Luminant

(in light of Firefly)

Violet and crimson bleed into the burnt umber
like a post torrent migration of emotions.
He stares into the darkness but the darkness
offers no protection. Colors intrude into what
otherwise would be a calm void.
Colors in their brilliance attack his retina
like hornets invading a beehive.
Purples taste bittersweet and reds burn
like cayenne on his emotional palette.
He wonders what might be an antidote
to these feelings that are like sharp crags
upon tender skin. These feelings that are
so beautifully vicious like a cheetah taking
down a gazelle in a blur of yellow ochre
and streaks of blacks.
Spots are only spots when stationary.
If you see them as a blur, then it is a forelighting
of death bathed in luminant scarlet.
Even with eyes closed the hues do not recede.
Light from the outside color the pink
of closed lids like an organic projection screen.
Light from the outside illuminate in detail
the creases and folds of his pain.
He is not allowed to shelter from them
even in blindness, even in darkness.
The only comfort he has is in the knowing
that eventually even the most brilliant hues
die into grey, into a lackluster that only time affords.

don't tear the silk

silence. he waits for it to come. he knows it will come if he is patient, if he waits long enough. is it enough? faith? does he have to have faith? perhaps. faith is not something he has ever felt he could be an owner of. it is not so much that he has no faith, he just can't seem to accept the concept that faith is something you can own. it seems or feels paradoxical. so he waits, he thinks that perhaps he can wait as an exercise in some kind of mental and emotional exertion. it is not about patience. he could think of it as a challenge, as a kata, a movement of non action. a stillness like in the motion of a calligraphy brush in the fraction of existence right before he plunges the ink laden head onto but imaginatively, into the rice paper. a splattering of blackness, stray drops throwing themselves into a pattern preceding the next movement of the brush, an extension of the hand, a linked appendage of the arm, an exploration of his mind, his vision, his instinct. all that power, potential and dynamism withheld so momentarily before the energy explodes. to know the degree of power that comes when the brush is released is to mirror and comprehend the stillness of its opposite. now, he feels the reverse. in this moment of waiting for silence, for stillness, his mind churns with thoughts with almost violence with the movement of a cyclone trapped in a funnel spider's web. don't tear the silk is his intent. flow with the surging energy, flow with the swing of emotive gyrations but don't tear the silk. just turn and bend and turn and whirl, and the quietness, the tranquility will come. it will come at its own pace in its own moment. for now, just sit. just exercise non action and the silence will come.

Pulp

There is a place and a moment
out there is the deep blue sea.

Somewhere between floating and sinking
the water changes between support

and demon, wanting a luscious meal.
Somewhere the colors make a change;

between cooler falling deep below
and blackness, is really a dark violence.

Violent in her pressures to hold you;
violent in her loving crush of you into a pulp.

Tea

(for Hina)

Time ends at a place
where your heart ceases longing.
It gives up the painful desire
to fall into the waterfall;
to throw itself into the glacier.

Pain ends in a place
when a tired muscle starts pulsing.
It gives up the tired motion to die
to roll into an easy lulling sleep;
to simmer itself into a gentle hell.

There is a sign on the other side
where your soul finds a right place.
It finds a color to soothe your mood
to seep into your being like strong tea;
to release the flavor you've been hiding.

14 June 2007

a blood trail or a snail trail or just vandalism

Copán
(for suttonhoo)

there is a line sketched out in dried blood
it's not a geography of vengeance or sicilian intent
it's just a place where a lost, wandering heart once stopped
it stayed too long and when it left, finally
part of its soul wanted to leave behind a trail
a blood trail or a snail trail or just vandalism
of the place where it once parked what it thought
was a noble, court love, flamboyant love
no one dared tell it that it was just an infomercial
that its grandfather had bought into some years ago
but these were crisp lines you would have to concur
ghostly fine lines in the midst of a snowstorm
splayed out like toothpick fences in a indian monsoon
yet in those tiny yet to be washed blood lines
there is a lineage of smiles and broad confidence
there is a lineage of sacrifice until a daughter's blood
so look at this map all you want and remember its purpose
for all the brothers who have followed have given to mayan gods

one god

there will be time. time enough. the words stumble around inside of his head. he is not sure what it means. he heard those words in a movie but the connection is nil. it is just noise. time shifted noise just like red shifted light. it stays with him or he stays with it though he knows he should just let it go. they are just thoughts and he should just let it wash over him and then they will be done whatever their purpose is. so he closes his eyes and takes a deep breath and lets out a sigh that sounds like the voice of an angel dying. or perhaps a demon, is there really a difference? is it really just a matter of point of view? one person's angel is another's demon. that thought is probably more accurate, use that one instead. can one believe in angels and demons if one doesn't believe in god? or a god? it occurs to him that he finds the idea of having more than one god more palatable than the idea of just one god. is that odd?

conversations

this morning a dark cerulean blue came to the horizon while the constellations were still telling me stories. orion was relating old hunting stories and cassiopeia was bitching how she got up there, upside down. they were refusing to fade into daylight with as much resistance as they showed when their exploits turned into myth. cassi said to me, just wait, it will happen to you too but you may not even have stars for people to remember you by. even upside down, hanging here, at least i've got multitudes looking at me. i glared at her and thought, i need a cup of tea. and there goes orion again, insisting i practice archery at night outside so he can correct my form. i tell him to chill out and keep his distance. i am of scorpius, after all. just tell me stories. that is all i need, stories to fill the restlessness which stirs a wanderlust within my chest; a wanting to go that can't ever be sufficed for how does one escape their own heart?

turquoise

i looked for you
there was this turquoise ocean
and i sat there, waiting for you

my friend who would have
come out of dying the glow
come out and give me me a hand

the hand needed to become stone
it's the place where we all end
and i waited for you

This is the silence of astounded souls

Crossing the Water

Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people.
Where do the black trees go that drink here?
Their shadows must cover Canada.

A little light is filtering from the water flowers.
Their leaves do not wish us to hurry:
They are round and flat and full of dark advice.

Cold worlds shake from the oar.
The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes.
A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand;

Stars open among the lilies.
Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?
This is the silence of astounded souls.

– Sylvia Plath

from the outside

he watches himself from outside of his skin. he stares intently, thinking there is a light in there somewhere. it just must be hidden.

he sidesteps away from the shadow of the trees looming behind him. the trees of life he almost expects to abandon – the way he feels. this feeling inside of his chest. it's what happens when you constrict time and space by the force of emotions. reality is distorted in the same way that large bodies in this universe distorts space. how does he deal with this? how does he deal when he himself is the cause of the distortion? did einstein think of this? what if he called stephen hawking now? what would he say?

it's happening again; the thoughts. he remembers that he is supposed to breathe. three slow deep breaths and he remembers he is sitting on a cushion on the floor of this small room. with three breaths as if each were a brushstroke, he lets the cascade of thoughts splash over him and realizes they are just thoughts.

Spleen

The beautiful morning and its pale blue sky
feels to him, like a ruptured spleen.
His mood far from the sky and its crisp air.

It's the color of blood escaping the liver;
a crimson turned dark and burnt like umber
awash in some demonic purplish gel.

There is a space around his corpuscles
that shimmers like Antartic borealis.
It's a kind of dangerous beauty that lures

the inattentives to a downward fountain;
his own personal Scylla and Charybdis.
In the kingdom of animals, bright hues

are oft warnings of malacious company
but inattentives are like moths to a flame.
Hot or cold, real or fake, moths don't care.

(June 12, 2007)

Americus Rain

Moments of the South come to me
like soft rain falling on leaves.

Curtains of rhapsodies and
a choir of moaning droplets

Hiding sharpened points beneath;
an veritable arboreal punji array.

(June 7, 2007)

being productive

it feels like the first day i've been productive in over a week.

it's been longer since i've painted.

it was due time...

glaze and reflection

it is like a glaze; the way the fog comes in at speed unlike the breath from your lungs. air moves faster than your tissues know how to handle. temperatures seem hot and cold in interstial flashes; like dawn and dusk happening in sequential cycles but at the speed of an antique strobe. it is not the flash that gets you. it is the burnt piece of plastic and strands that look so beautiful after the light that leaves you wanting to say that it should not be over like that...not like a cheap flash.

it's never over like that. it's just you find it hard to believe that it is that way. it is hard for you to believe in a string of events, a string of anything larger than your senses can tell you. it is the source of our passion. it is the source of our love and hatred. it is the source of the entire spectrum of our emotions. we are lords to entities within ourselves that are and have always been larger than we can control. and that is the allure.

Limbs or crooked lines

Collision

Thinness or is it shallowness?
Limbs or crooked lines
against a thick flat grey;
a ceiling that reflects
as much as it shelters.

Branch or forearm?
Appendages
that have purpose –
how do such organs compare
with the spongy grey

that thinks or the red
pulsing lump that feels?
There are so many
extremities like a thousand
souls reaching out, each looking

for a new flavored Nirvana.
And they are all related to
two particles crashing
into one another in the vast
traffic jam of this universe.

(May 12, 2007)

To see further

a found poem (on blackbird.vcu.edu)

by PAULA CISEWSKI

Telescope Psalm

Am I afraid to be forgiven?
I’d have to wear nicer suits.

By the time everything is fair I will
have devised a system to send word

via the birds on my roof. But I am
of two minds about most subjects

and, in turns, one mind must elbow the other
who is snoring. That’s why I thought I enjoyed

talking too much tonight at the brewpub
until the silence of the long walk home

made a better argument, better
company. The sky’s library of stars and dust,

whatever is possible remaining possible
even as it’s gazed at through the private

telescopes of an entire hemisphere.
It’s now. It’s not forever. And this

forever shall be true. To see further,
those without telescopes sometimes

cup their hands around their eyes.

believe it or not

"Believe it or not, I can actually draw."
– Jean Michel Basquiat

bonjour à jeudi

thursday morning in vista, looking northwest. the fog comes like liquid, knowing that the warming sun on the other side of the ridge will soon melt it into vapors ascending into the distant blue of earth's ceiling.

twin tailed gazers

lola and bo bo at the window this afternoon.

wish i had a video cam to capture the synchronized flicking of their tails...

if only

lola on the window sill in the afternoon.

all our moments could be this serene...