Postcard 102

Our shadows grow longer though we remain.
To what end do we near?
Look at all our footprints out on the dunes,
a thousand soft crescents cut, the wind occludes.

We, side by side, tingle-fingered, hawker-caught.
We caravaners, hundred dollar ad hoc camp-siters,
commemorative t-shirted and fifty dollar fire-wooded.
We like to pretend that we are different here.

And even step-outsided, pause at worked,
live stream screen gathered, like to believe
that now we are released of fear.
Imagine that -- marvel released of fear.

That looming moon is just a roving stone.
That blinking oculus is just the shadowed sun.
But then when rage spills out into the streets, what or who presides?
When our mighty broad laned cities tremble and slide into the sea,
                                                          just what is pulling at the tides?

The air is odd, the sky is orange and when the sun
-- our light, our hum, our heat -- is finally obscured, it is not the moon,
but by the smoke of all our forests dry on fire.
There is no armageddonal climax, no horrible relief, no hands of god.

The sun returns unchanged in parallax.
The days the fear, anxiety in unending flux.
Without crescendo, we should marvel with fear and awe
that it is all more than just a single cosmic fuck.

Postcard 101

 

What stupid  impoverished imaginations return again to war? 

But Oh, its so extreme and brave.  What cannot we war upon? 

But ah, its many shackled phrases. Let's let the leaders loose and see.

Let's cast a new color -- battleship pink.

What else you got? 

You got that stone pitted dread, as lifeless as an iron-pitted meteor?

What else you got? 

Let's grow a new shape and call it 'root', a vascularhedron, like river and leaf. 

What else you got?

Fear as layer-flaked away as rust? Your prisons, your destroyers, your tanks, your concrete splits with fear, painted over with patriot paint and fever pitch. 

But oh, its so pulse pounding.

Let's set our watches to a new time. Measure life in graces and gifts.

What else you got?

Wars? What little wounded people acting big. We know other ways. 

Let's have some new imaginations -- past a second dimension of balance, a third of scale. Past a fourth of righteousness. Let's have an imagination of beyond.

Postcard 100

 

Wear your heart in your fists, hard beating and quick.
You grow weary. You grow weak -- that's ok.
Drop shaking legs to knee to pray.
To whom, or to what, should you pray?

Grace to your fear, four in hand
frothing before you and driven here
Smoke offerings to your rage and wrath
To smite is divine, most divine.
What can you burn, incensed?
Your pain -- a mantra chanted --
goes two ways, burnt away or fetisized.

Rise like cedar, rise like tides, rise like distant smoke
Rise refreshed with sharp white teeth rebuking.
With shoulders wide, unyoked the past.
This has gotten out of hand.

Wear your heart in your fists fragile and kind.
You grow open and strong. You rise like quick pulse,
like tectonic shift shake casting off.
Like a switchblade you wield your sharp mind.
You straddle canyons deep, long and wide.

Wear our good weakness like a shield.
Where is wisdom? You are wisdom bound.
Wear your heart in your fists, hard beating and quick

Postcard 99

 She was an indifferent rain. Too cold for naked running in, or it could have been I was the coward. We all have pain, but she was best at bringing it to bed. I passed that place the other day. It's pretty now, not like before. I've told too many lies for her. It was a thing that has an end, an end already back that way. The ground is dry already. It is a thing you sober miss like whiskey slipping darknesses. There is a feeling free that wants to be constrained, like pulling slowly from a bucket,  a length of iron chain. When I am gone, she told me, know that I will not be. Goddam, not she's a liar too. She's gone, she's gone. Not in the waitress smile, nor in the grass, nor in the trees; I have no hope she smiles down at me and she dries too soon from memory. She had to go she had to leave and I, here, am the coward. We all have pain, but she was best at bringing it to bed. She took me in, she held me down, she pressed me into her singing cries. She was better than the coward me, and braver too. She had to leave away like dry lightening.

Postcard 98

A Ranger checks in: Control one, 804 (ait, ohe, foar) Shoreline along the shore. The tide's coming in high today. The waves are chewing on the stones I fear. I fear they will rip the children away.
Control one: 804, the hills are aflame. The trees are popping like corn.
Control one (trembling): Let's all go home
Ranger: Oh no. Do not get panick crisp and hard with fear. With packs of dogs unleashed, with troops of derelicts, these commons are mine. I'm good. Well, hardly good, but here. In heavy oiled boots I stride long and light. With a broom a brush a spade I cut tight and sweet.
Control One: You are still out there. Are you still there? Do you remain, but why?
Ranger: Seeing each far slow drawn horizon, each move I make is an arc scribed perfect and complete. Control,  the earth beneath me evaporates, but if I stand or move is each as empty and complete as each season changed.
Control: But why persist? Go on?
Ranger: The slow falling trees cast shadow and leaf. The weeds push blossom and germinate seed. The sea pounds stone and pier to sand like bleached white shell; the sea in tide and wave encroaches, sours wells, and my empty actions are the song I sing. I am a ranger, so I range

Postcard 97

Blood and sweat, laughter, tears -- things that drip and flow and peal. We enter and come with pain-pleasure, the push-pull of pulse flow. A new clean spring draws stones from soil, mountains sharp in cut and cry.
And old King Whirl, born crying, comes round on himself, self-satisfied and corpulent with the collect, the labor's sweat, the g;uttony of damn-up. collect and swell.
And old Death comes on like a flood and a drought, sooth-said and expected. Old death, a nattering madman, muttering and humming, meaning nothing. He carries, in his moment, cataracts of tears, lifetimes flowing ocean lightly.
Then finally peals out what is most feared, Silence. She speaks from corner to corner, to rafter's peak. Not a sign, not a moan, not a creak not a woosh not a drip not a groan or a squeak. But listen close and tight and do not waiver in the quiet deep and you will add the fluid peal of laughter, whole and pure and real.

Postcard 96

Today is a day of disdain. Please, goddammit, don't talk to me.
My hands, they hurt are sore, are tight, are stiff, are pain.
The air is crisp, the ground is steaming hard.
My empty hands are filled with strain. Desire.
Reason is to desire, irrelevant. My never-silent hands speak in open-closing pain.
They are screaming to create: that never filled desire that only grasps at soon-to-be.
Create: to paint, to ply to press, to pull up weeds, create a patch.
Bending fingers toward a thing or lack, the sweat and grip of pulling time into the now,
into a never satisfying was.
To create: the belly urge to hold in palm the beauty of 'to be'.
To create: is to, at least, participate. To draw up hot what cooling words cannot.
To finger-dig, to feel nails drawn back with smooth flesh resist. Those fingernail nerves that pass all through.
To plow, to sew, to reap to burn.
To skin to skin apprehend your passing beauty, the beauty I have hand in, in the holding, in the letting go.
In autumnal beauty held in pain, for a moment we substantiate, and then again again again, desire.

Postcard 95

When I, strong armed, roll up my sleeves, Look out!

The earth, it bulges with my gravity

When I crack my eyes steel blue, beware.

I milk stones for sweetness,  draw rainbow eyes and bent teeth smiles.

Despite yourself, you see my dog, a natural beast on line

Her teeth are cat, her hackles sharp as precipice

Her joy a deathly joy. Look out!

Here come my friend all shaking like liquid stones

They truck in no poor company, My friends

 -- my many knuckled friends --move blood as quick fierce as family

Behind you, are my two sons, unknown as uncut wood

and my daughter -- a Diana-- a revealed mystery

The huntress in the woods, flushing fear like rattle-antlered deer

Kneel. Obsequiate - my wife, flesh bound, is worth but me

She draws more than space, dark night, even she is terrified

When you drown, she will be the sea

Her name is Awe

and mine is Word

When I tug at my sleeves, look out!

Postcard 94

When we ran within twilight forest, through the ruin of limitless pillar-like trees
When we caught eyes in firelight sharp, or in the slack return of horizon moon
When those moments blink by, brief phosphorescent things -- like glow-worms,
salamanders in the fire -- seen unseen, unseen and seen
When we fell for a breath, in breath-catched love,
I knew that I would later think -- this is the gilding of our mortality.

These lives shed purpose like autumn trees.
And names and words and moments too, but sound it echoes like memories.
When we ran into twilight woods, the moiling duff slipped loose beneath us, as deep and loose as meaning. Your skin is already cool where my wide hands held and pulled you up. And your silhouette, so primal to my hungry sight, is now so slight and rarefied as your downy body's moonlit hair.
When we ran through twilight, time and all was desire and loss.
It was the loss that gave truth to the ephemeral, the unprovable of want and had.

If someone bottle-captures life
If they cure mortality, here is what the cost will be --
twilight forest falling,
love and all its painful coterie,
the spike of fear in constant loss,
meaning loose without utility,
and finally, that pleasant kind forgiving glow of forever faulty memories

Postcard 93

"Writing will create forgetfulness in the learner's souls."
Once, the whole story was fluid in a head. The story settled and filled and flowed like the ever-changing, same-named river. Each word was a drop, each meaning a bond.
I must abandon this analogy before -- as all analogies must -- it fails. I will leave it with you to gather and precipitate.
Give me a book. Give me a pile of books! Give me a mountain of books! Let it collapse upon me. Let if fall like an altar to hubris, a crushed babel.
There are two ways to kill a word, you see. First, define it. Second, write it down.
Like a man, a word is only when it connects, meaning - ever sought - between the names. Keep up! Every word is analogy. Every word pursues its meaning, as slick as water in hand. Remember, metaphor, analogy reduced becomes idolatry.
Carve a book and see!
It was easy enough, but now, with new tablet in hand, we descend, the whole world transcribed. No more creation spoken over the water. No more speak friend and enter depths.
Yet, in this embarrassment of riches is a new Homeric memory we can each and all access. I can rise from that avelanche. I can be a standing white crest in stream. I can reach outward to my fellow beings.
Hold and release!
Here is what you must do: discard, discard! Divest of this and this purpose here. The meaning is between the words. The meaning is the travel from my hand to yours. The meaning is the enriched blood, and words the stale air exhaled. But all around, on glass, on walls, precipitate!