downtown

today's acquisition.

over the years, i've had the opportunity to work in manhattan, staying there just long enough each time to enjoy all the good and great things a huge metropolis has to offer but never staying long enough for the city to get under my skin and leave its bitterness. i remember coming across a review of this book a while ago and when i saw it on the shelf of a dollar store today, there was no question.

i could not sleep in these hours before dawn

so i wandered and found this...

it is relative

it is again late. though this kind of late is relative, it relative because i cannot be sure of my origin. how does one measure where they are from? by geography, by the last words said in an incident? by the last wreckage that you had started (and one where parts of you were left behind)? no matter, right now i know i'm not at home and it is not such a bad thing.

sometimes there is a wonderment in being lost in a city full of secrets and no map has ever been drawn of it. a city not made obscure by the mist or narrow alleys but by the hundreds or thousands of faces you pall by and you realize you can't tell them apart. yes, that is the kind of face that is most difficult to ascertain because of their homogenity it is easy to forget who you are.

perhaps this is what solitude really is

nocturne, friday

sometimes, late in the night though not too late you are sitting there staring at the computer display with itunes running and the tv on but set to mute.

in such an event, you sooner or later wonder "what the hell am i doing?" then you remember that you were hoping to talk to someone before the medications your doctor prescribed for you to have a decent night's sleep are going to kick in. still, you find yourself defiant; "i can handle it."

yet there is not quite that level of determination you were hoping for. but you wait anyhow, you then start surfing the photostreams of people you like and your won then you stumble onto the epiphaby...

don't try to make too much sense of it, it is the nature of the wandering mind. don't try to understand all and don't try to remember everything. just let it feel you and then let it past...

i wonder

i wonder if she misses me at all like i miss her like the ocean misses the winds that turns its crests into the spray of angels...

autumnal cycle

october is here again. this part of autumn is my favorite part of the
year though it is always associated with great pain. perhaps it is something i do to myself to match the season; everything decays and/or dies in order to have a rebirth again in spring.

human

the best thing about being human is that you never really know where you came from nor where you are going. you are utterly unpredictable. this, is human nature.

morning light

something that explains the morning sun to me the way this morning arrived...


Distance as the Story of Plenty
by Erin Lambert


If the landscape has a pattern then it begins with your wrist,

between the radius and the ulna where it finds the will

to consider the oak and the wheel before inhabiting your pulse,

the heavy signature of a river, or hollow stubs of cornstalks

left to winter. If the mountain wanted to write you

of the many cries concealed within its famed anatomy,

or the bold and plentiful vision inherent to trees, perhaps

how even light finds its valleys come morning, it would have to

begin by conceding that it still cannot comprehend

how the crow is in everything, the caw so essential to the air,

though it would know the decisive knife strokes imbedded

in the flight, and how it was first conceived from the violet

of the evening, then cradled by the cold’s incalculable distance.

Saturday morning mess

I woke up to this mess on my desk. It looked good in the filtered rainy light though. I stared at the objects a bit and each one of them were telling me their stories. They reminded me of where and when they had come into my possession and by whom and why. They associated me with what was going on with me at the time of their acquisition. Even if I were not to keep a journal, little and large things around me always remind me of my own history in real time. They constantly give me points of references to where I am mentally and emotionally. Sometimes I come across something I've not seen for a while and either a smile will come to my face or the tears will flow...

on my desk. each item has a story. together, they could probably tell a novella's worth if i elaborated...

left to right, top to bottom: bottle of advil (essential); old but reliable iPod given to me as a gift from a very good friend; ink bottle (private reserve tangerine dream); edge of another ink bottle (lamy red); grandfather's old watch; dozier custom knife i bought right before a fly fishing/outdoor trip with mom back in 2000; aluminum fountain pen from japan given to me by an old friend after he went there on business; pelican feather quill pen i picked up on the beach on a camping trip with friends to the sonoma coast, ca in summer of 2006; insert from my most recently acquired moleskine; razor used to cut quills; red recife crystal fountain pen i bought as a present to myself in 2001; usb cable to scanner; top of orange juice can with screws from my old ibook that i just dismantled to take out the hard drive–the logic board died; buffalo horn money clip bought in vietnam during work trip in summer of 2005 with ican (ican2.org); xikar cigar cutter i bought on chestnut street in san francisco in 2002; cell phone headset; keys; burts bee lip gloss; button from a pair of khakis that need to be sewn back on.

This photo reminded me of a poem I'd written four years ago.

song birds

morning came to me in the chirpings of little feathery things.

in california, the birds are kind enough to wait til 6am or so. in south georgia there were birds that started at 4am, i love birds but then, i would have liked a Bellini shotgun then. but no point. i only kill what i would eat. no point in songbirds.

they say it's spring but there is for the most part nothing else

lit horizon

this evening near the time of sunset, i looked out at the view beyond the windows and saw an expanse of ocean lit up by a sunburst. though i knew the distance was at least 15 or more miles away, the horizon seemed momentarily close to me. it felt as if everything seemed tangible for a slice of time. it was fleeting but it was a good feeling.

soot and ash

to make soot and ashes of one's past.

today i read a poem by Jacob Polley. it was about how his father used his old diaries as fuel for a fire in the stove. it was a visual experience for me though i found it disturbing that someone would burn their old diaries.

would i do that? i asked and pondered.

would it be a sufficient way to purge your mind of those experiences and memories you'd like to forget? for me, probably not as the television screen of my mind is more vivid and higher in definition than the best plasma screen available. that coupled with a photographic memory, i would have to throw my whole self into the pyre.

makes me kinda stop and think, ya know? ;p

story

i once read in a novel that "i write now so that later i will have something to read." then later, i myself wrote the same thing. it was such a powerful thought that i kept it and believed it for so long. then one day i looked at the same novel again and in the ending it reads, "trust me, i'm telling you stories."

so i've been lying to myself. i don't write now so that i may have something to read later. i write now so that others may read it. others might even like what they read. but how odd is that when you are writing something that is so overwelmingly indulgent? what audience? am i thinking of an audience when i'm writing? hell no.

i have no audience because this is not a book for publication. this is a safe place for me to say whatever i want to say and there are a handful of people who look at it. and that is okay. it is okay because i trust them enough to say whatever i want.

so is this a story? am i telling you stories? good question. what does the masthead of this blog say? hah!

but there is a story here as all words contain some sort of stories, it is just sometimes we don't really want to know it so we don't pay enough attention. other times, we don't really want to know the real story so we pay the wrong kind of attention. perhaps this is how myths are created, quality assurance in storytelling. skin out the ugly stuff and leave the tasty, meaty stuff behind –– devoid of connective tissue. is that a little like the person who loves chicken but won't eat it off the bone? perhaps they ought to be vegetarians. perhaps they ought to just eat hamburger and nothing else. heh, i like that thought. perhaps i ought to press that on to someone!

so back to the story. i'm sure there is a story here but i doubt i'll start at the beginning. perhaps the fourth or fifth section of the book because if i start at the beginning none of the later parts will make any difference. it would be like having a nice dinner and being obsessed with whether the dessert you ordered is really going to go with the courses that are being served.

well, i lied. well not really. i just mean i'm not really to tell the story yet but there is one. just wait, you will just have to wait.

trust me, i'm telling stories.

random crossings: Easter, 1916

i had thought of this poem in a long time. years ago, i chose it to recite for a storytelling class in which i was being videotaped. looking back, i must have been so nervous the emotional content of the poem was lost in the reading. but today, years later when i came across something relating to Yeats i went searching for it and read it again slowly. it was so vivid in feeling that i could taste and smell the words; the sentiment and the pain...

and i realized it speaks volumes to what is going on with me personally and in the world we are racing in – this crazy world of beauty and violence, sadness and laughter. so here it is:

Easter, 1916

I HAVE met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

That woman’s days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

tuesday night's dream: the gauntlet

i was in sf or the east bay, but i think it started in north beach.

i was doing something with christine and david.

unusual cause the two of us have not done anything together for almost ten years. we met and went out to eat and hung out at cafes. when it was time to go home, for some reason that is not clear, christine was not going home and was leaving her car to me to drive to her place to crash.

i said ok but went somewhere else with david and andrea instead.

it was a little restaurant, kind of ship-shack but cute. it had little wooden tables for four people with small vases of flowers and simple but well placed settings on all of them. we walked into an oblong room with windows on the right wall and on the far wall. there was a view, it looked out over water.

i also have memories of a carnival somewhere along out there.

i don't know how long we stayed there but when we left david turned out that he was driving my old toyota from my art center days. we joked that it probably needed a new registration tag and a new headlamp so he'd better be careful.

he took me to wherever christine was living. i knocked on the door and a young woman answered. she was obviously woken up and dressed for sleep. i explained who i was and what i was doing there and she must have known who i was so she let me in. she showed me to christine's room. it was a spartan but comfortable looking place. all the furniture were made of wood. the bed was unmade.

the girl left me and i undressed and went to bed right away.

next thing i knew was that i woke up to voices or giggles, i opened my eyes to faces peeking through the bedroom door. they shut the door as soon as i sat up in bed. confused, i got up and wrapped something around me and walked towards the door. i pushed the door open and walked through to the adjacent room and was met with a sight that stopped me in my tracks.

it was a narrow long room with rows of beds just like the one i slept in. again, all the furniture here were wooden. the thing that made me stopped was there were about twenty young women sitting there staring at me and giggling to themselves.

there were "ooh's" and "ah's." it obvious i was not supposed to be here or this rarely happened. i felt not embarrassed as much as vulnerable or out of place. i started to walk towards the bathroom on the other end of the room. it felt like i was walking through a visual gauntlet. i remember whispers of mutterings of things like "ooh it's a man" and "whose is he?"

that last comment made me dash for the bathroom and close the door.

that is when i woke up.

awareness of confusion [or lack thereof]

sometimes it is through the musings of another or the awareness of their suffering that you are awakened to your own ability for compassion and survival that sometimes gets lost because you are too much in your own mind, unaware of your surroundings and others around you. sometimes unawareness sticks to me like glue. how strange is it to have something to apparent and not pay attention? and how ineffectual you can be to provide any comfort to them...

i have a friend who is ill and in the hospital. in the last several days, i've found myself incapable of offering any comfort. this disturbs me. even though i know there is really not much i can do except to reassure her she isn't alone or forgotten, it doesn't seem enough.

i don't know where i'm going with this. perhaps i just needed to air my confusion and sense of helplessness...perhaps if i let it out it will fly away and something will present itself...

death of an ibook

alas my poor ibook is getting old. it has been diagnosed with parkinson's disease.

so i'm taking donations for a replacement. :)

movement

movement, there is movement
below the skin. there is the sensation
of bone straining against muscles,
flesh, a million little strands of life
searching for motion.

eyes close slowly,
silently like a flurry of snowflakes
touching on water.
inside, behind the veil of eyelids,
behind the rosy glow of thin flesh,

lurks a universe of feelings,
an untamed expanse of geography
that no one has dared explored.
quietly, the synthesized fatigue
seeps into his tendons,

make movement seem like a dream.
making motion seem drunken,
lilting, like a still jellyfish
in a slow whirling ocean,
like the emotion given to him

in his ambiguity.
they float in his head,
flow through his tissues and
liquor him into a soft sexual lingering,
lasting rancor stripped of sharp edges.

they feel like her face,
that strange and familiar longing face
seducing him with eyes of a mythical cat.
the lean long body moving through heated air
like a trout in an almost freezing stream,

climbing upward against gravity
without even a stray wave of effort.
motion, movement, emotion,
he knows he has been invaded.
invaded by the wiles of her beauty,

her intellect, her skin,
a skin that cannot be evaded or avoided.
he tries for stillness, he tries for non motion.
the surface of his existence is momentary,
perhaps even coming close to still but

beneath there is Scylla and Charybdis.
beneath there is another domain
parallel to the flesh,
beneath there is another universe
side by side to earthly pain.

she has laid herself there,
in the multitudes of slivers,
into his molecules.
she touches herself and he feels pleasure.
she bites her lips and he bleeds on the inside,

tasting the salt, tasting the blood,
savors the taste of a kill.
hers, his, theirs,
the shared lust of a vampiric appetite.
the shared pain of a thousand lives
pulsing through the borrowed cells

of a thousand more.
closes his eyes again,
time moves behind cold lids.
time moves like water under ice,
the chill and the warmth indistinguishable.

the pulse of one's heart indistinguishable
from the many lives that have died to feed the one.
the many marriages between time and death,
the many marriages between loss and possession.
now the ice is closing in,

the surface of water turning to glass
like something so solid that was
just in the last moment fluid.
now the cold has seeped so far inside,
winter has reached the seed of lust.

winter has taken his corpus.
and she makes him sleep
for a thousand years with
the lasting, lingering, longing,
lovely taste of her sex in his heart.

beyond this featherless and flightless existence

He sat there staring. Staring into the little emptiness, the dark space that was between the illumination of the torch floor lamp and the little desk light. There was a little haven in spaces not covered by familiar rays.

The space called to him. The empty-full space spoke to him as if they had known each other for all their existence and perhaps longer. Whatever language it was made sense yet the words couldn't work in translation.

The emotions that got turned on inside, like a hundred fire hydrants, threatened to flood him, flood the room, flood his existence and travel back into time. It called for something drastic, something so familiar but vague at the same time.

He sat and moved his eyes, shifted his narrow vision among the items scattered across the desk: the fountain pen, its worn barrel, the quills and papers, the knife and pencil, empty cups of cold green tea. They all spoke something, told a story. His muscles understand though his mind could not or would not. His instincts were awakened yet his upbringing resisted.

There is the partially open window. There is the beckoning noise of the New York traffic, the Park Avenue cacophony. it is the rasping and howl of the after dinner rush of taxis heading uptown after post meal drinks. It is the distance and the cold it holds asking for his attention. In a shuffle and shove, he is on the table and little items are scattered all over the floor. A pot of ink is spilled, its scarlet stain grows upon the wooden floor like a foreboding omen, a poetic foreshadow.

Light comes up from below. Noises turn into a strange strata of chords, like Stravinsky's riot in the Paris Opera. Looking out he sees not anything man made but a murder of crows in orbit. It all seems to make sense. He looks at the growing pool of brick red ink spreading across the maple, onto the pale sheepskin, looking like a murder scene.

There is a last caw from beyond the glass, from beyond this featherless and flightless existence. The journey is brief in time but long in experience. The journey is not a plummet but a commitment. A marriage to something that had been secret all his years, all his moments. And in the time it takes to sprout a feather the people below find a pile of clothes, pair of shoes and shiny trinkets of an repressed life.

– sd, 2007

Thresholds

Clean, 1.1.07

New Year's day. Blue sky morning, it seems like any other cold January day really if you look outside the window. Its threshold into another calendar year is invisible. It is most real inside our minds. I was browsing through cirkusprinsesse's blog and saw her recap of 2006 and it made me start thinking about similar things. It was a mixed bag of surprises, fleeting moments of joy, dark abysses of despair along with an ever present sense of humor that twists itself into many different shapes in order to accommodate laughter into each and every situation so that I could go to pieces but not fall completely apart.

So what happened:

- I found myself alive and still living
- I reconnected with some family and severed connections with others that are family
- I learned that contentment and sadness aren't mutually exclusive and can exist in the same time and space together
- I reconnected with some long lost friends who are dear to my heart and found purpose in the friendships
- I accepted that I am in fact an artist to the very core of my being and to be otherwise is to destroy my integrity
- I learned that I can be extremely self destructive in order to preserve my integrity and that it can be preserved in healthier ways
- I realized that I am here mostly for others and not always myself
- I realized that some of the people I cherish the most are the farthest away from me geographically
- I realized that human connections are impervious to the vagaries of time and space
- I learned you can be very close with someone and learn to love them even when they are thousands of miles away and you may have never or ever meet them in person
- I learned that sometimes people you barely know can give you more comfort than your own flesh and blood. It is bittersweet
- I rediscovered that I can indeed paint though I am not sure where some of the ability comes from
- I discovered that some things I want to convey have to be done with words, images and silence in mixed combinations
- I found that I can live with very little
- I am finally officially divorced after five years of legal limbo
- I am a proud new uncle (again) to a beautiful little niece named Kim-Anh (she is in Paris, can't wait to meet her)
- One of my poems got published
- I found that in the blackest of depression one can find beauty and perhaps that itself is reason enough to persevere and continue
- I learned a lot about the inner turmoils of depression from a dead poet (Sylvia Plath) and found that she helps me cope from another place
- I accepted and learned to be more comfortable accusations of treason in order to be faithful to myself
- I embraced the idea that the only certainty in life is that uncertainty exists so I try to live with that in each and every moment of consciousness

I am sure this list could go on forever but I think this is the gist...