Come, walk with me...

Exquisite imagery, but what is the emotion beneath the surface? I am reading a poem that's like cloisone, as carefully crafted, meticulous, images inlaid and enameled, fine gold lines. Like the mechanical nightingale, a beautiful jewel, yet I can't feel a heart beating, no syntactical error, or slippage, where the pulse is.

Be flagrant. Let the emotion swell beneath the surface. Words that ride over the cross-currents. Imperfect. It's not that the words slip away or are unreliable; they are approximations. No inviolable carvings in stone.

If you listen to these promiscuous words. No, I don't know where that came from. And I don't think I've ever thought of words that way. But if you consider it...

On our walk on this late Summer's scented evening.

The flowers are bright suns in the darkness of the dark green hedge, yellow spikes radiating round. Did you notice them?

What other neighbourhood can you have a conversation with a man who owns a million dollar heritage home and a lake up North and who talks longingly of his solitary beach where his dog swims regularly and has no problems with fleas and come across a small gaggle of people surrounding a man who appears to have collapsed half on the road, half on the sidewalk? Should we call an ambulance? Mister, you're on the road, you have to move. He's in clean new jeans, a clean red t-shirt, his black back-pack tightly around his shoulders. I look closely at his chest: he's breathing, his heart beats. Where's he from? A man touches him and he yells with drunken, slurred words, Get out man, you f-cking b-st-rd.

Let's continue on our walk with my dog, who ignored the guy lying on the road, and she does swim at a beach, too, but she's been scratching and so in between her shoulder blades is anti-flea oil, Hey, don't pat her tonight!

What I most want to talk about is how life feels: in this body, with these perceptions, this mind. How my toes fit in my new brown Roots™ cotton socks in my brown leather Ecco™ walking sandals. How I carry a dog treat in a Guatemalan blue woven wool fanny pouch. How I went into a black car port and gave an old and smelly brown-furred dog who's always tied up a piece of the dog biscuit and the dear dog seemed confused and sniffed it and looked at me, and I couldn't discern what the problem was.

Or how I'm going to write honest words, not jewel-encrusted or bespeckled, even if sometimes they are lush. To share with you, and who knows how you'll receive them.

These words, which have been everywhere, Oh, Mama, everywhere. It's not my fault; I inherited them along with a glottis, and a dictionary (ahem, think biological and linguistic evolution). And how many glottises? Hardly virgin, with their geneologies and wide-spread usage, these worldy words.

What am I supposed to do? Spilling lexical wanton wiles everywhere...

Similes & Metaphors

When I use simile the 'as'/'like' is a gap the neurons fire over, so that one thing carries the energy of the other without either losing their distinctness. But the image is moving along the neuronal pathway of the poem, transferring and transforming as it goes. With simile what you started with isn't too different from what you end with, but it's been through a journey along a specific trajectory and is richer, heavier, wiser, more worldly, better able to explicate itself. Like life. I'm the same as I was half a century ago in many essential ways, though transformed in my knowledge and experience. I'm not a completely different being; I haven't become someone other than who I am.

Metaphor is a richer, complex process of leaping about, collapse into, cross-fertilization, creating a newness out of disparate parts. Metaphor doesn't work for me like the hand-holding of simile but in the relation of things to each other. The best metaphor creates strange, new, fertile relationships.

Often with metaphor I have to let the gap between what is being aligned be in the punctuation, the space between stanzas or paragraphs, and leave that as what the neurons fire over. Because it's like they leap from one highly specialized section of the mind, or a discipline of knowledge, to an entirely different one. Metaphors follow paths of intuitive logic: spark new connections, creating pathways that weren't there before, maintaining the flexibility of the language which is evolving through them. Liquid and plastic, metaphors open up new insights, ways of perceiving, create new realities for us to live.

The ability to make metaphors like the continual creation of neuronal stem cells in the hippocampus, but, then, I'm using a simile aren't I? :-)

Pruning A Wild Creativity

Wild creativity where I continually have to prune the excesses, this seems apropos. Slicing, trimming, removing. Articles, connectives, pronouns, prepositional clauses, whatever slows down the immediacy. Sudden leaps from one image to another, something invisible hovering between that connects them, something other than a random placement on the page, that is. Honing while listening to an internal rhythm, the syncopations of an inner aesthetic, what's overdone and weedy, or too sparse, how to. Otherwise I'd overrun, a confusing conglomerate of overgrowth.

Meditate perhaps for the same reason. To hone wildly outbursting thoughts. Clarify an inner terrain. Make it livable within the self. A friend recently said that I had the busiest mind of anyone they knew and no wonder I had to meditate.

Editing oneself. Ah, so.

How about you?

Propogating Fire

With my fierce language; it's my writing language, not my speaking words. In speech I am always bright.

Write from rawness. How else to find where we are? Plummet, forget safety. Go for the bleeding. Or maybe that's not it. Maybe it's bathing in nectars of fire.

The burning halo came anyway. And then I was alone. Leave the books behind to write.

I walk past a slate black iron tub in which a wash of rusted water runs, an Ecumenical bath.

A man in a white shirt photographs a bird-bath in the Church garden, a series of circular waterfalls in which birds shake their wings, flapping water.

An ambulance sirens by and crumb-pecking sparrows flutter so quickly to hide in the yellow rose bush that I laugh.

I am walking to a store to look at a sheer red shawl impregnated with flowers that I will not buy, but find myself standing near the park, writing in my notebook.

Two pigeons interlock in a dance on the ground nearby: the beak of one deep inside the mouth of the other, their grey heads bobbing back and forth. Is it a love dance?

It was humiliating that I was coerced into a dead-end corner with one ungraceful exit so the infidelity could occur.

Beating Breath

Still working on it -added IV:

I

Language of the heart.

An inner maelstrom,
rushing into the future.

Your distant pounding.
Can my heart be your heart?

What tightens or beats
too strongly or dissolves
into pain or
bliss?

A vocabulary of love,
our bodies.

Expansively warm &
beautiful. Knowingness
of the heart. Where
we breath.

II

The burning heart.

The Sufi Master,
Hazrat Inayat Khan: "in pain
the heart becomes living
and without pain man seems to be
living on the surface."^*

Pain brings the heart alive, and
when purified of bitterness,
shines,
then joy flows
from the "source of all goodness"
and acts of kindness
are easy.

III

Unknot the tangled heart

Slowly, carefully.

A delicate operation, hurts
furies, angers, losses.
Scar tissue, where nerves
have had to find
their own way
through.

Bypassing ourselves.

In Tibetan Tantric Buddhism
the Anahata, or heart centre,
requires copious hours of
purifying sounds of mantras,
visualizations of yantras,
untangling the knots
then energy flows
unimpeded.

Kundalini rises,
surging electric current
and multi-petalled
rainbows of love
flower in
us.

IV

We opened passageways, subtle vessels.
Until we hit the dead zone. Scar tissue,
and how many times were our hearts broken?
Where the nerves had gone dead;
where there was almost no feeling.
We liked it that way.
The soft, beating core hidden,
where blood thunders
in its cave of life,
red tides
rush.

I lay the whole day alone,
unable to move, or think,
as if I held the weight
of both of our
hearts.

When we came to each other,
nerves beating in our hearts
where they hadn't for years.

Beating Breath - rough draft

It's not language that I think about, but my heart.
The language of the heart.

Images that express the inner maelstrom which enable me to understand while rushing into the future.

Or expressing you, your distant pounding.
How can my heart be your heart?

Is it a metaphoric centre of feeling? Where it tightens or beats too strongly or dissolves into pain? How did we create a vocabulary of love based on physiological reactions? Or is there a consciousness located in the beating organ? Expansiveness, the warmth and beauty of love. A knowingness of the heart? Where we breath.

A person's "real being is his heart, and in pain the heart becomes living and without pain man seems to be living on the surface." The Sufi master, Hazrat Inayat Khan (A Bowl of Saki, Aug 15th, 2007). If we live and work with our body and mind without our heart, he says, we haven't lived. Pain brings the heart alive. When purified of bitterness, the light of existence shines through. Then we become a "source of all goodness," and acts of kindness are easy.

It beats. It is knotted. Untangle the knots of the heart.

In Tantric Buddhism much consideration is devoted to the careful untangling of the Anahata Chakra, the heart centre, with purifying sounds of mantra and visualizations of yantra. The Heart Sutra.

"A giving which gives only its gift, but in the giving holds itself back and withdraws, such a giving we call sending."

"Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?" Martin Heidegger

Give me platitudes, admonish me.

How do I write about fragility? What is it to be fragile? Shouldn't I allow the images to emerge and let feeling sort itself out from there? Can the expression come before the content? Do we learn about ourselves from what we do and say retrospectively?

Is life a backwards motion forwards?

I am always only catching up with myself. A lapse between beats.

An underlying combination of emotions, passions, thoughts, memories, talents, from which emerge words, images that express the inner maelstrom. Where the heart forever untangles itself.

If we can plummet the visceral reaction we can discover our feelings?

Appetites, emotions and feelings, from the simple to the complex. A spectrum where feeling is a complex nexus of interconnections, and we are irretrievably connected.

For me to have empathy, compassion, I need the full range from lived experience to understanding, don't I?

Does a newborn understand perfectly?

Clear mirror.

I tip language like a fallen cup

encrypted first draft of a poem