under summer moon

walking home from church in the twilight, the vacant lot glittering with lightning bugs, scents of lavender and wisps of citronella, leftover firework crackle, everyone on their front porches, finding that I'm picking up Spanish by osmosis. All ennui from the day, the tiredness and seemingly unshakeable somnambulism where I don't feel like I'm much fun dissolving momentarily in a place of community, wishing that the night could last a little longer.

I sat on my porch for awhile, hovering between adoration of Creator and the constant stream of questions and ventings, still sometimes wishing that I shared my space again because as much as I love the quiet and the peace that at this time last year didn't exist, and I know part of this is the rhythms and cycles completing and beginning again, that I'm not myself in times like these.

But I miss staying up late, driving through empty streets plumbing the depths of the profound and ridiculous, night walks to the lake to lay on the rocks and listen to the waves, because it's hard to do those last couple things alone and so I move upstairs to my balcony in wonder and solitude, trying to soak in the summer nights, angst out to Mark Sandman's croon and try to appreciate the beauty and not angst so damn much as the moon ascends through gauzy clouds, radiating a golden halo, bicyclists whisper past, and everything around me is finally blooming.

a blindness that touches perfection

When did I get so old, unable to stay awake, long gone those nights of laying on a living room floor listening to music and talking until the sun came up, having revelations and inspirations at 3am over diner food and infinite cups of coffee, frenzied painting at late hours.

And now, I'm fighting to keep my eyes open, wondering why the caffeine doesn't work like it once did, maybe it's the connection with people and if not that the creative process that keeps me feeling awake and alive and lacking either of those, I'm dead to the world or wishing I was.

Writing this late is my equivalent of being drunk, becoming either absurdly slap-happy or existential and emotional as the inner life bleeds out. I don't get drunk for that reason alone, because I do and say enough stupid that I don't need any other reason to do so. The euphoria and melancholia are already too saturated and intense and every fear and hope is amplified to deafening and debilitating decibel.

I don't expect anyone to fill that void of loneliness, because it's the human condition, the state of the soul even at its most loved but that doesn't stop the longing held in by veneers of cynicism and sarcasm so easy to see through. The constancy of dreams deferred is a hard thing.

blue and blue...

Insomnia revisits, sleeping in a different house, reminders of things I'd rather not think about and wish I could forget, hoping that the dog's skittishness doesn't mean any more than that, tuning out the conversations in the driveway of the house next door, coming off of caffeination, alternating stressful socialness and aching solitude.

I know that these pangs of lonesome are nothing compared to those of others, thinking of a relative of mine I picked up tonight who things never did work out for, unhappily married and now widower, with a daughter institutionalized, alone in a house losing hearing and mobility, surrounded by accumulated tchotchkes reminiscing about days long past and friends long dead, with nothing to look forward to, thinking more of what he's lost in this world than what could ever exist in the next. I stand there and don't know what to say and just break inside for him.

Finishing out tonight on a front porch looking out on blue world drenched in golden light and firefly flecks was good for me, to be in a place where I don't have to try too hard, pondering things we'll never totally understand as power chords and solos snaked through the night breeze as the world begins to rest.

The blueness is lighter than the mood indigo, a melancholia of accumulation, a tangle of emotion needing to be unraveled, in so little time and so much exhaustion of the emotional, veering wildly between passionate and pragmatic too hard to explain without baring too much.

a quickening and movement...

I actually made an effort to be social and went down the street to see a band comprised of a former classmate, her husband, and a former church bandmate from my Kent days. While it's not the kind of thing I normally listen to they were really good and to see them in this element, watching the chattering at the bar cease when they started to harmonize and the sound began to build...

How does one catch up on five years with acquaintances? They're mostly married and ask if I'm seeing anyone and why that hasn't worked out. I say no it never did work out (and don't add that I doubt it will) and talk about everything else, refugees and getting arrested, making ceramics and college radio. Everything just changed so completely since those days.

My sister is with me and knows none of these people. She asks if I can take her home and I understand, because she's got her own kind of pain she's struggling through, not wanting anything to do with God and having no good friends to fall back on, standing there as the rest of us talk about geeky musicianship, mosh pits, youth crews, and punk bands whose heyday was before her time. It's been at least five years since my last mosh pit, where I flew backwards into a puddle of PBR and rode home on the Rapid smelling like a distillery.

I'd never heard of David Dondero, the headliner, but everyone else seemed to. (I never did get around to delving into folk-punk, ironic given my musical DNA containing both), but his songs hit me in a strange way, this acoustic guitar and sparse evoking lyrics painting pictures of places I've never been, minor chords, the voice speaking of years I haven't experienced, as I laugh at kiss-off songs about employers and the ache taps into what I've been feeling, makes me want to write what I feel, so now I'm sitting at the 24 hour coffeeshop, deserted due to curfew and everyone my age drinking alcohol instead of tea, starting another novel beginning wondering if I'll ever get to an ending. I always end at three pages, sputtering out into fragments and nothingness.

I just need my brain to slow down sometimes because it never seems to stop. I can't bring myself to drink it away, my prayers are a jumble that I'm glad that God can decipher, and everything will happen the way it does, longing in the meantime for wisdom to go with the knowledge, and love that isn't just being nice to the people who are nice to me or the ones I enjoy, but love for the ones I can't stand.

I try not to be anxious, I try to de-tense, because it's nights like these that become dark nights of the soul by default, walking alone back to my car in the darkness glancing behind me, nearly running red lights because it's red light district hour and I get jumpy when I see so many people in the street on that corner, wishing that I could make everything ok when I see so much hurt around me deeper than my own, trying not to think about back-stabbing wannabe overlords, continual dreams deferred, or my lack of inspiration, knowing that sleep is needed and elusive. I always get like this when I don't sleep.

untense

A whole mess of emotion, the strange feeling of solitude like a hangover from spending more time with people than I usually do, coming off the adrenaline of wanderings in the sun, perusing books and drinking coffee, allowing my voice to harmonize on the high notes instead of the low, being entertained by local comedy, having conversations with multiple people I enjoy intensely but rarely see, celebrating a friend's wedding, an interlude at the east side beach, driving home through hail and downpour, running on empty and stopping to pump gas, getting soaked in my semi-dressy clothes, walking the dog through the humid darkness past girls smoking cigarettes and the revelry of Sunday nights on three-day weekends, loving these nights even as the bluest of deep blues bring out the blues in me...

whoever said we'd wash away with the rain...

Running errands for work since I have my car today was much needed because even changes of mundane scenery save me from completely zoning out and heading into that usual route of melancholia.

I'm tired and depressed, thinking about too much, grieving some things I wish were not as they are, and coming down from the buzz of countless cups of coffee. I'm sure part of this is the weather and the feeling of helpless frustration at the state of the world that's haunted me since my teens. Some who believe say that I shouldn't get depressed but if my God walked the earth a man of sorrows, I think it's okay.

Tonight will be tea, candles, creating, sleeping, meditation, solitude, music. It's times like these when I'm glad I live alone because this way I don't bother anyone and I can just be...



So much blood I'm starting to drown
Runs from cold to colder
Time to time the sky's come down
To help me lose my way
Tears and lies for answers
You and open veins, God knows I'm gone
Girl I just want you to
Come on down
Lord it's a storm and I'm heading to fall
These sins are mine and I've done wrong, oh babe
Come on down
Long Gone Day
Mmmm, who ever said
We wash away with the rain
See you all from time to time
Isn't it so strange
How far away we all are now
Am I the only one who remembers that summer
Oh, I remember
Everyday each time the place was saved
The music that we made
The wind has carried all of that away
Long gone day
Mmmm, who ever said
We wash away with the rain
So many tears I'm starting to drown
The rain in heaven's all come down
Silver spoons affix the crown
The luckless ones are broken
Fears and lies for answers
You and open flames
God knows I'm gone
And I just want you to
Come on down, hmmm
Lord it's a storm and I'm heading to fall
These sins are mine and I've done wrong
I want you to, oh, I just want you to
Come on down
I fear again, like then, I've lost my way
And shout to God to bring my sunny day

introversion/reconversion

Attempts at finding sanctuary thwarted by sundry fish fries and baptisms, I couldn't bring myself to mumble along with the faithful and made an exit halfway through the mass at some church I'd never seen the inside of before, ended up at the usual coffeeshop haunt with a journal and the laptop and tea now alone here.

My eyes tired and soul restless, scrawling letters to God in ink... adoration and questions and longing that barely makes sense when it hits the page, but to be known better than to know myself is a reassuring thing.

I could be out and among, but sometimes the solitude feels like the best place to exist, that place of safety. There's a part of me that fears closeness, because of all the bridges that seem to get burned in ways I can't explain, knowing that the last few times I was less wrong than I've been before, but knowing that there's still ash where connecting once was, that this is just part of life, and at least there is no bitterness on my end, learning to accept that as much as I long to make things right, to begin again, that there are endings, and I wonder how many more times things like this will happen.

I don't even want to begin sometimes because the ending seems so inevitable and when he calls up out of the blue saying we should hang out again, I hope that we don't because even though nothing's started, I just don't want it to go anywhere. It was hard enough watching things fall apart with people I lived with, I sure as hell don't want to get my heart torn up over nothing. I'm a bundle of raw nerves with a hemorrhaging heart and a soul that's equal parts wide-eyed wonder and cynicism. It's easier to watch from afar.

Is the lack of feeling a thicker skin or an emotional amputation? I wish I knew.

flood my eyes with light

"What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful." - kierkegaard

The trees are still dead, the brown grass flattened and matted like tangled hair by the flooded riverbed, and the cloudless azure sky more suited to a place like Arizona seems like an irony with its clearness. We don't get skies like that here. But there is green coming up through the dead wood and the broken reeds, heart-shaped violet leaves.

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed." - pascal

I walked in the valley alone with God and my questions, drove home listening to Pearl Jam watched the light fade from golden to blue. I am thankful that this sea of emotions, this inarticulate ache, a sense of wonder at the strange beauty of creation even in its least sentimental seasons, a sense of things being so wrong and in need of righting, this cathartic sadness that shocks me out of a complacent existence, has precedence as the agony and ecstasy of the psalms resonates, the despair of human existence in Ecclesiastes, the anger and questioning and wonder of Job, the visions of medieval monastics, and of course, my favorite poet ever.


The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fireV

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this
Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

they don't know, I'd never do you any good...

Is it that the late nights bring the truth to the surface or like the shadows of innocuous angles exaggerated by the tricks of lowlight, make things seem more scary than they really are.

I'm wondering why I'm still awake and why I'm being so damn emotional and pissed off because that's all it is, saltwater and estrogen and it's 1am so things that aren't the end of the world totally seem like it.