small stones in the river

O crepuscular half-beings--
Time and Space--
be thou appeased;
I have yet to finish my exams.

A hollow space in a stone
of surpassing beauty
and all I can do
is watch the water
knowing that I have no pockets.
The measureless grief
of dropping that one stone
to burble with a thousand other worlds
below the river
is a thought too painful,
too complete, to pass out of memory,
still too bright and heavy to hold.
Yet shadows claim me still
the lives I could have led
inside the intricately textured ripples of a tossed pebble.

Something with wings

Halloo in the frosty silence, halloo in the echoing night.
The smallest pieces of the globe are glowing shards in our hearts
The myriad reflections of a lost myth
Beyond the shadow of smoke, beyond faith,
Formless hope in the wellspring
What is the question reverberating against the walls?
A fairytale, is it made of more than glass?
Can it be bigger than the fine, fragile bird skeleton we clutch at with clumsy fingertips?
What will make it live and sing within the cages of our breasts?

Anything but wings

Here it is, the poem towards the end of the book about fireflies.
Go into the twilight.

I am the one holding the bubble wand. Fortunately (?) my power is in positively altering my environment, though I often do not directly feel the results. Let's talk about allelopathy, secreting chemicals that alter the growing environment and make it less hospitable for one's competitors. Allelopathy is an adaptive strategy. That's not what I do. I am about the business of making things slightly better in the space all around me. I focus and create bubbles, dandelion tufts, things beautiful and simple and buoyant that are dispersed on the wind to take root in some forgotten corners. I no sooner breathe than create, no sooner create than rejoice. And my greatest joy is in the motion and interaction that my loves and small attentions conceive. I create a place that is a little bit better, a little richer, than anywhere else, maybe it is the only clean patch and neat, or riotous and vibrant, but the party which is open, is open even to the people who come and take (we call them generalists) who will take what I can give and then move on. They pop the bubbles which would have died anyway, but they tread on the goldeny threads of inspiration and cosmic joy in that moment of dance between the world and the senses. They are loud and don't know what I have begun to say in the quiet. My worlds are not hidden from the street traffic, and everyone can see what is valuable in it but not why, and they pull the meaning up by the roots, dissect it to see if it had merit. A disincentive perhaps to share my world, to exhale (my being and my breath). Every body has to survive, but if I can't help but live in mutualistic association and I have no protecting symbiont the world takes care of itself by taking from me anything that I offer.

Show up at the page, appearing at this window I offer myself up as a blank mind to the tender mercies of the winds, Muses as faint in scent, as feathery to touch, as invisible, as passingly extant as all thought and inner experience flowering into some product the subtlest fluid of which it is permissible to drink and in drinking to be drunk deeply, to pour forth that fountain-- that voluble torrent of love and care, the softest words whispered to oneself and the dark ceiling in the night beyond light in the twilit chambers where filters each shadow becoming impressions on the pastel wall, as memorable as water beads running in the shower, and as intently noted even while they slide away all. Words are free and thus is their pain; to live fleeting, mutable lives in the mind, altering the landscape for the space of half an eternity--half a second. What could matter in this ever-fixed ever-changed war, where transformation is the only constant, the only choice, and the particular, the definite marks death?

I am frustrated with my own slow progress, self-referential loops that leave me myopic in the passive and descriptive, endless circular thoughts filled with commas, with hesitation. I am frustrated with the way my mind settles and clears following stones thrown to the bottom of a lake. How long it takes. I am the stone-thrower. I fight the gradual accumulation of what I already sense, and would stamp my feet to have the whole before me. Despite my tantrums I work steadily, I progress despite myself, or when I am asleep. I must keep myself in the dark, work miracles behind closed eyelids. No wonder my waking self forgoes sleep as long as or longer than it can physically be forgone, anything in rebellion, anything but what my deep self dreams of, anything but wings. Why can I not grant that boon in and for myself? I am yet keeping myself powerless. Stalemate with stale hopes on a dusty shelf, when I know that the snowglobes hold castles and patterns of the deepest shades, burgundy, royal blue, and the gold that burns. Dust is useful to me yet, and it suits my mood. Things which are glorious pretend at the tawdry. After all, from what matter sprung creation?

Awkward tusks and the tear-shaped moon

'The time has come,' the walrus said
but all the cuckoo clocks had fled.
'Never a moment's rest' cried he
and chased them all upon the sea.
'Time must behave' the walrus croons
under the sympathetic moon.
She solemnly reflects his tears
and listens to his deepest fears.
Her smiles as she looks with glee
at clocks cavorting in the sea
are no less mild than the glance
upon his tusked countenance
as, gently herding clocks, she led
the saddest walrus back to bed.

Held the presses for long enough, i think

So I just went through another period of senescence. Creative abstinence might be a more correct term, though it doesn't encompass the withering shoots going from green to yellow and souring fruit wrinkling and turning hard and sad. I am sometimes a cantankerous old maid, and let my worries keep me in my rocker on the front porch wagging my finger at the world. How much power fear can hold over us! It take a tremendous effort to lift that all off my shoulders vertically, but I've understood the intellectual concept behind melting my fear away. I just need to know it in myself and put it into practice.
I walked around in a mind-dance, wrapped in myself, living in a place that I couldn't explain beyond the pages of books, between the covers. It was fine and I did not know my loss and my loneliness until a man saw me today, and talked directly to the thing in my heart living in the minds of long-dead writers. He stood on a rock and the black-eyed susan he held in his teeth stared straight through me, and I was pinned to myself by his questions, and the manner in which he addressed me. A genuine address to my sleeping self. He held out the flicker or thread on whose tension my whole life is held taut. I am convinced he was an unwitting prophet for just that one moment when he was God talking to me.
What could I do? I stammered, I stuttered, but I was me, after all. And I had never wanted to wake up so much. When my mind is not on fire, it is only damp logs. The sparks hurt too badly if it takes them a while to catch, and disappointment is an acrid smoke of failure clutching at my throat. I feel the layers of swaddling and fight against them. How much more painful still to know that if I were to wake, I would only feel that good as often as a person such as this came into my life, or simply crossed my path as today. A torn soul I fled, not flew, from that brightly shining being. God doesn't want me to give him the middle finger, but reality is too rare and too beautiful to bear on a day like this.

Who likes to feel laughed at?

Once upon a time, the world woke up. It was the funniest story that ever happened. And then it could have been the end, everyone slapping their knees, except no one got the joke, so they just kept living. It would take too much time to explain the joke, so everyone is very patient with each other, and humorless. We ruffle each others' hair, and pretend to be grumpy about this small consolation. If you catch someone's eye right after they see a balloon that someone has lost hold of, they will show you a piece of the infinite, blue chuckling music that we are deaf to. But it doesn't make them happy, for who likes to feel laughed at?

awake and not feeling anything particularly strong

And so I am just going to write and see what comes of it. An invitation into the night, into the mind spaces and the in-between places. Between one window of glowing light and the cathode ray signals I'm beaming out, or between mind and brain, between the fingers and my keys, perhaps that is where it really happens, mind and keys, fingers and keys, yes there's a dance going on, a dance I can't understand because (have you ever felt this way?) as soon as I think about it, I stop being able to type.

for a while.

THe way to keep myself functional functioning in motion is to keep myself from knowing what my hands are doing. IF not, I will steadily undermine all my own work with secret ninja thoughts sent by which half of my brain? the half that doesn't like me, sent to assassinate all my attempts to create something or be happy. I was happy in the midst of a sea of rain, I was happy floating in a dream somewhere beneath the pine trees, I was happy in my nest, in the soft warmth of silence, a cloudlike comfort, heavy and confining.

How do I keep myself conscious, when my instinct is to be ever wider, ever open, and embrace that which is most uncritical and free? I feel afraid, afraid to love too much, to be the firefly leaking sparks in every direction until I must fizzle out. It is uncontrolled, I am crashing and burning. And I like it. The hardest things for me are easiest for other people, and I will start with the basic premise they struggle with for their whole lives. Do I want to close down? There are people who could show me how, show me myself in the mirror if I wanted such things. What is the value of control? Learning it so you don't have to use it if you don't want to. Dammit, that means I should. It's a good thing there are counterterrorist cells in my mind, and spies and counterspies. Otherwise, I would have to make up far more for myself to do. IF I weren't self-sabotaging, imagine, I'd have to imagine a lot more. Have wizard's duels with people I met at the bus station. Not that I ever go to the bus station, but it seemed appropriately inappropriate. I am inappropriate. I laugh inappropriately. And I act this way when I'm sober. I act this way all the time. Do I act this way when I'm me?
How do I console myself, is feeling emotion just my indulgence, my bigger weakness, bitter, the emotions and the elements I'm drowning in, am i the vaguest Flower like the Little Prince's, not seeing anything in front of me, my reasons not making any but internal logic, what is my character's motivation? I worry somehow that metaphors fail me, and everyone else sees through being a hippie, they see in it something silly which escapes me. Perhaps I take myself too entirely serious when I should laugh, so that I do not laugh inappropriately as well as laughing inappropriately. In that case, and on that note, I will end this post by expressing the regret that I ate so many chocolates before bed. Though I cannot guarantee that such a thing will not befall me a second time. Temptation wiggles her fingers even now.