Trying to Pray

This time, I have left my body behind me, crying

In its dark thorns.

Still,

There are good things in the world.

It is dusk.

It is the good darkness

Of women's hands that touch loaves.

The spirit of a tree begins to move.

I touch leaves.

I close my eyes, and think of water.

James Wright

Evolution.

It dies with us. The whole thing dies with us.

Jack Kerouac said there were four essentials for prose:

Accept loss forever.
Be submissive to everything, open, listening.
No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language, and knowledge. And,
Be in love with your life.

I looked around me. No one was there. I had no one's approval or permission, and no one cared whether I wrote or not. I asked myself why I write.
I write because I keep my mouth shut a lot and my ego truth is I want to live forever. Not only do I want to live forever, but I want the cup of tea I had this morning to live forever, too, and my left sock and the orange peel and the woman I saw pushing the shopping cart of canned foods. I hurt at my impermanence and at the edge of all my joy, I know all of this will end-the sunny days in spring, my house on Clubhouse Court in Franklin, Tennessee, a perfectville in mythical America. Then no one will know what it was like to breathe here or to stub your toe at the sunset on the hills as the sky moves in layers of color.
I write because I'm broken and hurt and I need to know how to make hurt okay. Rivers run through me, and if I don't allow them to cascade from my fingertips, I'll build a dam. With the fulness I'll die. I'll just implode.

I write because I'm an artist, and I mold my life through my words.
I write because I'm lonely and move through the world alone. If I don't write, no one will ever be able to say that I was here or that they knew me.
I write because I'm submissive. I give back as freely as I have been given, and I want to breathe life into everything I encounter, give it all a new name. I want to recycle everything I know before it's too late and I can't help anyone because if I can't help anyone everything is meaningless.
I'm desperate. This is all I have. I have nothing else.
I write because I'm insane, schizophrenic. I know it and accept it and have to do something before I end up drunk, suicidal, or in a looney bin.
I write because it's dangerous, rebellious, wicked even, and I'm wicked. And writing is the only way to make myself good again, to face my demons and spit in their eyes. It's the only way I can build a temple in three days and move into it. It's the home not made out of wood and stone, and the only one I'm welcome to return to no matter how long I've been gone, and want to. It's the only real home I''ll probably ever have. It's light and it's dark, and I eat it and keep it with me.
And finally, I write out of total incomprehension that love isn't enough and even writing, which might be all I have, it isn't even enough. I can never get it all down. There are times when I have to leave it, when I can't voice the words which tell what happens in my heart, in my bones. I'm left gaping, grasping at thin air for some fragment of a language to relieve myself, but there's nothing, and I'm empty handed. I'm angry. But writing is the only way I can meet myself. It's the only home I have to come to. It's the only place my soul has rest, where all the rivers of this world meet at one point of singularity and nothing exists but everything is here.

"When it hurts we return to the banks of certain rivers."

A day so happy.

Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.

Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.

There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.

I knew no one worth my envying him.

Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.

To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.

In my body I felt no pain.

When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.

"Gift"

Czeslaw Milosz

Today, I walked down to the water three miles away from everything. I intended to go there to pray but realized I've been praying in my heart my whole life and there were no words I could say that weren't already known. Instead, I saw how everything else moves in prayer, the trees, the delphiniums, geese and turtles. And I found that I was okay.

I stumbled upon some deer and tried out my Equus. Reading one of the white-tailed does was like a dream. She responded to everything and I responded to her. Being able to communicate in this way thrills me like it's the first time each time it happens. I feel I'm being a part of a miracle, or rather witnessing one.

I haven't been at peace for a few weeks until today. Nature is a kind of medicine. Walking back, I no longer felt subjective to the world. I felt objective, and I let this big earth pass right through me.

Also, I didn't feel alone anymore. And that has never happened.

To go on living when one has stopped living,

I think, is a terrible end.

To no longer taste the sun on

your skin

on any old morning

or feel this big world

engulf around you with each life,

small but complete,

such a dishonorable kind of death.

I would rather die wholly again and again in a day.

If I eat this spoonful of sugar,

I will break out of my body.

my love is animal..

Because I know a lot about horses, and of loneliness too:

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,

Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.

And the eyes of those two Indian ponies

Darken with kindness.

They have come gladly out of the willows

To welcome my friend and me.

We step over the barbed wire into the pasture

Where they have been grazing all day, alone.

They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness

That we have come.

They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.

There is no loneliness like theirs.

At home once more,

They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.

I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,

For she has walked over to me

And nuzzled my left hand.

She is black and white,

Her mane falls wild on her forehead,

And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear

That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.

Suddenly I realize

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom.

"A Blessing"

James Wright

Ode to Spring

Here's another story I found from 2006 when writing was a playground for me, something to do for fun like video games for others. That's when it was pure and natural... now I've become institutionalized, and everything's business. Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I. Apparently, in this I described one thing from three perspectives. Guess and I'll tell you at the end, maybe:

I was ashamed in their beauty. The clouds were thick and I could hear them talking as they past over head: "We may not make it, but look at all we've seen." The water from the pond grabbed at my feet before retreating. Oh, but the swans! For a little while they put me in a trance, and I believed they had created the earth and myself.

---------------------------

I didn't see them unless I looked. Even if I stared their white blended with the clouds and became monotonous. The only part of them recognizable were their black feet like footprints in the sky. I swam in circles and at odd angles as one set of footprints disappeared and was replaced by another somewhere else.

This was how the world turned,

not immediate

but slowly.

--------------------------

There was a man standing before me. I wanted for him to swim to me from the dirt so I could cleanse him, keep him under like the swans which found refuge in me. "Come and wade, child-man," I wanted to coax. Yet, I think we have always done that and without much attainment. Today, he was my only occupation as he stood staring, seeing for the first time. I wanted to rise up and swallow him, have him forever. But how the earth cups me, cuts me off. Only if those clouds would rain. But they keep traveling, deep in conversation.

3 Perspectives on swans; 1st man, 2nd fish, 3rd water.

I was looking through an old journal from 2007 that I wrote stories in and to my surprise, I actually kinda like them.. in an informal kinda recreational way. I think this one's about me and my best friend, Kaitlin, or it was inspired by me and Kaitlin, but I don't remember.. parts of this story may or may not be fabricated:

It was one of those days. She and I were wearing the same dress we wore yesterday. Also, the day before. We were going through one of those phases where you want to wear the same clothes everyday. This time the phase lasted nearly two weeks. We had always gone through phases like this. At one time we hung upside down off her bed so our hair looked like it stood on end and we sprayed a whole bottle of hair spray so it would stay like that when we stood. We'd hang upside down with the blood rushing to our heads while we waited for it to dry. We thought it was cool and we looked cool with it. Two bony nine year olds with dos like Einstein had cloned his hair and implanted it to our skulls, watered it regularly and watched it grow. This phase had lasted for a month of February on a leap year and only stopped when I had gotten sick from inhaling the many fumes from our Xtra Stronghold. Then we had gone through other phases and those phases got us here in the same dress, nine years later. We were stranded. At least we had hoped we were stranded. We had hoped for a lot of things and now we had hoped that we were stuck in the wild of the city and would have to scour to find food and shelter. For an instant I hoped we didn't know anyone else. I really hoped that. And we were a family. Family. The ones around when there's no one else. But we were in the same town we had been in for ten plus years and we knew everyone. That's why we wished we were stranded somewhere, and there wasn't a familiar face.

You don't really learn anything from it, besides the desperation and boredom of two teenage girls, so it's really not great.. or really good. But it's fun. It captures us, or at least me, in a different state in my life, when I was restless. Hasn't really changed but I believe acceptance is kicking in.