Sunday, September 30, 2012

who could ever know why




i like to watch the way things change
like toenails curling
around edges of un-noted strength
blisters getting bigger 
before they shrink back into place
hugging, hard on soft

we need each other
who could ever know why

you might be like a blister on me
or a cloud
changing shape
impossible to catch 
a dragon, a chimney, a dream
something i need
reasonlessly 

like feet, and history
maybe we could walk together for 
a while
in the back alley
the back yard
tracing birthmarks with fingers
naming the shapes like clouds
wondering how we ended up 
bare backs on the ground
leaning into the sky
like always

it's changing again
the way my hand feels 
cozying your love handle
and i like not knowing what to call
the wild pull
storm-like
that gusts through my body like a wind bowl

everyone wearing goggles
eyes open
somehow able to see
the sun flickering 
through terror drops landing 
everywhere

my brain weighs the weight of 
running
like a thumping load 
with no good destination

your face tells me a secret
i can't hear in words
so i listen my ear into your chest:

enough thumping loads
to tell all the clouds bedtime stories

i'm not sure who's whispering
but i'm sticking around
to find out


Thursday, September 6, 2012

On Love & Solitude

tired at the end of a long night making art, something beautiful out of the mess.
self portrait, after a long and beautiful night alone making art. 
iphone, camera+, 100cameras, squaready, and photoforge2

Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet
Rome, May 14th, 1904

And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to break out of it. This very wish will help you, if you use it quietly, and deliberately and like a tool, to spread out your solitude over wide country. People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we most hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.

To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is--solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves. Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate--?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things. Only in this sense, as the task of working at themselves ("to harken and to hammer day and night"), might young people use the love that is given them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must save and gather for a long, long time still), is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives as yet scarcely suffice.

But young people err so often and so grievously in this: that they (in whose nature it lies to have no patience) fling themselves at each other, when love takes possession of them, scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their untidiness, disorder, confusion... And then what? What is life to do to this heap of half-battered existence which they call their communion and which they would gladly call their happiness, if it were possible, and their future? Thus each loses himself for the sake of the other and loses the other and many others that wanted still to come. And loses the expanses and the possibilities, exchanges the approach and flight of gentle, divining things for an unfruitful perplexity out of which nothing can come any more, nothing save a little disgust, disillusionment and poverty, and rescue in one of the many conventions that have been put up in great number like public refuges along this most dangerous road.

...

The demands which the difficult work of love makes upon our development are more than life-size, and as beginners we are not up to them. But if we nevertheless hold out and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in all the light and frivolous play, behind which people have hidden from the most earnest earnestness of their existence--then a little progress and an alleviation will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us; that would be much.

...

And this further: do not believe that the great love once enjoined upon you, the boy, was lost; can you say whether great and good desires did not ripen in you at the time, and resolutions by which you are still living today? I believe that that love remains so strong and powerful in your memory because it was your first deep being-alone and the first inward work you did on your life.