Chopin & Vaporized Wine

At night, alive in the room, there’s a dark blue feeling coming over me – it is here I make myself overwhelmed. Oh, my. You still haven’t shared any of your photos of Friday Harbor with the Others. You’ve yet to share enough of yourself. You still haven’t opened. Listen to Chopin and cry your lower back out of alignment.

Mole

It’s hot and I am anxious. Words could help if I could make them form into their physical forms. I have a lot in my head I haven’t conveyed. It all bounces around and I cannot translate today. Earlier I walked around the yard, aimless and quiet, hoping to catch wildlife unawares, but they knew I was there, crunching leaves, barefoot… the only animal I encountered was a bellyup dead mole and I shoveled it into the blackberry bushes with a sad prayer.

nathaniel

every time I put a bottle down onto the glass top table the adherent acoustic guitar reverberates an open chord and desires to be played in a way that allows for tension and release and the aggravated assault of forgotten hymnals when god was lost and the strings are crisp and the setting is just so.

experimental music

It’s late. I’m drowsy from driving
and lifting boxes and trying
not to feel uncomfortable.
When my sweater fits like a second skin
but something grows between the layers,
an unreachable itch,
and the wipers sound off
for almost a mile before
a grey, starless night
and abstract noises
dominate the radio waves,
spiraling out
arms of many galaxies,
sent from the branches
of the arteries growing
in between your layers of skin,
vibrating the particles
finding a home within them to rest and cease.
Our nonchalance helped
ginger beer and distiller’s reserve
feeling like an old man with
freshmen french classmates
making a mockery
of how my hair looks
when flowing behind my head
beautifully in the wind
and the romantic kiss under the tower
gardens erupting in our eyes
as if it wasn’t just tongue
spit and gnawing at your lips
but our nonchalance did help
it was cool, you know
barely even mattered.
So I amplify the sound of crumpling paper
{as in another overthought first draft}
and layer it beneath
experimental swellings of
a moog synthesizer
and a history of electronic music
when signals were without tones
considered in the vocabulary of music
a random code has returned to melody
math is now music
and vice versa
I could amplify the sound of your breath
leaving and returning at the pink
hair dye stained pillow case
in the double stacked mattress bed
the forget me not green tangle design
and your breathing could be a symphony
a binary code to identify
the quality of your air
in and out
plucking of an acoustic guitar
in and out
nylon strings
math, vocab, hair dye, and a cut
a pipe organ feed through tremolo
concentric wobbling
connecting cables that shouldn’t
to invent biological music
genetic code to our essence
that makes the fire starting art instinct
in us to create without boundaries or care
in and out
a piano soiree with a concert hall full of black and white keys
to unlock nothing

morning poem & on becoming 23

morning poetic free-write

a too hot shower and too cold exit
of that warmth, coffee overflow
landscape is a sad grey/green wash
with hints of the impending great freeze
coming to trap us like snowed in hikers
taking refuge in an abandoned fire lookout
our eyes will quit creating tears
as we will burn them all for heat, for heat
the sky is a closed mess of dark clouds
rain to fog windows
let steam escape from the chimney
when no trees are looking
swaying
evergreen.

Ballast

Wednesday. October 29. 12:45 am

Careful about your age.
I have been believing in magicians for some cynical sense that all is well and right and that we will become resurfaced at least once more before drowning.

I am making a plan and it is tantric in origin with roots in Oregon and desires for Denver in the cusps of my comprehension, while the other sleeps a desolate sleep. Of obscure longing fought off with drinks and dreaming, while the realist wakes up early and confronts the sunrise without fear and without apprehension for the day that follows the suns arrival into our atmosphere.

April 3rd Rant (Nietzsche at a cocktail party?)

I owed rent so I paid rent. Now I owe rant. Here goes. Yesterday, the zig zag lines of cars traveling fast like swatches of color all blurred if I let my eyes water in the damp air. The bridge driven over in haste is at a mysterious height and there is little contemplation for swan diving or cannon balling. Only contemplation for blinkerless lane changers and never missing exit back tracking adventures sometimes elicited by a forced rut caused by aggressive drivers and an impossible space to fit vehicle within as transferred weight and emotion boil up and exit through the eyes in the form of silica and blood. 

New parts coming in the mail. A back bone I ordered from a mortuary. Some kidneys from the children’s hospital. Some lilac buds for my future garden. Nuts and bolts. Nothing too special. 

My legs took me everywhere yesterday. Happy that I have them and use them. There are others who have them and do not use them. We are a seated culture. Strapped into our cars and computer chairs, or on toilet seats with ipads in our naked laps. No room there for the adventurous walking stick madmen who strap on a back pack and walk a steady 5-6 city miles without purpose. Just to do. See. The eyes are so fulfilled when walking. Especially across bridges. The ones normally sped over. Stop. Watch the rowing shells practice in stride. The gentle rocking of moored boats. Sunlight reflecting. Years of layers of graffiti. Etc., etc. 

Now today. Assignments and reading. Vague concern for the perpetual sore neck and crinkling foil joints in my hands but this is no time to be a hypochondriac and get lost on Web MD. What a paradise for the concerned American who wishes to have a physical back drop to her maladies. Speaking of, my girlfriend and I, stumbling in love back from the bars heard and saw a crazy eyed old woman yelling ‘Help!’ from her cracked open screen door along the path. I was stewing about my insufficient funds at the time. We woke up and ran over to her. Her name was Rosemary and she wished to get a hold of her niece Lydia at the hospital. (Some number and direction, presumably for a certain wing, I can’t remember.) I guess nothing happened. We let her talk to the niece and then she dragged herself back inside. She held her left thigh and look concerned though did not want to trouble us by testing our empathy or anything. I noticed red on her leg but it didn’t register until later. Blood? Broken bone? We couldn’t call an ambulance because she seemed she could be faking her injury for Lydia’s attention. I don’t know. I was self conscious about my breath smelling like scotch ale and shuffled about nervously, though we knelt by her side instead of standing in dominance. She was wobbly and look back and forth between us like a captured animal pleading for pity. 

About self consciousness. When you are alone to be self conscious is meditative, brave, and healthy. You can assess your SELF as if it were a literary work or a constellation map, a page of algebraic expression, or an impressionist painting dissembled… Sit and mull over the day in your mind and if it was not too satisfactory, pick another day… Hawaii perhaps. Be there with the breeze and the sun and the sand mites. Inversely, to be self conscious in a social setting, unless at a pub on trivia night with your philosopher friends, is anti social death. At a party, holding a red cup and a little too self aware, the atmosphere will wash over you like dirty river sediment instead of a forgetful waterfall. The point, in a minor sense, is to lose your self. To depart from your harsh self effacing mannerisms that you are preoccupied with most of the day. Those a-little-too-analytic observations you have about your personality and the scope of the world in which you inhabit, the way your posture feels, does it feel stiff, too loose, awkward and floppy? You’ve learned that even if a few beers can help you ease into a different mental atmosphere, smoking pot will build a house around you that is barricaded and savage against the self around the others. Everyone becomes an inspector and your fears become heightened by the weight of gravity and the claustrophobia of the party-goings comfort zones overlapping. I would argue to be self conscious is beautiful. It allows for clarity. At party, though, one must be socially conscious. Let the self chameleon morph into whatever feels most naturally to get the most enjoyment out of the situation. Be a butterfly and later analyze. No one ever invited Nietzsche to a cocktail party. 

spring broken

Mental fireworks flared up with birdsong and the blackest tea, a thin film of sleep still covers my teeth weakly as I’m torn awake by movement and cold chills both. The heater clicks predictably in a total disarray like a drunk percussion band leader throwing mallets at undergraduate marching band drummers. Planes fly overhead predictably like the yawning sound of God’s total and absolute absence from modern life. We like to cling, to cling haphazard like barnacles, to our old wooden ship ideals, those washed ashore years ago, lightning blasted a hole through the hull with diamond precision and nothing floats.

This is the first morning of Spring Term and of my, freshly considered, junior existence at the University of Washington. Not sure how to feel except gently brazen, a blase demeanor though an infectious smile and nod toward truth and literature. There will be words. So many words to describe the world through other lenses. There will be fish eye, telescopic, retractable, malleable, grounded in observatory, depth charge, window washing… I will spray rain-w-x on my body and run through the rain watching it glide off my body as rocks tumble down a mountainside through a forceful upward slope.

My critical thinking will not flatline, I’ll be drowned in words. Courage to settle into myself and feel no teeth gnashing, snarling guilt about my charity case silent resignation apartment life. Can I exist without losing my mind in this apartment? can there be music and laughter even with the repetitious and insane click-clack of the heater which is so incredibly distracting to my rhythmic words and musical mind… it has no rhythm… it is atonal… there is no music… Quite often I hear voices and the slam of the garbage or recycling bins outside the living room. I hope they sorted correctly though throwing glass in with paper doesn’t make much sense and fills the consciousness with a dread that our mess is too great to fix easily, quickly, efficiently.

This is the time for growth. For job hunting and lovesickness. I have to carve my way into this place with the insane persistence of wind erosion or canal building.

Motivation comes from putting things off in a forest of distraction and suddenly finding a clearing in which to work through as much as possible before returning to the trees.

She is a clearing with big beautiful spruce and maple, with vines tangling around my feet when I step out too far, those tulip fields and nimble foot dance partners.

I am suspended animation. To believe that I have a purpose to fulfill today, in comparing clothes and eyelashes with the fellow students of my first two classes, the very first a long trek all the way beyond campus, it is rattling and confusing. Really I shouldn’t chase this rabbit much longer… questioning, concerned… everything… It should come natural and I can’t do it without a good breakfast. I can’t have the energy to pretend I’m more socially stable than I am among those who probably downplay it to seem humble in my presence. To overthink is to die in introductory settings. It must be instinctive and without polish. Let the dull truth shine like gleaming sunlight over an ocean.

Realize how worthwhile you are to get to know. Never pretend. Know who you are and nourish that personality with a magnetism to attract others with similar beautiful belligerence. Now clarity waits in the form of a petty breakfast scramble in the corner kitchen. There will be vegetables and fruit. Fuel for these important encounters with future peers. With confidants or co-conspirators. With enemies.