Exaltation

A crossroads of contemplation, confusion, and cosmic indignation in the mind of Waker. Mostly my personal poetry, sprinkled with moving reblogs, Star Trek gifs and eclectic sounds.

[miamaimania]

“Ceramic Computer” by Ma Jun ⬣ Ming-style patterns reimagine desktop hardware

[gandalfthegreyt]

“Fathers and teachers, I ponder ‘What is hell?’

I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

- Dostoevsky, Salinger, now I

(Marlon Brando, Pocahontas, and me)

[gandalfthegreyt]

Happy 10 year anniversary to this blog of mine. It feels like it just turned nine. My sister, 26, of motherhood, halfway to 36, and the memories keep shedding like leaves. Rather than tensely listen to what is my present on this long ride with mom, I decided we should refresh our memories with some classics, a few Neil Young live albums, the Basement Tapes, and now this incredible Talking Heads record. We can both hear JB crooning out “City of Dreams.” I’ve reached a point in my fragile lucidity to where I feel it might best serve me to forgo new media in favor of rewatching, rereading, relistening to every gem I’ve loved, now grown dusty on the shelf of my consciousness. Of course that won’t happen entirely, but we did watch Blade Runner last night. Anyway, how shocking to re-ingest Byrne’s “Dream Operator.” It true, we all hold the controls.

[gandalfthegreyt]

Our memories, long taken flight for distant lands,

Occasionally leave a feather on the wind.

[gandalfthegreyt]

“The End Of The World” by Bruno Diaz

[miamaimania]

Cuba, 1997 ↝ Abbas · a pink cake carried by bicycle through the streets

[gandalfthegreyt]

If I had a better jaw line 😮‍💨

[miamaimania]

“What will remain of us” (2020) ⧗ Mansour Aoun ◆ 32GB suspended in amber

[gandalfthegreyt]

Bookend

I’ve got to write more, quickly,

More beautifully, live more, sooner,

More beautifully.

I just read again the story of my namesake,

“Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters” by JD Salinger.

It was as though I read it for the first time, as my memory has never supported me nor been supported by me,

And that makes it all the sadder.

It regards a beautiful poet, too pure for life,

And that makes it all the sadder too.

That such a beautiful story could be written,

That it could enchant my young mother so completely as to brand her son with one of its elements,

That her son could be so vacuous and ill,

A non-fictional monster.

It makes my blood run cold and thin.

This planet, it’s people never deserved such random evil as what bubbles up from my core,

Such stains as my fingerprints on the hearts of the good.

One like myself should avoid mirrors at all costs,

Yet today I see myself

Clearly, horribly.

[gandalfthegreyt]

[gandalfthegreyt]

After The Heat Of The Day, Snow Fell

In heavy clumps as though the sky was wet paper,

Snuffing out the hot pan dreams of an early spring,

The couch pined like a lover and fear bedded her down,

While the floorboards underfoot whispered,

“This is it.”

[gandalfthegreyt]

Shout out to my mans.

[gandalfthegreyt]

3:15 to Vernon J

“The wolf, I’m afraid, is inside tearing up the place,” Flannery wrote her friend shortly before the lupus took her.

39,

So much life unspent, piled on the felt by fate.

Fear pushing mine all in without understanding the game.

Today I’ll take myself for an annual letting, eye the levels, assuage the fears I hope with a surface depth bill of health.

I feel the windings inside me arc, fray at the weak points.

I see death look up from the bowl two to three times a day, always patient, plotting unbothered the big take.

I search for normalcy, an even keel to sail by these shallow breaths, a buttress from the stressors that malform the gears in my chest.

The office is empty today, and I sit easy in my seat.

These dwindling days just fly by like all the others.

Little hopes and dreams all I dare to select anymore.

Little hopes and dreams all I ever took, save one or two,

And the big ones just fell through my shaky hands.

[gandalfthegreyt]

“Despite earlier scientific theories, dopamine doesn’t give us pleasure. Since the 1990s, neuroscientists have accumulated evidence debunking this idea. Instead, dopamine makes us want.”

- Dopamine Kids, an NPR article 03/06/26

Wow. I know I have the disease of more, but idk if I’ve heard this idea posed so clearly and succinctly. If I have the memory was lost in the great dopamine floods of always. Things to consider.

[miamaimania]

“Tiger” ⬣ Which head do you watch when they all want blood?

[gandalfthegreyt]

Like The Mist

I awake from nightmares to dim light, and I can feel the length of the day ahead.

Everything is still and damp and grey. I roll my windows down for clarity of vision and invite the mist to my breast.

This muteness is also within.

My gears turn at a slower pace today, less grinding, less heat, perhaps lubricated by this climate.

Anger and disappointment ever jockeying within me, the latter, understanding prevails.

There is nothing to change, nothing to choose, for I must choose myself, particularly if you will not.

Like the mist you cannot be corralled, coerced or contained.

You choose liberty. I do not blame you, for liberty is choice, the choice to prefer, the choice to ignore, the choice to manipulate, stonewall, seek, shun.

You possess a vast intellect and the ability to be anyone you choose, and you do.

You choose to be yourself, this truist version, the very mist itself, elusive, unreliable, both flippant and unyielding,

A force ethereal and haunting, a body formless and unfeeling.

Only your sharp edges separate you from the condensed atmosphere breathing on my window pane,

That, and your mortality. Unlike the mist you are not infinite nor held up by the forces of nature,

Rather, you choose to stand on the backs of all who have tried to love you.

One Atlas may hold up the world, but mist requires the many hands of lesser men to pass it along the plane of Earth.

No, timeless you are not, playing the same fading cards out again and again,

Tugging frayed threads, twitching old limbs,

The legs you stand on buckling one by one.

[gandalfthegreyt]

Grey Spaces and Hard Places

Include, but are not limited to:

- The winter beyond my window

- The hours of 7am, 8am, 9am, and sometimes 10 and 11, when your brain lies dormant and mine does not

- My bed of late, 99% of the time. Your bed, 100% of the time

- My brain between 6:20 and 6:45, when I should be showering and on time, but instead choose to snooze and be late AND dirty

- My under-exercised body

- My overactive mind

- All the “I love yous” that go unanswered

- 2022, 2023, 2024, entirely

- The spaces in you that do not trust

- The spaces in you that do not yearn

- The yearning in me that feels unmet and unending

- The idea that we are the same, that we both are impatient and desirous of worship, that we thrive on wholesale validation of our self importance, that it is justified // met against the reality that we will not both receive this, that one must take what the other gives, and that the giver will not be held with the unrealistic regard they offer and also crave.

- The absence of control

- The need to consume a sufficient amount of calories and nutrients

- The balance of consumption that will never come

- The aches and pains of this form that grow louder when I check the time, the date, the year

- The window outside my winter

- The unbearable silence without meeting the ceaseless chatter within, white noise, the whole world of others moving their soundless gums vs I love you I love you I love you I love you

- The spaces you give to others you are afraid to let me back into, the patience, the access

- The hours your brain is with him, every thought of me you keep to yourself, every text you answer in private, hastily

- That a body is a body is a body and mine is not special, worse in fact because of the past

- The idea that we could love anyone more than each other

- The thought I’ll never be put on a pedestal again by the one person I want to adore me

- The knowledge I had my pedestal, the sun in another’s sky, but I couched myself in clouds because the sky was not yours

- That I don’t feel I’m yours. That I’m impatient. That it’s 11:05am on a Tuesday, now over eight years since you chose me and over four since you chose someone else

[gandalfthegreyt]

Year Of The Horse//Yet There Is Light Also

2002, the first such year that succeeded my birth,

They erected a monument to my father and incinerated his flesh.

The next to follow, 2014, they stripped me of my freedoms and shipped me up north to rediscover myself.

It would take some time yet.

Just through the threshold of my fourth turn of my zodiac I wonder,

What trials will 2026 afford?

//

Yet there is light also.

Love radiates outward and inward from the woman this last cycle bestowed,

The only woman on the whole of this planet were you to ask my heart.

This past Friday the 13th saw us side by side in support, with no horrible turns of fate.

Every season of my life in fact has had light and joy to be spied in it, growth,

Possibility ever blooms and these eyes adjust kindly to the sight as time works upon them.

We only get so much of anything, only so many trips around the 12 year wheel.

The next will be iron, metal, my true birth sign, and with any luck we,

I will be there strong and tall,

Staring time boldly down, my eyes fixed unwavering on its face saying,

You’ve changed me, but I persist.