Rivendell

"Not all those who wander are lost..."

~ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

"In the days of the Third Age, after the fall of Gil-galad, Master Elrond abode in Imladris, and he gathered there many Elves, and other folk of wisdom and power from among all the kindreds of Middle-earth, and he preserved through many lives of men the memory of all that had been fair; and the house of Elrond was a refuge for the weary and the oppressed, and a treasury of good counsel and wise lore."
~ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

Healing

At times something inside of you shifts for no other reason than grace has broken through the stranglehold of pain. Spaces and places have profound influence, as do friends, and the stories they share. Healing comes slowly at times and is found in the moments of time which slip away and in which encounters of humanity occur. Our stories mingle and flow as grace weaves through them - the past is swallowed in the present as the future is aware of the past. This past weekend was an oasis for me as Rivendell was for Frodo on his journey after being wounded and needed to heal. I can't explain what happens when something shifts but when it does you know and life is different again.

(Healing Encounters: Music & Lyrics by Leonard Cohen, Come Healing)

 

Memorial Weekend

(Pearl Jam, Black)


In the morning
We were moving a rose bush
(With difficulty)
Tangled roots in the dirt
Rocks and red clay

In the afternoon
We were pricked by it's thorns
(The pain different for each)
The blood oozed into the ground
Our hearts turned black

Ed's

I still wanted to...

Sleep next to someone

Kiss someone

Feel someone

(Feel something other than numb)

The night

We drank at Ed's

The night

We kissed

The night

We fell asleep together

And you said you like the way I kissed

I held you

Your breast cupped in my hand

While we slept

While seconds ran away

I remember it all...

Tonight at Ed's

Again

Alone

 

Dalliance

"Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift."

~ Mary Oliver

Lines bleed into lines

Time and tension between breaths

Rotating spheres with similar regrets

Interchangeable eyes

Posing questions of consequence

The music plays

The melody stays

The beat sustains

The lyrical change

A blind pirouette

Dalliance and doubt

Charades and musical chairs with vodka and gin

Whose bed are you in?

With eyes closed there is no sin

 

Amber & Brooke

Amber, I cannot believe you are graduating from college this week with degree in history.

(Time still continues to mystify me)

Brooke, I can't believe you are touching lives as an EMT and becoming a paramedic. 

You were both beautiful little girls yesterday and today you are beautiful, intelligent and confident 

women.

For some reason you have both gone down branches of the river of my passions, dreams and love.

You are both pursuing your interests brilliantly and amazingly. 

I am so proud of each of you and filled with joy when I think about how you are moving 

courageously through life. 

From your first breath

I have loved you

So know

If…

All the music ever stops

If…

All the words are ever spoken

And there is nothing left

Only…

“The stillness between two waves of the sea…”

In the silence of the night

When the light seems distant

I will always come to you

With my love

(U2 - Original Of The Species)

 

 

Fathers and Sons

 

"Fathers and sons...

They held the light

Yes they did

And it shined all night

Oh ~ all night

And they took the blows

Yes they did

Never letting go

Oh no ~ oh no ~ oh no

And so they came with perfect schemes

And precious dreams that made them one

One by one

Oh ~ look up and see the eagles fly

And fill the sky beneath the sun

Fathers and sons..."

~ Neil Diamond

(U2 ~ Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own)

 

Words I Found

I found something today on a blog I look at from time to time, Pursuing Happiness (http://thisnakedlunch.tumblr.com). There was no author attached to what was written but the words are amazing to me.

I know I am difficult and complicated to be around and my moods shift and I isolate and hide myself - even from those who are the closest to me. I believe the words I found today must be how those close to me feel. I have heard similar sentiments expressed to me or attempted to be expressed to me. The thing is I don't believe I can be different from who I am. It has taken me so long now to know who it is I am and to begin to be okay with myself. Many times I wish I were different but then I wouldn't be me and then I would be a lie.

Anyone close to me please try to understand it is not that I dislike you or not love you or not appreciate you. I assure you, I do. It is just me who has to escape and recharge and be distant at times. It must be very frustrating to watch me leave into myself. It frustrates me at times. Yet, it is what allows me to be me.

Here are the words I found today:

How to love your depressed lover?

Last night I thought I kissed the loneliness from out your belly button. I thought I did, but later you sat up, all bones and restless hands, and told me there is a knot in your body that I cannot undo. I never know what to say to these things. "It’s okay." "Come back to bed." "Please don’t go away again." Sometimes you are gone for days at a time and it is all I can do not to call the police, file a missing person’s report, even though you are right there, still sleeping next to me in bed. But your eyes are like an empty house in winter: lights left on to scare away intruders. Except in this case I am the intruder and you are already locked up so tight that no one could possibly jimmy their way in. Last night I thought I gave you a reason not to be so sad when I held your body like a high note and we both trembled from the effort.

Some people, though, are sad against all reason, all sensibility, all love. I know better now. I know what to say to the things you admit to me in the dark, all bones and restless hands. “It’s okay.” “You can stay in bed.” “Please come back to me again."

Maybe all these words I found today are saying is I need space to breath till I am okay to venture out of myself again.

 

Rock Lake

I saw Rock Lake today
It was covered with ice

I saw the island we touched on
It was covered with snow

Where did that summer go?
And all the ones since?

Excavator

I am an excavator of memories
Transforming them into words
To fill blank pages 

Writing

I like writing 
In dimly lit bars
Alone
To cleanse my soul
When it is raining
When the words come
In coffee shops with good hot coffee
In places of mystery and inspiration
In places of silence and solitude
When I am deep inside myself
When the sun comes out
Sitting by water
Making poetic memories
When I am at peace
I like writing 

Time

 

I believe
I am beginning

To grasp

What happened between us

Or 

What didn't happen

In the end 
Are the two not the same?

 

Dislocation

“There is a moment before impact that is the last instant of things as they are. Then the visible
 world explodes.”  
~ Steven Galloway, The Cellist of Sarajevo

Thin lines
Entwined together 
A rope of life
Over and over 
Thicker and thicker
Layer upon layer 
Of familiarity 
Of knowing
Of being comfortable together
Sedimentary rock formations 
Formed together 
Over time
Over space
Naturally
Without thinking life merges and forms
Within the seconds of normalcy
In a moment 
It all dislocates
An emotional explosion
Rips and shreds the rope
Crumbles and shakes the rock
Nothing intact 
Nothing protected 
Debris strewn over the landscape of an existence
What would of been tomorrow
Ceases today
In the space between then and now

 

Blue

She danced 
In a short blue dress
Legs as long as the palm trees 
Swaying 
In the warm breeze
While her auburn hair 
Shimmered
In the moonlight 

Hemingway and Atwood

 "He had been successful in almost every way except in his married life, although he had never cared, truly, about success. What he cared about was painting and his children and he was still in love the first woman he had been in love with. He had loved many women since and sometimes someone would come to stay on the island. He needed to see women and they were welcome for a while. He liked having them there, sometimes for quite a long time. But in the end he was always glad when they were gone, even when he was very fond of them. He had trained himself not to quarrel with women anymore and he had learned how not to get married."
~ Ernest Hemingway, Islands In The Stream

"So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with. That’s about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what."
~ Margaret Atwood

Kay

Wherever I go
Wherever I have gone 
Wherever I will go
I will
Carry you with me...

 

Racing In The Street

Words so haunting
So universal 
Words interchangeable  
With the vagary of existence 

Experiences
 
So long ago
So far away
Where has everything gone
That was and is and is not anymore


"Fundamentally we're repairmen. Everybody's broken. Everybody's broken somewhere. You can't get through life without it. You've paid your artists and your film makers and your poets and your novelists to be basically your handyman or your repairmen. And we're willing to go into the garage, where all the junk is lying around, and we start to tinker away. When you contextualize and make small sense of those things, they start to repair those little pieces of you."
- Bruce Springsteen, HBO Documentary High Hopes

After

Is God speaking?
Whispering the answers

  (for resurrection)
   (for restoration)

Only after
The questions are no longer asked?

After time
After pain
After storms
After vertigo
After silence
After tears 
After darkness
After confusion
After undiluted slog
After liminal space
After being ship wrecked and broken

After it all
Now 
The rainbow of release

One Word

(Say Something - A Great Big World & Christina Aguilera)



I am looking for answers I am afraid to find 
To questions I am afraid to ask
Searching for an explanation
Searching for one word

Yes...one word

One word to explain everything
One word to bring clarity
Is your name the one word 
Is your mothers name the one word

Is the word
Is any word 
Merely a mask
A veil of letters
 
I am running now after nothing
Into the night that ends
And begins and ends and begins

Yes...into it I run 

Flailing my arms
Lungs burning
Mind racing
One word
 
Where is it
Where are you

Leaving always leaving
People leave like trains or planes
Your heart expands for a lover
Expands and contracts
You bleed for her love
You search for one word to make her stay

One word again
The bloody evasive one word
There is no word to make anyone stay

So she goes

And the wind blows 
Through leafless trees
Creaking in its laughter

The word is in a rain drop
But which one
There are so many rain drops
No way to look into them all

Will you help
Oh...you are gone already

I sit alone 
In the forest
In the city
On a street corner
On a log by a stream

Scenery changes

But not I

I was searching
While your hand slipped out of mine
Before I could kiss you
Before I could make love to you
Maybe in making love 

The word
The one word

Would be uttered
A sacred word 
A tantric word
To free spirits in the night
Trapped in their own freedom

Not free
Never free

For the word is never spoken
Not even between lovers
Masquerading as truth 
Lust lifts lost souls out of the mire
Only to be lost again
And again and again

This is no noble quest
This is a fantasy in search of meaning
In search of a word
In search of an interpreter
A sanguine metaphor
Folly and vanity 
Vanity and folly

We pretend and act and parade 
We play house and then betray ourselves
Leaving our damaged images behind
Collateral damage of our insatiable passions

To wonder why 
To wonder how
To search for the one word

The one word

To make sense of their fractured lives
So where are you
So far from me
So distant
In the past and forgotten
A dream from two nights ago
A dream I forgot
As soon as I woke up
The sun bleaching my memory

No artifact
No fossil
No fragment of our time

The moments stretched into years
Forgotten in a garbage dump of fears
A wasteland of consequence
An aborted rendezvous 
What word could have I sputtered 

What word
What word
What one word
 
If I screamed it
Whispered it
Wrote it
Sang it

No

No word stands against vile actions
Recriminations and resentments stacked and counted before bed
Kindling for fire fights
Napalm induced rage
Scorching our bodies 
I want you to stay my love
My new love
The love I am afraid of
(I am afraid of any love now)
The scars healed over
The scabs no longer picked at
Calloused and cold are my veins
I barely feel myself anymore

I am numb

I am drowning in myself
Suffocating on the very elixirs which are to make me okay
Downing my white oblong friends each morning

So I can sit 

Without pondering Camus's question
Hamlet's soliloquy 
Alphabet soup 
Words and words and words

Ah Macbeth perhaps
All sound and fury 
Ah yes - sound and fury
Signifying what
What indeed
 
Nothing
Nothing 
Nothing

We look and search and quest
With Don Quixote
Battling ferocious monsters
Only to be told 
Windmills are innocuous  
Seeing a mirage 
For nothing doesn't cast a shadow 
Only broken hearts do 
In the noon day sun

One word
One word
One word

 

Bukowski Days & Rejuvenation...