Emerson's Ghost

Thoughts, poetry, writing, insight, curiosities, modernity, philosophies, blah blah blah.

[emersonsghost]

Read, please.

I've moved here. Also, click this when the link works.  

[emersonsghost]

2011 was the year of growing up.

That's all I have to say about it, really.  Have a wonderful night, everybody. 

[emersonsghost]

Closer

Alone again, wool- gathering; little things in too big clothes,  my thoughts. Alone, thinking about the moon looking as far as it should, and the tenant house over the blue lake. There are little girls crouched poolside watching the nautilus of light burst out of the tarp of nothing night.  It is nearly like the sound of hot air balloons popping in spring.  I say goodnight. To you, my new moon, when I needed you closer. Goodnight to the room with the door cracked open at something bright. To the sleeping snakes, I say goodnight, barefoot by the water tower. Goodnight, I say, closing the drawers, shutting the shutters, pulling the veil over us all. Goodnight.  

[emersonsghost]

Staten

Salt. It is Maman and her finger. Shushhh. I forget now how many wrinkles in her brow.  The damp cap; the chill on cheek. A crib somewhere a long way away, a tower through a window, and music of wooden planets over my head already a memory, like a father leaving forever. The drizzle came and I searched for a sinkhead in the firmament. Out of the clouds came giants, ebon and aglow, hunched in the gloom, beyond words, beyond my close-far sight. All of this, already gone in my head. Sway and groan. A ferry. A crib. Lost.

[emersonsghost]

Chocolate

The whole world wants chocolate, including me, my hands going for the gold. 

[emersonsghost]

The Rift

Another vigil brought us to the chapel edge with  the cold shut out of the bedrooms of the world. Peace in the rift of highway and lamp; swung flashlight low to catch the bush and soft beam in the veil. The pregnant sky descended like a manta ray, belly as a borealis, broken. Something like childhood stood with us there, invisible, in an envelope of shadow, the dormant beauty of dawn. 

[emersonsghost]

The thing is

With poetry, I am torn between the academic and the words that stick. That is to say, there's a format problem I'm approaching. Do I write in a way that everyone will understand, sacrificing quality of word choice and poem structure in favor of appealing to a broader audience? Or do I write poetry by synthesizing The Greats and extracting my own, hard and literary style, but compromise by having to speak to a smaller audience in a much more distilled medium? The thing is, I'm Walt Whitman, in a way. I want to speak to people of my generation. To all generations, really, but to mine most of all. And I don't mean this in a condescending way at all, but you have to admit that this is true: there is an absence of the desire for high quality of written work, in what I like to call the 21st century attitude about literature. There is a reason the time of the movement known as Transcendentalism is popularly known in history as a peaking of the world's language and literature, relative to my own heritage. Ralph Waldo Emerson had almost god-like global influence, and being an American, I am a direct child of his repercussions.  But now, people are all about images and tastes and instant pleasures and clicking, clicking, clicking. Tumblr is the perfect example of an idea (blogging) being condensed to appeal to this generation of instantaneous gratification. And people are buying it, en masse. But people forget that there is so much to say, and that our wordiness may be what makes human communication so valuable. Sure, it may take me forever to get my point across, but that's the beauty of writing. Out of the babble, we expose our true selves. By being chatterboxes, novelists, debaters, poets, we become one with our humanity using sounds and letters and endless combinations of these.  But I may be wrong. Maybe future generations won't have much to say anyhow, since they'll be born in a world where communication is by the byte, and ideas are electronic and lightning fast and portable. But I want to believe we can do it. We can be the bookkeepers and the preservers of meaningful language. We can build a city of words that will never crumble. 

[emersonsghost]

Appeal to a higher power

Hey, man, what's with the unfollowing? What do you initially expect from following me, anyhow? A pristine and inspired sermon every time I twitch my fingers? I can't feign a TOTES RIGHTEOUS NATURE all the time. I'm human, and I talk about things of beauty and things that are ugly, like cussing or sex or what I feel about humanity or even me whining about my writing. Maybe you should try to move me, followers. I mean, I don't view you as obligated to look after me, but I'm curious what people want out of the common hedge writer. What are the words that burn? Teach me. You want simplicity and la sympathetique? Spit in my eye. Turn me. I'll try to deliver, just tell me what I should do. 

You want me to spill myself? I'll find the life. I'll bleed passion for you, if you want. Make me dance. Make me masochistic.  I express thoughts and feelings and emotions here. That's the real beauty of writing out of a concern for discerning truth. I personally follow people who write because I want to know them, I want to feel out their expressions, their emotions. Isn't that why everyone reads? To know things and to escape to that place of knowing? I have a lot of emotions for my writing, and I'm telling you the truth when I say I'm sincerely worried my words aren't up to par with who I am and how well I am telling my story to people. Tumblr is currently my only outpost of writing. And it's not going too well, because I feel a bit of discomfort with the community here and with Tumblr in general. So I don't know. Self-consciousness abounds.  

[emersonsghost]

I can feel myself getting worse at this writing business. 

[emersonsghost]

Public Speech v1. Starting Etiquette

A poem should begin: my heart beats without command. A solicitation should start something like: tonight is the night everything is capable of happening. When speaking from the heart, prefix with "truthfully".  When telling lies, use "I believe..." At birth: "tell me how to be." At death, "listen." 

[emersonsghost]

the heart of the matter

He wanted a new house built, something like a pop-up in a barnyard book, a place awash with the buttermilk of his life and loins. Lay the timber, he said, and pull these ropes taut, he said, and pretty soon the business was given over to those other men capable of miracles. The woods held their breath for a note: a chitter of fairies in the wind. The men are erect as the mushrooms; the yawn of frame is something like the wind chimes of grass flutes that bend, wind and wood rising. He wanted a new house. 

[emersonsghost]

A Doxology, A Resolution

Like ten open ovens in the undark of Wall Street, like a staircase solipsism while bathed in neon shadow of balldrop omega, like a shock of images, astrological, bereft of carbon and hydrogen, of wonderbread and Welch's; absolution by way of glass, by way of plug-pull, by way of the socialite electric suicidal, of breathless descry and decanter scoured in the cholesterol battery, of friendly fallacies dubbed noble in the World Wide wire-favela inside walled network, of smaller notions imparted via help hotline, of too recent kisses, of too familiar football bleachers; somewhere, from afar, as Pascal in the cathedral, wispy, as nirvana in the airconditioned tribunes of muscleplay, in the google of fictiondom, a thousand legendariums strong, by the goodwill of the multiplicity of the nameless spirit, my atoms collide. 

[emersonsghost]

the engagement

he told us and then we all said "ah!" and i said "what a delight." and i smiled because it was beautiful.  

[emersonsghost]

To kiss her face

WELL FUCK

[emersonsghost]

cool wind whistling through flaws in the bamboo to arrive at my cheek 

[emersonsghost]

Atrax

There you were, in the swamps of sadness,  mane hairs 3-dimensional in the bending light, white keen of shoulder blade, all tense. Ironic, I said, that you died in the area symbolizing unhappiness; brings up the parallel of horses having long faces. They do look sad. Then we watch the trailer for Warhorse, and tears break free. 

[emersonsghost]

in the dream

i was wondering what happened to my toothbrush. you walked out of the bathroom with only a shirt on, the head and handle of the brush stroking your lips. 

______________ forgive my long absences, for those who care. i'll try to write more seriously and frequently. the time is getting close where i may consider the business end of my creative work.   

[emersonsghost]

things for me to do at 1 am.

complain

cry at the moon. find a cigarette.

howl. record the howl. loop. howl over loop. 

cast a cloud of my immediate life in tags above my head.

think about production. lose self.

think about her, pocket mirror, application of lipstick, how the hug was too close to a kiss, to stealing rouge.

coke to wash away the sin.

thief in the night.