Thursday, January 12, 2012

Darkness Rose from the Night Like a Gown


One side of the torn card read “OOF”
& the other had crude letters
in an alphabet I didn't know, gouged
with a fingernail or coin.

In the perfect silence of outer space
a washing machine sang
& I was comforted.

The cry of a billion keyboards
fell back to earth.

Feel at peace with being
vulnerable.

I'm writing this in a rowboat.

Beware: the thing you love most
in a person because it is also in you
may mean to them the very opposite
of what it means to you.

One item we'll never see in an obituary:
"Successful mystic."

It is what it isn't.

Exhaustion came over me like a calling.

Fog & moon & Dexter Gordon
moving.

The brain part that processes anxiety
kicks in
in the presence of the ghost,
forcing reason to immediately make sense
& restore order.

Love is more belief than belief.

Why do they call those things silverfish
& why do they live in old books?
Why not call old books water?

Love is for when I'm no good
at love.

Your dark faith, bundled up,
scarf trailing, comfortable with mystery,
sailing through the night.

I love to play
but I hate games.

Can gentleness be fierce?
It can but requires
a new definition. New definitions
cure anything.

Remnants of my dream lay around,
the cut hat, the smoking bridge.

This morning a pale city hawk swept
over the garden, the rush
on my neck like a ghost passing.

(Silence is (humility because
there's no argument in) silence.)

I concede that humility is a virtue
but I am too proud to accept anybody
else's definition of it.

The ghost an alligator in the ceiling,
thrashing, a woman's voice
in the stethoscope, chills like a healing
from my ears to my toes.

Humility is freedom from what others
think, from what I think, from proof
& evidence & justification, from the
definition of humility.

Those girls have thousands of years
of many-armed goddess charmers
wiggling in their blood.

Contempt is cozy, addictive, violent.

The memory of a good book is better
than the book. The memory of a great
book is perfect.

Yes world I'll buy it all but 1st must
go to my room for my cc & won't climb
out the window with my brains into
the woods promise swear.

One day we discovered we had grown
into mountains together. Our laughter
surprised us like thunder & distance
& respect.

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Saturday, January 7, 2012

"What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words!


His real life is led in his head
and is known to none but himself.

All day long, and every day,
the mill of his brain is grinding,
and his thoughts (which are but the
mute articulation of his feelings)
are his history.

His acts and his words
are merely the visible thin crust of his world,
with its scattered
snow summits and its vacant wastes of water,
and they are so trifling a part of his bulk!

The mass of him is hidden--
it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil,
and never rest, night nor day.

These are his life, and they are not written,
and cannot be written.

Every day would make a whole book of 80,000 words
three hundred and sixty-five days a year.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of a man--
the biography of the man himself cannot be written."

--Mark Twain, Autobiography

This is strangely reassuring to me.
I've long suspected it.
So simple & plain, so obvious.
We are told only our actions count,
everybody says it--
thoughts & words are but thoughts & words,
and only actions matter!

But here is a very different take
on who & what we are
& it rings true as a field of bells.

What do you do with all those thoughts,
how to shape them, guide them, quiet them,
use them, not let them drive you
over the falls?

Write, meditate, listen, pray.

No wonder all this electronic crap
has come along
to take your mind off your own mind!

Thank you, Mark! Thank you, Sam!
Strangely reassuring, comforting,
mysteriously verifying.

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