Burial, Dreams, and Wild Seeds

Listening to The Pixies - Silver

Strange dreams, a time of endings and new beginnings, exciting and terrifying uncertainty, the dregs of mead bottles. I'm sketching new fonts for a secret project. It's super secret.

Listening to The Reverend Horton Heat - Psychobilly Freakout

Those dreams though, they tend to haunt you through the days. Deeper meaning in them is elusive, but the idea that they are merely pastiche is unthinkable.

Listening to Neko Case - Middle Cyclone (album)

Burying people is one of the things that we tend to have to do as humans. Comes a time and we have to put a person that we knew in the ground and know that we won't see them again on this side of the divide. There are orphans and widows left behind and we do our best to see them through, to do right by the buried, but it must haunt us. It's not just that our own mortality becomes that much more apparent (and it does); we knew this person and, as our dubious honour for having known them, we get to lower them in a wooden case about six feet under the ground and then throw dirt on them until we've erased any trace of them. And somebody has to do that; bodies have to go in the ground. So we do it, because it's our job, our duty to put our friend in the ground. That's all a bit macabre, but I just gave you whiskey sonnets and you know what you're getting into.

Listening to Neko Case - Vengeance is Sleeping

I miss you all and won't use names. It feels like some kind of cheap desire, this feeling. I keep turning up old dirt and finding names printed on buried keepsakes; half disintegrated, but jarring a wash of longing. Blind passion that does not know what my own mind knows, the residue of half-love with a half-heart (a half man carried that desire), distant flirtation that knows itself least of all, the border of knowing and unknowing, other to my other to your self. I am careful not to arouse expectation, but I carry hope deep within me. A hope that my cogent mind cannot direct. It's a hope that defies my own defined expectations (that arise unbidden). And who put this hope in me? Who planted this wild seed that defies the dirt my heart is buried beneath? Who waters it and whispers to a struggling sprout ("grow stronger than you know how")? Let me reiterate: I have hope.

Whiskey Sonnets

-Sometimes, when you are drowning in whiskey, you feel like writing poetry. Sometimes you write sonnets.-

                        .I.
The velvet curtain slowly pulled apart,
reveals a heap both pitiful and meek.
And whelmed within you see in dirty dark
two amber eyes among the filthy reek.

Not poverty that slays the man, but vice;
vice bitter, vice betray, and vice belays
the entrance underneath the makers eyes
to worship and to in his presence stay.

So cure me Lord, why don't you strike my doubt
for perfect sonnets never will atone
and if I'm made to suffer in this gout
then let me never suffer on my own

I'll fall against the grain in sinful pain
or see it carried out in rains of grace

                         .II.
The whiskey burns and smoke floats down my throat.
Sweet melancholic fire concedes to rise,
both West and South behind my quivering mouth
and back and forth behind my eyes.

But dost inebriance intrude too far
to squelch the murmer of the truly true,
oblivious ignore the fatal scar;
under no sun this foul weed it grew.

Let no drink grow too proud and tall
to smother what I've held as good and right,
no spark induce my lungs to fail,
no pleasure that my body will not fight.

Conceal every vice in temperance
and burn hellfire in my indolence.