In these day of spartan dreams, should I
let myself be coaxed to simulated
death by the stinginess of my over-
taxed imagination?
in this time of mortal fears, shall I
lay myself down like a lamb
on the slaughterhouse threshold
with little more than a plaintive
bleat to register my dis-
content with the way things are?
About
that moment when the moon comes full
above the treeline
and October madmen set matches to tawny waving fields scheduled
to be high-weed-mowed on the morrow, can I
muster no resounding resolve
and stifle the wildfire playing havoc
with my soul?
Throughout
still the mind and spare
the spirit,
turn and run for the hills,
and dig up a long-wide fire-
break
every half mile or so.
Get some sleep.
With all the cells of your body which renew
themselves daily, giving
you entirely new flesh, new muscle, new bone
every seven years,
accept your infinite youth.
With every thought that rises
out of old fact and fiction, like a phoenix
taking flights of fancy
from the rubble of experience’s accepted refuse,
acknowledge your uniqueness without end.
As each old day heralds new,
the wearing night succumbs to dawn, as the earth
cloaks and uncloaks her way
through her changes, and we are never apart
from her…
invite your unceasing renewal.
With the beating of your heart which never fails…
with the breaths of your lungs, ever filling-emptying-filling…
with each and every last part of you
that lives fully till it passes…
accept your infinite youth.
1994 (2002)
She saves my cards.
Each holiday or special
occasion, each handmade token,.
each
and every word, come
easy or coaxed long and hard
from heart
to hand
to pen
to paper
to her eyes only, she
cherishes.
Inhabiting the realm of spirit
is less easy
than most think.
Weathering the storms of blood crashing
against the walls of elastic veins
that give with the flow and
hug with the ebb,
as flesh seeks to mirror the mind’s flights
of fancy, chasing
objects of desire in dreams and sidelong
glances
reining in the roving eye,
the hand with a will of its own, reminding,
reminding, ever
reminding the heart to remember
the upward glance and check
the downward slide.
What dignity is there in love,
when weighted by heavy
bodies?
Of course, I cannot prove a word of this —
for the evidence is long since fallen
victim to conquest of truths
its distant cousin, or worse,
no relative at all.
Of course, I cannot heap up a mountain
of facts and figures
at our empirical idol’s feet and offer up
a smoking sacrifice
of eye-witnesses or reliable written
accounts.
So I must trust, instead, to the resonance
of cellular memory
to bear witness to my findings, born
out of chance readings of varied texts
that are magically related
in fully unexpected ways.
I must fall back on our faded, jaded,
ragged-edged ability to believe, our stressed
willingness to suspend disbelief
just a moment
till my side is heard out.
The following is less the offspring
of invented theory
than discovery and hope.
Oh, but we have traveled long, each
of us on a separate,
disparate course that somehow
comes parallel to the other,
now and then.
Now and again, I wonder
if your feet have fallen half
as hard as mine
on the dry, cracked soil of the dead
lake bottom
I sometimes call my “bid for glory”
and then again, my “bane” or
“obsession”…
Or if you are content
with anonymous comforts taken among
suburbanites and hidden
sinners.
Oh, but we each have taken
alternative routes — you
with your demure town meetings, I
with my spontaneous protests —
but still we find ourselves
linking arms
every couple of years or so — the chat
in a coffee house wedged into a strip mall,
the stray postcards blushing
of a latest adventure —
like loops in a chain link fence
placed around the perimeter of a once-
groomed garden
now gone to wild and woolly seed.
Again and again
I wonder if, and when, we’ll meet
again.
Interesting things always happen, when I invest quality time in exploring the Web. I find all sorts of fascinating material to ponder. And Twitter has been a real boon, in that regard. My thought process would not be the same without it, it’s fair to say, since I’d have access to a lot fewer ideas that are normally well out of reach of my solitary life.
About a year ago, I was on Twitter and caught sight of a call for papers for a conference in Antwerp entitled “Perceiving at a Distance“.
It looked fascinating. They had a great website (perceiving.at – find it now at the Wayback Machine). And there was all sorts of intriguing thought-material to “chew” on in my spare time (commuting, washing dishes, waiting for SQL queries to resolve).
I’d already been working with some ideas around perception, proximity, and distance, myself, so naturally I was intrigued to discover that — indeed — there’s a whole flock of folks who are engaged in philosophies of perception. And there was a whole conference about Perceiving at a Distance. Woot!
It got me thinking some more. A lot more.
It seemed to “conceptually bolt on” to another object of my contemplation, which has practically haunted me, since I first realized it, a few years back. Namely:
In all the 150 trillion (give or take) neural synapses we have in our brains, there’s actually no direct connection between the axons (presynaptic terminals) and the dendrites (post-synaptic terminals). In fact, synapses by their very definition, are not direct connections, rather a sort of “chemical bridge” for data to cross. In the illustration above, you can see a very small gap between the two parts of the connecting neurons. It’s minuscule, but it’s there.
And now there was a conference of philosophy about perceiving at a distance.
It got me thinking…
And it got me writing.
There’s a book in the works about this — and there’s even more to it, than I initially thought.
Speak to me not
of lost chances
and dashed hopes.
Dwell not
on opportunities seen
too late, then
passed over in the rush for more blatant,
immediate gratification.
Sing to me no songs
of remorse
over loves untended,
passions unkindled,
when the world smothered
the wayward sparks of your youth with the march
of police and dogs, and a series
of concurrent overdoses and
assassinations
that robbed you of your palpable hope.
No, tell me no stories
of folly and failure, don’t describe
how it all might have been
different.
Instead —
speak to me of the hopes that once
were, and will be
all over again.
Tell me how your unslaked thirst
drove you on past mirages
to drink at the waiting oasis.
Dwell on the fact that opportunity
did knock, once upon a time.
And hold precious your fantasies
of what never was — sweeter, to be sure,
than what truly could have been.
But one day, things changed. Their maid, Maria, arrived in the morning at her regular time to clean their condo. After waxing the black-and-white tile dining room floor, dusting the glass shelves and tabletops, rearranging cushions on the couch, love seat, and side chairs, vacuuming their brilliant white pile carpets, polishing their heavy, ornate silverware, and washing windows, she headed into the bedroom. She collected stray piles of dirty clothes to launder or dry-clean, rearranged scattered items on the dressers, and turned to the bed to straighten it.
But when she pulled down the covers, between the black satin sheets, she found the rotting corpse of an old, shriveled woman. Skin stretched tight across bones, cheeks sharp, teeth bared, pelvis and ribs angular beneath copper-colored, paper-thin hide, the body’s sparse silvery hair fell from the scalp, and the stink of decay filled the room.
Maria stumbled back in shock. With a shriek, she turned and fled the apartment, barely able to close the door behind her.
When Paul and Christina arrived home later that night, they noticed nothing unusual. Engrossed in the last twelve hours of their own experiences―politics at Paul’s work, and the new show Christina was opening in less than a week―they mixed their customary drinks and compared notes on their demanding workdays.
Looking up from her glass, Christina noticed the vacuum cleaner was still out, leaning in a corner of the living room. With a sniff and a resolution to give Maria a good talking-to, she replaced it in the utility closet, and went back to her husband. As she passed through the dining area, she saw the silverware had been polished, but not put away; forks, knives, and spoons lay scattered across the glass dining room table, gleaming dully under the dimmed chandelier. Christina replaced the tableware in its case, her lips pursed, adding this infraction to her mental list of reprimands for Maria. This maid had been with them for years, but lately she’d lost some of her attention to detail. Leaving lights on when she left the apartment, forgetting to unload clean clothes from the dryer, leaving the television volume turned up when she shut it off… This laxness was starting to wear on Christina’s patience.
Returning to the living room, she took the second drink her husband held out to her, and sipped. As the martini burned in her throat, she scented something―rank, bitter, sickly sweet, almost unnoticeable, but not entirely.
“This is the last straw,” Christina said indignantly, swallowing hard and shaking her head as Paul noticed the smell, too. “We simply have to find some more reliable domestic help.”
Cocktails in hand, husband and wife sniffed their way through their home, checking under cupboards and behind furniture for the source of the smell. Both agreed that Maria had probably brought some dead animal with her from her run-down neighborhood… perhaps she’d left it for them out of spite. They hadn’t raised her hourly wage in some time, and lately she’d been more sullen than usual. It was only out of charity, they’d kept her this long. She needed them more than they needed her. But still, her attitude had deteriorated in the past months. With mounting indignation, they made their way slowly around the apartment, until they stood in front of their bedroom.
With measured pace, Paul walked the perimeter of the room, checking under the chest of drawers and behind the dressing screen for the source of the smell. He set his drink on Christina’s vanity table and poked his head underneath; perhaps some food had fallen behind there and had taken weeks, even months, to go bad.
Hands on hips, Christina surveyed the room, nostrils flared. Everything appeared to be in place―except the laundry, which lay in a heap in the middle of the floor. The smell couldn’t be coming from there, she thought. Their dirty clothes usually smelled better than Maria’s clean ones. She could see nothing. But this room was the obvious source of the odor. Scanning the room, sipping her martini, her gaze eventually rested on the bed―a tangled mess of sheets and blankets. Incensed, she strode towards it and pulled hard at the covers.
Christina screamed. In his haste to get up, Paul smashed his head against the underside of the vanity, and stumbled woozily to his wife’s side. She stood ashen and shaking beside the bed, her quivering hand clutching the edge of the sheet. When he reached her side, Paul recoiled, his stomach churning.
It was a horrible sight―the corpse of an old, old woman, hair white and sparse, falling from a bony skull, skin pulled tight back from a skeletal face, grey teeth grimacing between shriveled lips in the light from the city outside. Flat remnants of breasts lay on a sharply bony ribcage, and the abdomen was sunken between pelvic bones stabbing upwards through the parchment-like flesh. An unholy stench rose from the body, leathery and emaciated, rotting and covered with a fine, grey dust.
“Oh, God―” Paul choked back a wave of nausea. Christina stood motionless, frozen with terror. “When we get hold of that maid―” he muttered, prying the covers from his wife’s hand, gingerly pulling the blankets over the body.
Beside him, his wife swooned, her hand clamped over her mouth. She reached for his arm and steadied herself, then staggered to the bathroom. She barely made it to the toilet in time. The martinis and late lunch she’d gobbled in a rush that afternoon spewed into the toilet bowl, as she heaved and heaved till there was nothing left in her stomach.
What horrible thing had they done to Maria? Christina wondered, her gut churning and her head pounding. What could they possibly have done to deserve this?
Paul’s stomach heaved suddenly, and he staggered to the kitchen where he vomited violently into the sink.
If this was Maria’s idea of a joke, he thought angrily, she could find work elsewhere. Was this some kind of snake-handler’s vendetta? A voodoo trick, maybe? He thought back over the past months. What had possessed Maria to do this to them? Was it the pay? Had one of his competitors at work paid her to do this? He knew he had enemies―they both did―but what monster could have put her up to such a thing?
“Honestly,” Christina snorted. She threw open the door, stalked through the dressing area, and burst into the master suite. Paul followed, muttering about the “unwashed masses.”
In these day of spartan dreams, should I
Accept your infinite youth
I am beyond these walls today —
She saves my cards.
Inhabiting the realm of spirit
Testimonial
Again, Again
kayLorraine 