Still-Life Composition of the Poinsettia

They float, clamour, collide, reach over each other, fold or open, radiate toward light.

A variegated mass of embodied thought. That greening poinsettia from last Solstice, Hanukkah, Christmas on the wooden overhand of the large old oak desk that came from a used furniture store on the other side of the country. Yes, this helps.

Feel what I'm feeling. Though sometimes I don't like what I feel about something and so block it until it drops like a dead leaf.

Or it's stronger than my not liking and I must integrate it into the mass reaching for the light.

Landscape as Subjective Figure

perhaps the landscape isn't what we rest in, perhaps the landscape is a consequence of who we are

Bullion of Hearts

Imagine a love that cannot be tarnished,
not even by us.

We messed the beauty we had,
with our switchbacks.

I demonize you; you decry me as a crazed woman.
We wouldn't speak to each other; my fury unabated
fierce.

You were a sleazy cheat; I was self-righteous, indignant.

What is this love that continues despite our resistance?

Surely not modern love, with its questionings, choices.

But some ancient love, as old as the gold sun itself,
primal, spiritual, enfolding its mystery.

What is a love that cannot fail itself?

And how can we trust it?

It is strange not to be fighting you
like a bad obsession, like an addiction to street drugs.

To accept your irrefutable, irrevocable
presence in my life.

The forever clause,
it's caught us
darling.

one of those 'perched days,' like the birds on branches outside, it's fine, feels on the brink of something important, an expectant day

Coming Into the Station

It's strange coming to the end of a story that's insistently told itself every day for a month.

I'd like to go on, but it's finished. Oh, perhaps another night of writing, at most.

It's not sad to come to the end, though having evenings to do nothing will seem strange, almost indolent, excessively free, you know what I mean.

I may even start going to bed at a reasonable hour again, instead of 2 or 3am, and do away with the weekend sleepfests.

What can I say about it? I've had a writer's block for about a year and a half in that nothing has flowed easily in that long. Yes, I do feel writing's been released in me again and that feels good and wonderful. Writing is flowing, the block's released, and I don't care what caused it or didn't.

The story is strange in that it is not autobiographical at all and doesn't have huge depth or any of the writerly slants I like to give things I compose.

The first day I sat down and wrote, without any prior notion of what to write.

Each day was like this. In fact, the less pre-determined, the more spontaneous, the better. I cleared my mind as in meditation and wrote from a fresh place. Often what occured surprised me, yet seemed logical in terms of the story that was telling itself.

The story, now that's another aspect of this process. The story reminds me of those long, boring dreams we have, ones that take lots of dreamtime, and if we remember them, relating them goes on and on and really we see very little point to them. They are not 'major' dreams. They are ordinary, every day dreams. Our little adventures, the ones submerged in our minds beneath the big transformational dreams, beneath the big thoughts and important occurences of our lives. What I discovered from writing this book is that an awful lot of things go on just below the conscious threshold. We are infinitely rich beings on whom the world makes a huge impact.

Yeah, there 's a fair bit of Eros in it. But not nearly enough. And towards the end it dies out altogether, but then the main character got married and has a family and etcetera.

But it was juicy in the telling up to the settling down.

I'm going to race through it cleaning up glaring inconsistencies, grammar, excesses, and if you convince me you'd be interested, and were willing to share your thoughts on the composition, by email, then I may add you to a version for readers and/or collaborators (for the purpose of editing typos only) who've expressed an interest in the manuscript.

grey pearls

thin brown pods hang in clusters on branches collecting the grey rain in drops that fall like pearl grey necklaces to the ground

To Go or Not To Go

Almost finished the novella begun during National Novel Writing Month, whose finish line I passed last Wednesday. The book like a weight, now, with no deadline. So I decided no more than 6000 words, to be finished sometime Wednesday night.

I was going to go to the Toronto NaNoWriMo TGIF (thank god it's finished) celebration tonight, but it's cold and raining, and I never did connect with anyone else doing NaNo here. I could read a snatch for 2 minutes, which I did last time I went in 2005, but.....

Lazy, perhaps. And, oh, some of the writing read at that tgif was real bad, oh it was hilariously bad, deliberately bad, and everyone laughed as they were meant to.... but, oh. Bad.

Yes, I'm lazy.

And older than most of the Toronto NaNo participants who party. Last time I sat with a woman in my age range and she was a self-admitted alcoholic who was so drunk she swayed as she sat. It was hard to understand her since she was slurring her words. If I recall she had written about 3,000 words in total, but loved to party...

If I ever got my wherewithalls together to realize I'm gonna do NaNo and go to the Toronto NaNo launch party at the beginning of November, I might meet some fellow nutcases who actually drove themselves to write like maniacs for the month.

So, staying at home, lazily lounging...

And writing, finishing the loose, wordy draft.

Sigh, no partying for this lady tonight, work continues...