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Blessing #3

It’s too bad I haven’t been saving the blessings I write into the title page of an inkling hope when I give a copy away to someone. This particular blessing I’ve used twice now, but I tend to keep thinking of something new before too long.

Blessing #3

May yer skeletons keep hidden
    and yer angels be about
wherever ye are bidden
        and whenever ye go out.

May the path before ye sparkle
    and the path behind ye gleam
from out more distant darkness
        that fades off like a dream.

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The Enduring Seed

As some of my previous posts have explored, I ran away from the Juvenile Los Angeles Courts when I was 15. This was unplanned. There was a “houseparent,” as they were called, I only now remember as RJ at my last residential home with The San Fernando Child Guidance Clinic who beat me into submission, pinned me down using a hold that is today considered child abuse and can actually kill you, and threatened to break my arm—the hold in question involved twisting my right arm halfway out of the socket at an angle that could easily break the humerus without much added pressure.

“I’ll just tell them you fell,” he said, laughing. Actually laughing. His wife, the other houseparent—there were just two that lived with the kids full time—kicked me in my face, which was half mashed into the shaggy brown carpet. “Oh! He just fell!” She laughed, “That’s going to leave a mark.” They both laughed. This was all going down in my bedroom, and yes I was no saint—I had just ripped my large sliding closet door off in one of my tantrums. I cursed them out for all it was worth, which only seemed to make them laugh all the more.

This was pretty much all I had ever known, one form of abuse or another. But I was beginning to realize this was not how it should be, that something was wrong, that most of the people who dictated the terms of my childhood and upbringing were in fact twisted, sadistic, and void of compassion—including my parents. It wasn’t long after this incident that I found myself hitchhiking thither and yon across the highways of America, taking odd jobs, avoiding the larger population centers, and by some unimaginable grace steering clear of the predators, for about 2 years.

This poem reflects on a night I spent atop a mesa near Kingman, Arizona, probably my 6th day out. My 4th day out, two days prior, a Grand Canyon National Park ranger gave me a subzero sleeping bag. I tell that story here.

The Enduring Seed

The midnight sky was moonless
            and clear as tempered glass
I could discern no gap between the stars
      that drifted up as numerous
                  as white sands by long shores
the milky way foamed like a standing wave

Beside me a Smith-Corona
            typewriter case contained
a toothbrush, rag, two sets of dirty clothes,
      half a loaf of bread,
                  a jar of strawberry jam,
and six days worth of desert dust and grime.

I climbed to the crest of a mesa
            feeling my way through darkness
and lined up the flattest rocks I could find
      to prevent my rolling downhill
                  as I drifted off to sleep
tears drying cold and taut on restless cheeks

I remember screaming out
            to that heavy shroud of stars
to whatever benevolent beings could hear my pleas
      I remember cursing God
                  until I spattered blood
in open palms I then washed dry with dust

Oh and I remember
            throwing back my arms
chest heaved out to darkness, fully expecting
      to be struck down—vaporized
                  by God’s infernal might
and somehow disappointed life went on

I remember crawling dazed
            into my bright blue bag
tired, weak, defeated and staring up
      through a drawstring hole
                  at all those distant angels
wings flickering syncopation in absolute silence

I was alone with my rage
            completely alone and free
alone with hunger, alone with fear, alone
      with sorrow, grief, and hate,
                  with raw, unbalanced, potential
alone in the dark struggling at the edge of extinction

The stars gazed back at me
            and offered only light
a billion little pinpricks stung my eyes
      I spoke once more through tears
                  and said I only wish
to know somehow that I would be okay

and with that very last word
            the dark that held its breath
throughout the hours with not a single stir
      exhaled and breathed at last
                  and from the twinkling expanse
a star broke loose and streaked across the night

There in that moment began
            a strange new resonance
a current of meaning for which no words exist
      an insight beyond the reach
                  of language or even thought
and to the watercolor stars—Thank You

I drifted off to sleep
            and dreamt of rattlesnakes
of scorpions, coyotes and unexpected strangers
      and here and there I woke
                  looked up into the stars
said Thank You and returned to broken dreams

The sun rose—I unzipped
            from my cobalt blue cocoon
stood up hungry, thirsty and cold—and stared
      out over sand and rock
                  as far the eye could see
and after bread and jam began my descent

That day I set off in search
            for a completely impossible future
a seed laid firm and deep within my soul
      that sprouted and slowly grew
                  from barren soils cracked
beneath the heat of apathy and malice

Yes, something did change in me that night, and I don’t think the language exists to express or convey it. Sometimes I wonder why I try, knowing full well that what I wish to accomplish is actually beyond the reach of words, imagery, metaphor—anything.

Yet, I have also been driven to the edge of language my entire life, ever since I stumbled across the Best Loved Poems of the American People as a 12 year old and my drugged, traumatized, disorganized brain for the first time began to stitch together coherent thoughts through the power of structured language, imagery, and metaphor.

So here I am, attempting yet again to walk the insubstantial hinterlands of language and find one or two lexical, imaginary vapors that may or may not convey some small aspect of my experience, and the insights gained therein.

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In Sickness

I made a note for the idea behind this poem when my wife was dying from refeeding syndrome in 2018. At the time, I was way too close to the matter to even think about writing a poem like this. But, now some time has passed, and my wife survived to regain her health again.

In Sickness

If I knew then what now I know,
  would I still take the vows?
Would I still pledge my life to you
    beneath the cherry boughs?

      Your arms are like a skeleton;
        your face is gaunt and frail.
      A bag is taped against your side
          collecting what you spill.

Would I still bear the looming loss
  if somehow then I knew
what “sickness” meant so long ago
    within that heavy vow?

      You vomit everything you eat;
        your heart rate will not slow.
      Each day it seems you’re nearer yet
          the place we all must go.

The truth is, I have no idea—
  The man I was back then
might well have taken every step
    to circumvent this end.

      The doctors at the hospital—
        They have no reason why
      you will not stabilize and heal—
          I fight back bitter sighs.

But he is not the man that’s here.
  For all my fear and grief,
I will not turn away from you
    so long as you draw breath.

Turns out there is a fairly high percentage of cancer patients who die from refeeding syndrome—a metabolic cascade failure that ends in death—especially with large stage 3 tumors. This is because the tumor takes all the body’s nutrients, essentially starving the patient. When the tumor is gone, the effect can be just like the prisoner of war returning to a normal diet for the first time after rescue, which can trigger the syndrome.

Unfortunately, it seems most doctors don’t know to look for this. It was pure chance that someone on my wife’s medical team realized what was happening and started the protocol for saving her life—parenteral nutrition. This means being fed intravenously until the body remembers how to correctly metabolize food through the digestive system on its own.

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Convergence

Once I finished “Light” in March, my queue was finally empty. So I found myself looking in a folder I long ago named “Backburner” to see what was there. This is the folder where I put files for poems that I started working on, but eventually abandoned for one reason or other. Upon reviewing its contents, I decided the folder didn’t contain anything of interest to me. Inside that folder is another one named “Altogether Abandoned.” In there I found a few old ideas sitting in digital limbo. One was titled “hybridanelle—original marriage commemoration attempt.” I only vaguely recalled what that might have looked like, so I opened it.

The first 13 lines of this hybridanelle were already written. I tried to think of why I abandoned the poem, and then I remembered. It didn’t really feel like the marriage I was entering into. So I scrapped it and composed “Matrimony” instead, in large part inspired by hurricane Katrina. Much more fitting for my first marriage. The first 13 mystically abstract lines of this unfinished poem were actually more fitting for my current marriage. However, there’s just no way I could re-commemorate it to my second marriage. My wife deserves completely original poems, such as “Wild Cherry,” written a couple years—and not that many poems—ago.

So why bring this out of the mothballs? Well, I liked the language of these first 13 lines. I didn’t actually think I could make it work as a full hybridanelle poem, but I thought of this concept of life as a stream and streams converging into one another as they move through the fields of existence, and I decided I’d like to give it a try. So, no longer a marriage commemoration poem—just a poem inspired by the notion of convergent lives, hence the title.

    Convergence

       Consciousness emerged in swirls of color.
          The pliant void composed a shifting stream,
      an ever-changing song of rippling texture.
   Awareness rose and surged in subtle shades of light,
     searching through confusion for companionship and trust
         eventually to join another stream for life.
           Two channels merged to share a mutual course,
          brought to flow as one by karmic forces.
       The pliant void composed a shifting stream,
     singing like a river that curves throughout the night,
    swelled with faint reflections of a darkness steeped in stars.
       Awareness rose and surged in subtle shades of light,
            sent before the hidden crush of pressures
         en route to mingle matters of the soul.
     Brought to flow as one by karmic forces,
       each turbid swell of dream converged and realized
           harmony beyond the scope of individual strains.
              Eventually to join another stream for life,
             each flood progressed with all its sense of self
          through wooded solitudes and desert places
      en route to mingle matters of the soul.
 Condensed from engrammatic vapors, recondite,
     elements of being coalesced until in streams
         awareness rose and surged in subtle shades of light
             amid the grassy sprawl of open spaces
          beneath the floating glow of moonlit clouds
     through wooded solitudes and desert places
  down long cascades past deep brown pools—where lithe
      recollection’s slender shadow below the surface stirs—
            eventually to join another stream for life.
                Like soft white rays refracted through high mists,
           consciousness emerged in swirls of color
        beneath the floating glow of moonlit clouds,
    an ever-changing song of rippling texture
that shimmered down from realms of dream, so faint and slight,
    time held no form and had no bearing until from out this trance
      awareness rose and surged in subtle shades of light,
           eventually to join another stream for life.

This, my 22nd hybridanelle, was a bear to compose. As I suspected, the refrains used in the first 13 lines were not easily remolded into fresh expressions. It also took me a good while to figure out what I was doing with the meter and end-line schemes. There’s one scheme that doesn’t use end-line prosody all, but related concepts, such as “color” and “texture,” “course” and “stream,” “pressures” and “forces,” and a few more. Pretty interesting.

The meters, it turns out, switch between pentameters, hexameters and heptameters. Being a bit out of practice, I actually found it difficult to wrap my brain around this complexity, and I kept forgetting to double-check and make sure I’m following the correct pattern. This gave me some insights into why poetry took a 135 degree turn toward gushy chopped prose a couple centuries ago. It can be bloody difficult, and a lot of times the end result is just not what you were hoping for.

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Let’s go down

There was recently a death in my wife’s family. It was no-one I knew. He was close to her father, however, who now lives with us. When something like this happens, my wife will want to visit one of the Catholic churches in town, presumably to pray for the soul of the departed.

Let’s go down

Let’s go down to the masonry
that holds the high-arched doors
and in to the pews beyond them
to offer our inmost prayers.

Let’s go down to the marble font
and cross our heads with the water
as we remember with all our thoughts
one who is no longer with us.

Let’s go down to the heart of the nave
where ancients circle the altar
and bow our heads in the solemn light
that eases the restive soul.

Let’s go down to the effigies
that peer from their quiet coves
and light the vigils with incense sticks
for one who has gone before.

Let’s go down to the redbrick church,
the one where spirits dream,
and kneel at the creaky old wooden pews
to pray for the recent dead.

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I must be

One may be able to infer from these words the nature of an inner struggle. It is a struggle that has endured in one form or another since childhood. Now that I’m a father, now that I look every day on my baby son and experience the wild array of emotions that come with watching him coalesce and evolve, this struggle has become all at once completely inane and yet all the more intense. It is winter. My one method of preference is exposure. Yet I have a powerful new reason to cope with the fears and uncertainties that have plagued my being for as long as I can remember.

I must be

I must be more than memory,
   more than just a name,
more than faded echoes cast
      from pictures in a frame.

I must be more than faint suspicions
   coiled in the heart,
smoke-like apparitions drifting
      through a starless dark.

I must be more than supposition,
   more than just a guess,
fashioned from a dust that fell
      through years of emptiness.

I must be more than stories told
   by uncles, aunts and kin,
anecdotes of vague recall
      from time beyond your ken.

I must be more than fantasies
   of how things might have been,
conjured up to fill a void
      that widened in my stead.

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Samsara

Birth. Death. Impermanence. Samsara. Samsara is a concept I was exposed to and learned about during my late teen years. At first, the notion of a never ending cycle of birth and death—coming and going—was somehow a comfort to my thoughts. But as I’ve meditated on the concept over the years, it’s become less and less of a comfort and I begin to grasp the value in learning how to find one’s way out of this never-ending stream of coming and going.

Here I reflect on the coming, the going, and the impermanence of it all. This is my 6th synthetic ode.

Samsara

i

Roiling coiling boiling
             beyond memory dreams
   phase and shift in amniotic mists
         swirl in the silence of pulsation
      swim in the stillness of song and dance

Slowly gently gradually
   sensations coalesce illuminating
shapes only somewhat guessed before
      till time takes hold and presses
long hard strained contractions
         bearing breath into the light
      where lungs expel a fluid reverie
   and struggle with thin arid vapors of life

Now spry pink fingers fan out
            new translucent maple leaves
      that ball and bob and grasp
         at each candescent moment
   each ray of raw potential
               emerging from the void

ii

Ailing paling failing
             beyond hope of recall
   yesteryears evaporate like mists
         drift in and out of apprehension
      drone in the absence of conscious thought

Fiercely surely naturally
   perception dissipates into a darkness
shapes only somewhat recognized
      as time slows down and shuffles
somber strained abstractions
         toward an ever shifting shade
      where lungs expand in fluid misery
   and struggle at each dim sensation of life

Here sun browned fingers curl up
            frail exhausted walnut leaves
      that twist and creak and claw
         at brief pellucid moments
   at dreams of lost potential
               returning to the void

iii

An old oak grows on the side of a hill,
the side that faces the afternoon sun;
on the ground in the grass, her litterfall
has collected around her ancient trunk,
its bottommost layers turned back to soil.

A short distance away the blanched remains
of a sister lies rotting in the grass,
her wood resculpted by late autumn rains
and frosts that covered her corpse with a glass
that deepened the wedges along the grain.

The old oak rises, the last of her kin;
her trunk is split and a third of her limbs
in perpetual winter scrape like bone
the progression of ever changing climes—
the blistering azure, the thunder’s groan.

In the shape of a crescent moon, decay
has collected around her knobby base,
the twigs and branches that once would display
a green that shimmered now turning to waste
where skeletal shadows reach out and pray.

Another third is beginning to wane,
the crown has turned to a light mottled shade
and the leaves have begun to curl and thin
where, before, a reflective glimmer played
like fairy folk dancing within the sun.

She is old; she was old when condors soared
in the skies that revolve above her leaves;
for centuries she has weathered the storms
that lumber in from the watery weaves
which pattern the sandscapes of distant shores.

Her time is near, as it nears for us all;
the vibrancy of her youth has been lost
to the powerful change that claims us all,
yet she faces the end and bears the worst
with a grace that exists within us all.

So here part i explores birth, or coming into being; part ii explores death, or going out of being; and part iii explores impermanence, or the stream of beingness. Most of the parallelisms in parts i and ii exist between the two segments. You may find it an interesting experience to read parts i and ii at the same time, line by line.

Another thing that may catch your attention as you read is that part iii uses an entirely different style than the first two parts. Everything about it is different. Parts i and ii read like free verse while part iii reads more like a piece of classical poetry. This is intentional. This is meant to jar the senses by jabbing a sliver of “impermanence” under the fingernail of thought.

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Loss

Two of my wife’s uncles have recently passed away. The first after suffering a series of debilitating strokes, the first of which occurred around five years ago. The second about a year after discovering stage four cancer in his throat and enduring debilitating surgeries. I plan eventually to write memorial poems for each of them.

As I reflected on what it must have been like for the families of these men, a metaphor formed in mind and I found myself writing this.

Loss

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 is my 10th Petrarchan sonnet.

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the resting place

Imagery and metaphor do not express ideas and emotion; they evoke ideas and emotion. What’s interesting about this is that those who read rarely even realize that these thoughts and feelings have been evoked from—not transmitted to—them through this process. As a poet, I’ll sometimes look for imagery and metaphor that evoke from me feelings and ideas similar enough to the original inspiration to consider it worth sharing.

But, I also recognize that what each reader will experience from my words will be unique to them. So, while the poem may be “mine” from the standpoint of having authored it, the poem is also yours from the vantage point of reading and experiencing all it evokes.

the resting place

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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The Rarest Gem

There is a women’s Christian group that meets at 7pm on Tuesdays at one of the coffeehouses I hang out at. They usually gather round a large meeting table near the table I tend to favor, so I’ll often find myself listening in on their discussions—Not because I’m interested or nosy so much as because I possess the unfortunate inability to tune anything out.

Six to ten women attend this meeting, bringing a thin blue book with a title something to do with living a wholesome life as a Christian woman. Each week they discuss what they’ve read and share stories about what’s going on in their lives, often giving one another advice on how to deal with this difficulty or that personal trauma. Considering all the personality types involved, it seems like they form a great emotional support group for one another.

About two weeks ago one of the women was visibly despondent throughout the discussion, so toward the end, after each of them had shared and discussed something from her week, they gently ganged up on her and got her to open up. She broke down into shuddering sobs as she attempted to explain what was going on with her. Turns out she was feeling overwhelmed and depressed by drama and chaos created by some of her close friends. Stuff that perhaps fewer men than women would understand or relate to.

This poem builds on some thoughts that formed in my head as they urged her to draw a line and demand that her friends respect certain boundaries.

The Rarest Gem

Peace of mind is a rare and precious gem,
  shot through with deep unblemished shades
   of autumn skies that never fade,
each facet polished to a cool aplomb.
It waits within the deepest, darkest clime
  to be unearthed from rock and clay
   and crafted in the light of day
by empathy and wisdom till it gleams.

   So we must choose our friends with utmost care,
for there are those with whom it can’t be trusted,
  who treat this jewel with disdain,
   who scuff it up with gall and shame
until it’s rendered void of all its luster
  and every thought is muddied with despair.

This is my 9th Petrarchan sonnet.

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Of Promise

This one is for a kid who is remarkably lazy and unmotivated. Some people seem to believe that “promise” means “promised”. This is of course not the case. Nothing is promised, even where there exists great promise. One way or the other, an effort is involved in realizing the potential of ones promise. This particular breed of potential manifests when one applies oneself to the task of of its development and refinement over an extended period of time.

Of Promise

Promise waits for no-one
   and refuses to be known
by those who sleep in ruin,
   who refuse to learn and grow.

Promise is the angel
   who will never hear the pleas
of one who hides behind the
   skirts of mere velleity.

Promise stops, however,
   to listen to the soul
that struggles ever forward,
   ever focused on the goal.

Promise sings in shadow
   and will only come to light
for those who work to find her
   where she plays just out of sight.

Promise gives no refuge
   to the one who has no care,
who floats through life dependent,
   weak of will and unaware.

Promise stoops to succor
   him who stands and bears the weight
of tragedy and sorrow,
   striving hard to change his fate.

Promise is potential
   that will only sprout and grow
when fertilized with effort
   and well watered with regard.