Thursday, August 31, 2017

Dichotomies


The mind likes to make distinctions. This is this. That is that. Never shall they merge, blur their boundaries, or overlap. Also this becomes "good" and that becomes "bad." From there the attachments and aversions form, and we run from what we dislike and cling to what we do. It's what we do. And it's a bit crazy making sometimes. Take the talk about prison, for example. Inmates call everything not prison "the world." The world doesn't exist for them inside the razor wire. And inmates don't exist for us. They are off the map, out of sight, out of mind. They are no longer part of our social compact to care for each other as citizens, members of a social community. "Let 'em rot" runs beneath the thinking that severs them from a larger "us." That line of thought, of course, fails to serve us and them. Men and women get released and rejoin those of us out here in "the world." Nature too is seen as only in "wild" places. It's not part of the city or prison. But it is.  Life is everywhere, even in the bleak plains of the prison yard. It and they are part of us, whether we want to admit it or not. Some dichotomies, mostly the "us and them" don't cut it right. They, in this case, is still us.

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Working


The long list of tasks shakes you out of sleep. You can't seem to organize them, or remember them, much less act on them. The meetings you have to schedule, to attend, the typing of inmate work, the compiling of manuscripts for the magazine, the curriculum design for the new course, the honors contracts, the guest speaker invitations, all the correspondence, the contacts with people who might help, just what you are going to do in the next class all bang on the door of your sleep, turn on the lights, and sit on the bed and harangue you at one in the morning. Even the cat joins in to remind you that she needs feeding and a visit to the vet. So what do you do? You lie there and try to sort it all out, but your brain doesn't cooperate. It just tangles up the voices into a knot that settles into your neck. It goes on like this for a couple of hours before you slip into a fitful unconscious. When light says it's time to get up, you pull yourself into the day, dead beat tired, leaden, bags under your eyes. You carry on.

Monday, August 28, 2017

So Close


It's right there, so close you can taste it, so close it could taste you if it were in a biting mood. All you have do is the thing you can't quite muster the courage to do because you have not yet fully seen what is possible. That is your work now. Imagine what might be so fully that it becomes what you do, the base of your being. You have to see around the edges of what you know, habits that hold you back, the defaults of familiar, though. That's where your feet have learned to step. You will have to teach them to dance now that you listen to the moon, no longer fear the light. Step to. Fill up. Lean in. Pucker pooty. 

Saturday, August 26, 2017

He Doesn't Get It


He is thick. Dense. Obtuse. The world has changed, moved on, split into a new mutation, mitosis gone viral. He lives still in his dream of things being the way he hoped, not even so much remembered. You can't blame him for wanting this chaos to be predictable, defined, according to plan. But there is something wrong with the inability or unwillingness to embrace things the way they are, even if that stings for what that says about him.

Friday, August 25, 2017

All of the Things That Escape Me


The cerulean blue behind the clouds over a city baking in an August sun. A gecko on the window screen just as the sun changes night to morning. The chance to cobble a phrase that might answer a question that has been waiting for you since you were born. The passing woman whose eyes lock yours in a moment of eternal recognition before slipping into oblivion. The red shift. The owl outside the window. The hummingbird waiting for you by the empty feeder. The open space that might be filled with a drive across town to the reading by the poet you fear. The possibility waiting in this simple left hand turn at the corner of this street and this green light that might signal the beginning of your leaving your rigid habit that has become so familiar you think it is all that there is.

Young Woman Sitting on a Stool Next to a Tall Window


I saw a young, blonde, fit woman today who had scars on her lovely legs. They ran across the skin in a pattern that I found puzzling as I passed by her, carrying my dark bloom of indulgence. What had happened here? What accident endured rock climbing or cycling or running some bucking, white-capped river in the Guatemalan jungle? Her hair shimmered yellow white in the morning sun and she scribbled away intent on her page. No humor or joy here in the set of her jaw; her brow etched lines of intent to stab the page with her sharp gaze. I stole a glance at the other leg as I passed her and saw that this one too had the patterns, the metered slashes marking some set of cryptic rules up her leg. Then the slashes formed letters that shone through higher up on her thigh. "C-U-N-T," they spelled out in crude, block script. What poison or injury had happened here? What pain burned so severe it grew into the imperative of the cutter? Or was this the work of another? She and I had some things in common, though she, nor anyone, would ever know. I was sorry that I had no comfort to offer as I passed through the thick glass door onto the patio where friends waited, already on to the palliative of small talk and laughter. 

Thursday, August 24, 2017

The Story Goes On


Just when you think you figured it out, the game changes, the rug gets pulled out, and a wall pops up right there in your face. So what do you do? You regroup and write up a new narrative to address the new situation. Jobs, houses, cars, lovers all come and go. You just have to adapt, Buckwheat, adapt. But the old story was so good you think. Why can't I just keep it? Well because then you end up wearing a Trump cap and sounding off like some redneck idiot. That's why. You gotta write a new story base on the changing beat, the shifting season, the ever evolving flux of this crazy life. Get with it. Hop on the boat. Grab the gunwales because the big rapids are just past that big drop we're about to go over. As your heart breaks with the loss, remember that, like it or not, you are going over, even if you don't get over it.

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Not Making a Thing Out of It


It would be easy to read the signs and infer that all hell is about to break loose. You can't sleep for the heartache, the questions, the feeling that all is lost. Thoughts don't go anywhere, but just spin in a knotted skein. On your birthday you dislocate your thumb doing your favorite of things, a mountain bike ride, something you used to be pretty good at but that now beats you up and down and inside out. People don't answer your emails or text messages or phone calls or distress signals. Bills keep piling up before checks arrive. The only things you really want get taken by someone else, get lost, or break. Nobody wants to publish your life's work and the critiques you get back show they don't understand what you are saying. You don't need to look at politics or foreign policy insanity to add your unease, sharpen your fight/flight edge. The signs right here, close to home, are clear enough. You spend the afternoon getting drunk by yourself and liking it, a lot. It's the only time you have felt good for a while. You are the only one who seems to believe what you know to be right. It's all just what is, you say to yourself. No need to get your shorts all in a bunch, no need to make a federal case or big thing out of it. Just let these hard days go by. You'll get some sleep eventually. Eventually. Or not. What is the price paid for overlooking the signs?

Lost Causes and Other Defects of Character


Another semester of pushing the river has begun. This time I have the nice problem to have of teaching a class on prison writing. Now that should be a wonderful thing, and it is. But it's not coming together like it might. I want it to be too many things: reading about issues related to mass incarceration, creating community projects to address the situation, convening workshops to practice what it is we do in the prison workshops, getting guest speakers, making it fun, and on and on. I just can't see how to make it all work for one thing. And the actual workshops are floundering for lack of bodies. People like the idea of going into a prison on Saturdays to work on writing, but don't so much actually want to give up weekends. I can't blame them for that. Point here is that all of this may fizzle because I can't get the program or the class together is a way that works. There is this giant gap between the way I want things to be and the way they are. I don't organize well enough or have the leadership chops to inspire people. Just sayin'. This shooting for the hardest job with the lowest pay, the one that will likely never work out, is just another in the long line of defects that have plagued this crazy life. As that begins to wind down I am left with not much to show for a circuitous mess of trying to make a diff. My head hurts from so much banging against the wall.

Monday, August 21, 2017

Shadows


On this, the day of the big eclipse, I resume my work teaching for the fall semester. The fact of that keeps popping up and slapping me with cold panic. I am not ready. Don't know if I'll ever be ready. Things aren't as easy as they were before. I used to sit and curriculum ideas would come to me. I just recorded them in syllabus, and, poof!, all done. These days, all I get is a blank screen. Well more static than anything. I have to put effort into getting what I need to do my work, earn a living. Aye, it's time to step it up, bring more A game, to boldly go where no dilettante has gone before. I'll have to learn some new tricks, pick up some new habits. That's a tough one for this body, the one that decided long ago he would never try too hard at anything. This is new territory, this dark and unexplored poorly lit place with no easy path. Bit by bit, I know the light will reveal what waits there for me, will point the way through, part the waters. 

Saturday, August 19, 2017

As Luck Would Have It


He got old during the decades of routine, sleep walking, doing what he should. But then, right there, under a moon gone red with magic, he woke up. You can guess what a shock to the system that was. His heart lit up like a butane Zippo, and he couldn't sleep past four in the morning. He was confused because all of this was very new. He didn't know what to do, who to talk to. So he just fumbled around with only friends he had, a bunch of words he had picked up along the way and stuck in his pocket just in case something like this might happen. The only remedy available to him was to sing to her, the woman in the moon. He wanted, more than anything, to hold it close, this source of heat, but that wasn't going to happen. You can't contain or possess a rising moon. Just his luck, he thought, this incessant wanting of the only thing he couldn't have.

Thursday, August 17, 2017

Definition


Who is this who claims to be you? Are you that rushing of emotional fire and ice? That knot in the back of your neck? Those loops and chains that keep you from what you know you must do? What defines that mess and magic that is the organism, the body, the brain of you? It is the witness of the cacophony, beloved, that defines who you are. The watcher, the one who can detach and then direct is the one you look for. Don't be fooled or swept away by the fears that you will never have enough. That is a vestige, an ancestor. It is he who is bold, calm, direct, and soft but unyielding in strength to do right who defines you. Listen to him, the one who listens. Be the one who watches and deliberates before taking the wheel of the being they call you.

Monsoon


Clouds within clouds
the cat leaps into a lap as thunder
peals
toads bleat like sheep
tarantulas dance a tango

A wave of green
breaks across the yard
rivers run chocolate
pools waterfalls flooded roads
creosote scented air

Through the window of a coffee shop
the urbanite
considers
power out
fresh salad

Words peek
like gophers from hiding
places
so much life
so many mesquite beans

Time to eat
and mate
and leave a mark
gather while you can
so they will
know you were here

Not so hot
steamy streets
search and rescue helicopters
drop a line
hoping to hook a memory
clouds within clouds

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

A Terrible Quiet


The air has gone dead still, quiet, and oppressive. One storm has passed and another is building, but right here, things could not be more empty. This moment is the final gasp of my summer freedom from paid work. Starting tomorrow, it all starts again: the meetings, classes, grading, schedules. My little platform of calm is beginning to tip and will soon dump me into the hopper of full-on, semi-gainful employment. Not that I am not grateful for a way to pay off all my extravagances of summer or anything. I need to work if I want to play. But this last moment of calm is both wonderful and terrifying in its imminent crack of the whip, the call to evacuate my private dreamland.

Monday, August 14, 2017

601 and Anniversary


Yep, I have reached the lofty heights of 600 blog posts. If the sum total of them is an ocean, the amount of writing that I consider to be beautiful and true enough to be worthy of a reader would not fill an eye dropper. That's they way it goes with writing, for me, I guess. I write a lot to find the nugget of what I really want to say with the best words to say it. I don't know if this is the best use of my time, given all the duties wanting attention and energy, but it's what I do. Now the rest of this crazy life opens up in front of me, with today as a reminder of how quickly things can end. Fourteen years ago today, I was bitten by a rattlesnake in my front yard. I thought I bought the farm that time. But here I am, still upright, juggling words, waiting for alchemy and magic and a life lived in love. I'm taking that to the bank.

Saturday, August 12, 2017

Intiation


He was an angry child of a man and tore through hearts like they were paper tape at a finish line. To quiet the harpies of his pain he looked for comfort where he could find it -- smokes, tequila, hot sex. He was headed for a cliff but he didn't care and hoped the end would come quick. But then she got pregnant and he met responsibility, a thug who carried a bat that he would use if the young man ran. The music was there, full-frontal, and he turned to face it. Shit. He reigned in his impulses and did what he had to do. Mentors were hard to find. He had to read and write his way into the calm that would make the hard work possible. He had to scrape up the remains of his broken life with a broken and rusty tool, and work them into something that might give instead of take. It was a gauntlet. This will take a long time he said to no one in particular as he turned to the overwhelming work ahead. One piece at a time.

Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Rusty


After three months of construction on the New Mexico place, it's hard to return to the world of letters and teaching that is my other life. Gold screws, tub saws, and belt sanders have been replaced by cursors and clicks. I find the digital directions of how to compose the new improved syllabi baffling and have trouble locating required materials on GoogleDocs. For some reason I am denied access, as if my time away has pissed off the machine in the same way it did my cat, Simone. But I have to crack the code out of necessity. Time to suck it up, chill, get my ass in gear, gird the cyber loins, and join my colleagues in the march toward foundational literacies. To do so, I may have to knock on some doors and speak with someone face-to-face. How irretrievably old school, clunky, and rusty I have become, tin man frozen mid chop.