yeah, so i get a little sappy sometimes. so what.

i haven’t been writing much, because i’ve been pretty happy. i’m of that sadly predictable bent that requires conflict, angst and/or depression to write “artistically”, and i just haven’t really been conflicted, full of angst, or depressed.

yeah, sorry, i know how terribly much that stinks.

it was a long, cold, wet spring, and now the summer whistles by far too quickly, with far too little time for doing all the things i’d really like to do, but that’s how it always is.

i’m happy, but i think internally i may still be at a crossroads. the determination of how, exactly, to move forward beneath the light of some things, while firmly outside the light of other things, weighs on me now in ways that i don’t find comfortable. so much change has been, and so much continues, but what stands before me now seems simultaneously insurmountable and insubstantial. i feel that i can just barely discern what’s standing before me, but i know damn well i have to cross it before i can truly begin moving on.

and one of those things….

little deaths

it took a couple of little deaths for some things to begin healing inside me. the first of those was back in January, where complete, abject avoidance proved to be the stronger suit. it was a tough series of cards to play as an empath, i don’t mind admitting, but having played them, i know i am the better for it. i couldn’t hold anything resembling a coherent conversation with that one, and as a result, i am now even further removed from my past and the dreams i once dared to dream.

but that was quite fitting, after all.

the other little death occurred just recently, and while i still fail to understand just where exactly that particular train got derailed, i’m by no means pleased that i had to once again play the “unconcerned non-observer” role to get by. the words should have been enough, and the actions (or lack thereof), would have made my intentions clear to even the most deluded. but no, somehow, they were not. so that one wandered away in a fit of peevish self-pity void of exactly what i knew all along was lacking: a true to desire to change the reality in which she had entombed herself.

life goes this way, sadly, far too often. no one has piqued my pity and disappointment quite as well as these two fine souls have managed, and they are gone.

little deaths: little things turned grey within me, but i hope their lives prosper in positive ways.

(for that last one, a restatement of the obvious ~ in peace)

you knew
what it would and wouldn’t
be, let alone become,
long before i ever had the opportunity
to confuse it all. you knew
what would fail to move
before you set about to redefine
the benefit in attempting
to change what you knew would be
unmoved.

you knew
the realities surrounding
you, and chose to color them
in forgettable hues. you knew
where i stood, and transported
me, redefined me, and who i became
through your eyes was unrecognizable,
so i stepped away, thus becoming
unmoved.

the 23rd/24th of this month marks the completion of our first year together, ghosts, memories and all. we don’t like being apart from each other.

and that is the greatest gift i have ever been given.

but that is how we do it, cast in stone.

so same, the days
in essence
so governed by extremity
and the levity of change
          that dream
     undisclosed
we grieve that none may know
the inner joy
engendered by the storms

that was jotted down during some work meeting in which i had only a bit part, if any. i don’t know exactly when. and the entire sentiment of not knowing that is exactly how things have been.

shit. that rhymed. you can shoot me now.

i am actually doing well. things change rapidly, which always seems to be the case with me. i don’t try to make things difficult, but that could well be simply another way of saying that i don’t have to try.

happiness approaches, which is not to say i’m entirely displeased with the here-and-now.

ugh. i’m gonna stop now. too many caveats, and i barely just started.

(on a completely unrelated subject: i don’t know what the hell “melon berry” skittles are supposed to taste like, but they taste like the smell of an old man’s farts contained with decades-old wet flannel. don’t ask.)

The following is at least tangentially relevant to my mental state of late. Which really isn’t saying much for me.

Sigh. I did it again.

(from “Porcupine”, Echo and the Bunnymen, on “Porcupine”, 1983)

There is no comparison
Between things about to have been.
Missing the point of our mission
Will we become misshapen?

A change of heart
Will force the nail,
Nailed to the door
To all avail.

There are no divisions
Between things about to collide.
Hitting the floor with our vision,
A focus at some point arrives.

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.

…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.

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.

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.”

or maybe that was just me.

fuck if i know.

my return to singlehood was finalized on February 11, 2010. Since this was an amicable endeavor on both our parts, and not a court-battle, we weren’t informed until the 16th (her) and 17th when we got notification in the mail.

after much thought and consideration, i decided to stay here in town. in fact, i made an offer on a condominium on Friday, which was accepted on Saturday. so, i’ll be in town for a while.

so how’s that for probably the most succinct update i’ve ever given?

and it is still a little strange
a strange little thing
stranger still than having nothing
but having nothing would be stranger

now the struggle begins, truly learning how to be on my own. i’m not good at this, i’ll admit.

but i’ll figure it out.

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)