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manifesting manifestos. magic is in the mere making of it, the process itself, conjuring conjunctures. perhaps more apt if yet abstract: the moment-to-moment absorption in doing, aligning thought, word and action.
the over-wired mind takes its time to unwind, reaching in from behind to find nothing at all, an inky chasm of pure possibility.
home is where the heart is, which is to say, where you are.
my roots are fragile saplings, tender to the tethering touch.
well i don’t know where I’m going and I don’t know what I’ve done,
but i mean to say, steady on let’s just follow,
let’s follow the sun.
(at 3:08pm the air turned chilly, slithering around my shoulders like a sketchy arm in a dark elevator. I grew famished, and departed upon the following line running a ribbon through my mind:
Would you mind, never mind your mind, the gap between you and me where we might be, were you to see?
Now, where were we?
empathy is embodiment of another’s
feelings- what are feelings?
serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine
(to be “balanced” for happiness and contentment,
or else craving, despair, restlessness, NEUROSIS);
memory, thought, daydream
(always after the fact, sense, experience);
repulsion, attraction
(is the law, the draw, the motivation).
i think in text, always after the fact.
clean sights and sounds and arrange them
on a crowded page,
where they jockey for position within
the mind maze,
a labyrinth of the mundane,
occasioned by doom but more often desire.
this texture creates the narrative creates the memory.
the truth?
is on the tip of my tail.
i chase it in circles.
i could do this forever, narcissism junkie.
or sit beside it, idling in the breeze.
presence takes practice.
my mind craves meander.
so then move! from one world to the next,
each one more wild
than the last,
further from yet nearer to the past.
where were we? empathy.
a force that unites spirit and form,
the presence of another’s presence
in whatever way it is inscribed:
a confession.
a secret.
a shared ecstatic flight.
a terrifying fall.
eyes that dare to dive in.
words that tumble out the mouth or pour forth from the fingers, unperturbed
by the double.
-but must it always,
after the fact,
be subsumed within the mindmaze?
chasing, being chased.
where were we once upon?
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.
when eyes meet there is a flash of understanding.
where within the screen do we find our mirror neurons firing forth?
pay attention
to the data.
taken together in infinite intricate interactions
of form and meaning,
we create a tapestry of makeshift sighs, high fives, smiles, shared laughter;
we remake the mirror daily.
intrigue takes us to the source.
swim liminal we shall through life’s watery edges,
and take time and care to trim the hedges.
(so coax and buzz the furry fuzz,
for useless is as useless does)
His face would have been handsome, had it not been for the maniacal contortions of his eyes and mouth, and the pushy manner in which he shoved large bottles of bourbon and wine to our lips. “Are you trying to tell me,” he cackled in a heavy south american accent, “that YOU are the new fountain?!” He bounced about us, grinning, encouraging us to dance and play his nonsensical games.
“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.
i keep strange hours.
here’s to the heart of the matter, to opening and upward.
the steady rise, the beautiful journey back to begin,
the song you can’t get out of your head.
in the darkness small thoughts fester and foster
here’s to fortitude, to the beatitudes!
your attitude, your joy and your peace,
the now that tastes like tulips,
the soft and the gentle,
the lovely abyss.
be more say more hear more songs in the breeze
write furiously, be crazed with ecstatic complacency!
this is a hearty hello,
this is the softest pillow
be gentle with yourself
find the love in the trees
learn how not to say please
let go, be free
this was meant for me to
be more!
write sonnets at dawn
you create the world you live in you craft the self
you choose how not to think
and how to believe
Sometime between night and morning,
I steal minutes from my bedside,
turning them over carefully
in my hands.
As the sun engulfs this small, cramped haven,
as the beats stir to life, to warm the small places,
between my fingers and toes:
I crawl outside and to the roof,
I let the light tuck itself neatly
around the world,
and I miss you very elegantly.
Nothing is sweeter than cold white wine on a hot summer morning.
Nothing is finer than the rich and well-lit dawn.
The day yawns open to greet me,
as I scratch it behind the ears;
I measure love in the time it takes
for me to crumble.
The game is on,
my nerves are lit:
under heavy fire
and fuel is this writ.
an unresolvable dynamic resulting from
a tedium of dreams combined with
a few isocoles triangles,
who watch my movements from
shaded corridors
as I take out the trash.
Taking out the trash,
I catch your reflection in the glass.
One must stop caring about such things.
Oh call it off!
call me crazy.
Take your world rainstorm by rainstorm
into the bright and painful light.
I will sit here and write.
I will list my loves on one finger.
I will spit and snarl and howl at the moon.
I will throw the frail bodies of joy and suffering
mercilessly against the brick walls of this place!
Leave it to be,
be it to grow,
grow to be more.
I am tired okay?
I am tired every day.
I am bored without a drink or a bowl.
I am psychotic and sane!
I am your neurons your fire your pain!
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