Introduction

25 Random Things

1. I am a random thing. Consistency is an alien habit I occasionally try to pick up, but never with any enthusiasm.

2. I am the person my mother warned me about.

3. I hate dogma but I like dogs.

4. I like eccentrics, especially the British ones—they have taken it to a fine art and are an example I seem to be emulating effortlessly.

5. In another life, I was a burrowing animal, as evidenced by my predilection for large purses filled with odd things that I can feverishly sift through to find the article of interest I'm sure I put in there.

6. My idea of a spiritual experience is a performance by Sankai Juko, an avant guarde Japanese butoh group. I once drove 300 miles through a blizzard to see them in Lawrence, Kansas. Usually they perform in Paris or Tokyo-comparatively, a blizzard was easier to navigate.

7. I loathe bigots and small minded idiots. I find that they bring out masochistic tendencies in me to try to dissuade, deter, or convert them which are doomed of course and thus becomes a form of self-inflicted pain.

8. I'm addicted to reading, good conversation, travel to exotic destinations, caffeine, nicotine and salmon.

9. I prefer complicated questions to simplistic answers.

10. I prefer Tanqueray's "Rangoon", Bombay Sapphire, or one of those ridiculous, but delicious gins coming out of Oregon now which bill themselves as "crafted with hand-picked juniper berries and intriguing aromatics" to mix with my tonic. In another life, I was a British Colonial who went native.

11.  I believe in that old southern saying:  If you're born to hang, you'll never drown, so let the big cat jump.

12. I have had extraordinary things happen in my life and especially enjoy the ones that involve precognition, surprise, synchronicity, and magic. Jungles, ancient temples, mysterious strangers, and flashes of intuition are also favored.


13. Having left the Baptists at 12 years old over theological questions (original sin, the idolatry of Catholicism, the patriarchal structure of Christianity), I still appreciate them for helping me develop an appreciation for the deliciousness of sin and a fine skepticism of any belief system that claims to have the answers. (see Random Thing #9 )

14. I know all 50 ways to leave a lover.

15. At 56, I've discovered that my Irish genes are coming to the fore—and no, not just the drinking and swearing—also a passion for storytelling and writing poetry. And now that I'm out of the Midwest and on the West Coast, I get great encouragement from folks who actually care about these things.

16. My best teachers lately are the dying and the demented. I work with hospice clients who are teaching me how one dies with grace and courage and also with Alzheimer's clients who constantly expand my perception of reality. There is more shared laughter and meaning in this job than any I have ever done. It's restoring my faith in humanity that I'd pretty much lost during my long exile in Missouri.

17. I prefer to think that things happen for a reason, that we create our own reality, that creativity is true worship, that if there were a God, mine would be a cross between Oscar Wilde, Maya Angelou, and the Delphic oracle.

18. Since I believe that we create our own reality, I have to acknowledge that the above beliefs are quite possibly as bogus as Mary's Immaculate Conception; but nevertheless, these are the ones that afford me the most freedom of movement and ideas.

19. I know the value of good friends because I've been blessed with them.

20. I believe being generous, honest, thoughtful, compassionate, and caring creates light in dark rooms.

21. I believe the Buddha's a bitch to emulate. 22. William Blake wrote: "Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion." I mostly agree with him.

23. For the last eight years I've been watching our country become a fascist state—torturing prisoners, making people disappear, tapping phones without warrants, starting illegal wars and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in the name of "democracy"—and thinking we were doomed to an Orwellian nightmare future. With this last election, I'm beginning to think there's a glimmer of hope to hook onto.

24. Last night, I found myself discussing poetics and politics with three poets, an old blues singer, and a Tantric Buddhist lama who dressed in leathers and rode in on a huge motorcycle.

25. My sign is the Dragon, lately I'm feeling like a Phoenix.

Why be "Safe"?

It's what we were told to go for when I was a kid in the 1950's.  There were rules and there were roles and if you stayed inside the lines, life would be fine.  But even as a child, I could see that being "good" only landed you in a too early marraige, a passle of kids, and a life as chief bottle washer and general dogsbody.  I wanted to travel, to write, to meet interesting people.  Farm wife in the Dustbowl of Oklahoma?  No thanks.

So I took the opposite path whenever it presented itself.  An experimental life collecting enough bad boy artists, musicians, and writers along the way, to become thoroughly sick of being the muse and all the accompanying supporting roles.  I'd certainly avoided marraige, kids, and stability.  By the time I hit my forties, I found myself moving in with a soft-spoken, polite, and steady partner and thinking perhaps I'd have a civilized, reliable partner who wouldn't need rescuing.  He wasn't an artist of any type, wasn't prone to temper tantrums, affairs, or mysterious moods.  I was safe from my own predilections. 

But where there were no temper tantrums, there was silence.  No affairs, but no passion.  No mood swings, but a monochrome landscape where everything was predictable.  He watched the weather channel while I wondered if I'd died without realizing it and this was my personal hell.  I fell into a virtual coma for 16 years with occasional attempts to connect with this man.  I'd had a safe life with him, but it turned out that kind of safe isn't worth it to me.  I left that iife and have one that suits me much better now.  It turned out that my kind of safe is feeling confident enough to set sail without knowing where I'll be going, and being able to happily change direction when the wind turns. 

This poem was written long before I skipped town, but it seems to pretty well communicate the frustration and futility I felt trying to bridge who I was with the dampened down, mute button on, person that this man wanted me to be.  I couldn't communicate that to him, but by writing the poem, I finally communicated it to myself.

What It’s Like

I.

Empty chasms, can’t cross
Can’t turn your regard from
The window framing an empty street
Can’t break your silence, can’t
Fight a man who isn’t there, can’t
Fight the feeling that the key
Was lost somewhere in your childhood,
Or your mother locked it in her
Safe deposit box and forgot the bank
She put it in, can’t remember taking it
From you. Can’t remember when I last
Felt you look at me. Turn your head and
Look at me….

II.

There you are, behind the customs desk,
Glancing at my emotional baggage
As if it belongs to a stranger,
Coming toward you on the conveyor belt.
I’m on your list, a known emotional terrorist,
There’s no way you’re going to let me in
No way you’ll allow me to breach
The tight borders you maintain.

You might give me a visa if I leave
My luggage behind, if I promise to
Live in your country and never mention
The dreams I came with, never speak
My native language, never plan to
Go back home.


III.

Maybe you’re trapped, I think.
Maybe you’d like to move
Outside the cage your fears have made.
Maybe you’d bite any hand that tried
To lift the latch, and not just mine.
 But it’s not your teeth I fear, but
That you like the cage

IV.

And when I cry, and my tongue
Is sharpened on my disappointment,
And my heart is twisted inside me,
And comes spilling out in jagged stones,
You look away, you leave the room,
My anger is a begging bowl,
And once again, it’s empty..


V.

Somewhere you’re in there,
A soft heart trapped inside
A cage made from all your fears.
I’m offering you a key,
But you’ll have to be the one
To unlock the door, to
Let your feelings out
Like the birds the Balinese
Let fly for a few tourist coins,
Who come back when the
Coast is clear, and singing
All the way home.

In Defense of Romantics

There are romantics and there are Romantics.  It's the difference between a Barbara Cartland heroine and an Isabelle Eberhardt (check her out here).  Cartland's archetype goes against society only to succumb to its conventions, the plot is predictable, the heroine becomes enthralled and voila! a tidy ending.  The Capital R Romantic, is anything but predictable, is immersed in the act of being alive to whatever impels her or him to charge headlong into the fray of it all, and there is rarely a tidy ending.  Isabelle (a real person), drowns in the desert.  Shelley drowns in a storm while sailing his boat, the Don Juan.  (Romantics' ends are often ironical)

The above poem was written last night while I was pondering my perverse  preference for capital R Romantics over the infinitely easier life of a lower case r. I did spend almost 16 years pretending to be a lower case, more mature r, with a very sensible partner; but did, as I wrote in my first post, come out of that coma.  It did not satisfy my need to feel alive to chance, to luck, to magic.  I started the poem as a complaint against my own Romanticism, all the trouble and trials it has taken me through.  As it developed, I realized it had become a whole hearted defense of Romantics. Perhaps we're misguided at times, but never monochromatic.  In a world becoming more fearful and standardized, we need all the color and daring we can get. So pick your card, what kind of a R (r) romantic are you?

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a tidy world is not a dream that appeals to those of us who
trail chaos like a forgotten scarf dangling from our shoulders
we’re Isadoras who like fast cars but neglect the cautionary
principles such as scarves demand, literal dangling participles
that can sentence your life with a definite period at the end.

but worse can be imagined:
life as a banquet requiring that all the right forks
must be used, careful orders of each course, game
carved into thin slices served on Sevres china
polite conversations with no Wilde sparking furor
among circumspect Victorians, no unexpected desserts,
all the bouquets arranged in unrelenting symmetry.

romantics are endearingly careless:
we misplace our keys to the kingdom,
forget our appointment with our accountant
rushing off for a blind date with a dame named Destiny,
lose our optimistic lists and are doomed to
prowl the aisles of The Kum and Go Grocery
listlessly picking up whatever is not on sale,
coupons clipped but left at home.  

the universe is  either approving or fickle
but never dull--our affairs are messy, not a Hallmark
moment to be had, preferring passion to placidity
we favor difficult lovers who’ll turn up later in
complicated poems. We are often lost to
rattlesnake trances, lost cause crusades,
operatic soliloquies, and eloquent despair.
we’re drawn to storms and cataclysmic vortexes
tiptoe to the edge of cliffs  to contemplate the view  

trailing clouds of tattered glory, misspent dreams, and
half-finished novels, charging happily into hostile territory,
dark alleys, and dreaming the impossible scheme, we’re
what’s left of a wild spirit the world’s jackboot soldiers
can’t wipe out of existence, the genetic sport in the
homogenous gene pool, we’re the wild cards in the marked deck
pick your card.

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Getting to the Heart of It

Three years ago, I met an old flame in a grocery store parking lot.  He told me he was still writing, but had spent the last seven years focused on painting.  Abstract Expressionist paintings.  I told him I was trying to overcome my philosophical stance against marriage in order to make moving to Mexico with the man I'd lived with for the last 16 years easier. He laughed, shook his head, and said to come out and see what he'd been up to when I had some time.  A few days later, I drove down a Missouri backroad with spring redbud and dogwood lacing color through a lattice of branches and shadow.  We drank wine and talked about poetry and painting for 6 hours without stopping.  When I went home that night, I wrote one of the strongest poems I'd ever written; the first I'd written in several years.  Four weeks later, I'd sold the house I'd bought with my erstwhile partner, jettisoned most of my belongings except clothes, books,paintings, my two French Bulldogs, and was heading to an island in the Northwest where I'd lived in the mid-80's. I was accompanied by that old flame, now a relit one, and feeling like I'd just awakened from a long coma, the world alive to me again.

And there the story would normally end.  And you know the various permutations.  If not a happily ever after Hallmark moment, then perhaps a Hollywood bete noir, or at the worst, a soap opera script that becomes its own parody.  I won't reveal the true story yet, because that's not the point of this blog.  The real story is what we learn from our relationships and what use we put that knowledge to.  What we make of these attempts to connect.  Mine became poems.

This blog is also an attempt to connect with others who are trying to parse their experience of relationships into some coherent sense. I'd like to share a poem a post and for each one, relate the circumstance and emotion, the questions and the answers that led me to writing that particular poem.  I hope that those who read this and find some response in themselves will respond on the blog.  In that way, both you, the reader, and I the curious blogger, might end up making a collaboarative narrative together, much larger than any one of us could manage alone...

Here's the poem I wrote that night that I realized I was about to change my life.  This is the poem that allowed me to see that I had been limiting my life through self-censorship, that red pen wielded by none other than myself.  It was time to be myself again.

The Red Pen

the red pen blanks a black urge
to throw words at walls in
anger, in howled frustration, in
raging hope that threads through fog
and misspent longing.

the anarchist's circled A drawn
in tea leaves, left in porcelain cups
readerless, unnoticed
in the mannered rooms
where waiters wear false smiles,
and conversations fly like starlings,
eating up the air so no song
can slice the silence.

crawl beneath the searchlights
breathe through reeds beneath
muddy rivers, let the dogs bay
until they tire of chasing your fugitive heart
through a wilderness of burning forest
let the cacophony of voices brutal with
empty power die before you surface.

Then breathe. Then sing.