Wicked Claw

Wax And Stones

Did I want to be a saint so I could be plaster or stone and untouchable? That must be part of it. It’s rarer and rarer to find those old stone saints in Catholic churches anymore, holed up in their grottoes, tranquil expressions on their glossy faces, feet lit with the red votive candles of the adoring. I think that is part of the impulse in every child who wants to grow up to be a saint. I know its in me, the idea that as I progress in holiness I’ll rise above it all. Not be touched by what other people are touched by, not be plagued by… being a human being.

But the church walls tell a different story. The stations of the Cross tell of a mother weeping for her son, of a deposition: a dead body peeled off of a cross and saints wailing, of a man spiked to wood, side opened. The icons tell of hearts on fire, hearts exposed, hearts pierced with seven swords. Heads, the seat of all reason, chopped off with swords, the bodies we glory in shot through with arrows. It becomes clear, if we let it be clear, that sanctity is all about exposing ourselves to the full risk of being alive. Not about stone virgins, but hearts of flesh.

It is much harder to be a flesh virgin than a stone one.

The truth is charity at a distance is easy, but love is dizzying. It is terrible to love someone else. I know that now. Now when I love someone I try to tear apart every word they say, try to make myself un-love them. It comes up again and again. I ask, going for visits, what do I fear? Why am I afraid? I am afraid of this love. All of my life I have been on guard and no one comes to far into my grotto. There is an army of burning votives at my feet to keep folks away. Kneel. Tell me your need. I will smile on you. Leave me to myself. But don’t cross the fire. Do not touch. Do not enter in. Do not turn me into flesh.

Flesh feels and yearns and weeps and, in the end, rots. Stone is strong and enduring.

But only flesh is alive.

eleven at night

I've started reading again, reading novels I mean. I'm reading Zeitgeist, this amazing, thick and pretty much out of print weird ass book that came out a few years back. I'm getting Ben sort of turned onto it. It's the weird sort of out of the establishment writing that i admire and do. I want to make a sort of midwestern outpost for this type of different work.

I've been watching so much television and film. I think... this is what I want my work to be like. I want to recapture in words the scenes I see in cinema and televison. i want to write like a movie or like a poem...

or like a freakshow.

Witch's Blood

i'm growing used to you now
i dreamed fo what it would be like to have you
but this is beyond my dullest dreams
after the longing and the pursuit
learning to live with that i've caught
the first step is to chase and not to run
away
the second step in evolution
is the motion of the paw across the throat
the spurt of blood
adam crawls out of the mud
not an animal
and we are adam's children
we have to learn the next step
the next step is to live with what
we've caught
and i've caught love

I think learning to love someone is very boring. That's why we don't do it sometimes. The excitement is wonderful when it starts. The excitements gets you there. But the actual love can be so daily. You have to pull back and look at it, realize it is what it is: love.

lips like heaven
paul saw seven
but your place is the eighth
faith in your thighs
love in your mouth
charity
the rarity of the roundness
of your secret hills
will--to ride the night
like a jockey in a derby
the whole night is the derby
and your are the most magnificent
--no not a steed
need turns lies to words
riding you,
being ridden
is like the fire or the wind
like being born again

Witch's Blood

though the temptation is strong
don't close your eyes.
even though looking down is what
you know
and the small circle of vision is
the safest
remember when hawks fly in circles they
go wider and wider
why don't you open your eyes and look up
i am--of course
talking to me
you just happen
to be standing in the way.

About writing

If the words are true, be they poem or story or what, then in the end you become their servant, you serve them well. You, who thought they would live for you... You live for them. They live through you. They remake you. These are the words through which the worlds are made.

Witch's Blood

This is for Brian
whose thighs were full
and met at an ass rising
and dusky like the waxing moon
soft as prayers and cusses
firm as faith
the sight of it makes me
sure that heaven smells of
deepest earth
and its gateway in is all covered
in brown hairs

Coming Back

Good Lord, i'm trying to come back, little by little. Step by step. I never knew how much of an instrument the computer really is. I've been jockeying through two crappy ones and finally bought one. This is it. Late at night, before bed, my mouth tasting like coffee and cigarettes I get a little time to write something about the writing life. This is it, I suppose, just the acknowledgment that it is exists, that it is made up of little bits of struggle to get your words out no matter how seemingly meaningless they are, no matter how sporadic. Like right now, when I am just writing about writing and trying to connect to you all again.

Labyrinth

A friend of a friend said, "What you do is better than therapy; writing. But it is my therapy first. Maybe that is why it is better. I woke up in them iddle of the night with worries that twisted into anger and instead of writing to someone else I wrote in myself. I went into the labyrinth to work on the story and in the twists and turns I came back with so much more than when I began typing. This process is magic. Done well it threads in and out of the bowels. It disturbs, does not leave one the same; heals. Like God's, the words of storytellers do not return to us void.

Waters

The Message that comes to me tonight in the dark is love. Love, love, love. This love is the window that lets the air in, the light in the dark, the fire of life. And I am dreadfully afraid of it. I am afraid to be carried away by this love, to love something too stony or afraid to love me back. I am afraid of being done in by love. Something tells me I've been done in too many times before.

Or maybe the truth is that I've never come to this point. That anger, jealousy, impatience, shortsightedness... all of these things come in the way of me ever gettign a chance to love. I feel like last week was the door I've never gone through. With one person I wasn't willing t work things out and I broke it off. With someone else... I was broken of with. I don't know what it's like to go into these treacherous waters.

During Epiphany

This year has begun with a bicycle accident, the theft of a second bicycle, the crash of my computer and the near end of a relationship. There's been a bit more. We are in the season of Epiphany and I come to morning prayer, not to blame God, or even to engage such a person, but to enter into the experience. Prayer is, faith is, the entrance into the Experience that goes on around us that we ignore in the smallness of our lives. Our lives are focused on us, on the little bit of us we identify as important, on the small matters that keep us in yesterday and never get us to today, that keep us saying, "Tomorrow.... in ten years." The act of prayer frees us from this.

The question of how is permited, but scarcely useful. This morning I feel, after the reading, an immense sense, not of the abandonment of God, but of the great protection. Last night I felt that the world was--not pointless, but willfully malicious. Now, beyond reason, a sort of grace sets in.

We've begun the new book. When I think of what a difficult time people have in books in film these days with showing the lives of religious folk I don't think it has anything to do with religion. Religion, when it is good, is about our connections to our people, the small people we are born into as well as our society, and through them the connection we feel to the cosmos in general. The way call religion is a root into both of these worlds. Sadly enough, most people these days feel none of these things.

The fact that I'm obsessing about not having my messages returned by someone who couldn't possibly have returned them by now shows just how much I'm trying to evade writing.

Note: don't sabotage this relationship. For such a long time i've been trying to be in a relationship and when I fianlly am in one, I am so used to relationships beign bad that I keep trying to to sabptage this. The combination of jealous obsessing and shirking work is not a good one. I'm tempted to say I should meditate, but really, I ought to be working. That's the best meditation. For everytime I've thought: why am I waiting for your call, obsessing about the messages you don't return? I have better things to do, I ought to realize this: I really do have better things to do. I'm just being lazy.