Paradox bound

Sultry night. A pastiche of fulsome smells embroidering the air with a memory here, another there, all helter skelter. She left for work this afternoon asking me why I was sad, an acknowledgment rather than a question. My reply, I don't know. A heart can be heavy and light, I should have answered, a paradox generated by time-senses come alive from the awareness of movement, a brusque break with the routinization we use to tamp those senses and convince ourselves we're immortal. I see nothing but transience tonight. Excitement, apace last night with caution, lunges past it, fueled and foamy around the rippling mouth while the abandon the reward for a resigned course suffuses me. We're all frangible bits of flesh and dream, imagining that the former keeps us whole when the latter alone negotiates with no oblivion, leaving the work of decay to molecules.

Sultry night and I'm symbol and sign, kin to pollen and gnarled tree limb, unto myself beloved and lover. Vespers and I swirl as one. Wind is my transportation, reigns I grab at whim, disembarking the same. All I ever was resides as will in the motion of every particle, every orchard's burden, every peasant's sigh, every Cypress calmly defying paltrier expectations. Joy! The percussive past reassures me, Joy!

When left to fend for my soul's purchase as a child, how I became indebted to my parents for the independence granted from any one thing, enslavement to all. On the cusp of an old adventure in tress to appear new do I thank all for owing all. In purity, without solicitude or want, am I by a duty Absolute absolutely free.

And so, yes.

Carpentry (she smashes clocks)

Up, carried by a dream wiping clean the patina of chronological life to find myself where I had fallen asleep yet surprised at being in the midst of an existence having all the features of mine while foreign to me. The short-haired carpet underfoot; the smells bearing more of themselves from the coaxing heat that's recently arrived to remind of the grit and sex and tumult of life; the clock above the mantle like so many clocks above so many mantles, as if they were born to pair, the former an almost organic and symbiotic lover of the memories sitting upon the latter, tick-tock we lived and died; the humble rustling of a hamster cocooned in a little globe of shredded paper she'd lain there; her, adrift in her own ocean, lids like petals softly concealing wherever the dark or light played lambent in her eyes as the red plush chair already sold and nearly gone gave her solace a final time--all the same in a visual, sensual pattern of familiarity that somehow breeds caution, if not fear.

 Caution: this is not your life. How did you come here? Up and up not into clarity but amnesia or a return to an amniotic state of innocence compelled by our leaving here soon, compelled by wonder, a naked eye visiting a potential future unprotected by repetition, those physical motions we imagine locked into an invisible and unyielding choreography set by a rational and divine order. We relocate our lives soon, we enter a portal of creation, everything blank and black with only our mistakes and the blood they spill to paint whatever house we'll call home again.

The sorrow of imminent relocation cloys and crabs my heart moment to moment now, compounded by the same I sense in her. We leave together but also in a renewed and fierce isolation from each other as the uncertainty of an untested path forces us into ourselves to reexamine the fortresses inside, slap their walls to ensure their soundness, feel our armor, and by its purity also feel an intolerance towards those acts or duties still a part of this place we will abandon, an intolerance to the compromises made and dignity divested in making them to construct a house now proved vulnerable to the circumstances of others, wills not ours. The order we thought divine shows itself illusory and we weep like children watching death claim and disintegrate the bodies of their parents. We weep for what we do not know, as well.

From my selfexamination I emerge no more or less emboldened by the reserves of strength or weakness found than when born; and with the same impertinent joy do I hold in the realm where sky and earth kiss the hand of my partner, my best friend, the person in whose gaze I will always find my solace, my being, my dream, the only certainty, the house withstanding all winds.

The last thing

And there's a last thing that was the first thing and always emerges when the only truck you'll have with life is honesty. You know it though never the right word.

And the Jews say God's name is ineffable.

The thing sits in you as the legacy of your birth, enameled up over centuries in dramaturgy, a bemoaning both the beginning and purpose of language, the allcry of the newborn blasted with pain. This thing is not loneliness though loneliness articulates its earthly sense; and it's not sorrow though sorrow enrobes it. Nourished by absence and presence entwined, the thing opts for worldlessness, a thereness like sudden violence or the authority of a storm.

The wall-clock's metronome keeps apace with its digital counterpart on the screen, each tick signalling a terrible loss, the horror of irretrievability. The torment of man's ingenuity, the need to by calculus or statue or dumb gashing name this thing. Shamen reinventing themselves as doctors prescribe around it; houses of shouting men and women would with writ or verse would lash it to a pole, paper it into stillness for study. This thing that means you can't ever keep your child or a tear of outraged hurt or of the joy preceding it--the great benevolence, leveler, death for life and the reverse describing the quintessential moment. This thing, it defies nothing, embraces the imbecile, tolerates the wise, never lets go. Never in it is a tick forgotten or remembered. Paradox its subterfuge, our agony, all passion. This thing that hides the harder you seek is right around the corner, there, on that bend you know so well, there in a mirroring blade of grass from a morning sun thirty years ago you were sure the first and last, the enduring one.

And then it happens. Invincible, you feel this thing make an etch of you, an afterthought held in mimeograph. Artful at last, you are testament to streaming tears, you are the laugh ever echoing, you drink from Keats' urn, you wallow no more, becoming it.

But, oh, for one more first kiss.

Strategic Planning

The placental tides swing back, a wash in the throat-bile and its balm the same. You hold, and nothing’s sadder, to the walls containing the promise of a liberation you thought fated. You hold, tight, to perse dreams of walls wainscoted, life bled true. And there’s truth in that; and in that truth of selfholding held long enough, you believe. And believe the next step in believing. And something better than you and a bit less happens; and you call it evolution though you know it’s another name unnamed by the one rendering it.

We don't care of the plod sending billions of shamed children to drugged doom by parents split and spoiled and spooled by the curvature you haven't the courage to name, though you know it screams and claws ever neural impulse, sketching decay on screens and print and the universities declaiming us. 

The marrow of it came to me when I sat on a red couch asking myself how truth and everything heard might be one and the same and where they differ. Currency had nothing to do with it: it's a ponzi scam crumbling us all ten, fifteen years from now; the monetary system is the largest gull by gulled hurt, redblue bruised. I thought that sending one simple message, indiscreet, might have an impact. And with the simultaneous force a thousand ways by cells respiring, construed, owed, give something we'd by any consensus call better. 

The plan was............................... 

hungry again

Will these impressions endure? Rain blinking silver beads against the asphalt purlieu spreading beneath the balcony, lit by the swaying beams of trucklight parasitic in purchase of a night every Being's repose. Bodies skeltering up unshapely grass mounds to doors lacquered recently, gaudily masking the impertinent, rotting, stormlashed pinewood, a patina over death as deathly coating the souls passing through those thresholds. 

Some pause, pretending to remember and looking at nothing within or without before headfirst and down they trundle into the confines of these drably grey wainscoted rooms fit best for the plump bedbugs and grubs leeching the moisture and thin, unstaunched blood inside. Will the spindly tree in the northeast corner, hunkered limp under the cloying expanse of nightsky freeze as frieze in the minds of us lumbering, life-weighted people circling the warrens of timber erected here, neighbours neither wood nor man to any? 

Will it stay with me later how a minute ago this body rose vertically, a wraith, from its supine chair by a reflex reconvening after its own mysterious response to the chopping wind that gutters electric light as if appropriating for nature what man thought his? Will I remember my blind kinship with the silent quake of this night's urge?

No hunger after filaments of matter, yet how I now starve. Famished. Gnostic.

Tradition

The Mardi Gras festival gathers the emaciated destinies of the people around this region into a kind of weltering remembrance of the immortality of their cells, the stones steeped in the blood of their precedents and a precognitive alertness to the vector of life sure to follow and steep anew in whatever continuum of violence and of consequent regeneration describes the irreducible carnal reality some avow as under-girding the misdiagnosed realities of religion or society. The looming ritual meant as a bill of lading for our souls in exchange for a body long ago willingly forfeited, Easter, sparked off by this "fat Tuesday" parade, terrifies me the way all blind treks of routinized significance do--the unctuous release of hoarded joy into the commons of humanity remains hoarded in me and pulled at by the mob against my wishes; issues forth, squeezed out savagely like a ripe gourd in the fist of a manic angry child. What more mournful than the worm-bedecked comfort wrought by selflessness?

It struck me in this unfreezing and unexpected cold in Louisiana: whatever problems there are are not mine alone; the body clinging to mine knows as little as the body to which it clings.

The usual cluster of notables peopled my dreams and lifted me into consciousness on a fat red rug ably designed for rest. The twitter of my soul and a blink of light behind me that was no blink but where my imagination thought it brought me to a rousing desire to snuff more wine outside.  My wife--any other title would be inept--came into the room, twirling with the spangles of an angel's sleep, replete with a mouth upon whose motions calm and excite a sailor as do waves, and said the smoke polluted her. We respond:

When you burn a piece of paper over a campfire it alights to the wind, carrying it upwards in a rocking motion that reminds you of the seemingly arbitrariness of butterflies, of vultures circling the sky about to drop.  Lunging into the air as you dream a butterfly might, gratifying, you make your way. Detach, then, from myself, as you would the deft cut in the air left by the remonstrance of a butterfly following its instinct, and consider the unlikeliness in our care for smell and sound as matters to no less my soul than the next boy who dies today for lack of water.

My digits type frozen and every misstep a likely hazard. Send me in all ways but not onto a balcony because you, delicate smoker, couldn't take a whiff of the poison you work to buy.