Oh the possible punches packed by the brain from an empty tin-can when it comes to tumbling too loudly, pushed along by wind, tricking on ears at metallic kick-along footsteps causing neck double back and double back and triple back.
Just me and that wind.
Just me and some trees. For all I know.
Just me and my dog- too busy darting untethered in the dark, bush to bush bedeviled by his snout- to sense my woeful paranoia.
This fear of sunless-sky time rapidly twists into sadness, as I’m well aware that I’m likely my own worst enemy- worrying myself so- amongst the blocks surrounding my domain, and even more-so that a place free of those lurking in the shadows is easy to imagine. This is the thought that I must hold between my throat and belly in a sustained inhale. Also, I have to remind myself to continue with breathing.
These notions dance erratically against the dread of the cumulative grouping of every horror movie I’ve watched, trailing me, or the fear of furthering my connection to the Me Too movement as I unintentionally create a target of my sole self in the street. Forced comfort causing friction against collected phobia. Like Rachmaninoff dropping from a dream to somehow share a stage of opposing sets, simultaneously with Siouxsie and the Banshees. Or trying to shimmy to Parliament Funkadelic, in synch with slow dancing to James Taylor.
It can be an easy endeavor to entertain this vision of harmless walks, as experience introduced myself to itself in tales sunk in from traveling fashion.
In the city of Florence. In the country of Italy.
There was an occasion that lasted a night, that lasted a lifetime in a seed inside my heart or soul or mind or maybe all at once or sometimes it may float around, where I became enlightened in an evening to a coupling sense of rawness and security; who’s mathematics equaled a unique sum of awe unknown to my own certainty before. Walking along the drunkard’s-dream of cobblestone streets, gliding through Moorish marble piazzas and the basilica’s double colonnades, exploring the banks of the Arno river, over uneven bridges, beyond Donatello’s conquering breast of Judith, past dizzying, extending stone structures, in the middle of the world, protected by an angelic omnipresence, cradled by an exotic energy in that the threat of an attacker was nil. News to me- it was- that this was even a conscious idea before this moment.
How natural keys fit between fingers. How deep the wagon wheel grooves can be driven before even questioning beliefs.
And all of this experience to have a tin-can maddeningly rattle me out of a purifying parade through the commonwealth. The uneasiness of the unseeable nipping my heels and herding me by invisible hand towards the absolute calm of home.
Posts Tagged ‘random’
Night in Shining Alloy
Posted in beat poetry, musings, ordinary madness, paranoia, poetry, Uncategorized, tagged beat poetry, poetry, random on August 25, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Flotsam
Posted in maritime, musings, photography, poetry, prose, Uncategorized, tagged random on March 1, 2018| 10 Comments »
We spent days in mist. Ocean dust.
My hair looked like a $90 job. A 10 rating.
I was training myself to walk backwards, parallel to the shore without looking behind or falling in. All core, hope, imagination, determination.
Seagulls crested in unison; scattering sporadically like the response to a secret boom or big bear sneeze; returning to formation like an answer to lots of questions unasked.
You’d rolled up your pants and still got soaked, just like every time we’d come before
Submitting our tarnished souls
To our repetitive salt water baptism.
In the small beach-town little matted dogs’d do erratic dances behind worn, corroded fences of tetanus-threatening rust. Do not touch. Beware of dog.
They’d bark their heads off ruthless, and untrustworthy.
4 legged Napoleons. Land piranhas.
My mutt wasn’t having it.
Beneath the bridge connecting coastal access to sleepy commerce center, congregated the bums, whoopin’ and slipping around, catching alarmed crawdads, drinking Old Grand Dad, having a helluvatime.
It’s important to share booze with strangers. The spirits encircle. Your lips are the same lips. Kiss purified by alcohol, don’t fret and the more road-wary the better. They give you pause and ease your mind with uncharted thoughts, though I’d nonetheless really liked to have spared the crawdad.
A furtive pocket-full of notes I fumbled to extract a poet’s name to match our moment to their word-song. Income the spirit of Mary Oliver as the breeze picked up, whispering wild and precious, wild and precious, wild and precious life, what do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life… knocking cattail’s hollow sound and grass-scratch blades joining in.
Everything is coated in a filmy dew of sea and the world there feels small and briny; the longshore men sure look longingly back from a decent woman and forth to the empty possible space aboard their barnacle-scraped boats. What man you walkin’ with? Don’t see none.
One can fantasize right quick about sending off to another land with warmer breezes and new poets to ponder. Making love in the hull with inescapable sand inbetween the buns, hun. Clams for currency. Hundreds of nautical miles.
But the breeze- a melody of crashing waves and the maritime’s half-full loneliness all surf-stretched, and you’re simply incapable of good decision making in wet dungarees, so on we shuffled through the sand and kept watch of the birds.
Haiku Break Pt. 5
Posted in musings, photography, poetry, Uncategorized, tagged for a laugh, haiku, levity, random, silly on February 20, 2018| 7 Comments »
When I start to think
In haiku form and fashion~
Man, is stopping hard.
I want to keep on
Packaging my words to fit
Five seven five forms
But then the sillies
Start kicking in and I can’t
Not be a pervet
So I must give up
The illusion of respect
And drag you down with me
…………
Next time’s sexy time
Shout “Holy! It’s colossal!”
Make the man feel good.
As the dusk decends
I walk streets hoping to see
Sex through lit windows
It’s crazy how much
My fantasies constantly
Beg my attention
Sex is like pizza?
Even if it’s bad it’s good?
Not down with frozen.
He grabbed my tit like
Trying to pop the brain out
A baby bunny ):
Capable I am
As well at reigning it in
And writing soft-core
…………..
Is there a better
Smell than dried eucalyptus?
Daphne in the spring?
When the petals fall
On my head and in my hair
That’s where I want them.
The common cricket
Rivals refrigerator’s
High, resonant sound.
When I hear sitars
I am just like Pavlov’s dogs.
Hungry! For curry.
Sometimes I wonder.
And it gets the best of me.
Presence. It’s a gift.
True art never sleeps
Continuum unperturbed.
There is no shelf life.
One day I’ll travel
The world in the name of sweet
Poetry. Just wait.
Getting off the plane
Walking down the hall to you
Standing with flowers
I can hear the guy
On the wall’s other side of
My condo farting.
Considering Wall Witnessing
Posted in art, musings, ordinary madness, photography, poetry in motion, prose, random, Uncategorized, tagged art, entertainment, humor, life, observations, photography, poetry, random, reflections, street photography, writing on January 26, 2018| 2 Comments »
Is anyone out there known to have learned skills of building just so that they could destroy, to start anew? If these walls could talk. If they could absorb.
Would they swell, well, wail?
With grief of past renters? Laden with uncomfortable memories of someone’s poor sitcom taste? Or spooked by the inability to comprehend an old tenants’ idolatry? Or find humor in and joy of private dancing with the likes of us they contain?
Are they pleased with the blush-colored tiles that coat their kitchen parts?
Do they revel in the bed banging against them ferocious, and ache for more as well?
Because if everything has energy, then there stands a chance at a secret life that we know as much of as to think that birds just migrate without communication, but magnetism and instinct? Greedy, narrow, humankind.
So then, am I their favorite thus far?
Should I lean up against them and divine their favorite music? It must be Nina- the album with her in front of a pond in Central Park…
The walls. Inert and unable to grow, only wither in time. Unable to self-fortify. But- able to hear? God ears? You are probably not alone.
Turn off your halogens. Be true be true! If someone or something is always the witness, could you really be you?
You can find a hammer and smash till you’re blue. Or bang out a window to let the air through.
If these walls could listen. If they’ve been listening all along- how would you do?
1 and 2 Sides of Same Name
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged entertainment, musings, opinion, random, writing on January 11, 2018| Leave a Comment »
There are 2 places to write from/ 2 ways to write.
The 1st: when one is writing, journal quality- where feelings are expressed in reporting fashion.
It is often sourced from the raw heart, but the other side of the heart. The side where the flowers don’t grow or pepper the in-between-places of words. Visual description is scant, exchanged for survival mode.
The side that is blood-swollen and rugged tender raw. Like half an hour to an hour into a wasp sting.
It’s to the point.
An aggregate of hurt, observation, and questions on the factory line at the beginning of processing.
It’s fresh and harmed. Or fresh and ruby red. Or fresh and perplexed. It’s still warm and may be beating.
The 2nd is once the thoughts have entered the bloodstream. Once the thoughts have become brain food, or maybe even the body has digested all the possible health or false nourishment and excreted the rest. Or maybe it’s sights upon describing the excrement. Or sights on love. Or sights on love that was. Or a safer place in reprieve of conditioning. All in all- it’s a place where art lives. Where words form tunnels that no one’s ever taken that lead to pieces of sky no one has ever seen. And the culmination of comfort, acceptance, and understanding leads to an ability to play with descriptors and bend them now to explain what was once impossible to catch in 2 hands/ to hold in one’s mind.
The same person will write in these two fashions. It is chew then swallow. It is egg then omlette. It is crawl then walk.
The brain intakes, assimilates, activates.
Reading a memoir of an author is likely to be the opposite of their flower writing. If you want to learn about a recommended writer, learn their work before grasping at their version of themselves. It is sleep then dream. But more so learn then understand.
*formerly titled “How To Read About Authors (for Dummies)”
Clouds are Easy
Posted in art, creativity, inspiration, love, meditation, musings, nature, photography, prose, random, travel, Uncategorized, tagged art, entertainment, games, inspiration, life, marqui, mind games, observations, personal, photography, random, reflections, science, street photography, travel, true story on January 7, 2018| 8 Comments »
Eves-dropping on neighboring cloud watchers across the isle:
–Young girl- maybe age 7- speaking in absolutes: “I see a hand.”
–Man beside her- maybe mother’s boyfriend: “I see it.”
Pause. Watch. Stillness. “I see some mashed potatoes.”
–Girl -calm: “Oh yeah. Yeah.”
“I see a coyote without legs. Do you see it?
Planes are huge. Almost bigger than the world. We’re almost to space. Did you know that?”
–Man attempts an explanation about atmosphere, stratosphere… starts out strong. Flounders. Reverts to talking about library books on the subject.
Girl turns her head from the window of Largest Views. She finds a heated shaft of sunlight taken to sitting on the top of her hand from the other side of the plane. My side.
Reflection projection.
Steady she holds it; her sun-hand. Her free hand whirling small fingers atop its partner’s radiance. Spinning a small dance above orphic golden. She wants to show her mother who sleeps;
Looking back and forth from mother to glow, mother to glow, mother to glow.
She is a kind child. I can tell. Her mother rests on, while dutifully with providence, she hosts the light.
Girl sees me looking and offers a soft-kid smile my way. It’s too late to look away. I’ve been indulgent in my dreamy observing.
Down she puts the sun.
Back to cloud-watch; the line between boredom and the ease of nothing else to do, giving call to the deciphering of true existences.
High game, low stakes.
Infinite interpretive possibility.
A pooh-bah baby; she tells what’s what. The crown in passing light.
In a flash I’m brought back too.
Times no linear thing when you’re suspended in the air and have exhausted your ink pad and reading resources and suddenly… I’m young again, head-scratching, squinting wonder, looking for what’s really out there.
By and by eking out that dolphin pattern of automatic coordination involving focus, locus and vergence.
If I’d stare hard enough… If she’d stare hard enough…
Now the mother’s eyes are opened and the three talk of sun. I hang on their words like heavy warm suds sky bath; well intentioned interloper that I am.
They share curiosities over cardinal directions; the great Atlantic acting to anchor the origin. Wondering just what they’re flying over. Wondering where the man’s house might be very right now.
In an instant the plane tilts- revealing a ground covered in snow. A secret held from us by the simple act of sheltering our eyes. Covered in snow, dotted in trees. All small far down. Snow inside of snow.
The clouds have begun to thread, actively uniting, they soon mimic the land below as a blanket and a few levels higher measured by hundreds of feet, or thousands if you’re good at guessing jelly-bean-jar-quantities; filtering sun, laying across us fly-ers, dressing us in riches of watermelon and orange juice two hues.
Girl, Man, Mother are quiet. My mind quite quiet. And the clouds- speak silence full into the figures we see of them. Wipe away to white. Begin again if you please.
Exhuming Creativity & Shots at Luster
Posted in creativity, inspiration, musings, nature, ordinary madness, poetry in motion, prose, random, Uncategorized, tagged art, creativity, human nature, imagine, inspiration, life, miscellaneous, musings, nature, personal, poetry, practice, random, reflections, strange design, words on October 12, 2017| Leave a Comment »
There is a well of surface-scraped-depth within me.
I know.
And maybe you too.
I need to know what gems lay deep, bound by body basalt; encased in black rock; kidney crystal. Clinging to crags. Affixed & sturdy.
Formations of luster; robust & ripe; uncomprehended in fullness.
And it worries me.
How to mine myself for precious bounty?
Am I made of softer stone? Might I chip?
What earthly instrument would act as chisel?
How much wonder, precision & intent is required for self-extraction.
To mother words.
Arrange them & categorize.
The placement in a great pantry of order, positioning strategic visions; moving over pink salt, second hand plates, glass jars, almond flour, the old orange juice press, wayward spices- to arrange enigmatic & even alien feelings that can use the generosity of air-time to dry upon the lacquered, shaded kitchen shelves still shieldable from light with manageable doors.
That can benefit from this. To breathe & to steady.
The place my private mind has kept sacred & mysterious, precisely where X marks the spot, though barely tended to- not having intended to gloss over them or feed the deterring, fleeting, faux shiny distracting forces; shielding fears of my own discoveries & the responsibility that comes from choking- one day- upon an throat full of undigested diamonds.
How do you do bounty?
We are each equipped with inherent, ancient farming techniques.
How to learn treasure.
Did it!
Posted in inspiration, love, musings, nature, photography, random, travel, tagged california, city, entertainment, excitement, fun, musings, nature, photography, possibility, random, starting over, taking chances, travel on September 15, 2014| Leave a Comment »
So here you are. You picked up and you moved. Finally. You finally moved- (Good job.)
Something you’ve been talking about for a thank-goodness-noone’s-counting long of time. Three years? Four? Enough time for change to brew to the point of the bubble over. So you ride out in the cascade, thinking of the times where you were so detached from holds and your spirit was far freer, though before you left, feeling tied-down you did not. You just felt… cozy. Comfy. Copacetic. And it’s those C words that can be dangerous.
Because that’s no place to stand.
So you took off in the name of new C words, like new conquests. Like crazy. Like can’t stop won’t stop. And it can all just be so fun. If only you let it. And if only you can conceive of it. Or perhaps just let. it. go.
So you done gave it all up. The pretty house. The fun & loving social circle. The sweet man. The main income sources. In the name of…?
And you’re not quite sure, when people ask you this every-day-question, of quite how to respond to it. The answer varying, dependent on mood, on weather, on wind velocity, or based upon the most recent strangers’ interaction. All in all it is hardly surmisable.
It is the untouchable. And it takes focus to remember that not all is to come with a black and white outline. And it is to show that sometimes you gotta pull that thread from the old sweater. Perhaps those tired sleeves’ll fall off. Or it’ll just keep going until your left with a new ball of yarn. And you can be kind and donate it to the kitten company, bringing them a smile to wiggle their whiskers. Or you can go yarn-bomb the town.
And that’s California, man. The land of possibility.
The golden state, for it’s expanse, and so-many-subcultures, museums & eateries, everywhere art & art galleries & feral or lawful graffiti, mania, excitement; native pride & alcatraz take over; animal parades & freaky carnivals, pop-up-shows, seedy establishments, fresh-fortune cookies, raw struggle & swollen riches, lawlessness, confusion, and contagion, and on on on.
And ocean.
And green; for dripping night-blooming-datura plants; massive, shedding, fragrant eucalyptus, girthy taproot, secure base; established, luscious thick, envious jades; swishy, flirting-with-blocking-the-moon-palms; nooks and crannies: a dream for sleepy monkeys if only one would escape it’s captivity, or the ideal habitat for weary squatter and mangey pooch.
And brown; for trash upon trash in the city parks, don’t-drop-your-keys-in-the-gutter-because-how-dirty-streets; filthy, creepy alleyways where you must pretend not to have a smart phone or sucker you might be; curbside furniture left for days, covered in soot; mysterious weaves on the ground; white bums with black hands.
You might not have realized how grimy it could be. And how distracting, to boot.
But that’s ok- it’s your renaissance.
On your time. And you made it.
You are in charge of celebrations.
Viva su revolucion!
If You Please: A Mini Questionnaire
Posted in creativity, inspiration, love, musings, photography, random, Sexy fresh, travel, tagged culture, entertainment, fascination station, freedom, inspiration, life, miscellaneous, personal, photography, random on May 7, 2014| 20 Comments »
Can I ask you some questions? Would you be so kind as to take a moment to reflect for me? It’s about you. It’s for me… well, for now. But I have ideas OF COURSE. So if you prefer, you can answer anonymously. You can even have my personal email: thelighteningcan@gmail.com and I will respect your privacy when I reiterate. Though, I don’t think you’ll be feeling too exposed when you get right down to it.
I want to know 3 things.
- What makes you unique?
- What makes you special?
- What makes you fortunate?
I have answered these questions with my own brain to provide a template of depth I hope to find, verses some topical answer. Answer in one part, two parts, three parts… whatever. Get loose with it!
Baby L (me)
- What makes you unique?
a. Often- I’ll see people that seemed deeply embroiled in a heavy make out session, all intertwined and public. Then upon further inspection it turns out that it is in fact just one, solitary obese person.
b. A new vocabulary word that I have never used before will be on the tip of my brain upon wake, awaiting its debut in my conversations perhaps.
c. I dream about water bodies in some capacity every night.
- What makes you special?
I care deeply for justice and work towards it in some way almost every day. I have wired my life around it.
- What makes you fortunate?
a. I am fortunate because I have creative, tireless brain that when on the right trajectory has the capacity to produce beeeaaauuuty! And crazy drive. I am constantly getting new, cool ideas for art on a larger scale. I’ve always been dipped in some form of self-expression.
b. Also, I have parents that have been supportive of my zany ways that differ so strongly from their approach at life. We love each other.
c. I have a beautiful house and beautiful friends.
d. I’ve been granted with an overall positive disposition.
e. I consider myself pretty self-aware and am always striving to be my best self.
f. I got rhythm for days and I ain’t afraid of no dancefloor!
So there it is. Spice it up/ break it down. I’m listening. Sock it to me (((please!!)))!