Equal Night...

Twice a year
once for Yin
and once for Yang
We pass the Balancing Point
and hover there for just a moment
hanging in the Black
perfectly perpendicular
aligned with Our Star
Day lasts as long as Night
and Night no longer than Day
We pass this point
and balance on this edge
just as We begin to explode with verdant Life
and then again We balance here
at the other side of Our Revolution
just as We begin to grow cold and die
These Equal Nights are the doorways to Our Two Worlds
light and dark
Life and Death
Yin and Yang
back and forth from one extreme to the other
in Our Endless Revolutions
but always passing through the same
points of Perfect Balance
in one door and out the other
We live and die all the while
swaying to this Eternal Rhythm
and it shapes us
molds us into Who We Are
What We Have Become
And so We hold these Equal Nights as Sacred
Special
Holy
or Magickal
examples of those brief ineffable moments
of Alignment
and Balance
and Perfection
these Equal Nights guide us to seek those moments
within Ourselves
and without
We feel this rhythm
and We see this balance
return again and again
We see it in Our World
and We feel it within Our Selves
and We strive to achieve that perfection
And so do We accomplish
all Our many
Great Things

KIC1013...

I gave Her a star

my Valentine

my Forever Valentine

designation K.I.C.-

ten-thirteen

now bears Her name

a Kepler star

a binary star

so 

truthfully

two stars

locked Together

Forever

each attracted to

and repelled by

the other's force

of Gravity

Two immense

uncontrolled

Nuclear Explosions

so gigantic

so astronomically enormous

that their own weight

holds them in place

and keeps them from growing

any larger

Chaos poised

in perfect Balance

these two fireballs

right now

are spinning around each other

in the cold vacuum of deep

extrastellar space

each throwing off enough Heat

and Light

to brighten and warm

a dozen worlds

they spin around each other

Burning

locked together

Dancing

through the void

They have been dancing for

a billion years

and they will keep dancing

for a billion more

They will still be dancing

and burning

together

lighting the dark

long after Our World

has turned to dust

and blown away

and there is no one left

to remember them

But for now

we call them by Her names

And it's not enough

it will never be enough

there's so much more I could do

so much more I must do

But for now

I call them by Her names

so we can look up at night

and see ourselves there

on fire in the void

dancing forever

And so I call them by Her names

my Valentine

my Forever Valentine

Eleven...

When the Earth was still flat
And clouds made of fire
And mountains stretched up to the sky
Sometimes higher

Folks roamed the Earth
Like big rollin' kegs
They had two sets of arms
They had two sets of legs
They had
Two faces peerin'
Out of one giant head
So they could
Watch all around them
As they
Talked while they read
And they never
Knew nothin' of Love
It was before...

The origin of Love

Now there was three sexes then
One that looked
Like two men glued up back-to-back
They're called the Children of the Sun
And similar in shape and girth
Was the Children of the Earth
They looked like
Two girls rolled up in one
And the Children of the Moon
Was like a fork shoved on a spoon
They was part Sun
Part Earth
Part daughter
Part son

Now the gods grew quite scared
Of our strength and defiance
And Thor said,
"I'm gonna kill 'em all with my Hammer
Like I killed the giants."
But Zeus said, "No.
You'd better let me
Use my lightning like scissors,
Like I cut the legs off the whales
And dinosaurs into lizards."
And then he grabbed up some bolts
And he let out a laugh
Said, "I'll split them right down the middle,
Gonna cut 'em right up in half."

And the storm clouds
Gathered above
Into great balls of fire

And then fire
Shot down from the sky in bolts
Like shining blades of a knife
And it ripped
Right through the flesh
Of the Children of the Sun and the Moon and the Earth
And some Indian god
Sewed the wound up into a hole
Pulled it 'round to our belly to remind us
Of the price we paid
And Osiris
And the gods of the Nile
Gathered up a big storm
To blow a hurricane
To scatter us away
A flood of wind and rain
A sea of tidal waves
To wash us all away
And if we don't behave
They'll cut us down again
And we'll be hoppin' 'round on one foot
And lookin' through one eye



The last time I saw you
We'd just split in two
You was lookin' at me
I was lookin' at you
You had a way so familiar
But I could not recognize
Cause you had
Blood in your face
I had
Blood in my eyes
But I could swear by your expression
That the pain down in your soul
Was the same
As the one down in mine

That's the pain
That cuts a straight line down through the heart
We call it "Love"
We wrap our arms around each other
Try to shove ourselves back together
We was makin' Love
Making Love

It was a cold, dark evening
Such a long time ago
When by the mighty hand of Jove...

It was a sad story
How we became lonely, two-legged creatures
That story...

The Origin of Love

           -"The Origin of Love"
             Hedwig & The Angry Inch

Dichotomy...

Prism of bright Sunlight
Refracted
Through Curtains of Rain
This Is
And Is-Not
Tao

The Tao Of Cliché...

Welcome to Bad Poetry Week!  Along with the one story, I also wrote a few shitty poems at the cabin in the woods last weekend, and now I feel the need to share them with both of you.  As the saying goes, "Misery loves company." 

It's hot
and it's humid. 
But it's the perfect temperature,
and the best climate. 

The bugs are all over me,
a distraction. 
A thousand tender caresses
from The Mother. 

I am wearing too much clothing. 
But I am completely naked,
open,
and exposed
to the air
and the light. 

On opposite ends of the wood,
I am too close to you. 
But I want so badly
to be inside of you. 

There is no sound here. 
And it is defeaning. 

I am completely sober. 
And out of my fucking skull. 

I feel like shit,
and have never felt better. 

Here,
with you,
I am all alone. 

My books
all define the Infinite,
while void
of any meaning. 

I Want so fiercely,
like a sucking hole in my chest. 
And I am content. 

I miss you all,
now that you are here with me. 

The wind swirls around us,
and nothing moves. 

My belly,
my heart,
and my head
are all empty,
so I nourish the insects
with my skin,
and my sweat,
and my breath. 

And when the storm
finally breaks,
and the rain
finally comes,
I will
finally
be dry.

The Old Cherry Tree By The Lake...

Dead tree, blossoming
Twisted trunk, pink flower buds
Like a corpse breathing

Ancient and rotten
Split and stunted, bent and burnt
This is surely death

Yet blossoms burst forth
Pink and fragrant, life from death
Impossible bloom

This, here, is the Tao
From dead Yin flowers Yang life
Fire roars from ashes

I see this, and know
I am this tree; my Tao flows
From root to petal

...

Just posted this yesterday, and I'm already editing it.  I posted it too quickly, and almost immediately saw changes I wanted to make.  Doesn't help that haiku is about the most immature, Creative Writing 101 style of poetry, either.  But, I'm not a poet, and I've never claimed to be.  The thing I like about haiku, is that it isn't necessarily about being pretty or poignant or profound.  A lot of the power is inherent in the form itself; anyone can do it.  It lends this almost zen-like quality to whatever you say.  So, I find it's perfect for expressing zen-like thoughts and emotions.

I found this tree on my way back from my old high school during my St. Patrick's Day drift, after sitting for a while under the tree where She and I first fell in love a couple of decades ago.  I was stunned, at first, to see something so blatantly impossible.  Then I was attracted to it, because I found it so amazing.  Then I felt an intense kinship with this tree, as though we'd shared similar lives, and were both going through the same experience just then.  I would've taken a picture of it, so that I could share this amazing sight with others, but my phone had just died the day before, so I didn't have a working camera on me for once.  Seems oddly like provenance, now, that this mystical vision should only exist in my memory.  I have this strange feeling that if I went back to that spot, the tree wouldn't be there anymore.

I'd been planning to write a full entry about the experience at some point, but during meditation yesterday afternoon, the seeds of this haiku began to form inside of me, and by the time I was finished meditation, I knew I had to express them.

Words Everyday...

I've decided - for my mental, emotional, spiritual, psychic, and perhaps even physical well-being - to try to post something here every day.  We'll see how long I'm able to keep that up.

I imagine most, if not all, of it will be like most everything else I write - masturbatory, self-indulgent drivel all about me, Me, ME.  But they say "write what you know," and what I know is introspection and self-analyzation.  I am, after all, my favorite subject to ponder.

I think a key to keeping it going will be to just write whatever I'm feeling right then, whatever comes into my head, whatever I want to write about.  No set topic, no set word limit, no pressure to do anything specific other than WRITE SOMETHING.  Again, we'll see how well I actually do.  But I'm looking forward to it.  It will feel good to do some small creative exercising every day.

...

Some people are able to walk the middle path.  Able to keep balance in their life.  I know that I have wanted that for as long as I have wanted at all.  And, I guess, in my way, I have been able to do that.  But not in a straight line.  Instead, looking back on my life, I see that I have always bounced back and forth from one extreme to the other, over and over and over, back and forth.  And there is definitely a kind of balance in that.  But not stability.

It's a violent kind of balance.  Not exactly the serenity one associates with the idea of "walking the middle path."  And, I must admit, not really what I want for myself, either.  I keep hoping that one of these days, I will end up in the middle.  That I will somehow bounce myself into a state of grace.  I'm not sure how realistic that is, though.  I like to believe that each time I whip from one pole to the other, that I get a little closer to the center, that I am drawing my poles closer and closer to each other with each oscillation.  But I don't know if this is true, or just wishful-thinking.

And another thought I try (and often fail) to not worry about:  is this what they refer to as "bi-polar?"

And if it is, then what does that mean for me?

If it doesn't hurt, it isn't Love...

If someone cannot devastate you, then you don't Love them.

Ok, you might love them a little, as in liking-them-more-than-anyone-else, but you don't really *Love* them. Not reflexively-die-for-them Love. Not opening-yourself-completely or trusting-absolutely Love. That kind of Love, what all the poets call "true" Love, can only exist along with the possibility of extreme emotional distress.

Once you lay yourself open like that, losing yourself completely in someone else, then you have handed that person the power to completely devastate you. That's a huge part of what Love is: laying your heart in someone else's hands and trusting that they won't hurt it. And when they give you their heart in return? Well then you can begin to understand how a bunch of balding monkeys rutting in the dirt could come up with an idea like "Heaven."

Or, less poetically, Loving someone is, in large part, about giving them a portion of the responsibility for your emotional well-being, and trusting that they won't abuse that power or otherwise fuck it up and hurt you. And the totally absurd thing is, THEY ALWAYS DO.

It's inevitable. There's no way to avoid it. Once we fall in Love, that person IS, inevitably, at some point, going to torture us in ways that we could never have imagined before. It's not necessarily intentional. (Sometimes it is. Some people are assholes. Hell, some fish are assholes. Just simply a fact of life as sure as the turning of worlds.) It's just that, as with pretty much everything other than "food good" and "pain bad", we aren't born knowing what to do. If we're lucky, by the time we fall in Love we've managed to figure out how to basically work our own hearts without too much difficulty. But how the fuck can we know how to handle someone else's safely? We've never done it before. And everyone's heart is different! There's no way we can get it right on the first shot. We have to learn how to take care of that heart, specifically. And we can't do that without learning what's Right and what's Wrong for that heart. We've got to make mistakes in order to figure out how to NOT make mistakes.

And those learning-mistakes to us, are emotional traumas to the ones we Love; leaving life-long emotional scars in the person we cherish more than any other human being alive. And by Loving them in return, by opening ourselves up to them and making ourselves completely vulnerable and open as only truly-Loving another person absolutely can, we allow them to scar us in the same way. Sometimes worse.

But funny enough, we don't seem to care. We keep putting ourselves in the same situation over-and-over-again, anyways. Ever since we invented the word "Love", we have sought it out obsessively and without reason, and regardless of consequence. Is it just biology? Are we just crazy? Is it something more? Or less? Is it some basic make-up in our psychology that demands to be expressed, or is it simply that the chemicals in our brains that shape our bodies into a particular binary form somehow demand to be exercised? (I.e., testosterone + estrogen = orgasm.) Fuck, I don't know, maybe it's just me. I've been slit-my-wrists, suck-a-gun-barrel miserable for about 80% of the last month because of Her. (If we go back 3-6 months, up that to 90%.) But that other 20%? Oh, gods, what a 20%! There's never been a greater fifth of a whole in all of man's experience! And I would die a tortuous death a thousand times before I let you take that 20% away from me. Just the memory of the seemingly endless joys Her Love brings me makes it feel as though any amount of pain is more than a fair price to pay.

And I think that's what it comes down to. At least for me, anyways.

In the end, 20% of Heaven, is worth 80% of Hell.

And then some.