embracing the essential

 on this Thanksgiving Day in the states, it is refreshing to see a whirlwind of activity embracing the essential traditional, that is, the bare traditional. 

in baking, that means a soda bread with honey, buttermilk, and a healthy flour. in sourdough, it means a mix using the same recipe that sustained the adventurers who crossed over the mountains to the Yukon in the days of the Yukon Gold Rush.

and likewise, on this day, when i pull down a copy of the Collected Poems of Robert Service, the poetry i read is melodic and on an essential level. essential an ancient basic, with all the wholeness intended, with no additives.

because here in the states, in what promises to be a return, a chance for reform, the people have risen up against post-modernity, that dark and cynical philosophy that includes Orwellian government aiding and abetting the poisoning of her populace.

we demand to be free. free from chemicals in our food. free from genetically modified non-food products tainting our supermarket faire. free from mass produced. free to embrace locally produced meat, vegetables, and fruit. free from agricultural subsidies that compromise the health of the people of a nation.

on this Thanksgiving Day, in America, we declare our independence from accepting what has been forced on us, and embrace the essential, the unadulterated form of food, the ancient and sustaining, not the processed and poisoning.

creating a style

 at one point in my earthly existence, i was at a loss for words. no matter the effort, i could not express myself in standard, English sentences.

 on a page.

it was like PSTD for a Creative, the frustrating mess of this world invading my creative space and leaving me impotent. It was like having semantic constipation, I could squeeze out a phrase, a word, a series of poetic words, but no semantic flow that constitutes prose.

so i wrote poetry, that hyper-emotional, but terse, word-flow. some of it made sense. some of it, i will admit, made little sense. 

to express myself, i fought Shakespearean license, that habit of creating new words or words one never uses. unfortunately, like a good boy ignoring the chocolate fudge on the plate, i eventually gave in to the desire, and out came the good, the bad, and the poetic. 

when my world became more settled, and the semantic flow more normal, the prosaic and the poetic came out of the word grinder in a form i did not recognize...it smacked of prose with a serious dose of poetic. too much alliteration. assonance on steroids. rebelling against fifth grade grammar. streams of consciousness with more dots than morse code. i recognized it for what it consisted of- poetic fiction.

and while it is one of the styles i write in, it is not the complete image of my work, it is not the collected works, nor can it ever be. I cannot imagine millions of readers plowing through Finnegan's Wake (the book, not the song) or The Silmarillion. No, I don't envision a movement, since it is not ever an "easy read," but I would be tickled if it did produce more than one other such author, so the form is not so much an anomaly in this present age.

 

poetic fiction

from one of my current works of poetic fiction

pungent...this air, a drink of oncoming forest...pine needles, soggy leaves, and moss underfoot.... he climbed the ridge trail. a guttural wail, the reverb from the next ridge over...the taste of fear. what the deep meant to harm, echoed inside his soul...he trembled. slipping through the shrub-boulder maze, he passed rusty-brown rhododendron to the site of his waning fire.

a cool whisper settled over the pit, where the day's remnants crumbled, threatening to dissipate into the darkness. a fine drizzle descended, and the forest view deteriorated into discord. in this dissonance, his heart raced, his head pounded, his frame stiffened.

but deep in the gray-green woodlands of that gathering darkness, a presence lingered. and though the sky and mountains melted into the night, the presence hid where no man could hide, between the realm of the known and the unknown...

he sat in his blue canvas chair and stirred the embers. the breeze. capturing branches above, the drops caught the ashes, dousing his hopes. there would be no warm meal tonight. 

he glanced at his tent, his home away from home, his shelter from any storm. the fire dead, he contemplated a cold piece of chicken left over from the Y Mart. a new day starts tomorrow, he mumbled...

but once deep in the depths of the valley, another stepped in to where the shadowlands had been. eyes came from behind the pines, red bullets that pierced the night.... 

a dead-end world

it is ten o'clock...on a dead-end street

the tapered end of a dimly lit candle

the walls cold from so many centuries

and far too few torches in the night,

memories of the dead-end world.

the Shannon, with dark and lovely tongue

laps the rock-rimmed barriers below

her tourists tucked in their cozy little beds

their buses airing in their own open bays

and far too few figuring hours in the night,

no memories behind the yellowed doors.

 

a micro-second of time

the list blew away in the wind before the welcoming doors of the grocery...that crumpled paper blown across the berm…

the doors open to brown eyes. feminine. like looking into a cup of warm cocoa. a longing there. or maybe hurt. much as you desire to look away, you cannot, you must not. they do not stare, they pierce….and you must look, but your mind tells you to turn away…turn away. don’t get involved.

but it is…you feel it in your gut, the ache, the offense. the well. the tender-well. you touch more than a surface. you cannot look away, even if…but you do not want to. you see her…the tattered threads at the end of her left coat arm, the scraped lip, the eyes that open too wide but close to protect…because you are near her. she makes no move to look up. you can hear her breathing. you can feel her breath. like stale tuna. you want to look away. you want to escape, you want to find time again. where is time? it is nowhere. she is here and you cannot look away, because she is pleading. but the words are not words in her eyes. so you walk, and turn to look, but she is walking away.

….did i dream that...or did that just happen?

as night invites himself in, the lights dim, and you find yourself yawning in the mirror. you have bags under your eyes. my eyes. you notice the gray hair on your shoulder and wipe it off. time slows. you see beyond the mirror. you see the pools of her soul, then the figure walking away. you look deeply, like a full breath in and out. in the waking night. 

why can't i forget?

but as you lay down, curled up in blankets, all alone, you pray…because it is all you can do. somewhere in the distance, separated by space, not by time, is another figure awake in her bed…

in a microsecond of time.