longing

what keeps me up at night #4

Charcoal all over the place… something keeps me from painting it. I don’t like nights anymore. Falling asleep with all the lights on, and in all my clothes, too early. Sometimes 8:30. I have nothing to be awake for. I could write but it isn’t satisfying. Not at night. Not anymore.

It used to be so magical. Always. I loved it.

3 am. I wake up. I get out of my work clothes finally. I turn off all the lights. And I know why I can’t get back to sleep. And I know why I don’t like nights. Any of them.

Life Support

 

 

September 2, 2019

 

__

 

I want someone

to linger

with me.

 

May 13, 2020

 

__

 

AFTER THE SHOCK

Long, meditative, simple, slow, mesmerizing scenes.  This windy cell phone clip was just a spur-of-the-moment snapshot from real life, but I’ve always admired the often-dreamy or poignant motif when used in actual movies.  I’d love to see even more movies daring to decelerate.  To conduct more subtle representations.  Daring to prioritize the art of the film over and above other considerations.  Daring to embrace less lucrative choices.

Daring, just by their existence, to subvert ACTION.

Lingering, sustained scenes that extend a moment out in time and space.  Like a poem can do – maybe that’s what’s so appealing.  Asking for attention to be held.  Attention held on a moment.  A moment easily overlooked, easily taken for granted, a moment to be experienced more intensively.

Scenes to yield into.  To take a kind of refuge in.  Akin to stretching muscles after a long sleep.  Or scenes to be challenged by, too.

This is not elitist.  This is about the quiet things.

Quiet things need time, space, and attention to be let in.  To be let in.  Because they are not attention seeking.  Versus the rather violent presence of that which does grab our attention, demand it, steal it, and in a way, corrupt it…

 

April 3, 2020

 

__

 

SIXTY-FIVE SECONDS

The hawk.  Something about all this reminded me of it from months ago, and I dug it up again.  And I’d like to post the video.  But WordPress doesn’t allow for posting it in the format I want.  As I intermittently avoid the issue amidst the other chaos, then venture to search again for a workaround, I keep thinking about it, writing about it.  I am lingering on this a bit longer than I’d like, but maybe that is just the point.  To linger.  To slow down.

I do not work in the movie industry, I am just someone with a camera and a perspective, who happens to also make money with cameras, who happened to have only a cell phone on hand on the day I encountered the bird.

“It’s a bit LONG,” someone said.  Yeah.

But I like that.

 

April 16, 2020

 

__

 

 

 

My Stranger

 

The earrings I wore
like tiny weapons
bounce light

Off the shine
Of mountains,
Like sunrises flash

Through the curious
Peaks of your
Clear eyes crossing

The table.  Summer glows
Off weeds outside, drills
the roots in so deep.

Our history envelopes
One glance, gone
I wince.

We share a glass house heart.
A new sap trails off peaks we’ve been.

Sofrito and crème fraîche fall
Over thick red meat
And we saw something there

Really worth drowning for, then you
Face south.  Like curtains dropping
Over a river, eyes

At the border of beef.  Each cut
Slowly sawn I watch.  Edgily
Feeling it out.  Then,

Without saying anything, you
Reached up
And took off the checkered
Cloth.

 

 

 

Night Water

–Thoughts from October.  I dig up this saved draft I’d hesitated to share but now it’s wrapping its arms around a sleepless night and my travel bug, that escapist impulse to jump in a car, on a plane, a train, a boat, anything–

All that really needs to escape is that toxic tendency toward self-censorship.

Writing is still elusive.  Writing is hard, unforgiving in a way at times.  Writing involves so much organization, I often can’t even handle it without also making visual art.  Words have felt like pressure cookers, images like rivers.  Images like relief.

It’s said that words, language, are limited and inadequate – but which mode of expression isn’t?

Images aren’t enough either, as enamored as we are of them.  There’s things that pictures just can’t do, can’t show the same way.  Pictures can not take the place of words.  So then it’s the writing that happens by surprise in the midst of creating art.  Writing is the relief.  Out of a sudden desperation, exasperation that  can’t be expressed immediately enough without switching mediums, turning to words.

Images and words have never been separate to me.  Two sides of the same coin.

There’s the times none of it seems to satisfy – images, words, whatever.  The moment’s raw and the only thing to do is keep going.  With the current project, with any project.  Whatever’s in front of you.  The medium hardly makes much of a difference.  It might make you feel better, or just more like crap but you don’t stop.  I feel strangely serene now in the face of intensity when it’s there.  Its presence doesn’t scare me as it once did.  As if my brain partitioned into two coexisting sides of reality, dark and peaceful.

When the inspiration gets intense, weird, dark, I imagine some of the reactions and opinions those pieces could incite.  Oh well.

Mixing beige paint in my room and laying it over black I contemplate my favorite person to be with.  Wanting this man is futile.  Will you leave once again and call me months from now, and what will I say then?  No more?  I love you?

Even the worst of you could not make me cold for long.  An inescapable fact, love.  I want out of here, too, restless.  It’s the middle of the night.

I toss this whole situation into question.  My job, my expensive life here in Oakland.  What am I doing?  This art.  These photographs.  This writing.  How much could I sacrifice to be able to do this all the time, nothing but this for as long as it takes?  Almost everything, I’m thinking.

What if I just said, everything?  What would everything look like?

Turn To the Quiet

 

It’s one of those mornings when I’m on the road again in my head.  Packing sleeping bags in the cold mountain air.  Blowing steam off my coffee in a circle of other travelers.  Packing up to leave, pulling on heavy boots.  Twelve thousand feet above sea level.  Hungry but exhilarated.

It’s easy to forget the struggle: what it takes to choose the adventure over the safe.  To get to those places and exist in them longer-term is mostly a matter of willingness to abandon fear, to detach from whatever status or position achieved, and then there’s the objects of our affections to be suspended or let go of.  An apartment, a car, a job, a semester, a social circle, a mentality, an ideology, a lover, a life dependent upon the comforts of the known.  Easier done when you have less to lose, but even then most will naturally balk.

For me, all this was nothing compared to what it took to return.  To reintegrate back into a culture built on and fascinated by the concept of freedom, yet embracing a type of freedom warped by comparison to the freedom you’ve just experienced on the road.  A freedom that almost looks like imprisonment – a rat race.  Yet this is the same rat race that gave you the road, the resources and privilege to earn it by struggle.  You yourself, you realize, love the rat race too.  Each day suppressing true feeling, true significance in order to keep up.  From time to time you wholly accept its superficial qualifications and you strive to reflect them, become them.  You get off on it, at least one small part of you feels this is natural.  Until the day that you just can’t take it anymore.  And then you turn to the few people whom you’ve ever really loved, in your mind.  You turn to the waves, the trees, the birds.  Sand, rivers, the clouds.  Tiny lights flickering in the shadows.

 

 

Let These Words Be Unimportant

Let me whisper.  Let me bring these words to you, let them turn yellow then purple like light diffusing through polluted air.  In a sound of voice I long to hear and embrace floats near me.  Connect these words in us through this space, not by chains of past offenses identity crises and grievances.   Let them feel comforting and welcomed, not as wounds, feel like birds at dawn singing through cold air or a bell tower carillon drop notes over chaotic streets on the way home from work in the evening.  Let these words mean nothing, let them be nothing, let them exist for no indisputable purpose or explicit reason, yet not be treated as meaningless.   Let them not be crowded out with opinions, nor create such crowds.  What makes such opinions more meaningful?

What if I have no history anymore.  What if I claim nothing.  These words have tongue in them, lips, lungs, I want for them to not be pushed to sting.  Let me kiss with them.  Let me exist with you as if there were nobody else before us, and nobody to jump down our throats after.  I have slept with these words when hungry, when lonely, now let these words take company.  Let these words be a place to land, not just a springboard to and from troubles, not as an opiate either but a place to be fearlessly awake together.  Let these words be a world that’s not too smart for romance.  Enough views crowd us one after another, it’s blinding.   If we come from nowhere beyond this moment, if only by sound we could touch these screens delicate as paper, what if.

Your voice alone is wonderful to me.  Carillon notes blending and separating over rivers inside send little messages barely heard, grow more resonant.  I long to hear beauty instead of these arguments.  Then these words will not chase you down, will not hunt you.  For truly I long for you and for no opinion.  I long to hear words exist less for the purpose of proofs, divisions, violence, information.  Thus let their intelligence here stake no claim.  Let these words be unimportant yet significant.  Be available and abundant.  Let them be valuable.

Come With Me


Yes I admit searching for your face in crowds afraid of what I’d see.  You came in closed the door leaned your bike against the armoire put your keys and wallet down on the dresser and stay

ed.  We listened to the same musical refrain over and over after the film credits stop

ed since you made it last

even long

er than needed that evening, years

your presence melts resentments and smile fades priorities then there’s only innocence in us.  I’ve felt long

ing and awe and dread since childhood toward everything in life and everyone I’ve loved.  This is why poetry picked me without asking.  I’d eventually tell the truth, sometimes incredibly pained and sometimes without flinching in a way that served an art.  I was less than eight when I knew I was alone.  I see her walking slow

ly

in memory, eyes locked down at the ground watching feet move mechanically, but once she stop

es to stare at a glow.  Strange.  A mesmerizing purple hue around a shadow, circling the contour of the dark form in the sidewalk – was this some prophecy for today?  Six brothers and sisters new lives pop in and out of dreams like a vague connective tissue.  Purple orchids sit in the windowsill wait

ing for water don’t need too much attention, bookshelves crammed with ideas and lyrics and pictures don’t make this old, ancient ache better, or easier the exceptional courageousness it takes to care.  Beyond the selfish, superficial, convenient or practical no bar, text box, or website brought us together.  You said you noticed I always look at the poem during critique instead of up at the group, you stay

ed long enough to get to know me a little but not very deep.  My most entitled and arrogant phase featured this loss although I couldn’t explain how much loneliness this arose from and alienation.  I still can’t keep up with demands in all directions by myself but who really can or how long

can we pretend.  Later on we leave after a short time.  Except in rare circumstances when we see differently those places in them that we fear.  And those elements in us embracing those who just don’t want to know, and those who do, and we take all of that.  All of it.  A fantasy is not a knowing.  A knowing says, this does not have to be so exciting.  A languishing calls in all of us.  Saying stop

by, hang out we are just talking.  It is not about being so impressed, it is beyond bodies, and we are not rushing out of here either.  We are not on our way home because there’s nowhere really to be, nowhere like here at least because why not with you, why not here making something, building something beyond our outfit and our face and our credentials?  I am dreaming now.  But this is the future of our yearnings.  Why not the freedom in doing nothing also, to stretch out in the grass for hours or lounge on the patio quietly, why not cooking and talking late into the night, where are these people?

Those who don’t mind the time?

This does not have to be so exciting it just has to be true.  I want to go find them and set down my keys on the table, turn off the internet and TV, to tell me their stories or notice the majestic shape of a tree reach in every direction for the sun to form such pleasing angles, am I crazy?  I am angry because there’s no antidote to the recklessness of others.  To the tyranny of business, being busy and making things happen.  There’s no pathology in craving more significance to our company — is it so dangerous to desire this today, feigning instead to resist real feeling as a means of self-improvement?  I have feel

ings.  That need not be cute or palatable.  Take no hallucination of ideals, that aesthetic is so tired.  The end is coming soon, dears.  Come by my love because fifty thousand options, fifty million options are not you, because fifty billion other options are still not who you are and because it does not matter about tomorrow, even now doesn’t matter because there’s nothing to do.  In truth, there is real

ly nothing.

Drink tea with me, no pool, no bar, no fancy food, no nice clothes, no entertainment.  I’m up the mountain pass now sipping the tea, bundled in wool, iron and wood and smoke billowing from fires in the freezing cold, there is no service here, and everything is free.  I long for you here but will find somebody to come with me, somebody along the way who wonders what it would be like to set their keys down anywhere, anywhere, and love those you find.  I create no words, no art to sell truly, I make piece after piece for those I hold and a place for us to exist in is all the same affair I work for, beyond the obvious yet not beyond those held in the middle of the darkness because the only thing we have that’s free in this world is each other and we know it.  This is why poetry is not endangered.  Is this not the belief anymore, here – what happened?  Nothing is just only ours.  Everything is for each other.  This is one truth of mine among many.  I wish it weren’t so sometimes.  I’d like to need no one, but this contemporary promise is a false idol of sorts.  I unpeel bananas

in the kitchen for breakfast, oranges

in the afternoon and adore them in solitude.  I don’t really adore french fries, though they taste good — a body is treated like this too.  It matters how you see

things, when we unpeel and also when we don’t.  I’m still being with them, still in love irresponsibly on paper and on screens and whatever and it’s great.  For us cyc

ling colors through bay windows, stay

ing up all night.  I come here to write for tears of long

ing to watch icy blue rivers in us melt

from ancient glaciers — they need a job.  In this moment as with most that matter nobody knows this about me and it’s okay.  I am the same as everyone.  You who recognize this thing.

You, taking he

art