Monday, January 25, 2010

I've Kept My Feet

Here is another whimsy. There is an underlying truth. I don’t really like being practical. I don’t have the instinct for it at all. My astrological natal chart places everything in all the signs but the earth signs. I of course was born to a Taurus woman with the same birthday in May that I have in November. She was my earth. I do have good logic and math. I reason my way through the practical things, and that is why I can survive in engineering. But I truly don’t have the instinct for it and so I am a terrible mechanic.

On thing I heard in the AA meetings a long time ago: My head is out to kill me and doesn’t worry about it because it is absolutely certain that it will survive the death of my body. That is the kind of thing an alcoholic thinks. I got sober, came back down to earth. Still don’t like it.

I've Kept My Feet

I write poems about
floating, flying, might as well
be footless, rootless.
I was getting to
just chopping my feet clean off,
dead weight, not needed.
Then you said this book
would change my life, maybe has.
I laid down my axe.

But I still hate socks.

March 22, 2009 9:20 AM

14 comments:

  1. I like it - and you do write about flying and floating! Only wings? No roots?

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  2. Karen, I claim roots in other places, places you may have to fly or float to find. Heh.

    An extreme case of Peter Pan? Peter is a good literary example that shows I am not alone in how I view things, and so is Harry Potter. I don't mean only writing them but that I fit with how many want to read these kinds of things. I have a feeling that it helps to have this yearning in order to write works like these.

    I don't have overlarge hairy feet and I don't want to tramp all over Middle Earth fighting orcs. Instead I want the privilege of traveling on the last Elven boats away to the lands to the west. To me that's like going home, even though I know I am no elf and would rather be Gandalf.

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  3. See, this is funny to me, your analytical shows through greatly. You are perhaps heavier than you think. PHOMPppp! You hit the ground. You smack me a little on the cheek, all wake up, be alert! I'm so pleased that there is great float in there.

    LOVE the idea of the mind surviving the death of the body! So appealing.

    (And this is not fair as I was to come to you today and now you have beat me to the visit by going to me! And there you were, at first appearing to argue with me, and then laughing it through. I wasn't meaning languages literally, but as vast imprints of something we don't necessarily understand on the self, but I think you know that. I wish I spoke more than English and a few phrases like, I want hot chicken in Chinese, or here is the knife, spoon, and fork in French. Hard to get a grasp on the language of me with just these few...)

    yes, love right back
    xo
    erin

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  4. Erin, I have a reader going and I often visit with too little time. I read in the reader but don't cross over to comment, become one of the silent ones, the little red dots on the Feedjit map. (Actually I don't know if I even show up on the map when I read you through the reader. I think not.)

    As for the idea of the analytical being of the earth, I think technically it is of the air. That would be astrological lingo. The earth commands the senses and the viscera. I get what you mean again, however, how I *smack* you with my words. I keep to my territory abruptly. I don't mean to usurp yours. This is not really a zero sum game. We can easily both win. This is a harmony. Even dissonance is a harmony. My voice does not cancel yours.

    Yes, I knew that you had used your linguistics metaphorically while I had lived in linguistics as a space from which to speak.

    I hope you understand that you can read my words without an an implied assault. I was mostly in awe that we both hit upon *linguistics* close to the same moment in blogtime without planning. Thus the music, the arrangement of it.

    I often delight in the orchestration of worlds between us all. It often seems order appears in the cacaphony, peeks through so suggestively that I am confirmed in anonymous divinity, the gods and goddesses dancing and at play.

    When we love, they love too.

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  5. You could be some new species of epiphyte and spread your roots in midair, draw it straight from the moisture and the sun while you float along. :)

    I'm charmed by the way you took the usual idiom about one's head and totally inverted it. Short and sweet and clever and the last line is priceless. (I hate them too. Except on winter mornings.)

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  6. Oh lmao! Yes indeedy, socks suck :)

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  7. I never wear socks! Well... not if I can help it :) When I fly in my sleep -- I actually swim through the air and I need my feet to help :).

    But no socks!

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  8. I'm really surprised with the uprising of anti-socks sentiment. Socks suck. Wow.

    I can't say how pleased I am that I can pull off humorous poetry from time to time.

    Thanks, all.

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  9. root bound
    potted plant
    stands by a window
    in the moon glow

    searching for moisture
    forsaken by its nature
    yet swimming in oscillating waves
    of lunar luminescence

    cold dry light
    now substitutes
    for wetness
    and chronic inebriation

    roots
    ironically
    provide stability
    and serene liberation

    roots

    GD

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  10. So there it is...try telling that to my head. Head says: I don't believe you. All roots do is hold me back.

    God's truth, I have an unstable relationship with my own traditional roots. Instead like one blues song, High Flying Bird, Lord, look at me here, rooted like a tree here, got the sit down can't cry oh Lord I want to fly (or some sing die) blues.

    Second verse:
    Sun comes up, lights up the day,
    Moon comes up, chases him on his way.
    East to west they travel every day.
    Lord...

    I used to love to sing this song.

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  11. Christopher, actually I was curious about how you seemed to disagree with me and yet loved me, appreciated my muddly thought, nonetheless. That is an honest state but one that I don't always understand. I am too young in this way, trying to grow up.

    As to the reading, well, I come here to feed a very specific intellectual need and to touch base with a friend. I never check the site reader thing. I don't take all of this that seriously. I just want you to know that I come because I like to come, because it feeds me in an important way, and that you are important to me, not in the reciprocation kinda way.

    much love
    and lightness
    yes, lightness!
    (you challenge me in good ways)
    xo
    erin

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  12. Erin, there's the key piece, I think. It is no competition in my mind at all, who thinks clearest or knows the most, who is right and who is wrong. That is not where I live. I am following my star as they say, not yours. I value you because you are following your star. I know it.

    There are ways that we each suffer the perceptions of each other, can look like one thing while we may be some other. "If I am a hammer, then everything important to me looks like a nail. The rest doesn't register."

    See, knowing this, I can be more free of it in others, since I presume they tend to the same shortcoming. I can work on myself to be less narrow, and allow you to be yourself too, whoever you may be, whatever you may be doing.

    I think we share a common love of writing and I presume this is the basis for a true common ground between us. I actually work on these compositions, both the posts and the commentaries, hoping to guide what the reader will actually read. I know I am not powerless in this. I also know you are not the only reader. :)

    I think I read in your words, Erin, that you are awake like this when you write too. So it is not how far you have come but that you are on the journey that excites me about you. All my closer blog friends are awake like this, not only that they are but that they touch me because they can, because they like touching people. You touch me. I know you like touching people. In this way, perhaps our words are like massage as much as message. :)

    What remains to say, however you choose to understand this, I actually look up when I look at you. The life of your heart is clearly worthy of my humility. I have been reading you right along as you know. I have found nothing in your clarity that takes away from the elevation I choose for you.

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  13. "If I am a hammer, then everything important to me looks like a nail. The rest doesn't register."

    OHMYGOD!

    Yes, yes, I work on letting loose my ego. It's still a balloon on a string and I have sticky fingers.

    I'm glad, Christopher. Glad for it all.

    xo
    erin

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  14. See? That's what I mean. You are delicious. What beauty.

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The chicken crossed the road. That's poultry in motion.


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