Stones

I was thinking about what kids fill their time with these days, computers and video games take up a good chunk of kids time. You know what I had to fill about the same amount of time on a regular basis when I was a kid? Rocks. I played with rocks. I'm not kidding either; get off the bus, throw rocks. Skip rocks. Stack rocks. Build a rock wall. Break rocks. Scratch things on rocks with other rocks. Rock fights with the kids down the road. We played with rocks. Times have changed.

Flushed

In the bathroom I found the flaw
in the thoughts that had been brewing
sequestered in my head
like bugs in my ears

Sitting with tingly feet
as I thumbed the catalog
took snippets of sonnets
perusing the pages

While all the while I pondered
what was stuck in my head
like some contrived confection
in the mouth of a child: wasted

There was something
something stiff that wouldn’t loosen
resisting my method
and hedging the thesis

Long I sat and drifted
though the channels
of tangential sub-thought
only to end up back on the pot

Staring at hard water stains
and the dried foam
of a shower two days old
only inches away

Memories of mornings
lather, rinse, repeat
and dim breaks from bright days
as I came here for relief

Warm and bright in winter
Equally the opposite
when the weather is warm
it always knows the score

And just when I think
it’s time to give up
POP
I see a passage through

But the lassitude of my reckoning
the languid method
has left me idle
and a bit unaware

So I stop
a motionless moment
as if moving might dislodge the thought
and trap the intellectual ort

The girth of realization
seems to turn its shoulders sideways
as it carefully squeezes past
out, and into the open

Ah HA!
of course!
how daft I was not to see it
so simple

The golden ratio
is the result of the imperfection
of the Euclidian attempt at symmetry
in a fractal rotation

It will never achieve
in its quixotic attempt
anything
but the beauty of flaw

So I fold down the corner
ten pages from where I started
and pile the books back up
ready for next time

Those who are the hardest to love...

"Those who are the hardest to love are the ones who need it most"
...not my words, but I wish they were.

Why is it when we can't seem to work it out, it makes us want too so much more? Why not just say 'fuck it', let it go, walk away, find something new? But no, we dig in, or at the very least we morn the passing of it...even if it wasn't working. Crazy.

A friend calls it "needing your pain" as in the pain defines who you are at the time. Maybe it just lets us think we were part of something we wanted to be but wasn't. I don't really know.

I think I'm hard to love, but I also seem to be drawn to those who I think need it most. And in so doing I encounter another who is hard to love (who is probably looking for someone else who needs it most). Its a feedback loop...emotional relativism...recursive/obssessive...who knows. It might just be another emergent pattern in the complexity of universal constructs.

Either way, it feels shitty. Especially since it gets dark at 5:15 now.

Through the past, darkly

I'll warn you now, some of this is disturbing. It might change your perspective on me, so think hard before you continue. I thought hard before I posted this, and to be honest, I'm still a bit nervous about it. It makes me feel vulnerable...and I hate that feeling.

I'll admit, posting things from the past (which themselves are ruminations on a past) is maudlin at best, egocentric to be sure, and one might argue a bit neurotic. All true, I'll cop to it lest I again play the hypocrite. But enough of the posturing preamble...

...I was straightening out my studio (aka "the shop") and found myself looking through boxes of papers from my old Howard Space Studio from 2000. In it I found some "poems" I'd written during a very difficult period. I was wrestling with myself, my past, the stuff I'd never dealt with (does everyone have shit like that?). In those days I spent a lot of time on a couch (if you know what I mean), and even more time secluded in a dark studio (which, by the way, if it weren't for several very special people, I doubt if I'd ever had emerged) drawing and painting strange little things which I wouldn't show anyone. In part because things like the following were where my mind was at te time...

Origins
Somewhere on the boundaries of waking and slumber
where stars are anything from dust to fishes
there lived a cast of bodies who knew more than they could say.

And each lived wholly separate from the others
who lived independently, and yet shared in the functions which bound them
deep within (and sometimes without) the body.

And though their paths were intricate,
their plans and actions possessed of energies unlimited,
their endeavors left the system stagnant and atrophied.

For when one would travel forward,
casting thoughts and goals ahead and charging past the crest of it,
somewhere else dark deeds retarded the purity of anything ever done.

And this was the origin of where they had begun,
in the dark deeds and desperation of another being's sickness
breathed down the throat, forcibly, of a small child.

It stunk of decay, of rot and infection,
and it crawled inside and fed on the pink flesh of youth and innocence,
and laughed as it cut the bonds which bound the child to love.

And in so stinking (though no one seemed to smell it)
the sickness spoke to everyone and warned them away,
and wide berths were what the child knew from then on.

But the breath of sickness returned to speak and play,
for even illness needs companions,
and together purged the pink of possibilities forever.

It was there, in the boundaries of waking and slumber
that the first of them were launched,
at the advice of the voice in the stairwell.


...So yeah. There's that.

So you might ask why I would share that. Simple; the only way to rid yourself of darkness, is to shed some light on it.

I read this today too..."The singular burden of solitude spares no one, not even great minds". It's interesting because I don't think of solitude as a burden. Loneliness yes, but not solitude. Solitude seems peaceful, loneliness feels...desolate.

My peripheral vision

...we're made of very tiny stuff, atoms. But we are also reliant on the macroscopic dimension, like the solar system. So we need both before we emerge, which makes us tertiary in as far as the complexity systems that lead to our particular dimension (life).


So matter exists...then stars and planets...and then, maybe, maybe, if everything is just right...life. We are not fundamental to either system, not atomic, not stellar (nor galactic or Universal if you want to take it farther), we are peripheral; A byproduct of the physical nature of the dimensions that become us.


It's a head-full, no?


When I'm done with this I'm going to tackle how matter is the byproduct of Euclidian and Fractal geometries (think sine waves!). We'll see how it goes...stay tuned.

Hi

...I think this will work. I'm busy of course, but I need to have this outlet. Now I just need to make the time and find the words.