monday, monday

mundane.
a breadth of hours
wider than
the indigo well
of your thoughts
is deep.

you come to
four o’ clock
after throwing out
line after line;
buckets pull up
nothing close
to enough
to sate

a day’s heart-
hunger. silly you,
fishing just
water to fill

that internal
gnaw for only
plain roots after
everyone’s temporary
tendrils tie you
down, constrict &
eat all your
sunlight,

green lust in
their leaves only
spreads further up
& further out.

you: full sick
of shallow sums
& only want some
challenge:

wading through
thick mud, thigh-
deep problems &
bootpulls of just
the most real,
necessary
work.

A Ritual to Read to Each Other by William Stafford

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail, 
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, 
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep,
the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--
should be clear; the darkness around us is deep.

In this language, no industrial revolution;

no pasteurized milk; no oxygen, no telephone;

only sheep, fish, horses, water falling.

The middle class can hardly speak it.

In this language, no flush toilet; you stumble

through dark and rain with a handful of rags.

The door groans; the old smell comes

up from under the earth to meet you.

But this language believes in ghosts;

chairs rock by themselves under the lamp; horses

neigh inside an empty gully, nothing

at the bottom but moonlight and black rocks.

The woman with marble hands whispers

this language to you in your sleep; faces

come to the window and sing rhymes; old ladies

wind long hair, hum, tat, fold jam inside pancakes.

In this language, you can’t chit-chat

holding a highball in your hand, can’t

even be polite. Once the sentence starts its course,

all your grief and failure come clear at last.

Old inflections move from case to case,

gender to gender, softening consonants, darkening

vowels, till they sound like the sea moving

icebergs back and forth in its mouth.”

— 

The Icelandic Language by Bill Holm

“I come from a land where poetry is like a tree which watches over man and where a poet is a guard who understands the rhythm of this world. He travels with history, and feels the rhythm of history. By heeding this rhythm, he realizes the gaps and distances that separate man from man. I see this separation between men as a darkness which science cannot dispel despite its transformative power. Only poetry can illuminate this darkness.”

— Ali Ahmad Said, aka Adonis

“Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding anyone.”

- Gertrude Stein

sum 'er

got that smother
sensation
& everything i touch
feels dirty cos it’s

all too hot. even

with bare feet i
can’t breathe. my
jeans suffocate
calves & thighs &

i am ready for my skin
to split open like
a hot vine tomato

too ripe, not picked
soon enough to keep
this heat from
tearing me open. or

me tearing me
open, just to
strip down after i’ve
stripped down to
last layers & still got
that squalid sweat sense

of fraying at all my dry
ends & ready to
catch fire.

burning bright

when the need to write
burns in your fingertips
instead of its usual tingle

& you pull up an empty window
& just go for it like you’re chasing
in a hard sprint after some wild thing
because the keys are always
too many seconds behind
your thoughts & over & over again
feeling the tail slip between your fingertips

so you collapse & catch your breath &
settle for describing the feeling
of a warm tailtip with the dirt-matted fur
in three colors & the residue that it left
on your fingers

because you wouldn't even
know what to do with that tiger
if you caught it
besides let it eat you because
you’re always letting tigers eat you,
regardless of whether or not
you’re still hanging on

you just want some sensation
a visceral mess of teeth & claws
mangling you into a red gullet

a craw for you to stick in
& describe & feel alive in &
get devoured so you can really
be one with the dirt & grass & trees
that you’re always too busy
telling to just stop
& be.

exorcises

these poems
are ghosts

head-hauntings
i have to stop
& exorcise
just to function

unpossessed,
like a normal
person & not
a writer

not some
brainpriest
splashing
holy water along
inner walls

repeatedly, all
hours of the day
just to keep
the spirits
of words from
physically
harming me

from breaking
all my inside
furniture,
from scaring
too many
visitors away.

morning

some days, like today, i feel electric beyond the ends of my fingers and toes. i get that internal resonance with everything around me and feel, for a moment, in tune with life. when the inner discordant wah-wah-wah of being just a little sharp or a little flat disappears and i get to just be, and being is good.

woke up an hour early today, long before my alarm. surprisingly, because i didn’t fall asleep last night until nearly 3 a.m., and i couldn’t go back to sleep. so, i took a nice long shower, took my time getting ready. put on some music and read a few good poems. makes me want to get up a bit early every morning. stop the rush and get inspired. any day started with poetry is a good day. any day when you’re not torn from the cocoon of your bed before you’ve metamorphosed enough to face a new day, is a good day.

feels like when i get a few moments to just get in tune with the day, the little irritations i normally face are given a proper proportion and thus become more easily disposed. i am not generally a morning person, but more and more lately i can find the appeal in it. which, fittingly, is the same appeal i find in the nighttime… people are still sleeping, and it’s quiet enough to think and do things, for myself, without interruption. navigating my way through the stillness that nestles around, and cups, inspiration. and i find my motivations and my reasons easier to reach.

i suppose i just prefer quiet before the day begins, or in general, as preparation for creating anything. it reminds me of that beautiful Ralph Waldo Emerson quote:

"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what people think. This rule,equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

it turns out that morning is a good time to get a good grasp on my independent solitude, and have it last me through the day.

parenthesis

my poetry
a kind of
postscript significant.

after-the-fact
parenthetical
asides, to read once
i’m finished.

posthumously pertinent
or seashelled:

right now, not
in-hand examined;
merely seen at feet,

objects which curl in
on themselves,
hold something alive.

so i, i will keep
curling.

a little experiment
of toughing it
out here on earth,

just the same.

cardigan

day dawned
already filmy,
grease-stained from
dark dreams.

the last legs of my
indifference
collapsed at 9 am,
everything

engulfed in flames.
ran through
a few rants,

waited
for the caffeine
cooldown & a bit
more clarity.

bad feelings
are not bad
in themselves.
you feel them
& move on,

like you put sweaters
in dressing rooms
back on hangers
when they don't fit.

no luck in store today
try again tomorrow.

pick

a word, pick
a string of words.

a poem can be
a beaded thing, not like
a strand of pearls, more like when you stick
a threaded needle into
a bright pile of glass beads.

a pattern emerges,
an unintended result of repetition.
a single bead that marks
a beginning:
a color, or shape for
an eye to stick to.

a rhythm in
all of the static
and white noise.

monday tuesday

a truly monday sort
of tuesday.

i’ve covered my desk
in a veritable townscape
of paper, envelope, post-it pile
abodes:

missing their rooves,
lying in wait
for my workday whirlwind

 of wednesday.

mania

manic up morning

i try poems

& delete

poem

& delete

morose sounds trite

with so much sun outside

& my poems

today have

that aa glint

in their eyes

of sorry

but it’s sorry

they aren’t back

in those good ol’ days

& not sorry

for what shit

they dragged

so many selves through

it’s sorry i’m

reminiscing

with this crowd

of pen & paper

not

actually drowning

& too sick

to swim

“What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.”

- Vincent Van Gogh

happy others day

this wasn't meant to be about yesterday,
about how mother’s day digs deeper
every year i still don’t have kids.

lonely stabs literal behind my sternum
makes breathing suddenly impossible.
no matter how much i fake cough
i can’t dam eye wells, or silence sniffles.

i excuse myself from rooms, slump
back to back with bathroom doors.
sneak sobs, wait in front of mirrors
until eyes don’t look so red.

back out, re-busy myself with keeping
surfaces calm despite the turbulent
brewing of some soul-tempest.

yes, everything in its own time, sure.
but i’m allowed to be weary of
ticking days with tearfilled pillows,
or these haunting bone-aches
of old, old dreams.

filmnoise grey

weather is still
filmnoise grey
pre and post rain.

half-reclined in
a breaking
ikea office chair

this minute
is liplicked
with fingers
nitpicking keys

trying to catch
poem edges.

waiting for a
story idea
to land in my lap

like a stack of
junkmail or these
earbuds that keep

falling out.

sixth of may

raingrey day,
until every pore
breathes petrichor.

already anxious
for a late summer lay
on hot cement…

drops hissing
as they hit, steam
back into vapor
so sunset shimmers

between black asphalt
and thunderheads,
reflects off mountainsides.

when i am soaked
to and through
my very skin,

and thunder echoes
from ears to toes
so my soul roars back

until grass grows chill,
until stars breakout
between blowaway clouds.

april, afterwords

spring settles,
this air blooms with
blossom-scent.

trees & wind full
of petals, of pollen.
all my doors
& windows open.

a wellspring
from toes & nose
meets somewhere
in the middle, my
self is full,
is overflowing.

imagination and humour

The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.

Oscar Wilde

march

titanium shoulder
gristles in a loose socket.
i keep rolling it
to hear the noise
& feel the grind
unique to this shoulder
and me.

fresh ground sound
foreign objects
rub, catch on
tendons or cartilage
stop, skip, hit, pop

interesting sensation
skeletal reverberation

lately nights
i think i'd take back
the old shoulder
which was all me
it could move,
it just hurt to.

can't get comfy
in my sleep
my left arm keeps
going numb or just
aching. it feels so much
older & younger than me.

monday night
i'd get more done
if i was marooned
or at least moved
& onmyowning.

march you twist
time & weather &
i get caught
in the knots of you.
wrangle some
daytangles
different from the
usual strands.

you're unnecessary
& sink me.
kite line tight
breaks & i sit
in the sway
of dead grass, undoing.

shipwreck

sleep deprivation

winds me up in

other ways, 

slants my thought

processes

just so; just so

i see everything

from a slight tilt,

& sense abandons

current plateaus

for easy flow

to a lower plane.

today,

my body is a boat

half-sunk in 11 o'clock.

my head a last

escape of breath

in amorphous

ascent over

wreckage below.

but is it retreat

or just runaway?

a climb for the sake

of climbing.

silt clouds skirt

lower edges,

& then still,

remains creak

from pressure

& slow settling

in deep dark.

tidepulls

today the old familiar urge to fly away is tugging at the backs of my shoulderblades with gusto, with necessity. i am poised on the edge of sprouting wings just to escape, start over again, or start somewhere new, where no one knows my name. the inner ocean is listless, lapping at the edges, tidepulling.

always the ocean. i crave to be beside it like a long-distance love. to curl up in a cradle of sand and lie there while the sound and fury of waves lull me to sleep. to have the wet, salt air and the living, briny scent it carries, purge the dry mountain dirt from my shallow lungs so i can breathe deep again and feel like i'm living and not just subsisting in some perpetual slide with no inertia, a movement state of solely residual energy and the lack of opposing forces.

i want grey sky and grey water and the tempest dance of them together on the horizon, in front of god and everyone, but mostly me. instead of hidden behind the fortress walls of these mountains. this giant bowl of earth and people and smog and all the wrong colours of gray. that yellow brown blah gray that leaves nothing in your soul but a sour, brittle note. reverberating and repeated until you wish you could go deaf. until you feel like double or nothing-ing the van gogh challenge, not for a lost love but for a lost will. or maybe a lost longing for love, which might be worse.

vivisect

after a while
you take a blade
to cut into
old wounds
and see if they
had healed yet;

just the way
you turn back
to welcome
old vices
and test the limits
of your resistance.

associations

solid marble eyes
lead fingertips
cement feet
driftwood lips

full books
of images
of empty
pages

inkstained
inside cheeks
soles of feet

lick or choke on
lollipop words

icecubes
frame blanket
burritos

slow show
dance
around tell

top tracks, icepacked.

i realized i never did my year-end post of the top tunes that i self-soundtracked my 2012 with. so, here ya goes, party peoples.

1. The Cinematic Orchestra – To Build a Home
2. Busby Marou – Not Fire Not Ice
3. Boy & Bear – Fall At Your Feet
4. Communist Daughter – Not the Kid
5. The Band – Tears Of Rage
6. Emma Louise – Jungle
7. Communist Daughter – Ghosts
8. Sparklehorse – Mountains
9. The Clientele – Ariadne Sleeping
10. Emma Pollock – Hug The Piano
11. Paul Kelly & Angus Stone – Four Seasons In One Day
12. Busby Marou – Better Be Home Soon
13. Lior & Emma-Louise – It's Only Natural
14. Communist Daughter – Speed Of Sound
15. Tinpan Orange – Like Snow
16. The Clientele – Policeman Getting Lost
17. Seth Sentry – Float Away
18. Mojave 3 – In Love with a View
19. Broadcast – Winter Now
20. Crowded House – Throw Your Arms Around Me
21. Seth Sentry – Dear Science
22. Crowded House – Fall At Your Feet
23. José González – Save Your Day
24. The Jezabels – Dark Storm
25. The Panics – Get Us Home
26. Angus Stone – River

let's just say 2012 was a year full of nostalgia and mellow tunes and aussie artists. so deal with it. i gotta find some new tunes for 2013.

but, i do want to share some of the sweet new stuff i found in 2012, even if i didn't listen to it as much as my sissy girly nostalgia music...these are definitely worth checking out!

• A.C. Newman - Encyclopedia of Classic Takedowns
• Beach House - Myth
• Bobby Womack - Please Forgive My Heart
• Bombadil - Laundromat
• Callers - Heroes
• Cat Power - Ruin
• Deep Sea Arcade - Girls
• Delicate Cutters - You Want Her
• Dent May - Best Friends
• Dirty Fences - Sid
• Dot Hacker - Inhibition
• Dylan LeBlanc - Part One: The End
• El Perro Del Mar - Hold Off The Dawn
• Electric Guest - American Daydream
• Father John Misty - Nancy From Now On
• Field Report - I'm Not Waiting Anymore
• The Hello Sequence - October
• Infantree - Fibber
• Islands - Hallways
• Jeans Wilder - Limeade
• Kate Miller-Heidke - Ride This Feeling
• Lasorda - No Intent To Return
• Shovels & Rope - Birmingham
• Anders Osborne - When Will I See You Again
• Capybara - Neighbor Crimes
• Civil Twilight - Doorway
• The Cloud Room - Crashing In Love
• Cold Specks - Holland
• Great Lake Swimmers - Easy Come Easy Go
• Mmoths - Heart (feat. Keep Shelly In Athens)
• Blessed Feathers - By Song Through The Americas
• Bright Moments - Travelers
• The Duke Spirit - Don't Wait
• Emily Wells - Passenger
• Eternal Summers - Millions
• Justin Townes Earl - Look The Other Way
• Lee Ranaldo - Off The Wall
• Lost In The Trees - Red
• The Lumineers - Flowers In Your Hair

Aloud

Early yesterday, my friend Jared linked to me a youtube video of a spoken word poem called "To This Day" by Shane Koyczan, animated as a project by a bunch of artists. It really moved me, mostly because of how much I related to it. And it got me thinking about how I haven't really done much spoken word stuff, not with my poetry or my writing. I don't know why I haven't, other than I hadn't thought about it. It's not like there are open mic nights and stuff  for poetry around where I live, or if there are, I haven't heard of them. But I liked being able to hear a poem as read by the author. I like the layer it adds, the inflection and sound affecting the way the poem is received, instead of the one layer of just reading it for yourself. I remember feeling this way the first time I heard Dylan Thomas reading his poetry, the way he emphasized certain parts above others, differently than the way I emphasized them in my head. I recall recording a couple of poems after hearing him back in 2006 or 2007. Never did anything with them because I hated the way they sounded, but I think it's important, in some respects, for an artist, especially one who creates things as a record of their own perceptions, to give as much personal paradigm to their work as possible. If you're expressing yourself, express yourself in ALL the ways, I guess.

Anyway, when I got home late late late last night, I started recording some of my poems. It surprised me, there are parts of them where reading them out loud really moved me, and I can hear my voice break, and recall that I started crying at one part where I had never cried before, in writing OR reading it. And just as different poems are written in different tones, they're read in different tones. Anyway, now I'm just trying to figure out how to link them here for you, just in case you're interested. Maybe SoundCloud will work. But yeah... experimenting... and these are totally unedited. so, soz for sound quality.

perpetuity


i have been you


ten nine


ten three

perpetuity

perpetual rule,
never bent
always broken:

always write! you say
put it down every day,
but stuff gets in the way
so you stay,

tread water.
and by water i mean
excuses.

and by you i mean
me.
and by tread, i mean
make them up
every second,

every second time
it crosses your mind.
you wanna unwind.

and writing things
just ties the strings

tighter, and tighter
imaginate
asphyxiate
tunnelend light
gets brighter.
here's the insider

scoop:
more cyclical loop
the loop

overturn
the gutchurn
heart burn
wordspurn.

make it a constant
instead of a dissonant
evict the head tenants

knucklecrack
word crunch
keyboard hunch
head bent
time spent

worthwhile
creative purge
play over the
daily dirge
of duty & the grey
runaway

find a smooth hollow
in a white page
and rampage or
just age

time to stop
got the word drop
too much hip
hop

this week.

shuffle
skip
repeat.

indigo evening

indigo evening
wraps memory
tight enough to
constrict me,

inhale efforts
but no room in
my chest.

ghosts of you
burn behind eyes
escape in swim
& tears.

arms ache down
to fingertips
to unwrap
tight memory.
unravel.
undo.

indigo evening
so full of longing
it can only be
empty.

wrapped in all
which cannot be
rewoven.

ghosts of you
press heavy on emptiness,
break into dreams
for years.

for years.

a batch of sort-of conversation hearts...

wonderlust

i've been so busy trying to take off with an art career, or a potential art career, that all my freetime and my insomnia time is devoured by the things that i "have to be doing" instead of the things that i should be doing, like maintaining my writing.

it's hard to write when i'm not depressed sometimes. and it's hard to be depressed when i don't have time for it lately, but it's easy to be depressed when valentines day rolls around for the third single year in a row. my winter melancholies hit me like a ton of bricks this weekend, and though i want to just go home and crawl into bed after work, i'm going to be up working all night on a drawing that i promised i'd do for a friend to give to his girlfriend for the aforementioned holiday.

work's been busy, but i'm grabbing a minute to write, because in between phone calls i've been reading my friend jonathan's blog, which i've needed to catch up on for a while. i feel like a jerk friend for not reaching out to anyone lately, especially not to old, dear friends who mean more to me than most people. there was a bit from one of his posts that stuck to me:

"dreams have the last laugh - still i prefer those laughs to the cruelty of the self-reflecting mind on the fringes of sleep - that's when the ghosts devour me, that's the only time they can"

it stuck because it so perfectly worded my thought process of late, and why i've been can't-sleeping for weeks now. i shouldn't be surprised, jonathan's always had the right words for things.

and now, images, or images of other people's words, because i can't words on my own anymore today.