Before Coffee

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons...
T. S. Eliot

...trudged the grey half mile to the coffee shop after an unproductive morning hour or two at home...waiting in line, glanced at the soup of the day...Sacred Lentil with Spinach...felt impressed...though soon realizing it actually said spiced lentils...which was just as well....not sure if I’d actually want to eat sacred lentils...worrying, wondering whether contact with my dentally-challenged mouth would defile hot soup better offered up to a goddess......though that’s a bit metaphysical for me, particularly before coffee...

May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
Robert Frost

....unless it were an earthly goddess...the only kind of goddess I believe in, really...(for that matter, really don’t go much for ideas of the sacred that exclude my crumbling teeth)....and might be nice, I think, to buy her some sacred lentils, sip coffee at our little table by the window, and with her watch the first drops of rain make their way to the sidewalk...

There's a Place...

...in a dream was traveling somewhere...at first, some kind of urban square at night...people sitting around a fountain...someone offering something...enticing, yet unnerving, dangerous...declined...but not without regret...

...moving on to a trail...apparently, at first, a high desert canyon I know in Arizona, but heavily wooded, and crowded...like that hill in Gettysburg, overlooking the valley where the worst fighting took place in 1863...gallons of blood shed in trying to get to where we stood looking at historical markers...but also still the Wet Beaver Wilderness...(no, not a dirty joke...one of my favorite places in the southwest...about fifty miles south of Flagstaff, twenty east of Sedona)...and a group of people were getting off onto a rough side trail into woods so tangled you wouldn’t think there’d be a trail there at all...voices shouting about how rough it looked ahead...

...continuing along the gentler path, alone, and around the next bend, a line of gigantic rock formations rising up above the trees, amber yellow pillars, like sandstone...but more solid-seeming, strangely geometric, like something Picasso might sculpt if he was a god and feeling particularly cheerful that day...bright beneath a clear cerulean sky....in the valley below, a stunningly crisp multicolored lushness surrounding the broad stream...maybe a river...but a quiet, shimmering blue...cool and slow...flat, glimmering stepping stones arrayed across the water...

...standing on one of those flat stones, struck, in the dream, by the very existence of this place...that if I was down, in pain, depressed, I could come here...to its water, its rocks, its trees...its sublime clarity...

....turning and looking back the way I came, was surprised to see I was closer to civilization than I'd thought...but the buildings I could see back there at the head of the canyon were gorgeous, too, like some mythical Northern Italian hillside village....though it seemed the rock under me, maybe the entire landscape was moving, and there was a strange sound...the phone...a friend wanting to tell me about her new job and asking if I wanted to get lunch...which was only reasonable at nearly 11:30 in the morning...and, really, there are worse ways to wake up...




*note on the the title of this post: it comes from here*

Camels & Humps

...I actually managed to do camel pose—ustrasana for you yoga nerds out there—a kneeling backbend where you touch your heels with your fingers for everybody else...I don’t know why it’s called camel pose....some asanas make perfect sense, like downward facing dog...which the average dog does at least once every morning...except that dogs actually tend to look up rather than down while doing it...which could be an issue if your yoga teacher happens to be a dog...otherwise, it’s all good...

you can be active with the activists, or sleep in with the sleepers
when you’re waiting for the great leap forward...
Billy Bragg

...anyway was particularly surprising since I’d never even come close before...at best ended up in some lopsided Quasimodo-like contortion, one shoulder way down there, one way up there...saw actually getting both way down there as one of those things where, if I keep up this yoga thing diligently for like the next ten years...maybe...and, at the very least, expected it’d be a millimeter-by-millimeter type thing...and yet, here was this great leap forward...or downward...or something...like something just suddenly decided to let go...funny how that happens...

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.
G. K. Chesterton

...often I think about what I’d change if I could take an excursion backwards, into the past...as documented a couple posts ago...the trouble with that being that there might not be any more myself to come back to...or a myself different enough to make the entire point moot...maybe a myself I wouldn’t like so much...smug...shallow...complacent...a casual bully....might I feel less need to stand up for the underdog if I’d never been one? Or have an overweening sense of entitlement that’d cause me to look on those less fortunate with indifference or contempt? Would more successful relationships make me afraid of being alone?

Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.
Matthew 19:24

...what I’m wondering is: have you ever actually seen a camel try to go through the eye of a needle? There could be some trick to it that only camels know...

Blue Blue

Nothing is as visible as what we try to hide.
Japanese proverb

...been reading these books on therapeutic writing...with all these suggested prompts for venturing into the jungle inside...shadow selves, inner critics, masks and mood colors...all that shit...and finding it’s taking me a long time to get through it...keep doing all the exercises in my head...including the ones they keep emphasizing should only be attempted with a qualified facilitator...preferably with a degree or two in counseling, present...can make for a rather harrowing reading experience....

Blue blue electric blue, that’s the color of my room, where I will live,
blue blue
David Bowie

...pick a color that expresses your “current life or state of being”...all I can think of when I read that is blue...it’s not even like I pick it...or that it picks me...it’s just there...in the forefront and behind my entire field of inner vision...any other colors just dancing around ephemerally...and we all know what blue means, right?...every day, every day I have the blues...blues fallin’ down like hail...when she turned blue, all the angels screamed...but, just outside, there’s the sky above the snow...I mean, it’s trite, but it’s real...all we have here is sky, all the sky is is blue...and but for the sky there are no fences facing...and, then of course the ocean, water...chaos between earth and sky...giver and destroyer...blue all the life giving waters taken for granted, they quietly understand...when the levee breaks, there’ll be no place to stay....

...synaesthesia is that exquisite little misfiring of the synapses by which sounds are interpreted as smells, or smells as shapes, or shapes as flavors...kinda like saying you want a red flavored snow-cone, but a bit more sophisticated....a friend and I used to sit around listening to music and making tapes for each other...he had these multicolored magic markers, and I’d write down song titles with those...always trying to choose the right color for a particular song...sometimes we’d discuss it: would you say those two are red songs or blue songs?...I’m thinking kind of a blending of the two, not quite purple, really, more like red and blue tendrils interweaving, swirling together, kinda....the strange thing was, he seemed to know what I was talking about...at least at the time....

...so, here I live, in between the mean old lonesome blues and the clear blue sky...embroiled in the raging ocean or floating on the calm sea...then, don’t we all...the ideal, I think, is to float peacefully on a raging ocean...but I’m not anywhere near there, yet...hey blue, here is a song for you...because it all, somehow, feels like music....

[particular shades of blue provided by Pablo Picasso, B. B. King, Robert Johnson, Lou Reed, Jane Siberry, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Memphis Minnie (by way of Led Zeppelin), the Grateful Dead, and Joni Mitchell]

Three Women

Went to my tutoring gig at the rehab a night or two ago...while trying to figure out who I’d be working with, was told I wouldn’t be seeing Mandy [names and other details are changed]...who I enjoy for her unstoppable sarcastic, irreverent sense of humor...who’s seemed lately, at last, like she’s starting to believe that she might be smarter than she thinks...who slipped out and did a massive amount of coke, and was now back, in the infirmary...though thankfully, she wasn’t sent back to prison...for now, at least....

Janie wouldn’t be there either, though she was brand new....I’d met with her just once, was surprised at how young she seemed...in fact, well under eighteen...and that she seemed to know something about poetry, and coasted through the reading comprehension practice GED test with little trouble...I was gonna dig out some poems from my shelves at home for her...but there’s not much point in that now...her pimp came to pick her up a day or two ago....

Then there was Sophie, who’ll be leaving before I’m there again....who, in my experience, rarely smiles, and is strikingly reticent to speak, and only ever does so in a guttural mumble...any expression at all seeming to dribble up from beneath layer upon layer of impenetrable scar tissue...any attempt at encouragement I gave her received as if it were some vague insult....Recently, one of the therapists suggested that we make up a certificate for people who are about to leave, formally signifying what they’d accomplished with me, on paper...which, in her case was significant...even if it’s hard to say how much that was a matter of improved ability, and how much simply realizing that she could do more than read the most basic words...not that, practically speaking, that distinction matters much...so, I had this cheesy piece of paper to give her, stating that she’d completed some tutoring...wasn’t sure what to think about that...

...but, oh god, opening the folder I handed her and seeing it...she glowed like the rising sun....