Something Tookish

[tocarryawalkingstick-blog]

I used to pray to the internet

and I pretended that I never stopped, only changed; that the pictures of pokemon and naked women, or vines and memes reblogged were somehow prayer enough.

This happens when you settle for small joys. And sometimes you need them. Sometimes the followers gained in bulk, giving your beard or body to strangers, who are somewhere struggling too, is somehow better than waiting for someone to hear your small words thrown wildly into the dark. But you need to keep speaking.

Some-when I forgot to use my voice. I taught myself that words tumbl’d would never really be art. This is a crippling lie. All words can be art, no matter how small or insignificant they seem.

So I find myself at an old altar – vast and digital and forgiving.

I used to pray to the internet, to speak to the universe here; this is me trying to find that old voice, to stir that spirit with new words, here, half a decade later.

[tocarryawalkingstick-blog]

Poets are like Septic Tanks;

they're full of shit. Tonight, I will squash this spider; I will turn the eight-armed universe into a stain on my hardwood floor, & afterwards, I will leave Hank's streets behind me, let him have his hookers in their pink jumpsuits that look like flamingo feathers smeared clean, & let him have his cheap booze & his world I am not ready for - one day I will walk his streets like the sound of broken glass, like cats gone feral on the black squish of asphalt & the city's grey skin. For now I will trade it for Italy, & soon I will tire of that too like the Aries I am - I will taste Persia, breathe the red dust until I am the red dust, & I will crush grapes for penance, & drink the wine that follows my footsteps. Rumi will be proud of me, or he will roll over in his grave, & the entire earth will roll with him. Better to roll in Rumi than the shit it has been; the atomic vomit of a world that needs glasses, but thinks it's too cool. You've had a few thousand years, now grow the fuck up. See what Dylan does to me, man? He let a spider sit in his head & spin webs from the whispers of gods, stripping the stars from their skin to spin the flesh of angels into orbit, & give a voice to the dead sea - & here I am kicking up flies with his nephesh. At best I can make a ghoul of my dead brain, & wonder why I didn't tell her that I only hold the coffee cup so much because I have nothing else to hold (It's no different than the time I told the girl that I was peachy, when she asked me how I was, & I sighed, & I added that the only problem was that peaches weren't in season. Ask me again & I will be an orange, but I will tell you that the problem this time is that we can't grow them this far north without pretending something, & I leave the pretending to the experts), or how I almost told her that I wished she was the coffee cup, & I could hold her always, but I didn't because I was afraid of saying something that might not be true because I knew she was a Pisces, & I've been trying to give up meat, & the last ten years have been wet enough - I'm starting to sound like the crackle of spit in the bottom of my pipe & everything is going to ash: I can barely find the cigarette's sour cherry inches from my lips when the lights go out, & I'm invisible in the sun, & I have loved the water well enough to know it always hurts me. I almost think it's time to move inland, to put a little dirt beneath my nails, but every earth sign I know is crazy, & I've already had enough crazy for two. I wonder at the air, but I know the wind does not always feed the flames, & I am small enough that a whisper could blow me to oblivion. Fire speaks the same flickering tongue I do & has sweet-talked the shadows into dancing for it - why would I ever fight over the same food? I will always go back to the water. But before the river rises again I will love my coffee, bleed her heat into my fingers, & I will sit here turning my kidneys black with what's left of a good night's sky, & try to guess what organ's going next; then I can start selling them, just before they turn, for fifty cents, because I'm used to selling myself short, & that way I can be as hollow as I feel. (Side notes:

My kidneys went before my sonnets.

My heart, who won two medals for bravery in the face of women, died before he could earn a third.

My liver told me just before Christmas that he's leaving, found a better job, & I keep toasting his success.

& this week I put my lungs on sale. BOGO. First come, first served. I have ten bucks against my ribcage that they're the next to go

): I've been short on breath lately, but that's what happens when you switch to single malt. There goes the night, & I'm three cents short of a refill, but just one more for the road - Once, I drank with a goddess that smoked like a fish. When I kissed her in my sleep, I tasted every fire I had ever owned, & I learned the only question worth asking: why is there always a redhead in the corner?

[tocarryawalkingstick-blog]

Reading Rumi

I have been reading Rumi, but maybe it would be better to say that I have been walking the same steps that he walked, & now my brain feels greater than the sum of its atoms; atoms which are only doorways to each lotus thought, which blossom with the sun, & open with the moon, & which feed the falcon who pollinates the earth with stars. I have been reading Rumi for a cure, & I have heard the Opener's whispers in the song of neurons, which are distant like planets in the great beyond, but as close as lovers on the couch before the fire, huddled in woodsmoke, which is the warmth & the smoldering kiss of God.

[tocarryawalkingstick-blog]

Apologies loyal followers of the oncebeard. I have been a terrible blogger these days; days which have been full of broken verses, & unfinished thoughts, & halfpoems, & quarterpoems, & single skullshattering & starsplitting words. But I have been writing & writing & writing, & that is why I started this blog in the first place: catharsis & rebirth. I'm in a terrible hurry now (which you know is nothing new) & though I feel like this is hardly worthy of my weeks away...it is something... The other night, my buddy Ian (photo is courtesy of him by the way) tagged me in this photo on the book of faces. As has been my strange tendency lately (twice before at least with other persons), I decided to comment on it in the form of a poem...I don't know as though I actually decided to or tried to really, but rather it just came out of me. Sort of like the blessings just spill out a little bit at a time these days. I'll leave you with it, another halfpoem or quarterpoem & what could be the poetic equivalent of a five minute freewrite, though I think it took me less time than even that: I am the white violence of waterfoam, dashing the greensmooth of wet rocks, & I am the babble & scratch of dry leaves on the bank. I am the silence of the treestump's hollow, & the shivering voice of a nevering pine, & I am the fall of the water in the sunlight's last fracture of sky.

[tocarryawalkingstick-blog]

Transitions; The Full Poison of Life

This will probably not be the only time that this happens, but the era of the beard has gone, & I think that it is time to reinvent the blog. This is not to say that I will be beardless, or blogless!, but rather that I am no longer comfortable identifying myself with my facial hair. Some days I want it & most lately I don’t, though it is getting colder & I suspect my bare face will be displeased with the wintery bite when fieldwork in five below arrives.

For now I want freedom though & that means no more beard blog.

It has taken me a few days to get around to writing this; probably a week even or more, though time is blurry & always uncertain in my thoughts that are scattered like stars, but I have had trouble deciding on new names. In the same sense that I cannot choose what tattoo to get from the calamity of images in my head, or what my favorite poem is, or which girl in the widening night to love in the language of inky fingers; similarly I can’t imagine how to limit myself to a few words. I mean even if I had an unlimited number of characters I don’t think that it would be any easier to choose.

As with all of the transitional times in my life, I found myself going back to The Hobbit. I may not be able to choose a poem, & probably that’s because to keep writing I have to love my own work more than everyone's, but I can definitely choose a book. I am always reading it, always remembering at weird intervals scenes from the animated movie & when I was trying to decide on a new name, instantly recalled the line a few pages before they set out on their long journey.

(At this point in writing the blog I thought that I was still unsure of the name, but it is here, while La Dispute, my new musical love obsession, filled the low silence of my room & while the animated movie played above it, that I made my decision)

In this scene, they are all in the room, all thirteen dwarves, Bilbo, & Gandalf, but because of the movie I never imagine the dwarves as really being there. Their bodies are gone, at least, replaced by the music of their melancholy greed. I see instead, & always, the wizard, white beard & smoke, filling the air with colored rings & many shapes, & beside him our reluctant hobbit growing larger; his long-contained self is expanding beyond his little frame. & there is a wonderful line there, spoken by Gandalf in the animated film, but a sharp, hammer driven thought in Bilbo’s mind in the book, just after, “something Tookish woke up inside him,” where he considers what it might be, “to wear a sword instead of a walking-stick,” and I thought that these were things that the current evolution of my brain could get behind.

You’ll notice I didn’t go with it exactly, but that’s because I feel like my days of carrying a sword are done with. I feel like I’ve spent my entire life mostly fighting who I am & fighting the going & fighting & fighting & fighting. I have spent my entire life bloodying a sword & I’m sick of it. I’m sick of slitting my throat with worry, of anger bleeding me out, of an asphyxiating depression & of trying to be somebody I’m not.

I am a weird, nerdy poet with two atomic soles, ready to turn miles to shadows behind me; ready to carry a walking-stick & to leave the fighting & the giving-a-fuck to somebody else. Someone else can wear the sword.

I’m ready for the full-blossoming mellow, to see the great mountains & for the full poison of life. I am ready to take America into my arkenstone heart & break her into diamonds that will by melt by noon – melt into the water & melt into the mouths of many between the breath of a kiss, on the sigh of the broken, over prayers of the lost. I am ready, I am ready, I am ready.

[tocarryawalkingstick-blog]

Visit Original Link

A long time ago, ok, so a couple months ago, when this blog was transformed from the “holy shit, Nate, you need something to keep you working on your final thesis for grad school!” blog into a tool towards assisting me in my fully becoming a poet again, I mentioned why despite the fact that I mostly write poetry that I wasn’t going to be posting much on here. And for those of you that are new to the beard & all those that ignored the first spiel; I will explain. Writers have it rough. When we are not published we are trying to get our name out there, which blogs work relatively well for if you’re pushy & tattoo it on people’s eyebrows & foreheads & tongues, but there’s a catch; a blog technically counts as a publication. Anything that gets posted on a blog can therefore technically be rejected by a magazine or journal that specifically asks for unpublished manuscripts.

That is why I rarely share my poetry. If I take the time to finish a poem, it’s probably not something I just want to throw away. I’m not a particularly fast writer – I mean I guess I am in the moment since poems take next to no time to physically write for me, but they take weeks & weeks of thinking & mumbling to myself & feeding my words to the wind in hopes that the wind will feed me back.

Recently, and by recently I mean probably a couple weeks ago, I blogged a random thoughtpuke poem from notebook #39 (I’m cruising through #40 as we speak, but not as fast as I could be given the fraction of time I’ve had to devote to actually writing. Sorry. Another story). I hate this poem, mostly because I don’t think it’s actually a poem yet, but fuck it, I’m going to send it out just because it’s so weird, & so totally, but at the same time not, me that maybe somebody will take it. Because I’m doing that I’m also going to have to delete it from the blog.

I know all of my blog followers consistently go back & reread my posts, I mean, how couldn’t you?

…

Well, in any case, I don’t feel right taking it down completely, so instead I give you my charmingly awful reading voice. Try & ignore the static fuzz going on too; I am nothing like capable with a microphone & shouldn’t be allowed to speak for such extended periods of time. My words were meant for the page, not the airwaves. Regardless though I give to you what most people have referred to as the Ju Ju poem in reference, but that I’ve started calling Where are All My Travelers?.

*Not responsible for brain aneurysms, flashbacks, nosebleeds, erectile dysfunction, or seizures*

**All other resulting medical problems, those were probably me – My beard**

[tocarryawalkingstick-blog]

I love mornings where you can’t seem to rouse the cold from your bones. No matter how many blankets, no matter how high you turn the shower, or crank the heat, you can’t seem to shake the shiver. Anything to remind me there is autumn in me.

I wish that I had more time this morning; really, I wish that I had more time always. I wish that I could shake time free like I have to with the pocketwatch in my car; shake it until the ticks steady my heartbeat & the hours seem infinite. In a very a few moments though, I will have to put clothes on, gather my vital possessions, & trek to work where the poetry will leave me, the saltwater I slept in & only added water to this morning to spread its silver thin across the mist of my skin, will fade, & where my words will grow stale & stagnant in the air before dying completely.

I am not all sour news though.

Yesterday, the sun was a rise worthy of Whitman, but I think I will keep it in my chest like Thoreau; feed my locomotive heart with the yellow clumps of wet morning like we found on the beach, sweet with seawater, & I will see how long I can carry myself through the day. A good dawn lingers; trickles off into the next like a stream through the grey cracks of an old stone.

In less than two weeks I’m going back to Keuka. I just took the time off for when poets collide part two, this time with two, maybe three other poets. I am equal parts excited & terrified. Last time, I felt the pull of the road dragging me further out to the vast American dry sea & only just managed to come home. It has not been an easy stay either; even now I want to call work & quit, leave my report for Cambrian unfinished (as I have for days & days & days as the distractions & the taste of poetry climb) & vanish.

Some of you might see that as sour news, but it’s not. There is nothing sweeter than discomfort; it is the way our bodies know best to tell us that we can be happier than we are. Less than two weeks, my better bearded readers, & by then River Horse (Least Heat-Moon) will have already been devoured, & I will inject another adventure, another person’s dawn, into my veins, & maybe this time I will let Keuka break me – let the great spirits beneath the shale carry me their vision & I will take it; smoke with them the sacred pipe & put Southbury behind me at last.

The autumn leaves are changing too, & I know soon you will have to fly.

[tocarryawalkingstick-blog]

I am starting a new thing. Every once in awhile I think that I will share with you all some of the pictures I’ve taken as part of working for the environmental company. Mostly they are not high quality, but I have never been a great photographer because my brain has always been more effective than a camera. Now I have to take pictures, all the time, & some of them have turned out alright & some of them are just plain interesting & things that people outside of the field may never see or notice. It is a strange world when you know it’s there.

That’s the spiel though; now to your regularly scheduled programming:

The guy I worked with on Tuesday, a wizard with ground penetrating radar, & a passion for rapids & rivers, got it out of me that I was writer. Actually, I probably told him. He was a real chill dude & I felt surprisingly comfortable letting my guard down. After awhile, after more words had been thrown between us, he asked a question that surprisingly few non-writers ask; how I kept finding things to write about.

When I tried to explain that I just did, & that it had gotten better recently, but that really there was no controlling or directing the cosmic flow of ideas, he went on to describe the writing process of a girl he once dated, from Newtown, who went to Purchase. Really, he understood the way it worked, but not the how, & described constantly being shocked or baffled or curious that even when he and this girl would be doing something so simple, so ordinary, she would suddenly trigger; something in the atmosphere of her eyes would shift & her hands would go immediately to notebook & pen, & words would just tumble out of her like dust shaken from the rafters of the universe.

I should have told him that it was visiting places like this, a concrete batch plant in Cromwell, that kept me writing. Or rather, at least, that it was old metal & transitions; the way that the larger things are, the more beautiful they become as rust reshapes them, or that leaves as they go from green to red, & fall, & turn to brown, & then to earth, to me, is just like watching the decomposition of my life. Always I find I am being led back into the earth.

I did tell him though that the longer I have pursued poetry, the longer I have tried to glean new words from the starry tongues of the great spirits in the howling beyond, that more & more this has led to my seeing people as the things in nature, which fascinate me most.

I once wrote notes about a piece of fiction where a man saw everything in code; would look at a tree & see it from the atoms up. Sometimes I wonder if that’s what’s happening to me; that when I look at a sugar maple I see only the words that I can extract from it, twist & bend into whatever shape I please, & that I will one day never see the sugar maple itself.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s not already too late.

[tocarryawalkingstick-blog]

There are Butterflies in the Oort Cloud

It is never a good thing to wake up fully dressed at 4 a.m. with the headache of a missed adventure pounding in your skull. Never good to wake with the familiar taste of home when all that your tongue has craved was distance; the salt of an ocean spray that might have let lips linger for another night; the miles of abandoned asphalt that might have let the taste of desperate, delicious new leap its electricity from kiss to heart like the violent violet of a desert storm.

Alas, beardlings, it wasn’t meant to be; after only brief moments of letting the momentum of my evening wane into quick, anxious words in my notebook, the whole weekend caught up with me & knocked me the fuck out in my Sunday’s best.

Now is the settling realization that the beautiful weekend was only a precursor for an ugly week. So many things set aside to plant a rightness in my heart. Even now, as 5 a.m. approaches, & I still desperately long for the curve of sand beneath my feet, I know that I should be at the office; that I never should have changed out of the discomfort of clothes I awoke in, & that I should be writing a report, not filling my fingers with the hope of poetry.

But the office is only money & if I was the kind of person that put himself aside to line his pockets, I think that I would die, knowing that the passion of my youth, twisted like an eddy in my chest & gut, was already gone. Instead of the office then, though the boss is likely to kill me when he sees how much there is still to do, I take soft pulls from my bottle of Sangiovese, cradle its warmth beneath my tongue, & let its purple heat stain my lips with memories.

There are so many things that I could write right now, so much to share after my long absence, but my thoughts are like butterflies between two screen doors in summer, pounding their wings against the wire frantically. There is chaos in the wet neon of their beating wings when there is darkness still & the light is just low enough to be liquid. They are unsettled, this vast multitude of butterfly thoughts. Because that was a fully processed thought…thanks butterflies…

::dips hand into the cloud & tries to take a yellow butterfly without disturbing the universe::

Thursday, I think, set me on the path that led me to my weekend. While the boss was readying himself to visit the mom in Minneapolis, I told him I was stepping out for lunch. I didn’t tell him it was in New York, or that I had no idea when I would be back, but I think he already had enough to worry over. About nine hours later I made it back to the office to turn the lights off & collect my things.

I drove the Taconic & loved every inch of its leaf-bloodied asphalt. When I found Vassar, it was coated in a mist bordering on warm & everywhere almostenchanted wet, & beautiful as always. Elizabeth & I had Thai & we walked, met the undying Mr. Miles in the cemetary, & we spent hours in a coffee shop that stole my heart. Were it closer, I would come back to that corner by the rainspitting fan every day. We talked about Little Garlic & his arch nemeses, Two Wheelin’ Toast & Spaghetti Head (ok. So maybe I played with the names a little to give them a bit of goof…), & there was something about being licked by horses (no details now. Ask me to do the experiment.) & it was just generally awesome & it was hard to go home.

Elizabeth deserves more than two paragraph-shaped thoughts, but time is running faster than I can type today & I need to pull another butterfly out of the clouds (think oort cloud & butterfly comets…at least that’s what I’m imagining).

::plucks free a cobalt butterfly with wings like a strong zephyr::

Tuesday (yes, we’re going back before Thursday so we can get to Friday better), I picked up my best friend from Brewster after I had spent the day in New Jersey. Tuesday was still deep in the heart of my discomfort & my somewhat sickness, & I had to settle for tea from that place of dollars signs & starlight instead of the coffee my flatlining heart needed.

We must have looked like ghosts on that dirty bench. The tension weighed on us like a cold anchor; each of us heavy with wet & night & a longing to wrench free from the deep sediment so that we might sail further than our backyards. It was time well spent, & some of the animosity that had plagued our summer was fading, but the truth is that we are both so out of place in this town. He should be back in Brooklyn & thinking nothing of The Bury, & I should have been gone five years ago.  

Tuesday made way for Friday though, and after I had a had a few brief moments to pretend at writing, he & another friend (both fresh from the bar & far more full of alcohol than I) joined me in the solace of my room. There is not much to say, really, not that I would put here at least, but eventually, after falling back into walking the well-worn, well-tread path have always lead to, realizing what we were doing & how wrong it was that at this point in our lives we could still be meeting in my parent’s house, we finally (the other friend gone off to sleep) faced the ugly mess that had built between us.

I’ll say this, & then I have to run because work will be calling to crucify me soon: not once did I even feel the need to hit my best friend, which is how we both thought this would end, & just realizing that, regardless of what came between us, was a happy swell to my heart. The chaos is calming & might one day slip mostly back into the earth.

(this is incomplete & I love you all & if I am most lucky, I will write more for you tonight)

[tocarryawalkingstick-blog]

Some of It Will Likely Stay

Tonight I took the long road to the office. I thought that maybe I wouldn’t actually have to do any work, & that my report would miraculously be complete, & I could sit here & write my blog in peace, but alas, the unfinished report was waiting. That’s probably one reason I took the long way, my not wanting to be here at nearly midnight, & another was the song I was listening to that kept my foot on the accelerator, & my arm elbowdeep in the misting twilight; knuckles white around the roof rack.

I took the long way & turned down the Ipod so that I could listen to the night that I knew I couldn’t hear from the office window. I’ll hear some of it when the din of cars grows quiet, but it will be nothing like the haunting noise of the living darkness. I took the long road so that I could watch deer glide across the rainslick asphalt, dance between the shattering of my headlights against the fog, & disappear into the dripping woods on either side of Old Waterbury.

There, on the way to the gas station to get milk (another reason I took the long road…because I forgot Cumberland Farms would still be open…genius), I dodged frogs & thought of the ex who used to call me on rainy evenings, on her way home. Sometimes she would call only minutes after we had parted because she wanted desperately to come back, knowing we could be weeks away from seeing each other again, & I remembered how I was too stupid to let her. I remembered the first time she screamed in my ear & dropped the phone, & how I could tell that the car had swerved by the rush of air in the cab & therefore in my ear; all of this to avoid hitting the smallest frog. Since then I have wanted to avoid them too.

Now I am in the office, there are dead leaves behind me like the corpses on Milton’s fiery lake, like the colored tears of the coyotes I will hear when the sky has settled. From my desk I listen to the gurgle of the coffee pot calling to me. I can hear Utah in its steady drip, hear mornings where the diamonds on the road, & on the fields still thick with buffalo, would melt by noon. I can hear Utah, but barely, & cannot hear the gulls circle the white expanse. Utah, in case you didn’t know, is everblessed with the gull as its state bird…lucky them, huh?

The smell is wrong. The coffee is not strong enough to fill the room with its thick dark, & through the window there is a rush of the kind of rain that lingers in the Moon of the Red Grass Appearing, even though it is almost autumn, & there will be no fishing, or early mornings around a cook stove, for some months now.

It has been a long week (and it is barely Thursday...), beard racers, & I feel like most of it has been a waking sleep. Even now, the time, that has passed since I have arrived here, has seemed a blur. I’m back to not remembering the last day I had off, & back to not remembering altogether. Lack of sleep, reliance on caffeine & settling for an empty bed when the weather is growing cold, will all do that to you.

I am trying to cling to the little dawn that I have left in me.

Mostly I don’t have many words tonight, despite the probably 500 or so above, & I am talking for the sake of talking. Or I am talking, rather, for me; putting words into a document that are not recycled like the garbage we dig up for our environmental reports. Really, I have just spent too much time in this office, working on words that are not my own, & I needed a break to reset my sanity.

I am almost done with Black Elk Speaks, & I feel my spirit is heavier. My brain is thick with primordial wisdom, much of which will drip slowly from my skull & back into the earth, but I am happy knowing that some of it will likely stay.

In the distance I can hear the coyotes coming like I knew I would. They are far off, but their voices echo the language of oak trees & running water off of the cheap, pre-fab buildings around me; echo down the bridle trail that runs behind the office. I imagine them panting stars into the cloudsoaked sky, their breath like pulled moonlight, their fur an oily vapor around their sleek frames, everything dripping like paint from a dark canvas, staining the Earth with colors only she remembers.

I want to sit on the edge of the grey cliffs carved smooth by a passing a glacier, dangle my feet from the cliffs which overlook the trail, & offer a music to the night to help the songdogs down their journey. I want to send them my notes like sparks to feed the hungry light of their sacred flesh, but there are other spirits in the hazy dark as old as the grandfathers, & not half as kind.

It is late, beard racers, & I think that though I did not hear it go that the dawn has left me & that there is no morning in my tired body. The words are hard to hold onto & harder still to corral into sentences. I blink & my eyes refuse to open all the way, preferring my internal darkness, preferring the inky playground of my thoughts where I am trying to remember what it’s like to taste the moon; what it feels like to run my lips across the hot surface of the stars & swallow the constellations that stretch from throat to thigh, or what the sky is like between my fingers when I am combing galaxies from dark curls.

In the thin darkness, between eye and lid, I keep my dreams heavy & I pretend that I am not alone; that the words I carry in my bones like the ringing wind through chimes in autumn are your words also – that these whispers, louder than the universe, will not slip from my lips into the infinity of unmade sheets, but will ricochet off yours until our bodies are the sacred sigh of seasons changing, one heartbeat at a time.

[tocarryawalkingstick-blog]

It is a Weird Calling from the Wilderness

The books at my bedside have become a tower, & my bed & mind are full with the gifts of a good adventure. In my belly is the heavy awesome of café bustelo, which I have craved & devoured daily since I was introduced to it, & my tongue is in love. These grapes look like the marbled madness of a midnight sky, coated in moonlight, & taste like the music of the spheres.

In Walden, Thoreau says, “As long as possible live free & uncommitted,” & beardlings, I think I am there. I am free at least & I am lighter than I was before I left. There are more than a thousand extra miles (1130.9) on my shoulders, but I feel like I could fly through the passage of days, & I don’t think I want to anymore; flying is too fast & why should I rush? My feet want to taste every slow inch of asphalt & dust.

The journey I wound around the swollen streams & pregnant rivers was long, and that was perfect. I took the Taconic (my favorite highway, with its deserted buildings & narrow, curvy stretches) as far as she would take me, stopped for a pipe & a taste of sky just before the end, & then let the north lead me to the lakes.

There, on the shale-covered shore of the little elbow, on Keuka Lake, where the vibrations of my ancestors’ ghosts rattled like lightning through my bones, I reconnected; I regained a bit of control over the chaos & I had a fucking beat time doing it.

The cabin of The Great Aiezza (one of the best poets I’m ever going to know, & that you should follow immediately) is something outside this world; something from the great beyond & the great beyond that.

“To my imagination it retained throughout the day more or less of this auroral character...This was an airy & unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a traveling god, and where a goddess might trail her garments. The winds which passed over [the] dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music.”

I reached this passage in Walden on the way out of town on Sunday morning, after walking naked into the lake to shave my face despite the cackle back & forth of motorboats on the water. I found these words in a gravel lot beside a cow field alight with goldenrod. It is not a perfect description, nor does it accurately convey the colossal pulse of energy that vibrates the blue walls of the old wood frame, but it does a damn close job.

The house of The Great Aiezza is a healing place of moonwine & nightbeer, coldsmoke & lifewarmth. It takes the puzzle of your broken heart, the chaos of a cloudy mind & it will right them – not cure them, not remove them, but realign them with the softspirit nestled in your breast.

There is magic in a place where the lake runs always through the pipes that starts a phoenix in you.

It is Friday now, a week since I left, & three days since I started this blog, & as with all adventures, the new that beat my zombie heart back to life has made everything else stifling. There is a change burning in my center that will turn me to dust, & soon, I hope, so that the wind may gather me up & redistribute me across the great beyond.

“The morning wind forever blows,” Thoreau says, “the poem of creation is uninterrupted, but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside earth everywhere.”

I can hear it. It is a weird calling from the wilderness like the cockerel from an otherwise empty wood in winter, but it is the only calling worth following.

[tocarryawalkingstick-blog]

The apples here are fresh & tart; so tart they burn my lips like old kisses that won't go away & sting the inside of my mouth where the cuts are thin like hair from eating peanuts whole, shell & all, while drunk on Port & Sangiovese. The cider is sweet & handpressed. The two are nothing to the grapes though.

If apples are the rubies in the orchard then the grapes here are clusters of crystals undiscovered - too fine for emerald, more alluring than amethyst, & to be honest beardlings, they're just fucking good. I know where Mother Earth hides her orgasms & I am gobbling them up.

[tocarryawalkingstick-blog]

Positive Vibes Set to Stun

Beardlings, I have been trying to write to you for days! First, I went crazy for an evening (ok, extra, non-functional, mental-breakdown, rabbits in purple suits wearing orangutan masks took me away crazy). The next night I munched out on a veggie burger, a little salad & a million peanut butter cookies & a glass of milk & passed the fuck out. My metabolism said, “fuck you binge eating,” though & not one regretful pound was gained. Of course there were mornings in there somewhere, but those were full of driving all over the landscape for things like gyming & a hot shower (since I’m still recovering from the Irene flood). And then there was this morning; where I planned really hard to get up early & write you, but nature went ahead & decided to mushroom stamp me in the face for the millionth time this year.

Kids, a mushroom stamp is…look it up…I’m not typing that, sillys!

But, as if the mess that Irene left behind wasn’t bad enough, the tropical storm or whatever that has been moving up the east coast & places like Pennsylvania, decided that my household hadn’t had quite enough fun yet & dumped on us. Instead of waking up to the annoying beep of my alarm, I instead awoke to the sound of a small tree falling on my neighbor’s house, & I stumbled out of bed to find the river already starting to swallow my lawn. Rather than towards the pursuit of my scholarly/notsoscholarly blog, I devoted my morning to covering myself in sand, moving the debris from the last flood, & to arranging sand bags into pretty little this wont do anything to help, but let’s lay them out anyway just to look cool patterns.

I’m more than a little frustrated about this whole mess & I’m probably going to write more about it, but I’ll spare you that for the moment. The key right now is mellow vibes; the pumpkin coffee is still warm & the oatmeal cookies are all gone, but the sweet cinnamon of their sugary kisses remains.

Hey, I need to kiss something.

But seriously, the night feels endless. Tomorrow, I’m having coffee with my best friend (since she has been evacuated back to CT for the weekend) & then it’s off to Vassar for lunch with my loveliest of elixirs. After that, it’s a whole shit ton of open road, some of it possibly submerged, but I’ll Oregon Trail it if I have to & ford the raging waters. I’ll take my chances on dysentery & dead oxen because there’s a poet with wine aplenty & a place beside a lake called little elbow in Senecan where I need to be & hopefully where my brain will find a little peace.

The great beyond is calling & I don’t think I can stay in this office for much longer. I was going to try to get a little work done, earn a few more dollars that I’ll need since I’ve barely been able to work this week, & I feel guilty about it, but I don’t think I can. There is energy inside of me building like floodwaters before cresting that cannot be contained by these four walls.

Positive vibes set to stun & smile cranked up to full volume. This beard is ready to rumble & ready to hit the road. I’ll try & snap a few shots & maybe upload those & a few words while I’m away, but otherwise you’ll hear from me when I return.

Keep it real while I’m away. And, while I’m thinking of them, two things: 1st, if there is not a tumblr out there called “this is how the cookie tumbld” then someone who likes cookies or baking or whatever should make it, & 2nd, ask me questions! I am full of wisdom; crazy, chaotic wisdom that smells kind of like sagebrush & feverfew with a piney aftertaste, but don't worry, I’m 100% organic.

Seriously, just ask. I’m smarter when prompted.

Love to you all & other such things.

p.s.

Get off your tumblr & go comprehend the moon! Go outside & give her a kiss; she’s all dolled up in dark purple & bruised gold & I bet she tastes just like cinnamon.

[tocarryawalkingstick-blog]

Hey, Ju Ju

These nights are full of autumn air & as far as this beard is concerned the summer is over. Good riddance to the summer’s sticky wavering of air & wet heat. I am at my best in the fall when things are crisp & clear. Already though I have warmed my mouth too many times on Elanor’s lips (Yes, I name my pipes too… Elanor is from Tolkien; it combines the Sindarin words for star & sun, and is the name of a flower in Lórien with gold & silver-petaled blooms on the same plant & sometimes even the two combined). Already I have taken too much of her sweet smoke into my lungs, and I know that there are many more nights to come of sending cavendish circles into the cloudy sky.

Beard racers, there is not much to report. The words I had about the aftermath of Irene & of the days & days & days I neglected the blog are behind me. I have moved on. I finished Blue Highways, in case I never mentioned it, & it was a joyous & sad moment; a moment of knowing, of love, & understanding that I know will all eventually leak away into forgetting. It was a moment of ings, it appears, & now I have ventured into more dangerous territory.

If Blue Highways was a test of my willpower, a test to see whether the remembering would tempt me to the places Least Heat Moon & I had both known, then On the Road is a test of my soul; a test to see what will come of all this newness & raw truth. Savannah tells me it will destroy the impulses that hold me back from becoming a traveler again. The rational fraction of my brain, however obscured, is terrified.

I’m still not sure that I’m ready to be reading this, and I think that somewhere in the twists and curves of my mind I knew that it would be a rough road once I set out on it. I’m committed now though & more than halfway through & I’ve only grown slightly madder. Still, sometimes, if I read it for too long at a go, it feels like my soul is being yanked around like a spider in the wind, & every thread I set just fails me.

I think that this will be a short blog, my loyal little beards, & probably you won’t mind that too much. There is another pipe waiting for me in a few minutes, and a bottle of spiced pumpkin beer to be had. And now there are fireworks across the river & I can see them in the water & the sky – these quick thunders of incendiary light are harmonies to my heat lightning heart.

I will leave you with words beardlings; weird, unedited, halfpoemed words fresh from the almostended notebook #39: (Click me to tumblrtravel to the future where this will be audio, not written words...)

[tocarryawalkingstick-blog]

Everything's All Apples & Plums

Beard racers, have you seen the sunset these past few days?! The one last night nearly killed me. Mostly I don’t mean physically killed me, unless you count my only half paying attention to the road, but rather like when Whitman, in Song of Myself, says, “Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sunrise would kill me.” That kind of death.

This sunset though, this sunset I found myself asking the empty air, asking the universe aloud if it had comprehended everything in front of me. It never answered so I’m not really sure the universe fully understood it yet either.

Here is where I wish that I could paint…I suppose maybe I could learn, but I am, probably as it goes with all things in my life, a little afraid of not being perfect at it…if you will humor me then, I will wordpaint for a moment instead:

The grey clouds, so grey that they were almost black, shadowed all but a few fragments of molten blue & honeyed amber sky – all of them curved, all of them involved in a frantic spiral around some unseen center in the distance. Behind them, the soft halflife of the sickle-shaped moon. A monofilament blade thinner than the strand of a spider’s web. Innocent & beautiful. Still there was blood on the horizon, dripping like dead neon into the cracks between the hills.

End wordpainting madness; beard back onboard.

I think that this sunset was just what I needed to end August. This has been a tough month to handle & my mind has a long way to recover…though, now that I think about it, I’m not entirely sure recover is the way to put it. I think what is going on with my head is less of an illness that can be cured & is more like the final evolution of the nine-horned rhino that manifests in my brain. I’m not exactly sure what a nine-horned rhino could evolve into, but something up there has definitely shifted. I could hope that the rhino has been extracted, but that would be too good to be true. Something big & ugly is still clanking around up there.

I suppose what I’m trying to get at is that in case any of you have noticed this swelling weird about me, I’d recommend getting used to it. I think that I should just embrace the madness. Other than the overwhelming EMOvibe that has probably soured dispositions a hundred miles in all directions from me, the state of my brain is mostly harmless.

On a similar note (that isn’t really similar, but while we’re embracing crazy we might as well embrace ridiculous transitions too), yesterday I split an apple with my bare hands. Savannah said that I used my bear hands, which I think I like a lot better. Scratch the previous statement; I split an apple yesterday with my bear hands. This is less a feat of strength & more a character quirk I never knew about. And now that I know that I’m the kind of person that breaks apples, I can go about fully developing it!

I think that maybe this is where the whole on a similar note thought came about; August had a lot to do with discovering & rediscovering things about me. August had a lot to do with me, when you get right down to it, & probably that’s why it was a little ugly, but it was something that I needed to do.

Beard racers, we have reached a crossroads. I am currently staring at a clock that tells me I have approximately 30 minutes before I need to start doing things that are not blog related, and I only have about 5 more minutes worth of pre-written (yes, I prewrote the blog with paper & ink…) blog to type up. Now, I could use what I’ve already written, or I could brave the chaos of my slightly caffeinated thoughts & try to fill you in on all that you’ve been missing.

Braving chaos!

Before Irene doomed the east coast, I was pretty much inundated with fieldwork. Fieldwork meant extra dollars in my pocket, but it also meant near on total exhaustion when coupled with exercise & lack of sleep. I did have one really awesome day though! While in the field, I was checking twitter & noticed that Stephanie Perkins’ new book, Lola and the Boy Next Door was onsale for preorder. Obviously I bought it & obviously because I’m a little fanboy, decided to tweet her telling her I had bought it. But I’m the beard & you know that means I didn’t just say “hey, look, I bought your book…” Right, well you’ll get to see what I said later, but she almost immediately retweeted it, and tweeted me back, and then an hour or so later, posted a link to a new blog.

(Pssst. Click the LINK before continuing!)

Awesome right? Totally turned an ugly day around & made my little fanboy heart skip a few beats.

According to my memory though, after that everything turned to shit. That bitch, Irene, as I’ve seen her called across my twitterfeed, brought doom upon the eastern seaboard. Much of my hometown is still without power, including my firstjob boss & the company office, which has meant no financial gain for the week (ugh ugh ugh), & though my family was lucky enough to avoid total loss of power, the flood, brought on by the heavy rains, was nearly as bad as the one that stole my car earlier in the year.

We didn’t lose anything more than expected (furnace, AC unit, hot water heater, propane tank), but what this means is that the beard has been living in a dark, candlelit room for the past few nights. What this also mean is that I only have internet access through a new laptop, which is so severely unprotected that one picture of a shark floating down a highway in some tropical island town after Irene passed through was enough to bring it shuddering to series of seizure-induced stops. In other words, this new refurb I dropped a few hundred bucks on is mostly shot at the moment, though it has been kind enough to let me type up my blog. Whether it will let me post it is another question entirely.

I guess I didn’t really brave the chaos too much. Mostly I just ran out of time, & the transitions from one thought to another in this thing are killing me.

It's walk time beardlings & there is a hot shower to follow if I hurry & then the loveliness of second job in the office. Sigh. There is so much more that this blog could have been, but it will have to do for now. I will give you more later & it will be better, I promise.

Everything's all apples & plums, and I think that means it’s looking up.

[tocarryawalkingstick-blog]

I Will Do My Best to Calm the Tide

Tonight I should be in Cheshire partying. I should be outside with my friends enjoying the cool air, which has carried smoke from distant chimneys to my door, but I can’t. In the morning this beard will be up with the dawn to drive to Pelham, New York. Instead of breathing in the almostautumn around Platt, I will drink the exhaustheavy air through my open windows on the highway. I will drive past the exit to my school, my alma mater now, past the memories that still hurt, & I will meet with a man that wants nothing to do with my work, wants nothing to do with me on his property, sucking up his money, photographing his life. Still, I will do it because I have no other way to pay the bills right now.

Have you ever realized how similar your physical fears are to your mental or emotional or whatever fears? I mean, that wasn’t a great transition, but hear me out. I’m afraid of heights, for example, though I think it’s more like I’m afraid of falling & I feel like this doesn’t just apply to the physical possibility of falling. And here’s why I bring it up, since I just mentioned bills; my friends tell me that I’m afraid of success, but they’re wrong. I’m afraid of failing. In everything I fear mistakes; even the little ones that I understand mean nothing still worry me that I’ll in some way go down a little. I’m afraid because I don’t like going back, afraid because I know what it took just to get me where I am & maybe I’m afraid because I don’t think I’ll be able to get back up if I do fall.

These are the things I think about on my walks. So if you have ever asked me why I look so unhappy when you see me along Platt, this is why. This is also probably why I stopped thinking in the first place, why I let comfort & complacency kill original thought in my head because all my head is full of is morbid & self-deprecating thoughts. It’s either that or complete nonsense. My apologies little beards; yesterday was insanity, today is depression. I am becoming somewhat like my rainbow-furred smallgods when it comes to states of mind & I am bringing them all to bear against you. I will do my best to calm the tide.

The day wasn’t all that bad, despite the date. After my walk I leaned against the railing of my porch while the sun set in the appropriate cardinal direction, & I smoked my pipe. Maybe that defeated the healthy purpose of the walk, but with all the rain we’ve been having it had been days since I’d been able to & the sky around my house was in desperate need of smoke rings.

I was shirtless after the walk, & though it was cold enough for a light jacket, when I went inside for something warmer all I came back with was my ninja turtles hat. I think that this is my go to when things are rough; it’s only a recently acquired possession, but it always makes me feel a little younger. And younger is one of the few non-ugly feelings I’ve got floating around these days.

A few draws into the first bowl of dry, earthy, dark & golden flakes I could feel the mellow spread through me entirely & could smell the Cavendish clinging to my beard and skin. I was not the only one enjoying the cool evening & the absence of rain. Looking probably like some bearded burn out, or maybe just like the motionless stay at home son that I am, I watched three boys trace the length of the street on their bikes. I smiled at them between a grin full of smoke & they waved on their way down & again on their way back & again. I stopped myself from wondering what they might think about the strange manbeard shirtless on the deck & instead focused on the echo of my childhood I heard in their raised voices. None of them could be much older than eight & their shouts of, “you guys,” & “try to catch me!” were high-pitched & innocent & so familiar.

I envied them. I wanted to join them. And then, as though my thoughts, briefly those of an eight year old, began to age, I wanted to take them by their hands & shove an entire childhood down their throats in one quick push. The thought was not as violent as that, but you get how it disgusts me. I wanted to take them to our park, clear the sand from the old words carved in the asphalt that date it & name it, & I wanted show them where to bring their bikes to get the most air off a jump. Or show them where the tress have curved to catch the sun & how with enough momentum they can run nearly halfway to the top & touch the pattern of white moss that hasn’t changed in decades.

I wanted to take them to the tree at the corner of the old swing set where we used a patch of dirt as home plate & the trunk as our back stop. There I could bend beside them & trace the arcs of our famous hits, tell them that we did it once, but that they could do it better, that they had to. I realized then though that I was trying to do for them what my parents & more so my friends’ parents did for me – ruin the magic, rush them through everything.

I went inside then, left them to a world I could not return to, except briefly, & I spared them the knowing, for now, that they would eventually learn on their own; that would eventually kill them like it killed me.

[tocarryawalkingstick-blog]

The Uneven Weeks

You know that summer is going to leave you soon when you wake up and want a warm shower; the kind that melts the cold from your skin & fills the bathroom mirror with steam. So much steam that in that brief moment of stepping out, you are naked to the world, but invisible to yourself.

It’s either that or just a really bad case of wishful thinking.

This beard is ready for the end of wet, nasty heat & the beginning of dry leaves & cool air. I am ready to reap the plenty of an American harvest. Some of you might scoff at that, but there are small farms out there; small touristy (because they almost have to be to survive in New England) apple-growing, pumpkin-patched farms for me to explore. Autumn will be an adventure, I think, & one that I desperately need.

In the meantime, I’m going to use my severe mental powers, which result from semihipsterdom, or the yet-extracted rhino in my brain, or just because I’m cute, & I’m going to try to make autumn arrive early. I started by sending these intense pumpkin pie cravings into the vast, vibrating universe, but heard nothing from the spheres. All I got was a serious mind-dementing hunger for something sweet. Now, I’ve switched tactics, & have decided that despite the smoldering stillsummer heat that I’m going to get back into long socks early. Day two, grey socks with colorful hearts, was a success, but I can’t tell if it’s doing anything yet. Maybe after day three…

Let me apologize now, while I’m slightly aware of my state of mind, for how weird this blog might come out. I noticed today that there is something really, really fucked up with my brain & though I have a few ideas why it’s hitting me so hard now, I have no idea how to remedy the situation. Be prepared for a little weird, little beards, and we should get along swimmingly.   

…

That is an ellipsis & this time the ellipsis represents all of the wasted effort I just put into clicking the refresh button on facebook & twitter & tumblr because I couldn’t decide which of my multitude of stories I would share with you. I have decided though. Fear you not.

For the past week I have been trying to clean my room. This might sound silly if you haven’t seen my room, & maybe silly if you have also, but it is almost always, needless to say, a slow process. Currently, I have the liquor closet all nice & neat, filled with delicious beverages, most of my clothes are away & in my cabinet, & some of the papers sitting around the room, that had gathered dust & sand, have been swept into old food center bags to be recycled. In other words, I have next to nothing done.

My desk, especially, is a horrid mess of old receipts, most covered with the strange curve of letters written in haste, then there are books of poetry & read & reread novels, pocketwatches, pens, cds & so on & on & on. I did try to make an effort with the desk though; I took this silly little somematerialorother cat that has been looking at me funny, sending negative vibes through the pink slit of its smug mouth, carrying a luckless carp, & I put him in the box he should have gone in months ago.

To fill the space beside my dry piece of warped, desert wood, from the slopes of Zion, I set down a pair of coyote figurines I had acquired years back; one, green, cut from a sheet of steel, by hand, by a Canadian artist I met in Pennsylvania, & the other, a brown & grey marbled stone from a touristy moneypit in Arizona. That night, after I had arranged my song dogs (a sort of obscure name for coyotes that I picked up somewhere & everyone thinks I made up. I swear I didn’t!) , & decided that I had put out enough of an effort (I haven’t tried cleaning my room again since), I went to the gym. Surprise, surprise; come on beard, give us something new!

Your wish is my command. New:

On the way home from the gym, bordering exhaustion, limbs achy, skin melting with sweat, I decided I wanted to take the long way home to hear out the rest of the Evaline album I was falling in love with. I tend to avoid the long way, the back roads through Newtown & Sandy Hook to Southbury, because for some reason animals have it out for my cars, but don’t get me started on that. On the long stretch of Main Street we used for racing when I was still in high school, I cut a hard left onto Hollow Swamp at the last moment to satisfy a sudden urge to drive down the old dirt road near Platt & the nature preserve.

This was the first clear night we had had since the waning summer rain had hit & the moon, a little more than half its whole shape, burned white on the oil-slick road. I’d like to say I took the drive slow, but as soon as I hit the dirt my foot pounded the accelerator & I turned up the music and let Niamh swallow moonlight & dust with her tires. I wasn’t more than halfway down, just barely to corner where I had a few weeks before seen the stag with antlers that could touch the stars, and a chest as tall as my car, when four eyes broke like fractured diamonds against my headlights.

I slid on the slick dirt, but came to a stop, a complete stop, a few feet from a pair of coyotes larger than I had ever seen them. If I weren’t such an animal nerd & didn’t pride myself on being able to tell the difference (skinny legs, a bushy tail they keep low to the ground, a sharp triangular face, & the many colored fur Native Americans often depicted as rainbow-colored) I would have thought that they were wolves. Strangely, the pair, probably a hunting couple, didn’t run.

And for some reason I didn’t either. With the windows rolled entirely down, I just sat there. It would have been easy for me to just drive around, drive off & leave them, but the thought didn’t even cross my mind. While one stared, ears sharp & alert, eyes like daggered prisms catching the white light through the low settling mist, the other, with its nose to the moonlight in the gravelly dirt, stalked around the passenger side of my car.

When I lost sight of the one around my car, when I started to hear the low huff of its warm breath, or thought I did over Evaline, which I had had enough mind to turn down, I gunned it. I gunned it until I hit pavement & I gunned it more until I hit home. Inside of me this strange fear filled my pores & I worried that they had been trying to distract me; that while I locked eyes with one rainbow-furred smallgod, the other was moving in for the kill. I feared that even though I ran that they had caught my scent & would follow me home.

In bed, after I had waited in my car ridiculously for a few moments for my nerves to realign, I imagined them slipping through the woods; multicolored, technicolored halfghosts gliding down the hill to the river where Paugussett Indians had once fished for their survival, where old, back country traders with dirty beards had minked the river from the Golden Hill. I imagined the broken diamonds of their four floating eyes scratching at my window, their shallow voices fogging the glass & I somehow slept better than I had in weeks.

It is believed that like the crow, the coyote gained prominence in Native American myth because it mediates between life & death. It may be no coincidence then that I keep two coyotes, or that they traditionally hunt in pairs, or that I saw two who took very different roles in our encounter. I think that maybe, in the pairing, one coyote is the voice of death & the other the song of life, that it is no coincidence that I met my pair during the transition, the uneven weeks of rain and weird weather between summer and fall. And I don’t think it is at all surprising that last week I had the sudden urge to clean because ultimately even on this small scale, it is part of getting one life settled in order to make it to the next.