Fin. And begin again.
October 9, 2009
I’m finally closing this site.
It’s time.
The archives will remain and comments will stay open, but I won’t be publishing here anymore.
However, some posts and poetry from this site may end up being re-published at my new site.
That’s right… I said new.
If you like, I invite you to follow me over to Translúcida.
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Image: Flickr
Sexual Alchemy
September 18, 2009
After a few months of languishing in the neglected websites section of the obliette of Cyberia, the other site I started last spring now has a new lease on life.
Sexual Alchemy is still about “sexual relationship as transformative practice,” but there’s a new twist.
Image: Moi
The Double World
September 7, 2009
In this post, and this one, I spoke of travel, arrival; a pilgrimage in the name of The Beloved.
Well, my pilgrimage was a very real one, not a metaphor. And I made it in the company of someone some of you may know.
Earlier this year, Robert and I met, first through our words and later in person (an epic in itself!). Then we embarked on a journey neither of us could have possibly imagined (and we happen to possess some mighty healthy imaginations).
From June through August, we not only literally traveled together across the United States (coast to coast – not once, but twice), we also traveled across the great and sometimes perilous divide that separates the lover from The Beloved.
During that time, we learned many things, not the least of which is that, on the Royal Road to The Beloved, it is sometimes very wise to get royally lost or, as Sulpicia (herself a brave pilgrim for Love!) so very accurately put it, beautifully unraveled.
Autumn is now just around the corner and, though our grand safari is far from over, our long hot days and nights on the road have given way to a place of stillness; a place of reflection and recollection for us both.
Here is that place.
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Image: When a Man Loves a Woman, Marco Mantoani
El Camino Real: Pilgrimage
September 2, 2009
This life is burning
Turning to ash as it hits the air
Every death is an end in the race
It’s a stopping and starting
A march over millions of years
This land is burning
Turning to ash as it hits the air
Every line is a place on a map
It’s a city or valley
A mark on these miles of fields
Travel. Arrival
Years of an inch and a step
Toward a source
I’m coming to you
I’ll be there in time
I’m coming to you
I’ll be there in time
. . .
Take this
Mute mouth
Broken tongue.
Now this
Dark life
Is shot through with light
.
Every journey begins somewhere. Or at least, after looking back, we identify a point when we thought it began.
For me, that point came somewhere between here and here; a time when I was given a dream of dying, a vision of a too-early ending… and a choice.
Then from very far away came a whispering from The Beloved that said: “The mystery of the sacred is its transgression. The holy is not a shrine, but an action. An acceptance…”
Before I could launch my usual inner philosophical debate on the merits of such a statement, I heard an unfamiliar voice inside me bullying its way up into my consciousness, boldly pronouncing an intention I was unaware I possessed: Yes.
I’m coming to you. I’ll be there in time.
And so it was I found myself on the royal road; a pilgrimage of an inch and a step toward a source. Travel. Arrival…
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Song lyrics from Pilgrimage by Suzanne Vega. (If you don’t know this song, please listen to it right now, yes? Even if you do know it, listen to it. Please.)
Image: Larry Landolfi
A break in the safari
August 31, 2009
Remember how I joked about being on safari? Well, it wasn’t a joke. For the past several months, I really was on safari — a royally fucked up, epic life journey wherein I traveled (in fascinating company) across the impossible divide between my old life and my new one.
Upon my return, after some time to reflect, I’ve realized two things: 1) Some really wacky-sexy-amazing shit happened that I have a desire to write about and 2) safari never actually ends, one just takes breaks (ideally, while dressed in carefully disheveled clothing and lounging in a really posh house).
In other words, I cannot stay away from this need to write for very long, even though I sometimes think I want to, and (as Isak Dinesen knew very well) safari ain’t over till Denys Finch Hatton dies (and since she so cleverly wrote him into a state of timeless sexiness, he never dies).
So, people, for all my flickering in and out of this space, all my fiddling with themes and such (which is about to happen again), the bottom line is that… you’re stuck with me.
So, stay tuned for, among other things, the Safari Chronicles. And yes, there will be charging lions and great costumes and the sexy washing of hair. And you might even detect a Danish accent now and then. Hell, I might even throw in a great soundtrack if I can figure out how to do it.
Gratitude Dance
August 29, 2009
At the worst of my back injury a few years ago, when I could barely roll over on my side without setting off pain that would make me gasp and whimper, I discovered that I could close my eyes, tears and all, and without moving my body, “dance” inside my body’s memory of dancing.
Lying flat on my back, I would mentally reconstruct the feeling of my hips making circles, my belly doing its rolls. I would lift my arms as much as I could and imagine that my shoulders were moving in counterpoint to my dreaming hips (hips that were, in reality, locked tight in a girdle of pain).
During those long empty days and nights, I would dream-dance to stay sane, to stay here in this world. I memory-danced in order to fashion an invisible talisman against dying while I still lived. For hours on end, I would cast my dancing dream body into the future and will the day when I could stand inside it, once again swaying to the rhythm of my own life.
Tonight, all these years later, I danced a prayer of gratitude to the Serpent who entered me during that time, the One who taught me to dance inside the mind of Dance itself. Dance, not as performance or technical accomplishment, but endurance of spirit.
Tonight, I danced, upright, rooted but reaching, an undulating bridge between heaven and earth. Exactly as I was meant to be.
Inside the mind of dance, all the coiled desires of the heart are possible. And sooner or later, all true.
…like the deserts miss the rain
August 28, 2009
A strange wind blows tonight and I find myself back here, wandering. Emptied out. Filled beyond what I thought I could hold. I find treasures here, and embarrassments, too. Trembling longings. Mirrored trinkets I missed, or forgot to find, hidden in plain sight.
So many voices here… and there. Something’s been left hanging… in the air, in the spaces between our breaths. Rain. The almost-heat of words. A future echo, a humid whisper, the Death that always wants to convince me He does not exist.
And now I know He’s right. Nothing is done. Nothing ever is. Here. Or there. There is only the return, the constant and always surprising return. What’s old is always new… eventually.
And so… Is it better to miss what is gone, thinking it done? Or, is it wiser to forget what passed us by and instead turn our faces to the sky, like the desert, who opens to drink the rain when it comes, whenever it comes. Again.
In any case, here’s to beautiful returns… of the old and new… the here and gone, and back again:
Magdelena, distiller extraordinaire, dancing the medicine from the poison
3barque, wily ferryman, surely of Charon’s descent
Voluptus, bringer of the voluptuous into words
Roxanna, the eye of the sybil, seer of the floating dream
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Title quote: From Everything but the Girl
Safari’s over
July 8, 2009
And the ghost that passed this way is flown. Maybe, to prove this little glance of life actually took place, some footprints will remain… maybe not. In any case, thank you, all who played here for a time. Be well, and good journey to you.
Let me not…dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
And my ending is despair
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
Sometimes a horse is just a horse
May 18, 2009
You know, I’m sick of trying to wrestle so much shit into words. Words hate me and I hate them right now. I’ve had it. Fuck it. I really AM tired of Sundays and Mondays, sick of trying to be anything other than fucked up.
Sylvia was right. Ariel is a good name for a horse. A great lioness of a horse. A whore’s horse.
Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.
Sylvia had a secret, and I do, too. But don’t worry, it has nothing to do with cooking gas. I’m too mean for that. Cooking gas… I’ll use that for cooking steaks and eating them, bloody, until I die, thank you. Leave the suicides to the romantics. They need that out more than I.
Ariel is just a good name for a horse, that’s all I’m saying.
Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.
Yes, I’ve just totally hacked up the great Plath’s poem right here on my little blog. And you should, too! Sacrilege… thank god! And the Lioness, thank Her, too… in his name. That other horse, that other name.
Ariel is a good name for a horse, a good secret for a name. That’s all I’m saying.
So, fuck off, all you words of doom, you poems of names. Especially those of you who never claimed your stake. Fuck off.
You do not do. You do not do.
A horse is just a horse. A whore’s horse even more.
Sylvia had a secret and she knew mine, too.
If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two –
The vampire who said he was you
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It must be Sunday
May 18, 2009
And I watched the world surround me
From inside a phone booth
And it began to astound me
I tried to keep my couth
I said it must be sunday
’cause ev’rybody’s tellin’ the truth
And then again it might be monday
Yeah it might be monday
’cause ev’rybody’s drinkin’ vermouth
~ Phoebe Snow, It Must be Sunday
Sometimes it’s hard to keep being good, especially on a Sunday night at the end of an era when every clock is ticking much faster than any of them used to. Sometimes it’s hard to hold onto things like compassion and the illusion that there is something in the world which does not want to hurt us, especially when the absence of compassion has worked just fine for so long. Sometimes, a slow vermouth and a room full of saxophone and smoke are all one should really concern one’s self with. Sometimes, it’s hard to remember one has couth to be kept, particularly when a phone booth is involved. Sometimes, especially on those Sundays that insist on turning their truths into Mondays, sometimes… one just really misses being bad.
