Glint of the Green Cat's Eye

Embroidered flowers, relation to real-world flowers undetermined, perhaps fuchsia daisies and tawny buttercups and peach poinsettias. Thought is vision-based. It transforms through the insula, physical signals from the body, sensations into feelings. Neurocircuitry. I am a wired world. The sensitivity of the central nervous system transforms the world out there into the one in here. I perceive strokes of coloured yarn as flowers with indistinct reference to actual flowers dancing on hillsides of brown earth.

Head-strong, body-wise.

Information comes in so many ways.

Should I tell a story? That's a different shaping of events. Pick a narrative, a point of view. Paint representation in words. Describe a mutually-agreed upon approach to a scene.

On my finger is a thick silver ring set with a black stone in which there is a green cat's eye.

Carvings on a snake-shaped rock, arrow-heads 70,000 years old lying nearby, in a cave hidden in the "Mountain of the Gods" in Botswana. Offerings to spirit.

Anatomically modern humans emerged from East Africa 120,000 years ago. Protozoa on the edge of the expanse. Passing the baton of chromosomes from generation to generation, sacred bundle.

The rock snake is 6 feet long with a gash that is mouth-like. It's carved notches appear to ripple in the light that flickers in the cave, making it undulate, alive.

Can I move from the mystery of the mountain cave to the one of the night sky of stars without connectives? The green cat's eye glints its visions.

It's what we can't see that negotiates us.

About the size of a small asteroid, all the dark energy in the universe. It's absolutely consistent, too, and doesn't clump or coagulate anywhere. Unimpeded surface, if you can imagine that. And it's shaping everything, not only how far we are moving from each other, but perhaps the structure of the evolution of the universe itself.

There is dark energy between you and me.

Oh, laugh. There isn't anywhere it doesn't penetrate. It's about the expansion rate. Be a magnet and it'll slow down. What we need to exert on each other are gravitational pulls.

The thread in the crudely embroidered flower on my sweater pulls. Pulls out, winding undone. A red lace of snake beneath my fingers. Or perhaps we are merely notches in the undulating cosmic serpent that is always shedding its skin, leaving skeins and webs of matter amidst the empty spaces.

One day I'll take you through a time sequence, and you'll understand the expansion and the gravitational fields, and the forces existing on nothing. To grow we have to push our gravity into the expanding fields of dark energy. That way we don't disperse.

Consciousness doesn't actually have an "I." That's a narratorial strategy we fabricate afterwards. Trouble is, there's no-one in charge, only neurolinguistic circuitries, insulas sparking feelings, a lightning energy of consciousness constantly recreating itself as we interpret ourselves in this vast place of fleeting planets and stars and galaxies, where no-one has the final word.

Flames of Insight Curling on the Edges of the Burning Paper

You create this writing. Yes, you do. I write the words, their coherencies dancing to my inner rhythms, but you create the meaning that the words impart. You, the reader, control my writing. Okay, that is going a little far, but I do write for your reading. When you completely miss the point of what I wrote I think it's me, not you. I wasn't clear enough; it's not that you have problems with comprehension, though in my darker moments I will admit I've thought this.

There are different groups of readers too. Who comprehend differently from each other. Offering your writing to different groups can be an interesting experience. But I won't get into that. Oh, and whoever leaves the first comment often defines how that piece will be interpreted and responded to. I often make it a point not to read the other comments until I've commented. I want a pure connection with the writing that doesn't need to line up with the 'group-think' because it's sure of itself. I personally like independently thought-out comments. On the other hand, when discussions get going, that's great too.

The comments often enable the next piece of writing. We are audiences, then, who shape each other's writing. It's reader-response carried to a newly imagined level, this critical approach to literature, but greatly speeded up in the blogosphere. The process of reception and meaning-making that enables the writing to live beyond the page it is written on.

Blossom

Should a flower not open to the sun because there is nightfall?

Should a flower, soft, delicate, trusting, not blossom magnificently, brilliant unfurling full petals, splashing perfume, colour to the world, inviting pollination, growing rich seeds for the future, pods full of grace, because the sun is swallowed up by darkness?

Outside, looking in.

Metaphors aren't arising. Something resists them. It's a constructed world that perhaps is a metaphor for its own processes. Of corporate wealth built on bodies of work. Of living off the crème of interest payments. Capitalism is "borrowing from the future."¹ These wide berths of marble pillars and floors and tabletops, of huge glass chandeliers and sophisticated stores, of pin stripe people, confident but wary, built on profits from debt payments. What enables one to have what one can't afford, now. Purchases contingent on future payments that gouge the paychecks of the present. A future that barely exists, or does as a distant phantom. All around me at the Food Court where I sip coffee and write in my notebook, not the upper echelons of power but office staff. Thin plastic credit cards already overloaded, mortgages, car payments. And a disjuncture in the metaphors of financial power that the structures are a concretization of. Profits from the excesses of the moneylenders practices, this glimmering, gleaming Mecca of wealth. What if we chose to live within our means - would corporate complexes of banks like those surrounding me vanish into the mirages they are?
_________________________________
¹ Cited at I Cite:

Zizek writes: "Lacan's notion of the debt that pertains to the very notion of the symbolic order is strictly homologous to this capitalist debt: sense as such is never 'proper'; it is always advanced, 'borrowed from the future'; it lives on the account of the virtual future sense."

Relation Of

Monsieur, you can't be possessed. Any woman who would try to possess you doesn't understand you.

One can only come into a relation of love with you.

How did...

How did you write that poem? How did you paint that painting? How did you find that friend? How did you know to be in that place at that particular time? How did you know how to escape that situation or choose that deal?

Unrepeatable and beyond explanation. Nor can you properly impart the sense of wonder you felt at what happened.

The series of apparently random coincidences that occurred to get you from point A to C were actually specific. A specific sequence. Intuition got you there.

It's a trustworthy navigator.

But requires 'letting go.'

In this way, it is akin to religious belief.

Living your prayer; living your wishes.

Putting aside your tiny maps and trusting that you know the way.

Let go. And find what you are looking for.

'Self-Portrait in Bathroom Mirror' Shots

Bought a new sweater today, have a new job, may be moving into a new apartment, a whole lot of new things, I guess. Not great photos, but what the heck...

Hesitancy

What position doesn't fluctuate? If the real is what returns to itself, can I? How can I stop the constant shifting, my heart, my muse?

Monsieur, I cannot flow in one direction. Despite effort, a contradictoriness. Potent feelings flow in opposite directions, collide, aren't neat, contained, tidy or even explicable. While I would like to not be confused, unsure, and have only my own fears to battle, I am a storm of paradoxes.

Always departing, never arriving.

Can writing write this impossibility? Such honour of the heart.

I curve and sway with your rhythms in a dance of intimacy. We are a single flower, padma lotus, spectral whiteness of prisms, following an inner light, its lightning, even as the moon's tides surge in us.

It happened suddenly, in the quietness of the moment.

Afterwards, enwrapped, arms of peace, and a peace that lasts for many days. And then the breaking, chaos swirls over.

There is a way through. A way through the resisting what we are approaching, pulling away, succumbing, falling back. Even with the red and white blossoms that perhaps notice us or don't, roses of love with baby's breath in the pale blue art deco vase on the table beside the nightlight. Even in the cramped place with roots behind the walls that we can't see, on the soft pale cream sheets. In reciprocity.

Jazz Riff, or an Autopoiesis

No

intervals.

It’s not what

they say-

no gaps.

Continuous

from the

first

moment.

Only

different

approaches.

I sway back

and forth

like a

stripped

mast

in high gale.

After,

it doesn’t

stop.

I am

speechless;

This

whirling

back,

intoxicated

to find

the illusion

I was

chasing.¹

Photo from the Brazilian designer, Sandra Machado's Collection, Noiva.

Vestido Corset em organdi, renda e cetim de seda
Design Sandra Machado
Foto Isabela Carrari
Modelo: Carolina de Siqueira Meneses

(used with permission)

____

Autopoiesis: auto(self)creation, "organized states that remain stable for long periods of time despite matter and energy continually flowing through them." Wikipedia

¹ The last stanza references Clarice Lispector's, The Apple in the Dark (Virago, 1985, trans. Gregory Rabassa), "as if he had caught up to an illusion he had been chasing all his life and had touched it in the midst of his own intoxication" (p.44).

Would you trust this woman...?

My boyfriend is away. Did I say I had a boyfriend? How very unusual for me to admit to such a thing! I never have 'boyfriends,' I only have connections that may or may not be called relationships, and yet towards whom I remain utterly faithful until he abandons me. Or I him. It always happens. And things somehow continue to continue after a respite too. I don't think I live in a world of normal intimate relationships, whatever those may be. To say, I have a 'boyfriend,' balks on my tongue. It feels like ownership. Like settling into someone else's definition. Like something people can make judgments about. Like an incredibly weird sort of dalliance of sex and fun with a little angst thrown in that is so strange that I'd almost rather not. So I make mysterious references to whatever might or might not be going on in my life at any given time. Men I love, and who love me. Yes, always that. Honoured. Of course. Treated with respect, kindness, generosity. Always. But never with full openness. There are secrets. Things that are hidden. Other relationships, other heartbreaks behind the facade of our dalliance. There is a hint that we might possibly make it to some semblance of a kind of connection I might mention to my children to warn them. I never bring my men home, though. Even with delicious sensualities, things usually never get that far. Though I never lose them either. We somehow all continue on together, closer in some ways, more tenuous in others. We never fully lose touch. Mostly it all exists in some fantasy arena, and afterall I do have a penchant for brilliant, independent, single men. The love life of a middle-aged creative woman is far more complex than it looks on the surface.


________________
Class this under humour. Really I am only talking about a very few men spread over years... :giggles:

Memory

Memory is a coordinating system. When you start losing your memory, you lose the coordinates of your mapping system, the one inside your mind that helps you negotiate all the terrains from the past to the present to the expectancies of the future. A coordinating system that is multi-dimensional, composed of inner and outer landscapes. Whose latitudes and longtidues are strands of narratives composed of interpretations of memories. Memory: what repeats itself. If a coordinate is touched, awakens, it opens out that area of the map and all the strands of narratives connected to it. Until it falls apart, senility, dementia, Alzeimer's, stroke, aneurysm, until the memories slip off the narratives like beads tumbling off a broken necklace.

She's lost the narrative of the streets. She can't remember where she lives, or the directions home. She thinks buildings long gone are still there. She can't remember what she said five minutes ago. What was a finely woven grid of electro-chemical impulses is sagging in places, torn, drifting, unable to complete its circuitry. Memory is unravelling and so is identity. But in a fog of forgetfulness that releases her.

_______________
At some point I stopped writing inspirational posts and let the deeper images emerge. My writing continues to deepen, at least I feel as if I'm diving into my undercurrents as I explore difficult terrain without covering it over with glossy patinas. Or perhaps I still do. Who knows? I let the images emerge whole and just polish them a bit in the grammar and in the ways that the metaphors are constructed. This piece is about my mother. It's a very difficult situation.

Communing

Yesterday, a day of inner communing. In dialogue with key people in my life, psychically, spiritually. Does anyone else do this? Talk to people you are not talking to? So many responses flood back!

What I am curious about is the intention - the thought behind the thought, where directions are decided, approaches, withdrawals, what the issues are, what new variables have entered our field of connections.

When I enter into this kind of communing I am amazed at how variable we are, hour to hour we make and unmake our minds on nearly everything. Once I gently plummet and discover the main feelings and intentions, though, all the actions and words make sense.

Knowing someone does this, psyches out others, even if gently and with only the best intention to love, honour, respect, I have some questions. Would you veil yourself if you knew I was plummeting you? Discovering if you truly love life or are staking your belief on what is actually a philosophy of death? Finding out if you are producing your best work or only being frivolous? Asking if you are faithful to what you state belief in or if you participate in guile? Seeking to know whether at heart you are fine or are in trouble?

The day went like this, with its infinitudes of caring about those I love, until I was finally satisfied. My world complete again. Spiritually connected in the flux of it all to those who are closest to me.

(Note: These little pieces are based on diary jottings before bed - I'm inbetween projects at the moment, keeping the creative fires lit.)

To Stay, or To Go, That is the Question

Should I stay, or move on?

This question central in many facets of my life presently. Yet even the new vistas we explore become continuations of the old issues from which we cannot escape. The larger ones, that are like the song we continually sing of our lives. I am always ready to move on; staying becomes a challenge that really is the musical score I dance. Leaving is easy, staying is hard, and knowing this doesn't make it any easier. There is nowhere to go anyhow. All new scenarios become reflections of all the old scenarios until you understand that you cannot escape yourself. If you cannot escape from yourself you might as well relinquish resistance to whatever it is in the present circumstance that you want to leave. Life certainly has its own logic but it is most irrational in its insistence on keeping you on your path of challenges no matter whether you stay or move on!

Portal of the New Year

Touch

In the steam, you disappear. Monsieur, I feel your presence only by knowing. You sit before me until you vanish; hot clouds dissolve us into vapour. Your strong sensuality, like Zeus, yet you become a phantom. Until I am alone. When the hot breath of air presses in on me your hands rest on mine, our knees touch. Two figures of naked skin streaming as the steam subsides. It was in the room you built, this womb of steam from which we emerge wet and hot into the cold air of the welcoming night.

Rapture

How deeply
the unfolding
through the water
of the blessings of
our bodies of rapture.

We are clothed in the streaming truth of
the night sky, its melting snow.

An offering
to fire and transparency.

In the hot springs as the clouds uncover
the full moon of the New Year
you plunge into me
while I dance in the water,
surging, volcanic.

Waves of heat
absorb us

Into an immensity that has no name.

In the creative presence of sensuality
our union effaces the conditions of union.

The essence of passionate love
is mystical union.

We become
a writing of love.

Transfigured.

Rupture

Do we imagine the depths of each other
differently?

Were we Shiva and Shakti dancing?
Our own Lucía Y El Sexo
under the moon in the water?
You kiss my breasts as I float
before you, I massage your floating
rapture,
and how many times do we
undulate?
How continuously
do we hum ecstasy
in the silence of the Winter's night?
Your final surge
rising, fertile, flowing
light, filling the lucid
darkness,
honey of
delirium.

We offer each other such
pleasure.

Afterwards, the next day,
driving me home, you said
you wanted to be clear,
that you love me
but weren't in love
the magic of transformation
absent.

You want your life to change,
that's what love does.

Your New Age
speaking
cliches
clashed
with your
strong loving
and a year later
I received a letter
from your other lover
about your nights with her
filling the hours
around ours, as well as
the others you had
slipped into bed with.

It was never
a question of love.

Portal of Breath

There are words I must speak, though surely never will. You call me across the expanse. I kiss your closed eyelids. I lie over you softly, breathing with you. With each wave of breath, like sea foam, I cover you with a silent resounding mantra, I love you. Even while you call me to you, you do not hear the rippling of my heart. It is when you are asleep and I lie with you that I hear the fullness of the silence between your breaths. You are the full intoxicating sea-garden in repose and I am calmly delirious in the scent of the night. In the morning you have forgotten everything; even the savouring. How do we "translate the silence of the real encounter between the two of us?"¹

Relation of

Monsieur, you can't be possessed.

One can only come into a relation of openess with you.

You leave, and yet always return. What you dismiss, you affirm.
Yesterday was no; today is yes. The horizon floods like continuous
Kabbalistic light.

______
¹Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life, trans. by Elizabeth Lowe and Earl Fitz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p.43.
_____
for Kaj Devai, from the manuscript, EnTrapped WOR|l|DS, 2006, in which he is listed as a reader of this book in my Google Docs, and in 2007 he accessed and printed on his printer and read apparently a few times, and then had me read this poem to him over the phone in 2008, and agreed that in this writing I should tell the truth.

Happy New Year's 2007

After dancing for hours to the beat of 30 or 40 ecstatic drummers on African drums, walking home past groups of revellers and noisy happy nightclubs, near dawn, I took this to celebrate the New Year with you...

During this festive time of the birth of the light, of the New Year, wishing you pure magic and joy, prosperity and success.

That the dance of impermanence flows with agility, grace, openess, love.

Touch, Rapture

Touch

In the steam, you disappear. I feel your presence only by knowing. You sit before me until you vanish; hot clouds dissolve us into vapour. Your strong sensuality, like a sensate Zeus, yet you become a phantom. Until I am alone. When the hot breathe of air presses in on me your hands rest on mine, our knees touch. Two figures of naked skin streaming as the steam subsides. It was in the room you built, this womb of steam from which we emerge wet and hot into the cold air of the welcoming night.

Rapture

We are clothed in the streaming truth of
the night sky, its melting snow.

Incandescences

Do I have anything to say? I wander around feeling a relief from the pressure of writing, a pressure which was so intense for awhile. I don't have to continually create what I'm living in writing; I don't have to reach for metaphors that inadequately embody my experience, imaginary or otherwise.

Only I do.

This I cannot escape from. Every moment is writing.

The world I interact with is composed of lights and planes and shadows, of sounds and textures, of feelings and thoughts, of people and events. Every moment is intimate.

The life that I live demands that I read it continually. That I be agile, open, dancing. That I maintain a strong sense of self while being loving, caring, gentle, giving. That I find where the light froths and bubbles with incandescence. That I fill my days with laughter inbetween the tears and furies.

Last night, amidst the usual family crises that occur over the holiday season, with many thoughts about the way we compose ourselves for ourselves and for each other, I thought, seriously, at least half of us are quite mad, barely rational, while the other half are caretakers, angels who hold us together.

But, then, I don't want to be like that, thinking those thoughts, and so I swept all such considerations away, leaving my mind a great expansive ocean. Meditation keeps me balanced. Always the vast emptiness. The silent bliss. Surely we are each everything, dark irrationalities and the stuff of radiance. All six billion of us. So toasting this mad, crazy ravage of love that we are on the earth!

Writing into the Future

While I don't think I'm still 'in' the writing that cohered around themes and that collected itself into a 'parcel,' my writing's changed. Who can stay the same?

My first husband accused me of changing every year. Ah, mid-70s?

Do we transform into different versions of ourselves as we age through the years?

It's the brain cells that are most magnificent, the way they are born, live, die and somehow pass on their information, their memories, to the new crop, and they do this continually throughout our lives.

All the cells in the body maintain the structure of the whole of us by keeping their processes going.

But transmitting memory,
and who knows how, is a feat, a miracle.

Is this why the brain is perhaps structured like a grammar? With syntax and a lexography? So that it can write itself into the future?

Star System

When you've finished a first draft... the months that it's taken, when things were rolling, or not, but moving, and then it's over. There's a lull. A let-down. An emptiness. I'm not sure what it is, perhaps like a mini-grieving? One should be happy that the end has come and the rewriting can begin, and yet, the high is gone. I don't know what that is.

It's like there is sand or something in my eye. So I'm typing with my eyes shut. Blindly groping in the darkness behind my lids, talking to you, my readers, whoever you are...

There are changes in my life, and more coming. I really can't explain what they are. Movement, but also settling in. Establishing directions for the near and far future. Odd, obverse things that we intuit but find it hard to speak of.

An image of myself spinning slowly while my life unwinds through time...

I'm here, touching the keys, staying connected.

But I feel as if I'm floating on the other side of the star system.

Yesterday I took my dog on a very long walk to Mountain Co-op and there is a small blister in the very centre of my foot, in front of the arch. And when I stand and press down I can feel the little dome and it's like a homing signal reminding me to touch down, to feel the ground.

My life operates on trust.

Sometimes I'm winging it somewhere across the galaxies though.

Why not float in space for a bit?

I was watching, The Lover, the movie of Marguerite Duras' novel, and while it's beautifully rendered somehow it lacks the poetry of her writing even though there is a voice-over (in an English accent, which doesn't work for me, but ah well). She wrote that book, it's autobiographial, when she was 70!

There was a lot of lovemaking and my daughter came in and so I turned it off. Now that she's in her room writing in her journal and drawing (oh, we are so alike!) I wonder if it's worth watching to the end? It's like, okay, look at the scenery, feel the heat, and there was no more to add. The book is beautiful. Her writing is stunning, as it always is. No-one like Duras.

But I am babbling!

I knew my posts were going to change, but I didn't know how to come back to them.

xo

Blessings

Still one more piece to write that will complete my little prose poetry book, my rhizomatic text, which I may or may not post. It's a Monsieur piece and you might just have to buy the book in 50 years when it's published to see how it ends. Sighs, and laughs.

Monsieur is an amalgam of the men I've loved/love... you know that!

But even amalgamated Monsieurs like secrecy.


For the last month I've been working at a very busy central switchboard at the executive level in a corporate bank, only a 7 hour day, but exhaustion! The board rooms, the expensively appointed dining rooms, the clients, meetings, parties. In a fish bowl. Asked always to wear a suit, be polished. Come home late, 8pm after walking my doggy, too tired to think, let alone talk or be with my daughter or help her with difficult homework assignments. Not to complain, it's money for gifts, and hopefully to move to a larger apartment (I pay rent and storage each month so can afford a better place just need the last month's rent, which this job should provide).

I was writing a book, though, when I accepted the assignment. Let me tell you, with will power, anything's possible. Almost all of the book, with the exception of the first bit, was written during coffee breaks or on lunch: work like crazy with calls piling up on the phones and then work like crazy on breaks writing in Second Cup, or one of the exquisitely appointed rooms high in that bank tower overlooking the lake. Enter whatever I wrote that evening when I was too tired to think or do much more than move my fingers over the keyboard.

Yesterday I took sick. Hot flushes and cold spells, perhaps pushing myself too hard. I came home early, went to bed. Today I've stayed in my jammies, resting, sleeping, warding off a sore throat, the flu. I just finished a 2.5 hour meditation that I did mostly on my back and feel greatly cleared. Bliss is restoring itself in me.

In a day or so when I recoup, I hope editing opens up. I just found out that I'm at the job until the end of the year, which is very good news.

It's blessings all round.

Chthonic

How did it happen? The soft cotton sarong of orange and plum and cream in wide swarths of colour and simmering moons became a snake with many eyes. I know by the way it winds around my neck while I sway on the floor.

Serpents of protection.

Am I hallucinating?

Dozens of gold snakes cling to me, pour over my undulating arms, wrap around my curving belly as I shimmy and gyrate to the sensuous rhythms of flute and sitar.

I am possessed. The writhing waterfall of coppery snakes stream while I hold earth lightning in my hands like the Minoan Snake Goddess. I can't stop dancing. I writhe and undulate and spin like a whirling wind, a belly dancer, a dervish, a dakini.

I am the lady of serpents.

Everywhere they slither and coil, opening deep chthonic mysteries, an energy of creativity that persists despite inner dissentions, or the envy of the other.

The face of envy on the dance floor is a mass of dry, dead hair, an austere, thin frame, a rigid torso that wiggles without sensuality, or warmth, the cruelty exposed. Its breath re-inhaled, the fumes. Unable to prevent. Incapable of damaging. Useless flap of useless motion. Rendered impotent, powerless.

Today the dictator died; the despot is deposed.¹

Afterwards the cries and laughter of freedom rise to the skies.
______________

¹I wrote this the day Pinochet died.

Almost done!

Almost done! Two more pieces, I think. Then letting it grow through editing and drafts, rhizomatically.

Only about 17,000 words and perhaps 60 pages, and most of you haven't a clue what's been going on I'm sure, but I am drawing it to a close.

Who knows if it'll be back to regular programming or not at Rubies in Crystal?

Life is so different now.

:)

Writing, Tides, Impermanent, Sores, Eyes, Uncoiling, Other, Muse, Subjectivity

-early drafts of these poems have been removed by the author-

Blessing, Pulse, Devotion, Eternity, Threat, Escape, Fragments

Blessing

On that day, the light that bathed the world was visionary. The sun shone with a relentless determination against the cold. I shivered in your arms. We stood in the weak Winter light receiving its lucent blessing. Even when the earth tilts and we are far away, the sun illumines us.

In your embrace, I am illumined.

Pulse

Is love always a revelation?

Or is it the underlying synthesis of existence, what we are founded on, what keeps the mystery unfolding from its nascence? Is love what embraces us or what we continually strive for? Is love a substrata that we can align ourselves with, open ourselves to, if we could clarify our vision?

Is the universe a pulsation of love?

Is love light, what is evident, or the deeper hidden energy of creation?

Surely, mon amor, love is all this and more.

Devotion

I know my love for you by my passion for you.

Eternity

Monsieur, yes, of course I understand what romantic love is, and it's capricious, dependent on sexual passion, it's created out of desire and obsession, fantasy and the colliding of bodies in ecstasies.

It's not the stability of secure love, the compassion of creation, what is strong and unyielding in its devotion to life. The foundation is mother-love, flowing sustenance, support, what is at the depths.

When I meditate I meditate into that flow, reality, substrata, vision.

Then the molecules that comprise our reality sing of love. Existence vibrates with unifying energies of love, the life force itself. Who could not respond with bliss?

To meditate is to dip into an energy of ecstasy and re-emerge cleansed and energized with cynicism and pain transmuted, rinsed away.

In these moments love is complete.

When love is everywhere, and easily accessible, why do we resist its flow? What causes us to shut ourselves off, slam the doors, refuse?

Why are we often hostile to each other? Hurt, wound, maim, destroy.

Is it because, even with love's promise, there is no eternity?

Threat

When she isn't swearing at the ocean, she is at her computer, blandishing other writers. Everyone is a threat; she battles everyone. No-one is safe.

Escape

Monsieur, you fell into that place of great chaos in me.

I didn't know if we could continue. When you left it was okay because none of the difficulties had to be faced.

Why are we always escaping each other?

Fragments

I wished to write a conventional letter of love, Monsieur. But all I've managed are fragments and far too many questions on the nature of love itself.

Sand, Horizon, Wind, Nomad, Tracks, Joust, Switchboard

Sand

At the seashore she shouted incoherently to herself and flung handfuls of sand into the air.

Sand from a beach so white it was like the pause between paragraphs.

Horizon

I wanted to make it over the event horizon this time,
to get desire past fantasy into the real.

But I couldn't.

Wind

In the angry, cold wind at the bus stop sand blew in my eyes.

My eyes filled with tears, the world of bright sun became unfocused.

When I stepped on the bus, my collar was wet with salt tears. The bus driver was concerned, 'How are you this morning? It's cold.' 'Yes, and that high wind blew sand into my eye - I'm not crying,' I laughed, 'it's okay.' And he smiled and closed the door and pulled the bus out into the traffic.

Nomad

You are a floater, tumbleweed, a fellow nomad.

How could it be any different?

Tracks

The point in the tracks where the switcher is.

You pulled it and we separated;
or, you went off elsewhere.

Gleaming steel,
it frightened me.

The trainyard was
a terrible vision
of the conventional.

I am responsible
for the manoeuver
that caused the
track switching.

The trains sometimes run beside the ocean and she was there, skeletal,
antique black lace gown, shrieking,
flinging sand.

You said all your women are possessive
and you had to hide them
from each other.

Joust

Monsieur, what you are suggesting is so unexpected, and breaks all the rules of jousting.

Deleuze knows: we cannot be anything other than rhizomatic nomads.

Switchboard

I sit at the switchboard, connecting people, transferring calls.

All day I do this.

Wonder, Transparency, Explore, Glare, Possessive...

Wonder

Thrust forward
into the unknown.

What carries us though?

How do we rise each day
and move with such agility.

I'm not sure how I breathe,
eat, walk, see or hear, how my heart beats,
let alone write my way through
this manuscript.

What is talent? What is the muse?
Why do we have to make art, create
businesses, produce culture, perpetually
shape our world?

This morning is full of
questions.

This morning you are too far
away to share in this conversation
of wonder.

Transparency

Monsieur, when you pull away after an event, trip, workshop, conference, when you say, let's just be friends, or let's take a break, or suddenly stop writing erotic notes, it is clear you are pursuing other interests.

How can you not know of the transparency?

With your worldly desire for encounters, I offer you up without complaint to your pursuit and conquest.

When it ends I may not be here, and that's a risk, but you don't care at departure (you have your eyes set elsewhere, mon cher).

But then, somehow I remain.

Only you could not know the complexity underneath, the way resistances and acceptances flow chaotically. Loyalty, consistency, these are crucial, yes, but, ultimately love rules over everything.

You are a good man, Monsieur, and you love me, I know that.

In your absence I don't stop loving you.

Explore

I explore the configurations of desire in a mutable world of connections.

Glare

Shades of love
in an over-bright world.

Is love ever found
in the glare?

Possessive

Monsieur, stop! I have never laid
claim to you.

Nor shall I ever.

No, I've never said, mon homme, mon amour, you're mine.

What a strange idea, Monsieur!

How opposite to the way I am. Impermanence rules!

Fever, Forgive, Wild Heart, Mirror, Culpable, Trapped, Insomnia, Sea-breaker...

Fever

As if a fever broke.

In the shower, warm water pouring over me but as if I came in from the storm somewhere out in the wilderness. The steamy fog unrolled itself and you found me sipping morning coffee and we talked.

Of uncertainty and even though decisions were made I felt they were also being unmade and that endings were beginnings.

Can the paint on the canvas be unpainted? Or must we whitewash and re-paint? Will sandpaper take it off? Could I sand myself to an essence, a place of blank openness, the untouched whiteness of the beginning?

Forgive

To forgive is not to condone, to allow the same behaviour to continue, the patterns to play out their relentless rhythms.

I forgive myself.

For being there: for being hurt or hurting.

That is all we can do.

Wild Heart

It is so precarious, day after day,
these inner desires, meltings,
flames.

The Mirror I Don't Want to Hold Up

Do I pick men who can't make a commitment, unattached, single, deliciously attractive, brilliant, because then I don't have to?

How many years did it take me to learn how to spell commitment? It was the word I balked on, always. Entrapment. Then I had to become liquid and be what he wanted.

Commitment is a deep promise.

Not ownership; not possession. I can make a deep promise to love you unconditionally and with futurity.

Whoever you are.

Culpable

In what ways are we culpable?

In what ways do we cause the events that befall us?

How often do we set up situations that implode and then we can disappear back into our lethargies. Perhaps whining; perhaps blaming; perhaps only sad.

If I look deeply at the words I spew forth I find hidden pins, off-putting things, tiny hisses and flashes, not quite the blinding spitting snake, but almost. Or do I exaggerate?

Sometimes I prevent myself from having what I most want. It's a determination against myself.

What can I say, Monsieur? I am a complex woman.

Trapped

I am trapped in my own fears, fears which disperse and vanish like fog in the gleaming sun when confronted.

Fears don't like to be faced: they hide; they lie; they rationalize; they obfuscate.

Like insects fleeing the light in the night on the counters of an old kitchen.

Insomnia

When I decided to obsess about writing the way I do a lover, I stopped sleeping. Now I keep my notebook with its empty white sheets beside me to write blindly in the night with a pencil without looking.

Words that flow in the symbolic between the imaginal and the real.

Reflecting and shaping.

All day, euphoric and tired,
such nights of intense love-making.

Sea-breaker

It was a small sea-breaker, Monsieur. But love flowed over it.

An ocean of love that could not be
held back.

Trail

The trail, Monsieur, is a decoy. It does not reveal my whereabouts, or my perspective. I could be elsewhere in the terrain where it is dense and dark and dangerous. You would never guess from my notes and messages. I could be escaping from our field of connections, and yet appear to be available, even stable. If you could know what maintaining these appearances cost you might be surprised.

But this is how I deal with my capricious interior.

Even with falling away, I remain close.

Shooting Star

There was a moment of confidence, but it's gone now.

Spaces

When a writer leaves that many spaces between paragraphs, I find it threatening.

What's in the white spaces?

Is it a white font of writing that curses us? Hidden writing that... She talks under her breath, muttering, blaming; I hear her the way one hears the ocean in a seashell held up to one's ear. In those spaces between the blocks of black words.

Especially when I see virid and cinnabar feathers lying about, and can hear the swishing of the endless sea foam beneath her squawking, the way she belittles us.