Touch

In the steam, you disappear. I feel your presence only by knowing. You sit before me until you vanish; hot clouds dissolve us into vapour. Your strong sensuality, like a sensate Zeus, yet you become a phantom. Until I am alone. When the hot breathe of air presses in on me your hands rest on mine, our knees touch. Two figures of naked skin streaming as the steam subsides. It was in the room you built, this womb of steam from which we emerge wet and hot into the cold air of the welcoming night.

Rapture

We are clothed in the streaming truth of
the night sky, its melting snow.

Do I have anything to say? I wander around feeling a relief from the pressure of writing, a pressure which was so intense for awhile. I don't have to continually create what I'm living in writing; I don't have to reach for metaphors that inadequately embody my experience, imaginary or otherwise.

Only I do.

This I cannot escape from. Every moment is writing.

The world I interact with is composed of lights and planes and shadows, of sounds and textures, of feelings and thoughts, of people and events. Every moment is intimate.

The life that I live demands that I read it continually. That I be agile, open, dancing. That I maintain a strong sense of self while being loving, caring, gentle, giving. That I find where the light froths and bubbles with incandescence. That I fill my days with laughter inbetween the tears and furies.

Last night, amidst the usual family crises that occur over the holiday season, with many thoughts about the way we compose ourselves for ourselves and for each other, I thought, seriously, at least half of us are quite mad, barely rational, while the other half are caretakers, angels who hold us together.

But, then, I don't want to be like that, thinking those thoughts, and so I swept all such considerations away, leaving my mind a great expansive ocean. Meditation keeps me balanced. Always the vast emptiness. The silent bliss. Surely we are each everything, dark irrationalities and the stuff of radiance. All six billion of us. So toasting this mad, crazy ravage of love that we are on the earth!

While I don't think I'm still 'in' the writing that cohered around themes and that collected itself into a 'parcel,' my writing's changed. Who can stay the same?

My first husband accused me of changing every year. Ah, mid-70s?

Do we transform into different versions of ourselves as we age through the years?

It's the brain cells that are most magnificent, the way they are born, live, die and somehow pass on their information, their memories, to the new crop, and they do this continually throughout our lives.

All the cells in the body maintain the structure of the whole of us by keeping their processes going.

But transmitting memory,
and who knows how, is a feat, a miracle.

Is this why the brain is perhaps structured like a grammar? With syntax and a lexography? So that it can write itself into the future?

When you've finished a first draft... the months that it's taken, when things were rolling, or not, but moving, and then it's over. There's a lull. A let-down. An emptiness. I'm not sure what it is, perhaps like a mini-grieving? One should be happy that the end has come and the rewriting can begin, and yet, the high is gone. I don't know what that is.

It's like there is sand or something in my eye. So I'm typing with my eyes shut. Blindly groping in the darkness behind my lids, talking to you, my readers, whoever you are...

There are changes in my life, and more coming. I really can't explain what they are. Movement, but also settling in. Establishing directions for the near and far future. Odd, obverse things that we intuit but find it hard to speak of.

An image of myself spinning slowly while my life unwinds through time...

I'm here, touching the keys, staying connected.

But I feel as if I'm floating on the other side of the star system.

Yesterday I took my dog on a very long walk to Mountain Co-op and there is a small blister in the very centre of my foot, in front of the arch. And when I stand and press down I can feel the little dome and it's like a homing signal reminding me to touch down, to feel the ground.

My life operates on trust.

Sometimes I'm winging it somewhere across the galaxies though.

Why not float in space for a bit?

I was watching, The Lover, the movie of Marguerite Duras' novel, and while it's beautifully rendered somehow it lacks the poetry of her writing even though there is a voice-over (in an English accent, which doesn't work for me, but ah well). She wrote that book, it's autobiographial, when she was 70!

There was a lot of lovemaking and my daughter came in and so I turned it off. Now that she's in her room writing in her journal and drawing (oh, we are so alike!) I wonder if it's worth watching to the end? It's like, okay, look at the scenery, feel the heat, and there was no more to add. The book is beautiful. Her writing is stunning, as it always is. No-one like Duras.

But I am babbling!

I knew my posts were going to change, but I didn't know how to come back to them.

xo

Still one more piece to write that will complete my little prose poetry book, my rhizomatic text, which I may or may not post. It's a Monsieur piece and you might just have to buy the book in 50 years when it's published to see how it ends. Sighs, and laughs.

Monsieur is an amalgam of the men I've loved/love... you know that!

But even amalgamated Monsieurs like secrecy.


For the last month I've been working at a very busy central switchboard at the executive level in a corporate bank, only a 7 hour day, but exhaustion! The board rooms, the expensively appointed dining rooms, the clients, meetings, parties. In a fish bowl. Asked always to wear a suit, be polished. Come home late, 8pm after walking my doggy, too tired to think, let alone talk or be with my daughter or help her with difficult homework assignments. Not to complain, it's money for gifts, and hopefully to move to a larger apartment (I pay rent and storage each month so can afford a better place just need the last month's rent, which this job should provide).

I was writing a book, though, when I accepted the assignment. Let me tell you, with will power, anything's possible. Almost all of the book, with the exception of the first bit, was written during coffee breaks or on lunch: work like crazy with calls piling up on the phones and then work like crazy on breaks writing in Second Cup, or one of the exquisitely appointed rooms high in that bank tower overlooking the lake. Enter whatever I wrote that evening when I was too tired to think or do much more than move my fingers over the keyboard.

Yesterday I took sick. Hot flushes and cold spells, perhaps pushing myself too hard. I came home early, went to bed. Today I've stayed in my jammies, resting, sleeping, warding off a sore throat, the flu. I just finished a 2.5 hour meditation that I did mostly on my back and feel greatly cleared. Bliss is restoring itself in me.

In a day or so when I recoup, I hope editing opens up. I just found out that I'm at the job until the end of the year, which is very good news.

It's blessings all round.

How did it happen? The soft cotton sarong of orange and plum and cream in wide swarths of colour and simmering moons became a snake with many eyes. I know by the way it winds around my neck while I sway on the floor.

Serpents of protection.

Am I hallucinating?

Dozens of gold snakes cling to me, pour over my undulating arms, wrap around my curving belly as I shimmy and gyrate to the sensuous rhythms of flute and sitar.

I am possessed. The writhing waterfall of coppery snakes stream while I hold earth lightning in my hands like the Minoan Snake Goddess. I can't stop dancing. I writhe and undulate and spin like a whirling wind, a belly dancer, a dervish, a dakini.

I am the lady of serpents.

Everywhere they slither and coil, opening deep chthonic mysteries, an energy of creativity that persists despite inner dissentions, or the envy of the other.

The face of envy on the dance floor is a mass of dry, dead hair, an austere, thin frame, a rigid torso that wiggles without sensuality, or warmth, the cruelty exposed. Its breath re-inhaled, the fumes. Unable to prevent. Incapable of damaging. Useless flap of useless motion. Rendered impotent, powerless.

Today the dictator died; the despot is deposed.¹

Afterwards the cries and laughter of freedom rise to the skies.
______________

¹I wrote this the day Pinochet died.

Almost done! Two more pieces, I think. Then letting it grow through editing and drafts, rhizomatically.

Only about 17,000 words and perhaps 60 pages, and most of you haven't a clue what's been going on I'm sure, but I am drawing it to a close.

Who knows if it'll be back to regular programming or not at Rubies in Crystal?

Life is so different now.

:)

-early drafts of these poems have been removed by the author-

Blessing

On that day, the light that bathed the world was visionary. The sun shone with a relentless determination against the cold. I shivered in your arms. We stood in the weak Winter light receiving its lucent blessing. Even when the earth tilts and we are far away, the sun illumines us.

In your embrace, I am illumined.

Pulse

Is love always a revelation?

Or is it the underlying synthesis of existence, what we are founded on, what keeps the mystery unfolding from its nascence? Is love what embraces us or what we continually strive for? Is love a substrata that we can align ourselves with, open ourselves to, if we could clarify our vision?

Is the universe a pulsation of love?

Is love light, what is evident, or the deeper hidden energy of creation?

Surely, mon amor, love is all this and more.

Devotion

I know my love for you by my passion for you.

Eternity

Monsieur, yes, of course I understand what romantic love is, and it's capricious, dependent on sexual passion, it's created out of desire and obsession, fantasy and the colliding of bodies in ecstasies.

It's not the stability of secure love, the compassion of creation, what is strong and unyielding in its devotion to life. The foundation is mother-love, flowing sustenance, support, what is at the depths.

When I meditate I meditate into that flow, reality, substrata, vision.

Then the molecules that comprise our reality sing of love. Existence vibrates with unifying energies of love, the life force itself. Who could not respond with bliss?

To meditate is to dip into an energy of ecstasy and re-emerge cleansed and energized with cynicism and pain transmuted, rinsed away.

In these moments love is complete.

When love is everywhere, and easily accessible, why do we resist its flow? What causes us to shut ourselves off, slam the doors, refuse?

Why are we often hostile to each other? Hurt, wound, maim, destroy.

Is it because, even with love's promise, there is no eternity?

Threat

When she isn't swearing at the ocean, she is at her computer, blandishing other writers. Everyone is a threat; she battles everyone. No-one is safe.

Escape

Monsieur, you fell into that place of great chaos in me.

I didn't know if we could continue. When you left it was okay because none of the difficulties had to be faced.

Why are we always escaping each other?

Fragments

I wished to write a conventional letter of love, Monsieur. But all I've managed are fragments and far too many questions on the nature of love itself.

Sand

At the seashore she shouted incoherently to herself and flung handfuls of sand into the air.

Sand from a beach so white it was like the pause between paragraphs.

Horizon

I wanted to make it over the event horizon this time,
to get desire past fantasy into the real.

But I couldn't.

Wind

In the angry, cold wind at the bus stop sand blew in my eyes.

My eyes filled with tears, the world of bright sun became unfocused.

When I stepped on the bus, my collar was wet with salt tears. The bus driver was concerned, 'How are you this morning? It's cold.' 'Yes, and that high wind blew sand into my eye - I'm not crying,' I laughed, 'it's okay.' And he smiled and closed the door and pulled the bus out into the traffic.

Nomad

You are a floater, tumbleweed, a fellow nomad.

How could it be any different?

Tracks

The point in the tracks where the switcher is.

You pulled it and we separated;
or, you went off elsewhere.

Gleaming steel,
it frightened me.

The trainyard was
a terrible vision
of the conventional.

I am responsible
for the manoeuver
that caused the
track switching.

The trains sometimes run beside the ocean and she was there, skeletal,
antique black lace gown, shrieking,
flinging sand.

You said all your women are possessive
and you had to hide them
from each other.

Joust

Monsieur, what you are suggesting is so unexpected, and breaks all the rules of jousting.

Deleuze knows: we cannot be anything other than rhizomatic nomads.

Switchboard

I sit at the switchboard, connecting people, transferring calls.

All day I do this.