It was Tuesday

Curves and arrows, beauty to bleed for. A stolen book of nice lines replaced, a lovely meat amid cholesterolic arteries, throughways that pulse with excitement and go sterile with misuse. Hatred has its uses here. So does dreaming, the hair of the psyche.

When a Finnish president wins a Nobel, do bloodways run furious, or do we wait for a dog food commercial to laugh? There is no we here.

But there is here: The only wrong part of us is uselessness. To be useless is not to ignore God, it's to ignore our wiring, a much more tragic circumstance. God thrives on being the underdog, and veins are real besides.

Does God live in our pipes? Only as a blockage--if not, we do not generally live with this knowledge or act accordingly. But put some strain of the heart, and it's Oh God aplenty. What a crutch.

I do not care for crutches. I suffer financially in private, I yearn upon the night, I call for God only when my grandmother mutters next to me in her church. I have suffered and it has been alone. Otherwise it is not true suffering, no?

To suffer with others is an inconvenience. True suffering is to have joy alone. It's amusing how much quantity affects the circumstance. It's terrifying to think that

this just happened, like a ponytail expanding in the wind that wasn't planned, or

a cancer ceasing growth because
it was
Tuesday.

Dilatory Days

That's better as a phrase than Salad Days, no? Of all we have to thank Shakespeare for, I completely despise him for that combination of words. There is no real reason for my disgust. I like salad. I enjoy days. I find the combination unequal to its meaning.

Dilatory Days, that's something I can stand behind. When I get around to standing behind things, or for things, or on things, or even occasionally by things. Now I procrastinate, of course, but only in the habitual sense, not the intentional sense. I'd most enjoy the time to write Are Go posts all day and of course all damn night. Writing about language is my backgammon, my mojito, my devil with a blue dress. Cicero would likely put me with the Greeklings (his term), those who write about doing something instead of doing it. Fine, fair enough. But I still have my voice. I'm waiting for that comeback, Marcus Tullius...what, Roman mob got your tongue?

This is a minor post on a tiny blog. Its purpose is to resuscitate interest in my uncommon words, to leave a fingerprint in martian soil, you know, just in case lives to come that are beyond our language will know that we tried.

Minatory Song

When I rip down this wall, you will fall.

The age of smugness ends tonight. I am the finisher of your epoch. I will not so much destroy you as I will atomize your existence. You will not so much regret the things you've done as you will feel sorrow for the stories your family will tell about your demise after you're gone.

Tick tock, click clock, your luck is fucked.

These threats are not idle or even exaggerated. There is a way that quiet people explode with an aggrevation only understood on a scientific scale. Souls expand and contract in equal ways over the course of a lifetime. Some fluxuate on minute intervals. Some change with the moon cycles. I've been holding this for my life, and the reaction will alter it permanently.

I'm not writing this to warn you. You already know I'm coming for you. These words are like the word Ambulance written on an ambulance. I just want you to know your power and influence: as your life gets worse, the world gets better. Now.

You Change All the Lead [Sadness of a friend]

Sadness of a friend, no isolation is so external.
To be so far, to share the same infinitive sky.
A life
of parentheses disengages,
leaving a single period on a white sheet.

This ink, this blood, these images
among concomitant friends and beautiful horizons,
echoes in my intellect, one body movement from a far lake or, less easily,
a flashlight against a daylit night sky.
These stars are different down here. Everything is different,
what this is, and what this is not.

A hug from the near-dead, a picture of the forgotten,
a richly colored sky on the day we are born.
A compliment from a stranger, a tree branch in reach,
so changes the sadness, so changes the friendship.

Untouched skin, unwatched planets, the core of Gaea's pubis
from which smooth and wondrous paths venture out
before calling back in the grammar of ancients.

My pulse fuels this constant fire, an approaching blaze.
My ink learns. My church burns.
Do you? Light as the biggest cloud, thick as a moan.
With an indication of all existence, you connect with me,
A single, perfect lily placed deep, deep, within my now perfect soul.

Etymologitastic: Caterpillar

So. I was recently called out for laziness with words. A good friend of mine writes an English language newsletter published for writers that do not use it as a first language. She has a splendid section devoted to etymology. I decided to be her inspiration: "Hey, what's the story with 'nick of time'?" "Hey, what's the origin of 'state of the art'?" "Yo, what's the story with 'checkers'?" In her splendid way, she informed me of Google. So.

Time for my own work on my own interests in this area. Still lazily, here's my first go. Completely from one entry from Google.

So:

Latin *catta pilosa means "hairy cat." "Catta" gives us modern English "cat" and "pilosus" is from "pilus" hair, giving us pile in carpets. That caterpillars should resemble cats in any way may be surprising, but note other names used to describe them - "pussmoth" and "woolly bear." (English Etymologies)

First

Every new writing should be like the first run. The activities, both core to our identity as living beings, should share in the same endorphins, that same exhiliration of doing it again after a tragic pause. That same welcome pain. That slowness. That assessment, after months of avoidance, of what is wrong in our lives.

Despite my earlier words, a difference: one is for ourselves, the other for the widest possible audience. Strangely, it's the latter through which we are more selfish, less important, and completely human.

In sickness

We appreciate the usefulness of the right words when we face unspeakable circumstances. Can't you feel your brain actually demanding blood from the body as you reach for the combination of ideas to communicate? We witness internal movement and chemistry as we assemble kernels into attempted wholes. The hospital: so much time, such faceless tsunamic emotion, and only the squeak of a nearby door to identify with. We need words to share this, and we have none of enough worth. That's not irony, that is the validation of human experience over vicarious hell.

Despite their darkness, shadows only exist because of light. What a twisted, ill-fated, and common marriage.

Abulia

I am without will to sustain a heavy thought stream, to manage the flow of a current. When we feel the power of flow within us and we do nothing with it but push it away from our center, are we better than a toilet? Ah ha, that old trick--turn my personal flaws into a shared discussion of misery, blame, and commiseration. Weaker than this coffee I'm drinking in some kind of attempt to rekindle a former me.

There's the problem right there--celebrating my past as a victory, a preferred state. A roach about to be flattened doesn't reminisce about safer days, it runs for life. Terribly sad it is to wait until moments of weakness and boredom to feel best about that cliche we call written life.

When will the logjam shatter? When will nature reclaim its beast within my unforgiving chambers? Answer: When I stop waiting for gravity and the passive world to act on me and I become subject in my own sentence.

Hibernaculum

A leg, a breeze, or something hackneyed, a chirp, a leg in the breeze. We wait months for this moment of rebirth, of spring's return from the dead, and it comes not with circumstance, but with accidental intent. The first community boaters of the year are on the Charles River, and it hits, that spring has been with us for a week and a half. A birthday gift that arrives late, a nice memory we think actually happened.

That's the trick of the season, though: spring never died at all. It just found a place to settle down, take a rest, and show up like a lost child who wasn't lost at all, just playing hide-and-seek.

And we, the victims of this prank? We're pissed off and we're angry and we're embarrassed that we fell for it again. Then, as an innocent leg passes on a dangerous breeze as a lovely devil chirps, we're thankful to live through a horrible season of silence so that the next, the joy of words, awakes.

Rodomontade

"In 1990 mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which operates America's unmanned interplanetary space probes, noticed something odd happen to a Jupiter-bound craft, Galileo. As it was flung around the Earth in what is known as a slingshot manoeuvre, Galileo picked up more velocity than expected. Not much. Four millimetres a second, to be precise."--"Wanted: Einstein Jr," The Economist

The article went on to note that some scientists that monitored JPL's other unmanned craft, regardless of mission, are reporting the same phenomenon--a slight change in speed, unexplained by gravity, inertia, or any of the known forces of the universe. A craft should be going at X speed, and something, some thing, it knocks what was once perfection and predictability subtly out of place. Just like Einstein did to Newton, and Newton did to the Bible. Who will do this to Einstein and his physics?

Four millimeters, whether faster or slower, matters. But my thoughts are more terrestrial, as children are ever more a part of a once-solo life, and thoughts of the next one to come will surely make time much more of a challenging thing than a incidental no thing. Will I notice seconds that are wasted, or minutes that expire without a connection to my kin?

My dad is the one who brought me back to earth, from a recent visit we had. Words with my father, a means of transportation, takes me back just a bit, back to times when time just was a space between other things. It felt nice to remember not being beholden to time, and appreciating that now, for fleeting moments only, can I waste moments without consequence.

My dad has gone home. The past returns, the future is very near. And as my past becomes intertwined with fog and falsity, I'm reminded of words I am sure to write some time in my seventy-sixth year:

I close every time you open,
opening only as you close.
It is this, much more than years, that has aged me.
This is a consequence of being sublunar.

At this point, those like me (there are too many)
have endured extortion for years and,
life-sentence prisoners starting to enjoy the attention of a beating,
we’re beginning to understand our crimes.

But just as the energy is exhausted.
What a horrible machine we are,
this sophisticated, cruel design assembled on the cheap,
unable to handle full occupancy and a full tank.
Loaded up, it doesn’t go far; filled with fuel, unshared elevation.
And so, life: enough to go halfway with some one for an adequate ride.
Enough. Thank the world for epiphantic instants (there are too few)
when consequences aren’t ignored, but embraced and brought along.
Gas it up, seat the world, it all burns.
What a ride

Ha: Would I have explained this fifty years ago?
Obscurity used to be so cool.
At a certain point, though, brilliance is a waste of time.
Or too tiring? At least to this thief.
I stole my own wisdom years ago, and now I reach back for my summer.
How real is any season from the past?
I’m too evolutionarily beautiful to care,
content that the world celebrates my beaux-zeaux art
in unanimous silence

just like my greatest day at the end of a millennium
when NASA put my initials on Mars.

21 weeks: formation

She's next to me, most of her asleep except for our baby, who for the first time I feel moving against the contours of my hand. Like any fool I assume the pre-infant knows that I am his father and that he is reaching out to me, or pressing into me for comfort. Maybe he is trying to kick me away from his peace, or protect his living incubator, his mother.

This moment is happening and I have no answers. No answers: the title of the journey that is starting. As we buy a crib and talk to friends about names and fight over something nonexistent because hormones and antihormones flare up like epic Greek conflicts, the reality of what her belly means affects me more each day, each waking night. And there are no answers. What will his laugh sound like? What will make him laugh? Which play will become his favorite? What stupidity will he learn from? Which women and men will bring him joy, and which suffering? Will he embrace one of our many cultures, or go his own way? Will he, in times of need, go to his mother, his father, both, or an empty neither? Who will his heroes be? Who will change the course of his life? Are they people I know? Is it she? Is it me? Or is it someone I will never know?

To owe gratitude without being able to repay it: may that be the harshest pain I need know in this lifetime. My person has left this earth, and did so prematurely (he was for so long 12 years older than me, but now it is less). I know my pain. May life work out in such a way that I never know my dad's pain for the same loss.

7w2d: Flicker

His heart, I saw it flicker. Seeing a heart beat without sound is how things go in early gestation. I didn't even notice until afterwards, when so much is obvious. The ultrasound imaging, so cloudy, such a Rorschach test with guidance. But when the lens discovered that cavern of life amid so much gray, and the enormous centimeter within, our lives changed, predictably and wonderfully. There he was, real and protected and visibly alive, a flickering pulse lighting the screen and everything inside me.

Though he was seven weeks and two days into existence, I was created that day. On this first day of a new world, I have such hopes to never miss a thing, and be ready with the words to somehow capture observations, weaknesses, exaggerations, hopes, tears, silliness, and wonder at this common miracle, this uncommon joy, this unique and universal sense of creation and the responsibility that carries.