To look back and reflect, happy 2009

Ask ourselves now at the dawn of a new year, while picking up the wine glasses and tacking upon the wall the new calendar, that paper compartment with the perhaps cliche, perhaps nostalgic, perhaps clever images attached: what was and what will be? These squares blank, each waiting to be filled.

We each at the starting line stand, a countdown is heard above the throng, each in his own voice joining in, as zero called a gun shot is fired and we set out on this 365 day lap around the sun. Vowing at this outset to change something perhaps or to continue to become or to evolve into something better.

This day excuses all the rest. Our sole chance to wipe the eraser across the blackboard and return the words previously written to the white dust from which they came. There is value in this symbolic gesture, though the act is without weight or significance apart from that endowed by the collective whole. Without such an act word would overlay word until a mass of illegible whiteness, a confused mass of neglected promises, goals, and commitments, obscured the whole board.

Allowing ourselves one last glance, a weight of sincere regret descends and is chased away by one more glass of champagne. We can permit ourselves tonight, we say, if only tonight, that forbidden pleasure, forgiveness. Tonight, all our shortcomings can slip away and fall safely onto a soft bed of fresh promises.

He speaks of failure as if it were the only state mankind could ever find itself in. As if the sincere and perceiving eye could only admit to visions of failing and broken humans. He reflects also upon those successes, those events that he willingly recalls as triumphant. Wherein he rose above the situation, the limitation, or his old handicaps, wherein his vision was broadened, his mind was strengthened, and his ignorance removed. We see him, nonetheless, wading through a quagmire. These, even the best of these, do not exist to be congratulated, to be applauded, or to be gloated over. They exist merely as footstones upon which the foot treads. A path that has lead irrevocably to today, the first day of the new year.

Past deeds great and small, noble and ignoble are the victuals that supplied the dining tables of our yesterdays’ meals upon which we supped. The patterns of these meals, but not the meals themselves have commanded the shape of our bodies, the circumference of our girths. No pattern can be altered in a day, or in a promise. No pattern can be altered without much stumbling, without much effort, without much determination. Yet always this pattern is changing, with or without our allowance, with or without our forgiveness. Therefore, to promote positive change, practice daily forgiveness, cease self judgment altogether if you can. Perfection is a dirty myth, stumbling blocks a lie.

Build in your mind a castle so impermeable it ceases to be a assailed, it ceases even to be spoken of. This castle may not exist, but your approach of it does. So once your castle is built, forget all about it and mind only your steps, for each step in stepping is all that matters.

Our hermetic alchemist; A flattened cardboard box

He would retreat outside the stone wall of the village into a world of his own devising. Like arms in deep river sleeves withdrawn to luminous caverns of glowing mind matter. Bearded, hooded, veiled in darkness. Our hermetic alchemist. Mixing minerals to alleviate the death pangs of a suffering world. A world of his own devising. Mountains from molehills and breath from clay; a universe of particularly subjective order. Lead did not transform into gold. No. In our alchemist’s laboratory lead was gold. For reality is language is reality. He who can shape definition has dominion over all. No longer is there any need for gold to remain static, unattainable, exotic; for our alchemist has no need to change the form of the object if he can change the form of the language, the form of the world in which the object is defined.

•

I have a bed now, of sorts. The kind Japanese woman at the store didn’t stock any three inch futon mats, but I could not imagine sleeping upon anything thicker. Four inches, good, she said. But in my gut a voice without lips or lungs insisted again, three. Even this depth seems a luxury reserved for the reclined, the worshiping narcoleptics dozing prostrate before the alter of life, the eternal slumberers. Perhaps, I fear beds. Symbols, as they are, of commitment, location, permanence. I have nightmares of bed posts. They are fence posts, no, twisting black iron columns supporting a wrought iron gate towering over me. Thunderclouds and claps of bright blue light above. When the downpour is too heavy and the wolves are snapping at my heels I will test the grounds within, and warm myself at the hearth in that enchanted castle of the beast. I’ve had beneath my body while it dreams these last three months of daily nights, a three quarter inch blue foam camping pad and a flattened cardboard box.

“I’m always ready,” he said, in a voice caked in the residue of his birthplace in exile. The glint in his eyes peaking through a hedge of thick facial fur the color of autumn tree bark, was somewhere between flames, tears, and hope. He nodded. And nodded again to be sure. “Everything I need is here.” He gestured towards his rucksack. Already packed, always awaiting dilegintly the secret word, the emergency code, the thick welder’s hands to grab hold and hurl it atop that two legged vehicle. He unzipped it and pulled out two metal rods and began to assemble a dual paddled oar. He showed me how a folded mass of black plastic could transform into a kayak in moments. “How long? Ten minutes tops. Yes. Ten minutes tops.” Smiling, he patted his faithful canvas companion. I began to cry because I loved him very much and I knew that as long as that rucksack was packed, he could never escape

Each instantless instant in it’s purity defined

Like I stepped into my skin. Naked before, I half moment behind, straining to hear the rhythm, ear pressed into a rotted rubber tire, squeezing every nerve to recognize the mechanical assurance, the maternal heartbeat of the machine, the clock ticking quietly buried beneath banana peals, teeth worn bone steel axles, disconnected eye socket tin arrow gauges measuring death pointing earthward, kneeling atop the mile high waste mountain junkyard.

Now, threads of everything, visible like the edge of a cloud, sparkling like Easter tinsel wrapping, connecting, but never binding each egg with the next. Discovered, nestled in a patch of tall grass, beneath the drain pipe, brushing aside the crisp autumn leaves with a Thanksgiving palette, the realization that I had already been aware, had found before finding, before searching. Known without knowing, without knowledge. Cradled where my brow meets, a quiet sound, like exhalation. The future draws us onward just as the past pushes from behind. Strapped between these two cords we find ourselves in the present moment. Yet, what is it but a measure of our experience quantified, manifested as a drop squeezed from a syringe pulled from a reservoir? All things have already been done. Only yet to be experienced. These streets, these people, they are not new to me, nor I to them.

I hear someone say once again:
You remind me of someone... I just can’t think of who.

This clock is not real, nor is this junkyard.

Texas is the Reason

We people. Hairless bipeds. Crapping, eating, sleeping, waking, loving. We of flesh, bone, ligament. We bound to earth, bound to will, bound to fate. We each naked beneath our clothes, each homeless without our homes, each alone without our families, each futile without our gods, each ignorant without our knowledge, each beautiful without our illusions. Become innocent again. Knowledge is your hindrance if knowledge is your blindfold. Allow no thing to fade the colors you see.

Your black and your white.
They are the same.

There are no answers here. Or there..

Can you see the beauty in war?
Sublimity in explosion?
God in suffering?

Yes. These and their opposite are true.

Can you hear me?
Can you understand this?

Preparation for a returning

What is return? Tell me.

I might say that I returned a book to the shelf. I mean that from the same place I previously lifted it, I have, after some period of time, placed in back again. Implicit in returning is the idea that the object's content has remained unchanged. For if, having taken the book from the shelf, I removed pages, crossed out words, wrote new passages. In sum: added and deleted where I saw fit. And then placed it back in a bookshelf that had been repainted between two books that had likewise been re-edited. Could you then say that I returned the book? Or would it be more appropriate to suggest that the situation was too disparate from the original to consider it a returning?

How can a man then ever be said to return? He, who never passes a moment in which he does not die and experience rebirth. He, who sheds his cells day by day and is remade. He, who finds himself entering a place at once familiar and foreign to him, a place, like him, molded like clay by the hands of the clock, and is familiarly greeted with, "My friend, you've returned at last."

He might reply appropriately, "Neither am I the I who departed in time passed nor is this the place from which I departed. Both have passed beyond this realm." But who can understand this? So he might choose instead to satisfy his friend and say, "Yes it is I. I have returned."

Each is then left to puzzle over the changes that have occurred, as if any other outcome where possible.

No. Say not that I have returned, but that I have come again, for the very first time.

There Must Be You

There must be you, though I resent it, who stands up for yourself.

Shameless and Godlike, like a magician in tune with the darker arts, you snatch doves from void and before the audience can inspect you return them.

You quiltmaker, you second hand tailor. You weave together the clothes of dead men.

You self-molded prophet of the most high self. You feel no shame in contradiction. You feel no compulsion to weave parallel lines.

You who've never felt conflict, judge me for wrestling with truth, with the angels, with God.

And you say I'm toying with myself. That I'm the sum of a simple and predictable math equation that you read about in college.

Yet, though I resent it, there must be you. For without you, who would remind me of the folly of human endeavors? Without you, who would lead me to the volcanic ledge of absurdity to unearth my buried convictions? Without you, who could I stand against?

You are like a broken compass always pointing South. I'm never lost if I consult you and then turn and walk the other way.