THESIS

JOHN E. URDIALES

Dr. ROBERT VIVIAN

EXPLORATIONS IN CNFPERSONAL ESSAYING

PRESENTED WEDNESDAY, 16 DECEMBER 2015

Table of Contents

Hope
I like for you to be still
Walking Far from Home
To M.K.
To K.F.T.
Martini-hours before Planes Flying above our Consciousness
Rumi-nations
Je crois en lAmour.
External Verifications that Your Doppelgnger is Stalking You
Iyes, I
Weah, wetogether
Autumn as the Unbounded Echo
Strings of Thought Connected by Intermittent Bouts of Autumnal
Bliss
Ode to Winter
The Larks Ascension
Ive Been
On the Discovery of Paradise
The Sound of the World, Thinking
Universal Memories
Dreams and Other Things: A Disheveled Requiem
Papa, Dont Climb into the Nest
Stars Dancing
Variations on a House
The Works of Man and God
Why I Write
The Miniature in Space and Time
Ubiquitous Serendipity
A Pathway to the Great Silence
Micro-essays on Night and Day
Consciousness in the Void
Micro-essays on Music
A Sacramental Moment
On the Matter of Strange-Being
Meditation on the Attentiveness of Things
Treating the Imagination

Hope
After Milosz.
Like the sun shining behind the clouds and on the freshly fallen
snow-petals of the garden, the frozen, slumbering tree, waiting
for the warmth of the sun to return to the earth, warming her
bosom with a joy so fruitful it abounds from the wicker basket.
The dream we dream is no dream, after all, but the reminder that
the living flesh of the earth is our home, our homebound solitude,
breathing, dreaming, loving, with all her capacity to be in the
world as the worldbut also as more than the world. The senses
do not liecannot, in fact, betray the heart of her ownand the
gate of the garden is left slightly open in case there are visitors.
But the garden and the worldthey are not together, they see
one another as the flower faces the sky and asks for Papa to bring
him some water. And wewe are outside of the gate, but we can
look all the same through it to find ourselves, our loves and
dreams, far away, but within sight because youre that confident
theyre all there, in the garden, dancing in the radiance of sun and
day. Take off your specs and discover that realm of your loves and
your dreams and flowers and vegetables and a strange spirit of
hope.

I like for you to be still

After Neruda.
I like for you to be still: an unwavering flame in the darkness,
sipping coffee with motionless grace, a songbird without a song
but humming all the while in a void of your being, being itself the
space of your sweet selflessnessand words pale in the presence
of your eternity, for without words you compel; without meaning
you convey meaning, meaning in a pureness found only in the
seasons, an elemental shift of the wonder of mountains, sitting
tall against an endless sky, enduring what could only be endured
by the beating wings of a hummingbird, effervescence touching
the ephemeral glory of you.

Walking Far from Home

After the song written by the band, Iron and Wine
I dreamt of the sound of sinners weeping streams of tears,
flooding the walls full of the words, BE okay, and their bridges
tumbling from the beams, splintering, dissipating into the river
carrying away their earthy protection, that grain of life holding
together the flowers swaying upon hillsides, the sound of their
music beating life into life into the earth, the soil of their mothers,
whispering I want you to come home. There was blood dripping
from trees-without-leaves, trees holding onto dear life because
they were worth being, worth having, and doing the work of the
air and the sky and the clouds lofting above canyons of this, our
blood, their bloodthose martyrs falling asleep on cushions of
bullet-shellsand boats filled with the consciousness of God, with
the believers in those bullet, being carried away into the
unknowing of the sea, boats full of saints and sinners, all blindly
drifting away into that cloud of unknowing, into the blaring
sunlight asphyxiated on the water. And the river led to a temple
where there were windows, and into those windows slept leaping
shards of glass, praying for the freedom to shine. In the temple of
the Lord there was a giant, resting, sleeping under the shadow of

the altar, waiting for the Lord to come as a fire, as tongues of

flames to reprieve the trespassers of the temple of the Lord, and
their kindness, it ebbs and flows and fills the sanctuary with a
perfume of incensed, and I saw this, I saw all this, as I was walking
far from home.

To M.K.
With each breath breathes heavens, expanding designs of finely
tuned feathers, sparkling spurs of thought woven in a tapestry of
a symphonic, lamentable tone. O, the richness of that droning
buzz, dominating itself in the deep recesses of the hum, humming,
perfectly pitched hums and drums and droning buzz, flames set
afire with the warmth of hearth-fires, pine-needles, and broken
glass scattered over hardwood flooring and train-tracks, zooming,
past lights and flashing lights, lights, O, how those lights echo into
the buzzing hum and drum of these arias, these meticulously
orchestrated notesbut more than notes, more than simple,
connected ideas, more of a heightened flowing of smoke through
portholes and the prow of sea-ships echoing into vast spaces in
between the surface of the waters edge and the stolen air,
drifting sweetly above, dwelling in the unspoken words of amore
from light to sea, bouncing back into the air. O, your notes, these
nomadic notes together as lovers, holding hands, singing French
impromptus and remembering the glowing candles of the yule,
the memories of tiny flames, flickering in shadow, in the honing
beacons of time. These notes sing to meto youand diminish
with the ritardo and the penultimate fermata-ed chord, buzzing
hum-and-drum against the stagnantand yet waveringnote in

between my soul and my consciousness, that being of my

essence, begging to be set free, to swim in the arias of that
beloved, breathing heaven.

To K.F.T.
Then let us sing, you and I, and lift our voices up with the barrelaged liquid in our hands, that search for great value in voice and
cheer and that high-pitched, eerie sound we find when you rip
open your chest to find the beating godhead, sleeping, haunting
that fear of the ebb and the flow of the blood, streaming through
river-veins, streaming toward that intentional consciousness one
finds in a beating godhead, in the rumbling of mountainous
thunder. I recall the sun, peering through wooden planks, and a
distant radio, radiating through our thoughts, and the subtle hint
of barroom cheer, of spilt beer and wine, and that demonically
cruel voice, echoingMary didnt have a baby, have a baby.
Unkind winds wanting to know what we were saying, behind that
boarded tree behind the stage, that stage where we bled tears
and threw aside our wanton thoughts to play together, under the
falling sun, that canopy of leafy shade, and safe from the tumbling
rainwater, from all the mud and the rain. Only a memory, it seems
now, until I look at that beating godhead, slowing, quickening,
sleeping.

Martini-hours before Planes Flying above our Consciousness

I.
Spirits fly through the dust collecting in our worn shoes, breaking
through the glass windows separating our world of almondspirited light and inherent poetry found in each breathe we take
and share with those who discover just who we are on the inside
of a dimly-lit hotel room from a world of stony creeks lofting
through cavernous mountains and cloud-cloaked summits, above
a city growing in a dark alley of night-terrors and bad gin,
surrounding our over-priced beer and twisted martinis, letting us
into a new door where we can always find mountainous rock and
stone in our half-stolen rock-glasses, waiting for an amber sea to
wash over us and take us to the depths of this cocktail hour.
II.
Streams of self-awareness are breathed out after taking in the
twinkling city lights below my winds, gliding over some foreign
city. The streams flow like the water droplets streaking across the
window, fleeing from some oncoming wind or unknown gusts
carrying long-lost windy-day-kites and umbrellas and unhired
nannies that now take care of the seasoned weather. They carry
the wind-gusts in their carpet bags and leave them next to the

lamp-shade. They bring books and scents of paper to test each

page, each fiber of the unread texts of the lives lacking literature.
Sometimes she will take my gushing realisations out of her bag
and leave them on the night stand so I can read them a bedtime
story before the ghosts and the monsters and the demons return
and steal away from me. Streaming, she asks me to hide it in the
closet safe-box where we used to go when we wanted to escape
an impending doom outside of our grasp, our reach. Its hard to
remember the times when we would go out and play, daydreaming on Papas freshly mown grass-blades, waiting for the
clouds to swallow the birds busily jittering by us, from tree-to-tree
and up, up into an endless sky, forever reaching out to Gods
hands.
III.
Remember we are dust, you and I. We fly on the backs of peacebestowing eagles waiting for the storm to catch us and throw us
into our desert prisons. We follow the rattling snakes down to the
rock and sand where Moses lost his temper and threw away all
patience, calling forth a spring for the thirsting wanderers. Now it
is a spring of snakes, breeding a colony in their den. There is no
more water, only dust, sandthey fly into my breast-pocket and

seep into my skin, burning the already sun-scorched flesh

protecting the same heart, aflame in a chest of weeping sorrow,
weeping because the sun never shone on a heart so fearful of
distrusting itself from everything, everyone, and had yet done so
under the guise of a fishermans boat gone out to drop gators in
the lake where our swans once swam, where little ducklings made
the best friends for little girls trying to remember what God said
when the earth ran away from the sun.

Rumi-nations
I.
I heard a voice speak softly unto my ear. It said, Let every action,
every meal, every thought, be an act of worship unto the Centre of
Love and Life; for to live is to love and the root of life has been
found in that same Caritas. Therefore, let your words be love and
your food be prayer and our drink be sacrificial blood, for a life of
worship and praise leads to the Divine. The quasi-walkers of the
land have told us to love and to live. Let every beast that dies so
that you might have food to eat and life to live be a holocaust
offering, an act of worship, an affirmation of your love for Caritas.
II.
Life is an aphorism for death. Death sleeps in the crevices of the
dried-up silicon valleys. He steals away my existence and locks it
up in some obscure retreat. I see that my existence rests in the
valleys of that dried, arid skinthose valleys of silicon.
III.
My soul is as a cup overflowing, yet it is not mine own. My soul
has become a vessel to carry this other soul that overflows the
cup of my life. How can I keep myself isolated from that true soul

which is also the overflowing cup? I tremble as I am infiltrated,

interrogated by the true soul: how? why? I sit in the silence of
that soul, not my soul, because the life there gives me life in this
dark evening.
IV.
A calming just before the storm when life becomes existence and
all of the living dives down into the ocean of a life-giving
testimony. Life creates its own when it gives. To give pain and joy
and an immersion into your baptism in order to live and to give
life to the lifeless. Life brings forth the inspiration for the soul to
take its form in the flesh. Glittering gold does not glisten as the
calmed, steady waters of the suffering storm, tempestuously
rising and falling in the heart of that soul.

Je crois en lAmour.
I believe in Love, in the heavenward shouts of the soul, a knocking
on the golden doors of my heart, echoing the deaf songs in the
breast of the far-away ocean, where, in the distance, the sun
rises, where the great sun touches the innermost depths of my
soul, wraps me in the cushioning arms of warmth, and this holy
place has remained for many thousand years, has offered blood
sacrifice, holocaust offerings, soaking in the sun, in the sun where
the walls of this holy dwelling, lined with ancient oaks, carry
histories of earthy harmony and heavenly love.

External Verifications that Your Doppelgnger is Stalking You

People say I look like their friends, their brothers, sons, dead
husbands. I would not know what to do if I ran into myself. It
would be as if looking into a mirror, but wearing different clothes
and perhaps slightly variant glassesor no glasses at alland a
swaggering stride which I might find overtly aberrant. What would
I do? What would I say? Would words even be necessary? How
might I prevent a row, a scene in the street? Would the hand of
God descend from the clouds and pick one of us up to prevent
some catastrophic event from happeningan event which He has
always-already ordained by allowing such an encounter? Would I
even believe in God? Might I, in fact, play the harp? Would I
orchestrate melodies of rich undertones without having a
conception of the soul? without having a clear identity of mind,
body, spirit? Would I have a spirit? I would have spirits bountiful
enough to live in ecstasyperhaps ecstasy, too, and other
inhibitors of hallucinogenic transformation. And would I live in an
imaginary setting, filled with the wonders of material love, of a
love so free it could not be chained, could not be understood by
the roving masses? Perhaps the moon might crash into the earth,
into this comfy, cozy town; or might the governing political bodies
break into civil war? Would life be worth living after such an

abominable confrontation? Would I remember how to pray, how

to think, or how to read, to write, to sing or how to dance? No
perhaps reality would crumble, would find itself in a situation
where nothing could continue as it always-already is, was, will
come to be. I would no longer exist: only we. Then againhe
might have great taste in music and coffee.

Iyes, I
Dont sip so fast, and try not to spill those peanuts over the
tablebut dont pretend like youre not hungry, and be patient:
he is still talking. And that glassis it crystal? try not to break it.
Ahh, a cool breeze parades through you. No, Im not reading her
right now; is she any good? But she, she is nice. Be careful with
that knife! And dont you know the crackers are for the dip or the
cheese and not both, but try them together anyway, and would
you like another glass? Oh, no more for me, I should be leaving.
Nonsense, have another, for believing! Am I too loud? Did he hear
what I said? I cant believe I said that. Maybe I will shift to them,
they look unentertained. More cheese, more cheese, but dont eat
so quickly, your stomach wont thank you for that. Is this the
single-malt? More oceans, waving through the valley. The
backgrounds hiss at the guests. How rude. Oh, hes fixing it. Did
you know about meaning? Its important to understand truth, but
different for me than for you. And youre not having enough
have anotherand anotherand what about some more
crackers? Dip? Cheese? Oh, let me get the jam. Am I shifting,
losing myself, what is happening and more cheese, more cheese.
Echoes reverberating against the ribs caging my beating godhead
and more fire, more heat, more flames to set on the table, next to

the hors doeuvres and is that his fourth or fifth glass ofcrystal,
right? But didnt we join you to have some sherryno, no, more
lowlands for you and you, but you must try the small-batch: its
sweet and succulent and reminds you of casting out tono, thank
you, Ive really had enough, but wont you at least try the nuts,
and oh, I suppose I couldthey wont kill me, theyll kill meand
it was only last week I sent out several inquires, having heard back
from only a handfulmore cheese, more jamoh, the jam is
delightful! Where on earth did it come from? I think this is crystal.
Wont you have another? Ive had too much to have one-less, but
sure Ill have anothergive us a hand, this one is a special blend
and oh, the cork broke, I guess well have to top offeverybody!
Another night? Well certainly! Lets invitebut maybe he
shouldnt come, and she will only ever talk aboutmore cheese?
Jam? Weve just about run out of those perfectly terrific toasted
breads, have you any more? And what are you doing these days,
its almost as if we never get together, and have another wont
you, please, and I see your latest artistic additions to the abode,
where did this one come fromshe doesnt really seem very
interested in, well, anything, and maybe we might put those kind
of shows on one day and now were talking! But please, have
another, oh, I cant finish thisthats alright, were just about to

leave, and oh, youre just a grand ol sportyes, well have you
over again soon, this really was too much fun, and next time let us
bring the snacks, and shut the door and run away to find the
barrel and jump in and set sail to rediscover that youve been
dreaming until the door slams shut and youre crying, but
weeping on shoulders of love, and it doesnt matter because sin,
sin, sin, sin and it will all work out because Im self-helping and
youre self-conscious and this dream, it really isnt as much a
dream as it is you, swimming, wading through pools of thought,
hoping to dock-in at the harbour and find yourself there, waiting
to bury yourself in the sand beneath the sea.
* * *
Weah, wetogether
Two independently as one, one togetherness of mind, heart,
being, being as one infinitely united together, inseparable by time
or space. A nagging, wrenching feeling of the selfwhich is not
the selfbegging for more, more, more until more is satisfied by
less, less, less, less. A dying urge that is satiated by the passing of
time in spaces inhabited by our inner being. This aloneness is
coupled by togetherness; my hunger is sated by solitudinal
presencean ontological presence of being. But now is needing,

is wanting, is craving and silence is the only remedy. To feast after

your fast is to assuage the spirit, to engage in the realm of only
one-half being, ever-watching of a needy-but-contentedness, a
finite allotment of your being which can only be understood as
nothingcease! The way to follow the way is to breath as the
road is breathing, carry yourself as if you were one-half being and
one-half presencethis is a universal makeup of identity, the
identity of the universal truth: oneness and sameness. Ah, but we
are also unique, and so uniquely hungry for what exactly?
Ourselves? A kind of inner satisfaction? A parody of being and
living, of non-being and essential understanding of the road to
where, exactly? But this is the struggle for personhood, for a selfrealising oneness with everything, with contentedness of being as
being. Ah, this pain is a life-force for that well from which I draw
my spirit, over and over, as a rowing from here to there. It
beckons feed me, but I choose the other route to discover myself,
to discover that there is food for the hungry and drink for the
thirsty only when the well is full, and when it dries,
pandemonium. Feed me, feed me, but with what? Is not language
and love satiable? What of that human experienceof love and
togethernessit is imaginary? Am I only ever satisfied with
dissatisfaction? But there is always that urge to disobeyto

concede to a higher beingand revel in the knowing that

momentary hunger will last only as long as this living is being. One
moment is filled with an undesirable hunger, the next a quenched
desire, and finally back to undetectable knowing. The unknowing
of hunger consumes as light dispels a darkened room, light
reaching to corners as it loves the space it inhabits for the sake of
space occupying space occupying that lovely, wonderful being of
space filled with a continuous fluid of wonderwhat is its name,
wonder, I wonderand the inexplicable love of itself for itself for
the reason that no reason is necessary to know the meaning and
being of itself. But why, why must I refuse myself, must turn away
to exile the necessity of myself at this moment? And what are
moments but presence of the presentthis moment, now, is a
present unto itselfwaiting to be unpackaged and understood as
no Other could be othered, and waiting, waiting for its time to
flourish unto a time of its own so that your hunger can be left to
reap its own reward, always begging for a liberation unknown
because unknowing becomes the key to understanding that the
fast will heighten your hunger, leaving you with the possibility of
self-othering, self-loving, and by that means, loving being as
being, yourself as we, together.

Autumn as the Unbounded Echo

On Beginning
Start with the earth and enter the womb. Find your life in hers;
your supplication in her seasons; your needs in her elements.
Begin to see that there is life outside of youof your voidand
love that which is not you as if you were in everything. This is God.
On Sailing
Find a ship and sail away to a land of your own being. Chalk sails
through the air and little girls and littler boys frolic amidst a sea of
sidewalk-chalk-induced fantasies, searching for the home they can
store their beating heart while they run and play and imagine
realities invisible to lords of cement and brick and stone. Cars drift
through asphalt seas, people dodge bullets and climb the
mountain of stairs awaiting their days of indoor suffocations. A
bird flies through glass windows and into mirrors of distant
realities where the sun gleams on water, where the darkness of
the sea swims, waiting for possibilities.
Half-Memories
Cracks in the paint. Dust in the corners. Water stains on the
ceiling. Memories take shape and disappear as quickly as they are

made. Never around long enough to invite to supper the next

evening, memories have a way of making an appearance. But
memories are cracks and dust: they return, unexpectedly,
eventually.
Autumn Sunsets
Just beyond the horizon, the sun is rising to a quaint spring day.
But herein the sanctuaryis the setting, autumnal sun. It peeks
through trees like school girls and waves goodbye like grandma
when I drive down the street following a Sunday afternoon visit.
The joy of autumn is in the rising and the setting of the day and
the leaves upon the trees and the ground, in the glade far away
in a removed place of worshipwhere the ground becomes the
sky, filled with the sun, and shines brightly as I crunch left and
right across its infinite boundaries. The purity of aging becomes
noticed in autumn: it is here we finally realise the greatness of
passing.
Returning Feelings
Emotions of joy and ecstasy meet sorrow and losslike the sky.
The sky is infiniteit covers only a fraction of the outlying space
of the earthand in its infinitude lies a secret between two
lovers. As the warmth of the sun melts into the atmosphere and

the cooled nature of the night sky collides into that warmth, two
lovers kindle a fire in a heart capable of much more than love. At
this meeting, the sun and the moon exchange favours and love as
they loved last eveningbut with a newfound gratitude.
Hidden Sanctuary
A place rests, deep in the woods, where lovers meet to gaze upon
the sun in the earth. The two become one flesh, blending life and
death, bliss and grief, into one being. It is quiet. No cracking of
fallen branch or falling limbno rustling of leaves in the soft
palms of the windno chitter-chatter of woodland faunano
motion but that of the loving sun overhead. A place of infinite
wisdom and mercy, of pure being intended by the Divinea place
where the timely toll of life ticks away as life appears to take
shape in the sky and on the earth. A cooling of the morning wind
leaves the brood for the afternoon: coloured leaves and twinkling
eyes in the trees and the sun, shining. A universal velocity about
the life of the earth and its inhabitantsthe flora and the fauna
rest in the woods. A comprehensive understanding of sentience.
On Time
Changes in the wind. The colouration of the leaves upon the
branches of trees. The peeling bark of the birch outside the

window. The acorn falling so far from the tree that it becomes a
flower. The dandelions flowing in the wind. Leaves and pollen
resting upon a spiders web. The rising and the setting of the sun.
Twinkling stars of the nighttime. Rays of light, emanating from the
moon, falling upon cadences of sleeping flowers and prowling
nocturnes. The chill of the midnight darkness. Dew upon the
leaves and the nourishing gulps of the noonday sun.
On Aging
Aging is watching the seasons roll by, unannounced. The rains
come and go as quickly as the blizzard blusters through and the
heat waves its shaking hands, back and forth, back and forth. The
wind comes and the leaves go, by command of the sky, because
the sky says it is so. And the earthshe rolls underneath,
begging for more sunshine, more time to tan. And the winter
harangues the earth for its urgency. But the autumnshe loves as
quickly or as slowly as the earth might plead. Her gentle hands
carry life into the void, into the vast expanse of nothingness, all
for the sake of love.
On the Discovery of Things
The rapping of a pen. The sniffling of a small child. The grass,
tediously yet fervently growing. The miniscule plant wafting

oxygen into your lungs. The ink-pen, staining the page beneath
your touch. A songbird, gently resting on the tree limb, waiting for
its love to return. Blind birdies shed tears when the seasonal
winds change from passionate summer suns to temperate
autumn reveries. In all things there is one commonality, one
communion: they embrace their state of existence.
On Listening
Doves, cooing. Limbs, shaking. Leaves, crescendo. The earth,
swelling. Tree trunks, pruning. The wind, laughing. Flower-buds
wait patiently in the palms of the trees for life to take shape as
you mold your hands around the earth and breathe life into it,
praying your clay-bird will one day fly away.
On Ending
Allow yourself to fall into the earth, to be caught up in her web of
cyclical life. Let the earth be your tomb and the dirt your place of
repose. Dying is as writing: we arrive at some culmination of
being. The words on the page stopthere is nothing else. But
what, then, of ending?
First appearance in the October 2015 issue of See Spot Run.

Strings of Thought Connected by Intermittent Bouts of Autumnal

Bliss
How is it that cold seeps into the flesh, through the bones, into
the very fibers of the human personthis is beyond personal
knowledge. Cold reaps as the day ends. Summer falls into autumn
and autumn into winter, all for the sake of time. What authority
hath time over the innocent soul? How could an immortal subject
itself to the pressures and ailments following in the shadow of
time? Time is but a shadowa lonely figure, prowling about,
waiting for a misstep, a divergence from the pathwayand
wallows in its own being. Why should one immortal being subject
itself to another?
Leaves are meant to change colours to reflect the
overflowing of seasonal wonder, not the other way around. When
the sky grays over the colour of the leaves, it is as if death himself
would venture to explore a realm not belonging to his own. In the
finite being of death there is a sense of balance: of the mortality
of humanity and the immortality of the cosmosand the cosmos
exists in the soul, and the soul is the greater being of humanity.
The sky should not impose upon the leaves.
What do you make of the sun and the moon and the stars?
Are these but astral imaginings of a world in which you struggle to

live? The reality of the universal is that it is not as big as you have
been led to believe: it is infinitesimal compared to the Being of
God.
The problem with existence is the impact of existing. One
lives to see the next day, to hear the sound of the wind, to walk
upon the untrodden road covered in leaves. But existing is really
so much more than the trivialities of day-to-day living. Existing is
being and being is living.
There exists a gap in human intelligence. There exist the
prolifica type of living geniusand the infertilean even worse
clinical neurosis of passivity and apathy. Both of these are
mistakes. At the other end of the spectrum is the unimaginable
the homeless man who sits at the curb because he has realised
the import of his existence, then and there. Much of humanity
lacks this kind of clear conviction about their own humanness.

Ode to Winter
Under the barren bark light reflects from the height of the sky,
light so fierce it falls, fades into shadow, into tea-stained steam.
Let us go, then, you and I, into the west, into shadow and
cover of forest, under the rays of a shining morning, begging for
the cold grasp of winters frost, for the earth to return to repose
and the sky to muddy from the sand in our eyes, our eyes and no
eyes, watching solitude in the falling leaves of the autumn bliss,
listening to the murmur of an empty seashell, glistening in the
salt-water-sunthe identity of a place is what fills itand
suddenly there are no sudden moments, only oneness with
presence and the certainty of the winters repose is within sight,
within the ominous state of wondering what could be waiting on
the other side of eternity, these daydreams of intimacy.
City lights twinkle, too, and live as the streetcars roll past,
desiring their ways above ways, past shops lit with the dcor of
Christmastide, with the holly and the ivy, both full-grown, and the
train-tracks whistle as children speak of dreams and heavenly
wrapped gifts, all waiting under the tree at their home. The light
of the life of the holiday cheer can be found in the couple, arm-inarm, walking past the crowding children, love stirring in the frozen
air about them.

The grass has long vanished, gone to rest, and the

hoarfrost of the winter winds have packed their bags, entered
their frozen hotel-rooms, gone to sleep. The infinitesimal flakes of
snow are beginning to pile-up, to mound into mountains of fluffy,
airy cushioning.
At once, I am sensed and sensing. The quiet wild of the
snows echo into me a hymn of incensing beauty. Contained in this
molecular being are the wafers of sustenance, the viaticum for
the soul, that great water which comes from the springs of hope,
and the increasingly beautiful moments of snow: the
serendipitous occasion for finding my flask filled with the minute,
heavenly glories descending from clouds where little men and
little women cut and cleave and etch-out designs in snowflakes,
the immensity of the world found in the simplicity of a single
entity, one being of a heart of beings, together finding peace in
the crescendo of small things.

The Larks Ascension

I am brought to the brink of boundless mountains, whispering
songs of comfort and startling stories of mystic dread, a despair
without hope incarnating itself into whispers of stillness, of those
moments following moments of self-revelation, of earnest desire
for personal truth, of immense proportions of intimacy, begging
for the lyres which play at night, odes unto themselves and to all,
to the always-already absence of your presence, or the presence
of your absenceI dont know whichand I look at myself with
the wondering auspices of a non-believer, of the one who begs for
the questions without answers and the answers to problems long
unsolvedbut why so unsolved when the moon still rises at night
and that light which brings with it the supplicatory return of
beggars at St. Bernardsand yet never possessing, never needing
an answer toanything, because the mystery of mystery is the
magic that sparks in between your indolent thoughts and the next
breath, the breath you take because your air is love and you love
that always-already desire to bebeing is being as being can only
be itself, beingbut without itself always-already present, again
begging for more soup, more soup, more soul, ah, this soul
begging for itself the warmth of ceramic and broth and steam,
steam rising and dissipating into everythingand yes, I

remember, I remember this soul, sitting atop its perch of the

silent bell-tower, echoing endless chimes of the icy melody of
yes, my souland I cant bear to be apart from that lonely perch,
that height of my soul because the perch is not a perch, is not a
lonely exile, but is exile because it is so far away, so close to
nothing and all that there is rests in my being and so much more,
and the perch is stone, rests uponisand falls into the pitterpatter of the dust falling further from the skin of this prison, this
prison atop a tall mountain, atop this perch upon which rests this
apparent soulYou called me from the depths of my mothers
womb and beckoned me to the heights of the dwelling place of my
soul, oh my souland who ticks as a tolling bell, a measuring
clock, counting down the days, the hours, the seconds, the
moments of my time until time stopsand beginsand no, I am
not a manI am not the man who comes to save or to be saved
or to understand the reasons for these words gushing from the
delta of my overactive-spirit, this spirit living unto a time without
time, a time not-in-need-of-time because love will take its place
and O, this crescendo of icy winds begging my soul for more,
more in place of less in place of nothing, and O, this reality, this
condition of being presses against me like a wall without
boundary, bounteous and glorious gourd of my soul, my soul atop

a perch atop a bell-tower atop a mountain of grandiose

proportion, and all of this becoming me and an avalanche of the
understanding of the condition of being, this presently anxious
habit of wonder, and the bells do not ring, ringing in silence, in the
presently and absolutely pleasant screams of a soul, silently
pondering the immensities of my intimate perch, my adobe haven
in the whirlwind of this living being, this being of life, and I am not
ready to begin to end because in ending, this light stops its
breath, its life-forcing abundance of endless possibility, of infinite
immensity, of the miniature scope gazing upon blades of grass, of
molecular-sized pleasantries and courtesies owed to no one but
you, you who wait for this all to end only to find yourself begging
for the beginning to unearth, to find itself buried in the deep of
the faith of your unconscious spirit, now dwelling in its exile
because you have placed it thererather intently or not-so
where the light may not shine, where the tonality of these bells of
a soul cannot ring, will-not ring out of fear of beauty, of wonderand-awe, and it is there where you hide your eye, your eye which
pierces into the discovery of your musical unconscious because
why?it is there where the bells will chime only if you believein
what?in yourself, in all, in the immense amount of possibility
contained in the thread of your fabric of being, in the habit of

your being, and its there where I, too, have discovered the great
epiphanies of my soul, formed from time-before-time, in the
constantly crashing and crushing waves of the oceans, of the air
above the sea carrying me away to somewheresomewhere I
dont know, I cant seeand its perfectly alright, you know, to
drift away, to begin to find yourself, waiting patiently, to find an
infant lying in the pig-trough, where you see how beautiful you
and me and we are together, separate, wherever the winds bring
us, even unto the infinite seas of space, themselves containing the
fueling love of our artistic prowess: the expressions of a soul
waiting for itself in the perch of a distant dream, a dream-lovingdream of bells, ringing, hoping for the echo to remember the
lighting of candles and the chanting of hymns we learned when
we were children because, yes, that is where we will dwell, where
we find our memory lit aflame, echoing and remembering
miracles of epic heights, of the heights where we distantly
remember that perch, that ode to the serendipitous dwelling
place of the soul.

Ive Been
Its been a long time and a short time, but Ive been walking all
the way, sometimes alone, sometimes together withwell, who
knowsand I remember the times Ive spent writing and
wondering where the words were coming from, where I was
drawing the water from my wellwhere is that well? and Ive
been wondering about wandering, about that great escape one
has to sit up and stand on their two feet and walk and walk and
find that place or that person or indulge in that idea about birds
flashing the tips of their wings over the surface of a boundary of
water, of the feeling of infinity absorbing into feathers, only ever
wishing to fly away and to discover on their own the great feeling
of flying and living and being, being in the form of a long-lost-andthen-found love, love tempered like the tempest of a storm upon
long-sails and your chest, a treasure trove of fish and the beating
godhead echoing, go, go, go and wonder and wander, and filing
you with that sense of fulfillment one has as they lay, dying,
remembering times filled with puffy pride and lithe flirtations, of
the warmth and the dexterity of youth, filling you like a cup that
could only ever take you in, to bear you until that hollow of the
chalice remembers forever of that godhead in your chest, telling
you to go, go, go and wonder and wander, and the torch burning

inside of you, scorching the walls of the temple, leaving the

imprint of the flame, that beautiful warmth of the burning and
inciting fire, shedding light over the dark shadows, the shadows
trying to fill you with the thought of being empty, of emptying
yourself into a bowl that will be incinerated, of casting you into
the consuming flames of oblivion, of the place where you know
you dont want to go, but you know that others fall into that
abyss, falling into the ditch from which they cannot escapenot
by themselves, not alonebut they are alone, they have to be cut
off because thats what they did to themselvesthey cut
themselves from their selves, from their humanity and their
beautiful burden of bearing the tiresome task of living in spite of
the knowing that everything would eventually endand you want
to help them because to help is all you can do, all you wish you
had the time to do, but the wind falls on them, too, casts its great
shadow over them to remind them of what they once had but
have lost, now burning in the flames of Gehenna, and the wind
washes over you, too, asks you to follow it, to let it be your guide
as you prance and tumble through the undergrowth of the
unconscious, of the barrier between barriers which you have
constructed and built up, reinforcing them over again with mortar
and cement and all matter of elemental barriers on that barrier-

between-barriers that you assembled in your coffer, protecting

that godhead or destroying its chance for infinite possibility,
taking away the meaning of meaning and of last nights screams
into oblivion, letting it leap backward into the darkness of the
nighttime veil, to the place where Ive been thinking about rivers
and swans and tiny ducklings, paddling after mama, after
themselves as they debate who eats first, last, and then the swan
sings with the water, with the spirituous and virtuous waves in the
water, in the place where Ive been singing and Ive been
worshipping under the threshold of a church door, waiting for
that moment when communion and community collide into
harmonic union, into that chance for swallows to echo in your
stomach, for hummingbirds to let their wings beat slower and
slower until they start to reason why they suck the honey and the
sweet syrups from the feeder, and Ive been thinking about this
wobbly table, here at the caf, hoping for the wood to grow
another Pinocchios nose and stand on its own, to stand in the
street and wave at the brightening light of the evening lamps,
piercing through clouds of fog desperately trying to take my sight
out of my sockets, to steal away into the good-night, gently
tapping on my cranium and asking why did the cage-bird sing or
perhaps where is that albatross, and still those songs of the swan

are beating against my godhead, surging blood and water and

tree-syrup through my veins until I see that Ive been wandering
in the pools of my thoughts for too long, for a time and almost
three-quarters, in the midst of the knowing that Ive been three
weeks, four, five, without that liquid sustaining my godhead
against the cold biting of the winter plains, striking against my
face as if the warmth of the amber liquids were already ousted
fires, still emanating the heat of your hands, and Ive been
thinking about the time God sent chills down my spine, that time I
opened the golden-gilded gates to find eternity waiting for me in
a prison-cell, in a confinement so tiny not even an espresso
machinenot one of those cheap onescould fit inside, where
there was only room for my heart and yours and we kept thinking
about where Ive been wandering, why Ive been wandering, and I
cant help the thought that Im doomed to where I am, to where I
was, that there are no future travels, no opportunity to sing the
lyrics of Bach and Handel until the coronation anthem rings in my
chest, but Ive lost the key and cant remember the combination
to open it, to let it fly out into the world and take me with it, to
take me into the forbidding wind that still carries that part of me
that wishes that dogs were stilling whining, still singing their
mono-syllabic hymns of hunger and thirst and attention, pay-

attention, and Ive been in the pit of my own foolishness, Ive

been looking for my hiding place in the forest but now the forest
is burnt down, is gone, and I cant find my hiding spot, my easy-toclimb tree, my swing where I let my hand touch the hand of God,
and Ive been wandering about looking for the sky, for that
intonous blue sky that brings to me the simplicity of colour and
imagination, of the clouds making funny shapes for the child still
swinging, still singing in that forest where the past was never
proffered the opportunity to meet the present, and Ive been
wondering if the sky will return to me, if we will have another
chance to return to those memory-filled pools of laughter, and
Ive been thinking about Godbut why dont we call him Abba,
why dont we let our Father take us by the hand and lead us to
him, why cant we remember those years of infant-like love when
our total dependence was on him, even if we didnt know it, and
why couldnt we know that his hair only grayed because he was
the Lord of Time, the Lord of heaven and earth, and the alwaysalready aging agent of our lives, that gracious task of growing old
and remembering sitting on the swing and singing senseless songs
about growing oldand He came to me that one time, I told the
story already, and he welcomed me, reassured me, brought me
closer to a heart that I could not yet understand, and he let me

touch His hand, let me be in His presence for as long as I wanted

because I wanted what he wanted, and Ive been worried about
worrying too much, about that great, plaguing anxiety occupying
every millimeter of my attention, pulling me toward something I
cant yet see or seem to understand, and Ive been hoping that it
will all be over soon, that that mighty hand might reach down and
pluck me away before I reach too high, too far above my own
knowing of the sky, of that blue-intoned shade that brings to me
memory and hope and glory, and Ive been studying those
corners, in the caf, in my bedchamber, in the backseat of the car,
and Ive been hoping those corners will rejoice with me when I
sing Amen! and Glory! and I cant help but think about the
disguises Ive been wearing all these years, all those years of
playing hide-and-go-seek with myself, with that other half of me
that is not human, and I cant help but wonder about Cain,
wandering in his deep aloneness, in that understanding that his
exile became his fate, that if he would have chosen otherwise, the
Son of Man might never come, but he had to choose, too,
because he had to act, he had to do the thing that was forbidden
to embrace that part of his freedom, that radical notion that his
freedom both limited and set-free his ability to chose, and Ive
been on many travels, wandering the earth, in search of

something that I cant quite put my finger on yet, and Ive been
thinking about the subtle, genteel touch of the fire-upon-thehearth waiting for me at home, wherever that might be, and
touching my back with a compassionate hand, with the hand of
God, and Im wondering about the homeless man sitting alone
alone with his thoughtsunder the steps of St. Bernards where
his only comfort might be in knowing that the cold will stop, that
the sun will rise again and instead of a biting wind, one which
rejoices in his stature, in his object of breadth, and the birds will
join him there, too, and I with them, and I will let the earth sing in
her unending rotations until I cant remember the day of the
week, the month, or the seconds passing by as I recall memories
sitting on the lake, waiting for the fish to bite the line, to sing their
response to my Hail Mary and for the foolishness of love to wash
over me, into that person of my being which I am, that small
reverence inside of me waiting for the candles to be lit, for the
choirs of angels to sing, and for the sustaining bread to call my
name, to beckon me to join him on a carousel-ride, on the critters
of the pools of our dreams, together loving the habit of sudden
and incredible spoons of brick mortar, the binding agent of my
flesh and bones, of that chest of mine, echoing to the beating of
the godhead bleeding inside of me.

On the Discovery of Paradise

If it is true that the only paradises are those we have lost, I know
what name to give the tender and inhuman something that dwells
in me today. We have lost paradise, you and I. This suffering
endured for the sake of that sometimes paradise, that place of
haunt from which we draw our inspiration, where we invoke our
muse, where our loves and hatreds, desires and deathsthis
place we call heaven in the pool of life from which flows our own
beingswe have rambled and lost ourselves in the warp of time.
The significance of our being is found in our finitude, our
ending. One purpose for beginning is its ending. The waters of the
sea crash against the rocks of the white cliffs gazing out upon the
ocean not because the moon dictates they should, but because
the erosion brings about the clearing, the end. Death, then, is our
rebirth into another way of beinginfinite importance.
Destiny. The plaything of the cosmosa great thing, in
and of itself. The playing of strings. The swing of a pendulum,
waiting for the final movement of the penultimate variation.
Destiny means to discover ones fateat the appointed time
and to embrace it as one embraces the greeting of the morning
sun. The irony of life is in deatha lifelong search for the last

moment is consummated in the creating of moments upon

moments.
Quote from Albert Camus, Lyrical Essays, 30.

The Sound of the World, Thinking

Whenever I seem to grasp the deep complexity of the world, it
escapes me through my dried bones, seeping into the cracks of
the wooden floor. The impossibility of living is answered only
when the thought of realisation pops into my head. And then
simplicity kills me, the thought, and any previous realisation.
Powerless, I feel compelled to hold the world between my
hands. I have a thirst for sunshine, for that radiant ray of light
protruding through my soul. But I cannot have sunshinethe
darkening clouds of the distance tell me otherwise. In these
thingsall thingsthe heavens smile upon the absurdity of man.
I like to sit in the dark to be consumed by itto attain
some oneness with the shadows and the dark shapes, floating out
of my mind. It is in this darknessgrowing rapidlywhere
oneness in the light is first discovered, a beacon of perpetuating
contentment piercing through the unknown of the shadows. This
is how the world is consumed by shadows, but without the
guidance of the light.
No more waves of heat pressing against the skin. No more
cooling breezes that remind one of life. But there is the reminder
of the necessity of these things. To understand this world, one
must sometimes turn away from it Where is the silence of the

world? Life is composed of symphonies of cars racing by, alarms

and sirens blaring in the distance and in direct presence all at
once. Where is the quiet of the world, the birds gently sifting
through the air, gliding on the wings of the wind, the leaves
rustling to the music of the air, the calming cool of the falling rain
droplets upon the grasses and the trees and the flowers?
Quote from Albert Camus, The Minotaur, or Stopping in Oran,
appearing in Lyrical and Critical Essays, 109.

Universal Memories
We were striding along, down a long, winding path, to
somewhere we didnt know. There were birds and chipmunks and
tiny snails prowling about the path. They, too, wanted to know
what it felt like to remember a long-forgotten past. The
mountains in the distance could remember our way, through the
fields of narrowing love as wind and tree and dirt united. But
where did they go? Where could they fly so they might remember
the world?
And so it is that flowers spring from rock. The earth
beckons me to sleep. Sleep a thousand slumbering dreams, and
drift down into her womb. Will the rains fall and seep into my
sleep, into my skin, growing life upon life upon unmistakable life?
What is the truth of man? that he is irrefutably prone to
error.
Quote from Albert Camus, The Minotaur, or Stopping in Oran,
appearing in Lyrical and Critical Essays, page 131.

Dreams and Other Things: A Disheveled Requiem

We Find Ourselves
The world is made up of over seven billion mythologies. Less than
half of them will ever make it to print. And less than half of those
mythologies will be read by the population. But these mythologies
exist. They exist, they breathe, and they live as two lovers adore
the apple of an eye not yet exposed to a world of love and lust
and plasma. Life becomes the livable unreality of the Real. We
exist to give life and to lead it to the next Universe. These
mythologies introduce us to words of our own which are not yet
known. How wonderful to know that there are words out there,
waiting in the void for us to discover them and to embrace them
as our own! How sad it is to think that these words might never
make it to the cranium sitting atop a manifestation of Godnot
to be confused with the Incarnate Man, but is, rather, man made
by God and for God and of God. God becomes, in this sense, a
deeper understanding and the deepest reality of our own
mythology.
On Dreams
As if in a trance, movement becomes dictated by thought, not
action, not movement. Balance is a phenomenon unknown to the

fawn. You see what you conceive in your mind but not in your
imagination. To know that you know something is not quite right,
but choose to act upon that something regardless of what your
conscious self would recognise as not-so-right, is to dream. But
its not so not-so-right that you wont recover from loss or love or
passion or death of the immoral you choose, simply because you
are dreaming. To dream is to escape back into reality, to explore a
world that feels oddly familiar, but something seems amiss.
Dreams are a state of complete knowable selfhood.
The Dreamscape
I have a friend who fears practically nothinghe takes dives from
the classroom desks and from the heights of an unexplored tree
and a world of love not yet hadyet he does have a fear, one of
which I both admire and cringe at the thought. His brilliance
cannot be taken for granted, as each thought pierces the flesh of
each tree he climbs, each seat he takes at the front of the room,
each page he pours his very blood into so that he may craft his
very-real dreams into reality. His dreamscape becomes the words
on the page, the thoughts dangling in the open air, the blood of a
thousand martyrs. His reality is the very transfusion of the
martyrs.

Demons in the Closet

I cannot find the words dangling in my closet, next to the winter
jacket and the cardigan from Grandmother and the rack of ties
never to be worn. The words have fallen below and into the boxes
of books and the shelving of jeans too worn to be real. I would
pick them up, but they have been swallowed by the demons in my
closet. Their teeth and eyes and the horns christening their heads
are too much for me to attack and redeem the words from a fate
unworthy of their stature. I stand and I watch them, groveling and
panting and gnawing at each other, ripping life from limb the
words, fallen into an abyss of nothing. For that is what theythe
demonstruly are: they are nothing in an expanse of everything;
they are existent in a world not theirs, not belonging to anyone.
But they gnaw at the words and the bow-ties and tear away any
reality that might have existed in my closet jam-packed with
words too loving, to known to be saved.
I Hear the Angels Sing
A mellow, low sound, yet high-pitched and glistening, the angels
sing hymns unto a God of ages, a Lord of Time and Space and King
of the Universe. The voices are carried softly by the wind and float
as wisps of delight and love. I will wade out into the oblivion of

our life and call upon death to resurrect those moments of blissful
and harmonious harking of the angels. Hark! Faith! Have Faith!
Now, believe and love unto the dawn of your age! Love becomes
the final breath of a humanity which dreams of joyous
incantations recited to the Being of Truth. These invocations
become the beginning of a cozy sleep with which we engage our
being with The Being. Sleep is coming soon. We lay low and we
understand that to allow the pillow to safely rest under our heads
means to allow one thousand pictures to fill our minds with
flowers and frightening shadows and rising stars from a night of
surrender to sleep.
We Dream of the Stars in a Hall of Majesty
Great love can change small things into great
ones, and it is only love which lends value to our
actions. St. Maria Faustina Kowalska
The starlight knows love more deeply than the depths of the
oceans, the hearts of the cavernous cells of the mighty seabeasts.
The knightly slayer of monstrous fish still lurks in the deep, waiting
for those beasts of the mighty ocean to attack the sailing ships of
mariners not well prepared to fight an immense animal hiding in
the dark void of the ocean. The waters swallow up the ships and
crunch the bones of sailors who waited to cast out the anchor
from the port bow. Nowhen you sail away to sea, you

understand that there are no stars waiting for you out in the light
years of space. Those stars are really hiding in the ocean, deep in
the darkness of dense water and coral wonder. They dimly shine
because the deep density of water forces its dark blackness upon
the heart of a shining face, a shining star. And so we come to the
heart of the starlight, hiding deep within the sea. The light pierces
through the dark, briny depths to discover its own heart, its
shining love hidden within itself, within the sea. The starlight has
its own love, a great love which pierces the brine like the light of
its face of grandeur. The starlight is tiny, yet strong, and holds its
strength against the impacting density, the strength of one
thousand thousand destinies.
Insomnia
I am stark-eyed and anxious, laying in motionless anticipation for
the dreams to roll in and to run out with the kayak, waiting to
begin an adventure into the sea of the deep dreamspace.
Letting the Dreams Walk In
I lay my head down and drift off to lands not seen, never visited,
never known by the eyes of a wanderer sent into exile. We drift
and float and wade through waters not-so foreign that we cant
swim in them. We swim for days and find that ship carrying our

selves and our mates and our dearest loves. We set sail for a
world yet to be explored, one where we can run and yell and call
the monsters to come out of hiding and dance around the flames
of a campfire. Yesthere are dreamlands out there, waiting to be
explored.
Unconscious Visions
Misting rain. Slight breeze. A subtle chill. The silence of the forest.
Trees, standing as still giants, looming over grass and mud and
flora and faunae. A sense of dread. A lone figure stands erect in
the centre of a field, under a canopy of trees and leaves and
things, waitingwaiting for the opportune moment. For what? An
overwhelming pulsation of blood and anxiety and the deep, inner
concern for solitude and sustenance pours over his head like a
bucket of ice-waterexcept there is no awakening. Nothing. No
feeling, no causation or eureka or epiphany of ecstatic harmony
and bliss. But woe and solace is in the knowing of the mortality of
the flesh. Inside, shaking; outside, calm. A bottomless desire to
inflict painon whom? To whom? For whom? Pain, and the
suffering of meaningless pain, wash away the comforts of a reality
lacking vision. But this beingthis manhe is blind; he cannot
see himself blink.

Pools of Un-harmony
Lay in bed. Wait for the dawn to strike the horizon with its fists of
might. Listen for the crawlers who only creep at night. A sound
tiny and almost-unheard at firstand it grows into its being. Dripdrop, drip-drop. The faucet drips and drips and trickles into the
room. Sleep arrivestoo late. Drip-drop, drip-drop. A scream
but without alarm is the sound of the soul dying in itself. Dripdrop, drip-drop. More soundsa door creaking, an ant scattering,
a dog prancing, a leaf cracking. Is this a dream or reality?
Confusion takes over, then panic, and soon chaoschaos enters
the room and makes itself at home, sipping on tea and nibbling on
biscuits. Drip-drop, drip-drop. A typhoona sudden rushing of
water cascades into the bed, lifts up the mattress and sucks it
down into a depth of body-less water. Screambut he cannot. He
is pulled into the ocean of infinite water. Drip-drop, drip-drop.
Drowning is suffocationa definitive exclamation against the
world and its being. No comfort for the deadonly a rush of
water and a light----
Trees are Curious Creatures
Sitting, standingthey lack matter. Leaving and barking at the sun
and the moon, waiting for life to wash over them or a chainsaw to

rip through their splintering bodies. Beavers, too, move about the
woods, seeking to crew through the limbs of innocence, madly
barking along while the sun shines in gladness and the wind
pushes the branches against the lives of the woodland creatures.
Trees are curious things.
Anxiety Attacks at 2:48 a.m.
Thump. Thump. Thump. The brain waits in eager anticipation for
its bursting relief, the sublimation to the story of the dwarves and
their happy cottage. But no reliefinstead, fear. Every sound
erupts as a volcano. Everything begins to shake, uncontrollably,
the hands of the clock trembling in fear, the cup clattering on the
saucer, steam rising from the kettle, screaming for the infinite
being. But nothing. Nothing happensexcept everything. All of
these things. Cries in the darkwithout motion, shape, figure. An
irreplaceable scent of lilacs and musty wool coats. The mind
begins to seizure and rip itself apart as the ripped pages fly out of
my books, the sky cracks into green, and the whole world
becomes focused in the moment when you rouse and realise that
your dreams and reality are not quite so different.
Incognizance of Reality

Nothing real ever occurs in my dreams. Real: that which is

tangible, made-manifest, or otherwise restricted to sensory being.
The unreal: that which becomes the haunting figure of the
nightmare, hiding behind a veil of unknowableunconscious
self-awareness.
A Dream
I am standing in the middle of a glade. Night and the moonlight
are unmistakably one. Someone has taken my glassesout from
under my nose. I blindly stand and wait for the guiding figure of
my dreams. The forest is quietthere are no sounds from within.
Everything has endedlife, time, day, light. Nothing remains
except the warm breath I feel upon my shouldersI turn to see
no one, nothing. This is a dreambut why cant I wake? Moon
and tree and leaf converge. The light begins to radiate from the
treenow pale and white, the leaves dying one-by-one-by-one. I
stand at the foot of this tree, its only protector. Suddenly, a stag
light grayrushes upon me and melts into my flesh. Its horns rip
apart my innards from my flesh and my soul from its perch.
Blackness, no light, only the heat of the dying tree. Now, an elk
appears on the edge of the forestoutside the boundaries of my
beingand I follow. I follow until the edge becomes the plateau

of a new forest, full of magic and fleeting happiness, a joy so

impossible. I am alone, except for the elk with wild antlers and a
head so massive it could barrel through a riverbed of glass
pictures and portraits, ink seeping into the waters and changing
the greens and blues into pinks and reds. The elk chargesI have
no time to reactand thrusts me into the river where I begin to
drown in my own blood. I have no legs, my arms thrash about
wildly as a serpent in a bed of teething birdlings. A sinking feeling
as I realise that the light I was looking for all along was waiting for
me beneath the water. My lungs collapse and I stretch out my
arm to find that impervious light. All I find is watercolour and
paintbrushes dipped in melted seaglass. And there was light.
Portrait of a Self
An infinite sea of glass shards protruding from a castle of waterwishes. The hand of Christwithout an arm or his fleshand his
omniscient two fingers pointing heavenward tell me that the sky
will show the meaning of will; he will paint his disciples in the
blood of their enemiestheir best friends; the skys colours will
transform clouds into oceans of majestic knowing. Thoughts race
across the page laying before you: I am not dead yet, but I could
be soonthe bend in my perception of reality has ripped apart

the strings holding my weeping bits of flesh togethera field of

blossoming hearts wraps its stalks and leaves are on the ground,
waiting for the wind to whisk them away, to carry them gently
into that far-away night, picking up trace amounts of gentle
weeds and strawberries and grasshoppers cavorting along,
waiting for the wind inside of me to pick up the dust and the lint
from my pants-pockets, hoping to find a pennys worth of glass to
pay for that bottle of moonshine. This is my mirrored reality.
Hallucinations
I.
Faces blur in a time-altering, ceasing fashion. All my friends are
deadam I dead? The clock softens and fades into the tick-tickticking of the void occupying the ink upon the hundreds of
thousands of pages, resting in the nooks of the library. Upon the
walls: paintings bursting into flame, exploding tapestries, melting
glass over hardened brick, disintegrating into articles of dust. The
ceiling begins to collapse. The whispering dust falls from the walls.
An ocean of lyrical madness consumes my mind and stars
plummet into the outpouring of my thoughts upon the bloodtarnished desk.
II.

Distorted light, flashing, etching shapes into the crevices of my

mind. Shadows moving through the cracks in the wall, in my mind,
digging for the trigger of reality. A figure lunges at methen
retractsI shudder. Voices chant eerie odes to their demonfriends. A clear, reassuring voice: look into my eyes, find peace in
your darkest survivor. Act. The walls begin to shake. I reach for the
door but it runs away, distanced. I fall, legs unforgiving. The
ceiling swirls and darkness fills the voids of the roomwhere am
I? I am told by the manno, now he is rabbit-headedto relax,
that I have nothing to fear. All I can hear is the deafening screams
in my head.
In the Dark
A breath. The creaking of the old, wooden floorboards. The
haunting reality that someone with a knife is standing at your
side, peering down upon your slumbering existenceexcept he is
outside of sight. It isnt that he is unseeablehe is as real as the
sheets on the bedor that he is imaginary. His existence is
marked by the reality of being but lacking the presence of being.
Will he kill? Will he remain there, standing, with the knife in his
hands and the plot to string your internal organs around a tree
like it was Christmas? Do you dare to turn and open your eyes?

Noinstead, you lay there, motionless, waiting for the dream to

end, waiting.
Less-thans
There is a hole in the fabric of my being in timean opening to a
world where alternate realities exist. Puddles of blood and
hacked-off limbs and cluttering papers of death-certificates
occupy my desk-space. Each trophy stands as it had the day of my
arrest. Bottles of blood and tissue samples rest upon the shelves.
But these are less-than real because they are what I fear may
become, one dayof what might escape the hole in the fabric of
my being.
The Burnt Shadow
An inn where the butchers go to find cannibals who will cast away
grief at the sight of a large tankard of beer. The walls tell tales
about songs of star-crossed lovers whose fate was as two strings
on the bend of a violin. Tables thump with the beating and
pounding of fists and tankards, ready to fight the sober intruders
of their homeland. And the shadows hide in the ashes of the fireupon-the-hearth, waiting for night to fall and the eyes of those
who would mock them to sleep deeply in pools of their own
blood.

I Do Not Remember
Do not, cannot, would notremember those times of which I am
accused. Knives and spears and poles and weapons and bloodsplattered stains and less-than-ideal graves of despair mixed with
fungi growing on the corpses of my dead loved ones. There is life
in their death and I wish I had helped.
Losing Now
Days are shifting and switching, forgetting. Time begins to lose its
meaning. The night sweats have continued: I drown in the pools
of my sweat at night. I awaken when the glaciers melt and nothing
stops. Consciousness slips in between my grasp and I forget hours
of my life as if they never happened. I awakeI am always
awakening from these erratic sleepsand some new place is
mine, a place I have never seen before: the rooftop of buildings,
unknown glades of the wilderness, under my bed, in the attic
crawlspace, on the edge of the roadtraffic sprawlingthe edge
of my life. I am on the edge of my finitude. I am losing my now.
Living Dreams
I am afraid of nightmares which would follow me out of my
dreams. These are visions of realityreflectionsmirroring my

every thought and desire. Their escape is pathological,

premeditated. They escape into the wilderness of my mind,
moving freely, without restraint, and seeking my consciousness so
that it might become consciousness. My humanity. My life. They
seek this: an essence of living. But cant they see they live already,
in my dreams?

Papa, Dont Climb into the Nest

The woodpecker singing his working-song echoes in the memory
of cookies baking, elephants pounding, children shouting, father
crying. Scents of summer leaves and the suns rays mirroring the
meadow of grass and twigs and chipmunk-dwellings clashes with
the sturdy nest standing on stilts over a hill leading into bloodupon-rocks, rocks scattered across the pools of blood-memory,
always remembering the crunch of bones, groans, and the casting
out of judgment into that sea of terror. Papa, hes making a joke,
he cant be hurt, dont listen, listen. Fear streaming across the
rivers of my blood hurdling through the cells and the barreled
tunnels of tissue-thin fear, expanding, growing into the
boundaries of reality.

Stars Dancing
A blanket of black clouds, illumined by pinpricks of white-hope,
stretches its arms from the distant horizon to the estuary of
white-hot light. These starry gifts light the corridor, lead us to our
own state of existence. In the dark of night, they wait to jump
from constellation to faint constellation, until their frivolously gay
playtime erodes through their blanket of warmth and the stars,
they fall into the sea, bullets of lead piercing their own reflection.
They give light to the darkened seawater, hoping for their own
eventual life-giving essence to catch fire and thrust themselves in
the very depths of majestic infinitude.

Variations on a House
The Day-dreaming House
I store up my dreams and day-dreams and fantasies in the house,
safe from the spring rains and the winter blizzards, free from the
heat of the sun and the beating of the wind on bark of wood, on
the siding of the house, the brinks underneath screaming in pain.
But the dreams do not screamthey are safe, mostly. I keep the
day-dream of the summer meadow, full of grass and fig and
cloud-splotched skies in the cupboards, hoping for a glass of port
with the visiting absurdity I dreamt last night. The markings on the
walls of my childhood colour in the nursery and ask for help, for a
friend to share in the forgetting memory of those walls. The well
from out back by the edge of the wilderness and the deepening
shadows overflowing from the intoxicated woods and pineneedles and dying leafsthis well is filled with memories, too, of
breads and wines and birthday-cakes, pretend-capes and piles
upon piles of leaves, waiting for the good one to take them away,
for their ashes to sink back into the womb of the earth, for the
day to become night.
Walking Through the Door After an Odyssey of Many Years

The knob turnsjust as it always has, almost as if it, too, were

aliveand the door has a subtle creak in the upper hinge as it
swings aside. A wafting of summers filled with shaded heat and
sun-bleached grass, drying under the long-dying treenostrils set
afire with the ashes of dried oaks and pines and kerosene cans
seeping into the rabbit-hole, leaves skyrocketing in a rush of a
fiery gustinglemon-scented wood polish and an aria of Bruce
Springsteen fervently mixing with muted television screams and
crying from the next room. Sizzling ground chuck and whispering
brown sugar, a wavering light, the buzz of the generated fridge,
and the clock, ticking slower every twelve seconds. The pant,
pant, panting pooch dripping slurped-up water, the water spilling
upon the surface of the slapped-down tiles, cascading through
creak and crevice, watering the plains of a too-dry desert of
burgers and cakes and sugared cookies, flying spoons and flowing
tears, a sonnet of love to the warmth of the oven as the
snowflakes falling just outside the window, hoping for a friend to
angel the snow with the presence of an innocent, imaginative
soul, waiting for the sun to jump out from its hiding place beneath
the mirrored blanket covering the sky above.
Unearthing the House

A shattering silencethe spaces pausing, fleeing their instinctual

creakings and groanings. From the depths of the cellar corrode a
shudder, a minute moan from the inner selfhood of the house.
Dark, abysmal, an abyss of cobwebbed cardboard boxes and old,
worn shoelaces tied around crates of clothing and baby blankets,
that old vacuum only used once and the dehumidifier that always
seems to empty itself. The stench of rainwater, leaking through
the back walls and cigarette smoke rife against the decaying
carpets and tattered blankets meet the inquirious dribble of
fishtank cleaning, beating repeatedly against the algae-stained
glass. More sighs from the elderly hound as he dreamt of
deepening grays and splotches of furiously enticing bones of
meat. The cellar seemed to echo with anticipation as the rains
could be heard subtly knocking on the slated rooftop.
Steps to the House
One. Two, three. Four. The rickety stairs, wavering under
insignificant weight, begging for mercy, receiving only pounding
nails, the splintered-being of wood wept beneath its dasein. Steps
leading nowhere, as if they could guide or adventure themselves,
deep into the obscuring wooded ridge between hopeful reverie
and dying realityboards upon boards upon decaying leaves

hiding from the wrath of the crowning day, itself shortening and
unleavening into yeasty clay, soil. The entryway is so rigid the
wind could trip over itself, into unknowing. With distorted eyes,
the tongue rolls out in mocking tones of a similar rigidity, jeering
visitors and taunting them with its deeply rooted unconscious.
These stairs lead nowhere.
Hut-Dream
Sitting in the living area, trying to undo the living, to un-live as a
way of being, but finding myself incapable of such the task, I
resorted to the onerous daydreama dream of alternative
reality. In contemplating this, I found the dwelling to take on
certain characteristics of the cave. The floor had become stonecold, littered with dirt and trafficked debristhe murmuring of a
seashell buzzed from somewhere in the distanceeverything
became barren, simplistic, unheeding of trivialitythe creakings
of the walls and the ceilinged heavens were replaced with a kind
of musty, aromatic perfume, setting free moths and pigeonsthe
reflection of my presence could be found in the echo of nothing.
The whistling and knocking of a chilled draft recalled my being
and found, at once quivering and onerous, my feet in the carpet,
obscuring all thought, consumed by the deafened rug.

Light of Vigilance
A light, steadying in the window of the house, waits for the
darkness to expend and for the night of vigilance to arise, until the
narrowness of the scope of the dream becomes the very beacon
signaling hope. And the house waits, too, for the darkness to
penetrate its four-stone-walls and hiss a dark message to cracks
and crumbles, entreating entry into its own nothingness. All that
glows sees and all but the darkness waits for the light to go out
the house sees, keeps vigil, vigilantly waits (PS, 34), keeps
vigilant, vigilant. Lights then flood the house, their light reflecting
into the hills, giving the fire-flies the warmth of their hearts, set
afire, wondering what it was like to strike that match and dispel
the darkness.
Sound-cluttered Voices
Voices muddle the spaces, echoing off of imaginary walls, the
labyrinth of endless passageways, leading into further expanses
lapping over ripples of time, occurring and reoccurring, and
shadows dream in corners of green-tinted paint, washing over
walls of already-dreamed-in deserts, falling into slumbers of deepwinter storms, eyes squinting through the wind in search of the
sunshine not-there, hiding behind blankets of tears and weeping

grief, grief itself hidden in the subconscious desires of the living to

live, to discover, wandering aimlessly. And the closet corners echo
into the tragic triad of the rooms converging walls, space and
shadow uniting into a black hole, eating dust and dying hair.
Desk Dreams
A seat of power, a throne of dominion over dominions of carpeted
consumerism, botched only by the fellow dwellers of the land
today, nowhere in sightand resurrected from oblivion by the
eagle that flies by the seat of his pants after the fifth or sixth cup
of energizing coffee. The royal red cushion bears the posterior of
a mind so much enraptured by the sounds of percussive breathing
and waltzing jazz he forgets it is a chair, a simple seat, and it
becomes, for him, the launching post for blank-slated spaces
lurking in the walls, creeping from corner to corner, the branches
themselves ripping apart until the wind of oblivion returns and
the snows begin to fall, indifferent to the shoeless wanderer, the
anxious scholar, or the pacing professor, all of whom sharing the
same thought: the snows arrive early, an unwelcomed guest. The
clutter of paper and the ever-changing heating-cooling patterns
occupy the multidimensional spaces of the abode. A fungal scent,
one of a moist sweat and weary wanderer, lurks in the far

cornereven the scents of the aging books cannot match the

scents and sounds.
Ivy-patterned Pages
Sweet lilacsivory-towered loveand toner-stained trees bring
us back to Grandmothers house, a dwelling of an amalgam of
scentsaging books and drying ink-blotches upon pages hiding in
drawers, the oven, baking, and deadening cologne, stiflingand
soundsthe timer, beeping, buzzing, vibrating on the cool granite
countertop where I once swung my legs as on the park-swing,
begging for cookie-dough and sweet fruits, teeth-tinting desires,
the echo of the background-television, a sportscaster casting out
his predictions into the sea of unknowing, the hum of a soft floor
fan, shifting about the stagnant and dynamic air-waves, waving
past the kitchen granite and Amish oak-wood and freshly-picked
flowers from the garden meeting the lax, compact carpeting,
memory-stained with first-falls and wrapping-paper dust,
blueberry cheesecake christening Vietnamese-china and Viennese
silveritself screaming with the heat of jolly berriesand
stairwell-promises revealed through the transistor-radio
reverberating against the beating godhead in my chest, echoing
the easy-going hymns of the tears of a childhood not my own, a

childhood given to the wind, itself leaving behind forever the idea
of a summer wren crooning Grandmas flowers.
Words, Trapped
On the pagein the pagewaitinglistening intentlyand in the
ink. Life resting in the hands of this wooden surface, the place of
opportunity, a desk. Waiting for nothing to begin something, for
being to end that nothing. Hands pressed rashly against the
window between worlds, the inauguration for liberation, hoping
for providence, fearing for the beauty of possibility, for that
possibility to end without beginning. Murder: scratching, etchingout, eliminating, gassing. Life without life, but also death with
opportunity, with thoughts but not acting. Permanence in nonbeing untilbeing. In this world, non-being is as significant as
being. And the desk, it, too, rejoices in the etched letters in the
hollows of its wood, its tattoos of remembering-words and
forgetting stories. The whole of the universe is a small as these
wordsbut containing more meaning than the words
themselvesand even the blank spaces written upon this, the
tablet of the moment, echoes together with the etching of letters
into the stone, the words that say nothing.
Nesting

The warmth of the home-nest is incomparable: 500-count layers

upon layers upon my thawing skin, itself shedding layers until
nothing remains but the bliss of humanity, the flesh emanating
heat as a radiator, and piles of cotton and polyester and wornthrough clothing form the edge of this miniature-circle, protecting
me from the outsidecold, unknowing, strangebecause this
heart excels and slows in the pools of adrenaline, rushing and
gushing forth in the rampant streams of blood and water and
consciousness, and everybody knows the heart of the fire helps to
make the insides warm and the eyes to glow in the shining
knowing that the dent I make in the nest rips into my
subconscious and offers me a sampling of an inner reality.
The Hiding Corner
A mind has drawers for keeping thingsintelligent thingsand
filing them away for perusal on a wet-day, a moistening air upon
the grounds, the leaves, the stark branches. Memory, name,
retreats, getaways, breakfast, a stranger lurking in shadow, luring
in innocents, pure of mind and heart, but corrupted, now, and
waiting for their too-soon end, their penultimate moment-ofmoments. This is living, for you and I, and living it we must do.

The Works of Man and God

The longest journey / Is the journey inwards.1 This is the journey
where the most falls and stumbles occur. Striding down the path,
you discover the stones and the creeping weeds from the ditches
below. These things and more desire to journey inward toward
the path, but cannot. The weedsthey die come the snowfrostsand the stonesthey crumble in eternity, into dustthey
cannot enter into eternity, into the eternity of the soul.
I am a man who desires to take walks [on] the road of
possibility to the end.2 It is the soul who must be the one to walk
upon the road of possibility, not the flesh and bone and blood. An
inner peacekeeper which ought to guide and protect. This soul is
the Virgil in the life of a wandering Dante, wandering aimlessly
amid burning flames, thorns, and dancing mischiefs. O, how their
glitter entices the flesh. Where now is that impossible road?
I write this not to confirm the journey as being under
guidanceperhaps the guidance of these wordsbut to put
down the thoughts of one who cannot unearth himself in a world
of discovery.

1
Taken from Dag Hammarskjlds, Markings, page 58.
2
Markings, page 69.

* * *
O God, thou art my God3
O, how I have searched for thee in the sanctuary of thine
power, how I have been in neglectful awe of your majesty, everloving. And now I find thee in the springs of the earth, as always
before, but with one difference: in knowing your presence
nowas infinite through the death of
Not I, but God in me.4 I am Gods and no others. It is in
God I find my strength and the will to endure. If I am not in the
unheard-of then I am notonly in the God-element am I a type
of I am. Therefore, my religion is God and His will for me.
* * *
God is as far away from us as he is close. Gods greatness is not
only in his presence but likewise his absencefor he is both
always-already present and absent; if he were not, he would not
exist. There is no God except through His creation, through
humanity, through the universe itself. That is to saythere is no
God if He is not in everything.

3
Markings, page 117.
4
Markings, page 90.

To believe in God is not enough. We need scents and

sounds and lights and air and bread and wine and ritual words
and love. In these things is God there also. This is how we
humanitycommunicate: through the material of our world. Even
prayer is a medium of humanitybut not a material of the world:
prayer is a human medium for communion with God.
In God, works are allgreat and small. But in man alone,
they bring to them the disquiet of discord, of a lack of fulfillment
in not only themselves, but also the world.
What shall be left after we harrow the earth, hollow out
her womb of elements and life, truth and beauty, wisdom and
reverence? Will the works of God survive?
* * *
Self-sacrifice and sexuality become united when one realises that
the ultimate submission is to the interiorto Godrather than to
the selfwhich is truly exterior. Let it be known: God comes forth
from the inner person, the true self.
Humanity is composed of two realities: sub-human and
sub-divine: we are either thrown into our natural goodness or
evilness. We cannot live impromptu agendas of will or will-not;
we simply must do, must see, and must be, rather than try.

Why I Write
The unbounded infinities of my habit is discovered, ultimately, in
my being. The stars shine to dispel darkness, itself inevitably
always-already remaining presently absent, and yet present,
because the paradox of being is in the nature of here and there, in
the dark expanses of outer-spaces, of the reticent corners of time.
I write because steam always-ready rises from ceramic glasses at
coffee-shops, because sounds destroy the silent spaces
surrounding this subsistence, this fractured being, fallen and
always falling into itself, into the pitfalls which define its own
essence, its habit of being. I write because it is a habit of being, a
way of expression, a deep understanding of the height of the soul,
the mind itself a waiter, catering to the needs of one so absorbed
in transcendence it cannot bear distance, the weight of
misunderstood silence of the soul. The heart of my being is beingmisunderstood, in a way similar to the nature of being selfimposing, of entering a room loudly, boisterously, honing in on
each and all conversations and rotating the confined spaces so
precisely, the corners begin to inhabit the space of themselves,
the shells of silence, hiding as far away from boisterous
anticipation and anxietyas far as possible. There is a joy found in
writing as in no other. In the process of writing is connected

deeper intuitions of the self, of ones own personhood. Deeply

human and immensely natural, writing is natures remedy to
incessant thought, to amused ambition, the heart of narcissism
bled dry and left out in the sun to evaporate into the clouds, to be
carried away by carrion or swept away into puddles of dust, of
echoing raindrops. To discover the habit of writing is to unearth a
deeper, more personal selfhood, one which comes from the
bowels of existence. It is from these bowels where my words echo
into the page.

The Miniature in Space and Time

Frost on Dew on Minute Infinities of Life
The space is echoing, deafening. I crawl into the linens, smooth,
waving, to hide, to hide away from the sun-behind-the-clouds and
the bleached blades of grass, withering under the morning
hoarfrost, stagnantly obeying the winds and the fading sun,
imprisoned in their own state of being, imprisoned in what could
only be their annual hibernation.
Acorns falling Gently into the Twilight
The sorcery of the trees and the leaves and the caressing wind,
calling forth from the trees their immanent roundness,
beseeching the leaves to wander, to roll about over grass and
pavement and rock and stone their spherical love, that ode to the
equinox and the twilight and the changing fallenness of the
worldit, too, a perfect sphere, holding all of our imperfectness,
our crying souls for warm milk, for the rolling waves of the round
seaand the caressing wind, all that while, carrying, strolling
along, with the leaves, transporting them across land and sea,
cuddling as only a mother could, to see them off to the world of
expectations and to draw them, finally, into the bosom of the

acornall of this being in its roundness, found in the acorn, the

heart of all things.
The Knowing of Space
The hour of your believing is, in the final analysis, the new
paradigm, the crescendo of a symphonic masterpiece, the
moment of your achieving authenticity in the cosmos of the
universe, in the very fibers of what it has meant and means to live
the being of your belief. In that hour, your believing will spin and
oscillate between the real and the imaginary, blending then into a
chord of possibility, the ultimate possibility, of opportunity. The
possibility of time and being will be absorbed by this, the hour of
your believing, and the universe will become as a shell, a hollow
universe holding in itself the continuum of all being, into the
genesis of knowing, of being as only the light can occupy a corner,
as only sound could muffle the beauty of the silence, resting
peacefully in the corner of the shell, of the hollow frame of a
universe so minute, its entire existence leans upon the greatness
of its shocking stature, a divinity found in only the humblest of
creations.
The Song of the Sea

A pounding force, one which commands and directs attention,

lofting gently above the stars to that pinnacle of truth, of serene
beauty and limitless distanceechoing a still-natured curiosity
and bounding back to the epicenter of the maker. Voices, singing
softly, and remembering odes to winter, the tude of a shell,
singing hatched memories of the crushing and swelling of the
seaherself a majestic, hidden loveand the pitter-patter of the
crustaceans, scampering across the sea-floor, tending to their
grimy claws, their echo-locating pinchers sending messages to the
rolling waves of the sea, to the infinitely repeating waves of the
sea.
Ode to the Song of the Sea
The children of the seas are the shells and the inhabitants of the
shells sing the song of the sea, the echoing, reverberating crashing
of waves, the soft lull of waters waving in the distance to seagulls
and pelicans. Their song is saved in the eternity of time in their
homes, their shells, their abode upon their back, that satchel of
their existence. The songs of the inner-home repeat to me those
almost-forgotten times of disbelief, of lost opportunities, of the
most joyous of eventsbirths, deaths, beginningsand that

ominous ode to the oceans of our lives, the vast expanses of

depth permeating into the fabric of our lives.
The Courage to Escape
Abandon your shell and travel to old places and new, seeking
yourself in all things, your being in the being of creation,
daydreaming the memories of that old house upon the hill,
reposing gently in the noonday sun, waiting for its stilts to crack
and break but only ever stoutly resting in that descending globe of
light, it, too, seeking a shell found in the horizon.
Place of Return
Burn shells into asheslet it become that which it is, its
condensed purity of beingand thrust it into the depths of the
pools of water occupying the oceans, the lakes, your mindhere
becoming also what it was, water, and realising its potentiality of
beingand set it out in the sun for warmth and loveto
evaporate into the sky, to become again one with everything. The
elements beg for a return, return to living in an old way, in new
places, in the midst of everything.
Cocoon Shells

I am as a caterpillar, filled with an inherent beauty, unseen,

unknown by all, but myself also a casingcovering this beauty
and itself beautiful, a creature of creationthe beauteous love of
created things is full of this void in mea void longing for the
transcending reach, barely within grasp, always in sight, always
filling and emptying into and out of the voidbecause I am the
void.
Thresholds to the Invisible
The meeting-place above my bed hears the cobwebs gather and
the dust, flying freely, and my dreams are scooped into a net of
wall to wall uniting itself to the wall, catching light and shifting it
into the darkness, darkness into nothingness, and the nothingness
into a tiny hollow point where three beings become one and the
universe escapes into the paling colour of eggshells.
Remembering to Turn-off the Lights
A cacophony of outlets screams their silence against the drums of
my ears, collecting their dust and light and shadow. The moist and
the dry, a symphony of pages and colours, notes and values
echoing their hymns in my head as if they were performing for
eternity, the crossroads designated for lightfor the expansion of
light into shadow, and back againfor sweet scents of the long-

passing autumnal repose, the corner that is not a cornera

makeshift fort of cushions cushioning the meditative spiritlyrical
markings and handbooks for calming, for humour and sketchings
of absurd realities living to the edge of the brim, the threshold of
the desert where the possibility of a return to civility, too, is as
absurd as the goings-on of make-believe tigers going on an
adventure.

Ubiquitous Serendipity
Sipping Scotch
An earthy aroma of malt-peat and honey-dewed hinting pave a
cleansed passage for cool gusts of calming arias to float along as
the waters jostle and tide through my esophageal canals. This
peat burns, brings to mind soft, Christmas-y winters when
grandfather and I would build log-fires. We would stack those logs
and build a fortress for consumption, for the great sake of warmth
and love in manifest-flames, to build a fire and watch the flames
glint and spark and dispel the darkness from the vast corners of
the hearth and home, to sit upon that hearth, back-to-flames, and
listen to the crackling and breaking and laughing and loving of the
fire-lit loves of our home. A scenting of earthy redemption and
heavenly cordiality are rife amongst the household guests, their
hearts setting afire even as the flames grow and recede, mature
and recline. But the warmth from that fire is a memory
Fountains of Amber
A river of amber flows through me. I smell the sweet vanilla
fragrance and taste the riding barrels, down to the river where we
kneel-pray, kneel-pray to fight the demon-ticks and stop them

from chewing on the barrels, from stealing the vanilla coated

coaster.
Scotch-Smoke
Its truly inimitable when you have two distinct tastes of smoke in
your mouth. The smoke flows through the air as the peaty, malt
drips down the throat. Walk and talk poetry and office-space
stories of a realm not here. That smoke trickles from fingers like
an old friend on a brief visit. Take your strolls out in the warming
weather and cast aside the people and the papers and the
responsibilities and the loves we have lost and go on an adventure
that is long overdue, library checkout items. We drift in the fumes
of those life-giving chambers of gas, filled to the brim with life
waiting to begin life. We become the airwe wonder and fly
away to a somewhere-landwe go to a place where we can be
those kids we used to be. I hope I can find that airiness again
tonight in my dreams. I hope the crocodile doesnt follow us this
time.
On the Water
But another smoke can drift over seas of immense grandeur.
Another smoke closes its hands and blossoms into a mushroom,
curling its edgy fingers around itself in sinful glee. It spreads its

essence over the water, claiming a territory not yet known. This
smoke walks on the water like Jesus did when the sky cast over
the sea a blanket of dark shadow. Do not be afraid. The dark
shadows prowl over the waters like the smoke-friend. I cannot
walk with themI must not walk with them. Only the smoke is
my friend when Ive cast out to sea, fishing for mushrooms hiding
under the blankets with sleeping seabeasts and frivolous fish,
waiting.
Sun through the Branches
Beating rays pierce through the fine needles of the tree branches
above the damp, pale ground. He moves the branches with his
armsthe windand rustles the air with a whirlwind of playful
glee. The day is inspired by the cool breeze aloft a mighty quest to
slay the dragons and find a cozy park bench upon which to sit,
read Hardon, and drink an afternoon cup of tea.

A Pathway to the Great Silence

Sitting, in silence, is one of the keys to understanding that the
beauty of the human person lies from within, not without.
Listening to the silence of the day, of the space around you, is at
once frightening and again uplifting: there is a God! you might say.
But God is not proven in silencenor in boisterous chaos: he is
found in the spaces in between the books, resting on the dusty
shelves, in the blank spaces of inklings, in the calmness of the
trees and the winds wave upon their encrusted barks.
At the apex of the silent giants, stalking out steps, is the
mystery of the great beastsilence. The huge spirit lurks and yet
also avoids contact with the world-at-large, preys on the paranoid
watchers of the daythe ones who must look or face the
blindness of their present beingand measures in the sandy
grains of the sea the mistakes and the utterances of the
bystander. At the heart of this beating godhead are the hands, the
feet, the whispering breath of the horizon, a virgin of serenity,
beckoning sailors to believe in the soft lull of the crashing waves
against the hull of their ship. The secrecy of silence herself is no
more lucid for being near.5 The whispering silence of our dreams,

5
From The Wilderness, W.S. Merwin.

too, meets on that horizon, on that distant island of horizontal

being where the chance-happening of the meeting of the manyfaceted personalities of the unconscious takes place. Even silence
permeates through the books, sleeping on shelves of a tiered
library, passing the time away in memory of themselves, of their
authors, long-dead and almost-forgotten. The being of silence
always-already exists as we interpret it, as it is and continues its
status of being until being becomes a new form, the rather
hopeful and promising metaphysical reality of the inner-self, of
that transcendent quality about humanity, about that golden
truth of silencethey are onethat is always-already
participating in its creation, acting codependent with the
circuitous action of ending and beginning. The metaphysical
bookends of silence are found in its beginning and ending: the
moment it begins, all else ceases to exist; upon its ending, the
world moves about frantically, as if in attempt to catch up, to gain
back the time owed to silence. But time belongs to silence, to that
ominous, forgiving being, that is found to be one of the most
fundamental truths of humanity: that in the mirror of the human
visage is found the silence of presence, why the descending
clouds are shapeless in the midst of so much noise.

Micro-essays on Night and Day

On Day
Darkness consumesah, but so does the light. Darkness flees at
the appointed timenever the sameto consume elsewhere.
But here, the light reigns the domain of the living; the kindhearted loves of each leaf to each tree to each spec of grass
combine to allow mother-earth to be as she always-already is: the
kindred warmth and deafening heat of the sun, the deeply
intoned veil of sky and that distant horizon of light beneath so
much always-already darkness, a darkness eating beating hearts
and suffocating spirits dry with intoxicating vapours. These, the
joys of an unknowing wanderer.
Light amidst Light amidst a Darkening Cloud
But there is hope in the glittering golden dome. O, mother.
Watching over us, loving, weeping, dancing. A shroud of gold and
the light of the moon are her worldthere. Panels of light
surround her, bring to her the fullness of the day, the depth of the
lake, the sorrow of the trees. The elemental Autumn loves as it
mournslike our mother. O, yes, mother. You once said your yes
and gave to us the worlda world just now outside my reach but
within sight.

Sunrise
A rising, glowing, incandescent bulb dips its paintbrush in the dark
waters of the lake to paint a sky full of the watercolours of life. He
rises in splendid love until the clouds smother him in their foggy
dew. Rays pierce through time, a bullet through flesh, and clouds
descend to the lake to enshroud it in a mysterious fog, too.
Creeping over the subtle ripples, calling for that essence of lifein
itself, a mystery, alsoand begging for the world to swirl its
fingers into a vacuum of eternal colour and light until the sky
pales and blankets this enclosed realm, house of praise.
Peripatetic Spirit Drifting over the Lake
Again, evening approachesand even sooner, night appears. A
stroll through the woods has helped to clear my mind, but
something still hinders me from sleep. A fresh wind blows through
the window to calm my restless spirit. That same wind wraps its
chilly fingers around the golden dome in the distance. The lights
pierce through my soul and fill my void with that same sacrificial
steward of lifein this is the calling to love.
A Flickering Flame in the Darkness

In this place of love, my heart echoes with the joy of the stone
and glass. My soul pours into the cracks of the walls and the cold
stone floor. I am alonealmost. Millions of candle-lit stars watch
over me as my spirit burns in the waking dream of this, my final
reality. Only here could God make man into more than he ever
was, is, will come to be. I dare not to move, out of fear of losing
that once-yet-always ephemeral cover of sky and moon and star. I
fear such a disturbance may wreck my very being and open a
fissurea chasmof invincible powers compared to one of so
lowly a station. My heart beats with the drums, pounding inside
of me, pounding the call of my deathtoo soon, oh too soon. My
love has not returned, to share in the dream of a life eternal in a
light so blinding I almost forget about the darkness. My soul
rejoices in the silence of stone. My spirit bows low to the flowing
river of solitude pouring into my ears and my nose and under my
fingernails until it is unrecognizably filled with the fullness of light.

Consciousness in the Void

I am but emptying out myself into the voidcasting a screaming
soul into oblivionwhile waiting for the ever-overfilling universe
to fill me up again with the imagination of one thousand
universes.
Time and eternity coexist except at the present: time is
now taking the place of eternity to allow for the reality of eternity
to exist codependent of timethe present time.
The void exists to be continuously filled and re-filled with
the force of equilibrium. An instable being fails to fill the void and
thus falls into the void of his being, or lack of beingwhichever
occurs first.
What is life but the lack of death? Is not the same
reversely true? Death in livingthat is our goal. To die in living life
is to find purpose in dying.
The cruelty of humanity is at once its greatest weakness
and its strength. The greatest cruelty of humanity is the sin to
death, to condemn another to death (literally, metaphorically,
etc.); but the greatest strength in this is the gift of permanence in
being to those who go on living, knowing that their condemnation
of others is the simultaneously condemnation of the personal
soul.

The sad truth is that there is nothing sad about the death
of the dying soul: the soul who dies does so because they have
sentenced themselves to do so. The soul who receives life chooses
to live even in death.6
The destruction of the self ultimately leads to the
decreation of the I. If, however, the I is wholly corrupted by the
nature of evilwholly by means of total annihilation and leads to
a degradation of the immortal soulthen the I cannot be
destroyed, decreated, deconstructed. It belongs to darkness.
Nihilism consumes the will which is broken.
What is freedom without full compensation to the world
of your entire being? What is speech without thought? Am I not
free to think? Thou speakthink!
Transubstantiation of the will. The will becomes what it is
destined to be when it accepts the faults that are not of the will,
of that which is exterior. Every action has an equal and opposite
reaction. To sin is to gain a little-death; to resist that sin is to lose
a little self-will.

This is not to suggest that the soul can choose its life or death independently
of fate. Rather, the dying soul dies because it cannot live, it cannot choose its
own goodness over evil because it has chosen neither.

Micro-essays on Music
My Hearts in the Highlands
And no one can uproot me from these hills of sweat, blood
pouring as valleys of streaming resolve, the sound of beating
drums against stone walls, hatched roofs, a droning roll of
metawaves seeping into my skin, my earsagainst those dualdrums pounding, thumping, louder and loudershaking the earth
beneath my feet as if a fissure were to erupt and drag that
harmonious sound down, deep, and the sound echoes over hill
and into valleys, across lakes and through bushes and into the
fibers of the peat, waiting to be burned, waiting to protect a
solitary one from the gusting winds and biting teeth of winter,
where no sound is heardno sound but the dying silence of the
deadening wood, the hum-less life echoing now in my mind.
On Meta-verse
There are no, can be no words. Only sensation in a sense-filled
nature of presence. Sound occupies sound, capturing itself from
within and from withoutas one. A being which consumes all
others. A flood of emotion and tearsstreaming, flooding,
gaspingcreating tears creating wonder and light in darkness, in
the presence of absence. But there is no absence, no nothing, as

this cavern embodies itself from the thing which is without. A

serene wind rushes through that cave, your inner sanctuary of
space-less presence, overshadowing your own shadow. This
presence is a joy embodied as that joy unknown to the darkness
of your outer sanctuary, your lesser abode. The presence of this
joy is a bird nesting its abode in the adobe farms of the desert,
wishing for material, hoping for rain, for life giving life giving itself
a wellspring of abundant life. A tree, sending out its loves because
it shares in a oneness with the things that seem to be othered,
seem to be without its own onenessbut they are its presence,
manifest in forms connecting spiritually, bringing about an
understanding of oneness, of itself, which is not really a self but
the realisation that in all things are one. This is a joyful song,
shouting unto heaven and to earth, all the while waving.
Miniature Heavens
Light, airy, frothy with the goodness of homemade soup, up and
down, down, up, down, up. Grande heights of unsurmountable
thrill culminating at the bottom in a calming, silent lake. So
content, such clarity of voice has these miniature heavens lining
up, one-by-one-by-two-by-three, prancing in ripples of the wind,
gazing up at the stars, wondering what time the sky will grin

today, how the moon ascends to her perch of beauty, of quaint

elegance and superior divinity. Up in a cascade of sky-rocketing
stars and comets brushing by, leaving a streak of their brushstroke
in a paling river of star-dust. Left, right, right-left, the stars guide
us back to ourselves, back to the seat of understanding that we
are silently sitting, listening for our bite-sized miniature heavens
to slip up and slide down, arpeggios of birds joining the ranks,
leading us up toward the sky, to the moon and back again, hoping
to become part of that orchestral masterpiece, to be one with the
heavens, in the heavensin heaven.

A Sacramental Moment
Chestripping openuprooting to flyas from a branchand
letting your wings take flightplummets from the rue du rue
seeking nothingnessabandoning everything, colourfor
blackness, nothingflight to the edge of oblivion, to piles of other
jumpsan Other among othersand intensifying clouds
swimming through the skies, longing to become that fated lifegiving rain, bringing night from day, dawn from dusk, and more
pilings of dust hiding in the cradles of corners, full of the
immensity of deadening life, of birth and death finalizing
themselves in the space of the converging walls, where the day
shines the brightest, where the earth meets the sky and the birds
fly into graying clouds and out into the space of the light of stars,
in their multitude, scarcely hiding, always awaiting themselves
and their light and the courage of the light of the stars to
adventure and to find in other enlightening spaces of that same
minute corner the secrets of hidden lives, of the courage to step
forwardleft-right, left-right, leftand receive as if no gift could
possibly be given away, no precious love be spared in the sight of
so much sin, but still not-so-much sin, because with a contrite
heart all things are made possible, all realities submerged beneath
the ocean of the beating godhead, of the heart seven-times

pierced, pierced with the love and the hatred and the undying
fondness for a sustaining life, for the earnest desire to receive
again and again without restriction, with a love so incapable of
fullness because it lacks youand that is why we are receiving,
why we are so inclined to merge our thoughts into one ideathat
in receiving you, we might liveand still my heart aches because
today it cannot take you in, cannot offer you a bed in which to lay,
a manger from which to eat, and I cant stop thinking about my
chest, ripping open, pouring out into a puddle the disappearing
notion of myself, of a you-less me, of a continuing desire for
separationbut separate we will remain, for in the experience of
the absence of your being, I might grow to understand the
immensity of your presenceand I am stuck, caught between this
rock and your beckoning call, that bell, ringing over-and-over
again, until the idea of supper returns, and I return, but I never
notice you standing there, waiting for me to ask you if you are
hungry, if you will find food to eat, drink to quench that
unquenchable thirstbut why so unquenchable when you are
that force which quenches, which sustains and gives lifeand I
am blind, I am without sight when I remember the activity of your
love, of the force which breaks my back in two, that great gravity
of being which pulls my spirit from my flesh so often, so often do I

go deaf, unable to hear you calling, calling in the night, in the

midst of the shadows where there are saints and sinners alike,
wanting, wanting me and everyone to walk and to act, to act
because that is the very thing we must do, and I must act, I must
take each step as if it were my last and approach the banquet of
your wedding feast, of that terrific sight and sense of knowing
that in receiving, one gives all they have, every last ounce of
being, reverted back to you, to that unquenchable thirst of my
being, and I am in you in that moment when I remember that my
tendency to be over-scrupulous disappears and instead I am filled
with the longing of your presence, of that great and terrible dark
night when my armour is taken away and my sword sheathed in
the cloak of your presence, and I am taking each step as if it were
my last, and I am worried about fainting, of failing just before my
success, of that grace you gave me to continue this journey to
you, until I fallI am always fallingand I can barely catch a
glimpse of you, standing there, waiting for me to stand back up,
to return to that stride toward you, in the moments before my
sight, my hearing, my animations, are taken away, taken to that
corner of my mind where I dont remember who I am or what I
am doing, but then I remember it doesnt matter, I remember
that you are there, waiting for me to stand up, and I cant help but

think about the time that woman spoke to you on the edge of the
well, asking why you were there, why you had journeyed to find
her, she in full-knowledge an unfaithful follower, and you replied
in your grace with grace, with that gravitational field which draw
all things to your bosom, to your heart, to the place where I now
stand, waiting, hoping that when I receive you, my world will end
and you will still be there, standing, waiting, loving.

On the Matter of Strange-Being

Strange matters, oddities of the dream world, are permeating the
spaces of the voids encompassing this wind, this movement of
life, into the passages of the reality of the inner self. The clutter of
sound erodes the fibers of my conscious perceptions of reality,
forcing me to embrace the facticity of my condition: be it
mortality or erodibility, either way the cosmos retain their
infamously benign indifference. The movement and the cosmicity
of the forces at large resonate into this vessel of warmth the cold
vastness of the universeindifferent though it may beand the
incredible simplicity that is always-already paired to the benignity
of that force which is penetrating, echoing, resounding in the
depth of the well. I am the wellnot the sacred blood of the
quenchable thirst, but the component of existence which depends
upon that which fills it. A cup can only be defined by the
substance of its capacitythe symbol and metaphoric liquid
occupying the domain of its beingby the sheer import of the
holiness of the soft earth of the cup, I am immersed in the soil of
holy love, of the grounds of espresso enlivening the always
darkening nature of the temple. The shadows lurk not because
they want to, not because they are bound to oaths of servitude to
no one, but because they must fulfill authentic existence: they are

obliged to the oath of their essence. Essence, too, fills me, is the
substance of the life-giving water from the hollowed well, this
creature of insistent perpetual-dwelling. I allow the dwelling to be
as with all beingalways-already present.
Other strange matters fill my voidthe void is a vacuum,
taking in the good as well as the bad because of that immense
benignity of which I have already spoken. If only I could escape
into the friendly spaces of the vastness; alas, the impossibility of
the action is in the idea of opportunity, the lights giving life to the
lifeless tree, defiantly attempting sustenance on the unfortunate
nature of the thing, the thing which takes in my presence as well
as the absence of everything and nothing. Leaves, too, fall from
my roots, my attachment to this great and epic cosmicity of my
essence. The leaves are my attachment to the world, my source of
attempted-life that always-already falls into the plains of nihilistic
being. I grow againalwaysbecause that is my fate, to
perpetually grow and die as a tree loses leaves and defies the
gravity of the artic winds and snows, falling because they must,
falling and crushing because they are never-believingbut they
cannot believe, are not fortuned that greatness of opportunity.
The stars are the ultimate chance for opportunity. The stars
contain my heart, contain that part of my essence that reminds

me of a bowl of soup. Life is like a terrible memory in this way:

always distant and yet moving further and further away until it
becomes so lost in itself that the memory seems almost a dream.
O, how I long to dream.
Strange-being is, then, an abnormal state of beingwhich
is to say, strange-being has nothing apart from normal or
natural being: it simply is. To jump into the pool of the being of
others is at once to jump into your own being. To be is to be
nothing more. Togetherness is as importantnot moreas
aloneness. The idea of the community is at once the same as
isolation, individuality. Even communities can be isolated, cut off
from the goings-on of the age in which we live.

Meditation on the Attentiveness of Things

I am so wonderfully enraptured by the idea of ideas, by the
continuously flowing stream of thoughts and consciouses
parading past me, by the necessary attention it requires to
indulge in the tangential, in the almost-completely unrelated
material of the physic pertaining to the physical realm; of this I am
certain: the warmth of [my] heart cannot make up for it. What I
am speaking of is the thing which Simone Weil likewise spoke of:
prayer.
When I allow my attention to be robbed from me by the
heavenly father, then I allow myself to me immersed in the
totality of my very-mortal existence, of the human condition
plaguing my every-other thought. The purpose of average things
is to direct the mind toward the heavens, toward that intrinsically
self-transcendent quality of which I adore to admire in humanity.
Why? Because that quality is the most profoundly non-human
sentiment I possessof all things capable of possessing, this is the
most unique, the most significant.
My attention is rung between clotheslines, thinly stretched
across the breadth of a violin, high as the sky floating above
cloudscumulus and nimbus. One soars because one dreams of
flight; one sings because the soul is the source of animating life;

one leaps because stagnancy is boring. Whyever would one

remain stagnant, after all? Is not the flapping of a hummingbirds
wings a sight of elegance, of pure reality? What about the sound
rain makes as it slams against the pavement, leaving one world
and entering another? Is there even a slim possibility that the
grumbles of the homeless man, sitting at the corner, are really the
words of a lover singing, Hosnna in exclsis? Stagnancy is boring:
of this, we can recognise, I think. But if we are not attracted to the
boring, then what is our alternative? Are we exciting? Are we
spectacular? Are we always-already entering into the threshold of
a holy of holies, a shrine of an epic understanding of the Divine? I
think we can not be sure of what to think.
Music is a terrific example. The study of and attentive
quality of music is so necessary that it begins to embody ones
way of life. To sing is as to rejoice in the Lord always, as we are
reminded by St. Paul, and to strike a key or strum strings or
percussively rap upon the keys of a marimba are likewise: to offer
up an ode to the one who reminds us of the value of our
connective things. Music is connective: it unites a people and
brings together persons who might not voluntarily join as one
given any other circumstance. Why is this? I believe it is because
of the attentive quality of the habit of performing, the habit to

music. Strict and urgent care needs tending to for the learning
musician or vocalist; to suggest otherwise is to take no part in the
combined realms of beauty and suggestion.
Writing is likewise an exceptional example. To write is to
pour out ones soul upon a page, lined with the stories of our
thoughts, of epic-sagas and fantastical dreams. Writing requires
an awareness that is not only attentive but also passionate,
meaningful, and purposeful. One does not simply write to write;
in other words, we cannot all be like James Joyce, great author
though he was, he had a tendency for spilling out nonsensical
letters upon the page.

Treating the Imagination

The imagination is one of the closest things we have to the
metaphysical, the other-worldly inspiration of love, dwelling in
our inmost being. The human imagination is boundless: the
imaginative powers at work are never-ending. Doves tempering
wind. A glassblower inciting fury into petite fragility. The
immensity of the design of a single snowflake. A droplet of
rainwater resting gently on cold planks of wood. Clouds
smoldering, trampling rustic tinder in a bay of converging leaves.
Daybreak.
Sren Kierkegaard once said, Dont despair at wanting to
become your authentic self. You are only what you choosethat
is your salvation. If one chooses to engage in the imagination,
then his task is to imagine, to let the creative juices flow, to
uncork the bottle of wine and go to town, to remember.
Authenticity naturally comes from the ebb and flow of life, those
bumps smoothing out over a period of time in which the
meditating spirit rejoices in the silence of his own presence, in the
great cosmicity of the solitudinal forces of his being. The sound of
the pitter-patter of falling rain upon leaves and moist soil and the
sinking fog echo in themselves the truth of their own habit, their
own aloneness.

The secret of living is not the living of it, but rather how to
live it. Does the rain question where it will rest, where it will be
absorbedinto soil or wood or concrete? Would a lark question
the ethics of the worm whose life ends when it is eaten by
chirping, hungry larklings? Neither should we, you and I, think
about the unnecessary, the trivial matters that inevitably have
little or no effect upon our decisions. In learning how to live, one
deliberates, one questions, but eventually accepts the simplistic,
the necessary, the unquestionable. Deliberation, then, is the key
to living: to live purposefully, meaningfully, and full of the zeal of
life is a way in which living authentically is culminated in the
simplistic way of living.
Furthermore, the imagination leads, inspires. Where
would Dante have gone without Virgil to light his way? Perhaps
Oedipus could have benefitted from a similar relationship. When
one imagines, the whole world becomes the unit of infinite
possibility, of opportunities overflowing into the chasm of the
mind, the heart. Together, these threethe imagination, the
intellect, and the heartwork together to form the union of
possibility, of opportunity. Life is full of opportunity. One can
achieve a sense of the understanding of purpose when the
starting point begins in that totality of the trinity of possibility.