An odd little rainstorm shows up from nowhere and these sudden clouds rack up overhead and as such derail my plans. Only rains for twenty minutes or so and then the sun comes back out. Only it's like being in the middle of something etc. and now that middle is gone and it's somewhere else to be found and so gets lost in space. What to do? Start something else? Settle for tomorrow?
But I wish not to hurry off to nowhere, especially in particular, (!) and so just sit here on the back porch - the back porch mountain of solitude hanging out in a small town of influences - and take in the air as it happens.
A truck out on Route 7 is using it's engine brakes against the neighborhood streets and it sounds like someone stuttering. A rapid vocabulary of sounds, brokenness and hesitation, the more you apply the sounds the more there is a hope maybe...
Everybody lives faraway... and it's only a phone call... and it's not like they are required at the moment or anything... but they just live faraway...
Try and concentrate on what you were doing - but instead look up at those clouds with their frosty white peaks like mountain tops riding atop the packs of twisted and layered gray mass that spin into a kind of wool that seems classic and penumbral and stupid and gathers shadows from the wind and has a storm packaged within - and you think you're never too old to engage in doubt, never too far removed to have a portal onto a problem...
Get soaked in the process...
Ah the first aster has bloomed...
Today without fail I still can't ever imagine heaven...
Hell is for suckers mom used to say...
Everyday there's a need for something like a tissue in nature that runs way below deep and so rips out your heart and then hands it back over to you to begin again...
And tomatoes keep rising from the garden like the fruits of paradise turned over and made into salsa and canned later for soups when the dregs of winter hit ...
Last evening at the ice cream stand... the tourists took so long to either make up their minds or get their money out and get out of the way that the sun went down as though no one might notice the full difference between an ordinary breath and a small silent bravo. Fathers called out for gleeful mindless children climbing across tables and jabbing one another with cones. Mothers lost in phone calls called out to fathers to harness the children as dollars worth of chocolate went down to the fate of gravity. A silly thing really but utterly worth it. To have one's own chocolate and watch the sights off a summer evening... sitting on the stairs that lead down closer to sea level... as though practically invisible... gleeful mindless people walked over me to get closer to the lake like American meatball heros appropriated from a source of endless life like vacation idleness and the un-lived terror of their failings and split into a simple human mask that grinned and spilled cold soda on my shoulders in the process... Gold blue light settled on the water. The ferry boat pulled into the harbor like some character from a picture book. A brilliant blue sky flared out into the sweet blanket of night and exposed those first few stars that grid the light in space like fireflies. Seagulls in teams went mad over a discarded sundae that lay on the grass all wasted rose and lemon and stripped mined sugar from those pleasant creeme machines.
Get rid of the anxieties in life and what's left? Leisure? The screws of disappointment?
It's that time of year when the garden goes unruly and you feel a little scared about it and the plants flop in whatever direction they take. Grasses take over like wands casting myths. After a long season you need to let go - but wasn't I the manager of this dirt just like three months ago and so was cheering on the natural order of things? So you take a look one day. And the whole organism is on its own without you. There doesn't appear to be an I within this equation that you do anything about.
Some years I take the time... I tidy it up.... stake the tall late flowers like the asters and wage a kind of mesmerizing air against the weeds that want so much against my own desires...
This year I guess I'm inclined to let it all go and watch. It's all quite beautiful. And I really don't know why.
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Thursday, August 16, 2012
soft vanilla
Aint it like mad crazy, an eternal kind of set up, a kind of mad crazy happiness to boot... oh it's mid-August ... and crazy with it. Like the way the air of life possesses smells that bend you... tomatoes on a platter with cheese and oil and basil... corn in a pan steamed for six minutes and then spread with butter until the mouth understands what the brain keeps talking about... the low feel of lake water on your skin after you dry off from floating at the park and forgetting about what made the day heavy... didn't all this happen just last year?
It's mid-August and suddenly there's need to have that knocks you about like a few steps after a few cold beers and suddenly you need to fall in love.
Plenty of sunlight and no humidity to speak of. Beautiful afternoon even if the forecast said iffy weather. Walked over to Park Street to a reading because it was way too attractive a day to drive in the truck. Some poems. Some food. Lots of chatter. Flowers in the ground and also perfumed out of glass jars and books to inspect and a large bowl of popcorn for everyone's hands. An airplane did barrel-rolls overhead like a noisy ridiculous insect. Motorcycles roared on the street like some big balled confusion. Lawnmowers from across neighbor's fences crashing through personal backyards. All folded into the din of a lively Sunday afternoon. Some poems. Some food. Some beer.
Walked back home and on the way bought an ice cream cone and watched the sunset on the lake drop down behind the old rise of the Adirondack range to the familiar west. One could do worse and I guess it's hard to go wrong walking along and watching colors in the sky and eating ice cream in the evening heat. Like all the years we spend bring us new innards. What crashed into what over those years - fingerprints on the eyelids from what we know - easy to settle upon the paper mask mystifications we invent for ourselves as a personality that sees death as anything at all but a clarity - as the years strip us down to a thin gauze from a horror movie you're afraid to peel off - and I thought never post handsome photos on facebook...!
Meanwhile back at the ice cream stand! The mandatory turbulence of two kids holding onto one another, of adolescent introspection at a take out window, each wanting something they say, but maybe different for each other they say, the way they hold hands together while deciding what to order, what do you want their whole body seems to say like a question singing out for an answer, holding hands, looking at each other, confused, so solid, settling for sprinkles, one on a cone and the other on a dish...
Got home. Has to be the best.
things to do in August after cold beer
a closed spherical spacetime of zero radius
small round stones in pools of willow shade
mark shelly quotes
tomatoes in hand
why be astonished at all
treat every light as a yield
watch an inning of baseball on television
don't even think about igloos
imagine there's a marilyn monroe apt for your phone
entertain bit player thoughts
keep in mind the word vesper and what pertains to the evening
have drunk dial questions at the ready in case someone answers
why does the world exist
should there be synchronized floating as an olympic sport
what's the unintended side effects if our memories are no larger than google
It's mid-August and suddenly there's need to have that knocks you about like a few steps after a few cold beers and suddenly you need to fall in love.
Plenty of sunlight and no humidity to speak of. Beautiful afternoon even if the forecast said iffy weather. Walked over to Park Street to a reading because it was way too attractive a day to drive in the truck. Some poems. Some food. Lots of chatter. Flowers in the ground and also perfumed out of glass jars and books to inspect and a large bowl of popcorn for everyone's hands. An airplane did barrel-rolls overhead like a noisy ridiculous insect. Motorcycles roared on the street like some big balled confusion. Lawnmowers from across neighbor's fences crashing through personal backyards. All folded into the din of a lively Sunday afternoon. Some poems. Some food. Some beer.
Walked back home and on the way bought an ice cream cone and watched the sunset on the lake drop down behind the old rise of the Adirondack range to the familiar west. One could do worse and I guess it's hard to go wrong walking along and watching colors in the sky and eating ice cream in the evening heat. Like all the years we spend bring us new innards. What crashed into what over those years - fingerprints on the eyelids from what we know - easy to settle upon the paper mask mystifications we invent for ourselves as a personality that sees death as anything at all but a clarity - as the years strip us down to a thin gauze from a horror movie you're afraid to peel off - and I thought never post handsome photos on facebook...!
Meanwhile back at the ice cream stand! The mandatory turbulence of two kids holding onto one another, of adolescent introspection at a take out window, each wanting something they say, but maybe different for each other they say, the way they hold hands together while deciding what to order, what do you want their whole body seems to say like a question singing out for an answer, holding hands, looking at each other, confused, so solid, settling for sprinkles, one on a cone and the other on a dish...
Got home. Has to be the best.
things to do in August after cold beer
a closed spherical spacetime of zero radius
small round stones in pools of willow shade
mark shelly quotes
tomatoes in hand
why be astonished at all
treat every light as a yield
watch an inning of baseball on television
don't even think about igloos
imagine there's a marilyn monroe apt for your phone
entertain bit player thoughts
keep in mind the word vesper and what pertains to the evening
have drunk dial questions at the ready in case someone answers
why does the world exist
should there be synchronized floating as an olympic sport
what's the unintended side effects if our memories are no larger than google
Thursday, August 2, 2012
Epistle. To: Berlin Film Actress
I wonder how much that we have to play with in this life is spent rushing for sensations? Why is it, do you think, that we're not satisfied? Why is it, the grass always rises up greener somewhere else? Yea. I think I understand the expression you're wearing at the moment, and so, go on and have a laugh on me. There's a quality to have. And I know how you often feel remarkable about it - you read a script and you slip into roles and afterwards you call a taxi or hop a bus and that's the end of it.
Anyway, I was standing on the back porch watching a storm develop from the west. Heavy thunder and crazy lightning and tree bending winds flying like the end of the world across the rooftops. The display threw me perfectly, like I was suddenly on a kind of holiday. I wanted to be as near inside it as possible. But I'm not in the movies. Maybe I've always wanted to be. And maybe thinking that way has always been a step away from all that heart thumping stuff that I want. So. Somehow real life figures to be a disappointment?
The rain crashed into the sides of buildings in waves enough to feel like a tide. The wind tore up the plants like some angry blind hand throwing them aside against the fucked up rain. Sirens began calling out upon a static thick air, one that tasted like bad electricity filled with the metals from old explosions. A real ancient storm brewing above a desirable south end real estate locale where the mortgage company just handed me a decent rate last month. And I thought of you. Other than the appeal and the safety of illusions, what more do I have? A fierce wind rattles my bones?
Maybe the appeal is simply passive, like a hand job in a porn film. You can always say, oh yea I saw that. Whatever happens in our heads and all that later on down the line...
Large dark clouds piled up like so much material up above it seemed that the sky could not hold onto them and so became the chaos of weather... and if you can't trust the sky then shouldn't you be afraid enough to run away?... and then let loose in lightning streaks that scared the clouds like a knife fight across a face... all the difference in pressure and air temperatures and the combustion between hot and cold the way thunder slaps you ears down on earth and instinctively you shrink away... but where's the move? The sky roiling above the ground like a sea driven from nowhere and about to dump a swamp upon your head.
Don't get lost might really be the application.
Don't get lost enough to explode the little phone in your hands.
Don't get lost - as the wind - my face - my thoughts of you - fly against one another.
Anyway, I was standing on the back porch watching a storm develop from the west. Heavy thunder and crazy lightning and tree bending winds flying like the end of the world across the rooftops. The display threw me perfectly, like I was suddenly on a kind of holiday. I wanted to be as near inside it as possible. But I'm not in the movies. Maybe I've always wanted to be. And maybe thinking that way has always been a step away from all that heart thumping stuff that I want. So. Somehow real life figures to be a disappointment?
The rain crashed into the sides of buildings in waves enough to feel like a tide. The wind tore up the plants like some angry blind hand throwing them aside against the fucked up rain. Sirens began calling out upon a static thick air, one that tasted like bad electricity filled with the metals from old explosions. A real ancient storm brewing above a desirable south end real estate locale where the mortgage company just handed me a decent rate last month. And I thought of you. Other than the appeal and the safety of illusions, what more do I have? A fierce wind rattles my bones?
Maybe the appeal is simply passive, like a hand job in a porn film. You can always say, oh yea I saw that. Whatever happens in our heads and all that later on down the line...
Large dark clouds piled up like so much material up above it seemed that the sky could not hold onto them and so became the chaos of weather... and if you can't trust the sky then shouldn't you be afraid enough to run away?... and then let loose in lightning streaks that scared the clouds like a knife fight across a face... all the difference in pressure and air temperatures and the combustion between hot and cold the way thunder slaps you ears down on earth and instinctively you shrink away... but where's the move? The sky roiling above the ground like a sea driven from nowhere and about to dump a swamp upon your head.
Don't get lost might really be the application.
Don't get lost enough to explode the little phone in your hands.
Don't get lost - as the wind - my face - my thoughts of you - fly against one another.