Afternoon Composition Revisited

All those foolish nights
With ounce after ounce of liquid madness;
Portayals confused by chemical potions
That cheaply stir my soul by the moment,
Then leave me remiss,
Outspoken by the noise of the music and
The laughter of others.
Stumbling home,
Half asleep already so that the
Very world in which I walk
Seems a slanted dream.
Cars go by-
More revellers for the dreamscape.
We are all of us revellers in the night
Without watchmen to gun us down
With sobriety.
We are almost never our own watchmen.
So I go to the bed dizzy.
Two much of the good thing, three flights
Of stairs and I'm almost at rest.
The self-destructive cycle is finally complete.

The First Day of The Coldest Winter I Know

Someone I know once said, "The beauty of a blog is that it waits for you." Well, waiting it has been. For a long time now I didn't bother to step in these awkward halls of unfolding adolescence, each step louder that the last, and all the same completely mute.

Today is the first day of the coldest winter I know. The northern winter, to be more specific. Late last night the wind came, and with it, the harsher points of autumn's fading fire. Though winter has not officially started for me it has. I come from southern regions and this temperature, this nature driven mood is befitting to my understanding of winter. And too, since I return to this place of words it occurs to me that winter is the perfect place for one to reflect. The soft glow of 60 watt bulbs, the frost on the window, the warm cooking smells that linger for hours without fresh ventilation; all these things cater to the thoughts, locked indoors we all are to be thinking them then. I am a little older now. 24 and finally watching aspects of life slow done. For instance my ability to drink. My metabolism slowing down shows growth outward more that upward. And all those little cigarettes I smoked leave me breathing a little heavy up three flights of stairs, where I now reside. Too, all things sharing. To live with a woman, and notice the subtleties of mood, calculations of affectionate acts and meaning in everything where once lay simple distraction or want of fulfillment. Since this is my own blog and my own proverbial "wealth of thoughts" I just want to say that I believe that man will never fully understand woman, and woman will never fully understand man. The complexities of each delegate their natures so that we are always just barely skating the surface of what seems an impenetrable ocean of knowledge. Of course, that too could just be a bunch of bullshit, but whose reading this anyways? All of my former readers I'm sure have found this place comatose too many times since the last heart throb to be coming here anymore. I come sometimes. I wonder about myself. I wonder who I was however long ago I read. I smile, laugh, feel anguish, reminisce. I wonder who I am now, and who I will be five years from now. After all, it has been over three years since I began this blog. Three years of memory, experience and change. That in itself seems a small sort of accomplishment. But the vague interests of a Sunday afternoon seem fleeting as I write these last few lines and I feel myself pulled away by either commerce, a cigarette, (I haven't given them up yet, but a few close calls) or simply a little work and Hemingway and perhaps a hot cup of coffee before the day is done.

Until the next time,
C.A.

Something

Staying awake far too late
As stimulants parade me inside out,
I feel the empty stomach breeding
More discomfort,
I don't want to sleep,
It is an absence;
One more empty pillow beside me, cold.

A missing, too,
The arts are what I'm missing,
All of them so delicate,
So stuck to me,
And I to them,
We waltzed around the mind,
Just once or twice before.

Wood falls, snow falls,
Things like arrows, feelings,
Semblance pouring into me.
Overwhelmingly potent;
This is real, for you,
For me, time is a trick maker,
Sometimes at our expense.

I can carve something of wood,
That which falls is still of use.
I can cool your face,
Blow back the wind to summer,
Spend my arrows sleeping
Rather than reading everything I see,
But I don't sleep lest next to you.

After The Ice Storm A Day After Power Is Restored

What is it about this time of year that fills me so with heavy-hearted feelings? Is it the endless gray skies above me? Perhaps it is the weather in general. Broken trees and soggy ground to walk on feeling as if I'm slowly sinking inside myself as the winter turns fully into view. I do not know what it is about the cold gray atmosphere. Perhaps it locks us a little bit more inside ourselves. Perhaps it is the pangs of increased self-reflection; insecurities about the future and our lives not being exactly as we've wished them to be. I feel depressed sometimes, that much is a given. I think perhaps we all do. What would suffice to change it? I can't change my emotions as if changing a pair of shoes. But oh how I truly wish that sometimes I could.

Winter is coming along. The holidays are coming along. The end of another year is soon and every year thus passed can never be again. Sometimes that is nice and sometimes it is sad to see. I see my friends, present and past. I see them change and marry and move and bear children and cultivate their collective industries of practice and study and then I see me in the backround, lost, looking long into the future, with a grim expression of unsurity before my face. Every man and woman lives their own life and see's that it accomplishes the necessities they feel are required. I think what I am really dealing with here is youth. All the hard facts about what it is to be young and scared and constantly uncertain. And youth is present though it is fleeting and I am scared that I have not taken any necessary steps to prepare for its eventual leave.

Perhaps this too shall pass. A good day is in the future, I am certain. The things I dread are impermanent. The hardships I bear are not so hard, if only studied a bit. I am just a mammal, a human being feeling the limbic overload, and not being able to anylize it so well. Whatever the matter, I will disperse. My tone is not cheering, most of all not so to me. Things will be better. This I know through time. I do rely on that. I rely on the independent nature of Time's prevalent response to all this mess. The world is in shambles, just like me. Full of grace and understanding, prone to outbursts, mistakes and change. Lost and uncertain, self-destructive, productive, ironical, witty, arrogant, and free. Pregnant with hope, infected with pain. The world, as I, is a living thing.

Nay! Nay! Nay! (Overdramatic title's are so tre` chic, don't you think?)

"She's well acquainted with the touch of a velvet hand like a lizard on a window pane..."

I tell you what, I never ventured myself a fan of The Beatles, but there it goes, grabbing me by the ears and dragging me down to 1967. Well happiness is a warm gun, eh? Fuck, that's great. I love it.

Aside...

Friday. Some Friday in September. I don't want to go out tonight. I am getting tired of the same old rap. A couple drinks, constant shouting, a bazillion cigarettes that will take their toll on me in the morning. Gah, just not that kind of night for me. I think I'll just go to sleep and wake up early and drink some fresh coffee, smoke a few cigarettes at ease, read a little science magazine I subscribe to, or maybe the Cosmos, or perhaps The Dangerous Book For Boys. That's a damn good book, right there. Something to keep around for little fellas to come. Ah, don't want to think about that kind of thing right now.

You know, I think I'm really missing those little bits that flash every now and then. You know the ones; the little flashes of momentary brilliance that light up your otherwise sleeping brain with a little shred of truth or something real. I feel that whatever mechanism I had to prolong, expose, freeze, photograph, anticipate, and so on those things has been shut down. Like this entry. I start it thinking, "Just maybe something will come out tonight...", but alas, it's nay. Nay! Nay! Nay!

There are the meaningful portrayals of the mess you are and there are the plain-jane messes. There are the abstract traces of the faces of you and there is just the one staring back in a foggy mirror or car door or what-have-you. Simply put they are one and the same and however you want to see yourself is by your fancies, facts or dreams.

My Right To Abandonment

You know, it wasn't so long ago that I used to frequent this place...

Every night, late and quiet, taken up by some strange thought, some deep connection, some simple, elegant, moving truth that so proposed to propel my fingers to dwell on it for a small space of time and leave it here for later days.

Well, those later days include today, when I only need to read a fraction to realize that I have exercised my right to abandonment. It has been a long, long time since anything of substance has crossed my mind. It only saddens me a little that the substantial part of what I am now writing deals with identifying my loss in the faith of my written word, and the passions that drove me to do it, and the eyes to see the passion, and so forth, and so on.

I went outside not long ago and felt the first chill of autumn's breath. I turned some thoughts around inside me. I am tired of my old ways. They are just that, "old". I want honesty in me again not fleeting but surviving. I am 23 years old. I've had just the smallest sliver of experience to make calculated guesses about the future, which in turn makes me sad. Sad only since I am afraid nothing great and unexpected will come again without my prompting it, negating the entire notion. I know that probably isn't so, but I guess that's just my thinking. I feel older too. I remember ripened youth as it flowed through me and it is fleeting since I've not preserved it in the slightest. No exercise, no proper diet. Smoking all the time, late nights, drinks, exhaustion. Insecurities, unexpected problems. The weight of responsibility constantly upon me, which really isn't much compared to parents, which bothers me all the more since its coming on eventually. Ah, I really am thinking in all the wrong ways. But, that's the point of all this, I guess. I want to get it all down so later days will come and I can say to myself, "Dammit boy, take a step back, learn from this, learn...". Maybe I will, who knows? I'm tired of second-guessing myself so much and ignoring my deep-rooted feelings as something not worth identifying. Write for thyself, live thus too.

More is to come, or so I hope. I don't like that I abandon you so, haven of heartfelt wonders and dreams. Straights of dreams await the eventual end of evening that tonight shall be, and so I ride lightly into it now with a face of an aging menace found remiss of some old ways that are worth keeping.

-The Author of This Blog

Just A Walk

Placing the straw stick in my mouth,
Bending my neck slightly down,
The sun pours over my form in droves-
These earthly things are pleasant ones.

I have to admit,
My walks would never be so fine
If they didn't contain just a little bit
Of everything. Of swallows in the hollows,
Of turtle shells shaken by the
Steps approaching.
The goose, the water lily,
The plain old limestone dust
On my soles,
The honey bee thrive
In a field full and fountained
By throes and rushes of thistle
And wildflower.

I realize some things when I walk my walk.
The both of us, like two little goldfish,
Chase each other in the muck,
Daring and comparing,
But the truth is, we're both stuck-
Stuck to be
The same color, the same ardor,
The similar nature, capable enough
To plainly, simply, easily
Love one another the way that
Two goldfish do who play in the waterfall.

I will take my strides,
Eyes wide, and realize that the fall,
The great leap into unknown drifts
Has got to be the very best thing.
I'm not going anywhere special,
Not driving towards anything specific;
I'm just going on another walk-
Just going on another turn of the pond,
Going to find that other goldfish,
That other lovely dusk of hues
A thousand fold in multiplicity;
I'm just takin' a walk your way.

Stride For Stride

Stride for stride, my bosom breached by a frozen spear of former summer grass,
And left unchecked are all my boyish manners, now found lost to me in morning mirrors.
Drizzled days, both flax and fluid, apart of the same good and bad that turn the check in countenance resume my parched and wilted valves and pipes in their inward and outward lulling hymns.
For a product of a heart that feeds on wayward longings; I draw on memory, when the sun birthed weeks on end of simple sunlight. While I slumbered softly stricken with thoughts and dreams so made of countless yesterdays and smiles, no longer fondly found beneath such pleasant prisms of glowing silence.

For what I see, of blues sky prisms and poetry- resounding woes out far beneath the dim-lit sky. The blood of fall in the form of leaves everywhere beneath my feet; moments made by the parch and pardon of lovers’ lips beneath star-lights; these are things for which I’m made to do and do without. O holy maiden of the morning, leave me warning of such tribulations I can no longer beguile of resolution’s pangs and longing aches.

Fresh Flowers (Versions 1 & 2)

Version #1

You are fresh
Like a summer field flower,
Lazy and sun soaked in the
Afternoon hour.
If you were a flower,
Would you find honor in the touch-
In the picking of you?
Or would you rather
Remain untouched,
Smiling wide through the day’s stride,
Until your winter wilt and fade?

Version #2

I think you are fresh like
A summer flower.
Lazing in the field, a sun-soaked
Spectacle jutting in the breeze,
Birthing by the honey bee’s brush
The multitude of your breed.
Sleeping nakedly in the sun,
And folding over with the evening’s turn.

As I sit here listening to Chopin I find myself lost in the hauntingly beautiful notes pressed ever-so delicately down like drops of rain. I find, that nearly nothing I have done these last few months has granted merit of significance to my existence. I am absent of a calling, and as the years keep falling I feel failing in the fleeting of time from my youth, where everything is deeper, truer, more vibrant and newer. I always envisioned myself dying young. Is that strange? I guess its very hard to fathom so many years ahead. It would seem much more fitting to die young, while the life was at its fullest; while one would be remembered lively and happy and busy and full of such stuff as all creators find continually jealous of and longed for and strived towards.

Don't misunderstand, I have no death wish, no want of breath ceased merely because I am young. To die young is doubley hard on those that continue to live. I have traced this by my eyes that have measured the end of a few friends, too soon taken so that it would seem even a crime to occur.

I'm misguided is all. I suppose I need only obtain a destination and I will make it. For even if I fail I succeed, as almost all endevours are never fruitless. Stick your neck out there and you've got the right idea. Still- its that choice that I dwell on. That one little destination I have not yet answered that I fear. It could nearly be any-which-way. I'm awfully scared of what I am capable of doing with myself. I have a certain moral flexibility that enables me to find myself in some seemingly quite uncomfortable situations which I would find quite the opposite. We'll not delve into that at the moment.

Maybe I just felt the need to write something. It's been a while since last time I put anything in this blog and it is losing a pulse more and more with my frequenting it less and less. Ah well, changes will come, and soon I'm sure. Until then, be good, little friends of mine.

To be quite honest I'm almost absolutely certain no one enters this domain any longer. That's alright by me.

Clair De Lune

When evening comes ‘round
I hear you beddy-bye making sounds in the bathroom.
Taking down your hair,
Glowing under low-lit bulbs over big mirrors
Looking into them and thinking thoughts full as the
Kitchen counter with coffee cups come morning.
Soon you’ll be in bed,
Softly pressed between soft sheets of white and I’ll be coming
To tuck us in.
It’s nice to have someone to walk along the raindrop days,
It’s good to feel that soft vibration like piano keys
Lay next to me to lull me to sleep.
What’s more, we’ve only just begun…
I know, I know,I’m coming to bed now.

Re A Lize A Shun.

Are you sifting off to sleep?
Are you soon to meet the dawn?
Traveller, traveller,
Treading on and on you go.
The world has been erased,
I am displaced.
I am me, a mortal plane
Of blood, bone and sinew,
Strained beneath the here and there,
Everywhere composed,
Unchanged,
Quite possibly deranged...

Soft, slow summer night lights
Lit the streets we walked upon,
We caroled on, we reveled for,
Raved on, spat and sat and saw
And saved for rainy days,
And sunny days,
And everydays,
And this is stupid.
This is beaten down verse of
Something I'm too lazy to entertain
You with properly,
Straightly,
Honestly and forwardly.
Merry-go-rounds of sputtered words,
Slip and slide alliteration,
Little words with little meaning,
Finally I figured out why I'm so sorry
At composing verse,
You just can't write the stuff
Until you've lived it first.

A Bit of This Or That.

I haven't been writing much these days because, well, there just hasn't been much to write about. My head feels dizzy from all the things I look for as inspiration, as muse, as truth to be written, as letters to be bullets, to encapsulate the brain in vivid reflections self-evident in timelessness and wonder. The only voice I ever found was the one barking twenty years prior into my ear, into the future, into my fingers, and finally here- but its bullshit; its old. There's no room for it these days when the whole world has seemed to have gotten itself in a big goddamn hurry. My thoughts are obsolete. Spoken flowerings of generations past where I was never witness to what was really going on. So, you see, I find myself at a loss. I can't quite fathom the future- at all. The future, to me, is dark and cloudy, murky and full of hopelessness. I know that sounds obliviously stupid but I am a bit of a black and white sort of fellow and it just doesn't help much with the general consensus being that of dangers, frustrations, inflations, degrations, fashion, sex, smothering, dieting, rioting, bigots reformed, opinions reformed, politically correct, progress in excess in meaninglessness. All the real future-tellers were ignored before and will ever be until what they have told has made itself apparent to us when it is far too late to rectify, changed, prevent, or produce. Don't go asking me to recite specifics for you, I'm of the belief that petty facts are what make the day go longer, leading further from the point. The idealists are in straights again only now its chic to be an idealist and cool to be a crybaby and hip to not have real opinions, personal opinions about things. Sure, we are all of us chock-full of opinions but tell me are they really so complete? Maybe I'm getting off here and maybe I don't know what the hell I'm saying and maybe, just maybe I'm not worth a shit as a writer because I reject my generation like a child rejects his bedtime and I shun these walking zombies who find solace in the easy way out and I scorn those that defy their own shadows and the shadows of their formers out of ignorance and pride and the likes. Christ, now I really don't know what I'm getting at. Perhaps it's just a rant. A silly little rant because its easy to be angry but its hard to clearly see and change, you know? The isolation's killing me and I think it's brought me full circle again and I don't quite know if that's a good thing or not, you see. So, at one o'clock in the morning, on my porch with a few cigarettes, a tape recorder, this computer, and some whisky, I sit, thinking, relating, rejecting, observing, reflecting, and inspecting the perfections and imperfections of my life in this Life.

These Are My Stripes

You're waiting for the real effects...
Like a trial prescription you try it out,
But sometimes the drug just doesn't take,
Won't commit,
Won't relieve,
Is hard to quit.
Half the time you worry and fret,
Suicide dreams of utter neglect.
And it spins and it spins,
Until the fondness that was
Stops,
Drops,
And bottoms out.
Then you're just filled with salty talk
For salty wounds that make it
Hard to walk. Dream on then,
See the "could have been"
Of it all, until a knife of rememberance
Stabs you in the wrist,
Leaving you limp,
Spilled on the tiles
Where you finally slip,
As the melancholy rises.
Guilt is inevitable.
No one can escape the sorrows
Of their soul's sufferings.
Offering a plate of repentance
Is not fulfilling enough for
Resplendance, radiance
Bound to faith unfounded,
Body and soul binding
To anything that eases,
Releasing,
Temporary,
Perfunctory.
There's a singer on a stage,
Breast akin to the expanse
Of universal boundry, sifting
General public opinion into the
Mire of her heart, all the while
Pursued by the grave, and
Death itself lay behind the curtain,
She is certain,
It is written,
All things expire,
The voice, the fire.
This is all just self-denial.
To commit, to leap
Into the heap of wanton feeling
Leaves me reeling
For the door to run away,
If I stay it only prolongs the ending,
Shall we be pretending
It to be any other way?
Maybe that's false.
There the ultimate feeling,
But it comes at a cost,
Or so I believe,
And often perceive.
I delegate emotions
Without much reprieve.
Foolish in numbers,
Subject to games
That I often detest,
Still I submit all the same.
Leaden, hardened bodies fall
Suddenly limp to the forfeit
Of time's collapsing product.
Harvesting the life we are given
Seems an awfully tough concept.
Driving and striving for
Something worth having
When the having is losing
All that was won before.
If I turn the face long enough
Perfection must arise,
But then you have the price again,
Seldom right, always grave,
Slaves to the end
For the comfort at stake;
It would do us one better
Never to be comfortable
In the first place.
We are all of us gamblers.
You come to me wagering,
And the odds are against you,
I am a rough hand,
I am a big game,
A big gamble,
Just remember whats at stake.
I'm not going to tread on water,
Not forever,
Somewhere soon I'll cut it out,
My bouts of resilience
Can only last so long, I'm sure.
Take me as I am,
A blade of grass is received
In no other way than this.
Though I'm maybe something more,
Maybe I'm not,
You never know.
Just let me grow in sunlight,
Soak some rain,
And whither in snow
To be birthed again as
The years roll on by.
I promise not to ask why
You are the way you are.
I'll ask you now,
Please do the same.

The Window Lies To Me With It's Green Sunlight...

Well, it is a strange thing indeed,
When Spring arrives and then
The cold comes back in little spells,
Blowing the heart back into winter.

In winter the heart, the mind
Are fraught with deep reflections.
Weighty plights are made of this...
It is just too much to compensate with words, I think.

Timidity stirs almost effortlessly-
It draws you into a kind of stage
Bereft of the audience's criticisms,
Everyone is playing to different tunes.

So, composition seems a trial.
What would I give in words
What I have not known all the while?
I take a step that needs a purpose,

But the affront is that I'm ridiculed
In pools and waves of self-reflective,
Ebbing, concave constructions.
It is for me absence or self-destruction.

In winter, I am merely jutting mortal planes
In far off dreamscapes without the change,
Without the hope, as busts of cold seem
To control the expiations of my soul.

To put it simply, maybe justly,
Winter is just so impossibly lofty
The way it holds you stock-still
With a feeling of it never ending.

Saturday Evening Post

Escapism is surreality at its finest.
Lips to lashes lash the eyelids
Left before her in the parting
For a drink from mouths that move
By muscles metered for the courtship,
They jerk swiftly in the muck of other
Voices spouting spasms of rhetoric.
Features dense like riparian buffers
Of untouched waters and you
Want to touch them for their worth.
Stalling however, stuck is the finger
To the counter top spill, wet wood grains
Meditate on what's in store, what will bloom
And how soon another evening fades
From youthful yard birds savagely chirping
At one another for a bit of wisdom.
Near her heated face the ice begins to penetrate
Between the lips full to the brim with
Scepticism for his forgotten name, not nearly
Remembered as he wish he were.
Wiser men have fooled themselves and
Foolish fools have risen knowledge from
The tampered ways of Spring's display.
Long drawn eye breaks take the kill
And make it ache with stings of hope,
She scribbled something with the pen
And now his hand is stained with a memory
Foreshadowing only bittersweet notions.

Yo.

I have not actually just plain posted on here for a while, so i think I am a bit overdue. It is a beautiful Sunday, the first of April, and I am hungover, tired, and ready to ride my two-wheeled beast into oblivion.

And it looks like you're not really getting an update after all. I AM going to ride my two-wheeled beast into oblivion, right now.

Goodbye, bitches.

Honey, Don't It Look Like Rain

To the solid earth my body's bade,
All in due time, not right now, I'm afraid.
I'm still all wrapped up in this
Commercialistic, greedy world.
It tastes of salt and then
It's under your skin shifting visions
Into confusion again and again.
Really it's a bit of dancing,
Staged by players wrapped in feathers
Of incredulity whilst the asshole
In the corner
Of the ballroom
Recites some modern prose he wrote,
Boasting about using the word "whilst."
It's a crying shame, really,
That six feet deep seems a very nice sleep,
Though I know better than to prompt the offer.
Until it comes, I keep waking up,
To Life as a constant, painful, monotonous joke
Reminding me of the reason for laughter.

Into the Black Hole, Out The Quasar

I am a traveler, and these are my travels.

I stick my eyes upward, and suddenly find
Black bands bending light while I
Drift into the spherical plane resist
Themselves and leave me smiling
Into the depth and rhythm of cosmic churnings.

I stop into the mire, I bounce inside the mixture;
Time stops, all is motionless in the
Magnanimous speed surrounding me.

Then, all at once,
Streaming into consciousness I find
Brilliant light before my eyes.
It twists and shapes and combines with the darkness,
Huddling like the hot air on black pavement into
A burst of birthing fractions made whole again.

I reach the outer edge,
I find the end point pregnant with clusters
Of numerous prisms expanding infinitely
Into the otherwise empty space of the cosmic fugue.