted back.

Things like how I’m just a long line or how I want to kiss
girls legs or tell everyone I love them.

Too many trying to speak at
once, I texted, but I need one clear vision at a time. It gets jumbled.

Later, at work, while I’m writing about the mental hospital, I read from Dag Hammarskjold’s journal:

During a working day, which is real only in God, the only poetry which
can be real to you is the kind which makes you become real under God;
only then is the poetry real for YOU, the art true. You no longer have
time for—pastimes.

I feel separated, he texted again.

Visions are a licking of the tongue. Or something under the length of
how I feel, floating each morning toward the carpet bugs, singing in my
lungs as I kneel.

Do you see them, too? She asked.

No, I said. But that doesn’t mean you don’t.

Then Roethke Said, I Believe in Ghosts, Too!

2009-04-11T15:28:00.001-07:00

I was reading this today, and it helped me, again, like things seems to do...always drifting in as disembodied voices, knowing exactly what to say, and when.

Roethke wrote an essay called "On Identity" and in it, said this:

"Let me say boldly, now, that the extent to which the great dead can be evoked, or can come to us, can be eerie, and astonishing. Let me, at risk of sounding off, recite a personal incident.

I was in that particular hell of a poet: a longish dry period....I was 44 and I thought I was done. I had been reading -- and rereading -- not Yeats, but Ralegh and Sir John Davies.

Suddenly, in the early evening, the poem "The Dance" started, and finished itself in a very short time--say thirty minutes, maybe in the greater part of an hour, it was all done. I felt, I KNEW, I had hit it. I walked around, and I wept; and I knelt down--I always do after I've written what I know is a good piece. But at the same time I had, as God is my witness, an actual sense of a Presence--as if Yeats himself were IN the that room. The experience was in a way terridying, for it lasted at least half an hour. That house, I repeat, was charged with a psychic presence" the very walls seemed to shimmer. I wept for joy. At least I was somebody again. He, they--the poets dead--were with me.

......

If the dead can come to our aid in a quest for identity, so can the living--and I mean ALL living things, including the subhuman. Why not? Everything that lives is holy: I call upon those holy forms of life. One could even put this theologically: St. Thomas says "God is above all things by the excellence of His nature; nevertheless, He is in all thigns as causing the being of all things." Therefore, in calling upon the snail, I am calling, in a sense, upon God.

Snail, snail, glister me forward,
Bird, soft-sigh me home.
Worm, be with me.
This is my hard time.

...the identity of some other being--and in some instances, even an inanimate thing--brings a corresponding heightening and awareness of one's own self, AND, even more mysteriously, in some instances, a feeling of the oneness of the universe.

.....

Once we feel deeply, to paraphrase Marianne Moore, we begin to behave"

So, yes, Roethke, yes. I was once in that room, with the ghosts, and have found myself there again, again when I was so sunk in my own dark that I didn't think words were things themselves anymore. That spirit couldn't be the tiny hairs on their backs and I wouldn't find a way to make them crawl across the green of our world.

But then, something happens.

And some spirit lets us move again, with their breath.

But only if we feel deeply. Let our gazes become active and silent on a solid thing. Let our gazes become rocks of faith, even if we grit our teeth against them night after night.

A couple nights ago I woke with a pain. Looking at my arm, I noticed I had bitten it in my sleep. Why would I do such a thing.

Then, in the small part of my chest, where the ribs sort of meet at the top, I felt a skipping joy.

Pain is something gorgeous, when you feel it out of context. When no thought attends to its play.

So, some spirit moved in me to rage against my disbelief, bit into the arm that writes and doesn't write. And when it doesn't write, it doubts.

But I said, then, to my biting ghost....

Tell me something I don't know, something I have seen once, but forgotten, or get out.

Then, the sun broke in.

I thought I was dreaming, but

three weeks before, I sat in the library and cried, reading Larry Levis' first poem in Elegy.

His black-box windows are now looking at me.

Now, waiting for me to say something about the community of trees.

Larry, I got in late last night. I missed your call.

Forgive me. Whisper something to me again.

No, tell the others I haven't forgotten them either.

Tell the universe I try so often to remember myself being not myself but dirt.

Larry helped me write a poem, once, even before I knew him.

You're thinking, how is this possible?

Check out Godel and his concept of time. It's all there. We're in this together, alive or dead.

So, Larry helped me write a poem once. I was sitting in Borders, having beaten myself up about not writing a poem, not getting accepted to Graduate School, and losing too much weight.

But he invoked in me a Fish, and at the end...my declaration, at the end of the poem, was:

Field. Cows. Flies.

And, a year later, after Marie Howe told me to read a man named Larry, I sat in the Graduate School library that I didn't think I got into, and read his line

Cattle. Field. Flies.

I got chills. I cried. I sang something in the small part of my chest, where the ribs meet in the middle...

I said...

Holy Shit!

And cried some more.

Now, Roethke says, Well, yes, Shannon, of course I believe in ghosts and dead poets.

I want to hold your hand, Roethke. Can you hear me, now?

From the Therapist / Client Series

2009-04-11T12:58:00.001-07:00

CLIENT on a train. THERAPIST in an office speaking into tape recorder.

CLIENT:

(to God)

Sometimes I walk next to You, swallow words, theirs, thoughts, collect things.

Imagine a wading pool with whole novels!

Someone said this was a problem, a way out.

Of what? Reality?

THERAPIST:

Patient romanticizes the imaginary. Distractible speech, incoherence…

CLIENT:

Codfish!

THERAPIST:

…Rather than meaningful relationships…

CLIENT:

Sound, sounds.

THERAPIST:

…sounds, sounds appear to govern words.

CLIENT:

(to God)

I told therapist, too many bookshelves will kill a man.

I’m hopeless, I know. I believe in the Utmost.

Or Highest.

(to passenger)

Not once does God write Christmas cards to electrons

I don’t know. What do you think?

THERAPIST:

She’s…

CLIENT:

(to passenger)

They’ll tell you I’m schizophrenic. I see words in waves.

(to God)

Clarity is morning daisies through a bay widow after You’ve spent all night dancing.

THERAPIST:

Client has effectively manipulated environment of thought. Quarantine.

CLEINT:

(to God)

Your poetry plays into fantastic behavior, an orange and red macaw.

THERAPIST:

One fears the room will fill with pages of her script.

CLIENT:

(to passenger)

I hang thought-maps, damp canyon girls, along the running board.

THERAPIST:

I wake in sweats. Perhaps losing the mind is a communal disease.

CLIENT:

(to God)

Searchlights: I cry about holiness. Searchlights.

Hopeless.

THERAPIST:

Her voice in my ear. She’s in mirrors,

Now.

CLIENT:

(to passenger)

How I sound like blossoms. Inside another’s ear.

Hopeless, I know.

(to God)

Someone must have stored a copy of You in a filing cabinet.

THERAPIST:

(to God)

She’s in mirrors now.

Light taps between ear bone and verbatim.

CLIENT:

(to God)

Thought babies born between us. Same brain.

THERAPIST:

Codfish!

2009-04-08T21:59:00.001-07:00

And that your hand is on her every morning, and that you are testing her every minute...

Somewhere, a shadow of me is sitting against a tree, reading.

I want to believe that what I am writing will set your heart going.

The thought, I am not working hard enough. Each night,

The gathering of the day's minutes nip at my toes at the end of the bed. I tell them, tomorrow, tomorrow, little ones.

Tomorrow, I'll concentrate on my thought baskets, I'll pile little books into my hands and really hold them. Not just pass them over with a light touch, the tips of my fingers.

I am simply a fool. Listen, I haven't said anything to you yet because you're only a light in a corner, a blue globe, hanging there, waiting for a word, or the barometric pressure to drop.

Just keep silent. I know, lock myself away. I want to. I long to go for hours or days and say nothing, nothing to anyone but the carpet bugs.

Just a few hours ago, I saw a carpet bug pass by my desk.

You're working harder than me, I thought.

To be alone is to be in kindness.

Not that I don't mind the bugs.

Or the lamp throwing things around, scooting under my skirt.

But, when I miss hearing from you, or you, or you, I get a tinge in the side.

I walk from one place to another, chanting the syllables of your name.

And they taste sweeter by the minute,

like listening, taste as though I've said nothing but Yes! for a month

So, it doesn't matter, if you heard, if you saw the note I left on your car,

It just matters that I miss you again,

and home is still inside my chest.

Lust Helps Us Along; On Psychoanalysis, the Artist and St. John

2009-04-07T21:27:00.000-07:00

I am currently reading an array of books (my bedside is surrounded by piles of books I’m “currently reading,” which is somewhat a lie, but only somewhat…I pick at things here and there, scoop things up and place them down again, like little birds).

Today, I am reading The Psychoanalyst and the Artist, along with St. John of the Cross.

It’s interesting, because there’s this call for Union with the self, in both cases…(if, as though rocks cast from a mountain, we are a bit of God).

Uniting with the self, with the unconscious, with the mountain from where our bodies were hurled.

And the Artist? What of her? What of her long hours, standing on the shifting weight of feet, gargling mysteries around on her tongue, convinced that there’s nothing, absolutely NOTHING new to be spoken or sung or written…

Union with the self? How can that be possible when it feels the search is never over? One work after another, broken off as acorns from above which refuse to grow. MY GOD! They are imperfect shells.

That’s a poem-baby. And yet my unconscious has failed to wean it into the wide world.

Or our spirits hang above the window as doves do, calling for their mates.

God isn’t a ghost-man out looking for bits of string to tie to trees.

We do not have to look for days for the right word or line break.

Gargling.

As though the artist is gargling the same words around in the throat. (Or, should they be a painter, the same images, color schemes, and such) Someone said a poet essentially writes the same poem, over and over again.

And hello! The telephone keeps silent. The rocks are not falling as often as they should, as though, if you sat in your room long enough, some work would curl up in your lap, complete, lovable, worthy of prizes and Grants.

Vulnerable. I am sitting at work, listening to a sociology class discuss intimacy.

Floating through the classroom and onto my desk:

“I think lust helps us along, helps us let go. Exposing ourselves is a process.

Whatever those vulnerable parts are, they need to be exposed.

But most of us are on guard.”

Says the professor.

This my mind picks up on while I’m trying to write this piece about psychoanalysis, God and the Artist.

But I am at work, writing this piece on psychoanalysis, God and the Artist because the universe works on a string of things, branching out like your veins or the capillary system in a maple leaf. And if I were any other place, I wouldn’t have heard:

Intimacy explained in a professor’s words, drifting over to my desk, reminding me:

Lust helps us along.

Lust for the body—of flesh or body of work.

And so we want to be done with it.

Why isn’t this poem working?

Oh, I’ve torn many strands from my head over this thought.

I’ve prayed, please, give me a vivid dream.

As though a poem would appear and I’d be writing again like I did when I drank too much.

So, I read in my book:

“The total life work of an artist is a more or less continuous dream-work.”

Total life. Throughout. Like when you set off to count the skylights and bridges form. You don’t understand until the lines begin to cross.

God laughs when you get a smirk on your face, when you want to hurl a cup of hot tea at his face and say

Why didn’t you TELL me my ex-boyfriend was a drunk?

Oh, young one. You’ll be free to feel the softness of girls skirts now….

Now that the poems are not each their own bodies, but a flowing string of things from the longest tradition.

Lust helps us along.

Psychoanalysis and the Artist says:

“You, you are an artist if you can weave together radiances of symbols in such a way and with such an interpretive relationship to reality that you can create the illusion of something alive and something manifold so that each who comes to look at it, listen to or touch your work feels himself caught in your dream-becoming-art….”

So, St. John wrote of passing through mountains and strands. Calling out that nothing, no, nothing would permit him passage if he did not grieve for the loss of his Love. Set about muttering on like a Mad Man in search of his unconscious dream-becoming-art.

His dream: these little flowers set out on a hill, or hiding behind a rock, which he will always search for. What can one flower (work) accomplish alone that many gathered together (one’s life work) can accomplish? Surely, the artist must have faith that at the end of life, something will have grown, some garden will have flourished that, in the young days of creativity, the artist could have never guess it’s rich pattern.

Will the garden be colorful, seasonal, limited, renewing? Will the work give one or many pleasure?

If the artist (gardener / gatherer of flowers) continued to worry about the end-result, nothing would get accomplished. And still, if the artist stressed and gargled over and over gain, over the same plant, what else could grow? What other works would be done?

So, I say to a poem-lilly: “are you grown? Are you who you’re supposed to be?”

I walk from my car to the train, from the train to Grand Central, from Grand Central to Union Square, thinking

Is there a poem to be found here? Here? Here, in this stranger’s pocket on the six?

And, while worrying about the little flower-poem that may or may not exist,

I miss The Garden. The City that loves me, itss bad breath and gorgeous breasts.

God, why have you loved me enough to place me here?

Why is this the city that’s kissing me, and will I find more poems in the side-streets?

Something keeps telling me, it doesn’t matter.

I am the Six and the rock from Your Mountain.

Once, when I was writing in a black notebook on the Metro North, depressed that Larry Levis had died so young after reading a book of his poems,

It suddenly hit me:

It’s enough I am here to read him.

And I’ll die having thought about his California.

Matthew Dickman’s New York Produce.

Catharina Evan’s New Jersey.

Megan Williams’ Idaho.

And God, why have you loved me enough to place me here?

When I got the letter about being on the waitlist for Sarah Lawrence,

I cried for 20 minutes in my apartment hallway, called my mother in Puerto Rico and said “I didn’t get in.” She said she’d drink a Margarita for me anyway.

But the Universe is made of a continuous string, like your veins or the capillary system in a maple leaf.

And Oh, young one, you’ll learn a lot about the Greater Picture through this, about faith.

St. John of the Cross said:

Who can set forth in words that which He makes them feel? and, lastly, who can explain that for which they long?

Assuredly no one can do it; not even they themselves who experience it. That is the reason why they use figures of special comparisons and similitudes; they hide that which they feel and in the abundance of the Spirit utter secret mysteries rather than express themselves in clear words.

Lust helps us along.

If it wasn’t for lust, I wouldn’t have called Graduate Studies every day, wondering if I was worthy of getting off the “list.”

If it wasn’t for lust,

I wouldn’t be singing as I do, about wanting to know my unconscious, climbing a mountain from which I fall every day, writing in the muddiest words the greatest love song of my life, all my life.

And each poem is a chord of it. A strand in a tiny fibre that makes up a piece of a long string within the Universe’s String System.

The Nature of this:

Vulnerable. Like when I cried, again, walking toward a pine tree and holding a hand for the first time since letting go of the last chord. The last poem-lily, waiting to be part of my garden, after I die.

Dear So and So

2009-04-07T12:01:00.000-07:00

Today,

I stopped at a puddle, crossing the street, hoping I'd see your smile, or someone's smile, at least.

I was reading about God. I wasn't trusting my own voice.

And then on the eliptical machine, I heard myself pronounce:

There's a whole other plane on which to live!

Not that I knew, exactly, how to live on that plane, but I knew it demanded my silence.

Where do you turn inward? He asked.

And I was on my way to Starbucks to buy coffee, and I thought:

I have no damn idea.

Sometimes on my yoga mat, I guess...or when I'm walking to the library, hoping I can get lost in Goethe or a book on neurology.

When I was on the eliptical, sweating the worry out, I thought:

Jesus, why has it felt like time suddenly stopped being time, and instead became one big, sloppy cocktail party?

Last night, he asked me, What's it sound like, when God talks to you?

What does it feel like? I asked.

No, sound like.

Oh. Nothing. It doesn't sound like anything.

That's right. He said, because didn't you say you'd die if you heard God?

I breathed. I noticed, I was breathing, then said,

Surely, you cannot hear me and live.

Sometimes, when I was younger, I thought the ringing in my right ear was angels.

Later, I found out it was residual damage from so many years of chronic ear infections.

Once, I was so sick, the ceiling fan came down and told me to cut myself.

OK, I said to the ceiling fan.

No, God doesn't sound like anything.

But sometimes I hear symphonies, I said.

Yeah, that book I'm reading, Wittgenstein's Mistress, she hears things like that, he said.

You mean, the crazy woman? I asked.

No. She might just be the last woman on earth, not crazy.

I wanted to shout out at the gym, to the woman cleaning the treadmill,

There's a whole other plane on which to live!

But maybe I'll just write a blog about it, I thought,

And send imaginary emails in my head, like

Dear So and So

Your tree is awfully lonely. Talk to it.

Love,

God.

In Me. Hidden, A Coyote

2009-04-05T12:54:00.001-07:00

As though longing for a grave or,

in my youth, blood,

I feel a stirring inward,

and when the inward refuses to unlock doors, there comes a stirring for a tearing away of the body,

for kneeling, as I did in childhood, against stone.

Why the desire to be still for hours, still and silent?

I am ashamed to cry or sing or pray,

even in a corner in my house,

even in the spare room in my ribs,

even in the dark of my eyelid.

But I’ll fall down, again,

down into a scattering.

Into a scattering a bit of bone, a hide, as though in me, hidden, a coyote.

And this desert, it wanders, takes branches into its mouth, hungers, racks the length of its back against brush.

Into a scattering, it howls, breaks flocks in the sky.
Hallow reeds tremble.

Into a scattering, flocks fall, feathering the ground.
How my heart feels, faltering.

And in this desert, the heat-body inside my body, rises, talks gibberish until my lips are parched.

Into a scattering, the coyote cries through the throat, star-light.

Into a scattering, brambles, so each step brings a pang.

As though for the grave,

the darkness hides in the hide of my thigh when the stirrings still

and the scatterings gather together.

I have laid my palms on the side and watched the prints lift, ghost-like, from the bed.

And then the tremble.

I have crawled, though no trail has been pressed.

The coyote, if it could, would let the tongue roll out, taste its own blood.

Turn in.
Turn indoors.
Turn the doorknob until the neck breaks.

I’d hurl my body into a corner.

Not to be impatient but to have a reason, solid, bruised, to whimper as I do.

I Never Say Anything Bad About Anyone // Why Are You Telling Me This While I'm Drinking Shots?

2009-04-04T13:57:00.000-07:00

I was in the corner, watching him.
It’s not like we go and socialize.
It will be easier in a couple years—
I’m very worried about her.

It was that summer they shared the house. I never told you about that?

He says to me: So, you still living up in Connecticut?
And I was like,
Yeah
He says, Are you still happy there?
And you know what I said to him? I said,
My house is bigger than yours
(I was kind of drunk that night)

I hate him. I really hate him. I swear.
He’s setting himself up for politics. Ugh.

He would verbally abuse his wife in front of us, at parties and I felt so uncomfortable. He was so verbally abusive.

And like, her father, his wife’s father, he was very ill and he died. And she called me and asked if we could watch her kids. And I had five kids at my house! It was not an easy task and he did nothing!

And we decided to move, we, you know, we did…
It was a huge mistake.
I hate him.
I wish him ill and I don’t wish that on anyone.

Wait, who were the neighbors I met?

Um, Connie and Bill—across the street from the Garrons—our kids played together, went to ballet and everything!

You know, like things couldn’t be better for us in Connecticut, it’s our dream home.

...I have to support my mother, you know what I mean?

...I was crying, Why are you telling this to me….while I’m drinking shots!
(squeal)

She wanted to buy a house, stay home, have kids, but she was like, 25 years old. She should be enjoying herself!

Did you have a different picture of how it would turn out?

Totally. We all did. But you have to respect people’s choices. I mean, here I am in my breeches on the train!
(laughter)
I remember thinking, she’s turning 40!

She worships her, she does, because her husband makes so much money

Yeah, well, you know, she’s just….

She’s a princess! I know!

She said to me, No one called me to say congratulations on your pregnancy—I, I was on BEDREST!

I mean, I never say anything bad about anyone!

I mean, I wanna go to Vegas when I turn 40!

Ha, but who knows, we may be living with my mother by then, you never know. This is a bad year for us.

Oh, don’t say that!

I may have to sell my aquarium!

Aww, I love your fish!

They each have their own tank—the kids just love it!

I changed the water on Saturday. Some of the real colorful ones died. Mary said, Do you think dad poisoned them? I said, Mary, no! Don’t say things like that!

She’s only eight years old! Where does this come from?!

The nanny isn’t helping you Easter weekend?

Yeah. Well, the kids are in middle school, so they don’t get home until 3:15.

Who walks your dog?

Um, my mother. I’ll walk them on some weekends because I like it, you know. But I’m usually not at home.

I wake up at 4:30.

John says, You’ve got bags under your eyes
And I’m like, Thank you! I love you, too!

Well, my first class is at 7:30 and I have to set up beforehand.

The kids are so funny. I said to them,

Settle down.
It’s Spring.
Relax!

There’s this little girl, she wrote:

Cells are parts of our bodies.
There’s blood cells,
Hair cells,
Sperm cells.
But sperm cells are only in boys

And she just went on and on.

Those kids, they just are something else.

Jackals Behind Tongues

2009-04-03T09:36:00.001-07:00

What do you want me to do for you?
Let me see again.
Receive your sight; your faith has saved you.

Let me see again, undoings, undone like last night falling into Your hands.

If I stand here until my feet check sensation,

if I told love to hide its face

if I crawled toward a door into darkness

if I hid in the dark until undoings were doing

their weight into my hair

could there be an ocean again,

again, in my hand, would there be writing

and when I held him closer than other nights

before, when I said to You in the dark,

on the side, unnoticed by love, bring us undone

here in the middle, let this feel broken,

let each touch burn a new word.

When we claimed to be gods, but didn't know we were

calling, was there an ocean, then, in between us

when I tugged eyelids, did this

undo enough to be Your undoing?

If I left, knelt, kept things close to my side...

Let our bodies be light, prayer-

bodies, undone.

We undo darkness, arms, each other,

haunting jackals, for eyes behind eyes

hurt behind pleasure-flowers under tongues.

Is love an instrument to play against Your ear

because when I knelt for him I felt undoing, singing,

though he knows nothing, nothing of being a god.

In Love

2009-04-02T11:38:00.000-07:00

"Show me, O Lord, my life's end
and the number of my days;
let me know how fleeting is my life. -Psalm 39: 4

Only a simple kneeling, but I feel it through my spine. To the top, which is the sky within me. These are today's joys:

Pine. Sunshine. Music. Reading.

Other Than Me

2009-03-31T18:35:00.000-07:00

You intrigue me, you said.

I thought, how so, how can this body be anything more than dirt.

Don't be unlike the movement you profess, you said. Or I imagined you said this, in my head.

Two hours ago, I wrote that nothing could move me but the image of you washing dishes in a road-side bar, crying for a woman, broken.

Your rhythm is the same.

Mine, I mean. My person stands up each morning, feels some kind of worried weight.

So, a man climbed Buffalo Gap with a woman who wrote lyrics on the tires of run down cars.

They thought about when their bones couldn't hold up, about the fact they never think of getting older.

And something happened when the sun refused to peak through.

Something stuck, like a piece of gravel when you walk, or a bluebonnet between a bridge on Interstate 20.

Don't read too much into the earth.

Don't settle your thoughts on the mesa. It will spit things out, like handles of whiskey from 1972, used condoms, chipped arrowheads.

Look, she's imperfectly climbing the stairs in your dreams each night. Admit something other than the fear you get, riding along the side of the highway, listening to grit getting stuck.

About you, dirt.

No one said anything the moment you woke and realized

That though one minute weighs differently than the next,

There are lovers climbing Buffalo Gap today,

As they will do tomorrow.

And so another cries, cleaning dishes at a road-side bar. He's not you, but that doesn't mean the trains don't pass through him each night.

Or that I'd banish

Anything other than myself.

I'd banish myself. Just to stand on a mesa and sing about how I'm made of dirt and bits of broken things.

What's the difference, really, between the heartache inside woman who once wrote lyrics on tires by the side of the road, the one you loved, and me?

One Flower Said to Another

2009-03-31T11:47:00.001-07:00

I am trying to write something from my belly, but I'm not coming up with anything.

Yesterday, in Marie Howe's class, we were talking about how writing is like singing, and something should be allowed to speak through us.

I started crying because I wanted more of this. I took off my glasses.

Shannon, tell us what you're feeling, she said.

I was just thinking about having things speak through us. Maybe we have to empty out. Our ego.

I cried because I want more. Or maybe it was someone tipping their hat and saying, OK.

OK. Walk barefoot. Look silly.

OK. Let your body feel like a million stones lift you. If the sky wanted you, it would ask.

So, I told myself to feel loved.

I was standing in an archway, waiting for a meeting. The sun was on my face. Then it wasn't.

The impulse to kneel and chew on the grass. I mean bite. Chomp.

When I was younger, I'd bath my horse with a hose then let her graze. When I'd place my face to her body, that was praying, too.

Now, I have the memory but nothing solid.

To fill in gaps, I study someone's eyes, nose pushed close to theirs.

Thinking we're two eyelashes, or flowers, side by side.

You're God, too, I said.

You make me want to believe you, they said.

I thought I was too small to become the sky.

So I told myself to feel loved.

OK. Feel yourself in particles, one flower said to another. But it will hurt, loving God that way.

My Ego is Shit

2009-03-27T21:57:00.001-07:00

I don't even know why I write notes. I guess if imaging in my head that there are some people out there that read and benefit from my ramblings helps me to write more--even if it's nonsense words jumbled up in Ivory soap and canary feathers--then I will continue to write notes, blogs, etc.

Being sick aside, I have had a most interesting Spring Break. The universe is testing me, perhaps to be more humble, to count my blessings, or just to say "Hey Shannon, just when you thought you were on a roll, well, HA, guess what? You gotta work harder, sweat more, climb a couple more thousand feet, and THEN, maybe your brain will be able to perform again."

I go through these cycles of writing things that seem to come out of nowhere, as though some brilliant ghost has descended and handed me a marginally good piece of work....and then, BAM. It all goes away. Just like that. And sometimes, this "absent ghost" period can last for MONTHS.

And I play the usual self-deprecating mental tape over and over again, knowing all the while in some corner in the back of my head that it will all come back...one day I will write something and not want to hide in shame and embarrassment.

Oh, but Shanon, don't you remember why you started writing in the first place? Don't worry about "audience" etc etc.

Easy. Easy said.

Yes. A long time ago, I used to write journals to guardian angels or to my horse or my dead grandmother.

And now? Perhaps I've lost my writing-spirit.

Tonight, I got tired of writing, spilling tears over my laptop, getting frustrated and saying for the twentieth time today "SCREW IT!" that I decided to take a break and read some Larry Levis.

I feel very close to Levis. The first time I opened up his collection, Elegy, which was the first book of his that I read, I cried. I read the first poem and burst into tears, right there in the library. I didn't care. His words, his images, his feeling...I felt a kinship. Which isn't surprising considering a professor of mine told me to read him.

And so, I read some essays, some interviews, hoping he'd have some sort of power to kick me out of my funk.

Well, it didn't kick me out of my funk. When I have lost my muse, it takes a miracle from God to get me back to writing descent poetry, or even prose, again.

But I did read this, which gave me some comfort.

"I write first, for myself. I'm afraid if I stop I won't do it anymore. And someone asked "Well, why. What are you afraid of?" And I said, "Well, writing keeps me feeling good about myself, keeps me feeling alive, keeps me....," and then I said, "It's the only thing that keeps me interested." Suddenly, everything comes back and it's at once crystal clear and also meaningless: that tree disguised in shadow of summer, sunlight on a doorstep that transforms it into a threshold of desire and then of loss, just the pure phenomenon.... And we're stilled, bewildered by those people who are truly happy all the time, who have a cash box for a heart. Almost everyone else has en enlarging kernel of doubt."

Kernel of doubt.

I have wheat fields.

There are times I feel myself wandering about in an alley of stalks.

And, yes, though I know the field ends, that somewhere the clearing will happen, I can't help but fall on my knees every now and then, wondering, lost, uneasy.

I don't even know why I wrote this.

Such a small Universe that I live in. I want to be a dirt devil that, though it spins for such a short amount of time, it knows its purpose and never lets up. It has shape. It has fury. Energy. And never once does it stop to wonder, am I destroying a crop field?

No, that sucker just rips a path straight through you.

You feel it. It speaks a truth even it doesn't know. Dust and cracked lips.

So, yes. I work, a madman at times, tearing things up and crying out some pathetic prayers.

But don't tell me to quiet. I rage.

Even when I'm filled with love, I rage.

One day, I won't be able to cry or sing. The winds will stop altogether.

And when the words abandon me, I'll find some other way to move my body. To bend this way or that.

I decided, that while I'm in this nonproductive, writer's block stage, I'll still write a poem. One long poem that babbles on and on about whatever the hell it wants to say. It's the most horrible poem you could imagine. It hurts just to write it. Just to look at it. I walk away ashamed. Horrified. Like I've committed a dirty act. Sold my body for a buck. I don't know. But I figure, what the hell. My ego is shit compared to how much I love Poetry.

Insist on yourself

2009-03-25T22:28:00.001-07:00

Someday, the words will come back to me—they always do. This is my profession, my life-love. My movement. It will not abandon me. I must keep the faith tucked away inside me, lean back a little more, breathe, know that my destiny is already written, that I have little control. The control I do have is to keep heart, to continue growing my passion and to stay true to my love—dedicate my body and its pulse to words, to faith in the muse, that my brain is always working.

And so I read. And what sort of selfishness must I have to demand my production be swift, shining, and many? I live my words, without speaking them. I step forward into them, gather words around me. I must not pressure myself to produce for audience, for the tiniest of recognitions. The words are their own bodies, despite never being spoken. They do not thrive on applause and neither should I.

If I could sit back and allow myself to sit in silence, in faith, then maybe my words will ring truer, as I will have allowed moments to pass through me.

If I can relax in the knowledge that what has come will return, then the confidence will begin to grow—not overbearing and insolent, but humble and nestled in its place.

To have faith in the wholly other—as my works are said to be, risen out of a dirt, a soil that is not my ground, not my making.

And why not communicate with others? Would I always keep my words from them? No. My works are just as much theirs.

Why can’t I trust this? Why so anxious?

“Insist on yourself. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. What is the master that could have taught Shakespeare? Franklin or Washington, or Bacon or Newton? Do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal pen of Moses or Dante, but different….
Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart…
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” –Emerson

Also, why would I want to constantly dig my way through days, always demanding product? Why immerse myself in the stress of demanding each day a perfection?

So my soul longs to break out, so I desire to speak and commune, throw my words out like long strands of gold, but how I need a pause, a hold. To digest, to being into me newness, gestation.

If I daily wait and kiss works, I may overwhelm and not gain perspective.

Like new lovers who want to stay bound to each other’s side, but how much sweeter the memory from a distance. How time apart brings the gift of contemplation, of breathing ones own light around the body, of waking into the self again and then to sing as singular and true. Then, when the lover returns, how much stronger each touch, force, independent and stable—a sure-footed stance from which to leap that much higher in the atmosphere of Bliss!

So I, too, should accept the departing of my muse, the long breath of Silence, thank my incapable hand as I would thank a soft flow of assured words and perspective.

2009-03-25T21:31:00.000-07:00

From letters

Emerson, My Pathetic Journal and a Couple Llamas

2009-03-24T22:35:00.001-07:00

All things left unfinished. Even as I walk from the bath to my bedroom, things drip and evaporate. I mean my thoughts. And where is the trust? If I have no trust, nothing will learn to settle, nothing will uproot from the sky and settle into my allotted plot.

I cough and my sides ache. The shirt drapes over me in the wrong way. I lift up my shirt and assess that I have gained approximately 10 pounds since getting sick and not being able to do my daily running. I feel a heat gathering.

Then a rolling down in my gut. Not hunger, but anger. My breasts hang a bit heavier. My stomach does not sit comfortably around my jeans, but leans over them. Perhaps this is all in my head, but the anger is still present.

You’re so damn lazy, I say to myself.

Of course, what I really mean is that I haven’t been writing. And when I sit down to write, it’s as though I’m running against a chain-link fence, my face cornered against the wires, but I’m watching the neighbor’s llamas stare into the fields.

I wish I were a llama, I think.

What lies next to me at night? I don’t know. A weighted being. A tall guilt. I try and breathe into it. Out goes the heat in my body, and in I am filled with violets. No.

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place divine providence has found for you…We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.”

Emerson. I feel tied to you, somehow. As though my only boat was your dead body.

I am so damn lazy.

I wrote in my journal. Last night, I wrote:

We should let something else move within us. It is always written, whether I write it or not. Don’t I understand? That my mind sometimes fails is inevitable, that my arms freeze in mid-air, mid-sentence, this happens.

So nothing. I don’t look at You. But why do I rush what I already own?

This journal. Writing in a journal, not good enough. Not good enough, my own pathetic word-garden. It’s not.

So I focus on my weight. As if gaining a few pounds leaves my brain incapable of writing.

Sometimes, I’ll sit and write emails in the dark, trying to find a way to a door I didn’t know I closed. Not a lover, god, nothing as pathetic as that. My own heart.
Emerson, why don’t you climb up here and give me a hand?

Here’s another journal bit. A bit I’d chew into a spitball and throw out at passing cars:

“How can I expect great and wonderful things to pass through me if I am not patient, guided, strong, disciplined?

Can I rediscover this moment, as though it is the most precious moment of my life and I have stumbled upon it, somehow?

Thought: this is my root: this, this self that’s questioning, but not in a worried sense, but in a stretching ones hand out, sense. This is my constant.”

No, not your constant. Silly garden. Words. Like I’ve lost all ability.

Everything unfinished. So I focus on the body. What forms are taking shape. New curves. Creation without my doing.

“No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.”

Emerson. I like how you think. Just as this blubbering attempt is mine. So I move through it. OK. Yes. My face against a chain-link fence. The llamas.

But I want to throw myself into something diligent. Something with age and there it rolls, underneath me, rolls my frustration. A god that never delivers.

I knew a man like that once. He’d talk of my brilliance in abstractions. Praise the shade of my skin. Sometimes. But leave me edged, high in some hayloft between his brain and mine.

I can’t see any way down! I’d yell.

And he’d be in the trees. He’d send notes, every now and then. Something like:

“Try the ladder, under your feet”

And I’d insist, no, no it’s jammed! Tell me about your mother! Your father!

He’d ignore this. As I sent strings of coded intimacies into the wind. I’d send them, as though I was playing strip poker at a bar. As though I was his.

“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

Emerson, again. Yes. And so I built stalls for things.

It is easy in the world to live for the world’s opinion.

But Emerson, what would you think of my babbling on like this? What would the currents say to the wire between us? I can’t undo the heat, the anger at myself.

I’ve spoken. Headed strait for the wire and chain-link fence. I knew I’d fail, but damn the llamas, their natural bodies, I’ve spoken.

All things left unfinished. I’ve gained 10 pounds. The water isn’t water once it drips. Evaporates. Between the bath and the bed. Between my journal and the phone call.

I wanted to say something about how I miss cutting myself. But the heat rises instead. And Emerson, not one word, my man. Not one word about society and my truth.

2009-03-23T08:13:00.000-07:00

Time to Breathe (Thought Out in my Head While Taking a Bath)

2009-03-20T21:51:00.000-07:00

Suddenly, I cannot make all of the choices I once had the liberty to make. My body is telling me to slow down. And the writing desk bares its teeth. Glenn Gould is my only comfort of late. Though, it’s a song without a song. It’s a movement without the dance. I listen to him play, my mind spins, but I cannot write.

I should learn something through sickness.

I have never actually listened to Glenn Gould play before, only listened to how the notes move me, move in and out of my cochlea and hit strides upon my wired mind. But am I listening to the notes? Or simply waiting for them to lean against me? Please, against me, lean your visions.

No, not listening.

And I do not wish to wait. Do not wish to sit and feel my days pass by without accomplishment. The writing desk is baring its teeth. And I feel like crying. I feel like my only line to a landscape is gone. My body takes control and I do nothing but fight. But stand in the doorway, one foot in, the other impatiently out, waiting for the ringing bell, the gates to open.

Am I listening to ballads or forming them in my mouth? Are the notes independent of my ego?

How this moves me, when I listen. If I really listen, his notes take me to the widest forest, or under your ear lobe.

But I do not want this long language, the many minerals here under me. How can I make my words as minerals? As an array of sheets in the earth, cool, light, or heated and porous. Why make them anything than what they are?

Against the backdrop of these ballades, your hand.

Does something really need to be produced by me today? The calm will still be there, if I’d listen.

I took three baths today. One to fill the room with steam. And though my glasses fogged and the pages curled between my fingers, I was able to read about the anatomy of thought.

Then I read the letters of C. S. Lewis. “All the things you like to dwell upon are outsides. A planet like our own…Or a beautiful human body. All the colors and pleasant shapes are merely where it ends, where it ceases to be inside. Inside, what do you get? Darkness, worms, heat, pressure, salt.”

Yes, yes. Like the caves my sister mentioned at dinner. Not caves, caverns. And out near them, the salt flats. And the time I rode in the car, listening to my mother gesture one way or the other, writing in a notebook, seeming sad for no reason, watching the salt flats sprinkle ghosts at me. What’s that? I asked. Salt.

The days or moments remembered. Where in the anatomy of thought do they reside. And why do I need to write to prove this? That one moment I was 14, driving to Carlsbad and the next my future self sits listening to Glenn Gould—moments will rise up and fall away, no matter the writing.

And so I am back in steam, glasses fogged, reading. Thinking, somewhere, there’s a day I have yet to live. With you. You who do not know the anatomy of my thoughts.

I read this tonight, between coughing and wanting to reach for the pen. Between meditation and stirring up my insides.

I read, from Etty Hillesum’s diary:

“The will flows smoothly into the deed, the barriers I couldn’t cross before have at last broken down. And I no longer say, ‘Yes, but I have not yet found my “territory”.’ I no longer suffer because I have not yet discovered the right ‘instrument,’ the right ‘object.’ All that matters now is the ‘deep inner serenity for the sake of creation.’ Though whether I shall ever ‘create’ is something I can’t really tell. But I do believe that it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word, by simply molding one’s inner life. That too is a deed.”

That too is a deed.

And I took another sip of water. I took time to breathe. Caught in between the ballads and the desire to write.

Between this one long breath and the next, is a pause. And You settle things, or throw them about. A mess or a calm.

The days or moments remembered. The anatomy of another’s thoughts against mine. And thinking of yours, and C. S. Lewis, Glenn Gould, and the stranger on the side of the highway, passing the salt flats so many years ago…

between each one lives numerous other lives. Could this all be our words, then, together? And if I am silent, is it so I can hear You speak?

I was thinking about myself, about writing, about leaning one ballad against the next. I was refusing to listen.

And I took another sip of water. I took time to breathe.

I've Said This Before, in a Kinder Sense

2009-03-19T20:44:00.001-07:00

My head aches, my joints linger over a sharp edge inside the bone.

I cannot push myself into healing, which is their destruction.

Can I sing the bacteria out?

Plants. I see them as plants with long vines, curling themselves against my insides.

Within me, worlds. I have said this before, but in a kinder sense. Worlds imagined and swirling, in visions, notes, words. Aren’t they also there? So curl round in me.

How many times have I tried to write and nothing happens. Nothing but the desert outside the window. Not in the way I’d love you, not in a quiet hour, stretching toward something that does not have wings.

Words need stillness. Not to be pushed forward, gathered.

But like the hours before a train arrives, how I shake with anticipation. Tearing a little something from my notebook.

What of bareness. So my mind has nothing. No thing to celebrate or approach or kiss.

I want a vision. I want a vision like a charge. Taped each morning, I want a letter. Or your picture.

So nothing fades.

In sickness, taped against the lung. Something has slipped away. The outline of a skirt. An idea.

Don’t words need stillness?

Stillness. The gift.

As though I thought I owned my bones anyway.

Are my words mine? Or something passing through? As though, out of the window, other things are searching other bodies.

And when I sit very still, perhaps the words will once again curl up next to me, reside by my ear, land on my nose. Not that I’d know. But the point is that they are yours.

Stillness—

Not how I’d love you, how I should.

Write a Day. Write a Day and You Are its Child.

2009-03-16T23:12:00.000-07:00

long day. I was tired, I was nervous.

I had a conference with Marie Howe at her apartment. Nothing felt prepared. Nothing. Had I written enough? Was I ready to defend the “poetry” I had been producing?

What was this, anyway? This “prose” or perhaps it was “poetry”? Or perhaps it was simply a string of things, a little bit of words strung about on a page…. a transcription of how the day had passed…how my memory told its longest history.

How did I end up here, anyway? I thought, as I boarded the Metro North Railroad at New Rochelle.

God. Look at me. I have a notebook.

I have a black messenger bag. I have a ticket and I’m going to Grand Central.

Look at that man, sitting across from me. He’s so beautiful. He’s holding a child. I am rocking my body to one of the greatest cities in the world. And I am worried about my meager words?

So I arrive. Do not doubt this. Do not doubt the day. It is real and you are its child. You have lived to breathe this breath. THIS BREATH.

I took one and found my way to the shuttle to Times Square. A man looks at me on the platform.

You don’t look like a New Yorker, he says…Are you a New Yorker?

Um, well, I live in New Rochelle, I say.

Oh, well, that counts, he says, and laughs.

I smile. I beam my smile toward him. Because my iPod has some Monks chanting Psalm 19 in my ears. I can’t discern their exact words, is this Latin, I don’t know…but I feel rooted.

And he spoke to me. I smile, smile. He smiles.

Actually, I’m originally from Texas, I say.

I look down. I look down and remember a friend of mine said that when I look at my shoes, people think they did something wrong. So I stop looking down. I look back at him.

He says, I knew it! Well, I could just tell. It’s refreshing, don’t get me wrong. You’re just. You have a nice smile.

We get on the shuttle. He sits next to me. I say, Thank you.

Do you like New York? He asks.

Yes. I smile. The monks are saying Amen.

I have some land upstate. He says. I like the country. I bet you miss the country.

Yes. Sometimes. But when I’m in the country, I’d miss running into people like you on crowded shuttles to Times Square.

He laughs. He says, True.

I leave; find the 1 to Christopher St. Where’s such and such street, I ask a random dog walker.

One block down, he says as the mutts paw my jeans. I’m sorry, he says.

No problem. I don’t mind. Cute dogs, I say.

I walk, listening to the monks and the bells. The bells. The bells.

The dog walker taps me on the shoulder

I’m sorry! It’s actually three blocks down!

Thank you, I say. Thank you so much.

Smile. Smile. It is glorious, this day.

Still, my hands are shaking. How are my words doing? Am I writing? Right now, am I? Who should I be writing to? Which ones should I show her? What’s my whole body saying, right now? What…what….what is this moment in the scheme of things?

There’s a theatre on the corner. People are standing in line. It’s 7:00 pm. And this exact 7 pm will not be repeated. Remember that, Shannon. Remember this is THE 7 pm. And no other. You are a child of this 7 pm.

Oh, are you trying to get in? A man asks as I stand outside the door, waiting to buzz Marie.

Oh, um, well I’m just waiting. I say.

(I am supposed to wait until half past for my appointment).

Well, wait inside, where it’s warm, he says.

Oh, OK. Thank you. Thanks. I say as he pulls his keys out.

Thank you. Thank you for your keys. And your blue jeans. And those lovely shoes. You’re gorgeous. I think. You’re a fine man.

The stairs are so narrow. It creaks. So many bits of shoes have kissed the carpet. And now I am one of its suitors.

Should I knock on her door? Should I wait?

Again, again. What do I do? As my words cling and clatter in my messenger bag.

Hold on, I say. You’ll get a chance to speak. My little ones, my poems. My half-lives. I don’t know what exactly to call you. Call you. Should I knock?

Break to the scene where I am sitting on her couch.

You should never wait. This is your time. You’re having a hot flash, aren’t you? She asks.

Yes. I am sorry. I say. Fanning my face.

But I didn’t…I didn’t want to interrupt. Don’t be patient. Be aggressive.

I just don’t feel like I’m writing poetry….

Lucky you.

The poems, they kind of do this dance.

I am on my feet. Don’t you see? I mean my knees. And how does the city curl inside my guts?

But the monks! The monks have their bread at night. And sing about the earth. Holding their breaths until mass.

This is going to sound cheesy, I say. I know. I know. But I feel like they are like my children. And I don’t know what to do with them yet. What can I do to help you be who you are supposed to be? They are just running around, you know? These “poems” these “works.”

It’s to God, isn’t it?

Yes.

Why. Are you ashamed?

No. Yes. What can I do?

On the train home, a man with a field coat and the Financial Times. I told him, hello. Hello. Man. Man I know I shouldn’t say this. But you have kind eyes. See? We both have blue ones. Blue pearls. Did you sail once, as a boy, into the deep corner of some canyon? I held you then. Though, I was not alive. You were 10 and I was 20 years to birth. Remember? Yes. I loved you just as I love this minute.

What will I do with all of the words?

The field coat, he hung it on the hook behind his seat. He put on tortoise shell glasses. I was still listening to the monks chant. I was going back to New Rochelle. He was on his way to Connecticut. I know. I looked at his ticket.

This is how it feels to love the railings. So much. Are these to God?

Yes.

I have a notebook. I write in it. The man next to me, he has a kid going to college. In California. Didn’t want to follow his dad’s footsteps to Harvard.

What to do with the string of things. These words. She said, keep writing. Are you ashamed?

Later, I will write:

Work must take time—so we can appreciate its gift. Not to demand, either from ourselves or the work, swift production—but that the work demands our attention, patience, servitude. How else will be become intimate with the infinite, with what cries out to last long after our shells crumble? Its not about us, our reward or fame—it’s about the complete body of what forms through us, what waits to speak to generations.

Oh, and then I will read:

“Is life so wretched? Isn’t it rather your hands which are too small, your vision which is muddled? You are the one who must grow up.”

And

“Dare he, for whom circumstances make it possible to realize his true destiny, refuse it simply because he is not prepared to give up everything else?

Thank you, Dag Hammerskjold

Your will to unearth the running stream of passion. Your only moment between the hardest of hours was to question your own voice.

This is the feeling. What I felt on the train. In Greenwich Village. In a kind of longing. Where my words were to be up front and center. In this blessed day. Does it matter? What are the smallest bits of me to say?

See this as my prayer. As I ride the shuttle to Times Square with a man who tells me of his land upstate. As I ask for directions from the dog walker. As I tell the stranger in the filed coat on the Metro North that, in fact, I love him. As I learn to ask for patience. As I lean into the couch as she tells me to read the diaries of a Holocaust Survivor. Who, who, am I to converse with her?

Humble words. I have a notebook. On the train to New Rochelle, I have a notebook.

Dare I refuse? Are you ashamed, she asks.

Me: straddling a fence between the immediate and the lasting—the night of someone’s body and the voice which outlasts the body—to dedicate hours to study or not, to choose social thirst or spiritual, need for attention now or after death. And who’s attention is it toward, anyway? Am I not a creature in thought? A mere shadows of the Universe?

Hello, he said.

Hello.

I have the Beatles playing. He said.

I noticed.

And so we danced. Moment to moment. Danced.

What did she say? He asked.

She asked if I was ashamed. Said I should keep writing what I was writing.

I said as we danced. To the Beatles.

Is this writing? He asked?

Yes. I said. This is.

Tend to it. To Nothing. Tend.

2009-03-16T00:11:00.001-07:00

"You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow."
--Jonah 4:10

What does my mouth taste like forming “worth”?

I want to be moved by you.

Between so many things. God.

Maybe, love, maybe, I’m unkind to things, too rough, light barbs, stuck, stuck, stuck.

I ignore. The light across my back. The bathroom fills fireflies. It does.

No, something's undone.

He laughed, surely, when I said the sky was my cousin. When the pine trees tickle my mind.

The mountains curve into me.

My fingernails broke against the stone.

Breathe, you said. Breathe.

Drink this. (hands me fireflies)

Make a mud-fist, you said. Break open weeds.

Pull on the fences until the horses call on you.

Until someone’s kinder words spit grains or pebbles into your ear.

See, in me a movement.

This is why I do not go to bars anymore.

A man once asked me if I believed in Purgatory.

You’re from Texas, he said. You must know this. Or kiss me.

My fingernails broke against the stone.

I said, When you sleep, your eyes roll back, don’t they?

This is why I don’t go to bars.

He said, One day, I’ll see you standing in a tree, looking lost.

Yes, I said, yes. This is how the sun comes down, how my days ends.

Speak, or I will not sleep. Or I will, but I’ll wish I died.

He sends you a vine, to cradle your head. When all else fails, tend to it.

Tend to it. Tend to it. Tend to it.

Or break your fingernails against a stone. Go to bars. Men will question about Purgatory.

Don’t you know? This was my old skin. Full, a wine-case.

Don’t you want to be a flame? He asked.

No. A raging fire.

Fireflies in the bathroom. That kind of softness. The kind God leans toward.

The kind that inspires. Worth something.

In me a movement!

No, no. Make a mud-fist.

Between so many things, breathe.

Does this mean it’s ten to one? Are you leaning toward me?

Is Purgatory this glass of wine?

Fireflies. Skin. The silence of wind. A row of pine.

Among the smaller things, agony.

Agony was a beautiful woman, I said.

Agony had shadows, like you. Like a list. Like stone. Her fingernails broke.

Eyes rolled back when she slept. When love was a kind of mud-fist.

So break it. Break and tend. Lean down.

Between worth and the bar. You’re inspiring the masses.

What’s wrong with breathing me a pine, a long silence, something across my back?

Break open weeds. Listen. Fires eat acres. Flies burn their bellies.

Tend to nothing. Skin.

Tend to it. To nothing. Tend.

Do you want to be a flame? He asked.

No. A raging fire. But first, ask me about Purgatory. Or barbs. Or worth. God, love, isn’t broken.

Well, first of all, Agony was a beautiful woman. She made mud-fists and broke things across her back.

worth, Agony said, was nothing in the end.

I Woke, Late, Remembering That Dream You Had About Me

2009-03-11T06:59:00.001-07:00

Late, I Woke, Remembering that Dream You Had About Me

"May my tongue cling to the roof of my
mouth
if I do not remember you,
…my highest joy"

My window blurs with rain this morning. I woke up too late.

Mirror, brushing hair.

Wondering, what to write?

Caught in the tangle of rush-morning-minutes.

I stretch my sides, rivers of blood, spots in the air. I am curling, brushing.

Have I thought of what I wanted to write?

This is my kneeling. By the bed, in the morning, the rain outside, the calm somewhere other than my mind.

Have I breathed?

Someone wrote “Shannon, I dreamt you were reading God” I brush eye shadow, lips. God. “Shannon, I dreamt.”

When was the last dream God was standing in a row of cows? In a field?

You placed your hand on me. I wondered. Have I breathed?

Rain, 80% chance. By the bed. This is my kneeling.

In the rush-morning-minutes.

You wanted to know, what I compose to. Is it Bach? Brahms. The sideways cab-drivers.

Somewhere, a man is drinking gin.

But inside a room, somewhere. Shannon, I dreamt you.

My window blurs with rain this morning. It’s late. But what will I write today? Your movement.

You push me through the door, into the rain.

I've loved your belly before. I felt rolling into me, your dream.

Is it raining? Have I breathed?

Somewhere, You're dreaming I'm reading God.

Is it in a field? Am I laughing?

Letter to You Because I'd Say this to Myself

2009-03-10T10:10:00.000-07:00

But,

Everything is transient. Nothing stays. It all circles each and each.

Do not be deadened. Rejoice because of it. Take up something like a stone and hurl it
into the sky. It comes back, but not for you. It never was something to be had.

Sure, Beethoven or Bach. Even Tchaikovsky broke through chambers
just to seal them up again. He beat the thin bones each night,
and when he wasn't, he was
coursing the lines in his head,
the scales of his pain, out into an ocean.

He'd rise,
drink, throw himself into a wall, record madness
and think nothing of it, muttering all the while
about circle eights. About the Black Forrest.

After his mother's death, he began composing.

So,
it circles. Get down on your knee. Grab the clay.
Use something more substantial than guilt to grind into.

Run into a wall. Hook something out of lime.
Your own hand. Not hope, darkness. Where hope recovers.
Grate it against your teeth. Tell the ground stories.
Lie. Learn something
about the stars: not beauty, but that they'd rip your bones
apart if they could. Just to be near you. This is intimacy.
And it comes back. Waves of sound. Or on a keyboard,
or in a postcard. Something is calling you forward.
I had a hand in that.
I said to the pine "hold him down."

Round again. Uncurl a fist,
learn a fugue by heart. It plays again
in your oval window and through it, to the midbrain.
It locks itself away. Until you push through.

Escape into lines, that's fine.
Escape into the codes, linear transfers.
But the earth will push you out again.
Grass will sing about God.
You'll feel something lighter than a woman's body, you'll feel air.
And all around you, eights and nines.
With gods writing about movements and the opera.
About auditory space.
And you'll think you've been here before, on this plane.
You'll think we've been the same person.

Tchaikovsky saw stars in his mind. But he composed anyway.

2009-03-09T19:44:00.001-07:00

Your letter arrived today. Maple leaves stuck to my shoe.

I said, my ghosts, my ghosts. Again in the bath, sang about fields, opened things up just to shut them out again.

What did you do when everyone went silent, when your ear wouldn't stop ringing?

My ghosts, my ghosts. I wait. Nothing passes by the window.

If I held my stomach, if I dug my nails into sides, would I lift somewhere toward you? Would the corner hold your shape? I ran out of wine.

My arm, half in bubbles, extended to you.

It’s been months. Sometimes, when I touch myself, I stare at the bare light bulb.

Maybe the walls will melt together. Maybe I’ll eat less, feel lighter, get a buzz.

Today, I walked until my feet hurt. I held the rock in my purse, curled my hand into a fist. Knew you wouldn’t speak. Knew the sky wouldn’t reveal you.

When I wrote “God, speak to me” I meant that my body was a mess. That the order of things was changing. That I couldn’t stop repeating the number seven. That eight swirled around like jellyfish above my head.

The pages spill into the bath with me. Your words blur into my midsection.

I make up the letters. I seal you at night, whisper imaginings, small tulips, under my sheets.

No wonder you’re silent.

Today, I Woke Up

2009-03-06T13:20:00.001-08:00

Anyone who knows me, knows that I spend the majority of my time at the library. I even have a specific place in the basement where I like to sit. My friends, when they cannot get a hold of me, know exactly where to go...down the curved staircase, past the government documents, science and psychology books on the right with the literature, computer-science and math books on the left and over by the square-windows...there, you can find "my" desk.

I love how I can see trees wave to me. I try and figure out the names of the trees. I think there's a juniper and an ash. My favorite is the pine. I like to look at their arms when I get tired of reading. It is winter, so all but the pine are bare, exposing their tender veins which remind me of dendrite webs.

I imagine my brain is made up of countless tree branches upon smaller tree branches, their expanding twigs stretching out to almost touch one another, the synapses gaps keeping them eternally apart.

So, I spend many hours trying to read, but the tress usually have their way of distracting me. When it grows dark, their bodies are still there.

In the library basement bathroom, there's a sign someone put up on one of the doors. I noticed it a couple days ago. It reads:

Today, I woke up and ______________

When I first read it, I was having one of those days where words are dry bones. Where I'd sit and count lines on the back of my hand, wondering when the gods of the library would appear. Where did they go? Where is their joyful dust? I'd ponder my palms, the lines God drew before I breathed the cosmos in my lungs. Bits of dust, dust, dust. I couldn't write. I was uninspired. I was stubborn and raw.

I read the note on one of those days and felt a simple voice inside whisper "Today, I woke up and...."

I woke up and read, I thought. I woke up and I tried to write. It wasn't anything brilliant or even coherent. But look! It is true!

Today, I woke up and read, wrote.

Today I woke up and

and do we love this minute? Do we notice it's clothing? Do we wake and breathe? Yes. Surely, we breathe.

It's easy to forget. This morning, I woke up and.

And I cried, thinking I wasn't listening to you. Thinking I was losing track of the words. Thinking my mind was blind and the library gods thought me a bad steward.

It's easy, so easy to forget. This morning. How there are trees that keep their heart-wood radiating from the inside out. How there are friends longing for our voice, how our parents still wake, astonished we were born.

This morning, I woke up and loved you.

Sometimes, there are signs.

I don't know who put up that sign in the bathroom. But Thank You. And thank you Sarah Lawrence, for encouraging the spontaneous, creative spirit that reminds me....

Today, I woke up.

You're Not Failing, Child. You're Singing.

2009-03-05T09:56:00.001-08:00

I want to live fiercely. Like I’m climbing for my minutes. My days.

*****

You are not failing poetry, child. You're singing. You're whistling footsteps. You're guiding a thousand gods when you cry, when you think you've failed.

They see your passion. They can smell it from the mountain.
Then they come down.
Now you’re wondering when you’ll die. Just as they rejoice in having seen you born. Let all the grass tickle your eyes.
Do not despair. Or, rather, despair. Despair into darkness, climb down the hole, but keep a candle lit, close to the chest.
Because despair sleeps at night with passion. It strokes her hair, it loves her gently.
She will return.
Let the darkness understand, but do not understand darkness.
You have not failed.
About you are lightning bugs. These gods. Your whistling sent them messages.
They’ve come from the mountain to glow about your head. Warm bodies.
There is hope.

You’re guiding a thousand gods when you cry, head in hands. Look up! Angels.

They have walked toward you, gods of the old country.
From your childhood.
From the tea-lights.
From the garden.
You cannot see them, but around you, messages. Look up.

*****

I was running five miles, I was singing.
But in breathes. I was running and breathing, sweating doubts out.
Calling your name. I was singing. Your name in breaths.

This is how I fail you. I breathe in.

Before I know your name, I sing it.

The dark spots build hives in my eyes. I am running.

Speak of how I will come back to you. I have come back and do not know it.

At night I compose long theories in the air about how my heart is electricity.
But it fades with morning. My lips seal the dream. Kisses the theory, smudges the lines so I wake with smudges. Nothing makes sense. Have I failed?

*****

You’re not failing, child. You’re singing.
You’re making your way through what will be the map of love.
Breathe in. Your palms.
Despair already licks the skin. But clean.
It is whistling the theory. In your ear. A thousand gods build hives.

It is hard to believe the streets have stone-bodies.
It is hard to love the body of rock.
The gods against you, this is why you bleed.

You’re full of theories. Nestled, there, in cell-homes.

One day, you across the sky.
The gods rejoice, seeing you, child, sparkling.

You are not failing, you’re moving. Singing. Inside you, the world.

Barefoot, Why Give Me a Voice

2009-03-05T05:22:00.000-08:00

"We are brought down to the dust;
our bodies cling to the ground."

I woke clutching daisies, hair of some other world. There, I say, stay. Alive.

These are my words, dropping off, leaping off onto the carpet, scattering their language and cursing the nation.

How can I understand. Morning is slipping away.

Last night was a woman, barefoot in Grand Central, sliding her way to God.

The soft padding of her feet, past me.

Holding high heals, swinging notes, hips, dress-coat smiling at the lights.

all this and bells! In my ears, bells!

I want to kiss her feet. Now, it is morning.

Why remember the stitches in the night, before the 11:10 train, which I missed on purpose, why remember? On purpose, missed. Let go. Leave.

I do not want to leave my bed. I do not want to open my hands to you.

The daisies will not stay alive, I ask them to.

Things grow out to wither. If I write this down, I said nothing. The train is leaving.

Woman, take your shoes and run from here. I cannot kiss your feet. There are no daisies. The bells stop ringing.

Go on! I cannot get out of bed because of you. I cannot write but that I hate the day, and your smiling dress. Let go, miss the train.

Why give me a voice?

My words, they missed the train. To run away. I hate the day.

I cannot get out of bed. To tread on words. On the carpet. Your Bells.

I will wear images on my feet. The woman sliding to God. Barefoot. I will wear her. Like a dress-coat smiling to the lights. Imagine. Nothing for our feet to walk on, one day.

I woke clutching daisies, hair of some other world.

Remember, they said. You’re alive. Let go.

Language, Pulled on by the Roots of its Hair

2009-03-01T19:51:00.001-08:00

Coming back to You is cold water.

There are notes in my hand.

But here I am, sat with my knees to chest, canceling notes out one by one, refusing to listen.

I need to be honest. Need to go ahead with what the gods speak. But my body, my brain, slugs on.

I can feel you when I climb the stairs. Your light through the window, but I cannot hear you in others, in the night, on the train, in Brahms. Where did you go to? Lean into me. Push against me again.

I cried driving home from the store. And a stranger leaned out the window, throwing his words like barbs.

How have I moved away from you?

It happened I passed into St. Patrick’s at Mass. I knew only half-prayers. The ceiling filled in the gaps.

And just as I feel my body being lifted, there, again, the weight.

Did this anchor chase you in dreams?

I keep spinning off the corner of the bed. Each time I’m convinced I’ve lifted. I can hold onto that feeling at dawn.

But it vanishes. Parts of you vanish. Where in the water do you go?

It is useless to ask why the body tires, why my mind changes language.

But you know it is constant, this movement.

The gift, pulled around by hair, is singing. Singing by the window. Looking down into some kind of ocean.

This is where I lift. You know this. You know the grooves on my mind’s edge-work.

But it vanishes. Parts of the sensation into the water.

On the subway, it could be any year. And so I wanted to go back to that line. Not just the line of thought, but that line in time when I wasn’t thinking about speaking, when you were speaking to my loneliness as though in a box.

It is constant, this movement. So why the thought of jumping, right before the 6 arrives?

This is the gift, pulled by the hair—the end-notes running along ahead of the 6. Tied to their backs, letters from you. End-note pests, end-notes from the deepest gutter in the Earth’s bowl. From You.

And the ceiling fills in the gaps. I am sat at the platform, confused.

And now to You who do not think

I am addressing each letter-curve to your house.

Tonight, I want to line each thought in a row and pull their hair. And through the floor-boards, feel it. Up through your feet, feel the root of how pain wraps its legs. Of how you know the groove of my mind’s edge-work

Speak.

I cried in the car, returning from the store.

The 6 keeps surprising us with joy. Letters on the back. What I wouldn’t give to cancel your end-notes.

You want to be spoken to.

Coming back is cold.

Where in the water did you go?

This is what I’d say to you:

Letter 1:

You will never believe. I thought something was saying my name. Out. Though it was just the train. I know, I know. Tracks clacking their teeth. And still, under my seat. A man to my left “I thought you were going to sleep through your stop.” How did he know my stop? What if I already slept through my stop? But I smiled, and gathered my things at New Rochelle. He laughed when my head hit the window, falling asleep. I heard my name. Called out. I know, I know. It was only the train. But perhaps I love you.

And, after making tea for the eighth time, I’d climb the stairs and compose this in my head:

Letter 2:

I didn’t mean I heard the tracks. I meant that I text a man each night I’ve never met. I meant that I don’t understand love.

Letter 3:

There’s a moment, in Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1, Op. 15 that makes me want the world in my mouth: 2 minutes and 55 seconds in. The strings break cages. Usually, I am on the train when this happens.

But 3 minutes and 30 seconds in, a soft bend. And I want to kiss you.

Letter 4:

You still won’t believe. Even when strings break cages, ceilings talk when you go silent. I tell myself this is your gift. Imagine, you in every turn. But, crescendos swallow themselves. Eventually, the advantage you have over me will weaken.

Letter 5:

I do not mean weaken. Can I ask, have you heard Piano Concerto B Flat No. 2. Op. 83? I know. I know. But the moment gets away from me, standing on platforms. The movement is more than likely your hand. The mice, philosophers ear-wings. I mean, yes, of course I converse with numbers. You are You only when I am not addressing her dress--plastic bag in a tree.

But I do not send the letters.

The gift I find, tugged on by the roots of its hair, when trying to comfort myself, is licking. Is tying its hands to mine. This is the language of grass. Of having a love and knowing it. Of walking each day toward a door that will not open.

Like a Prayer. Almost.

2009-02-27T22:20:00.001-08:00

I wasn't going to write. I was going to drink Mint tea.

Dante and Derrida: Face to Face by Francis J. Ambrosio

I saw this tonight, sitting there saying, "yes, I know what you're thinking, you're thinking I am not real"

And I said "My God. Someone dedicated whole days to you, weeks, months! And here you are, lying there. Word for word."

I want to spend all my time with you, Dante and Derrida. I want to know, again, what you have to say. And so did your author, and so, now, do I.

I found this book at Barnes and Noble in the city, waiting for friends to show up at Union Square so we could head to St. Marks and have dinner, converse, catch up.

When I sat down to read, I couldn't put it down. Why is it, why, why, such excitement for other's words. I grab hold and my whole body feels like leaping! It cannot go anywhere, it cannot find a place, so it stirs.

I sat down and thoughts race. It's as though my brain finds a lover that was lost down a path, lost as the mist descended. And now, what I longed for, is in my hands. IN MY HANDS. The words in ribbons, silk. If I could, I'd brush my lips against them. And the voice in the words, some voice. A long lost voice. Someone is speaking.

So many of these books. How can I get my fill?

So I sat and read. And read.

I wasn't going to write tonight.

But sometimes I find that, during the day, I have moments of complete astonishment and I wish I could share it with someone. I try to share it. But people usually look at me like I'm off in a garden of hedgerows, mumbling to myself about Time, Relativity, God or Numbers.

....no point going round in circles, so long as the other has not won back that advance I shall not be able to avow anything and if avowal cannot consist of declaring, making known, informing, telling the truth, which one can always do, indeed, without confessing anything, without making truth, the other must not learn anything that he was not already in a position to know for avowal as such to begin, and this is why I am addressing myself here to God, the only one I take as witness, without yet knowing what these sublime words mean, and this grammar, and to, and witness, and God, and take....(Circumfession, 11)

And the book, Dante and Derrida: Face to Face by Francis J. Ambrosio, begins with this sentence:

How does it happen that, as persons, we are given to writing?

The tapestry unfolds from there.

And around me people wander, looking at books, drinking Starbucks, hugging their children, holding a loved ones hand.

And this is true. This happened. I was there. Reading. Looking. Loving.

So, I must leave, and purchase the book, now nestled in my purse as I walk out into Union Square.

The streets are damp. It was softly raining.

St. Marks is fabulous. It's so alive. It picks me up with two hands and parachutes me into a rush. Just to see, the lights, the tattoo shops, the people, the lovers.

A moment and then another. But I only noticed after each passed.

Someone was wearing black leggings and purple boots.

There were two poodles, walking somewhere.

And I was thinking, how can I love so much at once?

All the while, the weight of my new book inside my purse, my friends' happy chatter, and my mind circling it in joy, like children in merry-go-rounds, like dizzying the brain-waves.

It was like, I could almost touch the strings between us all. Almost. And I smiled at almost. The roundness of Al-Most. Kissing the blessing of never knowing.

Almost.

Like a prayer.

You Can't Judge Flowers

2009-02-24T15:14:00.001-08:00

This morning I woke after dreaming that I was dying of some strange disease. There were spots over my skin and they didn't know when I was going to die. Before the dream, I was lying in the bath, looking at my arms. I thought,

I've lost a lot of weight

And didn't feel a particular way toward it. I tried to read a book about Spinoza, but fell asleep in the bath. The book fell in and I awoke thinking I was in a pond where goldfish brushed against my legs--but they were actually the pages of the book, enjoying a swim. I thought

Spinoza's been in the library too long. It was about time he took a bath.

I laughed and it echoed.

I then thought about loneliness.

Before bed, I tried to write. I recorded a poem. But I thought it was a bad poem, so I recorded it simply because I was afraid to. I thought

I shouldn't be afraid of words

And then I realized I am afraid. So I pushed through. I listened to my voice. I made myself do it. I thought,

Pretend it's someone else's voice.

That made it easier. I remembered Muriel Rukeyser saying that you should always question, "do I believe what I am saying?"

I secretly believed what I was saying, what I was hearing in my own voice, but there was a part of me saying "no good, no good." That was wrong, though. I thought

You can't judge flowers.

So, then I went to sleep, though frustrated that I "couldn't" write.

And I dreamed I was dying, though a man I once loved showed up in a movie theater and hurt me all over again, said horrible things about me in secret to show his strength.

You smoke? I asked

He said, yeah. Of course I do

Which I took as a sign that he lies, because for some reason, he never smoked in my previous dreams.

And then I woke, it was this morning.

I read Psalm 30. And then Psalm 29, which I liked better for the image of God's voice twisting oaks and breaking cedar to pieces. I thought I wanted to twist oak, as well. But even if I couldn't, I'd like to watch someone else do it.

So I had this feeling build in my stomach, a rolling and rolling until I thought it would grow and sing out of my lips like anger but in cherry-wood blood sap.

It didn't.

I cried. I cried because I didn't want to get out of bed. I wondered why I was so unthrilled for the day. But I knew to get up and find small pebbles to pick up and kiss. I knew it had to be hidden in the fact that I could feel.

Why Banish Silence / Fish Have Given Their Lives for Us to Touch

2009-02-24T14:47:00.001-08:00

I was thinking,

I am hurting because someone else is hurting. I am doubting because someone else is doubting. And this pain is not to be condemned or banished. It is to be held and loved and listened to.

Who am I that I should ask something to leave my house? Do not leave, I should say, but sit with me a while. Cry, or take the time you wish to take. I should make notes. When you speak, I should listen.

But the day builds and builds and bridges are constantly burned. I say "Not you, not anger." I say "Not pain, again, not me."

But this is part of our common inheritance.

Under me pass many fish through the dead shale, their skeleton bones crushed into fine powders. And in their eyes, oil swims which brings us closer, sends us over oceans, through the desert in cars--the moss does this too, pressed by years and our feet.

Under me, movement. Though stillness is requested at night. Lie down, why should I? If I am given to rest, then I will sleep. But if something moves through me, I should listen.

I am no more myself than the grass is the sky, but in their meeting, through carbon and oxygen, words. Words that grab your wrist and mine. And this is our hold. I am yours and love, you are mine. But not possession, no sooner the grass expresses the sky than the sky unfolds into the grass, but are they not forever separate?

And below, the ashes of countless fish. Do you see? This mixture. How things pass, constantly.

So why banish silence? Welcome it as one welcomes adoration. The silence adores You! And so does darkness and pain, can it not touch you? Can your body be spared creation? It is creation. I do love You.

So what to do with days that build and bridges torn down? When doubt-birds and anger-birds have no more branches and I refuse to know the mapping of roots of trees from which the birds sing? Then I deny creation, again, like a final cry against my own self and You.

To the Moment of My Death, I Will Be Holding This in My Hands

2009-02-22T00:07:00.000-08:00

St. George, Utah. My mother and I eat in nervous quiet at Arby’s. I know this will be my last meal in civilization for a while. Soon, I will go live in the desert. I don’t know what to expect, but try to focus on savoring the Arby’s Sauce instead of thinking.

The van pulls into the parking lot. I hug my mother, put on a brave face. The staff tells me that, for safety reasons and program policy, they have to blindfold me. This is the first moment it starts to sink in that this is real. I have signed over the next 30 or more days to the wilderness. We drive for an hour. My body is sweating, heart pounding. I want to cry. I remind myself that I agreed to go through the program.

At base camp, they take the blindfold off. I smell sage. It is night and the stars are more numerous than even the West Texas sky. I think about the Charlie Robison song about the man in prison, how they “sometimes let him look up at the East Texas sky / which sparkle like the lights of Loving County.” I can’t help but feel trapped.

Inside, the woman tells me I have to hand over all of my possessions. They will provide me with everything: clothes, shoes, pack, and sleeping bag. Everything.

And we have to do a strip search.

A what?

A strip search. It’s for your safety, as well as the rest of your group and our staff.

I want to break down crying. But I keep reminding myself that this was my decision. Well, kind of.

Lubbock, Texas: My mother and I are in the police station as she pays my “ticket” for shoplifting while on a school academic trip.

My mom looks like she’s going to kill me, I thought. She slams the car door, turns to me and says: “You are going away. I’ve already researched some programs in Utah. Wilderness Programs. Something has to be done. If you don’t do this, you can’t go away to college next year. I won’t let you.

My mind is racing. How did I get here? Why did I even take that sweater? Why have I done any of this?

My forearm is still bleeding from my nails the night before. I couldn’t use anything else.

It seems I’m always looking for a way out. As if someone else kept taking over my body.

Utah: base camp

So, could you place your clothes in the corner? Okay, I’m going to have to ask you to bend over and…

I want to die, I thought. But I comply with their requests. They are doing their job. I deserve this, somehow, don’t I?

After the examinations, I am back in the van, blindfolded. We drive for miles in dark silence. I focus on the bumps in the dirt road, fantasize about the van rolling off the cliff.

Utah Journal:

Day 1:
I don’t know how I’m going to handle this.

Today was my first full day. It was hard. We hiked all afternoon and I was okay at first, but toward the end, I lost it. My stomach was hurting; I was weak and couldn’t breathe. I honestly thought I wasn’t going to make it. I kept thinking I just want to go home. I’m so filthy! Covered in dirt and sweat. I’m sad. I’m just really, really sad. On the hike, I was in a delusional state. I kept saying over and over again Philippians 4:13.

I wonder how my family would react if they knew that I just want to go home. Maybe I will talk to someone about it. If I’m going to face my problems, I might as well face them. I’m going home.

Day 3:
This place makes it impossible to leave, even though I am an adult. It wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t feel like death. I wish I had never chosen to come here, makes me sick to think about how much money this is costing. I feel horrible. I just want to lie in a bed for days and sleep. My body can’t handle this. My mind can’t…I hate this.

The next morning, the staff tells me I can leave if I want. I am, after all, in the adult program. But they won’t help me leave.

What do you mean you won’t help me leave?!

Well, it’s three days hike to any civilization, and seeing as you’ve just arrived and have yet to learn the necessary skills to survive in the wild, build a fire from raw materials, set traps, dress a wound, identify edible plants, well, I don’t see how you’ll make it out alive.

I thought to myself: he’s doing some kind of reverse psychology on me. I know my rights. I can leave, and they HAVE to help me. I am NOT staying here any longer.

The rest of my tribe looks on. Some of my seasoned contemporaries sigh and place their heads in their hands near the fire-pit. They’ve seen this scene before. They know how it ends. Some stir their oatmeal and lentils, looking nervous about what is about to happen.

Fine. I’m leaving.

Blackwolf looks disappointed, but says

All right, but that means that Spirit Knife is going to have to follow you. For your safety. And this means the rest of the group will have to stay at this camp until a backup staff member can meet us. We won’t be able to hike to our next location until nighttime.

I gather my things, tears brimming my eyes. I feel a slight pang of guilt, but I push it aside. They will comply. They have to.

I set off. I don’t know where I’m going, but I guess they have to see that I’m serious. Maybe then we can sit down and sort things out, be reasonable, send a van to pick me up.

I keep walking. I look back. Spirit Knife is still following me. But she doesn’t say anything. I watch my boots. I keep my eyes on my boots until I get to a small mountain. Shit. I could go around it, but that would take longer, walking. I’m so frustrated! Why haven’t they seen that I am serious, that I want to leave? God. I guess I’m going to have to climb this damn mountain.

I start scaling its side. My hands have to pull at the dirt. Spirit Knife is still behind me, climbing. Fuck. What am I doing? How did I get here? With each step, my calves burn. The pain shoots up and down my arms and legs. Beads of sweat nestle into the eye-sockets. The desert blurs. Black dots dance in my vision.

I haven’t refilled my water bag and there’s a 15-pound pack on my back containing my food and sleeping bag. The seat-belt straps around my shoulders cut into the skin. The pain grabs at my lower back.

Fuck. What am I doing here? God. Just let me go home. I won’t drink, I won’t smoke, I won’t cut, I won’t swear, I won’t…I won’t…. I hate you Shannon! Why are you doing this? Why are you? I hate you. I hate you.

My body recoils with pain, as though to respond to my mind. I can see the summit. I can’t breathe.

I pull my body over to the top, trying to pull air into my lungs, full of bees. I sit down. The distance spirals in and out of my eyes. There’s nothing. Nothing but wild for miles. Days worth of miles. I can’t do this. I can’t do this on my own. Why am I running away? Why am I…

I look again out into the expanse. I feel so small. What am I doing on this mountain? I am running away. God, why am I running away?

I push my palms into my eye-sockets. Sob. Why have I abandoned myself? Why am I doing this to myself?

Spirit Knife walks up behind me, places her hand on my back.

Are you ready to go back?

I look up at her and, between gasps of air and tears, ask

Why are you being nice to me? I just made you walk three miles and climb up a mountain because I’m being a stupid, stubborn fool.

Sometimes, the hardest person to love is our self. Are you ready to go back?

Utah Diary, Day 23:

I can see a difference in myself. I can feel it, too. I try and reflect on this at night when I’m in my sleeping bag, looking at the stars. I can feel a love for myself I’ve never felt before, and a respect for myself. It’s as though someone introduced me to this amazing woman, strong. And then I catch my breath. She’s me. Why have I tried so hard for so long to hide her light?

Day 26:

I got my earth name tonight. Sunset Sky. Blackwolf named me and gave me
a powaka. How did he know, how could he know, my favorite sight in the
world? Did God tell him in a dream? My name. My name.

Day 30:
Vision Quest—well, I am on my vision quest. I feel lonely. It’s been 32 or so hours alone in the desert. Perhaps I need this isolation right now. It’s funny how many different thoughts go through my head when I have so much time to think. Yet I feel content. Maybe it’s the fact that I am able to feel, to feel such appreciation and gratitude for everything! I feel I am so much a part of this earth, so connected with the land. I can’t describe the bliss. I am going to miss being here. It’s amazing…did I actually want to leave when I first got here? Why was I so afraid to meet myself? I am never going to be the same after this.

I know I can do anything. I have already done it.

Vision Quest day 2:

I saw it. I won’t say what I saw. You’re not supposed to. But may I always remember this moment. This one. Which is already the moment after the next and next. Growing stone. To the moment of my death, I will be holding this in my hands.

Don't Get Me Started on Last Year's Cabo Trip // I'm Telling You, T. J. Max is a Lifesaver

2009-02-20T12:16:00.001-08:00

10:30 AM—Sarah Lawrence College Gym—Ladies Locker Room.

I hear a gaggles of voices as the Women’s Swimming Group walk into the locker room from the pool. I turn on my shower quickly, knowing soon the hot water will soon become scarce. The voices rise with laughter and chatter, non-distinguishable until a couple of the flock separate into the shower area.

Shower 1: Diane! Can I borrow some shampoo? I forgot mine!

Shower 3: Yeah, sure. Here you go. Cute swimsuit, by the way.

Shower 1: Thanks! Oh, you like the suit? T. J. Max. 20 bucks. I'm telling you! Great deal! I’m getting my hair colored today and I know you’re not supposed to shampoo your hair, but I also don’t want to chlorine to keep the color from penetrating.

Shower 4: Oh, I know. Do you shower at night, too? the chlorine stays on even after I shower here in the morning.

Shower 3: Yes! It does. I can taste it on my skin even!

Shower 1: Oh, how does your husband feel about that?

Showers 1, 3, 4: [giggles]

Shower 1: I can’t get the water hot, can anyone get hot water?

Shower 4: Oh, guys, Marissa’s birthday next week, so we should all do something for her.

Shower 3: How old will she be?

Shower 4: She’s turning the Big 5-0!

Shower 3: How old are you, Susie?

Shower 4: Me? Oh I just turned 45.

Shower 3: you do not look 45. I would have said 38.

Shower 4: Well, you know, my mother looked young for her age. I’m telling you, things start slowing down after 40.

Shower 1: [shouting] Who slows down?

Shower 4: I said the BODY. The body slows down.

Shower 1: I don’t get that. Maybe it’s because my MIND is slowing down!

Shower 3: Susie, things will pick up after you get the last kid outta the house!

Shower 4: Oh, I hope so!

Shower 3: Besides, we ALL look young, don’t you think?

Shower 1: Yeah but my hair, you know, if I didn’t color it, the gray would make me feel older.

All Showers: (silence, sound of running water)

[Locker / Changing Area]

{One woman, previously Shower 3, opens Locker 3, drops her towels, grabs underwear. Turns around to Shower 4, who stands by Locker 4.}

Locker 3: (pulling underwear up) Susie, what is in your husband in?

Locker 4: (putting lotion of her legs) He has a joint venture company.

Locker 3: Can I have some lotion? Oh, that must be hard right now.

Locker 4: Sure, here you go. It’s great for your skin. Yes. Since it’s with small business, there are fire alarms going off every day. I tell you! What about your husband?

Locker 3: (puts on bra) He owns a law firm.

Locker 4: (now in jeans and bra) Oh, really? How is that right now?

Locker 3: We’ve been lucky. It’s the bigger firms letting people go.

Locker 4: Oh, it’s just hard on everyone right now. Everyone’s suffering.

Locker 3: It is. It is. So hard

[Shower 1 walks in, shaking her hair with towel, stands by Locker 1]

Locker 1: [still shaking wet hair] Diane, you and the kids going away for spring break?

Locker 3: We’re going to St. Thomas!

Locker 4: Nice! Oh, that’s so nice. All inclusive?

Locker 3: Yes! We couldn’t decide between skiing and the Caribbean, but this winter has just been brutal!

Locker 1: I’m telling you, All Inclusive is the only way to go with kids. I mean, otherwise it’s just too difficult and expensive!

Locker 3: I know. Don’t even get me started on last year’s Cabo trip with the boys! John wanted to golf the whole time and the boys were bored to death! I was dying! I thought to myself, “well THIS will never happen again! What a waste of money!”

Locker 1: Can anyone lend me a blow-dryer? I forgot mine!

Locker 4: Here you go. Oh, I love those jeans!

Locker 1: Aren’t they great?! I’m telling you, T. J. Max is a life saver!

***This was this morning. Interesting Group. They always have funny stories and dialogues. And let me tell you, believe it or not, most of these women (who I regularly see walking about naked) have better bodies than I do! Of course, they have a lot of time of their hands to work out….Shower / Locker 1 character is hilarious. Always loud and eccentric and talking about the latest deal she found at market or T. J. Max or online catalogues. I get the sense that she kind of annoys the other women, but they have to put up with her because she’s in the “group.” There’s also another Swimming Group that consists of the older women…60’s and 70’s. Now THEY have some HILARIOUS conversations. And sometimes they even start talking to me while I’m trying to change…they do not respect personal space, regardless of if you’re clothes or not. And sometimes, the older group will talk about you like you’re not standing next to them. For example, just last week:

Livvy: Oh, Maureen, look at her (points to me, while I’m hovering in a corner, trying to put on my bra) She has a tattoo!

Maureen: Really? (looks at me) Honey, what is that tattoo?

Me: (with bra successfully on, turning around to grab shirt) umm, uhh, a rose type thing

Livvy: A rose! Maureen, did you hear that? A rose!

Maureen: Yes, yes. Oh, dear. Have you ever been to Ireland?

****

Words of Flight, How They Pass Between

2009-02-19T04:35:00.001-08:00

Passing different lines, I try and see exactly where the intersections spell out your name. It twists and turns, and I write about it, not for myself, not even to clarify the smog, perhaps not even for you…but to lay some tracks across an otherwise naïve trail.

I wish I could give each person this gift. If I could lay before the sunset, trace the red that changes so brilliantly to orange and spell it out somehow b-e-t-w-e-e-n the curves of letters, if I could, it still wouldn’t create a ribbon between my dreaming and you.

It shifts, the subject. At first I thought I was writing to you (points North) but perhaps I am writing to you (points West). And if that’s the case, I change my tone, slightly, because even if we meet at the exact same place, the shoe-prints will be of different sizes.

I love you in my way. As if I could produce manuscripts on the way you think, how your line of thought goes in and out of the briar patch, stuck, some days, to my sides.

And to trust that even among strangers I can see your form.

That we have already forgiven each other for loving imperfectly.

That my Dictionary weighs less because of the absence of your name.

And your light? What can I do but sift through with my toes what my mouth has already spelled, leapt forward to catch?

Yes, wind comes through the cracks between wood, but notice, so does sunlight. We build for ourselves as much as for each other and I’ll be here for ages cleaning the dust from the modest floor, sweeping the broom and repeating words and names into the air which float to the roof as I watch them fly out into tops of trees. Because I live there, too, flying to greet our unborn joy.

__________________________

_____

Tell me, what faith have you gathered around you? Where is the source? I can never trace it back to mud, to the body, to the places one can visit. Sometimes I read your words and sit silently for hours.

When the heat breaks through, it rests its heavy body somewhere next to my heart. Do you know this panic? To listen to its static all through the night, hoping among the paper-shreds, a speck of you might come through, and I can save it, record it.

I am merely a boat of sorts, catching things along the way. Some days there are anchors. Some days a shifting of words. The point is, I know nothing about direction. Sometimes I cannot even see your light. Where is the source?

To open your arms like you do, like the world could send itself kindly to your door. But I know there are hours of teeth and I cannot catch you in the middle of brier, frozen in between states, doubting I’ll be your messenger again. The brier grows up to the throat.

Still, I read your words and sit silently for hours, wondering. Who unfolded their hands first? Did your words fly in from the window. What is the origin of their bones?

Own Splinters

2009-02-17T21:58:00.000-08:00

Do not be conformed

to this world,

but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

That my mind can lift me, thank you.

For discipline and forgiveness, lavender bath salts and Brahms,

memory, how it fills gaps where loneliness grows too bold.

And for loneliness. It has an achoring effect.

Otherwise, I think I'd forget to reach out, to be more than just a body, but a movement.

I thought of this, feeling a heat rise up in my chest. Again, anxiety-creature. I locked myself in the restroom to breathe. My head was swimming like a balloon up on a hill. I didn't know where each thought would drift. I had no map for the moment. This can be a shock. We forget how controlled we keep the mind, most days, until it somehow breaks through the gates.

But I thought, let it pass, hold out your hand. Offer it help. Allow yourself this. Allow yourself to feel panic. Bend around it softly. Present it with flowers and a pasture to work things out.

There's no wrong moment, no perfect emotion. Only those that walk away unheard and those that are given a chance to come undone, without judgment.

For a moment—I could be the calm around my own splintering. And I thought, energy is energy—cry, kiss the forearm, remember running through the rain, asking the evening to extend itself, how sometimes it feels like the body dissipates. This can happen in confusion and in joy.

Poetry Vlog

2009-02-15T21:28:00.000-08:00

Meditations on a Water-Tank

2009-02-14T21:05:00.001-08:00

ou see, I try to hold another, to gain access to another day, to garner something close to my chest.

Imagine a water tower peppered with bullet holes, millions of them, so that when the sun sets, it’s as though orange-peel stars descended on its belly, chatting next to one another. I mean that to fill this tank would be fruitless. The sun shines through it, minutes pass from under it, time has its way with its body—it holds nothing but air, and even air finds the escape-hatch.

And each morning I wake, forgetting that no matter success or failure, each moment is clean, bringing with it no residue of the last or premonition of the next.

I forget the tank is peppered with holes, faulty. I forget that anothers words are fleeting and could change their tone at any moment. I forget, even after I remember, that I cannot fill the day with errands or litter my hours with trophies—if I do, they turn to ash in sleep.

And so I remember the desert, where nothing but Nature was my companion. This companion does not watch you, waiting for you to succeed or fail. It does not linger over your thoughts, trying to conceive a way to hold intelligence over your head. Nature simply is. It moves whether the day was a “success” or not.

I could have placed stones in a pile and said “look at what I have created!” and Nature would not respond but keep moving. If one really notices, Nature does not move forward, but inward and outward, all at once. It radiates because it is and knows how to be only Nature. It does not try to possess or hold, to garner or steal.

Nature is a perfect companion to observe habit. I sat, first, for hours and wrote. I climbed a tree, made a tent when it rained, took a walk and ate when I was hungry. But I was lonely after a day. I grew anxious as it darkened. I had made no plans. I had no one to speak to, nothing but sky and animal eyes. The trees became so human-like I thought I could speak to them. I thought about the ants and whether I could make something from a stone and bark, pieces of string. Leaves speak in patterns to the wind. Still, I had no one to parrot my mind back to me. I had no one to hold and the day was door-less. I had no access or possession of anything but my thoughts.

Nature is full of holes, why should I expect to be any different, any less “broken”? It simply is, though fires burn acres, though rocks fall and become pebbles, though it has nothing but its own bones.

Try and possess it. You can’t. And so the tank cannot be repaired. Days will leave out of the back door while you lie in bed, going over lists and managing fear. Call someone on the phone and link your fear to their fear, look at the chains they make, the lines and distintions you can draw. But the sun shines through the holes just the same.

When I had run out of ideas of things to do while in the desert, I simply watched. Watched things move and shift, watched the sky change hue, the ants form lines. And I suddenly felt as though I was standing in someone else’s living room, asking to be seen. Until I felt in some part of my brain sound:

I see you.

And still, I forget. Each day, I forget that I don’t need to hold another, gain access on the day, garner something to my chest. What am I missing while trying to prove my existence?

The tank is peppered with holes. It cannot be filled. What am I missing, trying to fill it up with deeds, hours, language, trophies, bodies?

I am missing the chance to gaze back at You.

The You that is my continuation, what I lean back and laugh into, filled with joy.

Blessed, We Read "The Winter After Your Death"

2009-02-11T22:16:00.001-08:00

Today, thank You. Blessed piece of grass. Thank you for humidity and my blue coat. For the woman at the atrium cafe, carrying her baby, smiling at me though it's early morning.

Thank You for Craft class, scansion, brains and study.

For a moment, I thought I was in a math course--the strikes and dips on the board may has well been on my body, scanning lines with concentration, a connection with each person in the room.

Sharon Olds' poem "The Winter After Your Death" under our eyes, offering the tiniest patch of grass. Look. "Deep in my body my green heart" I read, and felt the body lurch forward.

"What does your body do?" teachers ask. What can it do? Nothing...herds are inside. Herds, acres full of them. What can it do, my body, but bite it's own freedom in the bit of containment.

Poetry is the gate swinging open. The ears twitch. The soul-withers gather, let go. There's a coming freedom for us. That's what poetry shadows. The pasture gate, swinging open. Click, rusted, yes, but it will open to god-mountains.

And so we scanned lines. Jasper and I agreed on pyrrhic and dactyls and trochaic inversions. Sometimes I get lost just in those words alone. Word-joy. Who called this word-joy? Stressed/unstressed.

I laughed, laughed out loud in class because I didn't think I'd ever feel such happiness, learning scansion. Not like this. Not in a community, a table, which should be a fireside. That's what the professor said, "Pretend we're gathered round a fire." A fire that melts the "thick trap / door of ice, ... water moves"

Spring foot--like a fermata, a hold. And that's what we do. Hold things out in our cupped hands. They could be sweet moments, or bitter.

Like staring into a lamppost. She said she could carry it with her in the watercolor. Yellows running out of the lines. Moments or poems. Hold the breath, as we do, in-between next breath.

And so I remember scanning poetry in class. Olds poem between us, fireside...tapping our fingers or feet. Dipping in and out of accentuals. Signals.

Patch of green. We could lie there. For a mid-morning moment. And sing to the god-of being-alive.

Blessed. So we read "The Winter After Your Death" and feel joy.

"A poem is breath in the air. Or it’s ink and paper. It’s standing for a heart and a mind. And I go to people’s poems to learn about the heart and the mind, and to be less lonely as a human being, and to have fun. And maybe people go to poetry partly to find out what we’re really like, to find out how bad we really are, how essential it is that we change while there’s still time, maybe, to change. But a day in a life and a poem about that day, there’s something profoundly different." --Sharon Olds, BOMB Magazine: Sharon Olds by Amy Hempel

Library Triangle, Page 83

2009-02-11T14:13:00.000-08:00

In the library. At a desk with girl in blue boat. She has a nose-ring. Hair in a bob and pink sweater.Took off blue coat.

Man at a table behind her reading a book, biting nails, wearing swiss amry watch. Pearl snap shirt, he flicks the light on—high, low, high, low.

Girl with nose-ring types on Mac.

Her Mac looks at my Mac. Hers: white, mine: silver.

She touches her face, around the mouth.

Army watch chews his nails in time with her, both touching mouths at the same time. Now, drumming finger-tips. Smooth circle with index finger.

A girl diagonal army watch reading Count of Monte Cristo.

All girls touch their hair in the library.

Cristo's hair is a dark drape. Cannot see her eyes, just the book, hunched. Wearing all black. Rubbing eyes, combing hair.

Army watch biting his nails, petting lamp.

Girl with nose ring covers her mouth. Lips and fingertips, hiding a deck of cards, which are her teeth.

Monte Cristo pushes hair-drape aside.

Army watch keeps touching the lamp, high, low, high, low.

Monte Cristo is wearing skinny jeans, got up to get a magazine, New York Times.

They make a triangle: Nose-Ring, Army-Watch, Cristo.

Nose-Ring takes out library card. Walks to copy machine, not touching her face.

Army-Watch rubbing eyes, not touching the lamp, has tortoise-shell glasses, twirls them.

Monte Crito lies open to page 83, abandoned.

Three makes a triangle, though Nose-Ring is still at copy machine.

Army-Watch put down glasses, fingers pages. Has to be touching something, like girls who cannot let go of hair.

Woman in her 40’s sits down.

Triangle messed up.

Nose-Ring is back. Library card on top of her journal. She’s wearing pink, not hiding a deck of cards.

Monte Cristo open to 83.

No triangle, or three, because woman in her 40’s sat down.

Mac laptop. Everyone has one.

Cristo is leaving, black coat on.

Took Monte Cristo, abandoned New York Times.

Army-Watch put glasses on, fingering pages, took glasses off.

No more triangle. More a line. Page 83, gone.

Sweetwater

2009-02-10T21:55:00.001-08:00

You said you shot the film in Sweetwater. I wonder if you held her in a trough. People do that. People make hotness lick off their skin like that, in the desert, stealing horses. Making room for each other in a trough. And if the sun was setting, I bet the heat was breaking. And if you shot the film in Sweetwater, I bet there as dust. There was dust up to eyelids. All the way to the ears. You laughed. In the trough. Washed sins. Like a baptism. But love isn’t kind enough, or holy. So the dirt gets in. So it should. So you laughed between one another. The sun was setting, breaking the heat. Stealing horses, you and her. Making something between two, kicking dust.

In Sweetwater, hell slides its snakes. Hope gets in between love, which isn’t kind enough to wash sins. But you laugh. You knew it wasn’t kind, but the baptism goes on. Like the film, I suppose. Just once. But it was a dream. It ran away, stole the horses. The sun was setting, but you said it was kind. Like hotness on the skin. The dust gets in. Gets in between you two. Like hell. People do that. People wash in troughs. Love isn’t holy. So they should.

2009-02-09T21:24:00.000-08:00

And the mountains fall
Into the heart of the sea

But this stone is precious.

Still, under canyons
lie open-mouthed--
fish, scaled, hooked.
Gut a spoon for once;
break me against
giving sounds: oak,
round, my grief.

Don't You Just Love it When...

2009-02-07T23:15:00.000-08:00

Dont you just love it when....

1. You can smile at stranger's on the street and then they say "hey...um, give me your number!"

2. A friend calls you just at the moment you're feeling kinda lonely.

3. The sun shines and there's the smell of fresh cut grass...

4. There's a gorgeous sunset just down the way, and you're running and thanking God you're alive to see it (this is mainly a West Texas thing, I think...since I've never seen the sunset here in NY)

5. A stranger smiles at you on the subway

6. You are sitting in Barnes and Noble, reading two poets' letters to each other, and you just happen to sit next to someone else reading the SAME BOOK!

7. You buy the person behind you their Starbucks drink, just because.

8. Someone writes you a hand-written letter and it comes in the mail on a day that things just weren't going right...and it makes you smile.

9. You get to have a nice bottle of wine with good friends

10. You get sick, but it's not the getting sick that is the good part, it's the getting better that is great, because it makes you realize how good you have it to feel better!

11. You create something beautiful, and it comes out like a soft rolling sound...like you're in love with the world and can't wait to tell it so.

12. You finally forgive someone, and release your hidden pain.

13. You wake up laughing (my God, that's the greatest feeling in the world!)

14. There's a night in with friends...and you get to play Mario Bros. or Sonic the Hedgehog and it makes you feel like a kid again...and there's beer and it tastes really good!

15. You get to travel, and the world astonishes you.

16. You spend a couple minutes in front of a painting, and you find yourself moved to tears

17. When there's a brilliant movie on, and when it's over, you're completely silent because you're blown away by it's sheer awesomeness.

18. The smell of coffee in the morning.

19. Your mom's homemade lasagna (My mom's is fantastic)

20. When someone kisses you for the first time, and you feel tingles all over.

...you realize you have so much to be grateful for...

Get Out

2009-02-07T10:28:00.001-08:00

I cant' stand sitting here at my desk anymore. I am breaking down into tears. I don't know what's wrong with me. I have this fear that I won't find the words. I am so lonely. I feel like the air is thinner. I think I'm just going to forget about trying to write poetry today and just take the train into the city. I think I should just take the train. Because I can't get anything accomplished here. Maybe I'll go to Union Square and walk around. Maybe I'll read in the 4-story Barnes and Noble, drink coffee at a shop. Walk around and listen to people. Maybe I'll feel less out of my mind. Maybe I'll just listen to people talk to each other. Say something to them by saying nothing. Look at two people holding hands. Walk around in the waves and listen to my iPod. Restore something to myself that's missing. I don't know what that is. But maybe I'll find it when I get out of this box. I think I'll get lost and jump on a subway line I don't know where it goes, just to go, see new faces. Eat sounds. Chew on other's sentences as they kiss other sentences. Smell the cologne. My body needs to be around other bodies. Like flocks. I am tired of sitting on my own wire, branch, telephone pole. Maybe I'll go to museum, look at art. Stare at other's creativity. I don't know. I just know that all of a sudden I feel very lonely. I can't write anything today. Maybe I shouldn't write anything today. Maybe I should just feel the day. Feel others' days. What are they doing, where are they going, who are they loving? It's probably good to get out of this head of mine. I don't know. What will I do? I don't know.

Failing

2009-02-06T04:58:00.000-08:00

Didn't sleep. Can't stand this phase where nothing I write is good. Slept in between panic at the thought of having to complete a book by next year.

Why is it that now writing is a stress? Why is it that now, my form of self-mutilation is forced study? If I don't write something "good" then that's cause for self-doubt and criticism. If I can't write, then I shouldn't sleep. I shouldn't leave the room for days.

All of this. It's consuming. I feel like I did, halfway up the mountain, when I was sick, throwing up from the cramping of muscles around my stomach, bees in my lungs, ache in every bone. I wanted to lie down, but the rest of my group said "get up, keep walking." I looked at the dirt. Took each step in anger. Forced myself to feel all of the pain in my body like it was sweetness. Like I could master something if I could master this pain. And didn't the pain tell me I was alive? And so, each step I'd want to cry out, to lie down and give up. But somewhere inside me I thought, no, you don't deserve to feel the absence of this pain, you haven't finished. You have shown nothing.

And so, when we finally reached the top, I thought I'd feel relief. I thought I'd feel a swelling of pride.

Instead, I stood, surveyed the stillness and thought, out of all this, I am nothing, fleeting.

I think I fainted.

But it was finding my smallness that was the gift. Not that I had climbed the mountain, but that I could finally see how small I was. And though perhaps I should have felt discouragement, I felt comfort. Because somehow, I was there. Even if I fail at everything I set out to do, I existed. It was letting go, I think, of expecting a win, a prize, with accomplishment. I didn't feel joy at the summit. I only felt small. Sometimes, that's exactly how we need to feel.

I wrote this at four in the morning:

Other Voices

I want to lock myself in a room for days upon days, like a monk with his scroll or ancient book. I want to sleep for only an hour and wake with pain in my bones, teeth that crack and a heart that cannot help but stutter. I want lines to roll down my chest, lines of text. To have nothing to consume but the thoughts of others more brilliantly laid out than my own, so I can be humbled, hour after hour, about how the world is more beautiful than I could describe. Days of this. Days of trying to write and failing, days of other people's voices. Days where I get lost enough in the wooded words and rinsed metaphors that nothing seems perfect, or placed just so, or called out correctly. Where time loses its tick. Where I no longer want to write, because nothing I've written says something new.

Then, release me somewhere. Silence. Stillness. I cannot hear their voices. The Babel Tower has fallen. Then, I may have something to say.

But to You, I'd ask, what does it matter now?

The Essential Thing

2009-02-05T22:07:00.000-08:00

Nothing to write. Nothing, nothing, nothing. I will never experience the field of becoming because I have too much anxiety to contend with.

All day I've paced back and forth from one corner of my head to another. Paced until the pounding begins in the womb and moves into the ribs, a heat-baby that gets stuck, nestled next to my heart.

Something in my bones said “be still.” Not that I am the kind for stillness. “Waiting has no object.” But there are objects and then there are knots. The knots overwhelm me. The heat-baby stirs, bumps up against my heart. And I cannot sit still for the plain to come into view.

So all I've accomplished is a small chewing piece. My mind feels like trout have been nipping its edges all day. Nothing to sustain. Nothing to care for.

Except, perhaps a small offering. Though it is so flawed. But I imagine it still and blue, in the corner of my room. Standing there, hands curled one over the other. Or maybe it's an air. Yes, more of an air moving around some central point. The point is the poem, and its edges are a starry blue sparkling. If I could get through the atmosphere, I could read its text. But for now, I just enjoy watching it swirl, though imperfect. So, hang about in the corner, blue swirling node or knot or kind eye. I hope to get to know you.

Here it is, in it's baby-ness:

The essential thing has been stolen.
A monk, it crawls out into the night
to worship a moon in secret.
I know You are missing.

It was not that I awoke, but
the filed woke in me, a tree
lying upside down, tangled
in faith-matter, hope-birds,
wet, out of nest. I want to be
alone in this, to cry by the night
stand. My sudden joy. I forget
how to bar the door with my whole weight.

The monk has left his tower,
his robes dirty up in the muck
by the river, his hands pray
into the mud-mistress. I watch.
The essential thing has been stolen

One in the Morning, Listening to Four in the Morning

2009-02-01T22:18:00.001-08:00

“Reverence is one of man’s answers in the presence of mystery.”
–Abraham Joshua Heschel

The quote above was read by me tonight from a friend’s blog. She’s gorgeous. Her voice is gorgeous. Go look at her page: Lesley Sawyer

I was just listening to her song, Four in the Morning and I feel this weight. Always the weight. There’s this odd fuzz that rolls up over me. “I didn’t know if this was the way it was supposed to feel” she sings. “we were idiots, my god we were idiots.”

I smile.

I sit in my bed, my books piled up beside me, hopeless, helpless, kind. I know that all of the words in the world couldn’t reach and heal the rift between here and heaven. But it’s words, and expression, that reaches around us, connects one moment of someone’s pain to another’s moment of joy.

Whatever creative impulse grows out of her, whatever the road that lead to the pushing up and laying down of that song, or that letter, or your hands on my forehead; it can only be love that holds us all together. No matter the differences.

How someone’s viewpoint on beauty can be my home away from home. I can curl into someone’s recollections and sigh. You may have no recollection of me, but in your dreams, I have stopped by to watch, to listen, to spark off your beauty because I’ve been bleeding. I’ve been singing to get here, sitting up late at night, watching the dust settle on the ceiling fan. Watching my fingers find the right words to answer old broken hearts.

And someday, my rough edges will smooth and calm someone else’s pain.

That’s what we’re here for. Because without knowing it, we are each other’s keeper…regardless of what or how we feel, we are guarding, not our own hearts, but our neighbors. When we rejoice, it’s for some stranger. When we grieve or break open our alabaster heart, it’s the Other’s burden, soon we will know why.

I will keep reminding myself this. (how pain makes us turn inward and forget)

I will practice reverence.

Writer's Block or Mockingbird Syndrom

2009-01-29T18:15:00.000-08:00

Feeling a bit out of sorts lately. It feels like there's tiny clumps of cells gathering at various places inside my body...they vibrate when I try to walk one distance to another. The sun came out today. I woke and felt the slightest warmth across my shoulder. I thought I was still in the dream I was dreaming, where I collected something in my hands and handed them to You. But You wouldn't take them, only whispered in my ear "patience." And all was through. I awoke to sunlight. And all day, I try and remember my only becoming is this day. My only emergence is right now. If I wake tomorrow, I start over again with a brand new gift. And Monday, I threw the gift into the gutter. I stomped the ice and snow, crunching the brittle ground in anger and frustration. You just sighed and carried me over the puddles, though I never notice your devotion. I hoarded the pain because it was mine. Sometimes I feel so small that all I dress myself in is pain. And so the gift slipped from my hands. I felt myself chewing my own tongue, grinding teeth and holding the wall together with arms. I run. I run on the treadmill and I run from Grace. Forget that I am my own warmth, my own light, which continues to grow though I forget to tend to it.

And so the poetry is silent as well. My impatience catches me. Its barbs stick into my sweater. I hold back. I hold on. Hold on. I just want to see if I am strong. But I know You. You'd say I had nothing to prove. So why does it hurt to admit that I am scared? That pride has me running in all directions, gathering things, picking out words and images? A mockingbird desperately building a nest, a poem, something to love, for love, to stake a claim on the day?

I tried to write a short poem

slip knots inside
Conch shells, pink-
ness floating about
the head. You said
I needed to trust
less, wrap words
around ankles, swim,
drown them, wait;
see what emerges,
what light breaks
through the surface—

Gold, breath, bundles,
teacup,
your hair.

You in the Minute-Marble-Moments

2009-01-23T22:43:00.001-08:00

I don't know if you know this, but often I write to you and then off I go, writing to you which is You, capitalized. And you become the You I speak to when writing in my head. It's an intimacy, I think...

and so I write tonight... to you...and You

I am reading Aldous Huxley's Perennial Philosophy right now and am walking through some wild stuff. I think I'm beginning a sort of quest. I feel that way anyway...almost like I can see a path clearing out before me but everything is kind of hazy on the sides and fish-bowled.

At the same time, alongside Huxley, I am reading two books about Play..."Playing and Reality" by D. W. Winnicot and"Toys and Reason" by Erik Erikson.

Also, on top of all that, I am continuing with William Carlos Williams “Paterson”

I seem to find things drift toward me as though I am walking with my hands down to my sides and then up they go, slowly, my arms in small gestures, hoping that a signal will be cast, signs will stumble on to my path.

That's what happened with the combination of books (as all of my studies seem to arrive). Huxley was sent by a friend in the mail, Patterson, byWCW, was randomly purchased at Barnes and Noble in Midland. And both "Play" books were left sitting at my "spot" in the library. (I have a specific area in the basement that I prefer to sit, a place where ghosts and gods peek out from time to time if I glance over just in time. It seems to be where I am most relaxed, breathing a concentrated rhythm into the air, a pulse, a meditation. My holding station, my wagon-shed that happens to be full of stardust and just enough of the cosmos’ residual imagination that I lick off the desk when no one is looking). Anyway, some previous student had been reading the books, I presume, and left them piled up for me to find.

How we feel a connection with others through books. I imagine all of the hands that have held the various library books as I pull them off the shelf. If I were a library book, I'd love to feel that gentle tug on my spine, scraping against my neighbors like one in a row of teeth. It’s quite intimate: a lover's teeth while kissing and you happen to brush up against their set…two sets, a set of impossible combinations...like so many books--worlds bound up and separated from one another. How one book’s words cannot mingle with another's bound words, so to our inner lives remain intact, never touching, though we make love or recite our fears and inner dialogues....

So I am trudging through, though sleep evades me. And the tea steams by my bedside and I think of You and of Huxley and of God, or by that I mean my recent mind-wanderings and how I think of what I should do to see the world as God. Not the Church, but Nature, You and me, dust-mites and swarming anthills who have no idea of the gorgeous pine trees above us the galaxies that expose millions of belly-lights so that we can walk and converse and switch on our blackberries, dream, wake, garden and do it all over again in succession of two's and three's.

And here I am dissociating again. Did you know that I thought about You today? I would like to recall five times, but each time could be six times within itself. A moment of one thought could be a cluster of minute-marble-moments and within them, more.

So don't feel alone, or lonely. Like You, my feet hurt at the end of the day, from walking around in patterns I have yet to decipher.

God, Within us, Whole Lives Reside

2009-01-11T22:32:00.001-08:00

Something miraculous happened to me today.

I have a confession. I have been down these past few weeks. The West Texas Sun has tried to wrap the warmth of its heart around me. I've listened most days.

My body tells me I'm more than this skin. Moments where there's a slight pain that reaches in for bits of my heart, my hands curl up into fists. Petals all themselves, not wanting to be picked and named sorrow.

But Soemthing moves that cannot be boarded against, held back, or cared for. It simply is.

And so, I've walked, or ran, the couple of miles around my neighborhood, bordering various barns, specked with horses who look over toward me as gods do their children. And again, the pain at their beauty. But the dust kicks up from underneath my feat as I keep on running, listening to one breath lie down, then another on the tips of mesquite.

Why am I sad?

I keep asking, over and over, as I run around the dusty alley-ways. And the sky answers back with gold and yellow, pink and rising red.

My chest aches, half from the running and half from whatever it is I'm feeling around this sunset. And if God doesn't speak through west Texas Sunsets, I don't know how else my heart was born.

And then my miracle.

Weaved through circumstance, I find someone who perhaps I've been hearing in those skies.

I wrote recently about waiting, listening to whatever it is that stops us in our tracks when we let go of distraction.

I think I've been waiting to hear from another life.

This one.

I dreamed, these past couple of weeks, several dreams concerning water.

I run each day, around the time I can view my gorgeous sunset, and I think about these dreams of blue, surrounded by the desert.

Sure, I've missed a lover, a friend, but something deeper this time. My sadness, unexplained, should have no place while I enjoy my home, my State, my family. These gorgeous sunsets.

Why am I sad?

So I wrote these dreams into a poem.

I recorded the poem. And a man sent me a message.

This man, a musician, but also a writer, told me his story and said this after reading/listening to my newest poem:

"When somebody blows you away with their beauty or their thoughts, their words or their music don't waste Karmic steam on praise. Tuck yourself into the folds of their genius and absorb the heat of their blood. And as the tears splash on your cheeks tell them what you hear."

And, man, I should be saying this to him, in return.

God, within us, whole lives reside.

We are not, should not, be alone.

Please read his story, here: http://www.iburymydead.com

I read his book, "I Bury My Dead" and immediately wrote: "How can so many people be so beautiful and connected in these strange ways? I am so overwhelmed right now. I feel like my body is no longer mine and I don't want it to be mine, It's theirs, it's God's."

You can find him here, as well: http://www.jamesmichaeltaylor.com/

Keep weaving us together, Universe. Thank you.