Painter of Words

(For later consideration in a spoken word piece: )

Oh god, why poetry?

Oh god, you ravaged my insides

You made me bleed and bleed and bleed –

For what? Poetry?

Words don’t mean anything – things mean things,

Like spokes of a gear, like a gleaming sax

Strutting in moonlight

And as far as you are concerned,

Perhaps a parrot, perhaps

A pair of squawking heads would better suit your liking,

Making you laugh and cry easy colors, easy blue and yellow colors

You could dye your shirts with.

Oh god, can’t you understand

Red is a hard color to make,

That is,

Not to make but to keep making. You can bleed

More than once but can you do it while quaking in crippling sighs?

Can you ravage anyone else’s insides

and create till they die?

There are too many types of red.

Oh god, and orange –

Is there anything more infuriating than orange?

Screams acid and massive prisons and madness.

Orange is the color of poets.

I could have done anything else. I could have made skyscrapers ten thousand stories high, I could have gone into politics and lie, I could have solved equations, engineered fluorescent eyes, I could have eaten my fill of hot apple pie, I could have heard screams for my name – I wouldn’t be shy, I could have done any small thing just to scrape by…

No.

Oh, god.

This hill stretches up into the clouds, into the mist of limping, howling things…

Red must be eked on the top of dead peaks that were never alive.

Now all there is left is try, try, try, try, try, try…

The Dangers of Getting Too Literal

Real real real real real real real!

Nonsense Realm

Maybe it's just the archetypal/mythological/dreamlike class called "Social Poetry" I'm taking right now, but I've been thinking quite a bit about not just religion in general, but about our need for it in society. I'll be writing a paper on it soon, though in the more academic realm than I mean to touch on here.

My professor's ideology is this: That there is a serious deficiency in our ability to think 'metaphorically,' in any way other than the literal. This can be evidenced in society's way of finding other ways to see the world alternatively: Altered states.

In an article I read today, Jeremy Taylor says, "Whenever an individual, or a society as a whole, begins to seriously entertain the notion that everything that needs to be known is known and that the only remaining tasks are 'refinements of administration,' that is hubris." (The Living Labyrinth).

I worry for the future of religion. I worry not because I think people are doomed to hell without it. I worry because a vital part of our lives - the subconscious, the metaphorical, the imaginatory - seems to be quite dead.

There seems to be quite a bit of religiosity in my writing, whether I'm aware of it or not. My (not-quite) finished novel from last year was based generally around the search of a demigod for his ancestry, a desperate chase after gods. I hear deities, spirits in thunder and dry spells.

I think we're all looking for religion - not in an organized religion, hell and brimfire, regulation and damnation way, but in a deep-meaning kind of way. Something that'll make us understand the World with a capital W. Not just our world, not just what to get our parents for Christmas, or when we need to get tickets to the concert, or why did the boss move up the deadline, or maybe I can sleep at night if I send 25 cents a day to help a starving kid....

The World. The Cosmos, if you will.

Anyone who's had a precognitive dream will tell you there are things we just can't understand. There are things beyond our experience of the world. Trying to explain this would be like trying to hold water in a funnel.

This does not mean you leave it up to fate. This does not mean that because you can't know things, you don't involved yourself at all with them. This is a defense mechanism: "I don't get it" is not an excuse for "It's not worth my time." Because we live in a logical world is not an excuse to not think on terms of emotions and metaphors.

You need religion. Whether you like it or not.

Janine Fitzgerald (the professor in my first paragraphs) said succinctly what I have only been trying to say to both friends of devout religion and friends without religion. (I paraphrase instead. Theft is the craft of artists). We're wasting our time arguing over whether the Christ story is fact or fiction. It doesn't matter - that's not the point. Breaking things down into logical or illogical parts steals the power from any story. If it moves you - it is real.

Perhaps this doesn't make any sense. That's alright. Lack of understanding is a humbling thing, isn't it? Not only that, but inexplicable things often make more sense in the nonsense realm. After all, who would dare explain why a joke is funny? Once you explain it, doesn't it lose all its humor?

Await: Part II

Coatracks are cold, and rigid, and entirely unfriendly, but there is one thing that can be said about them – they are loyal. Except if a sloppy, distracted hand drops you on the floor.

The wool coat was a family favorite. At least, enough to keep it from going to Goodwill. It had lasted three simultaneous generations. By that I mean ten or so years. The neck of it where it rested on the coatrack for the past three of those strained to hold itself together. White cat hair from the cat that died last year clung to it. Brown wool clung desperately to each other, breaking familial wrists upon the edge of a cliff. You could even see through it in some places. At least, here and there along the tree on the back, there was the relief of red blooms, names inscribed in Sharpie that had long ago faded.

Who knows what poetry whispers in the pockets, what tea stains the front, what overeager dog tore the lower button. In case a hand wants to mend the button, or find the whispers of metaphor, the coat hangs on the coatrack by the front door.

Half

On a knoll separated by a thousand rivers deep, against the sun and knife-sleet rain, he stands. A soft hum he sings, bleakest eyes borne of battle scars. Lies and warnings he sings, singing me to cross. He has seen blood. He had shed it. It is him I fear, this man, the defender and slayer. He calls me again, but he knows no fear, and cannot know the soft thing of woman. He holds his mystery, a sage of turmoil, and whispers the third, a plea. But I cannot move, for the cavern between us is a thousand rivers deep. The scream of cacophonous symphonies tears his throat, and the statue moves, cracking off the rust from the rain. In a flash of lightning, the strong arch of his neck curves and his teeth flash something animal.

Skyscraper

You would think the sirens the shouts the mustard on hot dogs the smoke and steam were collective screams, but really it’s a quiet torture alone. There are lots of sounds, but there is only one sound; fingernails on concrete. The bodies are filled with negative charge, so they pass each other, so close and so repellent. She suffered from extra strong nails and the biggest nail file in the world is a pair of skyscrapers. They scraped through ninety five colors of graffiti, here and there made an m an n or an h an l. There are positive charges, too, like cinema or chocolate or Jesus, and these they rub against, cling to, a ravenous sandpaper standing on end. A man on the corner said no, no no give me your blood and sweat, and she scraped her nails. She was left alone, 24 hours with the windows shut and Sinatra blaring, and scraped her nails. Nobody knew that if someone asked her to wash the dishes once more she would kill them with a broken plate and paint their names on her ceramic. At the end of the skyscraping her fingertips were bloody, and the only graffiti was red ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

Manipulatable