October Invades

Waiting on Hope

Held deep within my chest, my very being,
the smallest seed is nestled, waits for spring.
The Gardener has tilled without me seeing,
made fertile ground where all I saw was sin.

And, seeing not the soul nor its true state,
I balked to think my being could be transformed,
but in my chest the sleeping seed awaits
and sends its roots and tendrils to my core.

Then, at the time appointed for its growth,
it breaks the fallow surface of my skin;
the hope that lay beneath has been exposed
and we are startled by the change within.

The Gardener, the one who placed the seed,
has planted hope and possibility.

So October invades, and with it all the death in autumn. All our hopes that rest in lesser things are getting burnt up like so many dead leaves. That security in summer money flakes and peels to reveal something rotten; crack that sitting stump, to maggots and a stench of death. And when that chill October wind sets home our loneliness, we know our hope is not companionship. Your house, your job, your car; shed autumn fire until they sit like blackened skeletons or funeral pyres. Mostly just that curious idea that your hope for a future rests in one other person. When down beneath the crust of dirt that's quickly freezing over, there's a deeper current and a seed that's buried in good earth. That seed is hope in the One who holds all possibility in his hand.

Undercurrent

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.

Sinking Ships and Bursting Levees

Listening to the Breeders - Night of Joy

All the things that I have had no time for in the course of twelve hour days and nine day weeks have begun to pile up like a pregnant tide, ready to pour in and overwhelm irrisistably. Sandcastles will melt down to their elements and vast dykes will provide only temporary resistance. To solve this problem I must row out in a sinking boat and do battle with the ocean rising or seek higher ground and try to knock the moon from its tidal orbit. A flood is coming and I fear my levees wont hold.

Listening to Marcy Playground - Sex and Candy

We all go down with sinking ships, not just captains, skippers, first mates. We all bleed the same blood when one bleeds, scrapes a knee. We all die the same small death when one discovers mortality. And if we choose the way of grace, we thrill when one new babe is born, we welcome home each sea lost sailor, rejoice when one soul bows the knee.

Listening to Son House - Grinning in Your Face

Proverbs 14:10 (NIV)
Each heart knows its own bitterness,
and no one else can share its joy.

Diving Bell

Listening to Smokey & Miho - Ocean in your Eyes

We make acquaintances, exchange pleasantries, get lost in a slipstream city, burning down the wind like a phoenix on the breeze. We know, of course, that these are the most temporary connections of all, tenuous fingers gripping fingers. And yet, if we ever lapsed in these conventions, we would shrivel into dusty gouls. It is the very fluid of our veins.

Listening to Eels - Bride of Theme from Blinking Lights

Everything is gated here; framed by cords or hoses. They crown each entrance and exit with a subtle dignity. We walk like indentured princes, holding our heads in the knowledge that we own nothing, but feeling our birthright coursing in our veins and knowing: we were born to be kings.

Listening to Tegan & Sara - Living Room / Terrible Storm

Interim, between unknowns. I can't tell what we were doing and sure no clue where we are headed. Like Tom Joad we put one foot in front of the other. But for now, we wait.

The refinery dominates much of my consciousness. It informs even the things that I write; as translated, of course, through the lens of the literature that I read. I don't subscribe to the school of thought that claims we cannot experience the "poetic feeling" without a form to interpret it through, but I do think it's the form that makes the "poetic feeling" legible. I finished Sinclair Ross' As For Me and My House in all its glorious bleakness and this informs my writing. I have been motoring through Stienbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (see what I did there) and you should know that his apocalyptic, rambling style is unavoidably infectious. And this city, this air, these people, this rich earth, those pregnant glances, the stench of shit, the trembling and tenbreous, the beating of a vengeful sun, the goading and grating, these deep mornings, a hand clenched in a pocket, wind, and you most of all. Each one of you. You invade me and change me more than you know. But I intend to let you know.

Will

Ghosts and Living Things

It's a new home under the same old sun. There might be ghosts under these floorboards, in this space where I too reside. The trees are empty of any new life as though time and season have no meaning here. The sky is bigger, as if declaring its own importance; and to us it is (important). We can't avoid this place changing us, but the change I want is under the surface, beneath the floorboards, the roots of the tree, and the rich black earth under the sun-baked crust. It's a new heart under the same old skin.