Category: Poetry

Free Verse

Lately, in the boston
Metropolitan area, the sky has fallen
Repeatedly.
I wish I pretended to care more.
the quiet white
Albatross,
Plumage pushing in clenching silence
As the world
Descends to meet it
A skyline receding
And falling ever downward
Like the wars of attrition
Fought as a last resort
In the middle of blood filled trenches
The sight of light long forgotten
The smell of soil, humus, death
A taste of the night in the air
Even in the pall-bearer grey air
Funereal and attuned
To the sum total
Of silence.

An Apocalyptic

The locust of dawn watches its prey
It sits in the fields of wheat
Grain rising with the golden dawn
Of revelation

The preacher sees the insect, clicking
Its angry chitinous legs
In preparation
The sound that howls like the
Cicada’s death cry
Across the endless plain of gold
Braided fibonacci
In circles, blonde french
Girls singing ring around the rosey

a Black chalcedony spark in the night
And the locust watches its prey
Its brothers sit on high, ready to harvest
Their blood yield.
Feast on the ripe earth’s grain
Claw into the flesh-y soil, and feel the dry
Bloodless land yield subserviently to its mass

The preacher knows the failure of inevitability
From the pulpit
Crying in tongues to Hecate, Hades,
And the pagan Hel
To escape the mass of destruction to which he cannot help
But witness

He prays for the hail of the almighty
The sun to blot out the sky
In ringed shadow
But not the locust
Not the prosaic monster

The flood of desecration opens its loud
Cacophonous wings
The capricious feeding begins
The crunch of bread
The failure of harvest
And the slow death

Of everything, under the threaded wings
Of Destiny

 

 

The Stream: 8.7.17

It’s very easy to be de-moralized, at times.

I joke regularly about my lack of readership. Partially because defending myself is harder than sheathing that metaphorical sword; but also because it’s true, and, above all things, I prefer honesty.

Image result for saraswati

Aum Vaak-dhevyai Cha Vidmahe
Virinchi Pathniyai Cha Dhimahee
Thanno Vaanee Prachodayath
That’s Saraswati, I like her image, and the Gayatri too, so here you go.
But, back to the point I wasn’t trying to make: sometimes, it’d be nice to be read. Perhaps that’s a bit prosaic of me, sitting here, reclined in my chair, head at a 90 degree angle by virtue of my back being just the incorrect enough posture to make it so. Hair too long, from the lack of time necessary to  get it cut. Feeling weirdly attractive, and only feeling weird about it because I’m not used to it.
I only recently visited the idea of self-love recently. It’s one of those foreign countries and languages of which I have become inordinately fond. One of those new vistas for my internal michelangelo…marco polo? Christopher Columbus? (ew no) to explore and cartographize, or something.
It’s part and parcel of leading a healthy lifestyle, and doing healthy things, for healthy reasons.
It’s why, instead of getting angry at myself for sharing the fact that I’m vulnerable, and tired, and a little lonely, there’s a me in my head who’s just giving me a hug and is petting my hair and going “It’s ok, man, you’re just you, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that”.
People have a need to have it together, and I do too. Few things these days frustrate me as much as not-having-it-togetherness…or y’know, something to that effect. Maybe I should rephrase.
Lately I’ve become real concerned about the nature of victimhood. Or, maybe not even that, the ability to be accountable? I don’t know, my mind feels loose, like a wrung out towel, so it’s all comin’ pretty slow to me right now.
But I’ve noted, as have literally countless self-help humans, that there is something to the power of believing. It’s not the same as moral certainty. Not that at all; if anything the morally certain make for easy victims.
Again I come to faith, eesh.
But victimhood is more of a choice than most people want it to be. And if more than 2 people ever read this, let me be clear: I’m not saying you haven’t struggled, or been the victim of some horrific shit. Statistically speaking, the odds are generally in your favor on that front.
What I am saying is that Victimhood can be passive, or it can be active. We all know the active type. The kind who make every excuse not to change their behavior. And that’s fine, by the way. Judgment doesn’t come easy to me.

But there is a person out there who has been wronged…pretty fucking brutally, for no reason at all. It’s led to this idea that they are unworthy, or unloveable. It has twisted their sense of trust, and given them the false belief that their life is less valuable, or less important. They’ve internalized darkness to justify it. That used to be me.

The terrifying truth about victimhood and self-loathing is that they are intertwined tightly. If the world is not a random, chaotic place, with no  inherent sense of any kind of real meaning, then that means there is such a thing as “Right”, and “Wrong”. Further, Morality for most people is pretty straightforward. Good guys, bad guys. Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and you’re the other ugly fuck.
We also assume that Karma is a straight line, and we also believe in Karma, even if that’s not what we call it. For the self-loathing crowd, the belief in being a bad person is rooted deeply through consistent exposure. You are made to believe you are terrible, and eventually it sticks. All your behavior, desires, and actions are motivated by this little demon that makes you a wrong entity.
And you believe it. If you were a good person, wouldn’t good things happen to you? Wouldn’t you be just? Wouldn’t life treat you, I don’t know…decently?
Well, maybe it is.
I don’t know about you, my experiences are quite a bit different than yours, I imagine, but the things in my life that were valuable, which increased my sense of compassion, and love, were those moments where I suffered most abjectly. Those moments where my head had to rest in my hands, because the weight of its sorrow could not be borne by gravity alone were the moments that were most enlightening.
But they only became that way once I stopped being an active victim. When I accepted the world doesn’t owe me stuff, just cause I exist. Instead of being punishment for being a monster, unworthy of love; an evil bastard with no sense of morality, and no sense of kindness; undeserving of even basic human attention. Doomed to languish in free-hand obscurity. And, rather, became lessons, stories with which to build truths. A true bottom-up approach.
When I stopped taking shit personally. When I stopped thinking that the world was designed to fuck me over. Well, then I started to live right. I started to love more. When I came to Hinduism, 7 years ago, I came to an understanding of peace and acceptance.
I came to understand that irrelevance isn’t a bad thing. It’s just a lesson.
I haven’t figured out what the lesson is supposed to be. But I have time and patience to make an effort.
Until then, I’ll just pretend that my existence is meaningful, make myself a king in my own eyes, and rule the domain of my heart justly. I will let love sit in there, and everything else, and watch the tide pull out to my own truth.

It’ll be pretty great.

 

Archives: Gold & Black

My heart shattered against
the          earth
and   when
it
broke
the wound overflowed with love’s blood
like golden tides
Pure & True
May
it
seep
with my presence
into the river of your thoughts
that mellifluous
aether of your dreams
And cross my chasm of infinite
black
nothing
That separates
us and reach your

untouched heart.

That yours may know that love
that has touched me
and married my darkness
with gold

Ekphrastic: A Bigger Paper Bag

Father John Misty
possessed by the spirit of Elliott Smith
Preaches like a holiday reverend
Over rhodes piano riffs and Figure 8s
falling sideways like lamniscate jokes
And hamlet references that fly over
The heads of serial killers and tennis players
Watching the footnotes and recording their dreams
While watching nothing happen in real time
And everything else happening
In a short foreign film about a boy
And his balloons

And darkness creeps in around the
Frame of his lilting
anguish
While he bareknuckle boxes
his demons
And Pitch shifting chaos
seeps in
Where the bag crumbles
Under dramatic swells

And I watch.