Refracted Neurons

We set our clocks ahead thinking it mattered, not thinking, time is a deck of cards swirling down an escalator, churning face down at the bottom. The streets roll into emptiness, not from leaving but stuck fast with staying, and staying, and I hurry as if I can run ahead, as if I might be the one to flip face up, to miss the fall, to float suspended the city frozen beneath me. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I was in the bus tunnel yesterday charging up my Orca card, and playing cards were sprinkled all over the place like someone had been shuffling while escalating.  Not as dangerous as shuffling while elevating, but still.  If you're gonna shuffle, do it while sitting at a table or at least while standing still. The city is pretty empty at this point, and even people like me who are just going to work and back are rare.  It's eerie, but it also made me think about all the empty places in the city and which one I would most like to wander through....

It was two days on from the longest night, morning glistening  in street lamps, puddles reflecting multiple moons, glistening feathers pinned back in predatory symmetry, the metal of a pole. And because the out-of- place is my kind of awe, we stared at each other unblinking, like the time a church was being razed and a sole stained glass remained sparkling  above the tumbling dust, or when someone who never heard of you sang out your name like the light it is, trickling like sun across  the back of my neck. ************************** I was walking to the bus the other day when I saw something odd on a street sign. I’ve never had fantastic night vision, so even though it looked like an owl, I figured it was probably a piece of wood. As I walked by it, I rubbernecked like an old man watching a young woman in hot pants. If it was wood, it was wood with feathers growing out of it. Now remember, this is the c...

Fall is the end of porch swings and blackberries, a riotous end of wind-blown rain of comfort falling away in red and orange. The tendril of sorrow that sprouts in me will not grow.                            It is not the growing season. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ I haven't written poetry in a while, so hopefully, this little snippet will prime the pump.  Unless the pump has frozen over, which is possible.  It's sooooooo cold here already.  

The longing bursts inside you for choruses of gloria tua from lungs too choked with smoke to sing and even though icons hold sway among the ashes, sound doesn't travel the same. As if Miserere was never misprinted, and the shivers trickling over and off you, are solely unfallen rain. But mercy is never what you wanted to ask for, and this fall hurts because in it, you see yourself. ------------------------------------ As a sort of a side note, the story of Allegri's Miserere  is the chocolate chip cookie story of the choral music world.  If you've never heard Miserere performed live in a cathedral, well, first of all, you should; and second of all the arrangement commonly heard is a result of a mistake.  Read the link if you're interested. Recently I've been having skin problems, you know, the kind of problems where the dermatologist speaks to you in Latin and chops off a chunk of flesh.  Just to make matters even more bizarre, I have to...

Behind each set of glassy eyes is a darkness so complete that broken bottles glint like stars and you button your shirt to the top button, as if to beg, for the embrace of an atmosphere you cannot breathe outside of, and hold in terror those who float free from the tethers gasping as they rise into nothing. Adjust your tie and swat away the hands that tug at you, dazed eyes that search yours, a constellation of shattered glass, your own gravity is in peril.

I am ill-starred, legs above the water, breath still held.  For me would you stand bareheaded, scattering wildflowers on the shore, or am I just driftwood in a sea of fragments of what was or could have been. My breath is still held for you, my bearings, my ballast, my scattered wildflowers on the shore, the star that I can point down to, the dial that seems to spin in its case, pointing always in the same direction, my bearings, my ballast, the sky I never grabbed two-handed, you, the star that I can point up to, the arch of waves that defines me, the bubbles, I can no longer hold, bursting with what could have been. The sky you grabbed, two-handed, standing unbevereaved, bareheaded, the arch of waves defining     you are ill-starred, legs above the deep. oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo I just finished reading Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania . This poem is rather heavily inspi...

I shake out my pockets for a currency, forgotten until this moment, when the mist settles on chimneys and the white sky trickles down to the tops of street lamps, and I can no longer breathe without puffing steam in a spiral, delight, liquid with the violence of living.  Please, another song. oooooooooooooooooooo I haven’t forgotten about y’all, I’ve just been working almost exclusively on a super-secret project that I’ll share with you soon. I’ve been so wrapped up in it that I feel like there’s nothing in my head except stardust. You know that feeling? No? Well, it must be a personal problem, but nothing that a good day of accounting won’t fix. The other day I went to Safeway and saw the most amazing thing. There was a man outside the store playing an accordion. I always think of accordions as being wheezy and brassy, but this was rich and nostalgic. Everyone kept throwing money at him and I was grinning like ...

I could see my shadow lapping against my feet, trailing behind me on a string, lifting up into the sky. I didn’t notice it rattle in the wind, coast up the side of a skyscraper, didn’t see it tangle in the web of wires. I only knew that the pavement was a stranger, and the outline of you vanished; and even though my chest trembled, I opened my arms, shaky, radiant, embracing a beauty found in incompleteness . . . oooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooo Just when I think I’ve got the hang of corporate culture, I go and do something that makes my boss laugh hysterically. Namely, using indexing tabs in the shape of bears. Me: Why is that so funny? Boss: They’re pink and blue bears. Me: I didn’t have purple ones, so I used blue. Boss: (Resumes laughing) I still don’t know why that was so funny, and this is a document that’s going all the way to the Principal, bears included. My other tabs are hedgehogs, but I’m not telling anyo...

It was glimmering in the lean sky-topping shadows, like sunlight freckling the grass through the leaves of a tree, just waiting to be spoken. It was in the hiss of static traffic, and like the sound; in swept the tide, burning my soles with water. The city called your name, and the precipitation fell so slight, so unwonted, that I wondered if, perhaps, it was just me crying. ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo Laying on my back under an apple tree, I thought, "There has to be a poem in this somewhere." ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

You say that glass, unbroken never glitters, that shorelines would stand empty, wont for sand. But my love is brittle, as pure as soda-lime, solid as the breakers that glisten on the sea. ************************************************** Now that the weather is sort of nice-ish again, I've been sneaking down to the beach whenever I can.  I don't know if I can even call it sneaking, since I'm carrying a bag of sand toys and cajoling two toddlers across a train-trestle/bridge thing (if you've been to Carkeek Park, you know what I'm talking about).  We actually ran into a traffic jam last time, with a row of twenty toddlers all trying to go down those see-through steps at once.  I've started working on a sort of sequel to Egregious .  So if you enjoyed the original, or you like sci-fi/fantasy mash-ups with a dash of horse carriages, check it out.   I am really working on making my writing more focused, and not being concerned about ...

I will no longer  be your penitence each lock, opened, each strand, freed. Some people go for that kind of thing but I have witnesses trailing down my cheeks, each tress, shortened, each hair, fallen, and I just can’t get used to the idea, that I can’t be your penitence, and like these strands of hair, you have slid through my fingers. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ As far as poetry is concerned, I’ve been a bit stuck lately. I was looking for ideas to jump-start things and one was “write a poem about a haircut.” As you can imagine, my first thought was Sha Goyjo. Well, maybe you can’t imagine. I've been lagging in general on my writing, and it's not bound to get better anytime soon.  Why?  Well, let's just say it involves singing and takes me back in time a couple of decades.  I haven't tried to read sheet music in a really long time, and I've forgotten waaaaay more than I thought I had.  B...

Listen, it’s a steel dove of a city, with eyes more grey than blue, still she’ll tuck you under her wing and in her jumble of language, coo more sweetly than your mama can sing. Her pinions are raised for you, tall sheets of glass feathers. When they called her green, Hon’, they meant callow, like you, they meant she is constantly burning with electricity, burning herself down, burning, like emeralds don’t, ‘cause if you squint just right the concrete under your feet is more beautiful than a flower. ************************** The weather turned unseasonably nice this weekend and today we headed for the beach. I sat by the water and stared at a rock, turning it over in my hands, and thinking how it was in some strange way more entrancing than staring at a daisy. Yes, that’s what I do in my spare time: stare at rocks. Wow, that's a really big rock. I finished the short story I started in Arizona and, I posted the next chapter of Murder i...

It is too late in the season for that amber disk to do anything other than warm me. Past the days of blossoms, of seed, of attrition, you are a blackthorn spring, a sun, spotted with the nip of winter. It is too late for the stretch of shadows, for the buzz of honey   that fills your mouth when you breathe. Here are the days of blossoms, of seed, of regeneration. of you, of unripe blackberries, and the vines of my soul take root. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The weather has been unusual for this time of year. It's as cold as the hand of death reaching out of a grave, but the sky is that piercing blue we usually only get in the summer. None of the plants have been fooled by this, and I certainly haven't been fooled. Just a little precipitation and we'll have snow. Seattle, via airplane For the moment at least, it's got me thinking of summer instead of Christmas.

I want to open my arms wide and spin, until the skyscrapers blur into a halo of i beams, steel, and reinforced concrete; and in this dizziness, the wash of voices and acrid wafts of smoke swirl into streamers, each thread more vivid than that look in your eye, when you close your hand around a spark of light. ------------------------------------- I've finally put all my urban themed poems in one place: City Poems for City People If you are not a city person, these poems are still for you. Ultimately, they are about finding beauty in unexpected places, silence amidst noise, and self standing in a crowd.

The city is a tipsy lady twisting her fingers through her hair, her bracelet the moon. When she rises, the streets sway in half-time, and I need to stop thinking about you, walking towards me in a crowd, your fingers twirling a pencil, your face, the moon rising and the streets sag around you and I can't stop thinking the city is drunk on your bare wrists, more lovely than the tendons of the moon. If you scroll, the building seems to move . . . ____________________________ Well, summer is officially here, and I'm not just talking about the solstice.  School is ending and I have no idea how regularly I'll manage to blog over the summer. I'll still be working on Egregious and this week is actually a big week for this story.  So if you've been following the story at all, hop on over to egregiousbook.blogspot.com .  I'm not posting a teaser this week, I'll just leave you with the chapter's title: Death is a ...

Just sit on the shore, tuck your legs underneath you, watch the brown water eddy and pool. Let loneliness come to you. Let her blow around you, hair whipping, cheeks stinging, fold in on yourself like a bud. Let loveliness come to you, like a flower opening uncaring, unseen, unspoken. Turn towards me lips to my ear. Let loneliness come.

Just in case you get hit by a bus, momentarily airborne, papers flying out of your satchel like ticker-tape confetti, or maybe you don't own a satchel and it's gum wrappers and a bottle of vodka crying big gulps of life into the cement. Whatever spills out of you, a rain of loose coins, pitter-pattering and rolling into the gutters, down alleyways, write it down, please. Pick up your scattered papers; sit, legs dangling in the sidewalk the traffic cool against your feet.

Even if you had the time to write it all down, you couldn't tell the story of the city as an endless series of individual biographies.-Steven Johnson It's not a hundred story building sinking beneath its own weight. It's running your hand over a banister, paint flaking, pulse racing as you realize story upon story touched there, each following its own plot line, each hand another protagonist, each protagonist you, and each you loved incompletely. It’s not a hundred stories, building the skyline, lights in each window. It’s running my hand, where yours touched and held this banister, and in that space we overlap, a hundred pages between us.

Someday I’m going to keep walking, squeezing into the vanishing point, compacting my body into abstraction, popping out on the other side of the canvas, but Love, you know it’s an event horizon, everything moves at a quarter speed, and I can’t quite make it through. 

The fog didn’t come in on little cat feet. It didn’t rub its back against rain pipes. No, the fog stomped its way across town, it was a giant made of cement, pressing down on plants and trees, three-story walk-ups, and you. (I forgot to mention you were in this story, not as the poet, but as the muse.) And this humidity, this grey blanket pushes me face down into the soil, until drowning in my own inability to swim, my only sensation is breathlessness. _____________________________________ I worked 11.5 hours yesterday and I'm feeling a little foggy . . . Oh, and I should mention.  The cat feet are a Carl Sandburg thing and that whole rubbing on things business is from T.S. Elliot.