don’t hate the player

50k + words.

29 days.

But who is counting?

NaNoWriMo

God help us all, I’m going to do it.

Extended Quote: Nick Cave

“In his brilliant lecture entitled “The Theory and Function of Duende” Federico García Lorca attempts to shed some light on the eerie and inexplicable sadness that lives in the heart of certain works of art. “All that has dark sound has duende”, he says, “that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain.” In contemporary rock music, the area in which I operate, music seems less inclined to have its soul, restless and quivering, the sadness that Lorca talks about. Excitement, often; anger, sometimes: but true sadness, rarely, Bob Dylan has always had it. Leonard Cohen deals specifically in it. It pursues Van Morrison like a black dog and though he tries to he cannot escape it. Tom Waits and Neil Young can summon it. It haunts Polly Harvey. My friend and Dirty 3 have it by the bucket load. The band Spiritualized are excited by it. Tindersticks desperately want it, but all in all it would appear that duende is too fragile to survive the brutality of technology and the ever increasing acceleration of the music industry. Perhaps there is just no money in sadness, no dollars in duende. Sadness or duende needs space to breathe. Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence. It must be handled with care.”

“All love songs must contain duende. For the love song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain. Those songs that speak of love without having within in their lines an ache or a sigh are not love songs at all but rather Hate Songs disguised as love songs, and are not to be trusted. These songs deny us our humanness and our God-given right to be sad and the air-waves are littered with them. The love song must resonate with the susurration of sorrow, the tintinnabulation of grief. The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil – the enduring metaphor of Christ crucified between two criminals comes to mind here – so within the fabric of the love song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering.”[2]

discovered

under a pile of paper tucked into one of my bookshelves: A promise from 3+ years ago that I intended to keep. 

If the heart of the desert is stony
and the soul of the sand is flat
if the rain brings one flower only
then darling, I’ll love you like that.

The Girls

So it is official now – every Thursday at 7 pm, I go see the girls.  The Girls and I talk about poetry.  They write, I listen, and we talk. D is mellowing out a little – she’s my regular and quite the rhymer.  F. wrote her first poem today with a nice little contrast between bingo players, young volunteers, and the homeless that the group makes sandwiches for.  It takes F. a minute or two to warm up, but she’s got these odd little stories that make up for the way she looks at me like I’d better say something smart or she’s outta there.  

Today we talked about words that are ecstatic in some way, which led to some reading of poetry from the Bible, the Gnostic Gospels, and Rumi.  Rumi is, as always, the final crack in a fractured heart.  And also reminiscent of Neal.  The Rumi: 

After being with me one whole night, 
you ask how I live when you’re not here.

Badly, frantically, like a fish trying to breathe
dry sand.  You weep and say,
but you choose that.   

After the girls, I went to Trader Joe’s and had a poem in the parking lot.  I wrote it down quickly, lest it escape.  They happen infrequently enough these days that I must be careful, though they are less infrequent than they used to be.  Thus far, it is title-less.

My tongue has been severed.
I say nothing now.  Anyway, I
have worn the old words out:
Forgive me, come home, love.
Over and over again, love.  Begged
sobbed, monotone and unfeeling
and finally – briefly – in monastic
ecstasy.  You removed your ears
and so there is no longer a need
to speak.  I hold my tongue
in my hand.   

And that, my friends, is that.  I think I shall go to bed and dream of Rumi.

Which reminds me.  I had a glimpse of a dream I had a while ago and I liked it, but now I don’t remember what it is/was.  My head is a leaky pail.

tidal

I am the tidal-smooth stone you place in your mouth
a  salty pebble to keep a certain kind of craving at bay. 

I cannot swim, but you polish me with your warm hands
you let me settle to the bottom and leave me to the mercy
of brine and sand.  You let the riptide tug at me

pull me distant, and when I think I’m finally lost to sea
you retrieve me.  I am your dark stone, pocket-sized

and overlooked.  You worry me alone at midnight
holding the weight of me on your tongue
just heavy enough to keep you from calling me love.

we all fall down

You burned my letters. 
The paper crumpled around my voice
like a hand curls into a fist. 
A hundred foetuses bent to comma
around the fledgling hearts. 
You heard the cinders whispering
to you for weeks after and dreamed
of the wonderful things those words
could have been. 

I burned your books one by one
and read the message you meant
to send in the ashes.  The burning
pages warmed the house for days. 
So when you asked if I understood, 
I could finally say I did.  I buried
the stubborn spines in the back yard
and planted a tree to mark them. 
Now the roots feed on our history
and the leaves foretell our future. 
The branches spread like open arms.

for hallmark

An octopus has three hearts
but I’d be fine with two
one to do my living with
and one to spend on you.

New Years Resolution No. 2

As of 0100 on 01 January 2009, I will refuse to obsess about my personal life and obsess instead on something productive: finishing a book and wooing an agent.  Posting photographs on flickr.  Taking more pictures. 

Possible exceptions – I will probably still post horribly opaque posts about my personal life here, like crumbs in the forest, guaranteed (or intended) to mark a path.  Whether the path leads back into or out of madness remains to be seen.

Draft

Call It Grief

The camera has no eye for frost.
The atomic sequins shimmering in the light
of a crescent moon, it takes a breathing
body to appreciate the way water curls
into itself under duress, the beauty of
a million solitary atoms shivering in the night.