Saturday, November 22, 2014

July 29 - Letters to Luna - Crow and Owl


Luna,

 You told me on our first date with patients you never take notes during the sessions.  You remember and prepare what is needed afterwards based on your attention to memory.  I have been attempting to give that flavor of focus back to you in our time together. 

 I have naturally found this wave of scribing these poems and words from flints of memory in our verbal, physical, emotional, and spiritual conversations.  I am very much seeking to explore each of these manners of a relationship with you as a journey taken in a steady breath.

 I have always taken on the identity of the turtle over the hare.  Contemplation, the sound roots, and ebb and flow of biological fire, mental webs, emotional welding, and a soul’s awakening to the greater universe at play are the path of the turtle.  The hare trades his pole for a fish.

 I have spent the longer portion of my road wishing to be heard on a detailed level.  The simple act of reading my words and encouraging me to continue such a paradigm connotes an appreciation for the analogies and similes.  Poetry helps me take the deepest parts of me and attempt to communicate that to another in a way where I feel I have the time and space to convey the breadth, volume, and nuance that the buzz and logistics of casual conversation and logistics often truncate. 

 One of my struggles in the past is feeling like I have been heard.  Part of that is my mouth trying to catch up with the hive in my head.  Writing helps me sort that nebula out and brand permanence to what I felt, thought, and experienced in that moment so that I do not have to invest additional energy in memory out of fear of forgetting jeweled lessons.

 Life to me is filled with every day as a beautiful opportunity to grow, play, cry, and laugh in this universe.  To live a series of days that merge into a slush of monotonous oatmeal that hardens beyond recollection frightens me as if I am ignoring my purpose of existing.  It would be as if I am allowing my instrument to remain out of tune with the universe.  Writing helps me pay attention to the detail and play in tune.

 These poems are like video recordings in a way documenting the subtly and conversations of our dates.  I do not know how long I may continue to write as such, but I can say that I feel like they are helping us grow.  I would not write them the way I am writing them if I did not respect your capacity to recall and interpret the inferences and analogies utilized based on your memory.  You have made comments here and there across our short journey so far that reinforces your prowess to register life in such a similar vein.  This common acumen makes me feel close to you.  I find it kindred as if I myself am not so alien and that we may be able to get each other in a way I have often fecklessly sought in others.

 I want someone I can share a sofa with, a house, a city, or a bed and be silent reading or hanging around conducting separate pursuits at times giving each other space.  Whether that sofa is in the same building, state, or place that intrapersonal intelligence to connect anywhere functions as a constant.  It certainly is reinforced through participating in common shared experiences flowing through daily life, but that foundation to me is the most precious water.

 The foundation is forged through these types of times reverberating.  I want to know and have my potential partner know me completely.  That is what I am doing with you in a manner that I feel is what is best for us and what we need.  Each relationship in life is its own animal.

 You said you enjoyed presents; well these writings and poems are my gifts to us.  I want you to feel noticed and heard.  I want you to feel like wherever this goes, a man saw you for your true self.  A woman let go of some of her controls to elect vulnerability and was still in control enough so that whatever fear or thoughts which established the dynamics of your day to day were fed a nourishment that usurps worry in exchange for a validation of your spiritual self, your inner being, which has ventured all this way.  I want you to feel safe. 

 I am imperfect.  I do not assume where this will go.  I simply want us to grow to an opportunity to see each other in our bareness that I describe in the following poem.  I want us to see each other in that manner of nudity.  In the intimacy of that experience we will choose what is we each want.  Whatever those choices might be, they will come from a place of openness and calming awareness.  Even if procession continues to a pairing bond they are but a couple laying down daily stepping stones in reaffirmed unique testaments of volition.   

 On Thursday I got a phone call that my daughter’s flight for Friday was cancelled.  This window of time became available and my first thoughts moved to creating an opportunity with you.  The poem I wrote captures that night and what I felt of our experience.  On Saturday you texted me the moment as I closed the door as my daughter’s mother was departing after dropping her at my home. 

 My text in return, “I have learned to never underestimate all the flowing parts of this universe.  Yesterday was beautiful & spawned through an alcove of time I do not take for granted as coincidence.  Thanks for sharing that with me,” comes from such confluences. 

 I mentioned last night that I have been on a journey for about the last ten years and definitely since the hurricane.  Much of my openness and joy to be my true self without feeling like I am constantly having to put out fires or post-pone relaxing into daily life is a recent transition.  I do not assume to understand all the parts in play of why we met or what we will be, but I do grow this experience with you with cognizance of that which does not rule out that which is greater than the self participating in a manner beyond human comprehension.

 There were times in my life where I would completely ignore and disallow all as coincidence.  Now I do not have to know, do not claim to know, I simply let it be, meditate, and most importantly I attempt to be aware as such intersections of volition and the universe occur to breathe them in and allow myself to be part of their flow.

 Severus

7/25/14 
Crow and Owl

Night was a novel wrapped in a whisper
Sinking six hours to emit past two a.m.
Staring eyes to the ceiling, head to the edge of stairs
Tumbling towards the ecstasy of reverie

As if this emission never happened in but a dream
Alice floods the room and sails in sight
Through the doors blind knowing that the sheets are white
The dodo bird flies to the shore rotating counterclockwise

The cogs inside like a bank time release
Vaulted oven the baker’s scent seeps through the crease
Spoken and folding the flour to return to silence
Time to raise yeast set the gluten aside to not stretch the strands

Too quickly in the batter’s arrangement in wheat
The sugar intoxicating alcoholic seeds
Root the bar top in a column
Constructed here like an ancient

He rings the doorbell like Jason for the fleece
Knocking and the rabbit’s hound barks the gate
Hers is trained, wouldn’t be so out of control
Going out and she is in the blind

His red t shirt looks to him like a rag to wipe his face
As she looks like a 1920’s Clara in a bow wrapped and damn
Off to fly the maple’s leaf on oak to park in a church
If she knew

Only an anecdote not needing an antidote
Walking for a dance hall crash and the vibe is slowed
The old man’s bar is asking for a conversation in the haze
Of Tom Waits ghost wishing he was in New Orleans

But this is smoke-free waterhole week
The garbled haggard emphysema petri dish for the sidewalk gawkers
Is but mist like a mannequin in a street window
Busing in some garbage for hipsters to ogle on their way to Jacques Imo’s

Tonight he and her draw circles, two centers with expanding perimeters
Evaluating what to do with the areas of over and not lapping 
Thankful each it taking time to sip because the shotgun sex in the air
Might drown the roots in too much too soon

She starts to count to six from two and how she prepared for the worst
Offenders in the system, bribed in some shoes or just a guard’s mistake
Sliced down a man and she watched the reel that these
Were the men she was to deal

Preparation for the limitations of the police
Coming to enforce the priorities
Of breasts and boudoir founded in her quests
With Joplin’s lover as her dance-mother doubled over from the bayou

Trumped like every story has a twin, parallel world to another within
Mothers, fathers, sisters, selves, asking, dancing, muting, tells
As if she was doing this or that on Bourbon poking the tension
Seeing her curl her feet inward in his kitchen

The three hundred pound blues guitarist and the hyper white boy on keys
Covering funk with a sparse audience that she sees, cannot dance
With an authority that makes him want the darkness
To conceal his arms and legs, as shoe heels and accustomed angles

Are on the verge to appear halfway ridiculous and the ball of energy
For a drunken piano was just that, awkward
Because he knows by the way she stands, walks, and glides
That she just might eat him alive

And his toes feel out of practice like wizened heirlooms of folk tales
Of wanting to see that air of understated empathy that he knows is in her
But he’s wary of women pulling the rug and the rabbit hole underneath never stops falling
For arms up above, mind gone into the blackness    

Pausing confident like that column knowing she does not have to be a writer
He does not need to be dancer for the world to make sense
He smiles like an early bird meeting a night owl like his lady hawk
A wolf in the dark howling for Ginsberg, Howl! Howl! Howl!

She’s a living-dare, walking-muse and she knows it
From the way she’s been used
He’s a living poem taking her home with a transparent window
He set the old fashioned glass two nights ago to simplify

Where his priorities lie
As if even words in context look like potential cutthroats
In plain sight
So he accelerates on the interstate in a quiet pulse hand on her leg

That he knows she knows the line where this night will not go
Because he set it, because she needs it too, doesn’t want to say the words
But appreciates his terms, so she can have the freedom and vulnerability
To be of all things, female

Pulling in the collages begin
Of dirty laundry on the wall and roaches scurrying
With nutrients and recipes like an alphabet
The turtle’s shell and circumstantial evidence

She soaks in that non-feedback way like a professional
For the football and the magic, the father leading the baseball alumni
To the music of black and white, jazz and stained gray carpet midnights
She retreats to the intersection of shadowed corners under the stairs

Like a lure for that moment where he will let the waters settle in non-speech
To pounce in the pull of a tiger to a tigress in the glade about the voyeur pane
Where she can look out and see it all coming
Finding intimacy sequestered

So that he will never look at that alcove of his home the same again
Below where something use to hang on the wall tumbling into forget

The cool darkness swallows him in like delightful madness in the maw
Of the universe crafting felicity in the bite of the vampire
Away to be something else
Like a clown fish pulled into the anemone he was built to take her sting

He asks if she wants to take the secret mystery stairs
She sees his novel like a beating heart behind glass open for surgery
Depending on the sentences where her eyes rest
Poems from 2010, the paint in blue lines and thirty-three colors

The symbols and words pair like Jungian archetypes
Above a weight bench, a computer and quotes from captains
She sinks to read, he points out his father’s favorite Nietzsche
Not upset for the lie, but that I can no longer believe you

E.E. Cummings sets her head to that hard pillow at the stair
He rambles in the slow shadow of how like an animal she finds her spots
Like a vagabond on the move finding fresh shelter each eve
In the torpid pace she breathes, “I am going to be vulnerable now.”

Childhood there were moments, but it was hard, pretty bad
Sure he had his, others, but she had hers
Maybe in love once, after that no
Dated men and women, they always wanted things

To change her or pull her like an interesting creature
Jean Grey like the Phoenix always in other people’s minds
Fire in her own, a burst, light the inferno to ashes
Because these tethers feel like immolation

When someone tries to wander in, unprepared, uninvited,
The house burns and she does not do well in the domestic, residential stereotype
Suburbia and its Jesus left for a spirt and a magic in the night
He thinks of thunder road and a graduation dress in rags at her feet

Of a girl wanting to be stripper like just what she was built to be
Beautiful and others want her, but she does not want them
That second part is segregated, emotions in a capsule like a split cache blunt
Callus staring at the world like a straight shot of whiskey

Burning gut, not cutting the liquid, full, the way life is
Prison cell or bar room, stage or patient’s face
Some people are lost causes can’t save them 
She wonders if she’s harsh; he just tells her empathetically

Some people can see the darkness like an aura on everything mixed with the light
Other can’t, when you see it, you can never go back to not seeing it
Real responses, pragmatism, truth: the best dirty words
Flooded in sunlight, some go blind, others stare into the star & say, “Is that all you got?”

Enough, pausing reveal, tired and a look to the watch
Marshmallow sheets and a pillow reprieve
She sinks the ivory and mingles with the blur of portraits
A lot of Picasso and art history feels like one of her pheromones

Buzzing his olfactory at how real a moment Frida Kahlo could have
Grown from the Earth in a full body cast
Where has she come from; relinquishing herself to stay over
Like permission that this might not end in a bus wreck

Texting sure her roommate knows, the way women do and men do not
Worries vary with what’s exposed just for walking down the damn street
He thinks, my God her body, but wants her to hear it in his eyes
In some foreign tongue 

He readies the blanket of night’s shroud; pulls the lamp
Nakedly endowed for a moment that she does not want him to see
Like a most beautiful un-dare it be conscious compliment
An audience may look, but that is not her, this is

A bareness maybe she has not felt in a while
Like the scent of a complement she wishes to preserve
Before the winds carry the permission she has given herself
To experience this, to open up and be, away

Swaying the press of skin like medicine and felicitous sincerity
Hinting something has him and her acting on the verge 
Hitchhikers on the road Kerouac’s searching for an engine  
Could the page turn; the man without a net learned long ago to let it be

He places his leg below her knees and cradles in
Glides his fingers across her back, pressing firm in alternating currents
The sun, the hours pass in a lazy Saturday morn, the flowers’ stems appear
He thinks of the thousands of words he wants to share

She says she likes to pinch and grab
Named after a song that is not even good
He used the word volition three times before the crow
Wary of anything everyone else seems to like

A person should always have a few enemies even theoretical
Like Jay-Z, Elvis, or Mother Teresa
Standards are important otherwise
We’re all popping bubble gum at funerals

She said she liked that he did not misspell words
And juxtaposed the responsibility of breakfast preparation
He smiled about how all the moving boxes have been picked up
She said she is very big on rules and wraps her hair around her finger

He thinks he failed school yard
And wants her to pull him out of his own head
She jokes why he is so serious like a bubble releasing as his insight into her registers
So he cuts a violet flower bloomed from a seed to match her dress

She asks how long he was married
And he cannot begin that sentence because the morning
Has rolled and the time of the question after will fold into fissures
Of time better for a morrow and she

Has yet to verbalize she was married at all
She knows he reads and that is all that need be said for now
Kindred and love is not forced or chosen it is a reaction
To the stimuli based on a path we choose (in steps)
For two birds to fly


Severus 


7/29/14
To: Luna  
I wanted to share these quotes to go with the other email from my writing room.

"We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit."
E. E. Cummings


"Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity."Carl Jung
I thought they paired well with the piece.
This is the guy who will be at the red barn tomorrow night with one of his tracks.
Peace,
Severus



Text 7:29 in 3:52 pm : Thank you

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