Monday, January 20, 2014

Day 8: Succulent Synchronicity


Day 8: Still knocking back jugs of water as part of an Aquatic -induced fast. Thought about juicing this morning but didn’t want the gnawing sear of the self-contained Juicer to wake up my roommate.  Anticipating my first bona fide Vegan banquet tonight that my dear friend and reader Valena is bringing over.  I’m learning (learning) to take care of my body. I’d much rather have someone I have never met get off on the bulk and inches endowed in the sloping sentences and encroaching paragraphs of my craft than (via enervated instagram image) get off on the inches of my cock or the sight of my body but after years, it seems, I’m learning that I’m not a body, I’m just mortgaging one for a very terse and finite skidded paragraph of what human beings perceive as time.

After years I’m finally figuring out how to take care of this body, this compartment of sockets and crawl spaced that I find myself graciously buttoned inside.   

Lately I’ve been locating  metaphysical gluten free breadcrumbs of assurance, mystical manna scattered in a paper trail dotting the first week of the reprisal of my Succulent Sojourn verifying that I am on the right path indeed.

The fact that Perspicuous was the word of the day at Dictionary.com was just the caricatured BLAM! flag slide-whistling out from the nozzle of the synchronicity start gun.  
There was a full moon dangling like a vitamin deficient trampoline hammering luminous sheets of seasonal ivory light cascading over the chalky avenues of West Peoria (or, more aptly stated, the double-you pea, initial variation thereof). The thin streets are currently caked with wisps of snow while the temperature continues to vacillate. One day the wind-chill is negative 10, the next day it tis forty degrees with a frigid breeze tackling the back of my neck as I stomp to work. Perhaps there is no such thing as Global warming. Perhaps Mother Nature is also going through caffeine and alcohol withdrawal related mood swings.






As a poet I’ve been blessed to give between 15-20 readings a year mainly at coffee houses and art galleries and (esp) local bars but I’ve read at libraries and Universities as well. I’m working on a new poetic project inspired by the vagabond street poet in BEFORE SUNRISE entitled GIVE ME A WORD AND I WILL GIVE YOU A POEM where, every Friday in 2014 (and beyond) I will write a poem based on a word or crazy phrase (honestly, the crazier the better) submitted by you the pithy reader, so, if you read this, send me a word or a phrase and I will scribe out the most beautiful poem every written using the alphabetical nautical of the human language and dedicate it to your eternal brilliance.







A poem just for you.

Those who have seen me perform know that I almost always punctuate my performances by reciting one of my favorite poems from a poet of note and then encouraging the audience to go out and read the shit out of everything that poet has ever written. Sometimes I’ll recite TOPOGRAPHY (what a poem!!) by Sharon Olds. Sometimes I’ll break into stanzas of Shakespeare or perform fragments of Prufrock or selections from Plath. I did a really cool duet with a dreadlocked girl name Nora (also a vegan) a couple of years ago by Denise Duhamel and Sandy McIntosh.   
 
I majored in English and creative writing at Bradley University and still harbor an unyielding  salivating pulse to read everything I can get my grubby little paws on but the bulk of my early germinal literary education  stems from  a public radio program hosted by Garrison Keillor the Writer’s Almanac. In high school I would come home, brew a pot of coffee, scribble inky linguistic wreathes of drivel into my notebook and wait for digit pupils of my bedroom clock to blink 3:54 when the show would convene. The show is basically Garrison talking in his gentle avuncular monotone, providing a list of literary datum pertinent to the days date. It’s fascinating and, when I decided all I wanted to do was just sit around guzzle coffee (and later chain smoke and shotgun beer) and read and write all day the Writer’s Almanac proved much more than an indispensable power tool, it was the commodious five-acre sprawling home depot that opened in the field that was full of corn when you were growing up. Time and again I have gone to the show and found solace in the vowels of Garrison’s voice. The highlight of the show is that Garrison reads a poem and I can still tell you the first time I heard him read the fourth stanza from Walt Whitman’s long poem I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC and how (somehow)  reality paused and the quantum curtains of time availed itself and life, outside the window of my bedroom at 2013 west Sherman just seemed to instruct to me that I should write poems for the rest of my life.
That this was my job.
I had been writing poems for the past six months,  since spring 1994, tinkering with the sparkplug of vowels while dissecting the narrative carburetor of high school histrionics in metered columns but that day, looking out at the arthritic limbs of the Sweet Gum tree my grandfather planted when I was four months old, I would have to assent was the day I accepted my calling as a writer.
Synchronic verifying-bread crumb #1 (falling off the succulent swivel of vicarious barstool):
While typing out this post I researched the exact date when I would have heard Garrison read that poem. The writer’s almanac archive contains dates listed of every poem garrison has ever read on air
January 19th, 1995. Junior year of high school.
 
The day I became a poet.
 
When I started this entry it was June 19th 2014.
 
Exactly 19 years to the date. Writing in the second story of an apartment exactly a block away from the house I grew up in, the room I first heard Garrison’s voice all those years ago.



                                          
 
But there’s another poem I first heard on the Writer’s Almanac that I almost always recite (ahem sexy California playwright Karen Green). A poem I go back to over and over again. A poem that if I had to select a piece of exposition to best be emblematic of the journey of  not only a writer but also my life sojourn it would be the sacred geometry of the 24 lines Yeats’ gives us in SONG OF WANDERING ANGUS over and over again. It is my poetic best friend. It is A poem deeply rooted in alchemical soil. A poem about following the unerring fire of one’s own psychological ache, ones creativity, one overtly-anthologized-Joseph Cambellesque bliss and chasing that fire in a dark wooden purlieu and  (through hunger and thirst) finding the creation who fully completes you if only for a nanosecond and chasing that breath of union until you are one with earth, the moon, the forever sun.

I was thinking about the end of the poem by Yeats, about the silver apples of the moon waltzing with the golden apples of the sun. I was meditating earlier in the day in my living room when I had an out of body experience. A couple of years ago (after a breakdown with the poetically proverbial love of my life) I had this weird breakdown and then (shit) left my body, literally jettisoned the framed epidermal husk playing hostess to my momentary pitstop on this planet. I left my body, grabbed the bottom of my neck as if wearing a prom shirt with late seventies lapels and threw, literally exiled Myself from the rolled-up socks of my flesh (I literally said in the trance-like vision, “I’m outta here!!!”) I found this portal (looks exactly like this) A kind of theosophical gazebo stepped into and was transported to this serene vista, a utopia where there were Greek columns everywhere as if they were harvested and everyone was at peace.




I had a second out of body experience a year later while meditating  in where I saw my old roommate (cool psychic guy named Mike Trusky, Gandalf to my Frodo) pointing  down this long corridor and when I trekked to the end I found myself basking this holy temple, which was dome and doily flavored and the size of ten  NFL. I sauntered into this large room and found myself in front of this altar. In front of me was a British mystic named Wellesley Tudor Pole and next to him was a Master attired in illuminating drapes of white. The Master looked at me and told me to bow and I told them that I could not bow until the person  I loved and who completed me was with me.

 The Master and Tudor Pole  smiled and told me to go out and find that person.
The most recent experience happened when I was mediating last night. I somehow left my body and I somehow had this image of two children who were in trouble and needed help. I was in this deep trance and I tried to snap out of it. Tried to wield whatever consciousness was hovering above  my forehead in vortex-carousel fashion back into the film of my flesh. Only I couldn’t. I tried four times, I tried yanking my wrists and groping my fingers. Finally something snapped and there was an audible clap (kind of like a golf clap, gentle yet with pattering vigor) and  I was reeled back into my body only I woke up in this world where again, everything was linear and resembled a panoramic photograph you would make of your vacation prints from Yellowstone in the mid-nineties. In this linear plane I found myself in the backyard of my childhood home . It was ravaged by a tempest akin to the tornado that decimated Washington, IL two months ago (still thinking of Leah and Eddie and Phoebe and V en famile). In the out of body experience I was next to my best friend of over 25 years David Hale. Both my childhood house and garage were completely decimated but there was this tree in the back yard, a tree that my grandfather planted called the Tree of Life that was intact, although the bark was bent in the detritus, so that the tree gave the semblance that it was bowing into the rubble of the earth. Hale and I each tried to release the tree so that it would sprout up straight only our attempts were futile. Finally I decided my quest was helpless and walked away and just as I was doing so saw that it was only a tiny piece of debris that was holding the tree down. I picked up the debris and the Tree of Life imminently sprouted again and began to bear fruit.   


The crazy part of this out-of-body experience was what happened afterwards. The moment the tree snapped back into its botanical posture I blinked out of the trance. I was back in my living room, the full moon dangling out the window when in front of me I saw two orbs. They were each the about the size of the snitch from Harry Potter. They were hovering twin translucent beer-pong sized orb with diaphanous rococo mandala etchings inside. In a way they looked like fingerprints. In a way they looked like diminutive crop circles.
For reasons almost inexplicable I reached out and clutched the one on the right. I then brought it to my lips and placed it in my mouth. I then reaced out and grabbed the second orb and did the same. I didn't think much of it. I was still in a trance-infested daze.
 
Later in the morning I thought about the orbs while pondering their significance. I wonder what they meant. I wondered if they were real or just psychological residue optically perceived after erupting from a deep meditative state.
About an hour later I was sifting through e-mails when I decided to click on the Writer’s Almanac. I then  ( Synchronic verifying-bread crumb #2) again almost fell down. The poem for today is Yeats'  SONG OF WANDERING ANGUS and all I could think was that I literally just swallowed the silver apples of the moon and the golden apples of the son in the manifestation of the twin orbs hovering in front of me when I awoke.
 
It gets crazier still.
It what happened next literally astounded me.
 
The first entry of Suculent Sobreity two, written exactly a week ago I end with talking about the last sojourn I took to Matthiessen State Park. I talk about my creative vagina and wanting to be reborn and how I traipsed behind the hulking ice of the waterfall in an effort to do so.
 
Synchronic verifying-bread crumb #3
I trotted home in the snow from work this morning, thinking about the orbs and the silver apples of the moon and how yesterday would have been the 19th anniversary of marrying myself to the vowels of my craft. I was at my writer's desk and looking for a notebook when, out from a heap of literati fell, like an autumnal leaf, a photo I had not seen in years. It was a photo taken when I was a senior in high school on a youth retreat at what would later be known as my creative vagina. It was a picture of Matthiessen and the frozen waterfall (I'm in the red). 
 

 

Synchronic verifying-bread crumb #4 is the date of the picture. January 20th. The same date as I am completing this entry. After celebrating my anniversary as a writer the day before.

After having an out of body experience and swallowing the Silver Apples of the moon and Golden Apples of the Sun.

After going a week without caffeine. A week without alcohol. A week without tobacco.

A week of juice fast and enlightenment.
 

 


There are 32 days left of Succulent Sobriety II.

.   I honestly can't wait to see what the remainder of this journey unveils.



 

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