absolute cancer

Now adding art

I've decided to start including my artwork on this blog, as that is another form of communication. I haven't been writing much lately, but I've been creating. I work mostly on a small scale: ATCs (2-1/2 x 3-1/2), APCs (4 x 6) and shipping tags. Over time I'll share some of my older work.

Here are the cards I made yesterday:

gentle winds

Looming backwards

I've been turncoated

scattered moorings betray a bitterness of thought

I remember that rock, a cool rainbow of lichen

yet in precious time flowers grow again

beauty of this land is an open hand
healing hearts warm with love

Waterfall

a terrible flooding
opening a history
internal, external
blue

inscribing nerves, skin, teeth
the incandescent edge
tears reality,
scares you.

Buttercup Crowns

I was challenged to write a description of a good childhood experience, and I came up with this, about making crowns of flowers by threading stems together... I just wish blogger would let us give form, shape, to the poems instead of lining everything up on the left.

The aluminum glow of dawn disappeared
into
the storm-distant sky.

Pulling cup after cup, they yellow flowers
dotting the field of vision
brighter than that sun.
I say a prayer of thanks.

Thumbs fumbling, fingers knocking
struggling happily to
find the green thread.

My known life on the edge,
I pretend normalcy,
threading stem after stem.

And the thrill of a completed crown
so simple, so true.
For the time being,
I sit in joy - the child I want to be.

afterwards

This gulf, this hole, this deep abyss.
Lugubrious beginnings
clearly tattle tail -
yes, I'm a suicide risk

perfect everything

The sky the woods the sun the sea all perfect everythings

The dip of moving water an unanticipated bliss

Apropos creation

Penumbra's clasp

Not the sour picture most people see

Serene

asking for help

I am asking, readers, for your help. I've only been published once, but want to continue that journey. Can you pick out 4 or 5 poems you think are my best? It means reading through a lot on this site, but I am truly at a loss to figuring out which ones are choice. Perhaps I am too close, to mired in the play of words. I do not know. Thank you, though, in advance.
-elizabeth

sprawl

This city needs a desperate flight upwards,
but it only sinks and slowly spreads,
a mud-monster melting, here.

Less can we walk than drive. Anyway
we’ve forgotten how and so
are left in our individual miserable orbs
of gas-guzzling existence.

Reduced to being because of forces
that command us unknown to ourselves
having not an inkling of the waste.

missing the arc of time

Strange animals that we are;
The past sodden with our feet
And thinking the future in outlandish dreams -

Mythmakers and reverie.
Slow pendulums and
Sick bodies winding down,

Pawned off for
The greater good,
Still smiling for the time to come.

draft

I am keen on the sky
under the moon,
leaving room for
alacram dreams
and sinuous tales.

The static there,
turns and turns,

more figured out later

otherness

Can I paint darkness on the right side of terror?
Can a fractured existence become a seasoned soul?
There's no joy for the masked.
I want to transform myself - become something Other.
My face, my skin, my habits, my body, my clothes.
My haze.

time

hospital bed fitting the spine and
an absent window.

the expectancy of fearless thought
failed to muscles and bones and ligament.

a souless feast of sandwich and sauce
and oh, it comes so soon.

vascular calcification and crystalline arthritis

Crystalline and vascular

trundle through

praise and disquietude

Clustered chairs, clustered leaves

The equinox shifts at midday and sundown in March

These aren’t plumes from the teapots throat, but forces unseen.

hungry sun

the interminable sun
loping past days of fatigue and heart and melt

i flounder in the apostrophes of hypocrisy
live out my days this way, crutching on unknowables

sweating…

Enjoy your death

We all have our hopes, dreams, relishing futures
fancied on summer afternoons.
Some people think about careers,
others families.

Me, I’m interested in my death. I want
to die electrocuted to my tips, rolling, burned
to a sultry brown crisp.

The end all be all of lightening strikes, shrowded in
electricity tingles and burning nerves for the briefest
(and hence longest) second of my life.

This has always been my dream, though perhaps
it’s not something I chase after as hard as I should.
If you have a desire greater than all others,

oughtn’t that be the one you orient yourself towards?
Shouldn’t that become your life’s project?
Your life’s work?

Holes

It’s the place where all thought leaks out
and the sun has the intensity of a final glare,
spilling meaning.

A caricature of belief and hope.
Sweaty instances in the ozone show,
uninvited.

Repository

Stand before me,
my life of desire, my intentional arc.
Radically rooted in the world,
reality and fantasy
rhizomatically twined.

In Autumn (a partial poem in progress)

In Autumn the concrete
sidewalks give way to the trees;
they become cluttered with the
stains of brightly-colored leaves.

In Autumn, the mudrooms,
porches and entryways too
give way to the trees;
cluttered up comfortably
with the fallen leaves.

In Autumn

I'm waiting for the teleological sunrise.

The luminous interval life

Passions are drawn out through the ages, but rest in little rivulets, overflowing with self, in micrcosms here and there. We forget this, wrapped up in our certainties and mundanities, until we are invited in, briefly, by the flash of light, a smooth surprising stream of incense, the pattern of water flowering on the bathroom tiles and window, or the intonations and curves of a person's voice. These draw one down and exude passion. Aha! There it is! The sound of ages and sages and audacious delights...a quickening. Memory is abolished and renewed in contagious flight. We suddenly remember, feel, our failures and loves and needs and desires and unwritten almosts, our futures diminishing, as they must,because everything dies, including tide itself. So we are pressed, but the squeeze is good, and we beckon it, call it forth even as it calls us, a circle of passion we hold as long as we can, until the light shifts, the incense fades, water dries and voices break. We are back in the world of the everyday.

Life startles

The moon this morning, drowsily calling, asking teasingly that I forget the sky and ground a bit, shifting my adoration to swim in its golden hollows. Midnight exactly. An hour quite accustomed to serendipity. Standing now, on a precipice to reality, but not sure which is which while the wind calls blindingly forth. How did you grope your way through 27 years to find yourself in the place you are now? How do any of us do these things? So surprisingly we find ourselves so very different from the self we bellowed to be. Always and continually thrown, and throwing - an unknown and unsubtle retaliation? - throwing both ourselves and others, throwing the land too, and plants and warm dark dirt and molecules of air. Terrified of seeing, yet so gently pushing, slowly, carefully, quietly that way. Will I be able to bow my head in unassuming grace, humble, when the moment of vision (not belonging, though, to the eyes) arrives - called forth and calling forth like the moon? For even every preparation is an expectation of how the world will treat its others, and so a paltry arrogance of sorts. Maybe this is when perception and interpretation give way to all those pressing realities. I am always surprised. That means something, doesn't it? Surprise is akin to wonder, but reveals behind it the human need.

Autumn

Incipient autumn light is killingly beautiful, surrenders to the trace. It is not so much a color as floating absence, a bringing to the space of solitude (which is not aloneness which never seeks permission). Solitude is chosen, as a terrifying, lonely excessive, or filled and abrupt of measure. Solitude is chosen, scuffling and sooty. Solitude is chosen as grace, as abandon, as solar necessity. We are changed, perceptibly, by the space. Solitude brings down the ceaseless pressure of time implied by form itself, brings the animated margins into the center. What is the sensory experience of an idea, of solitude? Rising smoke and sinking mist. Some stratum of unthickness, of movement, of hope.

And it Rained

Someone somewhere has a fire going,
the heady scent of sweet soaked earth
old decaying pine.

The world offers so many forms of penetration and pleasure –
why must people need focus on skin touching skin?
The air is thickening and glows.

Ahh, and this rain.
It’s abandon – the sounds open you to a place that is a lack of place.
Just rain and a powerful, sorrowful contentment.

A drawing embrace of the kind that rather than lull you
into nervous nothings or blissful forgetting,
opens up a space of awareness where the normally

named and objectified (object-full?) world is
washed clean of its pillage-tidings.
Something seems to have broken, or broken through.

Suddenly there's an overwhelming sense of time passing
and change and growth and death – the wheel is wheeling – and it
is full of serenity and contentedness.

Face of the watch

Time is a curious spiral rhythm, and we return again and again to the point of concern.

Clockwork

Between life and death lie the pills.
Longer lines like deeper breaths
and riverbend gradations.
Some accent of delirium,
tonality of the soul.
Precipitous thanks and lassitudes,
always mobile.

No logical sun could generate sense in this

Furrowing gray lands on open-ended flat.
Houses weren't built to handle this - the stress of lives poured on like cinder blocks.
And the golden motion of flowers carries no scent, or is that just my pedestrian future?
'Open eyes have genius and leak'

Futility and too much seduction will drive you away.
The heavy body of contingency says so anyway.
This city needs a desperate flight upwards, but it only sinks and slowly spreads,
a mud-monster melting, here.

Less can we walk than drive.
Anyway we've forgotten how and so are left in our individual
miserable orbs of gas-guzzling existence.
This holds inside as out.

Incomplete

the interminable sun
loping past days of fatigue and heart and melt

i flounder in the apostrophes of hypocrisy
live out my days this way, crutching on unknowables

sweating…

Trust is snow falling silent into the sea

I was recently challenged to come up with my definition of trust. The following is what I wrote in a stream-of-consciousness moment:

Trust is snow falling silent into the sea, is freedom uninhibited. An opening, a space. It is being vulnerable in front of an Other without feeling vulnerable. And without seeing the Other as so masked, so distant. It is the readiness for being vulnerable, too.

Trust allows for intersubjectivity on the confidence of subjectivity. Open. I can relax and not fear terrible repercussions. A small sense of belonging to something greater than oneself, and that the belonging is okay.

Trust is a moral prejudice, wrapped in inequality. A gossamer blanket.
Trust is not evergreen, is eternal.

Lost trust is angry tulips streaked with blood, and is easy to walk into.

Practical trust erodes emotional trust. Why? Why can’t I keep these separate? Why is the practical primary? Why does trust feel so though and sometimes unconvincing?Where’s the line between breaking boundaries and breaking trust? Where is the line between acts of trust and tests of loyalty? When you are hungry and sleepy you trust no one and nothing, for everything is choreographed to destroy.

Mistrust is vulnerability, fear of vulnerability. An open scab on toast. The apprehension that someone will utilize pieces of yourself against you. That you will hurt the person in some intrinsic way. Mistrust is the jauntily clad and quiet discord. Is unexplored color. Feels unceasing.

To move from mistrust to trust (in Self or Other) is a dangerous liaison, a flicker. Involving a leap of faith, a letting go of the belief I must earn my time to be with people, that I have to give back to them at least as much as they give me. Mistrust is a release of the defenses to many to even name. A loosening. Letting in the fact that perhaps self-worth isn’t tied up in intersubjectivity alone.

This is hard though – life is too complicated for reductive generalities. There’s beauty and relief in ambiguities, where the rain jumps back before being soaked into the ground. Trust in self would be believing this in terms of my actions and behaviors. For someone to trust me they’d have to be soul-blind, broken on the shards of experience.

Evening Stroll

The profound lyrical impulse of the evening, a sublime sense of inevitability and spontaneity at the same time. I walk and walk and walk and find it hard to stop. A lonely roaming, dwelling with myself...and yes, self-reflection is just a positive consequence of spending too much time alone. The long, low clouds know of a nuanced quiet I cannot grasp.

Quoting

I have a parasitic consciousness: I feed off the visceral experiences of others. In that vein I collect written scraps of experience, life and ideas transformed into pixel or ink. Most recently, Novalis:

“The greatest of sorcerers would be the one who would casr a spell on himself to the degree of taking his own phantasmagoria for autonomous apparations. Might that not be our case?”

Water in the Sky

It has been raining for days and days.
There is no such thing as a steady rain;
it is a chesire cat of emotions.
Rain becomes,
at the very least, increasingly irresistable,
in the way that a dance dissolves inhibition.
I have been walking in it, at first enjoying the feel
of the intimate,
cool friction,
and now I only feel it; the enjoyment is no longer necessary.
My walking through it is a silent common language,
each step for me an inverted paranoia...and for the single drop,
each step its last.

building project

magenta architecture
under
sentimental sky
our is
engineered insanity – sophisticated and true

After depression

What is melancholy's afterlife?

Azaleas dried up on the porch and

acrid, disjointed time.

Mysterious as the language of
trees is this slow thick fog and

landscape of broken memory.

Intersubjectivities

There is a pain and pleasure resulting from the impossibility of communicating anything at all without touching, caressing, the limit where all meaning spills out of itself, like a simple stain, an ink stain on a word, on the word meaning.

The Reservoir

But what does it mean to write in the dark by the light of a candle with nothing in sight? We live in continuity, and not. Or create our continuities and not. That is, the continuity we create is not the continuity, is not the continuum, but an invention for the sake of ease of understanding, for the sake of forgetting. You start to ask yourself a question, but know not what it is. Forgotten? Pushed Aside? Suppressed? Or something else - a question still, yes - but something unreadable. The slow fall into afternoon can be like this. Sometimes there is so much clarity, an expression of ecstatic union, unity, clarity - a centeredness, or maybe the lack of a false centering. Something not wordable yet. Something we ease and feel around, edgewise and unsire and blind, until at some point it becomes clear. Or it reveals, or we capture. Or coincidence is just coincidence afterall, but the long falling afternoons fear us into believing it's more. Are you forcing yourself into this position? Don't you always do this, and then forget? One second falls after another into oblivion and nothing, nothing.

A Stream of Consciousness Traipse

I pour my heart out to the clouds who ignore me in their discontent with the wind. Eris. Goddess of Chaos. Pulling back needless shrouds. I'm trying to breathe, reviewing broken dreams. All my paper is torn or empty and new.

Peace I Shudder

I’m already stepping back, wanting to throw out these pages for fear that the sentences, ideas, words aren’t clear enough, aren’t understandable, are too silly or fluffy or cliché. (The same fears haunt all my endeavors, really). But then I remember the Preface in Kerouac’s Book of Dreams, where he writes that as soon as he woke from his dreams,

“I wrote nonstop so that the subconscious could speak for itself in its own forms, that is, uninterruptedly flowing and rippling – Being half awake I hardly knew what I was doing let alone writing. But an hour later, over coffee, what shame I’d feel sometimes to see such naked revelations so insouciantly stated – But that is because the subconscious mind (the manas working through from alaya-vijnana) does not make any mental distinctions between good or bad, thisa or thata, it just deals with realities, What Is. It is only with our conscious mind (the mano-vijnana) that we judge and make arbitrary conceptions, that is, that we arbitrate and lay down laws about what should and shouldn’t be written or done. So I wrote these dreams with eerie sleeping cap head and now I’m glad I did it.”

This is the push enough to continue, so that with heart bent toward Autumn I can write what I see outside my window:

A nearby heirloom tomato so ripe, and red
A silver vine, a mud-stained mat
Woodgrain another language
Blackbirds flying overhead
And peace is so close now I shudder
In the sunlight

Poems for Poesia

The following two poems were selected as submissions to the journal Poesia, October 2006 Issue. Information about the journal can be found at: www.IndianBayPress.com.

I heard the Buddha crying just the other night

And in this solar century
what lies beyond these hazy fields?
For all we learn to see is nothing but phenomenal reality,
but still this beauty I can’t stand, it nearly breaks my heart.

So I fill my nights with madmen poets and philosophers,
caricatures of abandoned dream, a dusty-brittle unrevivable star chart.
It’s all intersubjectivity, and in the glow of love and loss who’d want it any other way?
And oh my mystery don’t leave, please don’t tumble down this well of memory.

And now these unpleasant desires, this cheap unpleasant plan:
I’m an 8 year old boy, an it, a mis-creation, a funny kind of dam.
I try out my life on a 50 minute hour, but never get there.
There are stories no one hears, but yes, still I know we are all refugees.
We are all of us falling, flailing, heartfelt refugees.

Interstices

Interstices.
I live in the cracks.
In the spaces between words, between poems.
In lack and inarticulation.
Where the day discreetly enters and soon overwhelms.

I am circumscribed by the moon, the sun.
Watching the dragonflies send their
new souls into the sizzling concrete of a September noon.

And there is only brightness upon brightness.
Where the light is no more cathartic than wax on flesh

and I seize this instant for its nothingness.

Untitled

In the park,
sunlight billowing from sky to water and settling then on your iridescent face.
And just beyond a father, daughter. Twin souls populating freewheeling space.

I notice this:
There are sounds that untouched children make,
swinging arms and gait. They sing and laugh and we know, by the contours of that sound, they are safe.

And you, child,
black braids fending off the sun because who needs it anyway?
There is enough light inside.
You, precocious where I was desperate; you, laughing like I wanted to laugh.

We both want to be seen, but me,
I wanted someone, anyone, to see what I could not say…

Storm

Lightning falls without any worries but the direction of a homing pigeon and the ferocity of a cornered lion. In the pause of the storm, the eye of the storm, everything turned an eerie yellow-red. Was this what it looked like after an atom bomb was dropped?

Poetry and other wordlings

I have a stockade of words at home, old poems, old prose. I'll first add these to the blog, then, at a much slower pace, start to add new experiments, new experiences, to share, to refresh, to find artful criticism from you, my dearest reader.