until again

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.

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.

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.

The past several weeks have been a collision of dreams: a confluence of conflicting passions derived from the abandonment of one set of expectations and the establishment of another. I used to dream and plan of a life with a certain someone, retiring on one of the lakes in the northern midwest, traveling the world as our children grew into adulthood and perhaps only coming back to visit whenever they had children of their own that we could dote upon. I used to dream of simple things: gardening and taking walks along trails across the prairie, watching thunderstorms roll past across the setting sun. These were quiet, precious dreams that I used to claim would define me in my retirement, and motivate the twilight of this incarnation. But these were dreams which I knew betrayed the spirit shut away within me: the longing for release, the desire to ride the winds of those storms and take pieces of those sunsets with me to my grave.

For more than a decade, I had resigned myself to those first dreams I’ve described. They had a certain appeal, after all, just not the type of appeal I’d have recognized as a younger man. I chalked up my resignation to those dreams as a function of my maturation. In the world into which I had committed myself in marriage, the example was to grow older with a calm, ever decreasing desire for risk. Life was destined to grow increasingly more stable, predictable, uneventful—that false sense of security that so many fall for in their later years. It was a conscious decision to look at life this way, or a series of conscious decisions. At the time I made them, security was something I felt I needed, and “knew” was something I “deserved.” I wanted to end my solace, or so I told myself. Convinced myself. For although I possessed them, used them, made them feel like my own, those dreams of a quiet egress from life were never truly the desire of my heart.

Over a decade ago, when I was but a handful of years into this marriage, I began to realize the internal inconsistency to which I had limited myself by taking those dreams into myself. I tried to ignore the realization, tried to stifle it in the presumed interest of my need to “mature.” That never really worked, but after several attempts I became so adept that the act of swallowing the uneasiness, and even the displeasure, began to pass virtually unnoticed.

Emphasis on “virtually.”

Years later, or just a few years ago (depending on how you wish to view it), I began having different dreams. A lot of flying dreams, if you wish to go totally Freudian on the subject, but also dreams which would leave my heart racing whenever I would wake, even when they couldn’t be remembered. I began seeing myself not old and quiet and resigned to my fate, but instead envisioned myself dismantling the walls of predictability with bloody fingers and screaming for the sheer joy of the effort. I visited places in my dreams I’d never seen before, met people whose origins were beyond my experience, and did things of which I’d never conceived, let alone conceived possible. One day, it struck me: I was dreaming like I had when I was young.

And the day I made that connection, I became wrapped in a melancholy which is only just now beginning to part and lift away like the deep, cold fog it had become.

Now, melancholy and I are old friends. We first got acquainted when I was in ministry school in Austin, Texas, and I realized that no amount of prayer, no amount of wishing, no amount of hoping, could save me from destroying myself if I was truly intent on doing so. God didn’t save me from myself; that’s one of the reasons why I left him back then. And what was left when I left Him was melancholy. There’s nothing like being woefully unprepared for life on your own (a topic for another day) and undertaking a course of actions that ultimately leave you entirely alone and bereft of any support, be it tangible or spiritual. At any rate, my relationship with melancholy grew from there over the years, until she and I ultimately became very familiar, for she has been a frequent and steady visitor over the years. I had never minded her visits before, but at the age of thirty-something, despite being comfortable with her, I suddenly found myself quite dissatisfied with her frequent appearances.

Ultimately, it was melancholy which drove me out of that situation. It took her a long time to convince me, even as dissatisfied as I was with her, because she’d only come by every once in a while, and the times between her visitations were happy enough. But each time she came, I hated her more, until I hated her so much that I couldn’t ignore the fact that I needed her out of my life. My dreams spoke of far better things than where I was at. They spoke of hope and passion that melancholy could never provide. And through it all, I realized that those old dreams of peacefulness and serenity were melancholy’s original footholds. It was the last time that melancholy came that I spoke to my wife about the changes that I needed. And she, being melancholy’s handmaiden, said no word against those changes, made no move to prevent or facilitate them.

So, I walked away.

And that’s the underlying story to that.