On the way down to Round Spring, an ancient site in the Ozark Mountains in southern Missouri yesterday afternoon, I wanted my shamanic initiation to be validated somehow for my mom. I reminded her of my memory of the bat I saw as soon as I arrived in Portland in 2006, at the very corner where, little did I know at the time, lived a person who called himself Dark River, who would introduce me to a sacred plot of land in southern Oregon where I would meet other shamans and continue journeying with them. I told my mom that the bat is a symbol of a shamanic death, similar to a baptism: an initiation into a new life. It is also a symbol of love, I told her, of energy.
When we arrived into the campground that my mom wanted to take me to, there was a sign that said, "Ampitheater. Slide Show Tonight at 8:30." A poster outside the restrooms next to our site indicated that the topic could be anything. So we decided we would attend. "What else are we going to do," I said. "It's not like we have T.V." Mom said. We had three hours until the show.
After setting up the tent, I fell asleep reading from the book Gut Symmetries, by Jeanette Winterson, a book Dark River recently gave me as a gift. I awoke, knowing I was just in time for the show. Just to be sure, I asked my mom what time it was. Eight o'clock.
By the time we walked down the road to the ampitheater, the forest was dark, and the trees were alive with the rhythm of the cicadas. The friendly female park ranger announced that the slide show presentation was on bats, demystified. Many stereotypes which normally give bats a bad reputation were replaced with the truth. For example, contrary to popular belief, bats are not blind, they do not typically have or spread rabies, and if they can detect from far off a minnow's fin two centimeters above the surface of the water, they will not fly into your hair, girls! Some of these debunked myths obviously were meant to be a little ridiculous.
One, however, really caught my attention. There was a photo of a bat who was protecting another bat (who had a broken wing), with its own wing. The ranger asked, "What do you call it when one person sacrifices itself for another?" It was obvious to me, a message: "Love?" I said.
I received information on how to build a bat house, and we were told to respect any signs we saw outside caves that indicated they were closed, since there is a disease affecting the bats, a white fungus that seems to be a growing epidemic in the North East U.S., and we think humans are the carriers. The Round Spring Cavern, there in the campground, was closed, "due to bat gate construction."
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Monday, August 10, 2009
666th Avenue
7/12/09
concerns. . . .i may lose this. Oh,well. The universe has been making me accustomed to loss. These things do not define me. My security is shifting to the formless, the divine, knowing that the more i give, the more i receive. This is a law of the universe. And “oh, well” in this silly world has become a statement, like “so.” In the “back of my mind” rests vague things that once were perceived by my senses, memories. Dark/River/Adam, an ever-changing being. Why is he in my life? Why am I in his? These are questions I seem to be asking more often lately with everyone I meet, everyone that disappears. Why did they disappear? There's a moving force, writing the story. After we get back from Sauvie's Island, River quotes an idea or two out of many I had put out there that seemed brilliant at the time: calling our house Sex Sixth Avenue because I merged things overheard, Sax Fifth Avenue. And I forget if this is my idea or someone else's. After it's here, does it matter how it arrived? And my name, Jory Lynntern. I merge things. And the night before: I ended up wandering with Jon, meeting him for the first time, though strangely, these people are seeming familiar. We all seem to have similar thoughts on the nature of reality. River/Adam asks me to recall some of the other creative ideas I had. I shrug, at a loss. “Into the ether?” he says. That thought scares me, but yes, and it resonates. I think that's why things scare me, because they resonate, and it's a shock that it resonates, because it seems it shouldn't. Everything seems to be dissolving as soon as it's discovered, becoming something new.
And i awaken with fading dream memories (is not dream-stuff the same as memory, and is there not more, or just as much, lived when asleep than when awake?) I just need to hold still, to relax. This is what ben, my guardian angel, has been saying to me. And i think this morning, reflecting as dream faded and coming into this ordinary reality, an illusion of constants, that perhaps i am a bodhisattva. Because i remember laughing hysterically at a jest, something done to entertain me. And i remember brandon suggesting i'm a buddha, that i do no wrong, that i have immense compassion and wisdom, that this is all i do, while the universe takes care of all my needs, and people feed, clothe, and entertain me. My sister and i came up with stuff we knew was unlike anything done before, and we would have had instant success had we cast ourselves into the world. Now it's all into the ether. Even my sister. I don't know what's going on in her world, over 2,000 miles away, and most days, i have no thoughts of it, because i am in a new world. That old every day familiar world has died, and where is it, that i thought would last forever? And i worry about my mom. Is she okay, in the dullness of my fading memory of her? Quantum nonlocality. I was cut out of a woman because i was upside down in the water tank. How did i get here? Caesarean section. There is nothing new under the sun.
0ther ethereal images, concepts:
recently i awoke in the night, a foggy fear sweeping over me, and for some reason i uncharacteristically stood up, from adam (dark river)'s couch in his room, and i swooned, falling to the floor, as if i had no muscles with which to move myself. I got up, walked into the bathroom, and dropped to the floor suddenly again, hitting my head on the edge of the sink. I felt as if it was my time to die, that the universe had overrided all my faculties and functions, that this was the culmination of my self-destructive thoughts and self-deprivation, and i didn't care. I was little disturbed at my apathy. I somehow expected the end to be like this. And maybe this was a premonition, a foreshadowing, or maybe i did die that night.
Pre-diction: an event or idea created through language; a memory of the future.
Memory: conscious ethereal image(s), scent(s), sound(s), idea(s), sensation(s), of an event that is layered over the present stream of events.
Diction: substance by which memory, prediction, or interpretation of the present is made; imposed meaning, order; tool for symbiosis with or manipulation of energy; evolutionary link between substance and ether. A mirror, through which the spirit sees its ethereal reflection, knowing itself as conscious energy, a creator, in spite of its physical form. A reminder of origins, through which a sense of permanency, immortality is achieved, language is itself a substance for recording the collected stories, insights, observations, of the (human) race.
at the beach, river says, oh, look at the little dog. And i think of his name-change to adam, and how the first man named the animals, and how the dog exists as dog only to us naming it. To the dog, it is not a dog. Humans, this subjugating race, dominating the world with its imposed limits. Language creates barriers. Then, last night, we watch The Rules of Attraction, where a couple of characters separated, in different situations, say, “You will never know me. You can never know anyone.” language is tricky, though, because it supposes things are knowable. It creates and sustains illusion. And illusions are built upon illusions. These illusions, of course, become reality for us, because of the nature of becomingness.
What else? (speak only truth. What resonates.)
walking back from walking jon half-way across the hawthorne bridge near four in the morning, after directing two guys to the prostitutes on burnside after they asked me, i stop at an intersection of streets for a truck. The guy behind the wheel decides to floor it, and i am a few feet from stepping into the intersection. If anyone had happened to step out into the road at that moment, they would be instantly killed by a vessel projecting through space at an unreal velocity. Is this natural? What are we doing? Playing with mortality at every moment. It's so easy to die. I think of a book of stories, or a television show making these realities evident, translating adult world ordinariness (apathetic rigidity) into child newness (wise, compassionate, aware).
A story where everyone communicates with symbols, without words: with hearts, for example.
A story where the world is without brands and money. Where there is only one kind of automobile, and the infinite choices are contained in colors, technological features, things that matter. And it is not a status symbol, but a beautiful work of genius.
A story where McDonald's arch ways are portals between worlds, and Western imperialism is an interdimensional idea to create oneness through domination, where it is neither “good” nor “bad,” but simply, necessary, for everything's purpose is: BEONE.
What am i? What is my universal purpose? Am i a buddha? I do not know where i came from. It is naive of anyone to assume they know. We've created the whys and hows of things. Through them all, what exists? I make connections between information, passing through, making an imprint on everything i touch. I follow the bread crumbs, i tell jon, and they seem to become more numerous when i follow them, and it's come to the point where i start seeing the hand throwing them. He says he knows what i mean, and has never talked to anyone who could put it so clearly before. My work here, if i never see him again, has been accomplished.
Everything speaks and shows itself through colors (light) and sound (also light), on this spinning ball floating in nothing. Maybe all the particles that form the earth are bound together by the same force binding us to it. Maybe it's all bound together by this glue called god.
The world is only as complicated as the human race has made it. I want to bring it back to simple. But it is simple and the world is realizing it without me. “Real-izing,” I tell Jon. “What are we doing?” I just observe. All the positive philosophizing discussions through which i've spread truth, all the people i've positively impacted by my presence, all the ideas and thoughts i've put into the world: it absorbs them and is changed by them. Is my purpose anything but this? It moves through me. Every choice, every failure is a success. There is no immorality and no obligation.
There is a circle known by some as earth. Perhaps it's known (or not known) by others as a warp of space-time, funneling. By others still, a work of art, by others still, as nothing.
___69696969696969696969696969696969696969696969(666)—999
a game (of consequences?)
between sleep and awake, is the body oscillating between itself and the ethereal realm of collective unconscious, a world just as, or more real, than the surface (at any given moment, i exist in other dimensions, where memories are still tangible events). We are approaching the point of origin, turning this ship around to go “forward to the past,” dying every time we cross the border, popping out of existence in one world to pop into existence in the inverse phase of our oscillation in the sine wave cycle (positive, negative?). The world we have made black and white, but it's not that way. or is it? And so time and events seem linear in the limited three dimensional phase, when it's a spiral. We're coiled, breathing, spinning, vibrating because of intense velocity. Where am i now? What about now? Space: where? Time: Now? “Back then.” “Next.”
And, I noted to Jon, I should be careful when talking about science, since I haven't studied it, although, as a culture, certain things that were mysteries in worlds past are less mysterious, entering the realm of common knowledge, things like Einstein's theory of relativity, light being both a wave and a particle, the microscopic world, the existence of invisible germs and bacteria. Yet this knowledge has not gotten rid of the mysteries. It has, though, in my opinion, introduced a dangerous level of ignorance and a new kind of self importance. Faith in scientific theory is just as blind as faith in religious thought, a faith in something not known first-hand unless the scientist or the prophet. So i tend to trust only that which i encounter first-hand. I trust my experience of the numinous.
Take me for a walk, O Jehovah, O Ethereal Becomeness, the Great Unconscious, the driving force that, through processes set in motion at a place and time before any of this was, is, perhaps, the only constant, the constant creator of our known world, because of which, we are also God and create and form the formless based on the form that had already come to be itself by the time we were born into it, that has come to be before we had physical form. Before that, was I also pure consciousness seeking form? I am, perhaps, pure consciousness seeking, again, its formlessness. Immateriality. Spirit and matter. Mind, matter.
Take me for a walk, please, Jehovah. Again. Get me outside of assumed form. Lead me to the form of spirit. You, in those sparkling silvery lighthouse stars, “Here I am! Send me, send me.” I am lost. Please find me. I've sent out the S.O.S. And you are finding me. When will these pen-pal letters end? When will i meet you in person? And will I find it was me all along?
concerns. . . .i may lose this. Oh,well. The universe has been making me accustomed to loss. These things do not define me. My security is shifting to the formless, the divine, knowing that the more i give, the more i receive. This is a law of the universe. And “oh, well” in this silly world has become a statement, like “so.” In the “back of my mind” rests vague things that once were perceived by my senses, memories. Dark/River/Adam, an ever-changing being. Why is he in my life? Why am I in his? These are questions I seem to be asking more often lately with everyone I meet, everyone that disappears. Why did they disappear? There's a moving force, writing the story. After we get back from Sauvie's Island, River quotes an idea or two out of many I had put out there that seemed brilliant at the time: calling our house Sex Sixth Avenue because I merged things overheard, Sax Fifth Avenue. And I forget if this is my idea or someone else's. After it's here, does it matter how it arrived? And my name, Jory Lynntern. I merge things. And the night before: I ended up wandering with Jon, meeting him for the first time, though strangely, these people are seeming familiar. We all seem to have similar thoughts on the nature of reality. River/Adam asks me to recall some of the other creative ideas I had. I shrug, at a loss. “Into the ether?” he says. That thought scares me, but yes, and it resonates. I think that's why things scare me, because they resonate, and it's a shock that it resonates, because it seems it shouldn't. Everything seems to be dissolving as soon as it's discovered, becoming something new.
And i awaken with fading dream memories (is not dream-stuff the same as memory, and is there not more, or just as much, lived when asleep than when awake?) I just need to hold still, to relax. This is what ben, my guardian angel, has been saying to me. And i think this morning, reflecting as dream faded and coming into this ordinary reality, an illusion of constants, that perhaps i am a bodhisattva. Because i remember laughing hysterically at a jest, something done to entertain me. And i remember brandon suggesting i'm a buddha, that i do no wrong, that i have immense compassion and wisdom, that this is all i do, while the universe takes care of all my needs, and people feed, clothe, and entertain me. My sister and i came up with stuff we knew was unlike anything done before, and we would have had instant success had we cast ourselves into the world. Now it's all into the ether. Even my sister. I don't know what's going on in her world, over 2,000 miles away, and most days, i have no thoughts of it, because i am in a new world. That old every day familiar world has died, and where is it, that i thought would last forever? And i worry about my mom. Is she okay, in the dullness of my fading memory of her? Quantum nonlocality. I was cut out of a woman because i was upside down in the water tank. How did i get here? Caesarean section. There is nothing new under the sun.
0ther ethereal images, concepts:
recently i awoke in the night, a foggy fear sweeping over me, and for some reason i uncharacteristically stood up, from adam (dark river)'s couch in his room, and i swooned, falling to the floor, as if i had no muscles with which to move myself. I got up, walked into the bathroom, and dropped to the floor suddenly again, hitting my head on the edge of the sink. I felt as if it was my time to die, that the universe had overrided all my faculties and functions, that this was the culmination of my self-destructive thoughts and self-deprivation, and i didn't care. I was little disturbed at my apathy. I somehow expected the end to be like this. And maybe this was a premonition, a foreshadowing, or maybe i did die that night.
Pre-diction: an event or idea created through language; a memory of the future.
Memory: conscious ethereal image(s), scent(s), sound(s), idea(s), sensation(s), of an event that is layered over the present stream of events.
Diction: substance by which memory, prediction, or interpretation of the present is made; imposed meaning, order; tool for symbiosis with or manipulation of energy; evolutionary link between substance and ether. A mirror, through which the spirit sees its ethereal reflection, knowing itself as conscious energy, a creator, in spite of its physical form. A reminder of origins, through which a sense of permanency, immortality is achieved, language is itself a substance for recording the collected stories, insights, observations, of the (human) race.
at the beach, river says, oh, look at the little dog. And i think of his name-change to adam, and how the first man named the animals, and how the dog exists as dog only to us naming it. To the dog, it is not a dog. Humans, this subjugating race, dominating the world with its imposed limits. Language creates barriers. Then, last night, we watch The Rules of Attraction, where a couple of characters separated, in different situations, say, “You will never know me. You can never know anyone.” language is tricky, though, because it supposes things are knowable. It creates and sustains illusion. And illusions are built upon illusions. These illusions, of course, become reality for us, because of the nature of becomingness.
What else? (speak only truth. What resonates.)
walking back from walking jon half-way across the hawthorne bridge near four in the morning, after directing two guys to the prostitutes on burnside after they asked me, i stop at an intersection of streets for a truck. The guy behind the wheel decides to floor it, and i am a few feet from stepping into the intersection. If anyone had happened to step out into the road at that moment, they would be instantly killed by a vessel projecting through space at an unreal velocity. Is this natural? What are we doing? Playing with mortality at every moment. It's so easy to die. I think of a book of stories, or a television show making these realities evident, translating adult world ordinariness (apathetic rigidity) into child newness (wise, compassionate, aware).
A story where everyone communicates with symbols, without words: with hearts, for example.
A story where the world is without brands and money. Where there is only one kind of automobile, and the infinite choices are contained in colors, technological features, things that matter. And it is not a status symbol, but a beautiful work of genius.
A story where McDonald's arch ways are portals between worlds, and Western imperialism is an interdimensional idea to create oneness through domination, where it is neither “good” nor “bad,” but simply, necessary, for everything's purpose is: BEONE.
What am i? What is my universal purpose? Am i a buddha? I do not know where i came from. It is naive of anyone to assume they know. We've created the whys and hows of things. Through them all, what exists? I make connections between information, passing through, making an imprint on everything i touch. I follow the bread crumbs, i tell jon, and they seem to become more numerous when i follow them, and it's come to the point where i start seeing the hand throwing them. He says he knows what i mean, and has never talked to anyone who could put it so clearly before. My work here, if i never see him again, has been accomplished.
Everything speaks and shows itself through colors (light) and sound (also light), on this spinning ball floating in nothing. Maybe all the particles that form the earth are bound together by the same force binding us to it. Maybe it's all bound together by this glue called god.
The world is only as complicated as the human race has made it. I want to bring it back to simple. But it is simple and the world is realizing it without me. “Real-izing,” I tell Jon. “What are we doing?” I just observe. All the positive philosophizing discussions through which i've spread truth, all the people i've positively impacted by my presence, all the ideas and thoughts i've put into the world: it absorbs them and is changed by them. Is my purpose anything but this? It moves through me. Every choice, every failure is a success. There is no immorality and no obligation.
There is a circle known by some as earth. Perhaps it's known (or not known) by others as a warp of space-time, funneling. By others still, a work of art, by others still, as nothing.
___69696969696969696969696969696969696969696969(666)—999
a game (of consequences?)
between sleep and awake, is the body oscillating between itself and the ethereal realm of collective unconscious, a world just as, or more real, than the surface (at any given moment, i exist in other dimensions, where memories are still tangible events). We are approaching the point of origin, turning this ship around to go “forward to the past,” dying every time we cross the border, popping out of existence in one world to pop into existence in the inverse phase of our oscillation in the sine wave cycle (positive, negative?). The world we have made black and white, but it's not that way. or is it? And so time and events seem linear in the limited three dimensional phase, when it's a spiral. We're coiled, breathing, spinning, vibrating because of intense velocity. Where am i now? What about now? Space: where? Time: Now? “Back then.” “Next.”
And, I noted to Jon, I should be careful when talking about science, since I haven't studied it, although, as a culture, certain things that were mysteries in worlds past are less mysterious, entering the realm of common knowledge, things like Einstein's theory of relativity, light being both a wave and a particle, the microscopic world, the existence of invisible germs and bacteria. Yet this knowledge has not gotten rid of the mysteries. It has, though, in my opinion, introduced a dangerous level of ignorance and a new kind of self importance. Faith in scientific theory is just as blind as faith in religious thought, a faith in something not known first-hand unless the scientist or the prophet. So i tend to trust only that which i encounter first-hand. I trust my experience of the numinous.
Take me for a walk, O Jehovah, O Ethereal Becomeness, the Great Unconscious, the driving force that, through processes set in motion at a place and time before any of this was, is, perhaps, the only constant, the constant creator of our known world, because of which, we are also God and create and form the formless based on the form that had already come to be itself by the time we were born into it, that has come to be before we had physical form. Before that, was I also pure consciousness seeking form? I am, perhaps, pure consciousness seeking, again, its formlessness. Immateriality. Spirit and matter. Mind, matter.
Take me for a walk, please, Jehovah. Again. Get me outside of assumed form. Lead me to the form of spirit. You, in those sparkling silvery lighthouse stars, “Here I am! Send me, send me.” I am lost. Please find me. I've sent out the S.O.S. And you are finding me. When will these pen-pal letters end? When will i meet you in person? And will I find it was me all along?
Friday, July 17, 2009
from Center, Universe, That's It
Rushing water shouldn't sound that way, like ten industrial strength fans pushing out all the air. You know, it only takes about ten seconds for the world--as you know it--to come to an end, and a completely different one to begin. I had the shower blasting away my dead skin cells when it happened. The dawning of a new era--or a new eros, and a first era as far as I was concerned--as I found myself washing the bar of soap. Don't ask me why, I just was. Suddenly, why didn't exist. The way it was was the way it was. Soap needed to be cleaned, and it had to be done in that moment, and, of a sudden, I found myself in compliance with that simple truth.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Forming Genesis
Arc
I arc upwards, myself an ark carrying an entire cosmos on-board, surprisingly light and marshmallow, marshy and malleable, refusing to be puffed, and self-contained--observing its own exponential expansion, buoyant and boyish, contradicting mind-bottlement. The mind is a breathing organism, practicing lamaze for its dream birth, coordinates telescoping into center, contractions through rarefactions. The galvanized sheet metal tree, gleaming in the Midwestern Sun, creaks although still on Art Hill, a summer night breeze slightly crescendoing, blowing in from childhood miles forgotten and not retraced. It is teaching itself how to walk, synthesizing steel into woody chloroplastered ecstasy, an alchemy of dream and matter.
Television and Fire Pits
Drums of mercury singe in their singing, sing in their singeing, sponging up particles of my reflection, a stagnant puddle of muddled candy wrappers caked with dirt and sopping with moonshine. The conglomeration swallowing torrents of dry heaves into its collected guts, a reclaiming of media into medium, cotton-mouth and head, existing alone in a washed-out sunny ionic field, popping into French varicose veins of ore and orange poppies, and vanishing into unexploded paintings of some Andromeda sun in miniature, cobalt blue, a dwarf star, humming silent presence, eating fresh green corn, drinking its saliva from an ancient rock anomaly knowing peace like an uncracked geode, a forgotten wormhole, where yin and yang swirl to heartbeat through purple pudding, modifying genes outside of the tube of modified organisms which happen to be genies internally combusting while sitting on a landfill of Velveeta. While naming x-rays something more like xenon, invoking Adam as muse, enjoying toxicity, eating the waxy paintbrush with waxen lips, living gluten- and tax-free on the ruins of an American mint, one hundred per century.
Trumpets
Trumpets then trumpeting into ruddy bell flowers, periwinkles and pinot forming their pair somewhere before 1999, Adam's infant voice buckles two tectonic plates into Prehistory. He gargles and chokes on the salty sea water, sending tsunami shock waves into the dawn.
Fungi
Liberal fungi who resent the implications of infestation, explore euphoric utopias with fungicidal friends, breathing into cores of seedless palindromic grape candy, writing the definitive work, The Art of Artificiality, a shoddy constructed artifice in treatise form on acid-free paper, post-consumer waste, contained within a plethora of python-tangled constructs, deconstructed, counteracting aceteminophine, dissecting dioxyribonucleic acid dreams of the same circular windows lodging in weathered coastal lodges, in cathedrals of swaying sea cucumbers and cucumber melon doves, in a merangue menagerie of Muszorgsky's posthumously performed mazurkas, sidereeling in one wing of public television, crumbling down graham-cracker crumble crust.
Organic Matter
Through spitting oceanic ash, prehistoric
La Brea Califormica granite taken for granted.
And this is where you tell me about your four-thousand-foot, four-inch mountain
atop the coast, while we wind it, me falling asleep, in the back of your black Volkswagen Cabrio,
left ear popping sitting stationary ascending, my suspended body taking shotgun.
"Smelt sands are situated in nonfiction embankments," I read,
reading not unlike a pseudoscientific romance, as
spittal ebbs and flows in the Norwegian reader's mouth bay, in the corner
of corniness, Cheese Wiz frothed into fondue.
And "off-the-handle" handles like a breezy rider writing
into existence writhing phonemes, a phenomenon of phantom glints,
of phantasmagorical forethought morphing into furry fairy tails, like zygotes formulating zygotes,
fashioning form on a run-way, running its way to the brink of the telescope, through which plays re-runs of America's Next Top Model.
I arc upwards, myself an ark carrying an entire cosmos on-board, surprisingly light and marshmallow, marshy and malleable, refusing to be puffed, and self-contained--observing its own exponential expansion, buoyant and boyish, contradicting mind-bottlement. The mind is a breathing organism, practicing lamaze for its dream birth, coordinates telescoping into center, contractions through rarefactions. The galvanized sheet metal tree, gleaming in the Midwestern Sun, creaks although still on Art Hill, a summer night breeze slightly crescendoing, blowing in from childhood miles forgotten and not retraced. It is teaching itself how to walk, synthesizing steel into woody chloroplastered ecstasy, an alchemy of dream and matter.
Television and Fire Pits
Drums of mercury singe in their singing, sing in their singeing, sponging up particles of my reflection, a stagnant puddle of muddled candy wrappers caked with dirt and sopping with moonshine. The conglomeration swallowing torrents of dry heaves into its collected guts, a reclaiming of media into medium, cotton-mouth and head, existing alone in a washed-out sunny ionic field, popping into French varicose veins of ore and orange poppies, and vanishing into unexploded paintings of some Andromeda sun in miniature, cobalt blue, a dwarf star, humming silent presence, eating fresh green corn, drinking its saliva from an ancient rock anomaly knowing peace like an uncracked geode, a forgotten wormhole, where yin and yang swirl to heartbeat through purple pudding, modifying genes outside of the tube of modified organisms which happen to be genies internally combusting while sitting on a landfill of Velveeta. While naming x-rays something more like xenon, invoking Adam as muse, enjoying toxicity, eating the waxy paintbrush with waxen lips, living gluten- and tax-free on the ruins of an American mint, one hundred per century.
Trumpets
Trumpets then trumpeting into ruddy bell flowers, periwinkles and pinot forming their pair somewhere before 1999, Adam's infant voice buckles two tectonic plates into Prehistory. He gargles and chokes on the salty sea water, sending tsunami shock waves into the dawn.
Fungi
Liberal fungi who resent the implications of infestation, explore euphoric utopias with fungicidal friends, breathing into cores of seedless palindromic grape candy, writing the definitive work, The Art of Artificiality, a shoddy constructed artifice in treatise form on acid-free paper, post-consumer waste, contained within a plethora of python-tangled constructs, deconstructed, counteracting aceteminophine, dissecting dioxyribonucleic acid dreams of the same circular windows lodging in weathered coastal lodges, in cathedrals of swaying sea cucumbers and cucumber melon doves, in a merangue menagerie of Muszorgsky's posthumously performed mazurkas, sidereeling in one wing of public television, crumbling down graham-cracker crumble crust.
Organic Matter
Through spitting oceanic ash, prehistoric
La Brea Califormica granite taken for granted.
And this is where you tell me about your four-thousand-foot, four-inch mountain
atop the coast, while we wind it, me falling asleep, in the back of your black Volkswagen Cabrio,
left ear popping sitting stationary ascending, my suspended body taking shotgun.
"Smelt sands are situated in nonfiction embankments," I read,
reading not unlike a pseudoscientific romance, as
spittal ebbs and flows in the Norwegian reader's mouth bay, in the corner
of corniness, Cheese Wiz frothed into fondue.
And "off-the-handle" handles like a breezy rider writing
into existence writhing phonemes, a phenomenon of phantom glints,
of phantasmagorical forethought morphing into furry fairy tails, like zygotes formulating zygotes,
fashioning form on a run-way, running its way to the brink of the telescope, through which plays re-runs of America's Next Top Model.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Corn Nuts
A man passes with greasy, curly black hair, and smiling, slaps the parked car as he passes to hold himself up; with the other, he holds a cell phone into which he says, "corn nuts" and passes on through the night.
I'm in a bar, mirrors everywhere. I see myself in smoky yellow lights, smiling, not slapping a car or talking about corn nuts. Not slapping anything. Not liking any store-bought food, or anything, for that matter, enough to talk about it. And then I forget where I am. There's a beer handed to me.
I'm on the front porch, standing just feet from my bedroom. The lights are on. It's cold. I'm with my boyfriend. He tells me he'll be here waiting with open arms when I get back from my trip that seeks clarity. The air is cold. I want to be in bed. Even though I know bed will not fix much at all. I just don't want to be here. Or anywhere. So I stay for awhile.
I'm in a bar, mirrors everywhere. I see myself in smoky yellow lights, smiling, not slapping a car or talking about corn nuts. Not slapping anything. Not liking any store-bought food, or anything, for that matter, enough to talk about it. And then I forget where I am. There's a beer handed to me.
I'm on the front porch, standing just feet from my bedroom. The lights are on. It's cold. I'm with my boyfriend. He tells me he'll be here waiting with open arms when I get back from my trip that seeks clarity. The air is cold. I want to be in bed. Even though I know bed will not fix much at all. I just don't want to be here. Or anywhere. So I stay for awhile.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
poems painted sea foam
i.
sea foam green
a crayola color i used
to use, not for sea,
but for tracing
my mind back
to that year, being in kindergarten,
on the West Coast
ii.
sea foam green
Maybe Ireland or some mythic shoreline
is where the foam resembles the crayon,
but not in Yachats, Oregon, or anywhere I've seen.
Maybe sea foam yellowish white wouldn't be as memorable,
not as romantic, i think, while the thick foam,
more like a grotesque rabid foam, washes up the dead
limp brown weeds, in ancient rhythm,
seen as through a Viewmaster, eight hundred feet below
Cape Perpetua, a place that myths have flooded
and will flood until even its sea foam
has a color named after it.
iii.
Sea Foam Green
A wax stick that colors the sky,
giving it an ominous hue. Like that paper
day in seventh grade, tornado warnings dopplering,
in the concrete block basement,
the school huddling in the cafeteria, under
unearthly fluorescent lights with roaches stuck in them,
amazed at the anticipation in the sudden electric,
wildlife hiding and waiting for mass destruction,
kids looking through slits for windows,
into the inside-out of ordinary,
into unpasteurized atmosphere, and
sea foam green is suddenly lifted from
rocky, fluorescent and mossy imagination,
sea foam green, still embedded in those ethereal
seventh grade walls.
sea foam green
a crayola color i used
to use, not for sea,
but for tracing
my mind back
to that year, being in kindergarten,
on the West Coast
ii.
sea foam green
Maybe Ireland or some mythic shoreline
is where the foam resembles the crayon,
but not in Yachats, Oregon, or anywhere I've seen.
Maybe sea foam yellowish white wouldn't be as memorable,
not as romantic, i think, while the thick foam,
more like a grotesque rabid foam, washes up the dead
limp brown weeds, in ancient rhythm,
seen as through a Viewmaster, eight hundred feet below
Cape Perpetua, a place that myths have flooded
and will flood until even its sea foam
has a color named after it.
iii.
Sea Foam Green
A wax stick that colors the sky,
giving it an ominous hue. Like that paper
day in seventh grade, tornado warnings dopplering,
in the concrete block basement,
the school huddling in the cafeteria, under
unearthly fluorescent lights with roaches stuck in them,
amazed at the anticipation in the sudden electric,
wildlife hiding and waiting for mass destruction,
kids looking through slits for windows,
into the inside-out of ordinary,
into unpasteurized atmosphere, and
sea foam green is suddenly lifted from
rocky, fluorescent and mossy imagination,
sea foam green, still embedded in those ethereal
seventh grade walls.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Then There Was Pink
Come, come, whoever you are.
Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn't matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow
a thousand times
Come, yet again, come, come.
--Rumi
Pink and Rumi should have been childhood friends. Pink had come from Richmond, Virginia and had grown up, like Rumi, in a religion that not only taught her mantras like "be no part of the world," but threatened her with severe penalties should she ever become part of the world. She didn't want to be like other girls who betrayed their families and friends, and worst of all, God and lived meaningless lives. Pink was determined to be different. If this wasn't enough, Pink was a military base child, only staying in one school long enough to meet a couple new interesting people her age before moving on to the next one.
Rumi had grown up primarily in St. Louis, but, like Pink, had already lived in several different places by the time he was five, although Rumi was not a military-base kid. Rumi would never have lived on a military base, for he was politically neutral, and though curious about the outside world, he grew up thinking of himself as priveleged to be uninfected by what the rest of the world was doing.
Until he was five, Rumi was an only child, and spent his lazy days looking for fossils in his grandparents' country gravel driveway in Missouri, looking for crawdads in the canal off the dirt road at his other grandparents' house in California, or, for another instance, on the school bus pretending to write in his notebook in cursive, clutching it close to himself to keep others from seeing his wise and mysterious writings. At these times, Rumi imagined himself to be an archaeologist, an explorer, a writer. But although these were his pasttime careers, Rumi mainly considered himself, if he considered himself anything, a philosopher.
He wouldn't see just the gum stuck to the back of the seat in front of him on the schoolbus, or hear just the rumbles and awkward squeaks of the bus and the background chatter of those "worldly" highschoolers who kept to themselves in the back of the bus. In that gum, Rumi would see the teeth-marked pinkish purple texture that gave the gum its gumness, and his eyes might've drifted, if he stared long enough, as sometimes he would, to etch marks that had scraped down past the surface green faux leather seatback to reveal just plain white. And these etch marks, though apparently random, would seem to make clowns and fishermen and all sorts of funny characters, and then, a question would pop in his head, a question of circumstance, just a simple question, that would turn into however many questions needed to be answered before he knew a perfect answer.
What is green? A color. The seatback. The maples. The telephone poles outside the window, while the bus passed, with drooping black cords, conduit to voices, connecting them, twisted with rain, like grass blades. These tree poles, his own arm he imagined throwing down, one at a time, or hopping over, as they passed. The speed mesmerized him, that he could be sitting down, viewing his arm in his own mind stretching through the window like Stretch Armstrong (although he hadn't been invented yet), yet moving fast enough to blur the fields, the frayed wire fences, the old wooden barns and houses with monstrous satellites in the yards, the telephone poles in the foreground. One. At. A. Time.
What is green (how to connect green with blurring. . .)? Rumi explored green. Greens. Greenery. The seatback was green. A dark jungle green? Or was it pine green? He flipped through his imaginary rolodex of Crayola colors. Definitely, there were many variations on green. What made it confusing was that green was something Rumi knew was only called green by adults, adults in America. Green was something seen. Green seen. Clean green. Something seen. Green, green. Mister clean. Clean. (telephone pole, please. thank you.) Green.
*****
Pink lived next door. But Rumi didn't know it. It was only for 3, almost 4 months.
"Where are you going, young lady?" Pink's mom, a young lady herself, asked, without realizing the irony.
"Outside."
"Oh, no you don't. Not with that dress I just bought you. And what's that in your hand? Is that. Come back here."
Pink said, "It's mine." And she spoke the truth. In her hand was a locket. It had come from her Ukrainian grandmother, her father's mother. Mamama told Pink if she could take good care of it, if she could promise this, then she could have it as her own to pass on to her own daughter some day. Perhaps Pink's mom disputed Pink's ability to care for anything. Perhaps Pink's mom didn't have a high regard for five-year-olds, and, in any case, she certainly didn't think they deserved to be the keepers of lockets.
"She's only five," Pink's dad used to say, playfully in her defense when she fucked up. She used to hear this, too. Fucked up.
"You're such a fuck-up!" he said under his breath. Only Pink heard. Pink's mom was in the kitchen with her headphones on, doing dishes. Pink didn't think her mom was a fuck-up. She thought everyone had potential, even her dad.
*****
Up-chuck. This was a word Rumi learned while sick once, as in, "Come on. You're gonna up-chuck and then you're gonna feel all better."
His mom was standing over him, over the toilet, while he kneeled, poised, ready, to up-chuck. The light was making his head hurt, and his mind spinned with his eyes closed, thinking of up-chuck. Eyes open for just a second, to examine the rim of the toilet bowl, a view Rumi never had before, and didn't quite want to be having, an up-close-and-personal view of the toilet, a string of spit gew he felt inclined to let fall, hanging from his quivering lips, induced by the smell of Lysol and urine, and the reflection of the white vanity lightbulbs above the mirror, as he kneeled upon the dirt-worn toilet rug only meant for feet.
Eyes closed and swaying, afraid he might collapse face down into the toilet spittal water, swaying forward and back, as his mom swayed side to side, saying, "That's it. Come on, you'll feel better." Next to Rumi in his right side peripheral vision, his mom's bare toes of one foot wiggled, the pink polish on four out of five nails, the pinky being alone, isolated, while the others had weathered paint jobs, like the tool shed out back that hadn't been painted in his lifetime.
Rumi wanted to get it out. He wanted to up-chuck. A chill rattled his bones. A speck of something, a gnat? a piece of lint? jossled that malleable pool in rings outward. Why couldn't it just come out? If, after these gruelling minutes without sleep, without up-chucking, he went to bed just like that, this moment would be meaningless.
The water swayed, as one liquid organism, at sea. His mom swayed, her toes wiggled. Rumi's mind pushed his whole body forward.
"Just think of that warm bed. Come on, Rumi. Just let out and get it over with," his mom said, telling him what was in his mind, without knowing, apparently, that it was Rumi's thought and not her own. This irritated Rumi. Enough that he finally let go, up-chucking right into that water, the bitter taste of stuff he chucked up: Corn Pops, Seven Up, a little homemade chicken soup, water, with just enough sweetness to make it the grossest thing he had ever tasted.
His throat hurt, but his stomach felt better. There was relief. He could stand up. "See? There." Reassuring, but condescending, and Rumi overlooked it whatever it was, because, being way past his bedtime, all he wanted was to be warm, tucked up into those cold blankets, the frost and blackberry thorns scraping at his window, to dream of past lives and future greatness.
Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn't matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow
a thousand times
Come, yet again, come, come.
--Rumi
Pink and Rumi should have been childhood friends. Pink had come from Richmond, Virginia and had grown up, like Rumi, in a religion that not only taught her mantras like "be no part of the world," but threatened her with severe penalties should she ever become part of the world. She didn't want to be like other girls who betrayed their families and friends, and worst of all, God and lived meaningless lives. Pink was determined to be different. If this wasn't enough, Pink was a military base child, only staying in one school long enough to meet a couple new interesting people her age before moving on to the next one.
Rumi had grown up primarily in St. Louis, but, like Pink, had already lived in several different places by the time he was five, although Rumi was not a military-base kid. Rumi would never have lived on a military base, for he was politically neutral, and though curious about the outside world, he grew up thinking of himself as priveleged to be uninfected by what the rest of the world was doing.
Until he was five, Rumi was an only child, and spent his lazy days looking for fossils in his grandparents' country gravel driveway in Missouri, looking for crawdads in the canal off the dirt road at his other grandparents' house in California, or, for another instance, on the school bus pretending to write in his notebook in cursive, clutching it close to himself to keep others from seeing his wise and mysterious writings. At these times, Rumi imagined himself to be an archaeologist, an explorer, a writer. But although these were his pasttime careers, Rumi mainly considered himself, if he considered himself anything, a philosopher.
He wouldn't see just the gum stuck to the back of the seat in front of him on the schoolbus, or hear just the rumbles and awkward squeaks of the bus and the background chatter of those "worldly" highschoolers who kept to themselves in the back of the bus. In that gum, Rumi would see the teeth-marked pinkish purple texture that gave the gum its gumness, and his eyes might've drifted, if he stared long enough, as sometimes he would, to etch marks that had scraped down past the surface green faux leather seatback to reveal just plain white. And these etch marks, though apparently random, would seem to make clowns and fishermen and all sorts of funny characters, and then, a question would pop in his head, a question of circumstance, just a simple question, that would turn into however many questions needed to be answered before he knew a perfect answer.
What is green? A color. The seatback. The maples. The telephone poles outside the window, while the bus passed, with drooping black cords, conduit to voices, connecting them, twisted with rain, like grass blades. These tree poles, his own arm he imagined throwing down, one at a time, or hopping over, as they passed. The speed mesmerized him, that he could be sitting down, viewing his arm in his own mind stretching through the window like Stretch Armstrong (although he hadn't been invented yet), yet moving fast enough to blur the fields, the frayed wire fences, the old wooden barns and houses with monstrous satellites in the yards, the telephone poles in the foreground. One. At. A. Time.
What is green (how to connect green with blurring. . .)? Rumi explored green. Greens. Greenery. The seatback was green. A dark jungle green? Or was it pine green? He flipped through his imaginary rolodex of Crayola colors. Definitely, there were many variations on green. What made it confusing was that green was something Rumi knew was only called green by adults, adults in America. Green was something seen. Green seen. Clean green. Something seen. Green, green. Mister clean. Clean. (telephone pole, please. thank you.) Green.
*****
Pink lived next door. But Rumi didn't know it. It was only for 3, almost 4 months.
"Where are you going, young lady?" Pink's mom, a young lady herself, asked, without realizing the irony.
"Outside."
"Oh, no you don't. Not with that dress I just bought you. And what's that in your hand? Is that. Come back here."
Pink said, "It's mine." And she spoke the truth. In her hand was a locket. It had come from her Ukrainian grandmother, her father's mother. Mamama told Pink if she could take good care of it, if she could promise this, then she could have it as her own to pass on to her own daughter some day. Perhaps Pink's mom disputed Pink's ability to care for anything. Perhaps Pink's mom didn't have a high regard for five-year-olds, and, in any case, she certainly didn't think they deserved to be the keepers of lockets.
"She's only five," Pink's dad used to say, playfully in her defense when she fucked up. She used to hear this, too. Fucked up.
"You're such a fuck-up!" he said under his breath. Only Pink heard. Pink's mom was in the kitchen with her headphones on, doing dishes. Pink didn't think her mom was a fuck-up. She thought everyone had potential, even her dad.
*****
Up-chuck. This was a word Rumi learned while sick once, as in, "Come on. You're gonna up-chuck and then you're gonna feel all better."
His mom was standing over him, over the toilet, while he kneeled, poised, ready, to up-chuck. The light was making his head hurt, and his mind spinned with his eyes closed, thinking of up-chuck. Eyes open for just a second, to examine the rim of the toilet bowl, a view Rumi never had before, and didn't quite want to be having, an up-close-and-personal view of the toilet, a string of spit gew he felt inclined to let fall, hanging from his quivering lips, induced by the smell of Lysol and urine, and the reflection of the white vanity lightbulbs above the mirror, as he kneeled upon the dirt-worn toilet rug only meant for feet.
Eyes closed and swaying, afraid he might collapse face down into the toilet spittal water, swaying forward and back, as his mom swayed side to side, saying, "That's it. Come on, you'll feel better." Next to Rumi in his right side peripheral vision, his mom's bare toes of one foot wiggled, the pink polish on four out of five nails, the pinky being alone, isolated, while the others had weathered paint jobs, like the tool shed out back that hadn't been painted in his lifetime.
Rumi wanted to get it out. He wanted to up-chuck. A chill rattled his bones. A speck of something, a gnat? a piece of lint? jossled that malleable pool in rings outward. Why couldn't it just come out? If, after these gruelling minutes without sleep, without up-chucking, he went to bed just like that, this moment would be meaningless.
The water swayed, as one liquid organism, at sea. His mom swayed, her toes wiggled. Rumi's mind pushed his whole body forward.
"Just think of that warm bed. Come on, Rumi. Just let out and get it over with," his mom said, telling him what was in his mind, without knowing, apparently, that it was Rumi's thought and not her own. This irritated Rumi. Enough that he finally let go, up-chucking right into that water, the bitter taste of stuff he chucked up: Corn Pops, Seven Up, a little homemade chicken soup, water, with just enough sweetness to make it the grossest thing he had ever tasted.
His throat hurt, but his stomach felt better. There was relief. He could stand up. "See? There." Reassuring, but condescending, and Rumi overlooked it whatever it was, because, being way past his bedtime, all he wanted was to be warm, tucked up into those cold blankets, the frost and blackberry thorns scraping at his window, to dream of past lives and future greatness.
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