Monday, February 23, 2009
I don't want to write.
I don't want to write. If I could just stop thinking about it, I wouldn't write. I wouldn't have to. There'd be no need. I'd just let the thoughts run over my wrinkly brain, like waters teasing embrace of a creek bed. I'd just let it run over and out. Whether I wanted to do it or not would not be an issue. All those thoughts would just be themselves, and run their course. And I'd feel fine, just dandy. If I could just stop thinking about it.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Thinking and feeling.
Poetry's been creeping up on me. Perhaps because it's a way to focus, like meditation, and not get swept up in the sea of words and wondering cascading through my mind. I do want to attempt navigating through the swirling ideas and select the bits that I can apply to an essay about hope and change (no, it's not about Obama!).
Sometimes, surveying the wreckage that is our world, the damage that we inflict on one another in seemingly indefatigable cycles; I think, if I love well enough I can help. Other times, I despair. During despair, if I can remember how I act when I believe, there's still a chance that the step forward needn't be followed by a fall back (perpetuating the myth that it is the despair that is more naturally valid). "Faith, hope and love abide, but the greatest of these is love." Without hope though, can love live?
Present stabs at elucidating my thoughts result in a frustrating amount of omissions and overwhelmed dismissal of the multitude of seemingly necessary tangents that wrap themselves around the central thought. Hence my inclination toward poems. Poetry has a tendency to leave itself wonderfully open to sparse language and broad interpretation. The following began during a walk on my usual trail that winds through the woods behind Berea College:
***
Love is stalking me
not creepily
playfully
clandestine.
Shuffling,
several steps behind
like a friend
setting up a surprise.
I keep my eyes
winding up the forward path
winking at skeleton trees
I won’t interrupt Love
reticent rogue;
becoming, being
it’s wonderful, mysterious,
approaching self.
I lightly kiss
the soft spreading earth
with skipping steps.
Love lingers.
It will sneak up
getting closer and closer until—
“Boo!”
“Oh my gosh!”
I exclaim,
“I had no idea I was falling in love!”
I smile to think of it.
Oh man, the stupid grin on my face.
Sun, the rascal,
acts casual casting
shifting light
sighing color.
Pretending its not romantic
I nearly bust with laughter
I’d love to share this joke
but choke back the urge
to speak
and spoil the process.
so I play a game with love
(while letting it be)
I walk with slow dragging steps
then fast
and
stop.
“oh, what an interesting beautiful place,”
I audibly muse,
touching rough bark
with fingers tips
eyes swallowing what there is to see…
Love is,
well, taking its time
for a reason
I am quite sure.
Still, a little peek
a discreet glance
a 180 just to check, I see
nothing.
Was it wind?
Brambles whispering
gossip about birds
and bees?
My own feet perhaps.
Oh, but no
no, no—
Love, haha!
Sly sneaker
you got me just now
but I know.
In the end,
I will tell the joke with confidence.
***
(Feel free to offer critiques, I know I can use all the help available when it comes to poetic compositions.)
And there are these little ditties I made from poetry magnets at 3rd Street Stuff coffee shop in Lexington:
***
She saw good
from dark
what can that mean?
***
Cool round moon
nest those
who cry.
They are nowhere,
slow to get home.
They may grow
to flower
after time.
***
Sometimes, surveying the wreckage that is our world, the damage that we inflict on one another in seemingly indefatigable cycles; I think, if I love well enough I can help. Other times, I despair. During despair, if I can remember how I act when I believe, there's still a chance that the step forward needn't be followed by a fall back (perpetuating the myth that it is the despair that is more naturally valid). "Faith, hope and love abide, but the greatest of these is love." Without hope though, can love live?
Present stabs at elucidating my thoughts result in a frustrating amount of omissions and overwhelmed dismissal of the multitude of seemingly necessary tangents that wrap themselves around the central thought. Hence my inclination toward poems. Poetry has a tendency to leave itself wonderfully open to sparse language and broad interpretation. The following began during a walk on my usual trail that winds through the woods behind Berea College:
***
Love is stalking me
not creepily
playfully
clandestine.
Shuffling,
several steps behind
like a friend
setting up a surprise.
I keep my eyes
winding up the forward path
winking at skeleton trees
I won’t interrupt Love
reticent rogue;
becoming, being
it’s wonderful, mysterious,
approaching self.
I lightly kiss
the soft spreading earth
with skipping steps.
Love lingers.
It will sneak up
getting closer and closer until—
“Boo!”
“Oh my gosh!”
I exclaim,
“I had no idea I was falling in love!”
I smile to think of it.
Oh man, the stupid grin on my face.
Sun, the rascal,
acts casual casting
shifting light
sighing color.
Pretending its not romantic
I nearly bust with laughter
I’d love to share this joke
but choke back the urge
to speak
and spoil the process.
so I play a game with love
(while letting it be)
I walk with slow dragging steps
then fast
and
stop.
“oh, what an interesting beautiful place,”
I audibly muse,
touching rough bark
with fingers tips
eyes swallowing what there is to see…
Love is,
well, taking its time
for a reason
I am quite sure.
Still, a little peek
a discreet glance
a 180 just to check, I see
nothing.
Was it wind?
Brambles whispering
gossip about birds
and bees?
My own feet perhaps.
Oh, but no
no, no—
Love, haha!
Sly sneaker
you got me just now
but I know.
In the end,
I will tell the joke with confidence.
***
(Feel free to offer critiques, I know I can use all the help available when it comes to poetic compositions.)
And there are these little ditties I made from poetry magnets at 3rd Street Stuff coffee shop in Lexington:
***
She saw good
from dark
what can that mean?
***
Cool round moon
nest those
who cry.
They are nowhere,
slow to get home.
They may grow
to flower
after time.
***
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Thank you NPR, for rockin' my socks off yet again
I heard these songs on the radio today, one right after the other. The first made me think. The second made me smile.
Winter keeps being what it is, in spite of me
Every once in a while, I wake to the feeling that I haven't been myself in quite some time. When my mind is in that place, I think perhaps Kentucky's been my cocoon, how I hope to leave it as a butterfly!
I hiked the pinnacles after work. What a beautiful mess it was, with thorny brambles and uprooted trees cast across the muddy path. While walking, my out-of-shape body greedily gobbled at oxygen. I felt the cold air in me. I had a sense that the exertion I was experiencing was akin to that felt swimming in the ocean. I remembered a day when I'd gone alone and sat in the wind with the sun laying over me, sand forming crystals on my skin. My nose and throat felt like I'd had an inadvertent dose of briny water. I let myself believe in it for a moment, knowing all the while that what my sinuses were clogged with was "Kentucky sludge." A side effect of the winter weather.
There's an open patch about halfway to the east pinnacle. It's a wonder how it changes from one month to the next. Today it was a field of tall brown grass and flowerless stems. Their dry rustling sang to the silence. I'd say the place was lonely, but every where I looked were watching hills rolling over one another, and swaying trees; all made shadowy by the unusually unfettered sun, and cutting their shapes into the achingly blue sky. An old tree, bleached bone white, lay lifeless and long across the field. I perched on the base of it's broad trunk, faced the sun and closed my eyes. "There is nothing better than this moment," a whisper told me, "how happy I am to be present in it." With my eyes closed, the sounds and sensations brought me back to a sense of the ocean. So different, but so much the same in the way each location, combined with Presence can simultaneously lift the spirit above this earth and bind it gratefully to the body.
I hiked the pinnacles after work. What a beautiful mess it was, with thorny brambles and uprooted trees cast across the muddy path. While walking, my out-of-shape body greedily gobbled at oxygen. I felt the cold air in me. I had a sense that the exertion I was experiencing was akin to that felt swimming in the ocean. I remembered a day when I'd gone alone and sat in the wind with the sun laying over me, sand forming crystals on my skin. My nose and throat felt like I'd had an inadvertent dose of briny water. I let myself believe in it for a moment, knowing all the while that what my sinuses were clogged with was "Kentucky sludge." A side effect of the winter weather.
There's an open patch about halfway to the east pinnacle. It's a wonder how it changes from one month to the next. Today it was a field of tall brown grass and flowerless stems. Their dry rustling sang to the silence. I'd say the place was lonely, but every where I looked were watching hills rolling over one another, and swaying trees; all made shadowy by the unusually unfettered sun, and cutting their shapes into the achingly blue sky. An old tree, bleached bone white, lay lifeless and long across the field. I perched on the base of it's broad trunk, faced the sun and closed my eyes. "There is nothing better than this moment," a whisper told me, "how happy I am to be present in it." With my eyes closed, the sounds and sensations brought me back to a sense of the ocean. So different, but so much the same in the way each location, combined with Presence can simultaneously lift the spirit above this earth and bind it gratefully to the body.
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