I Think You Are An Angel

This is a personal poem and I shall not myself reveal who I wrote this about.

I will take this opportunity to say that someone has recently said she thought I was an angel. I looked at that seriously in my twenties. How arrogant is that!? If I am an angel then I have been stripped and flensed and blocked. I have no sense of it. I do have a sense of otherworldliness that somehow has a very different relationship with God. Where we take it for granted that you can't argue with God, in my inner space there is a kind of memory of a place where you certainly can argue with God and I did so. I claim there is a sense at least temporarily that I won. What I won was the right to proove it, whatever it was I was arguing about. That's what this life seems to be for me.

I am here to proove a point. I do not understand the argument and think I actually can't without seeing with very different eyes, but I know I am rightly placed for it, this point of contention. I also think I am here out of turn because of it, would not have been in this life if this argument had not occurred. My life is both easier in some ways and also more difficult in others because of that. My inner resources are different, but my sense of belonging is woeful. First I had to learn to survive somehow the transition to adulthood. That took til about 26. Then I had to smash a kind of arrogance. That took til about 35. Finally, I had to leave the crutch of alcoholism behind. For me that was easy but only because the discipline that it takes is easy. That took til 54, but really is still in progress in the way that I still constantly bring it up. It is far more normal for a guy like me to be a gutter drunk or dead.

The long history of angels as they appear in our cultures, they are the manifestations of the adoration of God. It would seem that while it makes sense to speak of our self centered and self willed freedom to choose and to act, it does not make sense to speak of angels this way. They are God centered in a complete (perfect?) way. Thus I am left with an observation. If I am an angel, I am a fallen one. Whoa. Does this mean something? Perhaps. If it does, then perhaps Lucifer is not such a bad guy. I am no Lucifer, but then maybe our understanding of Lucifer is twisted too. I believe I have God's support. So I think does Lucifer. Think about that. How can it not be so? We are told Lucifer is in rebellion but how can that be true without God's permission? That, for example, is one facet of the story of Job, that there is a running relationship between God and Lucifer, and in the end we are instructed that it is beyond human understanding. Hmmm.

I don't know about you, but I really hate being told things are beyond me. Yet there it is. There are things square in the middle of my life that are beyond me. Lack of power of all kinds, including the power of understanding is my dilemma. I cannot avoid it, must admit it. Even all the way back to that moment when I was reminded of who I am, the sacred moment that made it possible for me to survive my path into adulthood, I have to admit I do not understand what the fuck happened. So I am radically dependent. I am dependent on you and the others in my life, I am dependent upon God. All else is pretense. If I am to accept the truth of free will it has to keep this dependency in place or else I will lose purchase on any sort of wisdom. Horns of the dilemma. Free will is self evident both from inclination within and experience in the world. I am a radically dependent man correctly intent on holding up my end of the bargain. That is the proper use of the will. I cannot drop either end of this deal without also losing any authenticity that can be mine.

This may all be complete crap. Probably. I don't care that this is not factually true, whatever that means. Frances, my last lover is certain that this is a cute story I tell myself and it really doesn't affect anything I do in my life. She smiles at me indulgently. It is self indulgence. Maybe. I know it doesn't matter to you that I keep this story, tend it, get better at telling it. Something happened to me that changed everything. That much is certain.

I Think You Are An Angel

I think you are an angel
not one so holy and distant
but here in my heart now
with words and words
that don't belong to me
these words you let out into the world.
Let out like the Northern Lights
across the sky
they reach me here
where I was feeling so silent.
I step into the glow.
And somehow now I
see differently.

February 16, 2009 9:14 PM

The Squirrel Died

This is sort of a true story. Mostly. This cat in my poem was the last old cat that I brought here from my old life, where I lost my wife to illness and alcoholism and divorce, and finally death. The cat was part of a pair of sisters we bought at a pet store because they were too cute together and my wife and I feared they would be separated. Annie and me, we tended to do things like that.

It turned out that they never did dote on each other, these sister cats, had no apparent special need for each other at all, not like our boys.

We had done this before with two red tabbie striped males. One was more adventurous than the other and the one more shy obviously needed his brother. His brother tolerated him, was clearly fond of him. But he also took risks, and one day he didn't return home. His shy brother went a little crazy in grief, changed, became as these needy cats do more difficult to live with. I am sure he didn't remember his brother after a while, but some of his grief behavior stuck with him, became frozen and in this way he never got over losing his brother.

When my last old cat, the one in this poem, lost her sister who died of illness quite young, I didn't notice any overt grief behavior. But what happened to her, when I moved here, she objected big time to losing her old house. That's what turned her. She was a place cat. She had established herself there and she didn't really like it here. She let me know. Over time she adjusted to the garage but insisted that the house was to be her toilet. I could never let her in for long and I had to keep track. This broke my heart. I wanted her to be an indoor cat but that just didn't work at all.

The Squirrel Died

A squirrel came in
to die in a nest it made
in a bag at the back
under the shelf there
in my garage. I don't know
how long it lived there
before passing but
my cat also lives on pads
I lay down for her
in the garage. There
was no bad sign, not at all.
We are both glad though,
my old cat and me,
that I found it and the smell
is gone. That was bad.

February 16, 2009 2:07 PM

Hornswoggled

Hmmm. Yesterday I posted from the River Styx. In this poem I am up a tree, arguably trying to piss up a rope, a little green man to boot. This is of course the very next poem, written just a half hour later than the poem calling for someone to kill me now. So I guess I was in an odd mood in mid February.

I am reading the recent bio of John Lennon, that huge 800 page book. I ran into something wonderful that I never knew before. It changes my history. In Liverpool there is a street called Lime Street. There was a famous prostitute called Maggie May and she worked Lime Street. Uh oh. It turns out that Maggie figured in a popular English folk ballad.

I once fell for a lady named Katy. This was back in 1970. In 1970 I was fresh back from East Pakistan (Bangladesh). I was a student part time at San Jose State, later named Cal State U at San Jose, worked a little and sold dope to stay alive and keep myself in dope. I lived with my dealer, a smuggler and student, in a dope house south of the campus, on South 12th St. The Dooby Brothers lived up the street at the time. Oddly, there were two roommates with us who didn't do much dope, and a lady who lived upstairs in a separate apartment in the house who was clean too. It was just that way in those days, with people mingling and not worried about it.

Katy came into my life looking to buy some pot. She walked into my room, me never having met her before, I was in my underwear, boxers. I didn't care and apparently neither did she. She slayed me just like that. I was hers, if she wanted me. This is all a really complex story and of course it didn't work over the long haul. She was married and trying to leave her husband who was substantially younger than she was. They had intended to be a rock and roll band. That didn't work, and neither did their marriage, but he was really in love with her. I was a year younger than her too, but of course several years older than him. So when Rod Stewart came out with his hit Maggie May, I sang it to her along with the radio. "The sun in your face really shows your age, but that don't matter, to me you're everything." Amen. She got really angry. She did not take jokes like that very well.

Now Maggie May turns into a famous Liverpudlian prostitute. Wow. I had no idea. I guarantee you that Rod Stewart did though. Now I wonder how many people here in the states got that thing at the time. That was a really big song here. If it was as big in England, I am sure it was big in a different way because of the folk song.

This thing with Katy was a big thing for me, and in a curious way anchored the part where I was going to move to Oregon if I could. That's a whole other story. Maggie May is a big song for me because of Katy.

Hornswoggled

I'm trapped here again,
hornswoggled little green man,
hung by the hemp rope
treed and upended.
You claim I'm upright looking
at it with God's eyes
but blood rushing down
reddens my admitted bad eyes
and I still feel down.

February 15, 2009 11:36 AM

Using My Last Match

I have no idea what this was all about. I was under some pressure because my lay off had been going on for a while. But I have succeeded in placing myself in the position to handle lengthy time off. Since I had the heart event I have noticed my own mortality statements in a different way and wonder if I was noticing my approaching issue at some level, sensing what was to come in May.

If I am really at that place where I die, then hurry up and do it quickly.

I know my body instinctively struggles to stay alive. I have lived through enough stuff to know I don't have to pump up any false positive to convince myself to stay alive. However, I also know that staying alive is hardly the most important value in my box of values. I need to know I am of some use. I don't even want one day where I return to being a parasite. I have been there, done that. I need to know that some level of comfort is if not currently in my life, at least in my future. Quality of life rates high with me. I have seen too much. I know there really is a line there and that I have no right to judge another's decision about that, nor they me. Staying alive at any cost is for me simply insane and inhumane. The Hippocratic Oath cannot be applied in violation of humane values. The rub of course is figuring out the timing.

Using My Last Match

Hit me with a club,
why don't you, with a hammer.
Don't leave me standing,
not in this bad light.
Don't leave me to die alone
in the empty dark.
Take me down down down
throw me in the river Styx,
feed me to the fish.

I've used my last match.

February 16, 2009 9:58 AM

The Perfect Storm

I found this. It is so good that I am putting it here. This has certainly happened to me, more than once. However, I am still sure that the source is at least collaborative between me and some Other.

"Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about."

- Haruki Murakami
Kafka On The Shore

Why You Should Write

I am currently reading Bright Shiny Morning, by James Frey. I am nearly done. What a gem. In the back of that book is an essay Jim entitled Music and Talking. He points out that he nearly always writes to loud music in the background. He points out that he always talks first what he writes and that if you talk you will see that language is only partially guided by grammar and mainly guided by context. Thus because he seriously writes as he speaks, he tends to write without many grammatical conventions, which do not show up in speech. He doesn't say, but he knows he should write. I know I should write.

Why You Should Write

The writing you do
reveals the design not yet
in God's world until
your hands and heart place
it precisely, a jewel.
That is what you do.

February 16, 2009 8:28 AM

Within Winter Lies The Truth

Today's words follow this time. I want this poem from last winter to sit with you a little while. I hope you won't move immediately into my prose.

Within Winter Lies The Truth

At the heart of it
like an old matchhead, glowing
under the crust, like
setting lava grows
dark with heat inside, within
winter lies the truth,
spring ready to rise,
life calling out to life, soon
it will feed again.

This is so right, true
that I can't argue, even
though it really hurts.

February 15, 2009 8:11 PM

Why would spring coming hurt? Because I have to let go of the old, make room for the new. Because I am attached. Because I have no choice and I don't like having no choice, go out of my way to keep the illusion alive that I do have a choice. Because I lack humility and humility is essential to my survival. Thus when I encounter something where humility is the answer I die a little inside and the loss hurts, always. Because life feeds on life and thus someone, some entity has to die that others live, a truth I deeply regret, as if it was my fault. Because I am so self centered that thinking something like that my fault makes sense and I know better. This shames me. Because I suspect that I object to life feeding on life because life might be feeding on me. That's just soooo wrong. That's why spring coming might hurt someone like me.

The Rising Orbs

People I know take orbs seriously, have gone to power points where they appear. They have night pictures of them, and of themselves and others among them. I have personally never seen them or been to those places. The places where orbs appear are not hard to get to if you know where to go. Not everyone can experience them.

I do know what it is like to call for someone to return. It doesn't matter what the reality is. The heart is another reality. I call for my deceased wife sometimes. I call for Mary and Frances. The others are so far back there before my wife. I don't call for them. I also call for the fantasy of some others whom I have never known as lovers. I called for Mary like that. One day she answered even though I never conceived she would. That is a lesson to me. Sometimes fantasies come true, and are even better in reality. That lasted two years and came to an inevitable end. That I knew it was going to be like that did not change a thing. That some others found a great deal in my loving Mary to criticize did not change a thing. It was a blessing and it changed my life way for the better.

Off topic...I am so completely pleased with this blogging experience. Sometimes the gifts are beyond measure. I look at the Feedjit widget and know there are many who never comment. I even know some friends around here where I live that go to my blog and never comment but tell me about it. Frances visits but will not comment. And you people who choose to interact are wonders of my heart. Today has been especially fine this way, with two poems in the comments. So this is just a heads up to those who may not go to the comment page, if you are coming here specifically for the poetry, you might want to check the comments. You never know when a poem might appear, sometimes a poetic dialogue. I have been known to write one in the comments of my own blog when the moment calls for it.

The Rising Orbs

The orbs always come
at this time of year
to nestle near the needles
at the base of trees
and rise at your name
called out in hope that calling
will bring you blessings
and blessings bring you
back to me, back to this place.

February 15, 2009 11:15 PM

Northern Lights

In replying to Joseph (Naming Constellations) today concerning Hafiz, I did a little research on the internet...what a tool. This time a little disappointing however. Indeed, now I don't know if I love Hafiz or Daniel Ladinsky. He is the latest and most accessible translator. I read a criticism of my source book on the internet that points out that the translation is so free that it is arguably not Hafiz' work. The critic is harsher than that. I have toned it down. That is the trouble with translation.

I have studied I Ching for nearly forty years. All my material is of course translated work. I have a dozen or more, including works by Thomas Cleary, which are later Chinese interpretations from the Buddhist school, the Confucian school, the later Taoist Alchemical school, and another spare hard hitting merchant's school. Cleary translated these commentaries. I consider myself a scholar, but I am hardly that if it is required that I understand the original Chinese text rather than understanding about it.

Now I must live with the idea that I have patterned myself after Daniel Ladinsky, thinking he was Hafiz. I am not sure I care. My voice is an honest voice. This is true with I Ching. It is also true in the poems I have written over the last year.

Northern Lights

I see you lying
on the snow to see the lights,
splashed across the sky
in the ice and stars
and later, at noon beside
you in the still air
are crystals, tiny,
bright as starshine in your hair,
in the bright white cold.

February 15, 2009 10:22 AM

Hafiz Speaks

I am going to let my buddy Hafiz speak tonight.

It happened again last night:

Love popped the cork on itself-
Splattered my brains across the sky.

I imagine now for ages
Something of Hafiz will appear

To fall like stars.

Isn't that cool??

And this one:

Last night God posted
On the tavern wall

A hard decree for all of love's inmates which read:

If your heart cannot find a joyful work
The jaws of this world will probably

Grab hold of your sweet ass.

I have more than one work. I recommend more than one.

An Ancient Spring

Here is a vision of the way it once was. I am drawn to pieces of this vision like I belong there, would belong here if it was more like this. I have a serious belonging problem. It is no accident that I am alcoholic.

Yet I am also aware of the advantages that civilization has brought to us. I am what I call a "hot house flower". What I mean by that is modern civilization has saved my life often enough for me to know that had I been born with this body in an earlier time I would never have made it out of infancy or early childhood. That has been carried forward as well. My skills are all civilized skills. In other words, not only am I still alive because of civilization, if it were taken away I would not survive either the transition, and if I somehow did, I could not make the transition myself to some form of more basic tribal society role, unless somehow I could be the shaman.

An Ancient Spring

The tribal drumbeat
matches, leads the dancing girls
while the shaman chants
at the edge of light
further from the fire than crones
go this night, well placed
to bridge the dark gaps
between the warming of spring
and the cold white shards
of winter to north
of this hopeful dancing clan
seeking a new life.

February 15, 2009 10:02 AM

Itchy Condition

I am just buried under work for the next little while, not sure how long. So I am sitting here earlier than usual, fairly dog bone tired. Apparently I was more energetic back in mid February. At that time I was still laid off, had a couple weeks to go.

Speaking of itching. I bought some stuff on line. One of the things I bought is a telescoping stainless steel back scratcher. Sometimes a well scratched back is better than sex.

Itchy Condition

I've kept this long search
going because I've felt so
strange standing still here.
I've made a good nest
and the wind breaks well around
the walls but I itch,
hanker after ways
I heard you went, others go.
I want a good scratch.

February 15, 2009 9:48 AM

The Garden

There is a place for shrines, for ritual, for practice, practice, practice in the spiritual life. This remains true even without God at the heart of things, thus Humanists tend to form these relationships with the heart too. Even Communists hold their parades in support of their yearnings.


Certainly I cannot live without my practice. At one point I held a particular location on the Willamette River to be my power point. It did not matter that I could no longer get there. Later, the Willamette National Cemetary became a power point. Sometimes I go there. Even if I don't, it is still there in precisely the same way for me.


The Garden

At the far, far end
of the gravelled path I placed
a shrine on the rim
of the gulf between
you and me, in the garden
I planted for you.
You remember it
I know, the gated roses
overhead as you
enter and the paths
that wind among the plantings.
I find myself there.

February 15, 2009 9:24 AM

In Thin Air

I sometimes feel just like this. For example, some years ago I was sent on assignment to a silicon wafer facility south of Salem. I was completely over my head. That's how that turned out. It still would have been okay had I been given a supervisor who actually knew his job. We were doing the process piping hook up design. They gave us a plumber as a supervisor rather than a design engineer. That meant I needed about ten years of experience as a designer in high tech in order to do the job. I had no support from above and that meant I had to operate at the higher level. I failed. The whole time I struggled and kept surviving, I felt exactly like this. I could feel the gravity but I didn't fall. The wedgie was uncomfortable.

Then something happened. I had a small part to play in it but the main thing was the business maneuvers that were going on. I was fired summarily and basically escorted off the job. They packed me up after I was gone. I was fired to protect a future contract that was in process. This had never happened to me before, hasn't happened since. The fingers holding me in thin air opened and I fell hard. I was ten years into working for the company that assigned me to the work, had been laid off and was back working on contract. I have never worked for them again, knew then I would not ever work for them again. This was my sobriety job, working for this company. It was the first job I got after I got sober and gave me stability in the first ten years of my sobriety.

The rest of that story is that I have been blessed by being released from that company, but it was a painful and embarassing separation. There is are many reasons to commend the separation. It might even be this could be called a divine intervention to get me out of there. If so, God sometimes plays pretty rough.

In Thin Air

It's me in thin air
without the necessary
wings, relying solely on
you to hold me here.
Amazing. I don't
float, nor do I fly.
Hanging in your pinched fingers,
I will not look down.

Don't look down, that's what you said.

February 14, 2009 4:14 PM

I Will Not Leave

Here is a poem of promise and commitment.

I Will Not Leave

Then remember this
on the day you walk upstairs,
that once you did swim,
turned cartwheels, let me
catch you, you who smiled for me,
who let me clasp hands
with you as your soul
rose to the lighted dew dropped
sky, who told me dreams.

February 13, 2009 9:53 PM

Hidden Under Snow

This is a poem I wrote as winter began to let up its grip in Oregon. Portland is far enough north that we have real seasons, but far enough south that they don't keep hold that long. Because one of my friends is Australian, I keep thinking about that. It's night there when it's day here. It's summer there when it is winter here. I believe it is very good to keep that difference in mind. It can be one of the true salutary effects of our internet connections if these connections can give to us the true measure of the planet. I can exchange with my Australian friend, but not easily converse. She lives upside down and backwards, or I do.

I have another friend who has gone rather quiet. She lives in Tehran. Ouch.

Hidden Under Snow

Thank You for water
fresh from the spring at the head
of the running creek
hidden under snow
sparkling in the sun of love.
I've seen with Your eyes,
know I've seen through love,
through the angelic limpid
true soul of fierce joy.

February 13, 2009 8:59 PM

Someone's Got To

I couldn't make this up. I'll bet you couldn't either. It is just beyond me to ever conceive of this. I found it on Post Secret, so somebody did make it up, perhaps even commited this act. I loved the postcard so much I wrote it as a poem. This act against the Gideon Bible is surely one of the ultimates in underground resistance, the sort of thing hippies loved to do. It is nearly perfect in its peacefulness. I don't care that I stole the idea. Stealing the idea (but not the form) is technically legal. Stealing the idea also is an underground act. Everything I am builds on the fact that for six years I was a hippie in one or another form. In 1966 this die was cast. In 1973 I was forced by circumstance to go underground. I began training up in things like careers and marriages. Even so it took eight more years until I bought a house. My heart still delights in things hip.

Someone's Got To

I go on long trips,
stay in hotels with nothing
to do, but pull out
Gideon's Bible
and draw naked people where
I can find the space
for them. Then I list
the pages on the cover
page to help others.

February 13, 2009 4:16 PM

Shirking Work Again

Oh man. A friend of mine has asked me to stand as a witness as he marries the woman he has been with for several years. I have of course said yes. This Saturday at 2pm. I have taken on the other job as a bachelor friend of a soon to be married man. I am asking him every day if he really wants to do this. We both agree that is my job until Saturday. Heh.

So he told his partner (they live together now). She doesn't like it. Heh. We are both laughing about that. He says she'll be okay again in a week. I have decided to avoid her til Saturday if I can. I value my privates.

Shirking Work Again

Climbing brambles reach
the top of the white trellis
meant for my jasmine
because I have shirked my work
again for dallying with
the likes of your tunes,
the hunting hounds of Harrow,
or your wide green eyes.

February 13, 2009 3:50 PM

Needing Advice

You can't push the river. Some questions are answered by realizing we have to stop asking them. It is possible to ask a question that must be answered both ways or even cannot be answered at all. Language is a very large indeterminate but finite system. On any given day there is a finite number of words and a finite algorithm for uttering them in any coherent way. On any given day I am a finite expression of humanity (of the human system) utililizing a finite system to express whatever I choose. There are two directions which cause serious trouble. If I try to express the infinite I enter paradox. If I try to express myself too close to the subjective heart of my life, I again enter paradox. This trouble was demonstrated in that latter way by Kurt Godel who proved that any system with sufficient power would be subject to the paradox of self reference, that you could formulate expressions within the system that cannot be responded to in the system. In other words, it is possible to ask questions concerning existence that cannot be answered. Of course the trouble with the infinite is self evident mathematically.

Thus trying to capture God in language cannot be a human activity. If God is ever captured in language it must be the other way, that God hands the language down. Even so, there can never be a satisfactory proof of any of these statements at the level of mathematical rigor. This is only as concerns God's identity, or ours, that is, the self referent or the infinite.

Oh by the way, that you and I might have an infinite soul probably doesn't change this a whit. We are in general forced to press through the finite systems of body and language in order to utter anything.


Needing Advice

I've come here today,
climbed your mountain to reach
the outlook where you
perch like the eagle
you are, glad to find you home
rather than flying,
soaring too far out
to bother with my questions.
I hope you won't shift
your shape so soon like
last time, leave me to trudge back
down the mountain slope
so unsatisfied.
I ask about life, is it
Meaningful story
or not? Yes, you say.
Then you shift again, sprout wings,
fly away from me.

February 13, 2009 2:57 PM

I'm Not Doing This Right

Here's the thing. I have this reputation as a "safe" man. In AA there are a significant number of women who don't start out trusting women, or even if they do, they are like me and do the best honesty and truth telling across the sexes, telling mom or dad. Me, I am grateful that I can have the kind of honesty I do where I would never tell my mother these things. Her instincts were wrong for me already when I was seven. But as a child of a single mother in the late forties and early fifties, I was trained to speak straight across with women and it works for me today. The women spread through the grapevine that I am one who will not mess with them. However.

Who is going to gift me with the kind of physical intimacy that I have done without for so much of my life? When Ann got so sick. Before that when I was a drunk. For the first few years going through our divorce and after.

In 1999 there was an intervention. The next seven years gave me an active sex life, even at times a colorful one. I have been solo since.

I am not lonely. I have many friends because of how I live. I don't lie awake nights aching for companionship. I would sleep fine if I didn't have other reasons for waking up frequently in the night. I always go back to sleep. This is not about desperation even a little. In fact I often observe relationships around me and go home grateful for my solitude.

However, I straight up miss physical intimacy. In the middle of the day back last February I spoke up.

I'm Not Doing This Right

Man, she called me safe,
said I was a godsend to
women wounded as
she, so open, kind,
so clear sighted and so wise
and five others gave
agreement. Oh shit.
Fat, aging, kind, wise old eyes,
Who, I want to know
is going to lay me?

February 13, 2009 2:27 PM