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Alone

Tonight I came across a poem blogged by a woman who feels alone and lost, and the poem was basically asking ten ways to none who’s going to save her from feeling so alone. To me it seems bizarre that a pretty lady would have such thoughts, since it’s really easy for women to get male attention. It’s generally a good deal harder for men. However, I found myself sympathizing and commented with an earlier variation of the following.

Alone

This poem has been published in my book an inkling hope: select poems, available in Kindle and paperback formats. Out of consideration for those who have purchased a copy, I have removed it from this post and online viewing in general.

Well, not complete sympathy, considering she’ll be able to land pretty much the man of her choice once she figures out how the whole male-female human interrelations thing works. At least for short durations (most men seem to be unreliable as loyal long-term partners). But, in the deserts of loneliness, it is we who must save ourselves, scraping our way across the barren steppes toward the ever elusive springs of inner peace. I don’t see how another can really save us individually from our own loneliness.

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A Lullaby

Thought I’d write my inner child a lullaby. This is my 20th villanelle.

A Lullaby

This poem has been published in my book an inkling hope: select poems, available in Kindle and paperback formats. Out of consideration for those who have purchased a copy, I have removed it from this post and online viewing in general.

This poem fell out pretty quickly. I came into work about a week and a half ago to discover my schedule had been shifted dramatically. There is a part of me, a fairly large part, that always feels that I’ve just done something wrong and I’m about to be punished miserably for it. I’m pretty sure this is connected to the same part of me that, throughout my childhood, lived in sheer terror of dozens of unlikely events. Events like tidal waves (though living well inland), floods (though not living near a river or flood plain), super storms (though living in a mild climate), and really out there stuff like black holes sucking earth into oblivion. Oh, and death.

These were debilitating fears. When thoughts of this or that potential disaster passed through my mind, my body would go cold with terror. Not just an anxiety that causes fretting and unease, but the sort of fear that whitewashes the mind like hi-beams on a dirty windshield and sends waves of frozen fear throughout the body like liquid nitrogen.

For some reason, the most trivial things can trigger this liquid nitrogen whitewash effect. The night I started this poem, I was told by my supervisor as I walked into the on-duty administration office to clock in that he needed to talk to me. As it turns out, he needed to talk to everyone—about the restructuring of everyone’s schedules. But, in that moment, I was frozen in the headlights, and it took me a couple of days to recover from it. This is one of the long-term effects of thoroughly messing up a child’s mind.

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Eye Fatigue

I have spent the first five or so weeks where I work sitting at a desk throughout the night in a dark group home unit. The only real light is a two foot long florescent bulb, fixed to the wall about two feet above the desk. So, just above eye level. Directly under the light is a fish tank with six gold fish swimming about, occasionally splashing a few drops out onto my laptop.

If you’ve ever seen a fish tank in a dark room with one strong light situated directly over it, then you might have an idea what of what it’s like to sit at this desk, hour after hour, with this fish tank wrinkling surreal light into your face while the full effect of the florescent bulb slowly but surely sucks the moisture from your eyes and brains.

Of course with the psychic imprints from children past and present—ghosts—walking the hall, peeking from rooms, and brushing the psyche, it can get a little heavy on the mind in other ways, too. This sort of thing can only lead to a postmodern bit of poetry.

Eye Fatigue

Objects seem at rest
    like tide pools
  rippling in the sun’s hard light
      thoughts drip restless ease

Lull back heavy lids
    to waking dreams
  feel the touch of ghosts and
      shadow conversation

Bright light darkens
    blurring mental eyes
  blind mind draws
      long cloudy veils

A familiar name
    catches in the ear
  twitch slide cross jerk
      white flash sudden cold

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Acceleration

I recently stumbled across Newton’s Law of Acceleration in my readings. It was explained such that I was able to grasp and appreciate the concept. Then I thought of how bound we must feel as a people who have come to more or less understand such things. Here we sit on a speck of dust flung out near the rim of a predator galaxy. There’s a lot going on out there, and all we can do is watch through telescopes the faded light cast from events beyond history.

Acceleration

This poem has been published in my book an inkling hope: select poems, available in Kindle and paperback formats. Out of consideration for those who have purchased a copy, I have removed it from this post and online viewing in general.
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Cathedral

There is a redwood State Reserve about 30 miles west of Ukiah called Montgomery Woods. The woods are a series of groves which have been purchased and set aside for preservation by various parties, most of which have been involved in the logging industry one way or another, oddly enough. A friend and I used to visit this park on a regular basis, and we came to think of it as being much like a cathedral. In fact, we referred to the entry into the first large grove as “The Cathedral”. Thus my 8th trisect poem.

Cathedral

This poem has been published in my book an inkling hope: select poems, available in Kindle and paperback formats. Out of consideration for those who have purchased a copy, I have removed it from this post and online viewing in general.

As I wrote this poem, I read up on the history and architecture of European Cathedrals, dating back to the Roman Empire, and looked for visual relationships between them and various points of interest within the Montgomery Woods. As I did so this poem began to take form with the first segment, “nave”, which is to say, the main hall of a cathedral. This segment focuses on the redwoods themselves.

Then I tried to think of a more complex object of focus for the second segment and thought of the Catholic Liturgies, so “vespers”. But as I finished “vespers” it dawned on me that this was describing a process more so than an object, and as I struggled to find a process to focus on for the third segment, I eventually decided to make “vespers”—the prayerful sounds of nature—that process.

I decided to focus on the “understory” of the woods for the second segment, which can describe anything found beneath the crown of the redwood forest. Slowly but surely, when I closed my eyes and visualized my walks through Montgomery Woods, I began to see relations between the understory and cathedral designs, and so segment two took form.

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Hard Fact

I like to hang out in Denny’s on my nights off. It’s one of two places in town that’s open all night, so if I’m not going to just sit in my tiny cottage and rot, it’s a place to go. When the bars close around 2am, the drunken masses crash the gates and burst in like a flood. They bring with them many antics and loud conversations.

One such conversation occurred right near me recently, and got me to thinking. Two middle aged women were going on about all sorts of things, including ex and current boyfriends, child support from ex husbands, and you name it. I quote the segment that got me going for this write in the poem.

Hard Fact

“How was it last night?”
“It was great. I felt things I never felt before.”

How many times have I heard this
    said this

It should have dawned on me then that
    yes of course
        each experience is different
            each partner a new adventure.

Yet it’s nothing new
    this new thing never felt before.

It’s been felt over and over
    since the dawn of man
        since infant hands first reached
            for mother’s receding breast

This is hardwired
    the new thing never felt before

Coded into every membrane
    twin twined strands whose chief
        design is to drive the wet
            machine to reproduce

Consciousness manifests a complex
    ghost in the chassis

It has never been felt before
    so it must be real
        sincere and meant to be
            the path to joy everlasting

But it decays and the hardware presses on
    relentless for the next new thing

The cell wins over rationale
    till no excuse can justify
        the barren need which strives to burst
            forth well placed seed

Yes, we are but hapless victims of our biology, and periodically we even think we’re having a great time. But really we’re just being taken for a ride, dragged through rocky, sulfurous mud by the wild horses of brutal instinct.

So, there’s some Buddhism for you.

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Rain

This poem, my 19th hybridanelle, is inspired by a series of storms that passed through Southern California when I was in my early teens, probably ten or eleven years old. There were a series hurricanes blowing over Hawaii at the time, and they were so big that they spun off storm after storm into Southern California—And I remember them as waves of storms.

Rain

Come, lend your rolling cover; shade this dry cracked ground,
conceal the tragedy of broken years,
and dim the raging colors that siege a weary mind;
ease the pressure from the pressing blue,
dull the stainless cobalt’s razor hues
which vivisect perception like a blade.

Subdue the cubist concrete, the painted slats of wood,
the swaying glass and steel that mock the day;
come lend your rolling cover; shade this dry cracked ground
with a half-light suited best for ravaged hopes
and gray the glaring cruelty of the sun;
dull the stainless cobalt’s razor hues.

Gather up your mass and spill your shadows down
across the crawl of long distempered hours
and dim the raging colors that siege a weary mind,
dissevered from the rush of tragic signs;
raise from out the waves your phasing layers
and gray the glaring cruelty of the sun.

Immerse this arid air in contemplative mood
until the asphalt mirrors every minute;
come lend your rolling cover; shade this dry cracked ground
where seeds have rarely sprouted into life;
grant a brief reprieve from endless drought;
raise from out the waves your phasing layers.

Fill the world with stillness; play that quiet sound
which puddles every lane with rippled moments
and dim the raging colors that siege a weary mind,
electric bright beneath cerulean drapes,
the overwhelming crush of open skies;
grant a brief reprieve from endless drought.

Break this barren view with drifts of coiled wind,
and let your blistered vapors calm each instant;
come lend your rolling cover; shade this dry cracked ground
and dim the raging colors that siege a weary mind,
trapped within a frozen summer-scape;
ease the pressure from the pressing blue,
the overwhelming crush of open skies
which vivisect perception like a blade.

My childhood was dry and barren in many ways. Barren of education. Dry of hope and potential. I watched it slip away for lack of resources. And then my brain cracked from all the drugs I was forced to take since I was eight, and I ended up institutionalized as a ward of the court from twelve until I ran away at fifteen.

They don’t prepare you for life in these places. What they prepare you for is a life of utter dependency upon the system. If you break free from this in any small way, then this is a degree of freedom, escape, success. I pretty much had to chew off a leg to escape the steel-jawed bear trap of the system—so in a sense I’ve been twice crippled during the process of getting free. Needless to say, as a result, it’s not so easy for me to fit in and be a good little cog in the societal machine. But I’m told this is part of what makes me “unique”, as if this were a good thing.

Rain was my balm during these years, even as a runaway. Knowing full well my sleeping bag wasn’t waterproof, I’d welcome the rain when it came, with something like a sense of joy, or perhaps it was a kind of serenity. I usually found a way to shield myself enough to stay relatively dry, and thereby warm. Sometimes I didn’t and I became a shivering wet sponge by morning. Yet it was my balm, always my balm. Everything seemed so stark and rigid in the full light of day, overbearingly clear. So clear it scrambled my thoughts into confusion. In the half-light of the rain I’d find myself, even as an eleven year old, just at peace.

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Origami

Recently, as I reflected on how I seem to resist the best efforts of people to change me in this way or that, I found myself writing this.

Origami

This poem has been published in my book an inkling hope: select poems, available in Kindle and paperback formats. Out of consideration for those who have purchased a copy, I have removed it from this post and online viewing in general. However, the above player can still be used to listen to it.

Indeed I have always resisted obvious attempts to change my nature, especially when the person making the attempt seemed to have something to gain from it. Those who have had the greatest impact in my life are people who just offered ideas, letting me take or leave them as I wished. I think such people felt no desire to gain anything by changing me, and were therefore compassionately offering a piece of information and/or perspective along the way.

Publication History:

Clamor — Fall 2009

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blindspot

My 7th trisect poem. Segment one is focused on the thunderhead, or supercell. This is the metaphor for the “thing” that has blinded all sense of foresight for me my entire teenage and adult life, at least since I was 13. I’ve always been amazed by how some people can see a desk job, and through it “see” a four bedroom house, a Benz, and a paid-off mortgage in 30 years, complete with wife, kids, a dog, and a picket fence. All I’ve ever seen is this thundering cyclone. Similarly I find it amazing how some people can look at a pile of wood and see a shed, a new business, or a planter garden, while all I tend to see is just a bunch of wood—and the thunderhead. So, this is segment one, “Erubus”, the realm of darkness and obscurity personified (not to be confused with night—that’s different).

Segment two focuses on the narrow road—in this case the road of life, specifically my life path, or “calling”, as it were, which I do my best to follow.

Segment three focuses on my interaction between this road and the ever-present thunderhead which looms on the horizon (and often much closer in the mind’s eye), sucking “the long horizon from the mind”. So the process depicted here is that of obscuration, brought on by a life of personal defeat and dehumanization.

blindspot

erebus

a million million shades of gray
swim between the land and sky
absorbing every detail into mist

many-jointed shoulders haunch
hulking up against the dome
to scatter shadows out across the earth

amorphous legs traverse the realm
labored with colossal strides
gaping forth an omnipresent maw

and in its belly rumbles deep
the acids of uncertainty
which churn the world into obscurity
 

calling

laid with crumbling asphalt rock or dirt
a rarely traveled path meanders far
across the scapes of possibility

beneath the canopies of ponderosa
along the stony course of waterways
amid the yawn of jagged desert peaks

the way of freedom weaves by dusks and dawns
a twisted uroboros colored earth
wrapped across the contours of existence

boiled in the depths of crawling storms
it rises writhing sharply into sight
a tired trail of chance and destiny
 

presage

colors fold into a distant haze
an open road to somewhere fades from view
lost in many-layered nimbus plumes

long cascading booms convey
a wall of nearing emptiness
which sucks the long horizon from the mind

this narrow road unfolds and turns
to meet the turbid banks of doubt
which cling to every curve along the way

weary legs and blistered feet
lurch and falter on the path
yet swing forever onward toward the void

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Surrender

This poem, my 18th hybridanelle, began to manifest in mind about three weeks ago as I walked through the Montgomery Woods near Ukiah with a friend, utterly panic-stricken and overwhelmed by an irruption of fragile emotions. I had at this point been experiencing varying degrees of the same for about a week and a half.

There comes a point with extreme anxiety—panic—where life not only feels and seems unfaceable, but on all applicable fronts is unfaceable. The only way through this sort of thing is to resolve, or have resolved beforehand, to live through it, no matter the torment. And since I had made a deal with myself as a fourteen-year-old, after my first NDE from a car accident (see my first trisect, “E merge nce”, for a poem inspired by this experience), not ever to submit to death while in a non-peaceful state, I was grimly determined to ride it out despite some serious impulses to do otherwise.

When the car hit me as a fourteen year old, I was in a state of extreme mental, spiritual, and emotional unrest, and the horror of this state “carried over” in such a way as to become tremendously amplified in the absence of spiritual impedance, my body. And on returning to my body, I understood that I can never go like that. My life has been about cultivating peace of mind to the best of my ability ever since.

Up to that point in the Montgomery Woods, I had been trying out various mantras to fend off the anxiety. Each of them would provide me with some level of distraction from my panic and emotional distress, but none offered any sense of comfort, reprieve, or peace from this turmoil. I told my friend who walked with me that my prayer-mantras were only providing some limited distraction, and that it seemed impossible find something that would overcome the sheer strength of my anxiety and doubt, my tendency to perseverate and fret. And then I asked him if he had any ideas on what I should ask god for in my prayers that might provide this offset.

He then told me that I was going about it all wrong; that I was going to god with my hand out like a beggar on the sidewalk. As he said this I already began to realize my mistake, but he continued. He went on to point out that the various religions of our Western societies have produced a race of people who go to god with a shopping list, and who become very resentful of god when certain items on this list aren’t granted. This could only be called ego-based prayer, and this is exactly what I was doing. So he aptly made it clear that I was asking the wrong question, and for the wrong person—myself.

And it’s funny, since I have been a member of twelve step programs most of my life you would think that I would already know that the most peace comes not from trying to manipulate god toward my own will, but in humbly seeking out god’s will for me, along with the willingness and strength to carry it out. Whenever I’ve done this, I’ve been led right, toward personal freedom and peace of mind, and in a way that magically contributed to a few other lives around me, oddly enough. Whenever I’ve done otherwise I’ve slyly managed to land myself in a brand-spanking new life tragedy that ultimately ends up sucking time and energy—peace of mind—out of my own life and the lives of those who care about me.

Once this understanding comes, it’s kind of a no-brainer—Just a matter of coming into contact with this understanding and internalizing it… Yet again.

Surrender

This poem has been published in my book an inkling hope: select poems, available in Kindle and paperback formats. Out of consideration for those who have purchased a copy, I have removed it from this post and online viewing in general.
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Opened

Not everyone has your best interest at heart. Some people will treat you like an emotional science experiment, and if you’ve become emotionally involved with such a person, I feel for you. It sucks.

Opened

I’ve been split with a rib spreader
     in my sleep
          awakened to agony

My chest won’t close again
     anguished nipples face the wall
          a red fist pounds dry air

Tears ripped from my eyes
     can’t wail back the rift
          and seal the wound

Muscles spasm in vain
     against the stainless grip
          pinned to a shiny table

Helpless fingers clutch
     themselves back until bruised
          fingernails peel back the skin

Where is the surgeon?
     where is the nurse in scrubs?
          who will remove this awful grip?