Magnolia flowers push through their felt cocoons.
I play the anticipation game, which fuels my attachment fears.
In my defense, the seduction is honest and hard-earned.
In the time it took to reach this conclusion,
Mt. Hood glowed peach. When does it become wrong?
When it becomes too much?
Restraint feels good too. Different.
Anticipation becomes the preverbal call and response.
The in-between. I can hold hope here, gently and with full intention.
I am looking for something real—an effort unchallenged. Less questions.
More of a slender inquiry like a river narrowing, entrenched.
Spelling out exit wounds as two bodies enjambed.
Taking is a kind of giving,
sometimes. This is a lesson
etched inside of me. It is hard-wired,
a learned behavior. I’m spying on the self
and its tendencies towards destruction.
Choices made at full speed—from spiritual delusion,
rapture and ecstasy.
Science says twilight is that time just before.
That too exists.
“I do not force myself, ever…I have regard for the inner voice.”
—Lee Krasner (1977)
August 2019, Oakland, CA
Genocide, immolation, massacre, breaking news,
poetic language, one million acres. Plan for the futures
in front of us and don’t look too far back.
There is nothing there. Just begging for mercy,
for immunity, for more than you deserve.
The bus is a warm refuge. Foggy windows blur
still naked trees. I trust their knowledge
on when to show up. A sky threatens collapse
and still a rainbow appears. Like that
kind of majesty. That kind of being in witness.
In sensuous fuzzed-out light,
I was held long enough to be astonished.
All this dedication textures delicate.
Fresh consciousness. In this flex,
my ears are open and eyes quiet.
It’s that time of year when the light finds you.
Tell me how you discover its presence.
When I am in witness to oranges turning orange.
It’s the time of year when memory chooses you.
Share what remains.
Grief becomes an extravagant home.
It’s that time of year when ascendant darkness requires faith.
Map out your rituals of living.
Listen to the hissy rustle of palm trees;
observe the jade tree bushes thick as thieves
and their starry blossoms popping off pink
during the winter months; absorb the audacity of wanting
to pet the family of gray and white feral cats on Balfour Ave;
and return to a sense of arrival.
Can I say it? I am of a darker nature, one that might ask
a man to do something worth repenting. Say, a whip.
A harness. Say, pleasure any way I want it. I want a body
with another body to say more than words. The light
furrowing of nails on shoulder blades to signify you
and forever and yes. A hand on the breast to signify: I want
you like a pious woman wants God’s middle finger to scrape the psalm from her tongue. …
—Traci Brimhall, “Self-Deliverance”
self-portrait, Oregon, August 2021
It’s possible
I should be worried—
terrified even—
at the number
of lovers I kicked out
of my bed,
rampant job insecurity,
righteous war,
pink snow
as positive feedback loops,
endlessness.
But I’m gonna be like Jesus—
spit out the lukewarm.
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
—Gustav Mahler
Some days everything collapses. Tessa Posthuma De Boer (2007)
There is always a promise.
A hint of certainty—an offering of control.
Then, a volcano erupts after knowing its status: active.
As covenant, trust and belief mutually inspire.
I know you know this translation and how it must feel
when holding sharp fragments—intergalactic vibes:
to want summertime oceans and prairie skies.
All this suggestion begs for minor mysteries
whose performance is a habit. Asking for discretion,
a hint of sin, and longing that chooses you.
“The absurd does not liberate; it binds.” —Albert Camus
I WANNA LIVE, Berlin (October 2017)
I catch a rainbow in my hand.
You remind me that even in stillness
light breaks sound. I take that fracture
and bury it deep inside myself.
I want my darkness to mean something.
You stand desperate. The concept of “self”
broadens into a flattened “we”. Self-appointed,
I anoint you and under faith’s observation
we begin to believe we matter.
“To imagine that turmoil is in the past and somehow we are now in a more stable time seems to be a psychological need.” —John McPhee, Assembling California
Read at least 10 poems a week. Keep a log of the poems—name of poem and poet—and write a sentence that will help you recall how you feel from the poem.
Keep a pen/pencil and paper with you at all times to write things down (“it will not stay in your head”).
In claiming this emotional space every week, anchors of memory and experience structure a highly unstable body of work. I arrive inhabiting this swath of living, or as Lauren Berlant said in her essay Cruel Optimism, “deflating the symbolic into the somatic”.
After all, islands are the tops of mountains. Perception as slant, signaling both perspective and insight. That sweet trigger of embodied habit. Writing from an ascetic life.
What earned reward lays in wait? Is it focus as illumination? Maybe the reward is endurance inside an anxious limbic system. Simply, a need gets satisfied. A temperance of honesty that there is no final outcome to this effort. That this predictive text, and its energy, may be read as art. That this is worthless.
drawn from the month of August 2017: the dramas of poetry
Internal struggles are creative escape. A quiet move to form a space where survival can be shown joyful. Today this emanates as imagination externalized into poetry, an archaic organizing structure. I find active comfort in writing. A motion that has desperation as its wings. I write because it feels good. Not from a place of fear, but from a deep place of longing that has expansive connections. I write because I love.
I could try to name all the details, get them just so, while also aligning them to a truth I’ve silently cultivated. Yet dear reader you will bring yourself, whole and fractured, to my exposed interpretations. When I write about light, darkness, or a combination (such as stars) I may try to steer you in a direction that makes sense—to me—but you will pull yourself along freely, or not. All I know is how much you desire days that open themselves.
I believe that kind of desired stillness can be found in a “good” poem. A temporary place of collaborative movement where desire meets an experience that shows effort.
I witnessed the sea lion lay still and bloated. A murder of crows took fur and the wettest pieces of its eyes. Obscenely exposed, tender in its inability to no longer defend itself from harm, there was both stillness and flurry of excavation to what the crows found most useful.
The truth from that image is not mine to tell. My privilege as a writer is to show. May I be so fortunate to connect you dear reader on another experiential plane. Not forcing but gently holding together a moment of stillness, an honoring. And I may tell you one thing as I adeptly show another disparate possession. That gap is not mine to control. I owe myself only the structure and integrity around the truth of this moment.
I evolve. I decompose. I exist here.
*** *** ***
Oscar Bluemner, Sunset of the St. Lawrence
*** *** ***
curated from the near past: self-immolation
Fixing fences is a full-time job and a hard way to make a living. Those edges form a territory where scarcity implies there is something to want. It is not absence or loss. There is a lack but it’s expansive, wide and open.
This lineage has been stored as power taken—a binding agent of trauma and songs shared in darkness. Fear becomes us like the secret textures of a thousand trees.
If it’s true that perfection is a scarcity never to be fully actualized, my life was first performed where sin delighted to now wanting love when wrong. This claiming is mine and its purpose is to make meaning.
Cache Culture 