Saturday, November 20, 2010

Clipped Wings

Time by ~imperioli

"Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted." - Martin Luther King Jr

"Someday we'll look back on this moment and plow into a parked car." - Evan Davis, Presenter for the BBC

"I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult." - Rita Rudner, Comedienne

"If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going." - Professor Irwin Corey, American comedian, satirist and pantomimist

I think there is no doubt that I am creatively maladjusted. However, I do not feel the fate of humanity is in my hands. I do feel a destiny. I hope that I am aligned with it in some way. I hope that my poetry and the other things I write and gather are part of that instead of a side note or worse, a diversion. I look over on my table beside me where I have a slew of papers, many of them the effluvia of my life, especially the bills that come due. At one end of the pile lies a manila folder and in that folder, usually six to a page, are hard copies of the poems I have written. There are about two hundred pages. This is part of my back up system. I have another set of these poems at work, in a file cabinet there. I also have them saved off on a remote drive. But I have no idea if any of that is important. Save them for what? I think there is no doubt I am creatively maladjusted.

Clipped Wings

To think of you with
wings is to lift my own heart
into the slipstream
of your feather light
flight beyond the slow moving
silver moon, twilight
colored sky, sunset
calling out your name and mine,
but I have clipped wings.

August 31, 2009 3:53 PM

6 comments:

  1. This is so achingly beautiful. I am glad for your hard copies and the ones in progress....
    Linda

    ReplyDelete
  2. I come back to this time and time again, "What I do is me: for that I came." Gerard Manley Hopkins. And yet while it might seem completely egocentric, there is a sister side to it of hope, hope that for that which is me, there will be a positive imprint of sorts made. It is hard for me to admit this second part because it sure as shit sounds arrogant but it is a nugget inside of perhaps all creative maladjusteds, that there is a reason for this drive to create.

    To think of you with wings is to lift my own heart. Yes, it does these things. Beautiful.

    xo
    erin

    ReplyDelete
  3. There is so much happening in the world that offers hope and yet the dominant display obscures and misdirects us from each other. It is terribly easy to forget about our brothers and sisters on the path for we are and should be dispersed to maximum effect as we chip away at the ice of despair that leads us to our collective doom. And yet we are to be found more easily now that the computer allows expression of the interdependence that forms us. I come here because it is easy to say this:

    I love you.

    ReplyDelete
  4. yes, for me too. it is more difficult face to face. the mechanics of me gets in the way. oddly, it seems unnatural for me in this skin. here is what i am, what i really am.

    love you too.

    xo
    erin

    ReplyDelete
  5. It is intriguing to me that there are so many of us who can say the same, that we are all here and human together precisely because we can say to each other, "but being here is like being an exile, like the only legal alien in New York, as sting puts it". It is not only that we are alien, but that we are the only one. That's how so many feel. My mother said commonly, "Where does an alien go to register?" There was for her something real about not only feeling alien but that there was no way to even bring it up, no mechanism for its expression. Me too. I nearly died precisely of this when I was 19-21.

    However, there are the others and some of them, like my last lover, are quite remarkable people, quite genuinely awake in their way as we show signs of being in ours. She has always been remarkably resistant to this alien thing and was adamant that it was self indulgence. My dad would have accused me of falling for some really sophisticated version of the illusion of central position. Actually, he did accuse me of it.

    I am convinced that is not right. I am neither particularly self indulgent, nor have I fallen any further than anyone else into illusion. However, I can also see how it looks like self indulgence to claim I am "not of this world" if you view me from the thorough conviction that every one of us is exactly as human as we appear to be.

    ReplyDelete
  6. The key, I think, is to remember that that fate is in the hands of *all* the creatively maladjusted together, not yours as an individual. We each play our part.

    ReplyDelete

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


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