webnography

Born alive dying dead,
start at the end and end at the head:
I am waiting to be born,
I am waiting to break free.
I call out to the moon,
but the wind-
it strangles me.

Nothing so near to completion can be free.

“As California goes, so goes the rest of the nation…” the headline read. We immersed ourselves in the mythology of the new frontier through full participation, hurtling headlong down 1-90 across the USA. It turned at the solstice when the moon spoke in yawns, ever glib in her slip-sweet tones howling, onward.

Before winding our way across the states we wove a circuitous path to all the homes we’d ever known - Joe’s in PA, mine in NY, Boston, Philly, New York and Wesleyan. At each place we paid our respects to the people who made it possible to prosper and sway, and here I give a shoutout to Joe’s family and my own, to Jeramie, to Jake, to Rob, to Isto, to Jenny, to Dawid, to Rod, to Jeff, to Natan, to Sam, to Alan and Alyssa. Further thanks to Rod to handing me Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poetry to get lost in overnight and in the dawn’s light, and whose words have remained burning inside me ever since.

“Poetry is the rediscovery of the self against the tribe,” but
“Don’t be so open-minded that your brains fall out.”

The road onward was marked by strong women and sensitive men. We rocked the gorges of Ithaca, caught wind of a wesreunion in the windy city, told tales ’round a campfire on a reservation in South Dakota, coasted through the mountains of Montana to camp near kind souls in Idaho, reaffirmed friendships in Seattle and Portland, then wound our way manic down the coastline to San Francisco just around Independence Day.

At this juncture we parted ways; I wanted to know if I could hack it solo. Surprise? I not only survived, I thrived, and thus the rub: launched from a new nest and a temporary mental incubation, a transportation across the seas to hound the hidden corners of time and self and space. I spoke excitedly, concocted brilliant ideas with a burgeoning international community of activists and academics, wrote poetry buzzing with flavor, listened intently to words i could scarcely decipher, enacted and actualized the very stuff of dreams.

Alone and strange I would conjure charming spirits from the dregs of the day by dousing them in firelight, follow the music to find the true spirit of the town, eat the fruit of the looming dawn and dance until the rain came down. I met bums and soldiers playing heart-songs on the cobblestones, students and artists seeking poetry in well-worn places, all the time helping to foster community within ISDT using my own peculiar yet authentic form of connectivity.

There are so many forms of participation, I’ve yet to incubate fully. This is why I must be untethered and wandering for the entirety of August: to foment and to cement ideas, possibilities, chance happenings. To live the dream rather than living to dream, open heart allowing meanderings, intuition in my teeth. At present moment this structurelessness and imminent homelessness is precisely what’s been needed. I am re-learning how to cook for myself, how to explore unafraid, how to follow the firelights that guide the way.

(This is not to say, “the end,” but please begin: how do we do, how me? how you? now and at this great division of reality. on one end a dream-dew blankets the swamp; at the other, a fire engulfs a fissure.)

And so i found the soul of Portugal, and found my calling also: a wandering empath nourished by adventure and diversity, open heart guided by intuition and empathy ever onward toward la musica au vivo, a cacophonous cadence of erratic heartbeats wound together and the spaces in-between. Full-fledged allegiance to the tribe and to the set path must be avoided at all costs in pursuit of the self-sensical, the poetical peregrination:

She spoke of the need to need nothing, and then nothing came to be: um amor blooming in poetic ecstasy. Obrigada, universe, for synchronicity.

we’re all forsaking our former forms-
however, every slip-sweet beautiful now is tethered
to the entwined snakes of memory’s web’d pathways,
though we stretch toward the intangible HOPE of future connection,
dreams crafted out of our utopian revisions,
ideal forms informed by the matrix of experiences re-explored,
re-interpreted, and
interpellated.

could it be any less clear
which path to follow?
night falls, the woods turn sinister,
no longer do we romp through that which is well-trodden.
rather, we step gingerly,
picking our way past the ditches, the floods,
telltale signs of impending doom.

lost in thought i slammed face-first
into a tree,
just hard enough to shake it free.

watch the tracks for rats
seeking scraps.
we seek scraps of hope,
climbing up the weary rope.

some build structures and rejoice,
but we, we sing best as they burn.
burn our bridges, burn a city,
fire is so pretty.

“You are ridiculous,” I managed between nervous gasps of laughter. He was unpredictable, spastic, and frenetic, bouncing inches from our faces and invading space at every opportunity. Before I knew it, he’d curled his body teasingly around the kindly and confused older Irishman, who beseeched us with apologetic gestures. The young, flamboyant man smiled up brilliantly, fingering a shimmering necklace that adorned the elder gentleman, “I got you a neeecklace!” The Irishman shot us a sheepish grin, “he is out of mind!”

We disentangled ourselves from the situation, following a few more rounds of “cheers!”, and wandered up the trail. Disoriented, we wished for home, for the feeling of it. Home was soon found, and it far exceeded our wildest expectations: we rounded a corner to a tall, bald Irishman in a long purple robe, wielding a glow-in-the-dark lightening bolt and surrounded by inflatable aliens. We greeted him with what were surely exhausted, young and hopeful faces, and were instantly seated around the small campfire and treated to tea. Our hero then proceeded to entertain us with a few rounds of classic Irish storytelling, replete with circular rhythm and mock humility (he knew he’d won us at ‘g’mornin’ to ya!’).

So commenced a morning that marked the last stage of a bewildering, night-long journey. Merely hours earlier I’d entirely convinced myself that sinister forces were at work behind this unorganized, chaotic festival in the forest. How to trust new faces at the campsite- other generations, alternate motives, as the night caved in upon itself? As the furtive and paranoid flashlight-lit glances of the dark night gave way to dawn, however, I began to see more clearly the utter absudity of that which surrounded us: a thousand ageless children from every conceivable nook and cranny of the world, gathered together in reverence of the hard beats and gentle spirits that had wooed our searching souls.

I could not begin to number the many times my eyes filled with tears that weekend. The kindness and openness of utter strangers, the familiar faces from countless long nights of ecstatic dance, the devastating beauty of the water and the earth, the re-creation of true community by those who simply could not comply with the stratum and structure of society as presented to us, how it had come to know us so deeply and wordlessly.

Yet still I seek to put words to it, so that I may pay homage, or rather, that I might recall the feeling of a welcome mist at dawn, sweat-drenched and joyful, drinking in rainbows that spanned the entirety of our shared horizon.