September 20 2007
To be sure, there's been more over the last year but how should one begin but by beginning again. The needle. Dropping the needle. Hearing those first few seconds of crackling vinyl bouncing up and down. Perhaps the greatest sound in the world, along with a mandolin, or a woman sliding out of her underwear. Inremittent moans, sighs, the sound of a congregation saying amen. The wheels of the car go round & round all through the town. I've never left. But I did hink back at some point over the last year and realized that Kesey had once talked about the prevalent importance of experience over the written language that without experience, the power of language becomes hollow. So it has been an experience to draw upon the last year or so. Walking blind.

July 28 2007
The Architect
They say he did not speak the language of people. It was mysterious but soothing to the ear like when you have a lover, trying hard to focus on the meaning, maybe the context but getting wrapped in the revelry of the sounds, the tones, moving up and down, around you. I’ve tried to chronicle as much of this life, as is my calling to bear witness. The haunting it undergoes into the veins of my consciousness, sometimes it dulls into a steady telling of the facts, an oracle in the morning, wet with dew, naked, on the mountain, reflexive. A bending back into the rhythm of what we used to know of as profundity.

January 21 2007
1.
Pax delivers himself from evil, only to plunge head on into snowy traffic. Pax creates a new vestige for anger. This lingering on anger only created an aloneness marked by a new-found sadness. All the people who used to call and inquire no longer doing so. When all else has failed....still you are left with yourself... The question is "what else, what else are you left with?" Could that aloneness ever be truly a vacuum? I remember getting sober back when and thinking about that statement, "nature abhors a vacuum," and immediately, feeling a creeping fear within myself that the black hole which would form within me would likely grow until I was entirely consumed. What a dark, dower thought but still I could not deny that something within me, felt like I was going to starve...

2.
I’ve told myself several times in the last few years
that I can’t write like that, visualizing placing
a ladder against a great white wall, and looking up
at a grand buttress, the planks of a building,
and it’s not that unfamiliar to me what is done
with the brushes, the strokes, the vision, or maybe
just my certainty that the job needs to be done—
that ladder, that raggedy, shaky, paint-splattered
ladder, so flimsy there in space: what if the wind
came in hard from the north while I was up in the eaves,
while I’m being so careful to perform, to patch
the words so you will love them, so you will
wrap your lips around them like the girls who
have loved me, or a popsicle late nights before bed,
or a blanket while you read the last pages of a horror story,
filling in the images we sew in our hearts, and
suddenly, it’s not the wind keeping me from the ladder,
it’s that I’m sleeping on the couch, below the ladder,
my eyes burning & chilling every time I regain
consciousness, how large the ladder looks, how
far apart the steps seem to be, how long the strides,
how many stairs edging their way to eternity—
surely, my breath will run out before the top, or
like sisyphus, I will reach my place, the grand place
of my oratory, of my masterpiece, only to fall
back down, to have return to earth again, only to
feel hope vanish, going down again, back to
the place where I was born, where I seem destined,
to hold a brush with workman’s hands, the kind
who does this work for skill, to eat, etches crude
drawings, dull scrawls on the walls of the world,
who knows not what he thinks, does not dine
in the halls of tradition, is a man without a country,
with destiny, will lean on the earth until gravity
bends him, until he returns to the earth—
what keeps me going back to the ladder is that
the view from the top is as inspiring as the view
from the bottom, that sometimes the ladder
is a catwalk, a bridge between seasons,
a place where I can reflect on where I’ve been
and where I’m headed, through field or stream,
whether the next step I’m considering will plunge
me deep into a rabbit hole, or whether I will
submerge from the forest untouched, and sanctified.
If I chose to write, if I thrust out my view,
I can still decide where to place the ladder,
when and how often I want to carry it with me,
it’s significance, if it indeed exists, or just lingers
as a harrowing or hopeful image in mind.
Whether to lean on the ladder, or stow it in the garage
for safe keeping, a sunny day, when it’s time
to paint the house I’ve been building, regardless,
in spite of myself, and whatever I’ve been fed that morning.

6 Feb 2007
The betrayal was not in the words, but in the omission, a blotting out of names, an interstate, a torrent of names, he was saying though he did not hope to reveal he knew her, or anyone for that matter. I’m watching myself finally do this, sort of recklessly, it is in the phone records. She can read the phone records. She pays the bill and yet, he may need to put an end to such an arrangement, for his own peace of mind, his desire to be purged of all guilt. He loved her, but had fallen out of love, and there was nothing he could do to bring himself back into the fold. When it is done, it is done. So he believed again.