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sTORIES pOEMS eSSAYS |
13 March 03 There is a cold blue simplicity to early morning thought. There is a time before we wake completely, before our mind heats up and our fears and inadequacies stir, when the mind is sheltered in nebulous warmth. This glow is life without fear. This light is a life of infinite possibility. This is not poetry; but when poetry is not devoid of fear it usually at least makes an attempt at naming it. It is from this infinite calm man of the morning that the courage to write poetry comes, he hands one the bravery to stand against the static of society; to lift a single voice above the crushing tides of cynicism. Poetry is not about story. If philosophy is found in dark undercurrents, it is the job of the poet to dip the ladle deep, pull some struggling thought from the depths, and capture its essence in the clunky blue ice tray, serving the deep in a glass of ice tea. If it is science to pin the butterfly to velvet and name its parts, it is the job of the poet to name the shape of air left in a living butterfly’s wake. If prose is potato soup, poetry is vodka. :: posted by walker 4:42am 03/13/03  29 March 03 You can't search for your soul forcefully. It escapes through windows opened for the first time on a cool spring night, you awake, drenched in cold sweat. Throat tight, cramped lungs, the temperature having dipped back into sweater weather with the departure of the sun. The cold extends deeper than the flesh, some small part of you has taken wing, left a cold-filled cavity in the dark underscape of the soul. You can't panic. The part of you that would is out pacing the streets. You can only pull jeans over the shorts you fell asleep in, put on shoes and a sweater and start walking. Clumsily, you start out, realizing you have fallen asleep early in the night. The streets are filled with people that sleep until three in the afternoon, and then flood bars, hoping to avoid the chance of bumping into the parts of their souls that fled years ago, evaporating in the vacuum of cynicism. They spend the night laughing at themselves. They are fleeing the thing you seek. And yet they are beautiful, moving in warm groups, circled to hold off the possible advances of wayward meaning, they make you feel alone. They have the power of numbers, the magic of bread and circuses. A million zeros added together total nothing but look impressive, fear and doubt in infinite quantities never stack, they only make a deeper puddle. Each huddled group leaves a different odor wake. As though they have all agreed to use the same detergent and fabric softener, the same colognes and perfumes. The only presence they create is physical, their brains serve the purpose of running their bodies, allow them to mimic whoever is closest and coolest and stop there. How easy to settle onto a stool and drink. Little crippling blows, night after night, until there is no desire left. No curiosity. Alcohol is not the only way. Bad philosophy, racism, religion, there are ten-thousand ways to crush out the fire, other men are happy to dig holes for your soul if you lack the ambition. I hope the living part of you can never die. There are bacteria that can enclose themselves in microscopic near-invincible shells and travel through space, riding chunks of regolith thrown into space by the impact of an asteroid on their home planet. I hope the soul is the same, i hope all these well-dressed human shells are carrying the seeds of great explosive flowering brilliance deep in their minds. But i don't know. It is so easy to become distracted. It might be socializing or alcohol, but it might be rage and hate, anger at the uselesness of so much pain. As a teenager I decided man had only invented two things, mystery and time but that is another story. The one thing we have truly created is meaning. Everything else we do is just a rearrangement of already existing matter. It is meaning which is the invention of man. It is meaning which tortures or fulfills us. But the meaning-maker is the easiest part of the soul to lose, it is the bulk of what i have been discussing here. I meant to speak of spring, i sat down on the couch planning to doze off for a short time, awake and scribble about weather. Instead i awoke restless, launched myself out the door and ended up here, in the library, still in a daze, miles from home. The calming roar of the espresso machine, the obnoxious banter of a cell-phone using brother scorned by his sister. Hopefully i'll find my soul in the second half of this walk. :: posted by walker 12:42am 03/29/03 31 March 03 ClapTrap. the flowering fractal edge of sanity. it is so easy to become lost in thought; to suddenly find yourself in a universe with no physicality, no solidity. on the one hand there is the real world; the physical incarnation, it is this we mustn’t lose sight of if we are to hold tight our sanity, but there too is the ethereal world of thought, a world composed of two primary states The first state is as safe as the physical world, the state of the imagined. This is a place of already thought thoughts, of groomed lawNs and swept sidewalks. These tidy islands are bordered by brooding pools of the unimagined, but though the unimagined is deep and hidden, though we must thrust great daring thoughts into its depths to draw the islands of truth from its bottom, it still too has a border, an edge. There are of course other states, in between, beautiful coral reefs of the barely known, the hardly understood. There is also a third state, the land perhaps in which the minds of the insane reside; this is the land of the unimaginable. It is a land impossible to describe, a true cartographer's nightmare. A place of mismatched connections, of frightening cognitive landslides. On the occasions that I find myself lost in this un-land, the words rescue me, like blowing bubbles when disoriented in water, I follow the sentences back to sanity. :: posted by walker 1:42am 03/31/03 4 April 03 It is never too distant. Always primed for descent, the normalcy settles in, filling my depths as the beauty never will. I feel so unprepared, so unaware. Is the gap between the magnificient and the mundane bridged by something as simple as a decision? Or are we wired, wed to our destiny, moist arks, wet balls of beating, breathing, branching acid? :: posted by walker 3:42pm 04/04/03 :: posted by walker 1:42am 03/31/03 6 April 03 i must by choice abandon my sanity. the thoughts of other men are jagged shards of inanity. only dangerous to the extent that i spread them willingly across the floor of my mind; that i allow them to slowly shred the flesh of ingenuity. Miniscule drop after minuscule drop, my blood drug from my veins by the mundane, until my desiccated soul dissipates, scattered by the stale breath of the soulless. I try by beating and driving the slaves of art and words to earn freedom from the failings of flesh and fortitude. What must be accepted and what must be changed? :: posted by walker 12:42pm 04/06/03 :: posted by walker 1:42am 03/31/03 14 April 03 the words abandon me. existence is leeched of meaning, the words become nothing but sounds, so many stacks, stack after stack of sound. I know the world has not changed, does not differ at all from the moment before when all was joy, I know the soup in my head has soured, that it is only temporary but it is so consuming, this chemistry that both is and tortures what is, me. :: posted by walker 1:36pm 04/14/03 |
