Resipiscence Lost

Coetzee's always a timely way to get to somewhere forgiving of every human indiscretion, rendering from the fat of lust its rightful glorification, a sardonic contempt held for anything that admits anything not meant just for us, just us, and all the time no matter how a bullet chips the bone in our elbow, the wrist bruised from words too often pounded without purpose. Our rally declares itself in regret recanted: it was all in the happy morning light for the best reasons and there is never a reason to mourn.

I saw her beating the Coetzee out of me, in her casual reflections, vitiating me in her idyll, with as careless a word as "okay," the belief held in pantheistic truths, where a sad slash of light reveals an Aleph acting as prism to all. All she had to do was remind me that I travelled, once

From Saskatoon to Kent, hence to Capetown, repeated thrice, dates remembered in a book tossed in the suitcase that brought me to both. With a sighing "okay," I'm reminded that

Landing back to a land once rebuked as all hick, preempted from a scrutiny that could be called it since the bias had set, reminding me

That forever lasts just that for me whenever staring at myself in the smalls and looking for the thing that makes me me without shame; that nothing that she ever did, any "she", moon or whoring bottle, ever did take a thing away from me that I didn't give back, dour pill, swallowed together, taking us where we thought we could never belong but always had.

All wrong: the one wilting scene thirsting for a bit of futurism, a daub of water to quench the disdain for a present that refuses to die in progressive images of geraniums....geraniums...strange flora....blossoming...proved a truth dust envies, and

That 

Right, that the little boy teasing a bug with the pad of his forefinger, trying to align the insensate creature's movement to his own, seeing where they differ and why; and as soon a dog whipped, a man murdered, a world poisoned, as stop trying to learn that

Spitting in the sun's as profitable as a billion hard cash bulging pocket and balls, each momentous in the mind, and there--forever lasts just that--disproving a truth dust envies. 

Telling her that when the geraniums flounder, petalled seals bashed by shore and man; and the whole of the raucous world utters a groan from incipient lust; and there was a reason never to have one though all of you was told to tell you there was, 

I counted you. I counted and, life paraboling, I counted again. 

prrrrrrr

Door cast open, a red gash as wounded as the womb, I inherit her, ask that the blush of good midnight air takes us where I wouldn't, pray for her. A rattling of bone, a shambling sack, moving from instinct to bed, there, right there, I see her.

And when I do, do I marvel.

Made

Here is a lie you made me in your love reject, a thought once felt: I chronicle the chaos of the ill-reasoned images from sleep in uneasy elliptical motions, a true orbit defying geometric simplicities. Unsure of the meaning snared in mild spasms of shock while sleeping, fatigue supplants vibrancy as the normal state; pragmatic dicta usurps passion. Beauty becomes something to weep for but never over: the nexus where condition and being vanishes arises. Only the collation of experience is left; to be is to catalog. When then the chaos? the agency once implied?

Unity defies chaos and in our hearts, yours and any who have heard you, and whatever your guise times long gone but still to come, we always knew it. Unity is truth; disunity, the easier thing to understand precisely and paradoxically because it conforms to staid, rigid shapes, never accounting for the passionate creation and recreation, and transmutation of life. Because we feel we cease to understand in the sense that can matter when either or both are at stake; and that is always. Unity has been one of your great gifts to me.

I love you more than I can ever express, Brandi. You are the finest thing in this finite world. You define the parameters of my existence; and I am grateful.

Mom and Dad

An archaic term that lit by a cigarette, bed replenished and depleted by orgasm, sings the tune of spilt lineage...

A lit past moon glistened by moorland recumbrance and the hallowed fascination of bone mouldered into loamy need, stubborn, my soul resposes while body, rent by the translucency of distinct urges knit from the ancestors of those bones, lays the land with its oldest friends, sharing a flask of worm and lichen, knowing the staying glory of a moment by which eternity etches its invisible, charmless feature, unchanged but to smile through the upheaval of stone and treeroot groaning with the mirth no humour can in the eons between yawns define.

Bone, tree, rock, loam--all with wet-eyed winks claim the same story, the only one, never told but always heard like the chant of the young girl's heart or airless wind. Contradiction binds through knotty stems and with grace procured by or for Gaia welds that seamless tale. And beauty unspeakable with certainty abounds, bounds, and traces the parameters of its demise.

The reproving upturned hand of a compromised blow to the quavering consumer of the Bacchus juice transmutes the juice into the ink of this pen, this bitch-sword, and in reproof finds its like through the word that, stabbing with the minutae of subtle, accumulated cuts leaves finally the g(r)aping wound unstoppered by cork or poulstice. The lust of gusted wind brings its calm-drip through a stylus less sword when said than surgical tool, cutting out the tumorous growth each slice regrows.

"Dry the Rain," an interpretation for Brandi, who does

You almost always talk about making life better; and you almost always feel better when you're bettering another's life. 

You can't imagine how you touch me. 

"If there's something inside that you wanna say, you say it out loud it will be okay: I will be alright, I will alright, I will be your light, I will be your light". 

Few if any people realize that Beta Band's "Dry the Rain" is the defining light of our century, and the most fundamentally Catholic during the same span, though it says not one word about Christ. I explained why I thought so in an essay I wrote couple of years ago, the kind that analyzes a poem-lyric line by line (called "explication") and then theorizes in between or in the end about the sum meaning of the work.

 

The shortest version I can render is that the lyricist's plea to have the gloomy-eyed Mott (Mutt? It is the ambiguity in key words that is part of the defining process of this song, mimicked as it does the ambiguous sense of morality the last century and this one, through many creeds, all philosophies and the horrors of war that themselves were willfully inspired by capitalist creed) take him in "dry the rain," a plea from a son to a father for aide and by extension, symbolically and as a statement of collective consciousness, for the "gloom-eyed one" amidst his junk, the rubble of his mental and physical consumerist constructs, a plea from a citizen for society to shelter him, redeem the legacy of his misdeed.

 

During this period, the music and voice are very grainy, further reflecting ambiguity through the harmony of form and of content that defines this as song as--for as far songs go--a Modern and Post-Modernist work of art; for the two are indistinguishable; the song perfectly echoes Marshall McLuhan's Modernist credo that "the medium is the message". 

The singer asks thrice of Mott to take him in and dry the rain, the number a symbol of the Trinity and specifically of Christ's word that Peter will thrice betray him before the cock crows. Here we see that the singer acknowledges tacitly his own complicity in his misery and confusion, as a son in the transitional phase into manhood, into accountability, will.

And the music again reflects this shift by the suddenly clear tone of the singer's voice, the filtering of graininess in the music, which accelerates slightly in tempo and, along with this newfound certainty of the singer in his plea, his greater insistence to be sheltered, aided, have made sense of what his father-society has left him, he grows in confidence. By the third plea, a full shift in sound has occurred, strong and defiant. The staccato growth of notes, now without a hint of muddle and assertion, leads to a sudden doubling of notes, two sets of notes running in parallel. The new strand has as its core a trumpet, the clarion call of angels: renewals, grace, mounts and is at hand.

Here enters finally the ultimate message, the redeeming forgiving of father to son, human to society, and ultimate God's Own grace: "If there's something in side that you want to say, you can say it out loud it will be okay, I will be alright, I will be alright, I will be alright, I will be your light." The trumpet now dominates between the two strands of notes, and again the ambiguity of language is retained: for no matter how closely you listen as these words are--also thrice uttered, like the plea, also thus retaining unity--you can never be exactly sure when he sings he will be alright or he will be the light; but the differentiation is clearly heard or, more to the point, and casting this piece as genius, you can feel it. Symbolically, by being alright by the previous generation's truth if only is uttered, the singer, now fully accountable, fully a man or woman, fully integrated into the world of God BY it, says that the truth will make him, the singer, the light; and that the generation preceding his need never fear his wrath if the truth is all that is said.

Redemption, forgiveness, grace, a welding of form and content aligning precisely to Modernistic tenets, raise this work into the upper echelons of artistic expression.


Okay, I guess that wasn't the shorter version...

I will walk now, loving you, and hearing in your voice always that trumpet.

Just morning

A sprite bird burgles the morning, every morning, catching the memories lain by night as if its every sense were contingent on obliterating them. I resent the birds, in halved moments. Mostly, I think of them as I would Tang: good in space; less than appealing when tasted.

When the memory- and the drink-sodden weight of my lids are by the heft of both hoisted-- I first curse those birds, and then know gratitude for their having the gall to be; and by being, be by me. Loons come to mind.

A mid-week morning hits me straight in the face. Then, without censuring itself, and mounds of teeth-grinding angst born, right there and then and all the time, loving her and hating unctuous familiarities, something drives something in me as deep as the need to define "something", and it is this, I with a grin guess:

If, Sweetheart, I ever saw a smile as bountiful as yours in how it directs the light to where it needs to be, I'd be more than a little surprised. Irascible qualms die in its cause; and if there is a half-hearted step between us, I assure you that it is mine, not yours; you have never been, never can, never will, anything but the very force of this world; and for you, only, with a hint of regret and some pride and more hope,

serviam.

a moment of existential distress in capetown

petulant wounds exasperate capetown's oxygenated attempt to seal them. Sunshine plashes everywhere. Even when the sky's overcast, the fulsomeness of the flora talks uninterruptedly of a bacchanal of photosynthesis. The liveliness doesn't oppress me but empties me. You have to be vacuously accepting of life when it'll by such bullying insistence preempt any possible decision to reject it. I end up resenting the knee-hack at my freedom to be unhappy (or happy). Five years from now I'd probably forget how to write my own name. People with regret say they want that, a place that makes you forget, but I don't. Each day I fight to remember it all. The splotchy profusion of vegetation crabs my vision, tries to crowd out my memories.

Nicolette rails against my continued interaction with Jessika. Our discussions revolve around issues from the past and her accurate, perky awareness that I still have feeling for Jessy, even if flora and sun and food and frequent sex collude to pervert the course of a love begun half a year ago.

"Pervert the course": I say the phrase with an acrid slime in my throat, convulsing momentarily the smoother functions of my bowels, triggering almost their spasmatic heft.

"Course." What course? Destiny? Where to commence, where to end, what lies in the middle? The plague of these questions is their insistence that time be marked by a calendar in our experience we're never privy to. We refer to it, this gross abstraction, as a means of economy, an economy almost alien to us in the dim glow of night's afterbirth, a fist of leavening grey thrown at the sky, some child's act (no doubt, let's us pray). Not even dawn cites the "time," only speaks of many dawns or a few when animal sniffed rarified air and for a while we loved beyond our instincts, when we sacrificed where it made no sense and didn't when it did. I assure myself that a story when told to its moral conclusion dismisses considerations of chronology effectively, resoundedly. The impression will be had; the time will not matter. So I console myself. The reality may be grimmer. The reality may lie in physics, particulate matter, a reliance on nostalgia upon which I can't count (the clock, though, never does fib). In any case, I think, to preserve any sense of outrage, I'll scowl at the sky, burrow into my chest with two clawing hands, rip it open, let the venal curse see the roiling maggots within and call it good