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 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 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.
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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