I have always aspired to a more spacious form
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose
and would let us understand each other without exposing
the author or reader to sublime agonies.

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us,
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out
and stood in the light, lashing his tail.

That's why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion,
though its an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel.
It's hard to guess where that pride of poets comes from,
when so often they're put to shame by the disclosure of their frailty.

What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons,
who behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues,
and who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand,
work at changing his destiny for their convenience?

It's true that what is morbid is highly valued today,
and so you may think that I am only joking
or that I've devised just one more means
of praising Art with the help of irony.

There was a time when only wise books were read
helping us to bear our pain and misery.
This, after all, is not quite the same
as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics.

And yet the world is different from what it seems to be
and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.
People therefore preserve silent integrity
thus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

What I'm saying here is not, I agree, poetry,
as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,
under unbearable duress and only with the hope
that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.

-Czeslaw Milosz

Originally posted by brenden at Help Us Support Planned Parenthood

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

This sacrifice is brought to you by my father's sudden death on Feb. 18, 2012.

Please, make it count....... 

Re-write the story I keep telling myself about why I cannot reach my goals. Stop believing the lies. Start embracing the truth: I can do this. It is within my power.

I sent a livejournal message to my sister tonight......she has been dead for seven years.  

I also sent a message to lj support asking them to memorialize her livejournal account......her time on lj was brief. I read her posts over and over again.  She is always just beginning to feel the bump of her unborn child within her. She is forever eating Atomic Fireball candies, defending Texas and listening to Phantom of the Opera. Her mood is eternally "mellow."



I'm a blubbering mess now. No response is necessary.

Since the dawn of the square root of pi, many couples have longed to count among their progeny a holy fool. Holy fools are widely revered in such countries that house ornate churches and perform elaborate rituals praising those who appear to be mad, but in truth have attained the highest state of purity and blessedness in which poverty, disdain, and dishevelment are embraced as a means to great spiritual riches.  Holy fools, such as St. Xenia of  Petersburg, the cross-dressing homeless wanderer  who wore her dead husband's army jacket and ordered everyone to call her "Andrew," are are desired as offspring due to the most assured belief that the bearers of such a child shall also receive eternal gifts.

Until now, there has been no clear instruction on how a holy fool can be sprung from one's loins.  But tiny, mystical Buddha's inhabiting the grains of sand on an unnamed beach in California have revealed in 18 easy steps how you too, can conceive a holy fool: 

Step One - Fold concentric mandalas into your DNA.

Step Two -  Apply swelling stars to the dough of your soul.

Step Three - Shake a bowl of protoplasm gently until it ripples out into infinity.

Step Four -  Lamb yourself, thrice.

Step Five - Wrap six feathery sibyls with symbols of affliction until a butterfly is sacrificed to the monarch.

Step Six - Wait 750,000 years.

Step Seven - Attach the tokens of feckless ecstasy to the balanced spheres at each ledge.

Step Eight - Heap sunken languages into successive layers of kindness.

Step Nine - Tremble before God.

Step Ten - Kiss the Zohar deeply, use your tongue.

Step Eleven - Give yourself over to the heaving abstraction of melting cellos.

Step Twelve - Clump caged hermits into the fray and insert the sloshing continents into the implied syntax.

Step Thirteen - Collapse into yes.

Step Fourteen - Heave a horde of paleontologists into the dead emperor's tomb.

Step Fifteen - Pulse until the reckoning is blue.

Step Sixteen - Kenotically alter the course of the hushed resolve until catacombs emerge from the spiced marble.

Step Seventeen - Cleanse the sky with spruce fur.

Step Eighteen - Repeat step thirteen until gazelles appear on the extinct horizon.

We were born on a prayer wheel suspended between the Hoodoo Pillars. Our hearts fluttered like beautiful twin omens, our legs were drawn up to our bony chests. The midwife examined our webbed feet and the loose skin behind our necks and pronounced us bird-headed dwarfs. Our eyes were deep reservoirs of things not yet plead.

Our mother was a nun who ran away from St. Isadore's monastery when her belly swelled with sea salt and ether. When we were born, her heart unfurled like a blanket and she wrapped us in her cashmere love.

We warmed ourselves on the terra-cotta earth, digging for milk and coral in the night. We ate pine nuts, chipped mollusks and kale scavenged from the butter caves. 

We slept like phosphorescent starfish, clinging to red-faced pinnacles in the desert rain. We dreamed of spiral occlusions, of tender fish hooks, of sea snakes drifting in the wind. 

We woke to an impalpable dawn and secret skulls in the sand.  Beardless flycatchers ached for luna. 

This was the time before the birds began to die, when sea shells could still be found in Utah, before the world unhappened.

My father was a walking stick with a walrus tusk for a head. He was marred by beavers and plucked from the banks of the Missouri river. 

On a Friday night in Omaha in 1961 my father -- the walking stick -- found a freckled red jasper stone at the YMCA community dance. When he held her up to the light, the iron ore bands in her heart formed a family of small sea turtles.

When they married, he rubbed his walrus tusk on her smooth jasper surface until a milky blue opal named Catherine was born. Pure as the driven snow, she embodied her mother's patience and temperance. If you held her up to the light, you could see scree and tallus reflected in her depths.   

For five years, mineral solutions and calcium carbonate dripped from my father's walking stick in the cavern of his existentialism until a stalagmite was formed. By her own tears would she grow into Dorothea.

Three tears later, a bluish crystal named Karma was unearthed from a hidden paradise. When the light shined through her just right, you could see two trilobites in her soul.

We are all in a shadow box on the wall now, waiting for the younger sticks and stones in the family to awaken to a curiosity about their family origins. Waiting for them to pluck one of us from the wall and wonder who we are and where they come from. 



  Two Guys from the "Sticks and Stones" found object sculpture series by my dad