If Only For A Moment May I Touch The Wild Twist

I stand alone upon the sentence of my grave
It keeps no form of weeping
No telepathic takings have their measure
No hush-hurries have their place
No one thing or soul is safe
If in reason-seeking came

Embers to be faced
From a fire which could not be traced
Stamped out
Pressed in around its edges
Told its name
Assigned its space
Dare we call Earth’s Mother
Tamed?

Here upon the wild froth
And crashing of its waves
There lies a subtlety
A saved and wretched madness
Unembraced
A lingered still breathing
Unlabored, though
If not in vain

Hopes collect in mass and come unkempt
Together, here remain
Tempt and torn
Undressed in haste
Of that which guiltless keeps the blame

Hard, unforgiving hands beat down
Of time
And laws of reason;
Soundness
And its often wake
Collapse upon the cleaved-leaning martyrdom kind

Not a one
Shall find complaint

Be stilled, unsorrowed, soothed

Like footprints
Be them far removed
Scattered in and off the path
Variations of a purpose
Deviated from degree

Still, the skilled wisdoms of the ancients unfortold
The blind–but not the sightless-heart would seek

Be it bound
To thee, in chains
To endless fuel
Of longing
For knowledge
And for innocence
Dichotomous belonging

Matrimony juxtaposed
Mortality in duty
Bind the seagull, searching seeking
To her own refusal shore
Emptied of her wanton sight
Unthieved unclaimed
Uncoward braved
Forevermore, Foreverstays
The treasure
And its troves untold
Or if at all, then too untake

She came–not once did hesitate–but crash arrived
In versions; sighs
The truth a disappointment
Perpetual, in nature

She was Compassion
Without permission
Sympathetic of all sakes
But came, she nonethelessing did
To have her bite
Her bitten dust
To taste
Its dew
The morning midnights
Too
A legacy, abate

Familiar should be as the gate
The worms shall have their meal

This of course, is what is meant

By patience, terms of virtue

Cyclical in terms of sense
In feel, it be serene
Portion filled divinity
The quiet keeping bliss

Simplicity reducing us
Duality, to this

The Lazy Man’s Fiddle

As a child I was told to believe in myself, to get out of bed on my own, early; to rise ready and reaching, reach for something, kid, until you taste it, touch it, know
And so
I reached, all right. I reached right to the eyes of God
Saw my fellow man
A sight for sore eyes
Even from that angle

I reached upon the ancestral path, touched prehistory’s keepings, and silenced by its sorrows I released its angry hand

I reached until the reaching wrote the writings on the wall, my eyes both saw the truth in who is building
brick by brick
the red-handed oblivion, the barrels of monkeys, the masses of them
Making fates and the laws
For us humans
It was a Blood Meridian; I didn’t reach that way for long

I reached the naked shaking fault; the midline, the angel’s fall; the lion’s den, the sacrificial blood; the albatross; the sound barrier boom, the speed of light, the hands of time, I reached and shook them once or twice

Mars, like Earth: so lifelessly breathing

I reached the heat of the wild noon
Mercury, mercurial
Elemental wrecking ball, I reached
into the core, the flame
The heat that kept me reaching
til I
Grabbed survived and lastly changed

I reached and read for firsthand proof
the eternal pride and prejudices; Newton, Nietzsche
Among the others
Such a sight-surprising touch
To well-read hands
When finding both
So long devoid
of their words and their pomp
their circumstance such
with their tongues tied to dust

I reached the romances too, the ones Love should cease to be if forgotten; the ones quietly ravaged, permanent, glass-like and ageless; I reached right into the middle of that rhythmic swinging see-saw

Wordsworth, Dickinson; the flower-pushing tragedies of a heart-infected wisdom

I reached her hope, and his regret
Neither have their feathers
There was no bird
There was no song
Echoes of a figure eight which wrapped around the hollow
This: the only thing there found
Still perching in the soul
Hope, if ever truly reached, is but an empty grave
I reached old age and touched its face, fingerprints, I used to trace
Its browline and its frown
No evidence of smile lines
And so I laid my reaching down
At last, with nothing satisfied
yet everything there is to find
My heart, to it is bound

Dear World

So, I’m in the hospital.

What started as a random ingrown hair quickly turned into a grapefruit-sized abscess (literally), and from there it progressed into a nasty case of MRSA Cellulitis.

After an immediate admission to the hospital and an extensive series of cultures, labwork, imaging tests, and consultations with infectious disease specialists and surgeons and many other doctors whose specialties I can’t recall — all of whom were dutifully dressed in their haz-mat suit-resembling ensemble — I was suddenly being wheeled into surgery.

The surgery was totally unexpected. It was invasive and cosmetically horrifying. Envision yourself coming out of anesthesia only to discover a massive, wide-open, gaping wound large enough to fit your entire fist inside — and deep enough to get halfway up your forearm. You think you’re grossed out?

Okay, I’ll spare you the rest of the details.

While in recovery from surgery, I developed another abscess. I’m currently on an infusion of various and ridiculously hard-core I.V. antibiotics– most of which have little to no effect whatsoever against the MRSA.

However, I’m also well-supplied with a nice variety of chill-out-and-feel-merry medications, which make it much easier to feel hopefully nonchalant about the whole ordeal.

Really, it’s just staph.

I’ve missed reading all of your wonderful posts and hearing all of your beautiful thoughts and hearing how your lives are going. I’ve received so many comments that I still haven’t responded to; just so you know, each one is invaluable to me. Your words hold weight and I promise to respond as soon as I can.

You know, once I get rid of this flesh-eating bacteria.

Your prayers and healing thoughts are appreciated, and I can’t wait to be healthy and home and reading your brilliant thoughts again.

A Love Story

once upon a time
a mindful poet
took a moment
seriously, by choice
sat down with it
and to it gave
his own first-person voice

speaking silent,
he proposed
“let me paint you
by number
letter you, suppose
immortalize your beauty
entombing
from you, in me, of us
both
within history’s keeping
of the things that ever mattered
keep us joined, reunioned, close
then
should humankind return
one day
to think upon me
it shall be you
they’ll always have
to recognize us most”

the moment paused and then replied,
“it cannot be
with me, you see
for I am not possession”

Conversations With a Crazy Person

Have you ever had one of those moments when it suddenly dawns on you that your brain is having a conversation with itself without any conscious effort on your part?

It happens to me every time I stop and pay attention to what my mind is doing.

My thoughts think for themselves. If I don’t have something demanding my undivided attention, my attention divides itself into a million pieces and gives each piece a full inspection. I know, it sounds crazy. See what I mean though? My brain can barely finish processing one idea before it flies into an over-analyzation autopilot.

I’ve always been this way. You know the type. I’m the girl who can barely get past “How’s it going?” without a fifteen minute pontification of the potential significance of the abstract patterns the syrup made on the waffles at breakfast. I think too much about too many things entirely too deeply and it matters a lot more than it should.

As a child I would hold mock trials in my front yard. My friends never objected. You think I’m being ridiculous and I won’t argue, but yes. It really happened. Regularly, and often.

It hasn’t changed much with age, either.

I married a lunatic, which wouldn’t say much about the point I’m trying to make except that his lunacy is deeply tied to his obsessive-compulsive need for structure. Predictability. Order. Patterns. His world falls apart if he’s not at least an hour and a half early to wherever he’s going. You think I’m exaggerating; I’m not. His job requires him to be on site by eight o’clock each morning; he’s there by 6:45am every day. In all the years he’s been employed, he has never been later than 6:45am. Not once.

He isn’t paid hourly.

We’re as opposite as two human beings can possibly get. I traveled like a hippie in the gypsy-freedom of my 20′s. I stayed awake until the sun rose regardless of the day of week, sleeping the mornings away in a tent (or simply on a blanket when I didn’t plan ahead and bring the tent, which was more typical) in some various mountainous terrain, where I had intentionally gotten lost the night before, learning the basics of another language or reading an autobiography or working on a term paper or studying for a final or swimming alone all the way across the lake, drinking coffee with dinner and dancing to the silence until I had to return to work or school. Even while working full time to put myself through college, double majoring at that, I never sacrificed the opportunity to live life to the fullest.

Him? He built his credit and trained himself to become the best he could be in his trade. Made sure he kept his lawn obsessively manicured and his vehicle ludicrously detailed, spotless.

Boring.

My philosophical mind drives him batshit crazy. The more curious I am about the why of things, the more OCD he gets about the how of them. My wonder is gasoline to the furious flame of his irritated ambivalence. It might be hilarious if it weren’t so totally crazy to live out in first person.

This particular wavelength I’m riding all started after a knee-jerk reaction I had to a flippant comment he made, the last time our polarities collided in a fury of spontaneous combustion. I told him he’s miserable because he takes himself way too seriously. He told me I make him miserable because I think too much and I take my thoughts too seriously.

His ‘crazy’ has a way of rubbing off on me; I digress.

I take my thoughts too seriously? Oh please. I take them as they come: all at once, all the time, all over the place and that’s that.

But as I continued to mind-screw his mouth-garbage, processing what was actually being said, an epiphany hit me. This is why I think too much (too deeply, too constantly, about too many things): my brain is searching for patterns in a patternless insanity.

I could’ve peed my pants with a “YES!”-type “aha” feeling when I stumbled upon this video; it hits the nail on the crazy man’s head: …Madness! WATCH IT THROUGH TO THE END.

What makes us who we are? Do you see a pattern?