Year: 2016

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Human Nation

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And the candidates lie while voters 

bathe in the light of soft memes

soaking themselves in pretty phrases

paired to poignant images sweet-wise,

and little girls in red, white and blue 

sequinned skirts twirl dizzyingly

mesmerizing masses of twit-whistlers

horning in on patriotic fear fervor

chords dancing adorable waifs a’spin.

Aren’t we all takers in the end,

sucking what we can get off and in

ourselves confined and conformed

to social patterns, strong-armed

cycles: do this or be stigmatized?

And so the world is just the world.

Life is just life, nothing more–

or less.

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Hoovering

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Yep, I read it in elephant journal today, the term meaning the state of sucking or being sucked back into a relationship that sucked.

Urban is more expansive:

Hoovering
1. v. To vacuum a floor or rug ;

2. v. Being manipulated back into a relationship with threats of suicide, self-harm, or threats of false criminal accusations. Relationship manipulation often associated with individuals suffering from personality disorders like Borderline Personality Disorder or Narcissistic Personality Disorder ;

3. v. Excessive consumption as in drug or alcohol use ;

4. v. Sexual term describing oral stimulation of the penis, vagina, or rectum ;

5. n. Derogatory term for taking advantage of others by taking more food, drugs, beverages, than paid for or borrowing things and rarely returning them.
1. I was hoovering the second floor bedrooms and hall!
2. After I broke up with my girlfriend, she tried hoovering me back!
3. Last night, Blake was hovering the cocaine as usual!
4. Last night was great, Tanya was hoovering me all night!
5. Alicia is hoovering her brother this weekend.

Say someone dumped you, broke your heart, and then walked away. Hoovering is that act or actions of the dumper coming back into the dumpee’s life to get one last buzz or rekindling solely for the sake of lighting up the dumper’s momentary lull in his or her life–a pick-me-up, if you will. So the dumper, knowing what makes the dumpee respond, tries overtly or pretextually to wedge his or herself back into the relationship without regard to the damage left in the wake of the dumping or outright wreckage by deception or other abuse. The hooverer is usually a narcissist, according to the ej article.

Now I am a logophile and enjoy words old and new. I like that there are labels to characterize the nuances of behaviors, like ghosting and hoovering, while I simultaneously despise labeling that lazily sizes someone up as simply a type–one behavior labels the person hooverer or narcissist.

Prior to the advent of psych-typecasting, we used to call ghosters, hooverers and narcissists the umbrella term: assholes. To me, foregoing the finer distinctions between one asshole and another is unnecessary. Bad behavior is bad behavior regardless of its personality phenotype (or is genotype?).

Does anyone feel any better saying “I was hoovered,” rather than “that woman was an asshole”?

 

credit: cei.org

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Let’s get her a dog

 
 
“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” Groucho Marx.

 

She’s socially uncomfortable.

Let’s get her a puppy, another dog.

Let’s get the dog a dog.

And the cat. 

All the cats.

Another playmate to her posse.

To follow her up and down the stairs.

Like lambs to Mary.

As she convalesces.

Her brain and confidence bruised.

Boredom and inertia breaking her.

Fear in cycles deep.

Of never ever going back.

And the cold stares.

Judgment.

When she needs a true friend.

Let’s get her a dog.
 

credit: dogbreedinfo.com

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Bhavana

  
Bhavana, meaning to cultivate or develop but commonly used as a word for meditation in Buddhism, filtered down into my comprehension pool of late, that place where I can see a term’s reflection and pair it with illustrative experience to flesh out the bones of the word.

Cultivating takes time; it slowly sweeps widespread across a large swath of reading, span of years and percolation time. Like when I first tried vegetarianism back in the 90s. I ran tons then and ate little meat to keep light. Thinking the natural evolution of cutting back on animal protein was a vegetarian diet, I took the leap but was unsuccessful. I craved someting, felt a huge hole in my diet and so gave up. 

Fifteen years later, without much thought, I just stopped eating meat. And never missed it. Like yoga and meditation, dozens of attempts over several decades and then one day it all made sense and was effortless to form the habit with full understanding of that seepage, that diffusion through mental pores of  cultivated disposition to bend not only body but behavior, to flex a will to become. Unfold. 

Sometimes conscious understanding needs time to catch up to that deeper knowledge, the stretch between knowing and understanding like the lightbulb lit with the words, “So that was what he was trying to tell me,” or “now I get how to play fifth position on the fingerboard”. Before, it was flat mystery like a hollow idea.

Bhavana is like a road trip uncharted and unknown at the start but so expected at the destination. As if you always knew where you were going after rolling back all the miles that you thought you had no idea where you were–an illusion, like your shadow catching up with you.

 
credit: wikipedia

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Wisdom?

 
 
It’s the nature of the beast.

To demolish all creative thought in a cliché, say

the sentence out loud without pause.

Don’t question it; don’t sneer. Don’t ask:

Does it mean surrender, resignation, acceptance,

withdrawal, wisdom, abidance or indifference? 

You already know the answer.

Code for trade-off, the things that cannot change

not by will or effort, not by demanding, wishing, 

hoping, foot-stomping, screaming, crying or praying. 

Laziness, perhaps, or exhaustion, one preceding

the other, most likely, at intuiting the insurmountable.

 
He’s always late, never checks his messages when

he’s made a date to meet me, and snores so loudly

most nights I can’t sleep, and counts on my inability

to hold on to anger time after time, til I wonder

if he’s just playing me, holding me down, keeping me

in the invisible stockades of pilloried complaints,

usual ones like taken for granted and love me enough.

 
“Look, if you want something bad enough,” my mother

always said, “you’ll find a way to get it and keep it.” 

That nearly always sounded like truth, like something

right out of the good book of cause and effect and

Newtonian physics or the natural laws of divine free will

or perception–on the little brain bits we have to depend.

The whole a-will-a-way combo, the tritest of them all.

Except how do I know if I have accepted in wisdom, peace 

and knowledge what I cannot change, made a fair exchange 

or simply ducked and run without a step in the face of the 

inevitable, my presumed conclusion befitting the fatigue 

of too many, just too many reasonable compromises?

“Better not to ask,” she’d sometimes say.

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David Bowie

No doubt music marks our days, sometimes quick phases, oftentimes longer, a decade or a lifetime. Bowie marks a near lifetime for me. Not too many artists have kept me listening as I pass through the decades with morphing styles and tastes befitting the ages, mine and the world’s.

I first heard Bowie in late 75, Ziggy Stardust most prominently but all of his early albums. I remember his young scratchy nasal voice (“Oh cacti find a home…”) that blossomed into that deep sonorous sometimes bass trilled at the edges full of flair and drama. My sister adored him and played his albums continuously in the basement room we shared back in Long Island. And when she slipped off the edge a bit, Bowie seeped into her paranoid delusions. She saw prophecy in him. Even in her mania, she appeared to capture the essence of him–enigmatic and forging.

We saw him, my sister and I, in the late 70’s, maybe early 80’s, if my poor memory serves me (and it rarely does), at the Forum in LA during the Low tour (or maybe the early 80’s Serious Moonlight tour–or both). He had already abandoned Ziggy and the thin white duke by then. I remember feeling nostalgic every year or two when he changed his style yet again, transformed into someone else, some other alien, sliding into the latest (industrial/Eno influenced) or setting the trend himself (Ziggy).

Some might characterize him as a chameleon or a dragon of sorts with his commanding fire burning everyone and everything up in frenzied delight or disintegrated fury if you read the stories of his professional and personal life, a long list of gone-throughs. But there is no doubt that the music world has been much influenced like a meteor scar on the earth, the crater of his prolific creative output over several media–music, art, film, drama–ever communing with the stars he brought our eyes to time and again.

Up to his probable scripted death by the seemingly indomitable cancer yesterday, he was in charge. He made the trends, first had us look gender fluidity in the eyes on such a grand scale. And glam rock, I believe, would not have come to the fore with its serious spark without him (okay Queen was pretty cool too).

Of course I am no music historian nor critic, just a listener, appreciator and star gazer. But as a fan, I know I will sorely miss the years’ passings without a Bowie change-up around the corner (just when you think he’s resting comfortably…). He seems to have synchronized my days, kept me abreast of the new, the old-new, the new-new and the new-old. But just as I said it as I watched his Lazarus video from his just-released BlackStar, “amazing”, as I’ve exclaimed it so many times before when he sent chills down my spine with some profound lyric, performance and/or song.

Peace, bro. I will miss the latest and greatest you sorely.

 

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This is for all the lonely, broken people

 
 
“Her name was like an echo of an ache in her.”  Patrick Rothfuss, The Slow Regard of Silent Things

Some texts are memorable by a single, sublime sentence: “Call me Ishmael.” “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” “Gregor Samsa awoke one day to find himself an enormous vermin.”

Rothfuss’ Auri story reads like a long prose poem, so lovely for the logophile in its wonderland of creative and created words (I looked them up) and specificity in naming things.

On to Book 2 of The Kingskiller Chronicle, a place I have enjoyed inhabiting almost as much as living in Middle Earth 40 years ago. Feels as good to wend my way through the words of this world as it was to learn to speak Elvish. 

However, Rothfuss’ little side venture tale of one of the mysterious waif characters in the main plot appeals more to the poet in me than the entire lengthy two-volume story appeals to the fantasy-adventurer. And this from a Game of Thrones fan. 

A short but delicately sensual read, I recommend the novella–an echo of an ache itself–to all the beautiful broken people the author addresses through it.
 

credit: sagacomic.blogspot.com

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Cave

 
 

My cave surrounds me wherever I go, shrouding my aura in darkness, oft-colored midnight, even then rich cabernet red and other so charcoal and dirt, depending where the eyes.
 
A child’s pinched lips and piercing wail at a dropped candy in a sweet shop, an obsessive loss and raging irreconcilable remedy no time will heal, deflects from the walls of my helmet.
 
But inside this dank hollow lie dusty old book traces by the scores with yellowed leaves of lingering tales in smidgeons of dribs and drabs hooked on peek-ish memory bites and
 
Tasty morsels of cookbook glossy tongue shots gleaming moist bread puddings, fired sugar crisp tops of creme brulet fine firm fork poked and 77 chicken crockpot recipes.
 
Flickering in the black are 35 millimeter reels spinning snowy memories cast in 60’s vintage plastic coating like clear crunchy couch covers that thigh-stick on humid summer days.
 
My cave halos me in shadows, protects me from seeing too crisply, feeling too widely and stepping too recklessly from coral blue wave-walls framing family, clutter, oranges and Picasso.
 
Within I carry the cavernous dim where the entryway light blazes shimmer on passersby or then again, maybe yet, the innumerably shot clear through rays shine outside in. 

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 Strung Out on Life Haiku

 
 
Beef stew in the air

Stairwell walls’ sticky with it.

Breathe, run, count 10, breathe.
______________________________________
Color in the lines

She could not stay inside them

Failed kindergarten.
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Married on a whim

Each good deed deserves better

Still waiting on gifts.
______________________________________
Two lives turn to one

Children’s bare feet pat down halls

tripping on carpet.
_______________________________________
Rumors replace truth

The papers sell story lies

no consequences.
________________________________________
Writing life haiku

Art belies the craft poorly

no skill for an ear.  

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The Two of Us

  

There is a photograph of you and me, our heads are contorted from sleeping upright in the back of a car, your face clearly lost to sleep, my long neck extended bent as far back as humanly possible without losing the head–only my head is actually cut off. My face stops at the chin; only the widely exposed distorted neck, almost serpentinely composed, and your sleeping face suggests that I have surrendered to what I could no longer fight.

Your haircut reflects the 80s, mullets being the fashion, which you sported briefly. I had one too, though straight hair does more justice to outline the do than my curly hair. We were young, maybe our mid-twenties and traveling, exhausted with too much caffeine and too little sleep. Our clothing suggests spring time or fall, light half sleeved unjacketed shirts and jeans. 

I cannot place the specific occasion of our sleeping in the back of a car or who took the picture. Our sister in law gave it to us this past holiday season and laughed, saying she had meant to give this picture to us for years, each time she came across it in her belongings. And this year was the year, though I don’t know why. The randomness of things stuns me slightly.

You and I share so much history, large and small, remembered and forgotten, largely the latter, and not for lack of significance so much as sheer length of time, the innumerable moments we have lived together. We grew ourselves from teenagers til these current waning years of our youth, of our lives. 

And we have suffered and joyed in measure to most, all of life’s gifts and trials. We have fared well you and I, though you would look askance on that affirmation. And then I would remind you about the synaptic net you form in your brain with such negativity. 

Thus it is with us, we who co-exist inhaling the dust of our pasts every day, lugging it inside us like weightless trunks of paperless snapshots and report cards and love letters we never kept or even wrote except in the air, in the doing and being of us, so that when life folds up neatly to square off a life lived, we’ll have nothing left to us but shared time, the illusion of being.

Lord knows, I cannot imagine having shared illusions with anyone else.

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