until again

there are many things that come to mind, many things that seem to be, and the seeming is the arrival, and the arrival is the impetus behind other thoughts. there are days like this one, and in it, the seemings, disarranged, facilitate the extravagance of all that waits to be known.

i try (and the attempts are trials), to maintain composure, but sometimes, the way in which life coalesces merely compounds the idiosyncratic tendencies of everyone around me (or at least my perception of them) and every plan, every expectation, every hope, turn into something other than what we supposed it would be—what we had dared to dream.

fragments of other people’s songs, their lyrics, their own communion with the world: these things i use, to trace my life throughout the confluences of existence, and even to define my interrelation with the world. there was a time when those were my songs, my lyrics. for a while after the spirit died within me, i was bitter, but the music never really left me. it lingers yet.

waiting.

waiting, like so many other days in my life.

but this waiting, this moment, this churning, has a glimmer: a spark.

a recalescence.

there is something about this time, this moment, that shines. the waiting, this once, is a good thing, for i wait here, willingly, at the end of the all which never was, and the dawn of the all which might now become.

(earlier this week, I took an old draft and turned it into this. something significant had happened the previous night, which i’m not going to explain it here, but it was a good thing: one which changed the entire tenor of the original draft from July 8, which was a much darker time. i am driven by rainstorms of late, and they drive me towards a glistening light.)

it’s raining again, like it always does.

not really, of course. no, never quite really, but it’s raining again, like it does, like it has, like it will.

i can see it: a small storm, far off, looking like some sort of soft, harmless little thing….a thing i would like to be in, despite the chill.

but the rain: always at times like this, it is the rain that pulls me back, even when it is somewhere else.

just: the rain.

just that, and only that.

i don’t know, in the deepest sense, what the rain truly means to me. it has always been with me, always a part of me, always around me, even on the driest of days. the internal meanings change as i age, and as experience dictates.

there are days like this.

and sometimes there are lifetimes.

and sometimes, i don’t know which are the longer.

part of my self-definition after i left home involved mnemonic devices in my writing: word-symbols which correlated to certain thought-forms more fluidly than i could say outright in English. one of these devices was the black moon.

over time, the black moon came to mean several things to me, but it started as being directly representative of an eclipse, and therefore for eclipsed thoughts: forms of creation which existed internally but never made it to the light of day. had blogging been around (read: common) back then (the mid-to-late 1980′s), i’d have been one of the most prolific bloggers on the planet, but even then, there still would have been creations that fell beneath the black moon. poems in particular had a peculiar tendency to creep up on me when i had no way to write them down, and songs seemed to always wait until i was either out of music paper or far away from any musical instrument.

but, at least those melodies would often stay in that mental playlist of mine, and would often be rendered sometime in the future, at least in some way. and especially after i enlisted in the Army, the most common way for a song to be written down was as a “poem”. these poems were actually mnemonic sequences, crafted for the sole purpose of capturing the song they actually represented. call me crazy, but the methodology works. i can still hear the song represented by the poem below (the title of which was an intentional double-entendre), despite a series of edits which, for me at least, lifted it from its role as mnemonic device and into something which might just stand on its own.

i’ll have to record the song itself someday. it is the melody that underlies the entire process of my departure from my unrevivable marriage.

this was written at a time when i still considered the possibility of reincarnation, multiple lifetimes, and all that other tomfoolery which is ultimately just as unprovable as religious dogma. for that, i must beg your indulgence.

within the realm of the black moon rising
~ October 2, 1989 in Lubbock, TX

called in and deeply hidden:
something more grand on this large scale
than wisdom;
and the changing patterns on the ceiling
mark the windfall
of the endless colors on the Wheel;
and for all that it seems,
something deeper hidden than the nightfall
is colored by the days it has failed to express.
so much, then ~
so futile ~ is the star-gazing wonder
of a few pale expressions of our doom.

so lying alone, i remain in wonder,
pondering for a while
the termination of the colder hand;
and gazing now beyond these wayward turmoils,
i symbolize the Law of Universal Doom.
it all shall end.
it shall.
and creaking like the back door of our memories,
slowly it opens,
and slowly, i begin to understand.
there is something more here than what is waiting ~
something more full of despair
and empty sadness;
and i search again the long streets of our wanderings,
and my memories fly the pathways
of so many lifetimes.
and so my question, unanswered still,
begs unasked upon my lips:
“when shall i be with you again?”

within the realm of the black moon rising
(and the planets all are melting),
i turn to see the stars,
and you are there again.
i lay my eyes upon thee, my love,
and thou art full of light.

days
pass by:
“cover me:
let me hide.”
fade away
into the world
~ it shall be this way
(somewhere).
and there:
there is someone
who loves me
~ i don’t know how.
tell me,
what can i do?
(this need for love….)
i have fallen
in this sway
~ someway.
and days
pass by:
the world
and all within it….
(and i cry)
there is hope.
there is fear.
there is sorrow.
there is cheer….
stand away, now.
let me part.
(i know what it is
that i remember)
for, it is over.
it is gone.
and it cannot hold me
any longer.

…September 2, 1985 in San Antonio, TX

this popped into my head this morning. i don’t know why, but i figured, why the hell not. those of you who tend to psycho-analyze me may at least enjoy it.

Of all the unknown things, unbidden yet undenied, there there is a hidden sentience to the way that life comes among us here between the cold stones. We are simpler here, and thus more complicated and complex. But, unknown to us, all the things we dreamed of, have relevance only within the dreams which contain them.

And life comes among us. It comes between us and rides the waves of seeming, which we say nothing should have a right to ride, since we, continually within our constancy, refuse those waves a life of their own. We demand a precedence undeserved: to be ridden by us, as if the riding would be a gift. And we call ourselves, Sacred.

Our dreams collide like the greyest swells beneath the midnight moon, arching over each other in intricate tangles of common essences and mutual desires. And we, wetly waiting upon the shore, shrouded in the fog of our presumptions, can only yearn to ride those swells.

The stones are cold, not warming beneath our misted hands, but numbing us all the more as we are supported by them, not of them (not yet!), but less somehow without them. For they live where we come to watch, and from where, as the cold sun faintly rises, we must ultimately depart.

And in the meanwhile, life comes among us, between us, through us, and over us, surrounding us with the mysteries of never, always, and now. We live between its gusts, among the shadows of the cold stones, much as we live within the wind, the mist, and the rain. It is less frightening here, less immediate, less uncertain. It is dream-stuff, but its pertinence is without dimension, and thus a part of all.

And of all the unknown things, that hidden sentience by which we define ourselves moves on slowly inland, free of us, leaving us staring at the sea, and yearning to ride the swells.

The way things come and go, and the changes these things bring with themselves: They eventually wear thin in a way that makes far more sense than the misunderstandings arising from them predicates. For desire has nothing to do with it: neither for what we want, nor where we want to be. And the mystery behind it all is nothing more than the half-seen reflections of all the things to which we once aspired.

We talk in circles that are squared: irresolute and unresolved, diminished by the need to face the continuum with a prescience factored and distilled, rounded at the edges of our competencies. We are surrounded by rhetorical reminiscences that no longer have any meaning in the grand scheme of things, for no misery abounds quite as repetitious as the constancy of our daily lives. And still, we find hidden meanings in everything from the formation of the clouds to the numbers of things that slip through our fingers and smash upon the floor.

We dream. And in the dreaming, we come alive. Our days pass incuriously, so we fill the nights with falsified wonder, resentment, and the searching for higher forms of relevance which we fail to understand only exist in theory. Our ignorance is duplicitous, our continuance foreshortened, our magnificence sullied by our self-predicted failures.

And yet still, at least for a time, we are the golden ones.

We dream excessively, deluded by the facility to envision alternatives, and mistaking the commonality of that for sentience, spirit, and grandeur. We live, in truth, at the mercy of the nearly unpredictable collisions between the confluences in our thoughts and the myriad of ways we fail to enact their visions. And there is more to all this, so much more, than all the dreams and vision-quests might ever hope to conjure. But we know only what we think we know, and believing we know only a portion of the sum, our boundlessness is both defined and limited by our lifespans.

In the reverse, as limitless as they are, we reduce our own complexities to facile, digestible pieces and term the recognition of these near-infinite portions as insight, making of them the elements of the crimes we perpetuate against ourselves. And seeing these things for anything but what they truly are, we make of them our punishment, our purgatory, and our parole.

Our convictions and our revelations are the same.

And only the smallest fractions of our existences fit the definition of “real,” and absolutely none of it is “sacred.”

what color hides within the light of the moon?
what peace lies in the shapelessness of forever?
and when morning comes at last transcended,
what life descends the heavens to slowly die?

what rapture churns in misery’s wakefulness,
entranced in a light still hidden
and yet still mysteriously unknown and shrouded
by the color of the moon’s last echo—
rippling waters shadowed in forgetfulness—
of how simplicity grows in sanctity?

and glowing through eternity,
does it shake the whispered sessions
in the crimson of the pool?

what in sage remembrance borne
truly hangs despairingly still in thought
(though triumphant still in an ecstasy now broadened)?

and the humming of the muse astride
the trembling cloak of midnight
is wrapped in the moonlight’s shivering wonder.
it stills the morning’s wondrous glory,
opaquely shimmering and enfolding itself
in the transcendence of time.

how faultless does the morning lie in memory,
though bordered still by truthfulness,
and entranced in a lightness, hidden
by the significance of resplendent terror
and the sanctity of a screaming night.

fully sacred in these trials of doom,
when morning at last arrives,
what rapture churns in misery’s wakefulness?
and what peace lies in the shapelessness of forever,
that the colors of the light of the moon on high
become the granite facade of the weightlessness of time?

(original: January 6, 1991 ~ near An’-Nu’Ayriyah, Saudi Arabia)
(edit: January 14, 2010 ~ Sioux Falls, South Dakota, USA)

There are days, and then there are those days that seem to last a lifetime. One such was yesterday.

But that can almost always be said.

Each yesterday, when viewed from the perspective of tomorrow, becomes something other than what it was, what it had been, but when yesterday lasts a lifetime, it hardly matters now what I think of it.

There are moments, and then there are those moments that awaken us. One such moment is now. But each moment, when lived in the here and now, becomes more than what it might have been. And whatever this one might have been, changed without my knowing.

i see you with a light undimmed. i know you with a thought unturned. what stands within my heart is you.

“Sometimes” is a lonely place, but it’s by no means an abandonment. Shifting perspective has a particularly insensitive way of fucking with that, but that’s just the joy of being human.

What we get is what we are. What we know…has yet to be understood. What we feel, is just another different thing, shaded and tinted by what we suppose…what we hope and dream.

And dreams are living things. Living, quizzing, perplexing things. Tender, but rough. Sueded by the fold of all days.

And so, we turn, drained and oddly satisfied, to those things that give us the only satisfaction we know.

i see you with a light unstrained. i know you with a thought unbroken. what grows within my heart is you.

It never mattered before, all the things that seem to be. The tighter, unbending, immobile brain-slumber. The jaded afterthought of the miserable ways we were raised to believe in the structured paraphrases of Bronze Age man’s dedication to structure, hierarchy, and bending other people’s will.

And where I used to find release through many, there is only one, now. only one.

for how many years now have i felt exhausted? and suddenly, i am whole, enlivened, invigorated, emboldened, entranced. there is a structure to this that will haunt me forever, and that ghost is the most welcome thing.

The darkling thoughts, the maddened hours…I am drained of them, and without them, I am left full.

i see you with a light recalescent, powered by the spirit in you. and there is only you. at the core, there is only you.

times.

and the way we change them.

sometimes it feels like this.

and yet, sometimes different.

so many complexities, or at least that’s what they seem to be. they’re really puerile, pedantic little things, so ultimately meaningless they deserve no attention at all.

i’ve tried so hard, for so long, to take the high road, i don’t really understand how i managed to let those who take the lower roads, pretending to be on higher roads than mine, drag me down.

sometimes, just moving with the music—swaying and letting the beat push through me—listening and feeling it in the grooves of my essence: these are higher orders of magnitude than the false dreams of the melancholy mythologies of half-dreamed ideals.

and it’s the same biochemical euphoria, but few seem to have noticed.

yes, it’s something different, where i’ve come to be.

. . . . . . .

times.

and the ways we are changed by them.

sometimes it feels like this.

and other times, it screams with the tension of all that is to come.

what so often i forget, is that the anticipation is the driving force of life.

but i have forgotten this for the last time.