An October Dream

An October Dream

I.
My chest hurts this morning –
it is a Saturday and it is cold and
I’m alone. I walk down the thirteen
steps to the street, hands fisted inside my jacket.
The last farmer’s market huddles on
the edge of Marion Square.
Bright tents hang stark against the grey October sky.
I smile at the man who hands me my coffee.
My chest hurts this morning, a tiny ball of fire in
my sternum, grinding a way out. I clutch my coffee
through quiet, waiting King street, watching my hands.
Breath catches on every exhale – it is just cold enough to see.
Down Market street, the edges of people’s souls
trail out of theirs mouths.

II.
She puts her hair down,
the edges shining in the sunlight behind her.
Here in the middle of this war, she is beautiful.
The world is dying everywhere,
and all that matters is the way she breathes.
Gives herself to the wind blowing
her hair in through the last of this day,
falling over my face.

III.
It is Monday, and warm.
I sit on the edge of Charleston and two
gleaming jet fighters roar in over the river,
running their patrols with missiles and bombs and
pointed noses full of .50 caliber ammunition.
They’re so close I can see the men inside.

IV.
Her blue eyes fill mine. My chest hurts again.
She says,
“The room we’re in is burning down,
and we’re just standing
staring at each other.”
All I can feel is the kernel of furious flame in my chest,
Hollowing me.


V.
It’s Thursday, and cold again, and I’m alone,
pen in hand. The clock above my desk
is stopped at 1:35 and two seconds
and I have no idea when it
is.

Down the Street

Down the Street

between the moon hanging in its gleaming track
and a pool of spotlight,
a girl in a black dress is dancing.

She weaves her arms and her hair whips -
blazing tracks to caress shoulders.
and it is all I can do not to fall in love with
the siren song of her skirt flashing against her legs.

Underneath the bright lights,
I lose my haze and drop confusion
in my wake. Down the street,
There is a girl in a black dress dancing a love song.

She steps out of the light for the space of
a heartbeat
smiles

Down the street there are green eyes smiling through
a breaking wave of thick hair.

She spins, her feet leaving the ground,
and she’s falling outside of the light –
Down the street, in a rush of salt air and igniting humidity,
I’m catching hold of a
hurricane in a black dress.

City in a Birdcage

Finally pulled this one out. Been wrestling with it for a couple of weeks, easy - took some inspiration from one of my friends to make it really happen.



City in A Birdcage

Fading August evening light
slips its way over us,
dancing on the rails of the edge of Charleston,
sunset on a city in a birdcage.

Summer flies away over the edge of the canyon –
orange light slipping through trees coated sepia,
blazing onto my face with all
of the soft caress of redemption. Orange light
bringing strength to stand –
strength to hold in and weather the
screaming gales of September.

Summer ending on a smile
and a wave as the traveling circus
folds its tents, collapsing smiles
and a lullaby into the echoing
keys of a piano.

Dancing on that rail,
in the slanting sunlight through the
metal lining of this
birdcage,
I am grinning for all of the reasons not to.

In one moment, the last summer sunset ends,
leaving us spinning on the slate tiles of that sea wall.

We’re all lions these days,
roaring ourselves out to the river at midnight,
underneath the strange low moon and
between all of the man-made havens of streetlights,
shouting our freedom in the
silence of Wednesday night Charleston.

And later, walking home,
north up Meeting Street,
all of the frogs in the bushes are howling.

Something That's Not a Poem

So it's a rainy Charleston day. The power to my apartment is off until either later tonight, or tomorrow morning. I barely slept last night and got up early, so I'm tired. As a result - I'm sitting in the Kudu coffeeshop, using their internet. It's good times.

Last night was a very interesting one - I uncovered and analyzed a few layers of this strange belief structure I have. I also was introduced to a new side of one of my friends. All in all, an intriguing night.

One of the things she and I spent a lot of time last night talking about was "purpose". Between coffin nails and drags on cigars, we hashed out a lot of interesting topics.

And for the first time, I was able to express coherently a belief I've always held; that because of the fact that humans are intelligent, self-aware creatures, with individual personalities, we each have a reason for our lives - a "purpose".
I don't believe that this "purpose" is a result of any creator's plans - I am an atheist and I stand unmoving on that issue. However, because all humanity shares a collective destiny - a result not of a god, but of the introduction of our civilizations coupled to our basic biology - each of our lives has a reason for being.

At this point in time, I am starting to believe that this reason for being is not a specific thing. It's as if each of our lives is the vague beginnings of a song. Subconsciously, we're all aware of what key the song is in - we know the time signature. We're tapping out the rhythm with our hearts. This song - our individual "purpose" - is something unique to every person. It's based on our personality and worldview - both the one we're brought up in, and the one we see.

We know the general direction of our purpose, and the point of our lives is to develop that. We're here to write the entirety of our song - to sing the melodies clear and bright.

But it can be so hard.

This is why I believe that people can be corrupt and can act harshly. This is why I believe cruelty exists - harmful people are people who have lost their sense of purpose. They are people who are either deliberately or unconsciously ignoring their instincts, and are acting to further their own ambition, to gain power simply for themselves.

Right now, I believe that my purpose is to attempt to express the world as I see it. I'm here, and I have this gift with language, in order to take in what I see around me and present it to other people. I'm here to strike a chord that makes others hum along.

Lifting Away

Spent some time the other night doing some free writing. I had a huge creative jumpstart in the form of an open mic, and this is one of the things that popped out. Enjoy, criticize, do what you will.

A Happy One

Love is what ties us together,
what comes above the hate and the jealousy,
to tie into the music and simple creative soul,
find ourselves and create ourselves –
allows us to love ourselves:
Our self

Man is the animal who laughs, and
laughter is for the soul –
music that reaches inside of you and finds the places in
your heart where it can resonate;
a creative mind can think with a pen,
along the strings of a guitar and sliding over the keys of a piano –
a creative mind spins the world with love and with
understanding,
to hit the right notes that will tell the story of the world and of human life.

It’s a man standing on stage,
it’s a man with a guitar,
it’s a man spitting verse and ink into words
through a microphone,
it’s every human being
who stood up and played just because they might as well have died without.
It’s the actress who truly finds herself on stage,
shining flame flashing through the steps of
a scene with all of the skill of a dancer
and with more passion in her heart than she could ever contain.

It’s the clarity of thought of a summer afternoon
in the sun and the simple contented fuzziness of mind
when waking to a cold winter morning
in the arms of the one who loves you.

So take it, and embrace it,
and find comfort in the simple acts,
as we spin our great web of human creativity
to find what we can create
with love in our hearts.

Jacques

This one's a poem that I wrote during one of my workshops earlier this year. We had to write a piece about a room that meant a great deal to ourselves. This is what turned out.

Jacques

We’re alike, this room and I –
both of us wanting,
waiting for the slender, quiet figure
to step back in, to fill
and sit smiling,
to be the one who fits naturally here.

We’re both waiting for him to come back,
To smoothly turn on the
gleaming corner lamps, forcing out
the shadows of lost summers.

He’ll drape himself on
this carpet –
jeans stark against the sea of woven brown –
breathe in the musk of
the room’s anticipation and replace it with
his clean air.

And then lean over me, strong fingers
gently handling my plastic model airplane,
tracing its curves and corners with thin, rough fingers,
applying the same considering caress he’ll give to
the blossoms sparkling outside the front door –

This room is waiting for the gardener to
return and cultivate, but
for now it’ll have to make do with me,
skinny boy with orange shorts
playing in the weeds

Self Affirmation for the Uninformed

This is what I believe.

White Dwarf

We’re told

Our self is something beautiful,

filled with the pure creative fire that explodes in an

artist’s eyes,

across a canvas,

across the sky.

We’re told

Our self is meaningless.

Our self is garbage.

Our self is the perfect butterfly

humming its wing-song, ending lives

infinities away for all eternity.

We don’t know!

We can’t know!

We’re all trapped inside our own minds,

gibbering to ourselves while we pretend to understand

this reality revolving around us –

because the human way is to live by conjecture based on

illusion based on perception.

The capacity for our sanity must be enormous,

because if it’s otherwise –

if our bag of marbles has smashed open,

and we’ve self-imploded already and this

life is just the last moments of the neutron star,

fusion dead and cold, ready in its spinning speck for

the supernova -

then God help us.

Why do I bother trying to understand the universe?

When there are universes enough inside my voice,

unnumbered unfound doorways,

a few of which I take and lovingly empty

onto these pages, tracing the birth and dark

of incredible worlds with the

rolling ink of a pen.

Oh, to have the ability to give up this

life and jump into my own eternity,

to spin my own humble heaven –

I’d make myself a small house with a porch,

sit with notebooks and pens to

watch each day as it walks by,

to write

until every cell

winks out and I am filled with

billions and billions of supernovas.

Because each and every one of us has his own path to walk,

and the only meaning to find is in what we do in the

absolute moment of our existence.

And I know now that meaning can be found even in loneliness,

but never in blank reams –

So I plan to go with pen in hand,

scribbling my voice as the

bells begin to cry in that grey morning light –

worried only in those final racing moments

about finishing my last piece.