Do not love half lovers Do not entertain half friends Do not indulge in works of the half talented Do not live half a life and do not die a half death
If you choose silence, then be silent When you speak, do so until you are finished Do not silence yourself to say something And do not speak to be silent
If you accept, then express it bluntly Do not mask it If you refuse then be clear about it for an ambiguous refusal is but a weak acceptance
Do not accept half a solution Do not believe half truths Do not dream half a dream Do not fantasize about half hopes
Half a drink will not quench your thirst Half a meal will not satiate your hunger Half the way will get you nowhere Half an idea will bear you no results
Your other half is not the one you love It is you in another time, yet in the same space It is you when you are not
Half a life is a life you didn’t live, A word you have not said A smile you postponed A love you have not had A friendship you did not know To reach and not arrive Work and not work Attend only to be absent What makes you a stranger to them closest to you, and they strangers to you
The half is a mere moment of inability, but you are able for you are not half a being. You are a whole that exists to live a life, not half a life.
i am going to bed, now at 7:08 to lessen the ache of being awake
this is a poem this is the business of us artists this is “business correspondence”
inform a collaborator a coworker – if you will of your passwords and processes before taking those pills
my corazón has nearly bled-out migrating across my torso, my limbs, and my crown settling into my cornflower eyes bloodshot with or without drops and disguise
the weight of this goddamned red muscle i’m so fucking heavy-hearted this cursed organ’s still goin’ my sweetest, singular escape, now aborted
the only thing i can do right, right now is to sleep the only thing i can do wrong, right now is to think
(who should i send this memo to? – no one, if not, to you)
i feel like someone
you last loved on a wednesday,
earlier this week
i feel like someone who was once your intense singular joy/ now again, an invisible naturalist, poet, neologist and crone
i feel like someone you forgot to mention the Hilma Af Klint show to
i feel like someone losing our intimacy
exponentially, by the second, against a shot clock in an un-United Center
i feel like someone whose forehead you won’t kiss; whose hollows you’ll never touch with hands or tip; like someone who’ll never climax again
i feel like someone who upset you with
Dreaming and that’s where it ended; who never listened to your diatribe about Waco, or heard of your plane rituals and four-part fruition
i feel like someone whose mystery you’ll let be; whose content is consumed without gnosis; like cold leftovers
i don’t feel like someone who you will walk across a frozen Lake or dry Lake bed to get to anymore in the apocalypse, station eleven style
i feel like someone who was found because of fresh words about rosy-golden light and then who was lost because of stale words about time
i feel like someone whose Diego died before she did and who missed meeting her Henry Miller, humbly
i feel like someone who swallowed all the art she’ll never create with you and she’s choking on it
i feel like someone who’s just about to close up the library – MH
i feel like someone who you owe nothing to because that’s exactly how you told me to feel
i feel like someone waking from a months-long dream, but it was actually a coma from a head-on collision, exposition
crash into me again, please
this time, let me die knowing i’m your sweet,
i’m your love
ps i feel like someone who just wrote the last poem you’ll ever read about you
but i don’t feel like someone who just wrote her last poem about you
she gently pincers the end of ki’s gorgeous black tail
gingerly pulling kin off the road
redundantly committing ki’s spirit
to the universe, aloud
with apologies for humankind, silently
purposefully committing kin’s body
to a safer spot
for mourning
and carrion feast
Ki’s body was unexpectedly heavy
full of walnuts and seeds
fat and strong for a long winter ahead
so alive just minutes ago, I saw out the window
I’m sorry
I’m sorry
for me
for my kind
for our machines
for our structures
for our carelessness
for our selfishness
for all this,
engineered, manufactured, destroyed
the falling snow christens quick
she wanted to go inside
and sob
selfishly,
because the possibility
of an aberrantly painless holyday
ceased with the dead black squirrel
she wanted to go inside
to tell someone
but the only one
was a woman, one profoundly unwise
and living individually in the moment
dis-understanding
in the least way
every single day
she wanted to go inside
and forget
but death was also present there
old, not fresh, also unnatural
the not-a-Grandmother at the stove
the stench of a potful of bones, flesh and fat
boiling on the stove
a pig or two’s rib cage
in her favorite cauldron
the one she’d kept for vegetables only
she stays silent
swallows her heart and disappears
caw, caw,
caw-caw
the crows have shown up
for a still-warm, Christmas Eve dinner
to be returned to the people, to all be-ings, to them
with my bones or ash interred, one day
the Sun, Moon, Rain, Wind, Clouds, Sky and Stars kiss me at all hours
did you see me open up this Autumn?
after a Summer spent crying,
wet, yet fruitless spent Spring wading into lies instead of soft blossoms and new grass Winter approaches, maybe the frost will kill this disease,
for good
For now, I bathe
nearly naked in sunshine, cold rainstorms, wetland pools and moonlight
unapologetically
|out in the open|
unabashedly
baptising my face, hair,
and eyes, my breasts vulva
and legs, my lips, throat, spine,
and my wild heart
ceremonially, first with wine, like Magdalene, anointing and anointed, in the name of the mother, Sun and holy ghosts
|cabernet henna| then, with rainwater from the willow’s edge, like Ophelia, lying in the woodland and meadow, flooded to cleanse or drown [to be, or not to be] in the name of the Moon
|I ponder the stone cistern laden with glacial deposits and ruminant bones|
the woodland is abundant with new mushroom, new overnight growth
[puhpowee]
the hint of ancient circles supplants my judgment with instinct and overrides decorum with new delights | and old delights, revisited |
an aged grapevine is rooted deep, climbing, trailing, snaking hidden in plain sight, everywhere and I’ve intuitedItas Ol’ Scratch, I take a hatchet to quell Its influence, here
You, Your windows are not true eyes Your lamps are not enlightenment
So, bless the dark
of the night
of the country night sky
And the Moonset
of my moon
it’s been decades,
but
this place wants to birth or impregnate me,
The violets that remind you of your dear great grandmother’s dining room on Oakdale Avenue African violets in purple, lilac, lavender, and pink on a plant stand near a dark window by the olive green telephone on the wall
The Violets that remind you of your first, truest love’s breath Lavender-perfumed chalky candy squares Choward’s Mints in dark purple foil sleeves from the corner store
/
But you were not one of their truest loves
//
the once-loving matriarch forgot you when the child stolen from El Salvador arrived/ a baby smuggled across nations yet, this was not a rescue mission for an orphan, no, this boy had a living mami / instead, it was a long distance shopping trip for a wom[b][an] whose insides were spoiled by lust and greed For one who coveted, but then drowned in the role of motherhood yet she still swam deep in men, floated in luxurious possessions; everything, everyone, an acquisition to her
The woman unbecame your Grammaw and became the boy’s “Mimi” – solely and wholly his / She once accused you of lifting $20 from her purse when you ran away from home and snuck into her house to rest and pee / She accused you of this – of theft even after her own daughter poached a child from a sovereign state, kited checks, pawned stolen jewelry and defrauded the housing authority / Mimi was silent, or complicit, in all those crimes
I never stole a coin or a child – or a permanent part of anyone’s heart
in 1999, you still went to her home, anointed her hands and face with oil and tenderness, preparing her living body for the grave, while telling her you loved her so much, truthfully. You went because you knew Instinctively that she was dying – alone – in her own house with the boy and his imitation of a mother, her imitation of a daughter
Her violets were wilting fast – no one had to tell you they were thirsty and unpruned from the neglect of her intentionally chosen beloveds and heirs who owned her home and her heart / she foresaw her own ghostly humiliation before the mortician’s eyes
She died the very next day
///
The Violets that remind you of Him, your first love, of his breath and kisses in a dark gangway or anywhere hidden that sweet ingredient imbued in the deep amalgam of his scent a pheromonic candy –
yet those same Violets remind Him only of his first, unrequited, true love he, pining for a brown-eyed, olive-skinned , spaniard, brunette girl who virginally metamorphised into a pregnant, 16 year-old sacred cow She only loved boys with slicked-back, jet black hair, the ones who wore silky shirts and baggies Her heart [and legs] open only for boys with names like Erasmo, Jorgey, Hector
She made Him godfather to the baby boy instead of the father or stepfather He wanted to be, despite his bended knee, promises, and all the begging, lusting, cuckolding, and undying loving/
silly rabbit.
Even now, He still scours gas stations and neighborhood liquor stores for the rare Violets to send to Her by mail, innocently asking the ‘substitute her’ for postage, a box, and “oh, some packing tape?”
The first Her is slick, broke(n) and old / but She is still the most beautiful of face, skin, voice and heart – to Him / He keeps ancient yarn ribbons from Her hair in a little boy’s treasure box in their now-broken-trust home / He, a pseudo-Nicholas Sparks romantic for Her / but He forgot the poem you wrote for Him just last year, on his birthday: Agape
She sends Him photos of Her vanity days and yesteryear Glamour Shots™️, gun poses and grandkids / While He sends Her photos of our adventures and of the one, truly Golden Boy – my boy – by text message all instantly viewed on the Gulf Coast/
All of this betrayal to garner Her sunnied emoji smiles and shallow sentiments xoxoxo 🙂 ❤️❤️❤️
While the ‘substitute her’ bared her real teeth and wore conflicted emotions on her face in the photos – and in the very moment they were living in/
Now, she just looks and laughs at the the pathetic, silly rabbit – holding his smartphone – googling cures for baldness, grey beards and stamina before Her June visit
////
To the one dead and to the one living : Violets remind me of you
/////
(Pray that ash takes its place, soon Or that I relocate in space, soon)
A clear glimpse
A clear thought
on this clear June night
Of age,
and Alzheimer’s
An old-timer’s disease
A clear memory recorded and archived tonight
An acute awareness of myself
tonight, in time and place
a new track to play on loop for a listener in my future life
a husband, friend, or son
a caregiver, a kind one
a visitor, volunteer, or nurse,
a grandson, or maybe, no one
A reddish dog, eating mulberries
from the sidewalk in shadows
Mottled concrete in the dim light of a city street lamp
obscured by the canopy of that beautiful, June, fruit tree
A woman, middle aged, seems so young, even a tad pretty, in her mind’s eye
Stretching her still strong body upward for plump, dark berries
Reaching for branches trimmed too high by the urban foresters
or arborists or surgeons, I forget what they’re called
On her tippy toes
grabbing, pulling, picking
squeezing the dog’s leash between her thighs
don’t get loose in the dark, don’t get skunked in the dark
Some of the best ones are lost in the awkward tussle
before she can palm them, save them, taste them
She triggers a reverberative rain from boughs on high
That precise, delicate sweetness of the bounty in her mouth
The dog’s belly full of the ripe windfall
sustained by both gravity and woman
His name was Woody, or Digby, I think
He used to climb into our sleep
Smashed and whole
The street, sidewalk and cars stained
by the impressive purple mess
the dark grass hiding perfect treasures for doves tomorrow morn
She and that dog
Always urban foragers and gleaners in June
All month long, her fingertips, heels and lips
tinted with their fuchsia dye, didn’t think to check his paws
A clear, melancholy recollection
This day, that day was also her son’s birthday
The first birthday he spent away from home, Nebraska, or Alaska, I think
That glorious tree, that good dog, that golden boy
We are in love with absolute strangeness
Strangers weaving desperate bits of truths with swatches of lies and patches of mystery together
into idols of flesh-like beings ready to exist in the garden of the unknown
We begin as avatars,
with our hollows filled in with wishfulness and wistfulness
Our first chore: fashion a blanket from our shared thoughts and song
and beneath it, together
We’ll conceal our new being from them, for a while
Conceal our new world from them, for a while
Our whole, true selves rarely revealed
to each other,
or to the other-others
to our-selves
Who are You?
I think,
Better to not know your You,
Not wanting to dispel the myth
of the You I’ve created: my You
Not wanting to deconstruct the perfectly vague architecture
of the You I’ve created: my You
Wanting You only as my own creation
knowing You, owning You, or owing You
or revealing to You,
can never be what I have conjured on my side of our bed,
under our cover, in our garden
Making You up whole,
completing You with my imagination
is godlike,
You, the Adam
I, the Creator and the Ethereal Eve
I give you the role you think you want
But just for this remote rendezvous
A scripted dialogue has gone awry with dangerous improvisation
A genesis of intangible intimacy, here,
Your being and words disembodied, afar,
is enough, for now.
To know You,
whole and complete and present
as [hu]man Incarnate
Near,
Potential,
Warm,
Muse
The angels hold their breath
What will she [i] [they] do?
For now, in the now, I am curiously
content in this undetermined, undefined serving of You
whether,
an apple to bite, to taste,
or an orchard for my harvest
⊕
“Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leafs a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.”
I try to remember to say #Grace. I cut this out of a magazine years ago and have misplaced it many times. Now, I’ll have it here always. Grace of the #Bodhisattva #Buddhist
This may be your last chance to “legitimately” view Graham Hancock’s brilliant and compelling TEDx Talk – “The War on Consciousness” – since TED has now removed the talk from its TEDx YouTube channel and will likely very soon remove it altogether from the TED website. Ironically, TED’s censorship and eventual removal of the video supports Hancock’s assertion that there is a war on consciousness – being waged on many fronts, but currently being waged by material-reductionist scientists, who may sit on TED’s anonymous science board along with Richard Dawkins’s atheist intellegentsia crew, who repeatedly assert that consciousness (or essence, or spirit) is non-existent outside of the neurons synapsing in our brains nestled in our craniums housed in our homeostatic bodies. The biology of “consciousness” is now being explored at the quantum level so that it can be once and for all, explained away — nevermind that the quantum world is even more phantom, elusive and foreign to most of us than consciousness is, because at least, we all directly experience our own sovereign consciousness — whereas we are expected to put our “faith” in the scientists who inform us that the Higgs Boson (aka the “God Particle”) exists because it’s been “detected” in their data.
TED’s curator, Chris Anderson, noted that they’ve removed less than a dozen of more than 20,000+ TEDx Talks – so why this one?
:::
Anything that can’t be observed by neuro-imaging, dissected in autopsy, analyzed in a lab, or reduced from the data in particle acceleration and collision experiments has no value whatsoever to applied scientists — and theoretical scientists don’t have a great breadth of scope or differentiation in their respective disciplines. Scientists label any pursuit of understanding or exploring consciousness outside of their institutions as “pseudoscience” to diminish it — even though it’s not being claimed as science, but rather beyond science (aha!). And don’t even think about mentioning psilocybin mushrooms or other ethnobotanicals like Ayahuasca as possible cosmic or metaphysical gateways — or dare speak of out-of-body or near-death experience (OBE, NDE) as alternate reality unrelated to chemical or biological malfunction.
Those stuck in the scientific box would do well to hoist themselves onto each other’s shoulders at least once — until one is finally boosted up high enough to peer over the edge of the box and take that first look outside of it. Science and academia can exhibit extreme dogmatism when presented with alternative theories outside of their biological, chemical, physical and quantum packaging. Perhaps one will eventually climb outside, wander around the box or even stray away from it — then, maybe the others will become so curious as to form a continuous human chain until the last one stuck inside the box is willingly pulled out of it — again there’s some irony, because this is precisely what science thinks it’s doing for the religious creationist, intelligent design or non-evolutionist thinker – “rescuing” them out of the dark box of ignorance by extending their own dogmatic rosary made of data links.
You know, those scientists, they can always crawl back into their box if they don’t like it out here in open, unlimited space; their box will still be there – as geometrically limited as when they left it — and most likely bearing the name of a wealthy donor.
“We are breeding a new generation of human beings who will learn more from a machine than their mothers.” #TheShowandTellMachine #1977 #RoseKohnGoldsen #AdBusters #CultureJammer
Antiquophile: An ancient bacterial organism which thrives in extreme physical or geochemical conditions (from Latin antiquus meaning “ancient” and Greek philiā meaning “love”); alternatively, archaiophile (from the Greek αρχαίος (archaíos), meaning ancient, and Greek: φίλια (philia), love).
Alternative usage: On the first weekend of the month, I am chomping at the bit to go antiquing at the Kane County Flea Market – I’m a total antiquophile! (see what I did there – photo below)
the limineen | poet & crone 