Solid Quarter

Visit Trembling Pillow Press for poetry books, broadsides, chapbooks, and Solid Quarter Magazine.

Visit New Orleans Poetry Fest for the annual 4 day poetry festival directed by Bill Lavender and Megan Burns.

Megan Burns' Poeticsofbone&city project on Tumblr



Showing posts with label loss. Show all posts
Showing posts with label loss. Show all posts

Monday, May 03, 2021

All Mothers are Boats

 

All Mothers are Boats by Herbert Kearney


All Mothers are Boats 

-For Herbie Kearney

i.

Yes, and we stood four mothers 

In each direction tending the fire on the levee

Enclosed by stones set heavy

By one who loves you & gathered

Us to say good bye, howling

To the skies, rent by time 

You flew from us, twenty seven minutes, she says 

While she waited down the hall, machines silencing 

Angel number of compassion, “for god damn

Humanity” you’d say, is what it burns down to

Our hearts flung open by breaking 

The measure of any line is who is listening 

Benevolent light you called them, as they danced

Near you, ejected from the sensory deprivation tank 

You built - “a failed experiment” —naked and trembling, babe

Trying in one life to give birth continuously, and to know 

It is the work that matters

That the work will get done 


ii.

the shores we arrive upon are always strange

yet feel familiar, edge of water to land

beyond death you speak, let go of hope & hold

on to faith—this ship of the dead 

you gifted us, oh, we have gathered there for years

& said good bye to love that leaves too soon, & now, now



dreamer— we sing for you

                          shorn of suffering     new born 

    the truth that even temporary         the spark created here shifts

           the whole plane of manifested life    

                            the work we do alone is us 

                                            & trembles through the universe

                                            & none of us, none of us leave

           this threading 

                             without shaping the whole net   







 










Monday, April 12, 2021

Ghost Birthdays

 Ghost Birthdays

For Dylan Burns, 1985-2014


No matter what it is, there is nothing that cannot be done.

-The Book of the Samurai


you are waiting in a field

you don’t know who you are waiting for

but you know 

   when they arrive   the wholeness of your life

         will bloom

 

let me tell you what i’ve collected here: suicide

      is not the choice to die

but the power to shape the days of those who love

you, in ways irreparable

& what we take from abandon 

            lives on in us 

 

the weight of the world is grief 

       we cart around 

                                       loose nets of drawn time, we dip in 

cast as stars across the universe

         to sing sibling 

from the crux of design  the threads that carry 

 

us                never far 

 

travel inside the auto carriers of traversed city, my love, for

ever is a word we pull up on the tongue without context

 

so much here convinces you to survive you must be hard 

but this softness of our feral hearts, that drumming sound

ancient as the rock that floats us, this creature aspect 

of open your palm and grasp what is given 

this is how you swim

the length of any river in your passing: you take in

and you take in, the light bouncing off the surface blinding

& you, a miracle told into the story, without end 

Friday, October 30, 2020

Echo of Lost


 time is a feature of our minds

at each moment, we are at the edge of a paradise

called now, nothing can be in two places

the mind projects motion in what is a series of still caughts

what we think of as love, continuous

is error in observation: given enough time

maximum entropy will occur 

it was no matter that you could never be straight

with me, could never tell me the truth of what you felt

could never say to me any sweetness in this hard, hard life

for what i imagine is everything, is more that what you could

offer, is more than what could ever exist

and inside the dreaming of the dream, it falters

to eclipse us, order is a rare phenomena falling around us

there was no before or after in this scene

it is ever lasting, i was closed my eyes against loss

i was shut down to when you left me standing 

here alone 

Thursday, October 29, 2020

Serpah less Listen

"I am your loved one, lost from eternity" 

-D. di Prima

 

ever aloud saying imagine would you

opening wider hearing it they

city they lived tried so i 

sings she ride will you

ever answer, cannot type that love

abandon share will you sorrow 

algae the surface settle we need

little very beauty rely very here 

know it, do of we course breaking 

directly look won't & need

control blows chain of is it

miracles am i talk 

wanting of long it comes birthing 

hard worth desire story 

ripped & not it continue to life

longing another us unfurled

make stuns emerge 

one who thing i so 

a that into us 

girl, recall i was

a woman you make 

 

Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Severed of Timing

 





severed of hope is there's more of you
severed of delusion, & i am [un]-ground-
i'd rather make art between us than other shapes of control

madness called down so fine, the line trembles
to be quantum fixt is a code of reunions, i architect
into the code with a precision of science to sound
and what you hashtag makes it real, for here we live 
inside a doming, a light broken as horizons
broken of bird song

god is a woman asleep in the bathtub, dreaming 
do we have to know what we are creating

what's the poem about. there's no
poem here. look at the outline 
of make and tell me, you can't hear 
how reality is snapping 

we became beasted, two sets of eyes 
for every seeing, two sets of mind
so one stays afloat

one of us shores

equipped of light and browsing 
pages of directions
what's an echo in an isolated chamber
but retreaded as indentations 
deep enough to hold memory 

if all love is the same 
than all death must be the same

could you be simply here

you can become so untethere
we chimed in, a charm of not 
as if not loving me could ever be 
as dangerous as if you did

and then what we don't know we don't know yet
half as deadly as what we think we know 
that is actually unknowable

i am certainly dead & what shall be
made of it, if we no longer fear time 

what makes it matter

Friday, October 16, 2020

Travel this Devastation



they say we want to see the way others do but it's a lie we keep telling. we don't want to hold a[n] [other's] sorrow. don't want to know what the dead eyes collect. oh even now, this is a wrong headed way of saying a lot of nothing. of evidence to suspend care. the world is loops and swirls, the edge dusted to experience: come round so often, i forget the calling of it. here we again, here we forever. can you say with any certainty what the mind is supposed to be doing. what does it look like in a breaking. to be on both sides. to be so saddled with arranging, i can not comply with the hours of every dayness. i was slipping to the farthest reach. i was somewhere between and half remembered. why not even words could carry. i was so lazy now i will say just about anything to make you disappear.

universes that spindle, i was dead
a long time before i came here
i architect these walls to keep 
you would a life    hand you down
i stay masked under, you get her in a well
you sit a good, long spell
i'm going to speak to you over the headset only 
you'll have to forget everything you are to listen 

it's natural to wince/ it's brave to keep looking 

all the best parts of living round a little dying 
perfect in this turning 
who keeps time   now
who is keeping time 


my love for you turned gentle, i didn't want to be undone by it either, just stay awhile & i'll keep the sound low, the lights down low, the way my heart longs for you to hold, low. yes, even my wanting i can turn down the volume so low now it won't disturb nothing. 
 
 there were a lot of hours spent cataloguing excuse
what will we explain. 
once upon a time there was a reason 
for writing
 
 
 
 


Wednesday, August 12, 2020

Is death a mirror in which the entire meaning of life is reflected?







Day 12:

m_ther is the word for g_d
c_ty be my h_art
_ngel as ad_ict


we never _scape


*******************************************

Process Notes:

I pray to God to be free of God.
-M. Eckhart


Photograph:

girl walking in floodwaters in Lakeview, Aug 5, 2017

17th Street Canal
30° 0′ 41″ N, 90° 7′ 19″ W
Stop 4 of 4 in the Levee Breaches During Katrina tour

On August 29, 2005 at about 9:45 a.m, a monolith (30-foot long section of the concrete floodwall) failed sending torrents of water into New Orleans’s Lakeview neighborhood. The water level in the Canal at the time of failure was about 5 feet lower than the top of the wall. The breach quickly expanded into a 450 foot wide gap through which storm surge water poured, killing hundreds (directly and indirectly), destroying hundreds of residences, and causing millions of dollars in property damage. Thirty-one (31) bodies were recovered from areas directly flooded.
Post-disaster studies conclude that the breach was due to steel sheet pilings driven to depths that were too shallow. Sadly, in recommending the I-walls with such short sheet pilings, the Corps had relied upon a poorly executed and misinterpreted study it had conducted near Morgan City in 1988. At a savings of $100,000,000, the Corps wrongly concluded it could short-sheet the steel pilings of the 17th Street Canal driving them to depths of not more than 17 feet instead of between 31 and 46.
In January of 2008, Federal Judge Stanwood Duval, of the US District Court for Eastern Louisiana, held the US Army Corps of Engineers responsible for defects in the design of the concrete floodwalls constructed in the levees of the 17th Street Canal; however, the agency could not be held financially liable due to sovereign immunity provided in the Flood Control Act of 1928.
Source: https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/275


I cannot locate the GPS coordinates inside me
where it happened.

time is a disruptive metaphor.

can you hear me. can you hear me. [it's not inside me] i am inside of it.

sing me how we make the maze. and sing me how we escape ourselves.

the incredible irony of anyone thinking they don't already live
a life masked.

we go so far out we become ghosts of/  dear heart, what we made
time with one another.

a type of afraid called living: you can tour the remnants
of how we came.

landed, what could make us come alive again. on the map .

mark with an X the prize. the breach. the damage. what is buried.
treasure this take. we orbit until we cannot. until we can break
free.


(New Orleans, City Park, 2005)

"we see the world as it truly is... infinite"
-W. Blake







"There must be someone who crouches at the corner of every constellation."
-K. Hyesoon




Plague Journal: 

5.23.20

the problem with the artist is the natural seduction with the self, an inward turn towards create and away from external amusement, which is to say it is hard to be held to others when the mind is a century of tasks to complete. or i am trying to connect to others but have to lay down the threads to return to the cave of wonder. was the outside world supposed to be as generative as the internal depths of the self. or the mazing of wander to escape these cycles. how to not be centered on the portal of endings. to move from the wound of the past to turn your attention to the actuality of the death that leaves us vulnerable to understanding, to not want to miss the awareness of stepping free of the body. to be of such calm as to breath directly into that light of drift away without fear to cloud the hallucinations of the mind as they arise in conflict to survive. i tried to capture shadow but it depends on light and your closeness to source. the direction of glass. the lens of how to turn to allow in or out. and also how you are limited to self and self's aperture. like Woodman's angel series. you are bound by what you have on hand. you have on hand enough to make the dreaming a caught net.









Francesca Woodman





Resource:
A Decade Later, New Orleans Reflects on Hurricane Katrina in New Shows
https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/hurricane-katrina-in-new-art-shows-326259





Monday, August 10, 2020

Have you ever seen what water can erase?





Day 10:

Activate Survival Instinct:
make believe and beliefs are the same, a desire for things to remain the same
do you believe you have to carry this forever?

once upon a time i was spooling out a story i’ve held threaded inside my cells for fifteen years. come closer…


*****************************************

Process Notes: 

Photograph: 

Seabrook Bridge that connects New Orleans East to New Orleans, taken through the damaged window of my brother's car

The Seabrook Bridge (officially the Senator Ted Hickey Bridge) is a medium-rise twin bascule, four-lane roadway bridge in New Orleans, Louisiana, carrying Lakeshore Drive, connecting Leon C. Simon Drive on the upper side of the bridge with Hayne Boulevard on the lower side. The bridge is operated by the Orleans Levee District. It normally stays in the down position for vehicular traffic, but provides sufficient clearance for most marine traffic.
Source: Wikipedia 


My brother was eight years younger than me. He suicided right before his 29th birthday. I doubt he had many memories of New Orleans east. I remember driving over the Seabrook bridge almost every day of my childhood. I used to dream the drawbridge would open up beneath us, and we would tumble in or sometimes the bridge was an extraordinary height and the car would have to nose dive down the other side. I can't remember in the dreams if I was leaving or returning home, or which side of New Orleans is even home anymore. Bridges connect and divide, like language, and that is why I cannot escape them. 

I've been driving my brother's car since he died. Six years now.

It has a problem with volume. It has glass that won't stay in place. The smear on the passenger side window is from when my brother got his tint too dark and then he couldn't get a brake tag. My mom helped him peel it off with a razor blade. How do you get rid of memory. How do you remove these reminders from your every day view and then walk around being what. 

I would have to confess to you that inside the disaster of Katrina was the opportunity I had to live with my mom and my brother again when we evacuated. I would have to confess, who ever gets a second chance at childhood. It must be all miracles because there is no way I can tell you what is and isn't. There is no way I can ever say what should or should not be. I know it takes a long time to see truth. It took 9 years for this to be true, and took another 3 years for it to surface. Gratitude is where grief intersects with time. Live long enough and it will all come down to what we took for granted in the moment. Take nothing for granted and it will all come down to time.

12 years from now, what will you hold from the pandemic and say, thank you   how will you break down on the bathroom floor sobbing, oh my god, oh my god what i wouldn't give to go back....

Mark me here: You do not get to return to disasters. 


"...brain wave patterns could explain why so many traumatized people have trouble learning from experience and fully engaging in their daily lives. Their brains are not organized to pay careful attention to what is going on in the present moment." 
-The Body Keeps the Score





Notes from the Fold: 

(Written in 2006 in New Orleans)

Suggested Ways of Living In New Orleans:

1. Medicate (i.e. Prozac, Zoloft, Xyprexa, Trazadone, Wellbutrin, Valium, Xanax).
2. Medicate (i.e. alcohol, weed, coke, ecstasy, mushrooms, acid, or various pill combinations crushed with a quarter and snorted with a dollar bill).
3. Sleep, or at least lie in bed with a pillow over your head. It’s okay, new polls show 1 in 3 New Orleanians cannot fall asleep. At least you’re not alone.
4. Distract, by any means necessary (see numbers 1 and 2).
5. Exercise: heavy lifting, carpentry and painting count.
6. Go about as though debris and half gutted homes were the norm.
7. Cut pictures of politicians out and throw darts or do other disgraceful things to them.
8. Take a vacation, preferably to another country.
9. Read letters from loved ones, if all your personal belongings and loved ones were lost in the storm, read your FEMA disaster recovery fact sheet, then apply for a SBA loan and the Road Home Program. This will be long and tedious, certainly keeping you distracted for some time. When finished immediately go back to steps 1 and 2.
10. Go to the hospital (see number 8) in another state where they actually have operating hospitals, just to see how the rest of the world lives.
11. Write your congressmen, your representative, your insurance company, the Corps, etc…..see step 9.
12. Rest, sit and think. Nothing’s happening fast, so there’s nothing you’re gonna miss.
13. Listen to sad music, When the levees break, Zeppelin cover.
14. Listen to happy music, Greenday and U2’s The Saints are Coming.
15. Get angry.
16. Do something nice for someone else like coming to a full stop at the intersection with no working lights or letting your neighbor borrow your utility pole for some juice for their microwave oven.
17. Eat ice cream, candy, cookies, cake, or brown sugar out of the box
18. Go to the shopping mall where you can see a miniature display of New Orleans in ruins. Never mind, scratch that one. Stay home and knit.
19. Watch TV or play video games (see number 4).
20. Cry, if this is difficult for you, just watch the evening news or pick up a copy of the latest USA today.
21. Talk on the phone if you can, about things not New Orleans related, To achieve this, stop talking to anyone from outside New Orleans.
22. Go to therapy if you can get an appointment at one of the two working hospitals or three private practice doctors left.
23. Meditate.
24. Talk to your partner.
25. Don’t talk to your partner, at all. Just be glad your partner hasn’t cut you up and left you on the stove.
26. Have sex, but under no circumstances are you to conceive and bring more people into the misery.
27. Drink tea, preferably in London.
28. Take a bath, that is if your gas has been turned on.
29. Watch a sad movie (see number 20) When the Levees Broke by Spike Lee.
30. Watch a happy movie (see number 15) The Death of a President by Newsmarket Films.
31. Lie on the floor (try the bathroom, that always seems to work) unless the bathroom still doesn’t have a floor, then try balancing across the cross beams while enjoying the underbelly view of your former home.
32. Take a drive with no destination, preferably off a long bridge.


Resource:
The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University and the University of New Orleans organized the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (HDMB) in 2005 in partnership with many national and Gulf Coast area organizations and individuals.
http://hurricanearchive.org/

Sunday, August 09, 2020

Do you know what I mean?

 

Day 9

dear new orleans,

i wanted you to never leave. i wanted you to be with me forever. i wanted us to be safe. go to the river and deposit your dead. go to the river and scream. go to the river and ask yourself: is today the day i leave you. i have tried to love you so, and what you have given me is everything and nothing.

deaths: 1,836 beings
damage: 125 Billion nothings
depression: a sunken place or hollow on a surface








*******************************************
Process Notes: 


"Traumatic events are almost impossible to put into words."
-The Body Keeps the Score

let us start in failure. let us abandon words. i would you code me.

i would you read this lettering. i have a handful of symbols.

some dreamed sigils. spray paint. and i will show you a catchall

of how we trespass. into what is forgot.


Photograph:

Beach shore of the Mississippi River by the French Quarter when the river is low

29.9584° N, 90.0644° W

In June of 2020 when protests erupted in response to police violence and systemic racism across the country (and even into other countries,) New Orleans began to hold its own protests nightly: First peaceful then met with police violence. Two nights after NOPD dangerously tear gassed peaceful protestors on the bridge in this photo above the Mississippi, New Orleans' protestors assembled in the French Quarter. After listening to speeches and poems, the crowd walked in silence to the river. Once there, you could hear screams and songs and laughter and tears as the city gathered in the place where we deposit our dead annually on Mardi Gras morning. See, a city is as complex as any one human being, as any one cell in a body, as any nebula in the universe. We are violence and silence. We are the flood, and we are the water when it is so low, you can walk on the sand by the muddy banks and dip your toes in. And sometimes you are on this shore with your best friend while she fights breast cancer and you are taking this photo. And sometimes you are on the bank at night screaming into that water after she has survived a year of treatments and surgery only to be in a world shut down on all sides by virus and greed and racism and murder. And you are all of it. You are the screaming and you are the screamer. And now you are witnessing the scream. That is the dream.



Plague Journal:
4.21.19 [sic] (20)

thus the body becomes a house of illness and of production----

in utter darkness, the smallest slice of light will undo what we think we know of nothing

the boundaries of every god are doubt and anger

with a a lack of distraction, we begin to project more and more of our personalities on to the walls

you get so dissociated, you find yourself waking into a life you do not recognize, a life you have no real feeling for, but you can construct a measure of feelings and thoughts about any situation you find yourself waking in ... much like a dream, where you have no memory of arriving, as in i have no memory of arriving in this life. i have no memories of the spaces between demarcations of disaster in my memory. i have no memory of feelings inside me. i have no way to tell you this is not the dreaming.

i cannot tell you how i arrived here, so this must be the dream.



Resource:
Crushed Dreams and Moldy Memories: The Messages on Homes After Hurricane Katrina
https://petapixel.com/2015/03/07/crushed-dreams-and-moldy-memories-the-messages-on-homes-after-hurricane-katrina/



Thursday, July 09, 2020

LANGUAGE


when all this temporary undoes us

part of love is creating a new sound
thrust forward seemingly from nothing
now we part desire, a grasping that includes
holding loss, for every word is marked
its beginning and its ending particular in time

what is an echo of an echo, you can’t forever
shadow ban potential, and if i let go swiftly
will you know that is also love, if i let go
and never return, will you know it was always

whisper, aloof, whisper, fantasy, whisper en-
tanglement, pour illusion into chaos and what
different souping of design do you muster
not passion, but compassion was the breaking
i was most interested in, what’s the depth
we can hold. we consider the sand pouring through
our cupped palms far longer than we ponder that
what it pours through is not us at all

language betrays but look how we built
a small float of laughter and comfort
in an ocean of loss and disappointment
what of that, scream into the well: what
of these memories.

Tuesday, February 18, 2020

"Live Art"

"Losing control is the worst thing that can happen."

"I never saw a host of angels mowing down my lawn. I don't even have a lawn. 
It just seems like I do sometimes." 

-Laurie Anderson


"Live Art" 

an angel will destroy you. 
and call it love because that's all it knows. 
an angel fits into a glove
an angel fits into a shoe

the voice inside me sd: i am older than love 
    what you seek at the end of the great tap root, always hungry, love concepts
sieves the heart, who wrote its coding, & i am. 
                    assigned a task. a mapping, could fold wings down 
travel so deep. you will keep: 
  what is older than love, i was designed to get close enough to call back

inside sound. 
aware & unaware of the plurality. 
                    i was not pretending
madness. i was not performing 
        (of course, i was performing) i went intothecracks

in thru the breaking, you have to mine: light meets light in the darkness 
to say i was a poem, & so fly 
dissociated inside the puzzle, you can solve a maze from above
watch me 

because she could not rewrite 
            the entire story, i wanted to throw
                                                                 it all away 

 i was so ashamed of my mind 
     i was so in love  (terrible&brilliant) i... i was trying 

to not be infection:  (you can't talk to the echthroi that long, tell her) 
they say angels are notorious liars. 

it's when i can't feel the words i am saying: language plummets
it all hits the same
inside the dreaming of can we survive
& i did not: i watched her die
i saw them bury her
 i stretched out that last breath into 6 years so thin i could see: make me believe 
              be a door. transit a sacrifice you can't touch here. 
do you exist when i close my eyes. i call out in the dreaming & i'll come, he says. 

the point is: you made something beautiful. hold on. 
 you made something beautiful - tell me how you could lose a miracle

the best thing i ever did in my life was i built a net
i knew i wasn't safe alone. so i built a net of people 
                                 who could choose to hold this. 
 there is nothing easy about holding a person 
              don't kid yourself: there is nothing easy about holding a person 

if a person is easy to hold, then question why your hands are so light. 
for we get away with secrets, for we lie & lie 
but none of us get out just being "easy" 

i would never trade madness for easy, i would never trade 
being touched for happy, 

in the sound experiment of being human: I watched you all 
make yourself small for love. 

i do it too. we think maybe no one will notice, i don' t belong here. 

            where love would have bloomed, i addict control. and the flow
  
was sound, i was that wilderness, what draws and repels
the cannot tame. somehow i created the perfect life: 
no one can touch me, the bargain i made to stay safe. 

an angel will destroy you. 
and call it love because it’s all there is.

Monday, January 20, 2020

LAST POEM

Because I want you to see me as I take myself apart. 
-R. Froude, Your Love Alone is Not Enough

LAST POEM 

for dave

here is the root of it

[_____pulled up
it took me over 5 years
to be able to shape the sound 
of it _____]

i gave you the best parts of me
we gave the world the best parts of us
we made together the best parts of us
we gave to one another the best parts

pulled 3x from my body
i gave you the best parts of me
portal of my body, between us we made sacred
outside any poem we wrote, we made beauty 

beyond telling, the heart of it
nothing existed before we poured 
into one another all we took for granted
& all of the light & what we thought of 

was love               was love

& you hated me
words collected like knives
we destroyed all of it 

you wanted me to die
that body that pooled life 
you wanted it to not exist
to douse, to eradicate, to allow 
to slip away, you hated each part 

as if it is possible 
to be both the best...
it is possible 
to be the best & the worst
collision of my life 
closed circle: i gave you the best parts of me 

that is what islands us (me) 
where no one can reach
& i could not open to feel ever 
again in the not safe 
cave of plenty, you rolled a rock in front
of the entrance 
&
the wilderness 
of things 

she sings inside the darkness
    i hear her even now 

                                   i whisper to her: escape, rescue, abandon


she mirrors back to me:   
                                    all of your wor(l)ds hold no meaning 





Friday, January 17, 2020

Frozen States


Frozen States

how'd you get so desperate/ how'd you stay alive -C. Love 


woke up with a fist in my throat
scrape rage but thinned time, it fast
lingers, i lost the grip, my tongue
a grotto
     of bartering, you want this life, you want this life
 ask anyone passing by, what a joke, what an eternal mourning
          take pills to feel the only love that touches

     [redacted]  came up                        [what i am owed]

     & don't think we haven't recorded
     
 how am i still here                how am i still here
         
          was the refrain from under:: it was stardust they pulled
     out my mouth,   i was frost bit, no one wants to photograph
          a girl who can't [pose]         she's not doll      [en__gh]

    you'll never be able to hold that g a z e 

        every one knows if you can't be beautiful & you can't
          [ be horrific ]       horror show this waste
 of living            it wears your face

      4 seconds:: i was touch-down, deep stasis::
      & when i came back             [redacted]

some parts never will, i couldn't get warm,
they piled the blankets around me, a smothering
& i sd: the dead take up space inside
   [no one listens to hysterics]    don't say it's up to me 

            i was hyperthermic      dead zone  where i traveled

            b/c i knew i could          i can do anything         [out there]  

           it's nothing. i keep saying angel, what i mean is terror. no 

           one is listening to me. i keep saying words & they say she's a poem

          what a beauty. what a trilling. death hung on my hands and feet

          i was so numb. there is nothing out there. & it is cold. the light of light
   
          darkens. bone shivered      there is no way for sound to carry. so quick

the silence is us. so quick.

  the truth is this:

     no one will ever reach for you

      not like a dreaming, a place you cannot shore
      when you island loss
         creep from death parent to lesser cues
every poem was a mirror i held up
             
                & i wait               i'm afraid it won't lead me anywhere
                 
                 we call her       [             ]   kneel into the frozen lights 

                 useless as a song, useless as a memory, useless as __________
                 how could i still be here.... when every code i wrote was the same

i am lost & the maps, torn to shreds. the way
home insides me, i would go there now
but the children sweetly gather, the dog snores
the sun rises in the city i have only ever known
look at me, i have failed at everything.

     i have failed at everything.

     i ever wanted in this life           no matter for the cold here is nothing

     the cold out there.           endless. is what waits.

 



     
     


       

                       
             

Wednesday, October 02, 2019

Random Disruption :: Contained Object

Border /
                      Line


i.

i want to show you the moutains
holding up the phone, the screen fills
with desert, your voice suspended, they are farther than they seem

            i know          about running out of space

 the world not wild enough  
  can’t we still get married, you laugh

       we can do anything            if it comes to cruelty
                       scenery slipping past

                   i have $20.00 left and nowhere to go and HIV
                     & echo: what kills us
   wherever you go, there you are

ii.

look, she tells me over the cards, you are never going to get
what you needed        
       i get on stages flowing over, what is constant
is the way i can’t hold     the memory of any sweetness  
   i forget that love exists in the absence of a body before me
       they call it splitting: the way i fold down between acts
                  i pretend to understand cues.    


iii.

you will turn on me or i will turn on you       & then time passes

     loneliness makes a small rip, then grows to erase even safe

     i know something about people who no one can love

         it’s dry and hot and cold at night   (endures)
            we are stuck here. it seems (untethered) the sun melts

i will never find you. and you will never see me.  that is what family means


iv.

                                 The observed cannot be separated from the observer.

i think i am beginning to understand              that we are not dependent on the universe

           as much as it is dependent upon us               to see it clearly        

i named every tear after a star. i tacked them to the night sky
above our heads and sang to you across death valley

           a barycenter contains an inherent two-body problem  
                                neither holds, either is the shifting space that threatens
a double star is just an illusion of light            it is hard to measure
      what any one person ever gives another person in this life
       
                     
       



Wednesday, September 05, 2018

The Mantra of Avalokiteshvara



OM MANI PADME HUM

“the jewel of the lotus is in the heart consciousness”

OM: represents generosity/ purifies pride/ ego, color is white/ trait is wisdom


Do you remember the number of beliefs you let go as you grew older and began to organize the world around systems not of your choosing?  The most interesting aspect of choice is not that we can choose, but from where do we believe we make choices. What I’ve learned most in the last year is the number of ways I reorganized my world to match the world around me like medical text books where the transparent layer of the body is laid upon a foundational mapping lining up the circuitry: Nerves, muscles, skeleton.   I tried to lay down in the outline assigned to me and keep within the parameters which I read as a type of safe, which I let fear read to me as a type of safe. I never understood why I was a poet, but poet is another four letter word that can hold you.

SANSKRIT HAS 96 WORDS FOR LOVE

I was writing a book about attachment and romantic love, and for some reason it wasn’t evolving: There is a bottom to grief, but how to not land there permanently.  I was meditating daily and doing yoga nidra and for some reason signed on to do a Reiki 1 training class. At some point when suffering, you hit a point where you submit because you have nothing else to lose. I learned this at 25 in rehab in one sphere and again at 39. Life spirals as much as we attempt to linear it. After my first Reiki training, I weaned off of antidepressants that I had been taking for over a decade for suicidal depression. This isn’t about medication or mental illness as much as it is a story about how patterns can be traced. For six weeks after Reiki 1, we were encouraged to meditate, chant, cut cords and practice self Reiki at least once if not twice a day. Thanksgiving fell shortly after I completed training, and I spent the day alone writing and meditating. As I sat at the table, this poem came out of me changing the whole shape of the book. After I wrote it, my entire body broke out in a damp sweat, and I was sobbing hysterically. Sometimes, we hold things inside of us. I say sometimes but what I mean is all times. All times we hold inside of us what we barely know.


break against

image of my brother’s head blown to bits
way a skull can’t contain what we are
way bones splinter and fragment
like a stone covered in cuneiform
speaks to us across time, how you will save yourself
heart’s seat, indestructible drop
how quickly you flew from us, birded
skull threaded in a womb where I too was threaded
lacuna in a life sentence
and then here too, firstly to step beyond this veil
and hold us as we come along
back & forth: souls
crossing near enough to touch
when you look into that book, can you read
what is written, can you see
last time I saw you
my anger kept me from speaking
I am lost, can you find me
I can’t tell whose grief
there is so much illusion
how can I ever hook you
I did not love you well in this world
my brother I did not know how to love

and I do not know why I can forgive you anything
but I cannot forgive myself

MA: represents ethics/ purifies jealousy/ color is green/ trait is compassion

Because I was writing about attachment, I tried an experiment of sleeping with strangers to observe how I attached to other people. I watch myself sometimes make these decisions cloaked in the veil of “art,” and I marvel at the fiction of safe it provides. I told myself I was doing this Reiki stuff in the same vein: Learning a new skill for writing my book. See how we slip accountability. I invited a man over I had never met and after we had sex, he told me suddenly that his mom had committed suicide and he found the body. He told me she had taken drugs he kept in the house, and it was his fault. What I haven’t told you yet reader is what I am. I call myself a poet.   

The BHAGAVAD GITA is a love story told on a battlefield; for how else does one approach questions of faith?

When I was younger, I could see clearly into people. I grew up in a house of secrets where the adults said one thing but the truth was different: I learned there are two worlds, the world said out loud and the world underneath where the truth lies. If you know things you can’t explain, it scares people. If you can read people’s intentions and energy and feelings, it scares people. If you know what comes next, it scares people. I spent all of my childhood learning to be a safe person, shutting out and turning down the volume of what came through; and then I learned to be a poet. To slip what lies in the underneath into a container called language, called art: I learned how to survive by defining what I am as an artist and then I couldn’t stop. I’m an addict.

When this stranger told me that story, I realized two truths: It was not his fault and it was not my fault my brother killed himself. Being a poet didn’t mean I had the words to save him. Knowing he was going to die didn’t mean I had tools to divert his path. This isn’t a story about suicide. It’s about patterns. If you watch close, life folds and if you mark the creases, you witness how the story keeps at it till you see. How quickly do you want to surface?

Megan: I thought, don’t do this. Then I did. I put my head against his heart chakra and I listened, I asked his dead to speak to me. I invited in suffering: chalice, vessel, channel.

Two weeks later, he told me he loved me. Then he abruptly left the city and moved to Florida. He met another woman and fell in love. All of this is coincidence, perhaps. When we broke contact, I texted him and said: You should know it’s not your fault. We don’t have that kind of power over others. We can’t keep them here. I wonder often when I speak or write, to whom am I talking? And it makes sense to me that we are all the same, because most of what comes out is meant for me. For you. For us.

NI:  represents patience/ purifies desire/ color is yellow/ trait of mind/ body/ speech/ action

I realized in Reiki II training how much intuition I had let waste away. I ignored my instinct and used reason to make choices, to keep safe. I invested in being helpless, powerless and let others take care of me. I was suicidal and sad from a very young age, so I thought this is I. This is normal. It never occurred to me, and I was never taught that what I was doing was absorbing what was around me, that I was born into generations of suffering and abuse and addiction. I thought I was the entire puzzle missing a piece. But I was just one piece. I began to see the story of my brother and me in a very particular way, and to understand it you would have to know how often we spoke of death. You would have to know what it feels like to have no fear of death.

The story fits on top of other stories; it is not new. It is a spiral; we are caught in its net. Once upon a time there was a sister and a brother who chose to come into the world together, one was a receiver and one was a transmitter. In order to shift great amounts of energy, a sacrifice is required. We can’t undergo great change without letting go of all we knew before, except by not being afraid to give up all of it: All that we love and all that we hate. Duality itself is what we sacrifice, and that is the trickiness of it. When my brother suicided, he set in motion a choice to go on one side of the veil and I set in motion an intention to find him. This is how channeling works: You have to be able to lock onto a reception. You have to be able to find a transmitter, blood of my blood, DNA of my DNA, memory to my memory as much myself as I am, I would know you anywhere. I would find you anywhere in all that can be imagined. And here we are?

The Egyptian myth of Isis is a story about a sister who goes into the underworld to bring her brother/ husband Osiris back. Isis is framed as a great healer, champion to women and children; she is a channel ferrying between death and life; so we, so we.


PAD: represents diligence/ purifies ignorance/ color is blue/ trait is equanimity

I thought I was losing my mind. There have been times like this in my life. The best way I can describe it is as though being unplugged like in The Matrix. It’s watching the world around you, but it registers different as a code perhaps more than as a coherent space.

I started doing this meditation where I visualized going down 108 steps, one step for each breath where I could think of nothing more than the numbered step I was on in that breath. If I lost count, I stopped and got off the mat. It took weeks to get down to 108 without losing concentration and then when I reached the bottom I realized I had no idea what to do once I got there.

Inanna goes into the underworld to meet her sister, and she is required to hang her skin on a hook. These myths, these stories, they are guidebooks for travel. You must learn to remove your skin, to find the hook, to hang your skin on the hook once you reach the bottom of the stairs. You must not be afraid that you will not be able to put your skin back on once you are ready to ascend. Who would choose this?



ME: represents renunciation/ purifies greed/ possessiveness/ color is red/ trait is bliss

Each chakra of the body has a specific megahertz at which it resonates; the chakra can be balanced simply by listening to the vibrational sound. What is the function of sound? Why speak? Why poet?  Often when the dead speak to me it is just an echo, a whisper; and other times  I speak out loud and realize I am not talking to no one, that in fact I am not talking but being talked to about what I need to see. Sound moves around us, vibrations of energy make us a never type of alone, but oh, I hunger for touch.  It is a lonely life to be populated by sound, to be haunted and distracted by unsaid.



HUM: represents wisdom/ purifies aggression/hate / color is black/ trait is compassion



I read a description of grief by William Dadarrio last  night in his book, To Grieve, in which he stated that love felt during grief is like a lighthouse shining the way to point out that there is danger but not able to navigate the ship for you. Grief is like that, a body of water you must traverse and no matter how many maps you consult, the truth is the journey has never been taken until you take it. That is the sacred key of life, for all the same stories, there is only the journey of you in the traveling. Around us, we choose to see and heed the lights shining on us great warnings, great desire for our safe passage, but whom do we champion to steer? I poet because of all the sounds I can create, there will always be a last sound. That is the only light I have to keep in line of sight: To let go in love. Which word will I choose of all the words for love when it is time to say: Farewell for now. Om Mani Padme Hum.



It is very good to recite the mantra Om mani padme hum, but while you are doing it, you should be thinking on its meaning, for the meaning of the six syllables is great and vast …. The first, OM … symbolizes the practitioner’s impure body, speech, and mind; it also symbolizes the pure exalted body, speech, and mind of a Buddha…. The path is indicated by the next four syllables. MANI, meaning jewel, symbolizes the … altruistic intention to become enlightened, compassionate and loving…. The two syllables, PADME, meaning lotus, symbolize wisdom…. Purity must be achieved by an indivisible unity of method and wisdom, symbolized by the final syllable HUM, which indicates indivisibility…. Thus the six syllables, om mani padme hum, mean that in dependence on the practice of a path which is an indivisible union of method and wisdom, you can transform your impure body, speech, and mind into the pure exalted body, speech, and mind of a Buddha….
— His Holiness the Dalai Lama