Phantomessa Unbound

Nighttime Wonderings

2006-11-30T10:07:00.000-08:00

I am so very, very tired...my eyes first opened at 5:00 this morning, and, one very long day later, it is now after midnight. A great part of my mind cries out for rest, but another part remains energized, calling my hand to the page as candles burn merrily in my gorgeous, silent living room...What is it that would drive my ink hence? What is it that would propel the drowning man to kick his ineffectual legs, or the falling woman to flail her arms in flight? Perhaps, even in the moments of sheerest desperation, there is unconscious hope, irrepressible as the tide, or wind, for salvation within the very act of demise itself. And what, after all, is the Artist’s life if not one prolonged suicide note? We shall all die, but some of us choose to make peace with reality, and leave something of ourselves to be known when we are gone...

Does existence ever wax, or is it condemned to wane for eternity? Is the nature of all things decline, or are there pinnacles and abysses, forced into the repetitive, obsessive beauty of a perfect sine wave? Or does each of us determine our own unique pattern?

Certainty, for all things, lies in their beginning and end, and so to ask such questions somewhere along the murky road of middle is to defy the nature of one’s present location. As such, I shall now cease, and consider other things.

Any suggestions?

For Pleasure

2006-10-03T13:48:00.000-07:00

I lived and died for Pleasure,
Now she lives and dies for me.
My call is her obedience
That through her I only see.

How sweet her taste
How rich her sound
Upon my waiting skin!
Embrace, for she is willing
To teach of love and sin...

(Or so it is they call it,
Who refuse her blessing’s whim.)

She serves me;
How she kneels in haste
To see my wished command!
My lust returned in greedy match
Seduced are we, as one.

And so I walk with Pleasure
For hers is the worthy step
In death and life she follows me
And her footprints, soon, are gone.

Tao of Chuang Tzu

2006-09-27T02:57:00.000-07:00

I dreamed of flight in butterflies
And then they dreamed of me.
The simple song each wing replied
My eyes, awake, yet see.

Each thought they bring is climbing grace
And covers tears with smile
A truth is light in darkest hate
That none may bargain once received.

And still they drift before my eyes
Though dream I not in day;
Mere fragments of perfection
That in chaos find ballet.

And so I smile, as in my dream,
For I know the gift I’ve freed:
I saw no butterflies in sleep;
It was they, awake, saw me.

My Sky is Lilac

2006-07-27T14:32:00.000-07:00

My sky is lilac.
When all the world sees blue
I see its cousin, in love with crimson dreams.
My truth is voiced in whisper, silk, and dew
When to all others
Softness is a scream.

My friend is love
And love is more than God;
A hummingbird that licks its languorous way
From branch to eye.
Worship is sight
And the screen on heaven is a roving sigh
Of painted clouds, who drift
Lest instead they die.

The noise is an infant
Choking on sobs of its own birth
Which it never in choice condoned
But live it shall
And jabber proud and tall
Until it reaches sky
And claims a home.

Their life is ice
That melts away to blue
So freeze I shall,
For I see not as others do.

I Shed a Tear for Beauty

2006-07-10T14:49:00.000-07:00

I shed a tear for Beauty
As a nightmare stained his brow
Supine he lay, in discontent
Known by those whose heart is spent
In defense of all else the world renounced.

A peace betrothed his sleeping tryst
With all the sky forsakes
Unto my heart, which blushed in song
To know each breath’s embrace.

I gazed in silent wonder’s lust
For an autumn’s golden glow
Until he stirred, and snow dust fell
To frost his tossed repose.

I knelt beside his ageless face
Whose raven brow and lash
Creased and fluttered with a sigh
To join the realm of man.

His stare met mine in glittered night
And saw my lowly dew
A dance, and he was standing,
So I rose in shaking whim
His hand of grace
But touched my face
And its tear o’erspilled again.

His somber strength I felt then smile
As all before was freed,
Then Beauty took me in his arms
And made sweet love to me.

A Word to the "Fairer" Sex...

2006-07-08T01:32:00.000-07:00

Dig your own grave in the wet earth of febrile iniquity...borne of the sickness of your gangrenous claws, which clutch him as a flea-ridden rat crawls over a corpse in search of any last morsel of remaining sustenance...For that is all you are...a starving rodent in search of food, and your touch is death. I know not of your sharp face, nor your balding fur...I know only of my yellow-eyed feline instincts, and they tell me to loathe all that you are upon his grey flesh.

Speak, and his ears will shatter...appear, and his eyes will wince...love, and his heart will break...

How dare you love him...and reduce his supple glory to the rigor mortis of lost hope? How dare you make one so beautiful as he doubt the extent of his radiance? Would you but smother him in your own quest to breathe? Would you rend asunder the muscle that beats in his chest only to accuse him of doing so to yours? What is your will...that the mustang’s back be broken to wear a saddle? That the starling’s throat be coated with honey to prevent a song more lovely than yours? VAIN CREATURE, I ABHOR YOU...and though kill him you may try, it is only a matter of time before he does, too.

The Night

2006-07-03T17:40:00.000-07:00

I walk in shadow, with hooded tree and veiled
Starlight, which sings sweet hymns between my step
And all the visions my sea has seen and sailed
Are banished in a will of recompense.
For what should eyes beseech when Sun decries
His love, the guileless Lady of the Night?
From her he turns a selfish, lordly face
And whispers nothings in the ear of Dawn
Who blushes, and the day thus carries on.
A plaintive sigh my throat shall therefore sing
Unto the Night, who is loved, at least, by me.

The Angel of Freedom

2006-06-28T01:52:00.000-07:00

There was once a girl, born into the silken cage of comfort and pleasure, who wished only for the ragged wings of freedom and poverty…Riches of the world meant to her as the vastness of the Sahara might mean to a creature of the deep, who knows neither dryness nor sand, let alone the singularity of the sun…But her world was wrought by forces that came in the lifetime before her screaming entry into it, and, just as those who dwell on the earth forget the soaring pressure of the atmosphere, bearing down upon them for miles, so too did she sink into the somnific void of accustomed living, knowing only in rare glimpses the endless space above, for which her dreams and quiet moments yearned. She knew, in her silent, pleading heart, that somehow, the sky awaited, and that she could indeed have wings to reach it, if only the indomitable fabric of her woven prison would somehow, in the blessing of a senseless and sudden gale, be torn from its invisible hold around her.

It was not until a score of years had found their way into her memory that the winds of fortune were at last blown by zephyrs of Fate towards her withering, pallid grace…Like a dried rose she lived; pristine but utterly lacking even a single drop of vitality’s nectar, and she remained trapped, as some medieval prisoner in a cage above bustling streets. Her torture was grotesque in a way unlike even the darkest ages had ever seen, however; for the bars around her were soft and gilded, and her fate not one of stench and putrification...It was instead, of lingering in a state of sightless, suspended animation, languishing in the polished hideousness of forced adaptation to an environs that poisons the soul…No, she was condemned not to rot and death, but rather to the agony of never learning to live…

And then, one summer’s day, as her eyes stared glassily at the wanton world around her small, small realm of space, she felt a breeze upon her cheek, and at first knew not what it was; for in her cage, the air was always still…unmoving…apathetic. But here; here for a glorious instant there was movement, unmistakable as a funnel of wind over a field of sand, and she felt her eyes lift unwittingly. Imperceptibly, they began to clear, washed by the dew of a single tear, which she’d not known her heart had reserved…

As she began to see in the soft currents passing through her tiny slice of deathlessness, she also began to hear, for on the air there came a song…Like a single drop of blood curling through a crystal glass of water it reached her ears, and her freshly opened eyes closed immediately in instinctive rapture, starving to discern the words…She could not hear all that was said, for much of it was beyond the grasp of her long-limited mind…She knew only that the song sounded like flames of a fire, and that she a ached to rest content before its jovial, flickering passion, and experience the sensation of warmth.

Yes, she ached. And there was a tingling in the limbs of her body through to the hollow pit of her empty stomach. She remembered, in a flash from her early childhood, that this was called ‘feeling’. She looked at her hands, and touched her face, and her flesh no longer felt brittle…but supple; as if a hand upon it would not cause her bones to break, but rather to give, and respond in elastic joy to the advance.

Her momentary marvel at the wonder of her own body ceased abruptly as a new sense assailed her on the wisps of wind growing ever stronger through the trembling bars of her spidery fortress…Sight, song, and touch paused to make way for what now permeated her mind…Slowly, her head fell back and she breathed deeply, into the soles of her tingling feet…On the air that poured into her lungs as a roiling ocean, there came a scent, and it seemed that if she abandoned all other activities save inhalation for the rest of her life, she would still be unable to drink of it enough. Into the back of her throat…the purest rain it was, that smell upon the very taste buds of her soul…Sweet as a downpour in a waiting desert, when every drop is infused with the blossoms of each, sudden flower awaiting the bountiful promise it carries…She breathed until her head felt as if it had left her body, and it was then that water once again coursed through her shriveled veins…

And, just as she thought she must surely have reached the culmination of these successive blessings, her closed, ecstatic eyes detected a change in light. The sun she hadn’t ever realized she was able to perceive was blotted out before her…
Slowly, she allowed her lids to lift, and her sudden vision was filled with a silhouette, descending with unrelenting determination from the sky, as a slowly falling star that knows it will continue to burn, even when it reaches the ground…As the form drew closer in steady, unwavering advance, she saw it was indeed a figure of human qualities, cloaked in hooded robes that fluttered in every shade of darkness, unaffected by the noonday sun but for a corona of stabbing light radiating from behind…him. For she could tell now that he was most unerringly male, though of what particular nature she had no idea, for from his back spread a magnificent pair of wings, as wide as twice his towering height, and their shining plumage was the color of an ocean in moonlight…black as the night sky, painted with the finest glaze of liquid sapphire…

Her eyes widened as he reached the door from behind which she stared. Answering her unspoken question, he began to speak…

“I am the Angel of Freedom,” he said, and his voice was the thunder of an autumn storm, wrapped in velvet.

“I am here because you need me; because you have lived far too long in a cage for which you were not meant, and because you are a creature of exquisite beauty, and do not know it. Come with me, and I will give you the wings you always possessed but could never stretch, and will show you what it is to soar above the world of men. I promise nothing but your freedom, and that you will live as you have never lived before, bound by none but your own desires…I will be here when you need me, as I am now, and I may be gone one day; for that is the truth of our unfathomable lives, and I shall only speak truth, lest your ears be defiled by lies.

"What say you, child? Will you fly with me into the creation of memory? My hand will open the door to both your cage and your life at once, should you will it so.”

The single tear that fell from her eyes, now moist with volumes of hope, spoke a thousand words of assent. Though she could see not his face, for he still shrouded his form beneath the hood, she could feel him smile, and it pierced her chest, and became a single beat of her strengthening heart.
From the cloak extended one of his hands, and she saw that it was indeed the flesh of a man, not ether of the sky, and firm, and comforting. With a single finger he touched the door…and so the girl was freed.

She reached for him, and found his hand to feel as it looked; both firm and gentle, like a warm blanket over carved wood. To her surprise, she was weightless with her hand in his, and felt a jolt of sensation between her shoulder blades, as he explained that her wings were forming…

“It will be strange at times,” he said, “but you will learn, sweet one. You will learn.”

And as the quiet thunder of his warm voice echoed in her joyous ears, he reached, with his free hand, to push the cloak from his head. So it was that a lowly child came to see, as few ever have, the true face of The Angel of Freedom. She gazed in wonder upon it; so regal in feature, with the timelessness of ancient kings, and met at last his eyes, which spoke both light and shadow, and burned at once molten and cool, as fiery amber and the smooth, brown wood from which it crystallizes…

“There is one sense of which you have yet to learn, my Dove,” he whispered, and then, before she could understand, he pulled her with tender ferocity to his lips, and in them she tasted the clouds, and the rain, and the sun.

When they parted, she felt as if she would fall, but knew without question he would not allow it to be so. As her eyes focused hazily on his waiting gaze, she saw a twinkle in his smile, and felt his hand grasp hers in fond anticipation.

“Come, little one,” said he, and her soul was filled with falling rain at each, blissful word, “The sky awaits the rest of your waking years, and I must teach you how to live them.”

Expectation

2006-06-24T20:15:00.000-07:00

I thought to walk along the sea
And feel the sun relent its fire
Beyond the scope of waiting mind
And edge of certainty’s relent
Where so often we live
In bored desire.

The sky was gone that summer’s day
Succumbed to mourning, cotton sheath
Some silver softness hid the Lord
Of earth and merry firmament.
And all to meet my hoping heart
Was gray
And I knew not where the sun would fall.

And so I turned my vision to the shore
Seduced by waves in thundering rhythm
Each curve and spray a child of beauty born
Its cry the scent of mermaid flesh decayed.
So saw I then a love I never knew
Existed in the pulling of a tide.

It flees, and the horizon matters not
So expectation dies
And the child born is Calm.

Concerto of the Present

2006-06-12T15:38:00.000-07:00

Ever shall it be when dawn meets the day, that the folly of all our lives is revisited in our hapless minds...For what are we to seek but reflection, and what are we to love but significance? The truth of all things is renounced by blindness, which is the starving eye of the wicked...

I ask not for certainty or measure of my existence; rather, only the grace to accept what things may come at the rising of each successive sun...The daybreaks of time render the midnight of uncertainty null and void, and in the progression of moments is the sole path to clarity. Therefore, rest content in the present, for it is nothing but rife with beauty, and you need not strain to hear the symphony of your everlasting ‘right now’. Life is a concerto for you...read the notes as they appear, and play until you are content in the glistening twilight of forever.

To Say Goodbye

2006-06-11T11:46:00.000-07:00

In order to fully appreciate those dearest to us, we must, upon each 'goodbye' to them, no matter how temporary, release them into the universe as if never again to experience their company. In so doing, we constantly reflect on the precious nature of their presence, and the next 'hello' will seem an indescribable, ineffable blessing...

Skeleton blinds on the window’s pain
Orange and blue, like the journey’s end
Where sun meets the sea
And turns to a tree
And we sail goodbye to our lifelong friend
Whose end we’ll never see
Though there from the beginning in a cry of assent.

The circle is full in the doom of a year
How calm the Dove who refuses to hear
Adieu, my sweet, without a tear
I’ve known all along the end was near.

The hourglass from ages past
Turns once
And it will be the last.

It is finished. You see there can be nothing more
Of all the love I knew before
Yours was the greatest they had in store
Adieu, my sweet, and the night begun
You taught me to fly, and I soar to the sun
Remember me fondly in your loving pen
Heaven knows when we shall meet again
We fly on winds of no promise or plan
Too late to begin the song in my hand

My breath grows heavy with the weight of a flame
Lit by your eyes
When nothing remained
My soul had gone out, but that you changed
Now afire I am in each moment of life

I want no reprieve from your soul’s demise

So though goodbye I must say to utter hello
‘Tis foolish to think we’ve nowhere to go
A journey begun in the red sands of time
Ever forth, my Love, in instants sublime
I’ve learned, so deeply, to be at your side
So kiss me, darling,
It is not time for goodbye.

The Storm

2006-06-08T23:09:00.000-07:00

Whisper softly on a sighing wind the voices of long ago, whose dying words take an eternity to know...I want not of the sea or the sky, but only the hallowed night, which lives in a quiet place, between heaven and wave...Watch it glow through the clouds, which embrace with soft arms all the aching chambers of my star-filled mind...They sing to me of peace, and I close my eyes in wild rapture, waiting in breathless poise for the fulfillment of their sanctified promise...

But peace unto my heart never comes, and such is the curse of all who live within the will of creation, whose clouds may at first seem calm and beautiful as a Flemish oil painting, but are in fact the deceitful storm of a tropical sea, lurking just beyond the eye’s horizon. It is all for shame, that we pretend to live as something other than what we are...forcing ourselves to endure the crystalline murder of a blue sky, when our inner tempest rages to be heard...The songs it sings are of the foulest brilliance, begat of the sacrifice of a lowly soul...

But slain we must be, for on the altar of our last breath will rise the smoke of immortality, carrying forth the hurricane of our thoughts for all time, as others who come after us know the record of our cyclone lives...And so it is that the immaterial becomes immeasurable, for the worth of a life can only be accounted by what remains of it at death.

We scribble forth in hasty perpetuity, caught in the pressure system of a thousand autonomous creations, all vying for release in jagged bolts of exhausting lightning...The storm is upon us; day and night, rain or shine...

We can do nothing but wait...and endure...
And die.

Wonder in the Dark

2006-06-05T15:57:00.000-07:00

There is truth ever in the flame of a candle, still in the dark as a single amber crystal resting for millennia within a sealed volcanic rock...The consumption of the world must be achieved through the singularities within it...As I stare in asphyxiated wonder at the soft, glowing perfection of my small, burning companion, I revel in all that mystifies my mind upon its existence...I know not what forces conspire to form its shape, nor why it burns in glorious yellow-gold at its haloed center, bringing an autumn sunset into my darkened room...And why should I desire such knowledge in the face of the little miracle standing merrily before me? To understand the ‘science’ behind its unmoving dance would serve only to sever me from fascination, and assert my dominion over its fragile, momentary nature. And what then? I would be lost in the presence of all its beauty; fumbling for chemical explanations and unable to see the essence of a moment, and the magic of simplicity. There is a profound loss of wonder that plagues our modern world, borne of our insatiable quests to explain with utter certainty the nature of all things. But remove yourself from such insidious searching, and you shall find in the everyday routine of your life untold awe and inspiration. Release yourself from the fierce shackles of total understanding, and come to know the quiet joy of a single wisp of light in the dark.

To Love the Sky

2006-06-01T11:24:00.000-07:00

Seek me in the facelessness of stars
Ensnared by all that wonder has to hope
I want the shining, ruby face of Mars
And dwell alone in darkest fears remote.
What gift hast thou to offer silent bride
Of lonely Art, whose bethrothal passes death?
To the trinket Fortune I steel no reply;
Far more is muteness warranted for breath.
Thus listen well, those searching here and nigh:
Your gaze is waste. I am cursed to love the sky.

Cemetery Reflections

2006-05-27T01:03:00.000-07:00

So many things, wrought by the hand of man
Crafted and spun to the best laid of plans
We all whisper bargains in hurried command
Thinking not of our fate
Plodding true with the sand
That falls in time, for on the ‘glass is a hand.

On the white stone he sits, in noble reprieve
Sculpture of onyx on tablet demeaned
Teeth in the grass
By mortality sheathed
Where all is made level, and none hence will stand
Above the earth
Which swallows all dreams.

Did they live? Or simply precede their death?
So many perceive life in rainbowless dread
So many colors, but they see none. Instead,
The dreary duties of expectation’s demand
Which cries like a child
In need of reprimand
But the punishment falls upon foreign land
And they live without knowing
They’re already dead.

Each white stone implores me
As Ravens fly by
Live each moment forsworn free
As if you would die
In the next, before earning your chance for goodbye.
For all is an instant;
The stones ne’er can lie.

Their black wings concur, as I look to the sky:
You are betrothed here from birth
So make the best of your time.

The Bathwater of Life

2006-05-24T23:47:00.000-07:00

What is life if not a slowly-cooling tub of bathwater, filled with steaming, eager essence at our birth, decayed to tepid exhaustion in old age...

What is love but the same transition...from smoldering and new to cold and stagnant at its demise...

All of experience is deterioration, until we become aware of it as such, for when we do, we realize that to live in the moment is to turn the taps anew and infuse heat into anything lukewarm about our existence. So, then, know the tendency of the universe toward thermal equilibrium and fight it with your will to live and lust for successive newness...With each moment of intensity, a faucet of youthful desire for life itself pours open, and you’ll never need sit in anything old or unmoving again...Become the maker of your roiling destiny, and love it with every breath you take.

Consumed by Fate

2006-04-17T17:55:00.000-07:00

In the setting cool of a mist-filled evening, the tunnel of all our lives stretches before us as the entrance into a granite mountain of black uncertainty...it gapes in yawning invitation...a salivating beast whose jaws are locked in a tantalizing portal of no return...We walk towards the sanctum of surrender, prepared to step into the greedy mouth of our own fate...whose tongue drools ink, and whose lips shiver at our fleshy sacrifice...he can taste, but must rest content, and purr in torture, for his locked mandible cannot unhinge itself into the final, savoring bite...Yes...our fate in the belly of the beast must be enjoyed solely by we who are swallowed, for to be masticated and relished by destiny would mean we knew of our own placement within its razored teeth...and to reach the final destination is not knowing where, exactly, one actually began...All is abandonment to the inherent darkness that is life, and to light even the weakest torch is to condemn oneself to the misery of Sisyphus, for the light will always die, even as the obsession to re-kindle it is birthed anew...So, then, cast away the foolish torch and resign yourself to lightlessness, feeling with your hands, and inferring only the most minimal detail from your sightless touch...resisting all temptation to see what lies ahead...You’ll know, very simply, when you get there.

It is a warm and beautiful journey, beyond the jaws of the beast...the hint of your sweet taste that reaches his growling senses is almost more than he can bear, but endure he does, for above all things our ravenous Fate may seem, the inescapable truth is only that it consumes us in Love.

Time and Perception

2006-04-15T11:39:00.000-07:00

In the sadness of Time there lurks an inescapable truth...below the surface of a thousand moments in an oblivion of larval verisimilitude...Swimming in circles of elastic shock, it catches rays of filtered sunlight through the dappled pond water in violent spasms of motion...There is no stopping its squirming growth, which aches unknowingly to reach the mirror above, and wishes to see what lies beyond the eternal glass ceiling of the substance in which it so blithely twirls and spins...Where there is a will there is Truth, and where there is a way there is Light...for all is perception, and the drive to succeed indicative of the conviction of its believer...What is it, then, that exists below the universe of all our convinced consciousness? What lives to breathe the air far beyond its reach? Ask me not the answer to these queries, dear friend, for any attempt to reach below the amorphous limits of perception is to turn a summer lake to ice, and never touch its waters again...In fact, all the world is frozen by our own dictation, and our perception rigid only because we will it so...Reality is what we believe it to be, and my eyes shall never see as yours do, nor will yours behold the world under the filter placed upon mine...Ask yourself always why things are the way they are...why the edges of something are straight or why an object rests unmoving...focus on the limits, and they will be broken...Consider what is not there, and force upon yourself the option of seeing it...Suddenly, all things are pliant beneath the touch of your powerful mind, and the world is a sensual putty, to be shaped into what you wish it to be...The sky is pink and green, the laws of perspective obsolete, and if you want to live in a Salvador Dali painting, grant your own request with the blink of an eye...you may construct anything you wish, for it is just as easy to operate within the invisible as the visible...All of men function within the non-existence of Time, whose plodding fallacy attests to the phenomenal power of constructed belief...The world is a blank canvas for your malleable perception...paint your own clocks upon it, and watch them melt.

Above the Cathedral

2006-04-14T12:14:00.000-07:00

It hits in waves of rippling silk, across the taffy water of my limbered mind...restful in turbulence, anxious by design...I am not of the sky or the sea, but of the promised earth, sanctified by its rooted bounty, without reason or ransom to be within its seeded self...Above its stilled body I hover, touching nothing but the nothingness, which becomes the substance of waking dreams...it is a field of smoke in the twilight, which rises in the condensing perspiration of day and night, whose union is the writhing love of transition...It is gone in a moment, with the glistening of the leaves, which sway in ecstatic rhythm to the moan of the moon...The night is alive with secret pleasure, known only by those who have seen the obsessive focus of surrender...

What gift will come to he whose philosophy is more than heaven and earth could ever dream? With all the life he feels, he sees the truth in the spires of a cathedral, which rise from the corpse of the ground to the sky, and touch the clouds through the limbo between them...Their peaks soar even as their foundation stones sigh into the mud, and they reach the heights of soft empyrean while stubbornly and fixedly adhered to the earth...

Sanity, sanity...all is sanity...but to understand the sane, one must exist ever within it, and so to be “in sane” means to be labeled its opposite...The inverse of cautious is to avoid precaution, and thus flee from the very precursor of what one hopes to escape...Such is the twisted world, which deserves naught but our fond farewell...for there was a time to rest upon her, but Time must end, for it is the construct of our minds, which lack the attention span to sustain it...Why, after all, should we create something we cannot allow to subsist? To do so would be an attempt to create an airless biosphere, incapable of housing life. So, then, release your ferocious grip on the grains of hours and minutes, which will always glide through your pitiful fingers and fall below you, allowing your slow lifting off from the field where they land...freeing your form of weight and facilitating your impending hover above all upon which the cathedral stands...You will reach nothing but endless perception, for to touch nothing is to see all that does not reach your fingers; in other words, the view of everything...You will tire quickly as your feet leave the ground, but your stamina for neither sky nor sea will grow, and soon anything but unbound limbo becomes a taxing sickness on your body, stretching your legs in torture and dislocating your mind on a wooden rack...Forgive the pain, for you need endure it not, and as you realize your time here is finished, prepare to meet the face of nothing and behold the eyes of everything.

Content in the Dark

2006-03-14T02:10:00.000-08:00

The ache of twilight is best matched by the pity of its glowing successor...for the lonely solitude of a full moon against her expansive, unrelenting lover of the Night is truly the singular pain of eternal transition...How lost are we all in such a state...broken and bound by the inequity of position...a sand mite screaming in the vain hope that the mighty ocean hears...How small we feel in the dark, when we know not our portent or plan; our fate or fortune...So we distract ourselves with the grand, baroque masquerade of nothing at all, lavishly entertaining even the most foolish guests at our table...bidden to receive their offensive, chortling company by the fear of silence that is our own directionless uncertainty...

Human existence is fundamentally nomadic...if there be one constant in our wanderings it is that we move without a lantern to guide us through the misty darkness of life as conceived by our limited senses...How dearly and futilely we strive for so many things in this Venetian ball we stage along the way! How we resist our own natural state of utter ignorance in blithe favor of contrived certainty! But the clock will strike midnight and the party will end, leaving us to confront the silent, deathless calm that emerges in the fading glory of all we had so carefully and theatrically constructed...it looms before us, in lightless ominence...the gaping void of our true reality...the unknown we must embrace if we are ever to know contentment in the velvet-curtained wings off-stage of our grandiose life’s performance...We must walk toward the soft breath of that mouth of blackness, leaving behind the twilight of our long-attended masquerade, and rise into the Night alone...As we stand within the background of our fundamental not-knowing, accepting at last the confusion and glass-walled confinement of human consciousness, our life will slowly begin to glow, reflecting light from the sun of all things greater...the sun we never knew was there in the artificially-lit hubbub of our foppish ways...So, then, come to love your own seeming misdirection...your absolute lack of a life plan and faltering search for purpose...and in so doing abandon all you have created to distract yourself from its impending solace...and, perhaps, as the garish day ends in a pang of twilight, you’ll realize, after all, that the honest midnight of uncertainty bears the certain truth of radiant, bountiful contentment.

The Hope of Home

2006-03-13T16:46:00.000-08:00

The escape from solitude is as the appearance of a sharp-edged door of whitest light through the gurgling fog of a mist-filled no-man’s land; eternally gray within the clinging clouds of apathetic resignation…To see a glow in the infinity of swirling nothingness is to know the momentary, eye-shielding blindness of that most unassuming and fragile of all human emotions…Hope.

Like a small child, Hope must be delicately and tenderly cared for…You will meet her with her soft, fair head bowed, hands clasped dearly behind her back, downcast eyes gazing at her feet, which, infant creature as she is, are still fixed in trembling uncertainty before their first, tenuous steps…But she will learn to walk, if you allow her the slow and uninterrupted time she needs to find balance, and soon her steps will be assured and spritely; her gait as jaunty as her twinkling smile, and the roseate shimmer framing the singular door from which she first appeared will grow stronger as she learns to run…until she trails it behind her as a rippling sash of Spring flowers, and the oppressive, gray soup of the liminal memory burns and sizzles with a thousand gasps into nothingness…So it is that the child of Hope grows into a statuesque maiden of ethereal calm, gliding peacefully through the primavera of the heart, tending the flowers that open their faces at her smiling approach…Her skin is as a rose’s petal; her robe the wing of a dove, and her smile the jade and amethyst empyrean of a summer’s twilight…Once she is grown, she never truly leaves…for she is loved by all who know her, and appreciation is the silken chain of every soul…

Yes…to Hope we return, again and again…She is the eye of any hurricane, the warm blanket of a winter’s night, the beacon on shore that guides us safely into port…We rest our heads upon her adoring lap, and sleep as we have never slept before, curling our hands around her graceful fingers, and sighing into the springtime scent of her ivory-carved body…She loves us for all that we are…nothing more or less...and in her serene and gracious presence we find the place of permanence that hitherto eluded our nomadic stumblings in the lightless mist of numbed desire…The glowing door welcomes us with a corona of roses…as blushing pale as the rose of her skin…and we walk gently toward the embrace of light and life that awaits in her pristine arms…With a sigh of tears our eyelids flutter closed as at last she places her smooth hand upon our cheek…and in a realization as bright as the door from which she came, we understand how we have, in critical subtlety, misunderstood her name:

In the instant she knew we sought her alone
But a letter she changed in a world of tone;
To the weary soul approaches
A glimmer of Hope
But her true title hides until its time to be known…

For the given name of Hope, through it all,
Was Home.

The Rainbow of Silence

2006-03-11T01:24:00.000-08:00

Candlelight flickers through the glorious ocean of silence that is the unmoving air around me…The quiet is viscous to a point of actual resonation, and the sound is a soft, single note that runs above as a hairline river of quicksilver, singing a whisper whose pitch is the highest melody heard by the ears, and the lowest recognized by the heart…For indeed, that is what stillness inevitably becomes: the beginning of the rainbow that arcs in polychrome grace between our desires and their realization…Like Iris, I move between the realm of men and the peaks of gods, drifting from the quiet of my mind along the bridge of exploration whose other side is the universe…Clouds of every hue embrace my rapturous senses as the words flow like rain before the sun of surrender, and burst into a thousand prisms of poetry…Yes…in this world of stillness and firelight I see the spectrums of endlessness, prostrate before me in a saturation of overwhelming harmony…The sound grows stronger as the silence caresses my naked body; supine in the light of the flames, which have ceased their wavering and resigned themselves to statuesque tapers…My soundless lover and I embrace as the night deepens and the colors glow brighter…I hear his sweet cry and know I must go to him…he waits for me in a bed of gleaming mercury, and I ache to rest in the ocean of his shoulder…My eyelids grow heavy with athanasia, and I know it is nearly time…How bright is the rainbow of my silver gaze, as I feel his arms around me and sleep my weary hand stays.

Hope of the Heart

2006-03-06T22:32:00.000-08:00

An aching heart I weeping give to thee
Unmatched in agony and wailing tears
Each beat a listless gasp of wasted years
That collect upon its face as festered wreaths
Of cinching doubt, constricting hope’s faint pulse
Until a single threaded artery remains
Tenacious force, in you my head must trust
When all is lost to stagnate in my veins
For so it is: my wounded heart must fall
To rise on hope of thou; my love, my all.

The Belly of the Universe

2006-03-04T21:52:00.000-08:00

All things live of their own rhythm and flawless accord, statuesque in their breathing silence, swaying to a thousand different breezes...and each zephyr touches but a single living thing. With life comes independence, for each must beat with his own heart, and each must exhale with lungs belonging to no one else. One can never know the essence of existence from any point of view but one’s own, and the admittance of this unavoidable restriction must be accompanied by utmost humility. Far from simply recognizing one’s own limitation concerning the viewpoints of other human beings; who are we to claim understanding of the trees or the animals...of the wind or the sea? How foolish we are to profess with absolute certainty that they do not speak or hear...Their life force is their own, and just because it is different than ours hardly means they do not live; that they do not sing their own perfect songs to the sky...Perhaps, it is merely our ears that are deaf to the resonating harmony of the world, even though we are immersed within it, just as a single bacterium is caught in the lining of the intestinal tract...We are inescapably unicellular; claiming to understand this creature called the universe, when in truth the forces of life far exceed the perspective afforded by our dark position within its belly...So, then, merely open your eyes and ears as obsequiously as possible, and in so doing, catch glimpses of the infinitely complex beast in which you reside...Confess that you understand nothing, and maybe...just maybe...the trees at last will begin to sing to you.

The Dagger of Truth

2006-03-04T02:09:00.000-08:00

Aching affection...pure gold with a point of steel
That longs for you night and day;
My heart some fine has been charged to pay.
At the cost my fainting form will ravage a sigh
For yearn though I might I can scarce tell a lie
The dagger of truth doth pierce my mail
Forged in the furnace of a lifetime’s jail
And the pierce of your love steals
Away from my breast, where embedded it lies;
Ecstasy borne of hesitation’s demise
And the will of abandon I find in your eyes
Which reflect my own in amber repeal
A gaze laced with questions
Whose answers burn real
Impale me, Love –
A wound’s blood itself shall heal.

Beauty's Balm

2006-03-02T12:59:00.000-08:00

There is a cool balm in the pinkened eve of day, when clouds glint in the rising moon as salmon in a dappled mountain spring, and the birds form fractalled silhouettes against the embossed silver of yawning night…Yes…a balm indeed…for Beauty is the most potent salve the universe yet has offered…if not one laced with the grinning potion of irony. Even as the most healing medicine of our existence is also the one of greatest abundance, so, too, is it the one least readily applied in soothing appreciation.

What have we become, that we drive in our boxes of plastic and steel down paved roads, too obsessed with shaving nanoseconds off our journey to an unwanted destination, that we miss the ruby-gold ladyfingers of the setting sun outside our window, or its prismatic reflection on the ocean in the distance? How ironic that, even as we tense our muscles in aggravation at the bovine honking of horns, and curse our wretched luck in this thing called traffic, the very state of peace for which we profess to yearn glows just outside, surrounding us in generous abandon. If only we could actually see through the glass of our boxed-in lives…the glass that everyone tells us is transparent but which is, in fact, coated in a thick, tentacled tar of the lavish travesty that is our modern societal construct…Instead of a simple cabin in a pristine forest, we live in excess along a war-torn road, and wonder why we are not content…why it is that we are always searching for the next thing to improve the quality of our lives…be it a new fitness class, or no carbs, or that all-in-one palm pilot/cell phone…Clutch at these things if you must, but know they’ll never ease your withering, tired carcass…For that, you need a much more potent medicine…For that, you might need to crane your neck to the western sky, and watch in silence as the day disappears in a thousand hues behind the sea.

Anticipation

2006-03-01T13:44:00.000-08:00

To anticipate is to love...for to look forward to something is to wish its expeditious occurrence; to desire its fruition and crave its completion. And to intertwine these components of need, want, desire and craving into the single, infintesimal point of anticipating, is to stir with a fatal incantation the mysterious components of that most elusive of human emotions in a boiling cauldron of inevitability. So, then, weigh carefully the degree with which you desire to meet someone, for you do, in all likelihood, want far more than just to see them...woman or man, friend or foe...if you want to see them, you want to love them.

Eyes of the Artist

2006-02-23T00:56:00.000-08:00

Wistful, dying melody
Cricket infants chirping screams
How will I know what the ‘morrow will bring?

The croaking voice I hear
Of all the creatures who whisper in ears
Songs the grasses sing.

Of all my truths I wonder why
The face of my youth is last to die
To my body it clings;
A tar of lies
That I wish no heralding of the timeline
Wrought by society
From whose prison of concrete
I wish only to flee.

Oh, give me the mountains
Or a single tree
Perched high above
On the winds of free;
Or a falcon’s whistled sigh.
How can I belong to a choice not imbibed?

The purple hills call all our names
And we answer perforce
Without sigh or shame
To our own drums we march
In a beat of disdain
From the world’s assumptive cast
Which binds our limbs
In stifling fiberglass
Until only a corpse remains

Heed me now all those who seek
To render us tame
And unheard of
And meek:
We’ll obey neither word
Nor incentive
Nor feat
Of monetary attraction
Or crumbling peak
We want not your hilltops;
Our own will we seek
Where the trees embrace the air
And there is no one around
To bother our pens
Or brushes
Or voices
Or musical sense;
We wish only for quiet
And to remain unaware
Of your electronic riots
And fruitless cares...

Abandon me, please, lest I rip out my hair,
For an Artist am I;
See the tears in my stare.

Writer's Midnight

2006-02-22T13:30:00.000-08:00

There is an untold balm in the deadest witching hour of night, when the sky is grey neither from twilight nor dawn, but rather from the soft, smiling glow of the stars, that reach with silver fingers of infinity through the diffuse, dew-laden clouds above. I am alone but for the trio of flickering candles that light my page and the scribbling of my pen across it. To one who might behold my glorious vignette of midnight solitude, all is quiet and still in this darkest of places. Little might such a daylight bystander understand the timeless company I keep in the thick, swirling sound of viscous silence…

The voices of the universe are tireless companions, and their whispers turn to melodious roars upon complete elimination of all the noisy distractions men have invented to muffle and subdue them…But here…in the dark and the quiet, they are as the restful cacophony of an ocean, drowning my mind in a tidal wave of truth and insistent choruses of revelation…imploring me to listen until my soul is saturated with their harmonies, and my hand aches in submission…I write not of my own volition…My poor pen flies across the page at a velocity that flirts with the edge of my physical capabilities, and my words are without correction or conscious thought…I read later, when the sun burns the sky, with the surprise of a reader, not the perusal of an author.

The air is alive with endless poetry, and the words vie as impatient children to be written down…I do my best to heed them all, pushing myself to the point of stabbing fatigue and physical collapse…yet I am but a human vessel, after all, and my willing spirit must, ultimately, defer to my weaker flesh…

The candles burn low, and the clock tells me it will soon be morn…several hours of eternal time have passed since I opened this book and began the evening’s series of transcriptions, and now my eyes are grainy and the shadows on the ceiling move in ways part of me knows is impossible…

Silence, all of you…you’ll have your chance to speak again tomorrow…but until then, I must bid your proffered tones an affectionate, if reluctant

Farewell.

The Ocean Below I Love You

2006-02-20T13:55:00.000-08:00

What is it that consumes the mind to the insatiable delirium of starburst suffocation? What tryst of all the senses compels me to write in gasping abandon, as if each word is a powerless kick of my legs below the surface of an ocean whose breaking waves I can never reach? Each successive scribble is a scream of my gagged mouth, wailing in muted agony to the diffusion of the sky, casting my thoughts upon the merciful wind, that they might be scattered far and wide from the ears of the one who inspires them...For, it is indeed true that the rhythm of the spoken word beats in inescapable tandem with the unvoiced thought…no matter how disparate we try to keep them. Such effort is always futile, and I am certain that even despite my most valiant attempts, the polite veneer of my silvered tongue does little to conceal the lurking screams of my heart and mind. Best, then, to bind my lips with the silken handkerchief of the written word, whose free reign will send the tyrant emotions of my body to their knees, and allow me to speak in the poise and logic that will keep your face before mine…all the while feeding the indulgent depravity that sustains the screams in the cavernous lagoon of my soul, where they have come to echo in repetitive eternity...

My muffled cries grow stronger with each draining act of resistance…for the wail of my craving will neither soften nor subside…Yet, even as my desire for you increases, so too does my will to ensure its reciprocation. How well you have taught me…how precise is my knowledge of your leading steps in this flawless dance of affection, that I know exactly how to compliment your dark, balletic grace with my own timid feet…Yes…we will dance, and I shall scream…but a sound from my throat that rings with the resonance of my heart you’ll never hear, for I release my screams into the ocean of my undying emotion, and to the calm surface of the roiling waters will rise and escape gently, as a soap bubble on a summer’s day, the quiet and unassuming whisper of a single, shimmering “I love you”.

Love's Martyrdom

2006-02-19T13:46:00.000-08:00

What speaketh she who utters but his name
Yet knows not of his life instilled?
Of all the flesh her inky touch doth stain
His is the skin marred ‘gainst Beauty’s will.
How do I love him? Ho do I bid him see
The truth his light bestows upon the flames
Of all my cool fire, which glows so suddenly
In brightest hues of dragon purity
And licks my flesh to smoldering remains?
In ashen love I lie beneath the stake;
A martyr I am, and you my dying faith.

The Peace of Twilight

2006-02-16T11:20:00.000-08:00

To realize the truth we must be blind
First, so that our greedy eyes dare not deceive
The written letter stamped upon the mind
In softly seared, if mutinous, relief
Of all the days spent vanquished by unkind
Who call themselves companionship’s coarse name
Celtic knot the skeleton unties
His hands an infant’s touch caress to shame
He scratches only those
Who fear the lovers’ blade.
What fool would run from bane of promise kept
His silken claws do always as he says
Of all the beauty mine eye hath seen to name,
Twilight alone its envisioned peace retains.

"The Name of Love"

2006-02-14T23:35:00.000-08:00

Mortal shield of invincible god
Whose nature shows not of his title true
Force by which all power kneels in awe
And genuflects before its sable hue.
The wonder in a mother’s moistened eye
Reflecting all the glow her newborn sees
Juliet’s knife and Romeo’s goodbye;
In suicide his false iniquity.
Upon these lips is history forsworn:
In the name of love are all things dead and born.

Sentence of Sickness

2006-02-11T00:08:00.000-08:00

What is the onset of illness to the body but the will of the spirit made physical upon the flesh? To believe in the conquest of writhing head over beating heart is to admit the nature of the human condition...for, in the end, we are far more of the stars than we are of the earth, although we have come to heed the cry of the senses far more obediently than the screams of intuition. As such, if you can only hear the voice of your body, choose to act as the unquestioning executioner of his wishes, for he is the eternal lover of your sensuous, immaterial self, and will whisper in your ears her sweet demands, in the timbre of his gravelly, baritone injectures...

What all we find thus ripened in the skin, the spirit hath the foresight to begin.

"The Rape of Juliet"

2006-02-10T13:53:00.000-08:00

What light through yonder window breaks
As she pulls egyptian shame
Around her fractured frame?
The mirror shows her weeping eyes
Their screaming stain
As ghosts of No and Please
Fly over bed unmade.

She is not Juliet,
Although he told her so
Above the savage pleas
And sound of heart abreak
Where, please, O wherefore art thou Romeo
The rain is cold all down my inner legs.

She’ll never find him
In all her hollow, wandering time
Birds of night are silent as the day
In song they see no light on window panes
Instead, but midnight in her huddled sigh:
Goodnight, my Love,
A thousand times goodbye.

The Flight of Life

2006-02-09T22:55:00.000-08:00

Sleep in peace under the translucent sunlight through the silent tree, whose branches are as untouched by the wind as the souls embraced by the undulating earth of their green foundation...Soft, lilting whistle of the mockingbird...carried on the absent breeze...sing to me of your happy life, which knows not the grief and pain of impending death. You live outside the prison this very place manifests...blissfully unaware of the shadowy curtain that o’erhangs us all from the moment of our birth...What must it be to live without knowing that such unsuspecting activity will be curtailed irrevocably by an invisible bearer of shining sickle and ragged wings? Or, perhaps, all will end in an opiate ascent into white roses and glowing light? Indeed, the uncertainty of the finish is what makes the race so terrifying for most of its runners...but still we pace...the seconds ticking rhythmically by with each of our fateful steps...the feet slowing imperceptibly with each progressive meter, driven mercilessly towards their destination and yet not wanting to reach it...

But there are those of us who have acknowledged the end...who have admitted long ago our inalienable rights to death, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...and so we run full force to claim our promised bounty, driving ourselves to race as intensely as possible that the sprint might be flawlessly run up to the infintesimal point of its unrelenting cessation...and so it is that our track is filled with adventure and beauty; fearlessness and immaterial wealth, unhindered by the leaden weights of caution, regret, or hesitation. In so doing, the race transcends necessity, difficulty, or exhaustion, and enters the rarest realms of the adrenalined beautiful...of Art.

Let life, then, be never anything less than a sublime masterpiece...of all things you engage in creating, let each breath taken be the most beautiful creation of all...let your very existence become a consistent renaissance of unemasculated perfection, that your feet barely touch the ground as you run...For, in the end, what less should living be than successive moments of soaring through the earth?

Many believe that life is lived on the ground, and death is ascendance into the sky...but I say let it be exactly the opposite: In all your earthen days make haste to fly, and upon life’s end descend in calm Goodbye.

Be Then the Wine...

2006-02-08T01:47:00.000-08:00

On darkest wings of asphyxiated night flies my love for you...for indeed it consumes me, at times, to the point of gasping suffocation...that state where the heart expands to fill my piteous chest and crush the supple pith of my strawberry lungs...My body is an elastic prison of maligned affection...gorging itself on the intoxicating vintage of your sanguine essence, and then condemning me to writhing discomfort when the hollow of my insides proves too small to drink of you to the last dregs of concentrated, coagulated glory...But I shall drink nonetheless...bloating my screaming, greedy innards until all that you are bleeds from my very pores...whereupon my frightened mouth will seek whatever skin it can reach, in a terrified act of autovampiric lust, to prevent the loss of even one precious drop of all that which overflows my submissive, aching chalice...

What wine is it that can be drunk without the sweet haze of lost senses or the lifting upon lifting of glass to lips, as we tell ourselves we’ll stop after just one more sip? Only the rarest merlot of perfect age draws such gluttonous indulgence...but the dark scent...the ruby smoothness...enrapture our palates to the swooning point of unresistance, and we can do only that which the ambrosia before us demands...swirl, drink, savor. And yet, with each waterfall of perfection down our waiting throats, that which is consumed in turn forbears consumption, and soon it is the wine which possesses the faculties and not the connoisseur...

I am consumed by you, my delicate glass of perfection...you have sated my every fibrous nuance and I stand in wavering disillusion, clutching at the banister of the staircase that descends from sobriety into abandon...fumbling for each step even as I lift the poisoned glass in my hand to drink still more of the arsenic that already dooms my bloodstream...My consciousness, while dangerously inebriated, still clings to a few shards of clarity...for in truth I am completely aware of my downward spiral...of the ways to keep the glass masochistically full for my own insatiable thirst...Yes, my Darling...I shall drink of you as long as my own rebellious mind permits...as long as this deliquescent path to self-destruction will support my sinking feet...I will taste you until I can taste no more...until the vaporous cursive of your bitter scent permeates my olfactory heart with enough strength to force the inevitable blackness into my field of vision and rend at last my legs from beneath the shivering trunk of my body...The blackness will consume me and I will fall, helpless to consume another drop of that which has so completely imbibed of my unsuspecting existence...

What say you, Beloved? Do you wish you had not offered that first, fateful flute to my innocent lips? Do you wish you had kept yourself locked in the oak barrel of solitude, instead of venturing into the range of my ravenous senses? Whatever the answer from your gagged mouth, the response is mute, for I have already had my first taste, and now my soul screams in guttural tantrum for MORE...Consume me, my love, for I am only too willing to yield to your incapacitating affections...I am without will or volition to do anything other than succumb to the radiant bouquet before me...my eyes close in surrender as, at long last, you fill me to the point of taut resist...I can take no more and yet I pull you inexorably closer...desperate to feel your iron pressure in every tingling nerve of my irremediable torpor...Yes...I am without power...a heaving rag doll...rendered immobile but for the shaking hand that reaches for the glass...that pleads for one last, subtle drop...Indulge me, my Darling...for I know well what I do...Indulge me in just a single glass more...for I am so very, very thirsty.

The Measure of All Things

2006-02-07T15:08:00.000-08:00

He is a giant among dwarves of mediocrity...wasting away all who seek to encroach upon the cavern of my heart, so overflowing with the greek fire of his passionate affections...Like the trembling Vesuvius of my soul he flattens all pillars of preconception built over the course of an unwitting lifetime. Poet and prodigy, beast and man, lover and fighter, he constructs anew the measure of all things, commanding with easy grace the skies and sea alike of my inner landscape...Indeed, the horizon itself rests upon his shoulders, gently curving into definition as the scope of my world broadens, and at last I sail past the slice between ocean and clouds, vanquishing my own fears of falling over an unforgiving edge into the nothingness of space...Yes...in his arms I am fearless...in the sweet, flowing drops of his kisses, which fall like turquoise rain from the heavy clouds of his lips, I burst into frantic bloom, as the dormant seeds in an arid desert, who neither need nor expect the water, and so absorb it all the more completely if it falls upon their sleeping, earthen beds...

What light can be seen after the ravaging tempest of his aching body? Indeed, in this question is the true beauty of his raging presence, for he is both savage storm and the delicate parting of clouds once rain and wind have found their inevitable deaths...whereupon he becomes the glowing moon, revealed in the screen of sky behind the cumulus curtains he himself parts...So it is that he is all things, encompassing the sky and its fury; the rain and its pattering calm...And I, in my infinite softness on the ground, lift my petalled face towards him, awestruck to feast of even a single drop that falls upon me...Wistful but for the growth of my own vibrant leaves, that tells me I do not dream the resonant water from the heavens...that his touch is real, and not a wisp of longing trailing along my imagination...Yet in my imagination he shall always reside, for in truth he is the surpassing of a dream...the product of a vision made flesh...

In the velvet boat we sail across the candlelit lake together, to his sepulchral abode, where my heart shall be entombed for all time in the satin and onyx coffin he has lovingly prepared in anticipation of my arrival...Yes...the Phantom of my Unconscious Desires waits for me...and I will go to him in this black moment and every other one that follows...Though I may yet walk above, far below I will always remain, locked forever in the embrace of a storm, a beast, a phantom, and a man...

Envy me not my bevy of lovers, for they are all tamed by no one...they swirl around me as a dark and sensuous hurricane, rendering me the eye of their fierce, burgundy storm...I am at peace in this forgotten center, where the world is as invisible to me as I am to it...in a casket of calm I inter myself willingly, evermore the midnight bride of happiness, resting forever in the faraway chambers of He who has become the measure of all who stand to be compared...and against whom comparison would surely fail.

"Fiery Death"

2006-02-06T00:14:00.000-08:00

In burning midnight, deepest mauve untold
Finds itself the child of garnet gold
The father’s bluest roots from which they spring
Exist the source for wondrous everything
Of peace and joy these colored families rise
In tapers harlequined towards the skies
A dance in window wide on breeze of night
In sudden stillness, windy waltz contrite
A lion’s eye and tiger’s coat both gleam
Within the roaring, silent humble cone
And with your feline face you too shall see
All things of beauty sieged in time alone
The moment flickers; the children waver dim
And gasp as life their glowing bodies leaves
From time they flee upon set course untrimmed
A sea of air their continuance reprieves
Until they breathe their last and sigh into the wind
Black lonely trunk whose flesh the finger stains
The candle has gone out, for my eyes a corpse remains.

"Guide Me if You Must"

2006-02-04T19:12:00.000-08:00

Guide me if you must, into the deserted hills of ages past...where the streams flow in glistening lapis beneath the perfume of sinuous, gnarled trees, whose bark ripples burnt cinnamon in the kiss of tawny afternoon sunlight...The clouds dance atop the water and wink in taffeta waves of reflected sky, where birds soar on cries of glee into the jade horizon...I wait for you in a glade of violet shadows, where all is quiet but for the stirring of far above leaves, which ring in singing vibration as the delicately plucked strings of a golden dulcimer...Listen to the song of Time, whose resonance will teach your ears of all things and nothing, even as you find in your throat the perfect counterpoint to its wistful melody...What song have you to offer the vertiginous reaches of the everlasting? Speak, even if you cannot sing, for the poet’s words resound with a disparate but equal beauty as the musician’s aria...

We are all golden-haired children...innocents taking our first steps on the soft banks of the stream, where our awkward limbs will be absorbed in cushioning reprieve with each hesitant stumble...we are all unknowing of our own glory, which falls from us in bursts of stardust on a still winter’s night...glittering diamonds in the bottom of each footprint in the snow, and every indentation is an unsuspecting work of creation, for us as unavoidable as those powdered tracks in our wake...and so, consequently, just as unremarkable in our eyes...Every artist creates that for which there exists no other option or bargain...we walk in the cold night of our solitudes and pause only occasionally to glance backward, unimpressed, at the trail we leave in the ivory landscape, even as all who follow us remark on the silvered beauty of our crisp and silent progeny...But for us, the threat of the first warmth of spring’s exhalations looms ever present in our minds, and we wonder, in a quiet terror that makes our pens and brushes shiver, when will come the time that we leave no trace of creation behind us...

Our fears are fruitless, for even under the singing summer trees the artist sits in a howl of eternal winter, mired beneath layer upon layer of somnambulate permafrost, mummified in the arctic peat bog of inspiration...even as the sun glints on the semi-precious waters and the fragrance of life swirls in arterial currents through the warm air...Yes...Guide me if you must to this place of sunlight and spring, but know that I’ll never be a part of the green grass you see, for mine is a world of skeletal trees against a full moon sky, where the snow never melts and water turns to colorless stained glass without ever knowing its own flowing nature...My horizon is stark, yes, but I can see it oh so clearly...an expanse of sugared silence before me awaiting the mark I sometimes wish I could escape leaving...but the journey awaits, as for us all, and the delicate crunch of creation beneath me is the sound my ears will hear even through the swirling whiteout of the harshest storm...And so it is that I will humor you...that I will sit amid the downy orbs of dandelions and the scent of honeyed clover...but know this...No matter how close we sit, our worlds are not the same, and the price of a moment in the company of my frozen mind must always be my inevitable withdrawal into it...And so I stand, breathing deeply of this dulcet Eden and yet never able to fully detect its perfume...You will remain in the company of spring, but the time has come for me to once again leave footprints in the snow...Guide me if you must to your world of sunshine and warmth; to your paradise of light and life...

Guide me if you must, but I can never stay.

The Feast of Life

2006-02-03T11:52:00.000-08:00

Thoughts of the ceaseless universe flow through my mind like smoke curling through a beam of light, whose radiance glows clearer with the progressive elimination of each of man’s grating distractions...To mute the dissonant sonance of the frenzied world is to allow the unseen and unheard at last to know face and voice...the silken ether of nature wraps around all of us in each instant, but our minds, as our limbs, are numb to its fingerless touch; so overwhelmed by the stimulation enforced by society that the hurricane of Truth in the world registers not even with the strength of the lightest summer breeze...But as we learn the delicate still of renunciation, the movement of all is pierced into finite view by the sudden sharpness of untaxed senses...To forsake the explosion of noise imposed upon you by modern society is to live in a realm that does not consume and debilitate your abilites of perception and recognition; rather, it is you who feed of all that is around you, savoring the beauty unnoticed by those distracted of televisions and car horns...digesting it for the nourishment of purity it offers your starving body...Feast of the soundless world, and a beam of light will shine before you to illuminate streams of wonder you never knew were there to see or feel. The banquet of life is laid before you...join me at the candlelit table and let us feast together...

The Force of Sacrifice

2006-02-02T11:20:00.000-08:00

With the blood of too many follows the redemption of too few...for the excess of sacrifice is too much paid and no change returned to the buyer...The will of all things material and immaterial in the universe is to live...to be conserved...to go forth in perpetuity. Sacrifice of any kind is unnatural, whether of body or of principle. All that we are, physically and spiritually, wishes to go on forever of its own inertia through an endless vacuum of uninterrupted space. But our lives are not lived out in an airless plane, nor can we move forward without bumping into others along the way...and in such collisions we relinquish our direction under the malicious guise of necessary compromise, and soon lose the law of our purest selves.

Our fading forward motion is not bereft of all hope, however, and can be propelled to new life with the fuel of consciousness. Each time you find yourself apparently chained by obligation or convention – stopped dead on the flawlessly beautiful path of the self, forced to alter your desired course for the sake of another paved with sacrifice – allow yourself, in that eternal moment of pause, to consider in what direction your very essence wishes to continue. Before deferring to the unbalanced force of sacrifice, consider the infinitely higher importance of that longed for by the soul itself, and ask it instead of all things external which road to travel. For sacrifice to know itself is no great crime, for even as it burns at the stake so rise the smoky billows of contentment from its cremated flesh...leaving peace to reside in the cool ashes of incinerated self-denial...

The escape of force unwanted binds all loss, and freedom admits its gain a worthy cost...

Sonnet

2006-02-01T10:30:00.000-08:00

A thousand perfect hearts I wish were mine
To offer forth in dowry of love
A prize of peerless worth I’d so design
In grandeur heavens’ envied glance behoove.
For he who sows the fields of the night
And reaps its solemn harvest in her dawn
Deserves a pristine song aloft in flight
With strength of raven clouds against the morn.
Alas, such multitudes I cannot boast,
Nor spectacle of glory can I claim;
A single pair of wings my breast doth host
Whose tranquil flight for you beats unrestrained.
And thus one heart I give in glittered woe:
A shining dove flies bright among the crows.

"Far Above"

2006-01-31T10:29:00.000-08:00

Virile leaves painted against the sky
Peeling bark that rakes against our ears
Unhand me, fools, I escape above your lie,
I seek to make your screaming disappear...
Crickets sing a song above the sky
A distant hillside rounds to meet the dew
The leaves beneath are soft...a bed to cry...
Of moaning Fate whose pity breeds fortune...
Rustling sunset aglow through branches thick
Redeems the crawling insects far below
My eyes grow large, their blackness ever swift,
When in unsorted time I dare to know.
Release my heart, oh world adorned of sun,
Resist temptation foolishly to grasp
From your cankered body I on my wings depart,
To bind me is to bind the venomed asp.
Forgive me, all I love and leave below,
But suspended spiders need naught but their webs...
And so I say goodbye within hello,
And prepare to live aloft on shining threads.
The moon will rise in haloed silver mist
Spun in cotton on branches skeletal
Your will my mind must stubbornly insist
Until all is done in free form elemental.
How dark it grows, and how I fail to see
I hear alone my screaming whispered pen...
You will me finish that I might be free
Until the next possession of intent.
It comes at last, this vision I must know...
In light I came
In darkness I must go.

The Universe in Sight

2006-01-30T14:38:00.000-08:00

Think softly of the things you see and those which you have yet to behold, for the wake of endlessness cries out for the greed of temperance. Understanding the truth in a given thing cannot be said to possess its zenith; rather, it is only the starting point from which to take the first step towards the state of real seeing, which is done with no comprehension or knowledge. To truly behold anything in the universe is to simply let it BE, unencumbered by any preconception or convention. When watching the sun set, do so without dwelling on its disappearance from the sky, for in truth the sun can do no such thing, and as it moves behind the mountains it is exactly the same as it was at highest noon...it is your position in space alone that tells you differently. Therefore, of your mind, cultivate a spaceless state; one that resists labels and categories. Once it is that you can listen without knowing what you hear, and see without understanding that upon which you look, your mind will in turn be able to live without becoming trapped by its own limited faculties. The object, after all, is to release oneself into the flowing currents of the universe, not ride upon them in the small yet sturdy boat of preconception and structured perception. In the end, it would seem, to see nothing is to behold everything, and to resist finite realities provides witness to the infinity of all things. The smallest objects, once divorced from their labels, become far greater than the whole world, and if you look without seeing, you will find the universe reflected in a beetle’s eye. And perhaps, once you gaze upon such unexpected wonder, the universe will likewise be reflected in yours

The Paradox of Time

2006-01-28T03:15:00.000-08:00

Wish not for the jade and amber tides of a thousand years past when instead the dark, ebony waters of the perfect present could be seething through the diffuse boundaries of your timeless mind...The war of the worlds is fought in the instants of progression’s perception. Conceptions of time are borne from the same fear as that of the inkless pen on the page: to remember and record events lest they be forgotten by our feeble human minds. Of time, then, ask not why or how it can be measured; rather seek to know it instead by lessons learned and moments remembered...For what, after all, is an hour but the sum of its seconds, and what is the progression of the stars in the sky but your vision of them through the haze of a midnght embrace? Time, in the ultimate realms of truth, is one and the same as perception...The heavens move and the stars collide whether your humble eyes exist to see so or not, and indeed it is your view and your view alone that marks these events as discrete. The world is but a moment; a piece of music flawlessly played, a breath of air greedily taken, existing neither in the past nor the future. So then, experience all things as if there were nothing before and nothing after. Let your days and nights be the same creature, for in truth, they have always been...difference and discreteness is wrought only because your limited senses will it so. To truly live is not to experience the flow of life as a glassy lake, but rather as waves on the sand, with every moment crashing upon you and receding before you can grasp it. The amber lights on the boardwalk of your midnight sea may burn out unexpectedly, but in this rejoice, for it will allow you to see the phosphorescent life below you that would otherwise remain hidden from view. And if you are stunned by the sudden, green glow that swirls around you, remember that it will exist only as you perceive it, both for an instant on the waves’ crest and and for an eternity in your mind...And in such lies the paradox of time: even as they linger for a moment, all things exist forever once defined.

Upon the Seas of Life

2006-01-26T19:16:00.000-08:00

Victims of the night can scarcely be said to encumber the dwelling of those forsaken by the day. For, to fall prey to and be abandoned by are two utterly diverse creatures, no more alike than the ship sunk by pirates and the one lost in the ravages of a storm. By what forces, then, should we allow ourselves to be overtaken and by which ones overcome? It lies within, the distinction, just as the pirates exist on the sea and the storm in the sky...that which lurks deep inside has the power to overtake and drown, while that stirring outside can be monitored, understood, and, ultimately, avoided before it overwhelms to the point of inescapable sinking below the surface. Therefore, upon the roiling of any of life’s endless seas, examine first the waters within for danger before turning attention to the world of exterior occurrences. The ambush of pirates, in the end, is far less forseeable than a looming gale on the horizon. When problems present themselves, search first for their genesis deeply interred within the casket of your heart, and you will likely see that they are not difficulties until named as such by the imposition of all that lives in the world around you. Embrace that which you are; indeed, dive into it unafraid, and in learning the nature of the waters in which you swim, you’ll never again be in danger of drowning within the darkest, most tumultuous seas of your life.

Unhand the fate that frenzies all your mind, and the calmest waters of peace your soul shall find.

"Run Away With Me"

2006-01-25T00:09:00.000-08:00

Run away with me, into the forest of nameless truth, where sunlight hides her shameful face and the night burns evermore. Run from the misunderstanding of a thousand years, and the places of worship that condemn us as devils, even as they sacrifice to their own false gods. Run to the quiet we crave, and let us find together a silence so thick that it drowns us in muffled inurement against the world of insipid cacophony that grates our delicate inner ears with steel wool of meaningless drivel. Let us escape, hand in hand, from everything to which we have never belonged.

Let us build a fire and dance around it in the sanctity of the impenetrable witching hour, until we collapse as one onto the soft earth that receives our steps and our bodies with an eternal sigh. And, as the fire fades to embers, let our love smolder and burst into flames beneath the distant sky, where the stars smile and share in our arching delight. I fall asleep in the steadfast tides of your shoulder, your hand resting in the hollow of my back, and we breathe as one in the bliss of undisturbed rest.

And when we awake let us do so as friends, and spend the quiet day ahead in peaceful companionship. As our minds run together over endless fields of inspiration, they’ll stop frequently to rest by the streams of laughter and longing. We’ll work in the tandem of survival, combining our strengths to fulfill our needs, and building our knowledge of the forest, that it may embrace us deeper still. In time, we will become more and more like our surroundings; indistinguishable among the trees. In time, we ourselves will embody in physical permanence the Truth of the forest.

And so, my Love, if ever they come looking for us, they will see nothing, for their sad eyes are accustomed to sunlight and lies, and thus they can hope only just to survive our world of dark reality. They will search, frightened, for any signs of familiarity, for anything artificial, and will be met with a void of silence that scares their chaos-conditioned senses. They will give up with uneasy reluctance, and plan a story to tell those who sent them, and we will smile silently into one another’s eyes from behind the trunks of the ancient trees that shelter us. And when they have gone, and the forest sighs in contentment upon their absence, we’ll emerge in quietude and carefully erase all traces of their unwanted presence. And then it will be time for food, and creation, and honest abandon, and into the forest we’ll run, until the welcoming jaws of timelessness close around us in deep, green asylum.

And so I say unto you, my immortal beloved, as I reach out my small, white hand to be enveloped by yours...I say to you with eyes as green as the sacred forest...

Run away with me.

On Clarity

2006-01-23T13:58:00.000-08:00

We speak of noise: the infernal, ceaseless drone
Of all who walk in waking, weakened day
Unsung by what the truest souls call home
Repealed by those forgotten in the fray
It burns the ears in rife cacophony
And chars the soul in fires of piercing dread
From its decaying grasp you must break free
To know the nature of worlds you’ve left unsaid
Escape the sound, run far from meaning’s fear
Unto the silence of forests long ago
And in the green expanse may flesh first hear
The simplicity of all there is to know
Your nails claw within your head in vain
To tear confusion from your screaming mind
The chaos outside becomes your vision’s bane
And suddenly all thoughts are born confined
Forsake it all, and your right you’ll soon employ
To hear the voices of the universe
Our tongues your hands will senselessly enjoy;
Our words creation’s offspring sweetly birth.
Ignore the plodding cows of mortal fields,
Who sound of emptiness resounding low
All those who speak of colors they can see
Are to our rainbows, blindest undertow.
Alas, the secret so few lack denied
That all who learn come obsessively to crave
The clue to free the locked and chamfered mind
The artist in us all to surely save:
A muffled world begets creative souls,
Clarity thy name is Quiet; life foretold.

Words of the Martyrs

2006-01-22T19:48:00.000-08:00

The tides of martyrs wash over the barren earth like oil glazing the surface of the bluest ocean on a day of shining noon...Flooding the mind they come, unwarranted of all who suspect them...oozing into the world of men without care or pause, dampening the horizon of society’s expectations and clouding the sunsets of established convention. To sacrifice in the name of a cause misunderstood and jealously persecuted by all who live outside its enigmatic walls is to shape without warning the face of the universe unspoken by the droning tongues of all who stand aside and light the fire beneath the stakes of redemption. For, to die at the hands of fools is indeed to be redeemed to the greatest levels of wisdom’s smoky clouds...Unburdened by all that came before, we find ourselves lifted high above the hatred that cursed us to death, before our humble minds saw that the end of earthly life was indeed a blessing in the guise of a murderous curse. Violence upon us was therefore forgiven even before it began, for our words, though filtered, can still emerge in spite of the very utterings that sent us where we now eternally reside. Seek your own death, be it by the hands of those who hate or within the hearts of those who love, and you can never, truly, die...The acceptance of your own decay and demise is what, in the end, will deliver you to Forever.

Of Head and Heart

2006-01-20T16:45:00.000-08:00

Warbling on the dark air, the songbird cries through the night of all she’s lost to the greedy hands of the day...She yearns not for redemption; rather, begs to the cool air only for a moment’s peace in spite of her torment, which she knows she must fully endure. “Be still,” whispers the wind, “for you know not of that which you ask, and even the simplest pleas can fool the logic of your earthbound mind.”

She sighs in the dark, interrupting her sad song with a shaking breath, unsure of all she is and all that she has become. What, after all, becomes of us when we long for something without understanding its pull on our hearts? Could it not be that our hearts are, in fact, being pulled right out of our quietly screaming chests, destined to beat somewhere else, while the location that truly needs them is left without a life force beating to sustain it? Yes...so it is when we succumb to the powerful suction of yearning within our chest for anything which has not first been experienced by our minds. Intelligence bridles the wild mustang of our emotions, but it is only a harness of the softest leather, meant to gently guide rather than break into complete submission. Therefore, just as a full saddle should never be placed upon the horse’s back, let only a teaspoon of reason temper each gallon of passion, for to love with too much restraint is equally pernicious as yearning without comprehension, and to experience the wild mustang in a fenced corral can hardly be said to contain the truth of its essence, which is found galloping in abandon across the open plains. Let love, then, be both the wildness and the bridle, both the boundary and the unbound; savage beast with the clear eyes of a man. In this way, your heart will never be lost on the wind to longing, nor will it be caged in the dungeon of restrained passion. Keep yourself wild for all time, running as recklessly as you can, but rein in your steps if only to avoid the most dangerous falls...The steel tempering of reason and passion will produce an alloy of unbreakable strength, and you will know joy all the days of your life within the shining suit of armor it so humbly affords. Forge your heart and mind into a weave of golden chainmail, and it will protect you, similarly, all the days of your life...

The heart in the chest is unwitting and blind, but seen through the head, it enlightens the mind.

Of Knowledge Part II: Night Vision

2006-01-18T20:13:00.000-08:00

The choice between submission and acceptance is one that requires the will, in both cases, to be bound. We all cry out for that which we do not understand to rake the coals of our minds into fiery realization, when instead we should be begging for the strength to douse the embers into a pile of black, hissing steam. For, it is only by extinguishing the glow of all that which we think we know that we can truly even begin to comprehend that which we do not.

That which you allow to burn in your mind does so in a cage around true awareness, simultaneously penning in Truth and keeping you out of its sanctified prison. Grasp the bars and rattle them all you will, but they’ll not yield until you realize it is from the own metallurgy of your preconception that they are forged, and your will to shatter them will remain impotent until aided by the solvent of humility. Admit all that which you do not know and more, and the steel bars that block you from Sight will melt before your incredulous eyes.

What, then, of the sweet taste of truly knowing something...of the honeyed flavor of its essence once you savor it for the first time? Let there not be made a mistake...it is indeed possible to know and to understand, but, as with all delicacies, the palette must be appropriately cleansed before enjoyment is complete. Let not the fish course of your life taste only of the bowl of soup that immediately preceded it...when you approach anything with the taste of prior experience influencing your overwhelmed tongue, the newness of a dish will be lost to the perishable taint of that which came before. Therefore in every moment cleanse yourself of all prior tastes, that you might truly savor in your perfect mouth the freshness of each current morsel. Resist the impulse to judge the moment based upon “truth” you think you “know”, for the security in this is nothing if not fleeting, and your memory will be one not of jeweled nostalgia for that which was, but rather critical recollection of how the past could have been improved upon. You must, ultimately, trust in uncertainty, for it is always the unilluminated path that leads most directly home.

Do not fear the dark corners in your forest of knowledge, rather, seek to expand them by blowing out the fires that light up the areas around, until all is black and seemingly impossible to know. Then, in the midnight silence, stand still for a moment and wait for your eyes to adjust, and soon you will see not only that once lit by the flames, but everything, including what once seemed to your limited mind darkest and most inaccessible. Walk around with your new eyes in this velvet landscape, and marvel at the vastness of what there truly is for you to see, hitherto hidden from your own unsuspecting vision by all you merely thought was there to behold...Revel in the absence of external light, and understand, in the end, there is never any cause to fear the dark. On the contrary, it is the glow of all you think you know that should send shivers down your spine, for it does nothing but hide from you that which actually IS. Seek with desperate passion this dark uniformity of all your thoughts, and like pupils in the absence of all light, your mind will dilate to a new level of understanding you never conceived of to exist.

The Night Vision of Knowledge...as you learn more and more how to develop it, you will transition imperceptibly from the meek rodent who darts about the open field of blackened grass to the falcon who soars through the stars high above, able to detect the slightest movement in the dark expanse below...Yes...your eyes will sharpen to a strength you would have once deemed impossible, and soon all those around you, still trapped by the light of conception, will marvel at the clarity you so effortlessly proffer their confused, fire-lit worlds.

You are bound only by that which you see lit most clearly before you, and limited most severely by the truth you unshakingly purport. Choose to step away from the circles of light cast by these burning torches you carry aloft before you in your journey through life, and prepare for utter amazement at a world you never knew was there to see. When the last flame is extinguished, you’ll see us before you, smiling in midnight, awaiting to embrace you with arms of the very darkness you sought so long to ignore...

Welcome, young night wind, to the Real World...

"Let Us Go, Then"

2006-01-17T17:23:00.000-08:00

Let us go then, you and I
Where words are borne and daylight dies
And jealousy hides her shameful eye
For the soft winds' piteous lullaby...
On anguished dreams we'll dance away
To moaning night and starlit day
Of clouds alone in soft array
Whose death, in foolish, dies...
Fill not our gentle days in useful tears
Each dripping diamond vanished years
Forget me not, unsanctioned Dear,
Perchance you glide away...
There will be time for you and me
And the yellow smoke around the tree
Curling its fangs for all to see:
The fruit I cannot bear.
Unrest in peace 'til slumber true
Once needed running now is through
This luxury, my gift to you
Stay still your spell to breathe...
And so, unmoving, rest awhile
In bliss and torment, quiet smile
A winded moment unbeguiled
In midnight's careless dew
Where eyes escape from view
And the tree is free to die
Let us go, then, you and I.

"Fly Away"

2006-01-16T00:16:00.000-08:00

Fly away, my Love, into the twilight sun, where the amethyst arms of awakening night extend to embrace each beat of your glossy black wings. Pause for but a moment atop my open palms, that I might savor the featherlight weight of your presence, and remember its delicate pressure long after your dark silhouette disappears over the horizon. For, when you are at last gone, the emptiness of my hands will seem an astonishing burden, and it will indeed take time for them not to crave the gentle heaviness that so long graced their hesitant curves. And yet, the perfect beauty of watching Freedom itself soar into a jewelled sunset far outweighs the loveliness of its caress against once-imprisoned fingertips. It is to the warm updrafts of the Beautiful – of Art – that I therefore release you joyfully, and without any hesitation, which might, in cage-like generation, grow into imprisoning bars and break the flawless flight feathers which allow you to rise on the Wind in creative abandon. No, my sweet Raven of eternal moments, I’ll not delay your departure should your obsidian wings grow restless. Let my farewell be a kiss whispered on the air beneath you that helps rather than hinders your majestic voyage. Let the ethereal wisp of my lingering affection become a jetstream of inspiration, casting you to the waiting stars of unending creation. Let the essence of my memory propel you to the Essence of Art, where the sky is filtered gold and the light casts its faceted sparkle upon the dancing satyrs of words, colors, and song.
And, in a gilded meadow, on a breeze perfumed by eternity, I’ll alight by your side after my own journey to this Artist’s paradise, folding with soft grace the crimson wings that blossomed from my unsuspecting shoulders upon your disappearance into the sky. In the end, it seems, Freedom is nothing if not a paradox: its embrace comes only upon its release, and to let it go is to gain it forever. And so, my Joy, understand the true glory of your presence: for, in spreading your wings, you give me mine, and in flight together we ascend, divine.

On Pain

2006-01-15T17:46:00.000-08:00

To be in pain is exactly that which the preposition dictated by linguistic convention implies: to exist inside, within, or in a location defined by pain. And, because two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time, to be in a place of pain means to be in a place that is unique...that you yourself occupy alone. As such, the journey there must also be solitary in nature. We descend into pain on our own, and can therefore blame only ourselves for the path we take and the destination at its end. To say someone has “caused” you pain is to say someone has “caused” you to walk absentmindedly across the street without watching the oncoming cars. Whose fault is it really when your body flies through the air after impact? Who should have seen the consequences of such behavior? Take responsibility for your own demise, and in the same way, claim ownership of your pain, and make no one else beholden to it.

On Love

2006-01-14T21:34:00.000-08:00

The price of true love is payable only in the currency of the immortal soul. To truly love is never to confine within the constraints of four walls, even if those walls belong to the largest, most pristine of palaces, whose foundation is constructed of stones quarried from good intentions. No, to love is to meet on the wind in an open field and embrace in freedom as the sun’s rays deepen into the kiss of the moon. It is the choice to linger in a sweet expanse of waving grass or run off in search of an unknown forest. It is understanding how to dance in a swirling breeze of melodious dialogue, only to revel in the separation that yields a glorious, screaming soliloquy.

To love is strength and courage. It is the conditioning of the soul to a state of fortitude that endures the wrenching perfection of the rose’s bleeding petals, the aching intoxication of its sensuous garnet scent, and the piercing beauty of its thorns. It is equal pleasure in all sensations, and the grace to move within each feeling in poise and calm, knowing that even the howl of the strongest storm will eventually fade to a whisper. Listen to the whisper, whose gentle voice will tell you the distilled truth of the cry that preceded it, and know that, perhaps above all, love is patience.

Love is understanding all of these things and still being certain of nothing. It is wisdom and innocence, reason and recklessness. It adorns the cradle and uplifts the tomb. Under the inconceivable force of its timelessness, you will become both an unknowing infant and a wizened elder. Let the contrast of your child-blue eyes and wrinkled visage be beautiful, for love is nothing if not Art, and to be an Artist is to embrace paradox. Forgive confusion its unseemly mask, for that which appears confounded is really only a mutant form of extreme clarity. True love, no matter how mired in all things extraneous, will always prove its own title.

And if true love always contains truth, it may be believed without question. Defer always to the demands it inspires; follow the path it directs, no matter how rocky. Slay the dragons, appease the demon, and lay forth your life to reach the beautiful princess in the golden tower. When you rescue her, she’ll tell you with a smile that the greatest secret to Love . . . is simply, to endure.

Bottling the Ocean: A Word on Ownership

2006-01-14T13:24:00.000-08:00

The impulse to claim is the decaying compost upon which grows the mildew of all mankind. It begins with the earth, whose sweet, grassy body is senselessly divided into partitions of power, allowing the so-called ‘owners’ enough illusion to decree “this space is mine…whatever grows here is mine…keep away, for nothing here belongs to you”. Initially, in an hesternal era of scarcer resources, this would have had inherent within it a logic of survival, but in most wealthy countries of today, such divisions quickly become territories whose occupancy yields far more pernicious consequences.

Consider the example of twenty-first century Los Angeles, wherein the majority of metropolitan inhabitants spend their existences vying to claim the aforementioned partitions of earth, along with the many ‘accessories’ that have attained nearly inextricable adherence to the land itself. A given lot of property will have upon it a house and a car, at bare minimum, and these are both a part of the statement that underlies all claiming: “This belongs to me, not you”. Such subtext, in turn, promotes a desire to increase that which belongs to you, and decrease that which does not belong to you. The quest for sheer number and size of possessions to claim is the inevitable result, and all participants search for their ‘own’ largest houses, shiniest cars, most elite clothing, newest gadgets. There is, of course, competition inbred within such activity, but more destructive is the transference of extreme importance to such items, and the lack of personal autonomy such transference breeds. Each instance of claiming harbors the parasite of dependence, and soon one cannot imagine walking down a sunny street without an iPod to ‘pass the time’. Focus is removed from the self and the world, and placed squarely into the abyss of claimed objects and their needy offspring. These impish children take several forms.

As one comes to rely increasingly on material, claimed objects, reliance on the self concomitantly decreases, and the world is soon processed through the murky filter of that which is claimed, rather than through the clarity of unaided sensory perception. Experiences have ‘meaning’ only when somehow attached to those objects so noxiously incorporated into the very fabric of the self. A blue sky is no longer ‘exciting’ unless seen on a 50-inch plasma television, and a social event shifts focus from actual interaction to concern with who is wearing what, or who arrived in the hottest new ride…Living descends into the infernal, mindless realms of vicariousness.

The inability to process world experiences in a manner disparate from the utilization of material possessions begets a mentality of dependence. This mindset, even in its infancy, has drastic personal repercussions. In the immediate battlefield of the self, comfort in solitude is the first unfortunate casualty. To be alone – truly alone, with no possessions, portable DVD players, or iPods for company – and be completely at peace, becomes a strange and distant concept that slowly drifts into the enveloping, unforgiving mists of the mind. This utter loss of ability to sit still in the quiet, cavernous space of the self and simply be has far-reaching, often irreconcilable effects. For, if we are powerless to find comfort in nothing, we must live in submission to the force of doing something – anything – instead. We come to need and depend on constant entertainment and occupation. Of course, this may double directly back to the material object, but there is, by extension, another iniquitous option. If one cannot find comfort in oneself alone, one will almost always, at some point, seek it in someone else. Personal relationships, especially those of the romantic persuasion, are subducted by the same impulse to claim as anything able to be purchased with the average American Express card. As always, the cancroid growth of dependence accompanies the impulse, and soon one cannot ‘live without’ that special ‘boyfriend’, ‘girlfriend’, or ‘fiancé’. In addition, the existence of these labels signifies a complete reduction of identity, and their application implies the subsuming of a human being into a specious category. “John” is no longer his sovereign self, but rather simply “Jane’s boyfriend”. The possessive ‘s’ trailing after the offending female name insinuates the ownership of unsuspecting John.

So it is that the world is fraught with humanity in clinging pairs, tugging at one another with the tentacles of ownership and dependence. And yet, one might ask, what is actually so terrible about the latter? Shouldn’t we be able to ‘depend’ on those close to us? A brief point of clarification, then, of the nuances of this oft-confounded word. “To depend” can, indeed, be a positive action, when the connotative meaning is “to receive help”. In other words, the implication is of something additive; of a surplus to another state, already complete. It is not, for example, negative by any means when a friend offers a ride to the airport and the obliged traveler accepts, coming to depend on this unexpected assistance. However, with the penultimate word of the preceding sentence, one arrives at an important clarification: the issue of expectation. For, when “to depend” becomes synonymous with “to expect”, the meaning shifts abruptly and no longer signifies a benign addition to wholeness, but instead the filling in of something missing in that which is otherwise incomplete. Autonomy once again falls by the wayside, for in deterioration to dependence/expectation is the similar and ineluctable disintegration of any ability to exist on one’s own. Dependence eradicates all but itself.

The consequences of expectation are gradual but severe. If one returns to the image of filling a hole, one is forced to consider the formation from each individual act of expecting an indentation requiring material of some sort to level its surface. That material is inevitably pulled from the one of whom the expectation exists. And so this force between two people becomes an all but unstoppable cycle of erosion, as each person pulls at the other, and holes are made and filled in and from the essences of both. Eventually, nothing but a barren, craterous hillside remains, exhausted of all its original potential for growth and life. Somewhere in the midst of the dust and drought, a realization dawns that no new seeds will grow, and the pair ends in a chorus of bemoaned queries of “what went wrong?”

What went wrong, what is wrong, and what will continue to be wrong until it is brought to conscious attention, is this putrid compulsion to claim. How, in the end, can any person or thing in this world be considered to ‘belong’ to another? The expansive nature of each minute detail of the universe cannot possibly be fathomed, much less ‘owned’. For our feeble human minds to envision even slightly the sweeping scope of each person or facet of life we face, it is perhaps useful to consider the tiniest individuality using the image of a vast ocean. How does one lay claim to even the smallest quality of such a body of nature, whose depths are unknown and whose breadth stretches farther than the eye can see? Perhaps, one might think to bottle a glass jar full of seawater and in so doing be somehow in possession of that limitless liquid force? Hardly…for in a glass jar the ocean is no longer an ocean, but merely a container of water, approximately three percent salinity. The ocean loses its essence, and so it is with all things subjected to the nefarious, transparent confines of the ownership impulse. What inevitably remains, in every case, is an empirical shadow of the power and potential of any given person or thing.

What is one to do, then, to experience the ocean in each of life’s wonders? The answer, it would seem, lies in immersion. To know even a fraction of the Pacific is to feel its waves, shiver in its temperature, be pulled by its currents and befriend its shores. Even this cursory knowledge is accomplished only by plunging with complete abandon into uncertain depths. And so, too, must it be with the world, with life, and with people. Enjoy everything; experience everything…to the fullest extent allowed by the senses. Swim in complete freedom, but at the end of each aqueous adventure, dry the body and leave without surrendering to the impulse to take anything upon departure. Let the experience find its merit without the promise of any repetition; indeed, don’t expect it ever to occur again, and be content with the perfect, momentary nature of it all. Put nothing in glass jars for the future, for in the uncertain future there can be no certainty of happiness. Let there be only the here and now, and let the self be free from trying to claim it. In the end, the present can never be owned, for it slips from the future and into the past even before any futile efforts to capture and bottle it are inspired, let alone executed.

In this process of forfeiting one’s impulse to claim, it is essential to temper the steely point of awareness with an alloy of humility. It is, after all, from a degree of arrogance that we look at a given thing, label it, and purport an infallible understanding of it. In so doing we assert over it our dominion and claim. However, pausing for a moment to examine the germination of this tenacious weed, it becomes apparent that roots take hold with the simplest act of perception: seeing. Our eyes, in a way, become our enemy, for it is in their confident, unforgiving grasp that all things are captured before their subsequent sacrifice on the altar of ownership. We rely relentlessly on our vision, given its strength by the light of day, to tell us that which we do and do not know. What then, occurs when this sense, the cynosure of the claiming impulse, is weakened significantly or dispensed with completely? What, for example, happens when we leave the bolstering visual environment of the sunlight and attempt existence in the depth of night? All at once, we can see less assuredly, and as such can label and claim with little readiness and security. All at once, we must show humility in the face of our own limited perception; willingly prostrating ourselves before the awesome force of obscurity around us. We can claim nothing, only allow ourselves to simply be; to succumb to the embrace of everything we do not know, and rest in peace within the shadows of our own infinite smallness. At that moment, when we can sigh in contentment in the consort of the atramentous witching hour, the impulse to claim will wither and die, never to resurrect, even in the divine power of the noonday sun. A bold new beatitude of the solitary self thus glints, an onyx beacon in midnight: Blessed are those who dwell without claim in the heart of darkness, for they will know peace forever.

Predict Nothing

2006-01-13T21:00:00.000-08:00

You can predict nothing. The world is unfathomable, and consequently each moment it gives you will remain similarly inscrutable until its eternal arms are wrapped tightly around your pliant consciousness. To predict is to struggle against the embrace of the moment, to writhe in discontent because the nature of the arms that have come to hold you is different than expected. So, then, expect nothing, and instead allow yourself to fall completely into the caress of each instant given you by the world, and find beauty in places that prescription and prediction would block from view in cold, black completeness. In so doing, your life will be a photo album of searingly beautiful images, and not a single page will be marred by the pernicious grip of disappointment and regret. No prediction, no expectation, no discontent. Welcome to living.

"The Pear"

2006-01-13T03:59:00.000-08:00

Springtime skin in taut resist
Unwilling give to piercing kiss
Glowing stretch of subtle taste
Reveals at once in dripping haste
Dulcet roundness, rapture pure
Snow-white flesh in moist allure
My mouth possess, dissolve divine
Allow these lips their slice of time
Yet tarry not, oh savoring tongue,
Lest whiteness quickly tarnish dun
Brown fate escape, delay reprimand;
Sweet fruits, once bitten, consumption demand.

The Giant

2006-01-12T00:03:00.000-08:00

The dark Giant rises in soaring, solemn majesty against an endless, cerulean sky, its every spidery nuance knifing the visual void of blue in savage, stark relief. Winds ply their way fiercely around unmoving stone, searching for a way to cirucumvent the forbidding perfection that so completely resists their howling, tracing forces. To those who find themselves in the cool shadow of the imposing facade, it seems inconceiveable that a structure of such spellbinding complexity and scale could have been built by mortal hands. Surely, a fortress of such divine majesty descended in thunderous birth from the clouds in fully-formed silence, rather than suckling from the ground up, a weaning underdeveloped infant. Surely, this was Athena from the head of Zeus, shield aloft, untainted by the weakness of woman, and the sweat of men has not soiled these immaculate, gray stones?

Step from the purple shadows of the west front and through one of the three portals. Surrender your fear as this Titan of symmetry envelops you and see the details His overwhelming presence initially masks: the serene faces of polished figures, which seem as supple, posed models, powdered white; the delicate foliate bands, carved for eternity into marble, but appearing ready to melt as buttercream before your eyes; the mathematical exactitude of repeating pointed arches, highlighted by shocking riots of color as sunlight bends through the tracery of stained windows; unexpected bursts of polychrome laughter in the eternal interior twilight. Through the lancets, see the arching shadows of flying buttresses, encrusted with gargoyles, whose writhing, grotesque beauty preserves forever the mutated features of those who so lovingly experimented with expressions of their own torturous ecstasy as the Giant relentlessly consumed their days.

For it is true: the blood, sweat, and tears of many lifetimes soak these stones to their cores, but the mortality of any mason can do little to undermine the divine strength of his creation. The individual, laborious cuts of each chisel etched a life force of the whole that compounds upon itself, and the long energy of development leaves behind a creature of immense, indestructible power, offered no further protection by any appendages of war.

In the soaring verticality of the cavernous nave, do not be overcome. Crane your neck in awe but for a moment, and then leave the center in favor of the margin. In the side aisles, lay your lips upon a corinthian column and feel the soft texture of the cool stone, strong beneath you. Inhale the timeless, metallic scent, unchanged for a thousand years, and learn the pulse of life below the undulating, gray skin. Understand, in your infinite insignificance, that the awesome singularity of the whole will elude comprehension until you abandon your blindness to the story carved so minutely into the multiplicity of its parts. Cleanse your eyes with a crystalline tear, and as the shining drop of darkness slowly fades from the smooth surface, be content in the knowledge that the warmth of your embrace has given his cool body heat for a thousand years more.

Quest for Survival

2006-01-11T14:43:00.000-08:00

There exists, it would seem, a deep-rooted and unadmitted desire in our world for it to be something other than what it has become. The rapturous attendance of recent “fantasy escape” films such as The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings trilogy is, in many ways, a muffled cry for a way of living completely absent in western culture of today. We are captured by these stories because they show us in vivid technicolor everything our lives are not...everything that for a few precious hours, we can pretend them to be.

In the general sense, it can be said that we live very far removed from the creatures we actually are. This is clearly apparent at the most fundamental level of existence: the physical. Our bodies are powerful and complex, and enable us with many advantages in a given survival landscape. Our dexterous, prehensile hands can easily make tools, fire, or weapons; our upright posture allows us to travel nimbly over long distances, and our eyes are frontally positioned, lending us the wide, binocular vision of all great predators. These physical attributes, of course, are all linked by the computing power of our disproportionately large brains, which we have used to develop even more sophisticated methods of survival: hunting, fishing, agriculture. Indeed, we are masters of survival...in many ways we have honed it to a level that surpasses all other animals on the planet. We’ve advanced it so far, in fact, that we no longer worry about it. And therein, I propose, lies a problem...these finely formed bodies and minds, so perfect for surviving, suddenly have nothing to do.

Have you ever awakened in the morning and wondered about from where, exactly, the day’s meals were going to come? Or whether your shelter would be strong enough if those clouds in the sky decided to throw out a thunderstorm?...And this is not just a question of McDonald’s or Carl’s, or if the roof needs re-tarring...these are considerations that might determine whether or not you actually wake up the following day. The fact is, barring small internal concessions to the possibility of freak accidents, most people today take for granted the fact that they will, most likely, keep on living.

What if there were no work or school tomorrow, and instead you were concerned only with securing food from unready sources, keeping warm, and perhaps making a few preparations for the same quest the following day...How would life be different? Would it even be recognizable? If you were directly responsible for your survival until the following day, how much more intensely...more involvedly...would you live?

Extending this, it is also important to think about how interactions with those around you might change in a more distilled survival situation. For, with the disappearance of survival necessity follows a withering of the same sort of intensity in how we live with those around us. After all, how many of us can name anyone on whom we actually rely to survive?...(monetary reliance is, of course, hardly worth mentioning in disqualification)...What is the fabric that binds your friendship with any given person? Would he help keep you from starving by plowing fields, harvesting vegetables, preparing them and cooking a meal? Would he fight a wild animal in protection of you, at the risk of his own life?

There is, naturally, a degree of simplification present in all of this...although that word is slightly inappropriate, as it tends to be pejorative, and make survival somehow of lower rank than our current lifestyle...But we’ll call it simplification for lack of a more mentally accessible term. Concerning ourselves only with the tasks of survival and its first cousins inevitably seems ‘simpler’...and rightly so; it’s what we do best. It is what, deep down, makes the most sense to us, because some part of us knows we are consummately well-equipped for it.

It is our inborn call to the fundamental skills of surviving...of simply continuing to live, day after day...that draws us to vicarious experiences such as Narnia. I observe this, first and foremost, as an active participant. How, after all, could anyone fail to identify with the necessity of dodging a sword thrust toward one’s heart by an enemy? Or the need to fight to protect one’s brothers and sisters? Reasons for actions are immediate and direct... “if/then” statements are starkly consequential: “if I don’t dodge this sword, then I will die”. Such concepts are comprehended with a certain relief by our exhausted instincts, accustomed to slogging through far murkier territory to uncover understandable reasons for actions. In terms of physically continuing to live, what does going to work each day actually mean? Can you get there in three steps or less?

Our instincts are bored. Like wolves in a zoo, we pace restlessly, wondering what to do with our unnamable energy, trying to understand what it is we seek, peering searchingly through the chain link fence of our own comfort. And so we go to things like movies and love them for the fundamental chord they strike within us, but then it’s “back to reality,” even as our hearts scream in protest...“Take me away,” they cry, “for this is something I can understand!”

All the same, however, understand this: the world, even its urban incarnation, is still a place full of battles, magic, and adventures that all must be survived and lived. Any other conception of it has been imposed upon you. Examine carefully all the things you are told you “need” in order to “live”...that new car or plasma TV...and ask yourself how, exactly, they will contribute to your physical survival of another day, and why, really, you “need” them. What might you be doing if you didn’t have them? What if there were no time for movies or television because the adventure of your own life consumed you as completely as such vicarious experiences? What if the essence of survival and living became your reality once again?...Answer that, and perhaps our paths will cross. Otherwise, it is highly unlikely we’ll ever meet...I’m generally far too busy hunting for food and battling White Witches in the urban wilderness to make frequent sojourns into the civilized world of men.

Wolf in Dog's Clothing

2006-01-10T18:32:00.000-08:00

Like two grown men forced to dwell indefinitely within the confines of a crowded attic, they pace restlessly, searching with clouded, yellow eyes through the lattice of a chain link fence. Back and forth they traverse, rhythmically crossing over one another in paths of repetition so regular they seem to wear trenches into the soil. Indeed, what would you have them do, for there is nothing in this obscenely small space to occupy their subdued instincts. Their bellies are round and haunches padded with the unnatural condition of surplus food and inability to hunt. Their gait is smooth and unhurried, their movements lacking any of the snap motions that evidence reactions prerequisite to survival in the wild. To me they pay no attention; their senses numbed to the presence of just another human, defenseless and tender as I might be. In all, I feel as though two large, friendly dogs meander before me...how could these docile creatures be what the sign unequivocally purports: Canis lupus – Gray wolf.

The vestiges of wildness, however, are not completely absent in their understatedly frenetic pacing. It is as though they struggle to remember something long forgotten...as if some past life lurks beneath the surface of unconsciousness, pushing against their captive minds with strength just incapable of breaking into awareness. See how they pause to gaze wistfully through the fence...

You catch their scent, don’t you...you feel the helpless hoofbeats of sweet, young gazelles in the adjacent enclosure...It awakens something within you...you yearn to run into the herd together, fanning out to either side of the unsuspecting grass-eaters, pushing them into a frightened core of bleating meat, orchestrating your long-awaited feast with flawess, feral synchronicity...yes...you long for it, though you know not why...you long for this infernal partition – this strange, spreading tree the color of a fish’s belly – to disappear so that your legs can run as they itch to...you long, at last...to be free...

A keeper enters the paddock with a bucket of food, which she places on the ground like a bowl of puppy chow. The wolves ignore it for several moments, standing motionless at the fence, peering through it, ears alert. Eventually, in resigned concession, they move to the bowl and begin eating delicately...dispassionately. Before even five minutes pass they are back at the fence, pacing resumed. They are unsated, as is the lone figure who observes them in stillness from afar. A frown on my face and a tear in my heart, I prepare to relinquish my pen and leave, too disturbed to prolong any further this prison visit sold to me as entertainment.

Museum Communion

2006-01-10T10:50:00.000-08:00

I pour out my viscous thoughts in a crimson river of silence to the mottled stone of centuries past, and they are absorbed, as water into a soft bed of moss, by the Assyrian giants who stand before me. Their featureless stare is in profile, yet my gaze they meet directly, and the Griffin smiles in invitation as he lifts a ripened fruit in my direction. “Taste,” he says, “and you shall be absolved”...

I am pulled, swirling in the red sands, toward the low relief of his graceful form, and his wings flutter and lift from the stone slab to which an ancient artist thought to commit him for all time. But he is far from trapped; rather, he merely pauses here to rest from his nightly voyages on the winds of space, and the missing portion of his wing attests to his incomplete residence in this expressionless cube of air.

We pause for the same reason, he and I; hence our kinship in the quest for quiet and beauty. I am fortunate to have come during one of his respit moments, for even now, as I, he grows restless, and will soon depart for the jade and midnight currents of eternity, riding aloft to the plains of ethereal nothingness, where he’ll fold his wings to his back in the light of neither the sun nor the moon, and taste the fruits of honey that he now shows my desirous, envying eyes.

The radiance clings to him even now, glittering on the edge of his robes and atop his sandaled feet, and the fruit grows taut with juice in his winsome hand. My mouth wets as his beaked visage smiles deeper, and the curls of his hair seem soft as lamb’s wool. He beckons my aching mind, and I swim in longing, faint to take his hand and soar forever into the dappled firmament that awaits...and yet, my body remains stubbornly rooted to the soil of the earth; my essence interred in a physical sepulchre of preconception, and I can only cast him an apologetic glance across the interminable distance and utter a single, shaking word of solemn, irrefutable promise...
“Soon”...

Of Knowledge

2006-01-09T19:17:00.000-08:00

Speak not of that which is unwritten...rather, rejoice in the silence of words you do not know. Understand the vast expanse of your own limits and come to revel in the void of knowledge that will plague your existence for eternity, until the recognition of this unquenchable hollow itself evolves into a balm for the agonizing dagger of thirst it perpetuates. In this is the only conceivable modicum of peace, for to pursue the elusive changelings of knowledge and understanding is akin, for those of pure motivation, to a race run on a quicksilver track, and each step forward seems only to yield an unavoidable fumble of movements that, in turn, necessitate a host of additional exertions. Forgive these motions their innocent demands, which curl around you like the fingertips of a child, and love them with unconditional purity for the unexpected enlightenment they yield. Find joy in suddenly mastering that which you never knew was there to learn, and savor the sweet taste of fruits harvested from seeds you yourself never thought to plant. And when the nectar of revelation trickles slowly down your throat, you may of course pause to enjoy the momentary pleasure it affords before continuing the endless search for its next precious source. On wings of utmost humility alight from flower to flower, coming to know with utter completeness the flavor of even the blossoms that seem unappealing, for to truly seek knowledge is also to relinquish discrimination, and even the most unassuming bloom might prove the sweetest taste upon lips of the genuinely curious. In this way, it would seem, the most valuable journeys are those whose destination, until reached, remains a glorious mystery, and, ultimately, the detours along an already unplanned path subsume and replace the importance of any far-off point of cessation that lingers on the misty horizon of Truth.

Incipit

2006-01-09T18:43:00.000-08:00

Welcome, beloved friends, invited or accidental...I have at last joined the world of online thought interchange and am humbled by your visit. You have entered a realm of uncensored thoughts, artistic exploration, and consummate freedom. The postings will be of unpredictable and variegated content, but consistent in their unmanipulated record of a random soul. Thank you, in advance, for any part of the transcription you choose to read...