Merry Solstice!

Thomas Merton: “there is in all things … a hidden wholeness.”

Lots of things finishing. 

Going into a New Year with a heart that is swollen. 

I bought my Dad a Fender tee-shirt.  He's been wearing it all of the time.  So sweet.



Happy Holidays.
Love,
 
Mel.

JMW Turner in the Bath:

I have this affection for the mould in the bath,
crawling up the faucet from the porcelain.

It's life and death:
organisms feasting on rot.

I trace their curves with my fingers
and wonder about their lives.

From the neglected base of Mars
black,

blooming into icy ceruleans,
molested by burnt siennas.

It's the same as the sky in November
above the accident on 208,

where we all, human,
having to slow to turn our heads.

Turner, hear me here:
from your sea-faring living and dying,

come back,
just for this, for me:

It is only your tides and your clouds
that are blissfully, still becoming.

aspect

Venus conjunct Pluto:

You look upon sex as an almost religious opportunity for self-dissolution and union with the universal whole. For you sex contains the seeds of enlightenment through immolation of the ego in the fires of physical passion.  (source:  Linda Goodman)

truly happening

slipping in and out

of sleep:

the image
of your hands
pulling at my belt buckle
in such haste;

that brief film, over
and over,

truly happening.

your hands
are so romantic, loving,
possessing of
so much violence

black and white indie,

racing, barely floundering,
over and over,

truly happening.

the foreground and background blur,
and your face is his face
laced in the raindrops
on the window.

the glass:
and there is no one
left behind, just
a hiccough of memory.

the hands that hold the camera shake,
it is truly happening,

and there is no
telling apart.

On a diet of marijuana and apple juice

I am fairly certain that you are leaving me...
your silhouette is blacker somehow.

another fucking poem about the moon.

Someone told me
a halo around the moon is
a bad omen.

Tonight,
and every night,
if there is a moon,
there is a halo.
It's pollution.

And the sighs
of pleasure or pain
or even ecstasy
are laughed into
the smog --
even if there is
no laughing...
or no moon nor omen at all.

on my mind

hymn to parts without a whole.

From "The Tenant":  "Tooth is a part of ourselves.  Like a bit of our personality."
"At what precise moment does an individual stop being who he thinks he is?"

Why these themes?  What is "me", and what is "my"?

Why chasing to the bottom thoughts of Sharon Tate's death, why did the psychic see me following her down a rabbit hole... just in passing, "why Sharon Tate"?

My teeth, my head, my mouth, my tongue, my voice,
my speech, my hand, my script,
my body, my turn-on's, my psychology,
the backs of my knees, my orgasm, my
impulse, my brain stem

My neck, my throat that swallowed the fly,
my stomach,
my stomach acid,

my digested insect?

My love -- or my not-love -- when we
cum together -- your cum, my cum,

your heart (not organ), my heart (organ--
not-organ)

what are we left with?
Your ghost - my ghost.
the silence after sex, dissected--
amputated, cremated, scattered.
*
Cut off my breasts,
they are not me.
Pull my teeth,
excavate my gums,
they are not me.

Mine my throat,
sever the chords,
they are not me.

Mutilate my sex,
conquer my dreams.

Scoop out my womb,
eradicate my birth
and my death,

and my Self -----

they are not me.
~

When I masturbate in the shower,
are the waters
that wash down my lust
to the drain
not me?

The vibrations
of my voice in prayer,
are they not me?
not mine?  not my?
...organs:
me,
donated to the wind?

new poem babies

I repeat your name as a mantra,
falling into its rhythm
into trance.
~


Dream-scattered poem:

Umbrella-darkened face
fractured in the flooded gutter
is more real.
~


Of course, you
don't remember
how well you tasted.
You tasted like
the sound of the ocean
from a conch shell.
I would ask for you back,
call you desperately
late at night...

but I have you already bottled;
and eroded smooth by the sea.
~

Fires:


I learned early to
celebrate the burning;

be it smoking to the filter,
self-immolation, spontaneous combustion
or cremation.

Long time, no see.

Hi blog, it's been awhile.  My very quiet friend.

Today, New York Times article about Frank O'Hara:  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/09/books/frank-oharas-lunch-poems-turn-50.html?smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0

I have not written a poem since last we spoke.

It was easier to write love poems when I was not in love.

"In love" became a consensus pretty recently.  But it is also real.  Real like dreams are real.  The moon is no more important, no more beautiful.  But I feel its transits in my chest.
And I need to appreciate the pain of being in love.  That's beautiful.  I've known that for a long time.  Even when I didn't believe in being "in love".  You know, that sort of gorgeous desperation.

How a couple of words can throw me into turmoil or ecstasy.

I realize these are symptoms of bipolar disorder.

But truly, I've jumped off a cliff here.  And I have no idea how I'm going to land.

And I am learning how to love all over again.  Even if it's unanswered, unanswerable, hidden.

Norma Jean Baker helps me out here:  "Only parts of us will touch only parts of others".  This is a huge part.

And man, how willingly I would give it.


I have spoken to a therapist.  Soon she will be a one hour a week friend.  Nice to know someone is getting paid to hear me speak candidly of self-hate, abuse by myself and by others; the days or nights in which I feel like I'm screaming into a void.

"Ancient children, I am one..." -Joni Mitchell

I'll be back eventually.

YES.

"Poetry is the way I fuck you when you’re gone." —Nicola Cayless, Literary Sexts

Been absent awhile. Here are two poems.

Let the moon
take over
for me tonight.

Move my limbs, surge
with even
greater force,
my blood.

Let me be
in shock, let me
lose a couple pints.

Let me stare at you,
and rely on you

to not
take advantage of this.

I am in shock,
I stare,

wide-eyed but blank.

Let the moon take over,
guide your imbecile hands!

I am a dripping red marionette.

*


There are cobwebs on the bedposts.
How can I sweep them?

Life depends on capture,
on encapsuling,
feeding...

What have I got on them?

Even bending for you
backwards, you're mine.

I'm wrapped up,
and I'm looking up

at the stars.

*

and, just to cheer up:

So lazy. Just posting some drawings.

I need to fucking find these tarot cards.  They were not terrible.

Fun astrology stuff

And a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"The whole world is an omen and a sign. Why look so wistfully in a corner? Man is the Image of God. Why run after a ghost or a dream? The voice of divination resounds everywhere and runs to waste unheard, unregarded, as the mountains echo with the bleatings of cattle."

Neat article:  

Astrology, Science and Non-Rational Means of Knowing

by Barry Goddard

http://astrotabletalk.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/astrology-science-and-non-rational.html

old poem... who the fuck was this about?

Ivory cheek to

cradle the broken bones of

unborn nights with you.

poem

5/15


Did anyone
care about my deaths
in past lives?

Were there
poorly attended
funerals?

Recent lovers
crying
over the newly experimented
body?

This time around:

I want my ashes
made into ink,
written a love letter with:

Sign me,
I Love You.
And,
Sincerely...

Sorry for ignoring you, blog... poem babies?

Okay so it was not the first time I received some sort of Jesus pamphlet while waiting on line at Bergen Regional for my happy pills.  This one was fun... so I tried to write about it:


On the pamphlet I found on line at the crazy house pharmacy:


Heart trouble disease
and its cure

The damaged organ
is the soul
and the disease is sin.

Jesus is the cure.

I imagine a holy
glowing fist
clenched in my chest.

But when I kiss
your stomach
and the sin of it

washes over me

It does not tighten,
nor turn black like ashes,

It opens.


~



Keeping Secrets


...Lavender in the underwear drawer.

Wearing those panties,
the lace that was no protection.

The panic attack
in the car
on the drive home.

The deer's eyes,
reflecting headlights,
mirror-like
and bumbling

Thoughts exploding in blood
and glass shattering,
metal bending and flesh compressed
into the unsuspecting
telephone pole.

(You didn't ask for a call,
making sure I was safe at home in bed,
hand down my pants
and thinking of you...)

There's inexplicable heartbreak,
I mean a heart, broken,
tangled in the carburetor,

A combustion oven flattened,
no longer expanding --
saying Go.

A deafening and then an
obliterating silence.

My body tossed 100 y
through a windshield,

to a godless and crimson heap.

Baudelaire

"Oh God, give me the courage and the strength
to see my heart and body without disgust."

"But what distressed him greatly was not having another hermit there to confess him..." - Cervantes

poem for a woman.

She is on the floor
of some ocean
somewhere,

dancing.

Unheeded by
crushing fathoms.

And the moon dances
on the current,
drawing her.

Such peculiar grace...

they move
as old lovers.

small poem

Dreams are chemical misfires -- Neorologic drivel.
And cigars are just cigars -- when I'm not dreaming about you.

From Robert Moss' "Conscious Dreaming", which now houses her photograph.

"Let there be made an image of dreams, which being put under the head of him that dreams, makes him dream true dreams concerning anything that he hath formerly deliberated of:  and let the figure be that of a man sleeping in the bosom of an angel....  Thou shalt write upon the breast of the man the name of the effect desired, and in the hand of the angel the name of the intelligence of the Sun." - Cornelius Cegrippa (16th C. Magus)

A confession

I have not gotten out of bed today.

"Moonchild" by King Crimson, Christina Ricci scene from "Buffalo '66"

Some days I just want to dissolve.

 It has its different forms.  It can be beautiful.  I have always felt the original ending to "The Little Mermaid" is beautiful.  The Disney version is repugnant.  To turn into sea foam, be washed away.  Is Ego still there?  Like everything else, moved by the moon and the tides.  Above all else, I want to be on a beach somewhere with bare feet in the sand, staring at the moon.

...And every day objects are so provocative.

I bought white tiger lilies for my dresser.
They're practically pornographic.
When they blossom, they're as big as the moon.
It's under their incandescence that I sleep, and dream about you.

paintings! and cheesiness!

abstract #3 and #4

oil on mylar, 11"x9", 2014

Romantic picture of my night table:

"The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It is not like a drug; it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure; it’s a little like making love, the physical act of love." — Francis Bacon (artist)


My cat is cuddling with me this morning.  His namesake:

These little things make me grateful.

poem

Primal digestion


I have a number of pelts
and scalps
given without reluctance--
tied, with your own hands,
to my belt.

The useless
parts
to the vultures.
They don't care for decoration...

They don't care,
who killed, how or why?

They take the true spoils of war.

The sinew and stopped blood,
corroded into meaty rust.

I, too, have wings.
They're spattered in blood.

And I, too, am cleansed
by my own fluids --

but you stick around.

I shower in the
hottest waters.

I scourge my skin.

But it's not you
I'm washing off,

Not your hands, maybe
the only real thing about you.

They've made permanent imprints.

Fucking rejoice!

And crush me into submission.

Journal snippets:

"The mysterious weakness of a man's face" - Sartre

"As long as space remains, and as long as sentient beings remain, until then I too remain, and help dispel the misery of the world." - Buddhist prayer (from the Dalai Lama's [favorite] prayer before the US Senate.)


Painting notes:
Why one painting is working and the other is not:

-Stronger/better thought-out color relationships
-Forms are "defined"
-Trust and romance
-Better interaction of opaque ("painted") and transparent
-BALLS.


Poem:

I'll rock myself to sleep
and come up at dawn...
Opiate dreams of you,
your face blooming as the poppy,
bursting red,
moving over me
and down my throat
and I can still breathe
until you drown me again
at nightfall.

*

Nothing... nothing at all, all through me.

*
Rearranged slices from a couple of poems.


I want my bed, all of it and all of my self
to reek, seaweed and sea foam
caught between rocks, dead
starfish washed up

The sounds of the highway are oceanic--do they
move with the moon?  As I do?

(some cheesy yet raunchy shit)


...Like a kitten
licking her paws after her first kill,
I am thinking of you.

Whoever you are, I could eat you alive.


*
Offering


My skin feels unreal,
strange.
It may not belong to me.
...It could be yours.

A couple of things.

New paintings:

Untitled I and II, 11"x9", oil on mylar, 2014

Then there's this new single by Lykke Li:

http://www.nme.com/news/lykke-li/75855

Charles Bukowski, "In Defense Of A Certain Type Of Poetry", from Portions From A Wine-Stained Notebook

"The middle-heads and English teachers talk continually from a rather absent and disabled platform of life.  Yet, their drivel, like a continuing rain, drowns almost everybody.  I hope that these few words from the corner barstool have gotten through to some--that our seemingly unsuccessful lives and ways and poesy are chosen ways.  We are, most of us, neither killers or fakes.  But someday we will write down the word so beautifully, o, so perfect and real, that all you monkeys will come out of your gardens and begin to be enough for me to look

upon

that which makes the
face and body and love of you

and

I will not twitch in my damned
rented cot
for hours of
spasm and pain and horror


I die and pray for you and
myself


if I could wish all you
bent dead bastards
the tiny inch of my life left
I would plunge it into you
and
sleep forever."

Thing I am working on.

There is suburban filthy snow

and the rhythm of cars,

alone/along 287.

There is your shadow

riveted by tire tracks,

as we stand at the foot

of the haunted woods,

but where we didn't necessarily stand,

but left our markers and elegies

good enough for cut white flowers

from the grocery store.

Will I get to take
you, drunk on wine,

on my floor?  Forget what

was important just last moment?

There's the waves of tires

and the waves of you,

and another storm - 

fresh then grotesque -

entrapping you to my bed.

Recommended by a friend... sultry, even raunchy... and right up my alley.  So good.


"Like Kurt Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout, laying down world-saving truths in the pages of disposable stroke magazines, Bill Hicks was trying to light the way into the 21st century – on the stained-carpet stages of strip mall chuckle huts, usually following a juggler."
-Patton Oswald on Bill Hicks.  Article.

First of all, this:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvcl3_DHJI0

Then, this:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_Kr_OFoqbI


Good things:

-Still writing this.

-Joyful hang over

-On the anniversary of his death (20 years):

-Fleeting sense of magic in my bones.

-Decent advice

ugh. fuck it.

-Sitting out in bitter cold, smoking cigarettes and talking about anxiety and Tarot.  Skin on my hands still raw.

-More cigarettes in warmth and Jeff Buckley, specifically "Lilac Wine".

-Another reading last night, good conversation with a missed friend.  Happy to make her laugh.

-Romantic illusions.


Today's resolution:


-More romantic illusions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PC68rEfF-o

Anais Nin

You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications.

- Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947

Day 1

There's a sheet of palette paper on my desk with just Titanium White, Naples Yellow, and Ivory Black, all untouched.  Well, the black has one broad brush streak through it, which resulted in a shadow that pissed me off so I gave up.
I'll try again, maybe today.

Once a friend accused me of never finishing anything I start.  He was half-right.  What's that line about nothing ever being finished, only abandoned?  Who was that?  That was a smart guy.

I am a self-proclaimed artist... a painter, specifically.  Some days it can be really difficult to answer to that.  There are thoughts like, "Shit, wasn't I able to do this in college?", or worse:  "Shit, wasn't I okay at this in high school?"  Anyway, screw that.  Hard.

~



Update:  The exact quote is "Art is never finished, only abandoned."  And it was a smart guy:  Da Vinci.
My memory for such things is terrible, at best.

Anyway, it's towards the end of the day... (I've been using 9 PM as my "early bedtime".  If I didn't do this, I would go to sleep at maybe 6:30).  But here are a couple of things I got out of bed for today:


-Coffee and the first cigarette of the day

-To take care of my African Violets.  They are a living thing in my care, and they're still doing okay after about two months.

-This article:  http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116701/patton-oswalt-picks-five-comedians-who-should-be-dramatic-actors?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_content=4081028

-To listen to The John Lennon Collection, which I forgot I had on vinyl.  This is the photo on the insert:

Also, I found two 45's hidden in the sleeve:  one is George Harrison's "All Those Years Ago", and "Writing's On The Wall".  The other is The Beatles' "I'm Happy Just To Dance With You", and (heh), The Beatles' Movie Medley.  My record player is unable to play such things, but I think my dad's might.  We shall see.

-To see my kitty friend, Humphrey/Elsie chill in my window, enthralled by the world.

Okay, I think I might keep this sort of list-making as a format.  It's at least a form of writing that I do daily.  It doesn't necessarily cheer me up, but it gives me structure.  Here is a great article about lists:  http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/01/four-famous-new-years-resolution-lists-jonathan-swift-susan-sontag-marilyn-monroe-woody-guthrie/