"very nice, but maybe in the next world...."

OH HELLO

I am the ghost of Troubled Joe
Hung by his pretty white neck
Some eighteen months ago
I travelled to a mystical time zone
And I missed my bed
And I soon came home 

(I want the freedom and I want the guile)

They said :
"There's too much caffeine
In your bloodstream
And a lack of real spice
In your life"

I started something
I forced you to a zone
And you were clearly
Never meant to go
Hair brushed and parted
Typical me, typical me
Typical me

Loved and lost
And some may say
When usually it's Nothing
Surely you're happy
It should be this way ?

And when you want to Live
How do you start ?
Where do you go ?
Who do you need to know ?

Oh, Glenn.

(heres to the seemingly eternal staying power of the smiths)

"The loneliness of clothes draped over the backs of chairs is blue; undies, empty lobbies, rumpled spreads are blue, especially when chenille and if orange; not body warmth or body smell or the acidulous salts of the vagina -- no -- blue belongs to the past -- to the minutes after masturbation, to thought, to detachment and removal, fading, to the inside side of sex and the self that in the midst of pitch and toss has slipped away like a lucky penny fallen from a dresser."

high summer of strawberries blueberries peaches and cherries, melon, peas and salad greens.  some kind of grass poking up through the straw, tall and rather lovely but it needs attending to, my perennial bed needs tending and i worry over the cucumber beetles.  going out early to drown the japanese beetles there isnt one to be found, they must hole up deep in the black raspberries when the weather proves rainy and gray.  neighborhood eggs and new yarn for the summer project, a coffee cake to bring to breakfast on the water tomorrow.  rain and public radio. 

weeding baking knitting napping walking watching.

its apparent what the intensive application of composted manure does to the tilth in the garden, and this fall well start from the other side to give the lower footage a chance.  the straw mulch sprouts lithe green swords of oat, a volunteer cover crop we let live.  the tomatoes begin to amaze, the corn begins something one can hide in.  the sunflowers are suddenly enormous and grand.  everything is suddenly enormous and grand.  the wind is a gift in the two o'clock sun.  once a day the deer run across the road into the brushlot on the corner.  the evenings are gentle.  i plumb the depths of my library for some story that i dont slide off of like mercury (buying a pile isnt an option right now, and when it is ill know ive exhausted the shelves).  this years garden cost next to nothing, with last years seeds and gifts from friends and neighbors.  weeding under the beans and chard i continue to find nasturtium.  for hours in this mad weather with the tin pans banging on the tomato cages like a tibetan oracle orchestra and the windchime under the prayer flags and the hawk that came today describing low circles just above the oaks along the creekbed.  im happy.

solstice. 

serpent wisdom, serenity, and a greater sense of synchronicity.

bats and lightning bugs, dogs on the lawn cats hunting in the shrubbery
just quiet, and watching.

i walk it off through the summer when the wind is like water and the bees share the lavender lying back in the grass naming clouds.  green and brown and in the autumn, purple.  the summer of windows open wide to gentle nights of stars or rain and mornings of bright revelations.  milkweed butterflies and roses the squirrels are plush and the chipmunks brightly painted when i walk to four chestnut maidens dusky smelling tresses dancing in slender silver and green and turn around.
the mathematics are bones, the poetry, flesh.

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life? 

- Mary Oliver 

excommunicated. 

mercifully for someone like me its nothing new.  but still the world makes a way for me, the Greyhaven i scuttle about in requiring neither obeisance or rage.  i have never had much luck with others.  madness, loathing, desperation bred from what must have been a bad landing, learning not to relax into my own lifetime forever looking up onto the road home i step and broke in holes.  i begin now to sit on some small solid ground and look around me. 

 

In the Silence

In the silence
of the city night
when the lonely
watch the sky
in yearning
I at rest
beside you
lie in peace
I searched
a thousand skies
before you came
And in the morning
when the world
is new,
the lonely turn
away
as I turn to
you beside
me
And in the quiet
of the afternoon
when the lonely
roam,
I turn inside
and you
are with me still
I roamed
a thousand miles
before you came.

~ Stephany (1947-    )

"...I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. "

happy Bloomsday.  the new meds program has wiped me slate fair clean.  not a thought in my head, out there in the garden picking pigweed and clover until it rains on me.  beautiful long summer dusk lying in bed listening to the birds and the soft cool skin of the one man what loves me.

good to see the hill st. phantom.  union drunks with old berries and bones strewn picking red clover in the beautiful light.  even.  good to have the language between us again, the weight.   blond women and dogs gooseberries and greens he pointed to the shining pine resin and said it reminded him of me.  

tonight in the dark with the light through the willow a detraction from fireflies and starlight, little candles in the garden, fairylites through dicentra leaves and the neighbors not coming home soon.  darkmoon heartache.

my hands are getting old.  it was good to see him smile, his wrists easy, i remembered what i saw.  that strength a smell in the back of my throat.  but gone on and transformed into something other anymore.  all this estrangement.   so glad to meet you, angeles.  and then youre strangers ghosts rocketing around your pelvic bowl this evening a skeleton cloud across the sky.  nick drake between the bars a twelve-string and and a back porch swing black dogs in the dark cats in the bean rows let go.  this our little ship over rye fields and macadam most of the old retaining walls broke down i can see you.  and who are they to say?

edgar winter and hats and taft.  pellegrino and captain  black.  ill love them all from afar.  spin my yarn dance down the dooryard build the soil sweat equity on my own soul for this time remaining.  labor is truly made worship, the shakers said.

mr. soundman the water rises in these seven year cycles i meant maid like marian.  a postcard of the arc and you in normandy home for snow and then midsummer i should have let you have your way.  but too gone for me.  is there nothing i can save?

it feels like burying.  grief a fist shaped ache behind your breastbone folding you over fetal and even the light hurts but you start over.  on one. 

om namah shivaya.

my recent attempt at connection.  theres a part of me, an old part, that says its me.  that im just plain unlovable.  thats the vintage tickertape, the classic reel.  but im discovering an even older part, wiser perhaps, that says be alive.  dont be a bit part in your own play.  these wonderful leaps i make some times, and even if i fall arms windmilling back so slow i dont even feel the time pass i remember being there.  Being There.  

ive got my life.  and sometimes i forget and  go smiling,  jousting windmills, quasimodo.  and i must not get it at all because i dont get it at all.  its a relief to return to the garden, walk the dog, kiss the kitchen floor.  a poorly assimilated alien.  theres the part that aches and its that hurt that feels good to rub it.  but i dont have to hurt there anymore.  because thats just where the old part wore through. 

shakedown and im wondering what to wear for the saturday night return debutante ball.  its like tv or processed food.  you can spend your entire life with it and you end up the hungry dead.  the wiser part says be alive.   

i use all my quotes for tumblr.  the bass player said i had the mark of cain.  this was high school, and i carried demian around for a decade, giving copies away like zippo lighters.  i listen to turcoaica angali and thats the density i deeply crave.  the sound packed together raindrops to waves and all the information of the birth of the world.  with derek those waves are light.  i discover king crimson.  that was your density, you said, king crimson and cnn and am radio.  and then the casting off with an omphalos tether into formless night.   dead on avenue d i got your rock.  i still remember the look in your eyes and the kitchen on pearl street over strawberry tea.  dig the olfactories, man.  moving out i found some works you had stashed.  i was peace and shelter.  when i turned you away you died. 

i went outside and dug around a little and realized its what i should be doing.  the purselane and pigweed little hydras my sweet tulsi and monarda and mugwort babies such different creatures than the sunflowers and the corn.  even one practically prenatal columbine pinched carelessly (what stratify?) into heat wave potting soil elbows out up against the edge of the pool, growing.   my wee white tomato allotted her own hoosie, and the gap in the sunflowers will stay so.  more nasturtium volunteers ill never need buy that seed again.  but pigweed and purselane like some sort of mulch my cultivator a square blade on a stick and i think about amending my soil and realize that ive become a person who can look forward.  my treasure lies in the now, but dread does not presage with every breath.  theres so much to learn in the time left.  im allowed to choose what to do.  im blessed with these fleeting little leaps, they save me like angels.  and theyre such basic things but things ive never known.  when i was very young they called me an old soul.  but im just a babe in the woods, only now understanding that there is no spoon.

tide comes up and my chirons in aries my moon is in pisces lilith in scorpio.  they get married moon void of course but so did we.  looking forward to afternoon coffee under the tree and a quiet friday.  it would be nice to know some folks, but thats not where i need to be.  i need to be here, now, they cast ashes wherever i went and im taking my cue.  something is obviously not ready.  thwarted aborted time-suck.  

dig your own garden.  

the sun is our star, radiating Life across a human infinitude.  

our heart is our sun.  

shine.

(for those of you playing at home, these photos are two weeks behind)

ego as the slag of consciousness. to portray my parents as swingers would be taking poetic license.

blessed above everything to stand in early june afternoon sun in the garden with the windhorse and the roses and the drone of bees in the sage.  infinite encroaching armies of redroot but i am contented and complete.

accepting and recognizing my self more clearly, the Good Light that wants to shine through chainlink fence of ego ego ego and it rains.  cold and i can breathe the damp my skin drinks the damp something under a mushroom in the tall grass and the ferns black starbright eyes  napping. 

things have significance.  it is not that thing itself but what it signifies.  absolutely everything carries meaning, an external manifestation of an intangible truth.  we are clearing the way.  the world is clearing the way.

when you gave me this ring the first thing i recognized about it was how it gave rainbows in dark rooms.  stars in the night sky.  

i will not resign to insignificance, if only in my own life.  

i do not give up.  that is the thing they cannot take from me.  the lesson im here to be learning, and my light to learn it through.  

we talked about ego identification and the glass of milk we talked about feeding ghosts as an exercise in futility and it eats a lifetime.  our one lifetime.  walking down the way with my two feathers and my applewand and my dog.  it takes more than one thread to make a dress.  this, i said, is the sound of a soul in chaos.  

so i go home and mop the floor and make brownies.  i shut the windows against the chill, theres something particularly absorbent about this house, and the damp makes it sag.  i have cornbread and coffee and listen to the cd i burned her.  these intentional lags, artlessness, set you down in a parallel universe where the colors have different names.  long songs and storytellers.  a break in the wave.  one o'clock and its fairylites and candles, and i think a lot about the ocean suffering and how were so cut off from our true natures that we can say thats okay over there we dont taste the oil in our own mouths.  were killing ourselves.  

those of us interested see the great struggle and call it by different names.  i see others as i see myself, the soul a world for the Powers to struggle in, but others see me as agent of that against which to struggle.  this is the first lesser distraction, lumbering loosely jointed spawn of ego.  the manifested flesh is negligible.  its the soul behind the symbol that carries any weight.  and im done dragging it all behind me. 

that, and Golden Boy comes home this fall.  Blessed Be.

ten for today:

1.  home

2.  garden

3.  cool damp break in the weather that soothes and primes the heart for sunshine

4.  my boys

5.  music

6.  compassion

7.  laughter

8.  socks

9.  brownies

10.  that feeling just waking up in your cozy bed

what im working on, with very limited success.

Circe's Power

I never turned anyone into a pig.
Some people are pigs; I make them
Look like pigs.

I'm sick of your world
That lets the outside disguise the inside. Your men weren't bad men;
Undisciplined life
Did that to them. As pigs,

Under the care of
Me and my ladies, they
Sweetened right up.

Then I reversed the spell, showing you my goodness
As well as my power. I saw

We could be happy here,
As men and women are
When their needs are simple. In the same breath,

I foresaw your departure,
Your men with my help braving
The crying and pounding sea. You think

A few tears upset me? My friend,
Every sorceress is
A pragmatist at heart; nobody sees essence who can't
Face limitation. If I wanted only to hold you

I could hold you prisoner.

Louise Gluck

i want the words to want to come through.  settling, the water gets clearer near the top.  mexican coca-cola and the white horse, the kerouac documentary makes me covet the angels that raged above around and through him the sparks words strung like stars relentless.  

stretch, more art, any art at all after such a while, the garden, the dogs.  i went out into the world and returned kissing the dirty kitchen floor.  sun house smokestack lightning and tomorrow i play at lunchlady.

brand new day spent picking oak leaves out of rosebushes, pulling maple sprouts from out behind the yew.  i had a lemonade and an ice cream sandwich and theres like seven different christian evangelist radio stations now so i switch from frequency to amplitude.  and theres the local talk guy wasp and snarky and theyre talking about keith richards and robert johnson and the guy kept using the word saturated.

home we hoe and the rain makes the hard ground good and brown again.  the marvelous sage blossoms and the bees in everything my strawberry plants settling in red at the root and reaching with one succulent fuzzy trefoil the mother strawberry babies are big but bloodless.  i go out fed and clean in the evening to marvel at the iris, draw the scent of sage blossoms to my fingers, the lavender, the rampant chamomile.  

i sense a certain lack of vitality somewhere in there, though, some obstacle or resistance.  i intend to spend more mindful time in there listening for what it needs.  this is an incredibly new patch of land were attempting to translate into food, soil is something built over time.  but i think i need to sow some light in there as well.  keep up the esbats, invest soul and time. 

chardonnay light of summer evening that makes you look around for a rainbow the dogs in front of the fan everyone quiet and keeping to their lives the whole valley peaceful.  

art and the garden.

what does it represent?  skulls in the vetch.  horse people vs. cow and sheep people.  reading broken hearts in the dirt and turkey feathers in your back pocket.  i didnt write anything down.  

wind through the trees, spiked lemonade, laundry on the line, your hand through dry sand the ocean.

what it represented to him was liberation.  the first taste.

and i see that liberation does not make us strangers then we are the same.  it was my strength card before it was the tale and then it was the burden and then passage and then now it is strength.  bone colored background of the machine age and the colored tassels and the beast.  

"The love that you withhold, is the pain that you carry, from lifetime to lifetime."