Bishop.

Amanda and her baptist Godfather.

I have gone to sleep after sunrise almost everyday this past week, (this past 3 weeks?) but don’t worry, I am totally prepared for my 9:30am class that starts tomorrow.

The Secret of Poetry

I once was read this poem, sitting on the roof of Lindy’s, an opera record by a composer who met death in a gas chamber in ‘44, playing through the bedroom window. A night of strange encounters and a sadness thinly veiled. We draw certain people to us, we perpetuate certain circumstance until we can learn to stop. It seems farther away than it was.

When I was lonely, I thought of death.
When I thought of death I was lonely.

I suppose this error will continue.
I shall enter each gray morning
Delighted by frost, which is death,
& the trees that stand alone in mist.

When I met my wife I was lonely.
Our child in her body is lonely.
I suppose this error will go on & on.
Morning I kiss my wife’s cold lips,
Nights her body, dripping with mist.

This is the error that fascinates.

I suppose you are secretly lonely,
Thinking of death, thinking of love.

I’d like, please, to leave on your sill
Just one cold flower, whose beauty

Would leave you inconsolable all day.
The secret of poetry is cruelty.

Jon Anderson. RIP 10-20-07

Could he ever guess that his death would be the moment another man measured his own life by?
Can any of us know what impact we’re leaving behind? That there are always people that will pour over every word written,
looking for the passage that will grant them peace?

In Sepia

Often you walked at night, house lights made
Nets of their lawns, your shadow
Briefly over them. You had been talking about
Death, over & over. Often
You felt dishonest, though certainly some figure
Moved in the dark yards, a parallel
Circumstance, keeping pace. By Death, you meant
A change of character: He is
A step ahead, interlocutor, by whose whisper
The future parts like water,

Allowing entrance. That was a way of facing it
& circumventing it: Death
Was the person into whom you stepped. Life, then,
Was a series of static events;
As: here the child, in sepia, climbs the front steps
Dressed for winter. Even the snow
Is brown, &, no, he will never enter that house
Because each passage, as into
A new life, requires his forgetfulness. Often you
Would explore these photographs,

These memories, in sepia, of another life.
Their use was tragic,
Evoking a circumstance, the particular fragments
Of an always shattered past.
Death was process then, a release of nostalgia
Leaving you free to change.
Perhaps you were wrong; but walking at night
Each house got personal. Each
Had a father. He was reading a story so hopeless,
So starless, we all belonged.

-Jon Anderson

A New Year

Caught up in a conversation, I didn’t realize the countdown had started until I noticed the volume rising with five to go, and I break away, push through the crowd,  through the dancing, and the spilled drinks, find him looking just as everyone yells one!

An instant of perfect timing that could only happen with him.

Reunited

three things to not think about:
miles to austin: about 800
miles to portland: about 1100
miles to vancouver: about 1800

Millennium Redux

Everything that you never knew could be painted gold or silver has been, in recognition of the y2k fashion recurrence. If it wasn’t already fully brought back to life, it is now. All while wearing the fur my grandmother recently gave me, assuring me it was Casual Fur. You know, that fur for everyday wear.

A Growing Distance

Placed another step away from reality.

Played for hours during the holidays, to warm the contemporary American family.

There is something wrong with all of us.

you aren’t made of anything.

Felt like Christmas started on the 23rd, and kept lasting. Full of all good things- people I love, wonderful family, some spectacle, and an abundance of leftover chinese food.

the 27th:

linear misunderstandings.

For Christmas, and every day of Chanukah

Why is it that when I’m around people who are nervous near me I feel immediately standoffish?

Mean and nasty through and through.

Woke up yesterday to  breakfast/dinner in bed, a muppet christmas carol, and the cutest boy in the ugliest sweater. The holidays are here.

I get off work at midnight, come home to change, and find a friend unexpectedly passed out on the couch, his car nowhere to be found. Dropped off to sleep it off? Clear sign the night got out of hand early on.

The only thing that forced me to wake up this morning is a house full of favorite friends, already making the coffee.

Trail of Wreckage.

I never mean to.

all night happenings its happening all night

a dry heat, good thing; water makes you weak.