These Primordial Circumstances

What primordial circumstance
brought about this planet
through physics and chance
accretion, thermodynamics, ellipses
and put it in the place where
every biological compound could thrive
and form through eons of mutation
things barely comprehended
in their ancient and distance space
I bless the day the first strand of DNA
came about and through the ages
of extinctions and explosions of populations
meteors and ice ages and predation
I rejoice in the supernova-ed star
that burst into the disc from which
the Earth and her neighbors are formed
every black swan every unknown
every missing link, every scientific doubt
every geological shift
every turn of the galactic center
everything to consider in the history of the universe
every quantum, every string in the theory
I love all of these
because that means there is you.

To Evening

Wrote this recently. =)

To Evening,
you sinner, thief
how could I lay here
and not know
you would leave?
And taking all of my heart
and all of his scent
upon my skin, upon my hair
you liar.

Though you return
you do not bend time
if my happiest moments
were within your arms
your burden has been dropped
somewhere along the path to day.

Oh, Evening,
Let some semblence
of that happiness return
when a man comes
once again changes
everything I thought,
I dreamed, I desired.

Return to me with that burden
to where I dreamt
joined by a man
and his scent
upon my skin, upon my hair.

To Evening,
I do not know you
as you know me.

The Trouble With Circadian Rhythms

Appropriate for my current bout of insomnia, I think.

The trouble with circadian rhythms
they do not dance within my head
my body does not move within their time
and dreaming only by day
I pass through night restless
with no man to hold me
I've no sense of this passage
the night does nothing to me
I've no chemical reaction
except to the smell of my lover
in my bed to chain me back
to this human clockwork
diurnally opposed, nocturnally desperate.
Where sleep dissipates some pain
solidifies the wisps of memory
I've nothing to show but my sheets
twisted in the shapes
I wish I dreamed in.

Braille

What did your hands read through the braille of my body hair? Did you find an interpretation for every hieroglyph? Reveal the secrets of every inch of me with only your soft, well-trained hands?

It lasted all day, just like things are supposed to. We slowly fell into comfort with each other. Under my hands I felt your tattooed skin, its bumps and untold secrets, everything covered in ink each with a story. Perhaps your skin is the more mysterious for all its many different colors. Perhaps every piercing on your body hides something I cannot comprehend, you are a labyrinth of mysteries, and I can only rejoice in that.

I've never made out in a changing room at a department store before, but it was the perfect moment in which to do it. The stars aligned, perhaps, to create that moment wherein the firefly sparks lit up behind my eyelids.

I didn't think it would turn out like this.

Stop Holding On

Stop holding on so tight to feeling a certain way. This is the advice I give to myself so often. Stop holding on to being healthy, stop holding on to the idea that you have to be happy, stop holding on to the idea that pushing yourself until you can't handle life is the only way to live. Stop. Fucking. Holding. On.

Sometimes just letting go of the idea that you're supposed to feel a certain way is the thing in the world that helps the most. It's really nice to just float along without grasping anything. Accepting that things, you mood, your health, your level of success your respect, these are all fluctuating things. Life is fickle as a plastic bag blowing in the wind, sometimes it's a gentle breeze, other times it's a hurricane.

Life changes, you change.

The first time we kissed there were sparks like fireflies all around. That's one of the saddest parts of living in this high mountain Paradis-Bolgia (thank you Dante), no fireflies here to watch from the porch or run around and play catch and release. They truly are a wonder of this world.

And a KISS! A kiss that reminds a man of fireflies should be cherished; it is joy, it is contentment, it is the childlike absorbtion of the mind in one singular sensation. How could anyone ever say that that is wrong just because in this case it happens to include same-sex attraction? I think it's the people who've never experienced that kiss that hate the love people of the world show to each other, gay straight or something else entirely.

I keep coming back to that kiss. It was not just an instance of lips touching lips. It was a full body movement, it included every muscle and bone. It had the whole of my world wrapped up in it. It was one of those moments. If a comet had fallen from the sky and killed me then and there when I stood locked with your body in the beginnings of love where only beauty existed...I would have had no regrets and nothing greater to want.

It is moments like this that keep me from moving to a high mountain monastery, taking a vow of celibacy, and never speaking again. It is that piece of the beauty of the world that I am looking for every time I look in the eyes of a man on a date. When I see into someone else I hope that they contain that same spark, that same alchemy that I've experienced before. It is those perfect happy moments that make all the hair pulling frustration of dating worth it.

You can only be as sad after a relationship as you have been happy in it. It's so dangerous. How can one resist? Man could be the only animal that does things that hurts him on purpose. Or, it could be he knows from some experience or Jungian superconcious that the joy and the pain go together, and you can't have one without the other. Which is why I choose to feel the full extent of the pain, and the full extent of the pleasure. Life is beautiful.

A Galivin Center Free Concert in July 09

We were at a free outdoor concert with your friends. The concert was well attended to the point there were too many people there for my comfort. We were both anxious you were drunk, and probably high, and so sexy mostly in black in July. God, I wanted you. Your friends were all in the same state you were in. They were all the type to let it all hang out, those are my kind of people, which I think you knew.

I got there a half an hour earlier then you did thanks to my amazing ability to find parking and navigate crowds on my own. I got to wait and watch people, which I was expert at. It was fascinating to my Anthropologist sensibilities. There were ALL TYPES there. Men and woman (and some who, like us, were both and neither). Hippies, grandparents, business men, children, all races, creeds, and probably a few extraterrestrials. No one was in their bubbles, they were all blended like when you take all your fingerpaints and mix them together.

You showed up, finally. I was nervous you weren't going to show. We'd only know each other a week or two, maybe three. You were my boyfriend by that point, it was so nice. We were on the same page, I wanted to write about Adam Smith at the time, and you didn't know who he was, I was okay with that, if everyone read the Wealth of Nations we'd all hate capitalists.

We tried to listen to the music there, but the mass of people with their soft bodies covering their hard skeletons absorbed all the sound and we barely heard anything that was just the roar of existance all around us. We ran through the crowd, two MEN holding hands in the middle of a city founded by a religious minority fearing prosecution (there's another story from the same night happening to different people at the same time when they kissed near a temple and got arrested for tresspassing according to this same former religious minority). We got dirty looks, we made out in public to piss those fuckers off. It was hot.

We went to your house for the first time, your bed was incredibly comfortable. You were so sexy, even if you were afraid of the size of your nipples.

I think before that we went to some greasy-spoon chain restuarant and I bought you dinner. It was fun. Later after we once again made that release of oxytocin and male hormones rage through our bodies we laid there and listened to your records. I think that was the first time I ever LISTENED to music.

I think your sheets needed to be washed, but I didn't care, I just wanted to be there with you.

That one November Night

The following is a mostly true (as I remember it) account. I have done my best to hide the identity of the other person in question, but some of you probably know who I am talking about. Some of it has been changed for the sake of story telling, and I make no apology for that...



I remember drinking straight up gin, from the bottle, no chaser, it tasted like a Christmas Tree. It was the begining of November. There was a protest a block away we walked around some. Our protest in your room that night was better, if a bit quieter.

We walked from your place to the train, but unintentionally met up with some friends who dropped us off at the bar. It felt good sitting next to you in their car. We both smelled like alcoholics, but you pulled it off better then I did. You had that rare ability to lucid dream under the influence and you filled me up with all the hope in the world that night.

I knew I was in love with you before that night, we'd spoken those words weeks before when we both realized, lying on my bed, that our hearts were beating with the same rythm. We were both able to give ourselves completely and consume the entire room in our love making. I think that was the night I shot over you and hit the wall.

At the bar you were charming, you knew the owner and half the staff, and I was not surprised considering your history and the fact I'd attended those harsher-then-AA classes with you, the ones the judge ordered. You weren't supposed to be drinking, we both knew. But, with all the medical testing you were farmiliar with you knew they didn't test for alcohol metabolites, they only tested to see if you had any alcohol in your system. It was so terribly easy for you to cheat the system.

We sat in the back of the bar, the same place we'd sit almost a year later and I'd remember this night with nostalgia and fear. But, tonight you talked about me, about us, about us TOGETHER. That was what clinched it for me. You talked about the one thing I think I will always strive for. A blending of lives so seamless you cannot tell where one ends or one begins. I guess that's just me being an idealistic romantic.

You talked about us moving in, you gave me a timeline, you gave me a hope for the future at a time when...hope wasn't something I was farmiliar with. Everything the year before that was shit, boring shit, painful shit, stressful shit. You were a beacon, a lighthouse.

Then we went home. I remember running by the Temple having to piss like a racehorse and you kept trying to get me to pee in the flower beds, which we both knew would get us BOTH arrested, but it would have been funny as hell. In hindsight I can't imagine who would have bailed us out, my father wasn't talking to me at the time, and your family was all so far away.

We smoked a few cigarettes, ate some snacks, which I think involved Triscuits and goat cheese and some frozen tamales. More Gin (we were both too poor at the time to spend too much money at the bar so the buzz was starting to weaken).

I wanted you in a physical way so intensely. My body was screaming to me that you should have taken me right there in the middle of the dirty kitchen floor and unleash the physical power we both held in so poorly so much of the time. The silent parts of me were screaming in banshee style, emitting gallons of phermones to attract you.

But, you were the alcoholic, and I was the naieve one. So we went to bed. You put the customary pillow between us so we wouldn't touch in the night, since you were terrified of being touched in the night. You said it was because you would overheat, I think it was because you were scared of ME. Not what I would do to you, but what I meant to you. Not that I think you would admit that now, dispite all the post-relationship exchanged 'I Love You's from both of us.

You snorred like a chainsaw. I didn't sleep much. I thought about sleeping on the couch, but I wanted to be near you. I still want to be near you, every time I hurt. It feels good to ache for you still. I am happy I had that night where every dream in the world had come true.

Comfortable Pains

This is something I wrote years ago. It i one of those pieces I read and I honestly don't know how it came out of me. I love it.

She who does not like to be a her
Who would have preferred different parts
To those she was given and all their trouble
To her a lady from hell
Who once was killed and now will kill
Dreamer of the thousand things we love
I would give a gift if I had any
To her first for her unhappiness
She is the second kind of love
An appreciation for unexpected things
I admire with these green eyes of mine
All her heartfelt yearnings for a different body
For, I feel the same in this body
Sometimes I wonder if we were souls
Misassigned to these frail frames
Neither of us really want
And now that we’ve arrived
How, God, could we change
These comfortable things
And comfortable pains

The Art of Eccentricity

At a certain point I came to the conclusion that I am quite eccentric. I have in my way cultivated oddities, intentionally chosen things for their differences from the norm. This way of life is one I have grown quite accustomed to.

Sometimes when I am home alone I sing at the top of my lungs and echo in my house. Sometimes when I am not home alone I get lazy after I take a shower and sit around in nothing but my towel. Sometimes I hum showtunes at my desk at work. Most of the time I think things at odd angles from the conversations all around me. Sometimes I can't stop paying attention to everything all around me in the world.

The world is quite beautiful when one is eccentric. I think that rather then strange eccentric may well mean one is simply unreasonably in love with the strangeness of the world. Where other people may chose to ignore or walk away from the odd or otherwise bizarre some of us walk right up to it and make pets of it.

This is not a pathology. I am not a pet to be kept for all my strangeness, for all my inability to deal with the normal world. I'm just looking at the man behind the curtain smiling. It's rather fun, once you get used to it. HE usually finds it quite disturbing.

I find that I have often given up my eccentricities to a certain extent when it comes to being in relationships. I keep forgetting to cultivate the oddities that I love within myself because I think they will make other people uncomfortable. This is a mistake. If other people are uncomfortable then maybe they need to learn something, or go the fuck away. A good friend taught me the wisdom of "Namaste - OVER THERE!" (for those not farmiliar with the Sanskrit greeting "Namaste" it means roughly "I honor the spirit in you that is also within me" and is pronounced "nah-MAH-stay")

So, I don't think I'm going to compromise myself anymore. I am odd and beautiful and I want to dance crazy in the rain listening the Arcade Fire and sipping a merlot making out with a good looking man.

Maybe I'm not all that Eccentric (depends on who you talk to) but whatever I am, I am at least really good at it.

A few poems

Old Mining Town
with ancient windows

that time has proven liquid
and dust piled upon dust
some human element

missing from this place

has left it's imprint

and looking on

taking in the scope

of joys and left behinds

the old bones of

not-so-ancient civilizations

show that things are changing

and we're always in

the process of ending

especially when the coal

you mine takes the last

train that's coming through

in the delicate arch

from southward sun
a beam did cross
your face while in
architecture I could
never engineer
and a fascination
with the insides
outsides, crosssides
of an inhospitable land
in your boyish way
you did fix a fear
mostly mine.

A Virgin Wood

help me Orpheus
one more song to sing
of men in woods
where I have yet to go
and traversed paths
that seem the need
of being cut anew

and that there
a virgin wood
where all paths
have been walked
and all tears shed
to me still seems
a mystery though I
have walked in there
I do not believe
I ever really arrived

Picturing People in Underwear

So, I was struck today by an interesting facet of my personality. I've heard it said many times before that if one is nervous when addressing a crowd, one should picture said crowd in their underwear. I find this to be insanely ineffective, instead I find it much more helpful to picture myself in my underwear.

Now, to give you some background on this, earlier this year I was in a contest that involved me addressing a crowd in a variety of outfits, one of them a bathing suit.

It was a thousand times easier for me to address the crowd dressed in only my (very tight) bathing suit then it was for me to address the crowd in any of my other outfits, no matter how sexy or dapper they may have been.

I would rather stand in front of a hundred thousand people in the buff then address them looking absolutely perfect in the nicest clothing possible. I know, so weird.

I'm going to have to contemplate the whys and wherefores of this.

Until then, see you in my underwear.

I wouldn't say I'm very good at dreaming. It's a skill I was born without, but sometimes I do it rather well. It's funny how the littlest things one can come into contact with can have such an disproportionate affect on one's psyche.

Last night I had a dream I remembered well. I'm sure Freud would have a hay-day with it. I will have to sit and contemplate it for awhile.

Right now I'm listening to Mika's "Life in Cartoon Motion" waiting for the coffee to kick in at 1pm and just feeling rather relaxed despite what I have to do later this evening.

I was reading something from Pema Chodron the other day. She talked about how when we let go of hope and fear we can begin to really live and deal with things as they are rather then as we wish them to be. I love it. Life is a much more curious place when one leaves hope and fear behind. It's more beautiful to deal with things without all the extra perceptions that hope and fear give us about the world.

I bring that up because today I have no hope and no fear. It's a beautiful day to live in this very moment. Later today I will be addressing a crowd of anywhere from 20 to 300 people. Speaking in front of crowds used to make me nervous and scare the shit out of me. Lately this fear has lessened as I've gotten over the HOPE that I will impress people. Isn't that funny? What I was hoping for was the thing that was holding me back from reaching my full potential in front of people.

When you act from the firm bedrock of your inner-self instead of from the ever-shifting perceptions you create around you a myriad of things occur that you would not have thought possible otherwise. You engage people, when you communicate from your heart you can open up theirs. I have heard this called compassionate communication. Compassionate to yourself and to others. It is the only way to connect to other people, and it can be terrify to talk to others without any of your protections in place, to read from the book of your heart with no editing.

Quentin Crisp said, "No man is boring who will tell you the truth about himself." I think he was fixing the quotation of another author, I have no current inclination to look it up. But, when you tell the truth about yourself to other people, when you show them a glimpse of the universe of yourself that is like a distant star so much of the time, you both gain something. You both gain that moment of solidarity, of humanity. It is the very thing we are all looking for. The funny thing is everyone is running around looking for it in sex, drugs, self-help books, paper cuts, and term papers. The greatest music is that which gives you that moment of solidarity.

Mme. Tetrazzini talks about how music only lasts until the note stops echoing. We think we have overcome this with recording. But really, most modern music with its slick production and pitch correction has only put the wall up in front of us even more. How can someone sing from their heart into a microphone in a square room with no one around? And even if they did how could you hear it through all the added reverb and effects added in?

And right now I have hopes and fears for everything I just wrote, but I recognize them as hopes and fears, and that is okay. They are there, I am here.

I think the human body is a beautiful, mysterious thing. It is so delicate and so rugged. The body is a piece of art, both Male and Female forms astound me.

So much value is placed on perfection of the body in an aesthetic sense. I prefer the perfection of the body in an acceptance sense. If we let go of the idea that we can make it an absolute ideal and begin to see it as it is, we can begin to improve from the solid space impermanence.

The only true beauty is unconscious of its status as desirable. It is created in spontaneity, perhaps it is merely discovered without its value known at the time.

I love artistic male nudes. My desktop background is Eakin's "The Swimming Hole." I live for the moments of such comfort as the men portrayed there have. There is no weight on their shoulders. There is only the moment of exist at their leisure.

Lady Chatterley's Lover, et al.

D.H. Lawrence said, "Ours is a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically." When ever someone uses the word tragic I prefer to replace it with the word absurd and things are then as they should be.

I recently had someone tell me that whenever they are in a public situation they think of what I would do and do exactly the opposite, I was quite proud of this.

It is not that I wish to be known as a fool, but life has made us all fools. I think this is where the tarot deck gets things wrong. When we approach life as though we are always 'The Fool' things may not always go smooth, but they certainly go funny.

Reading Lady Chatterley's Lover the other day I was struck most by how much I wanted to be Lady Chatterley, or perhaps by how much I was already her. I want nothing more then the blending of being, the intellectual intercourse that leaves one breathless and yearning for more and the sheer physical passion that encompasses so much of life. The beautiful thing is that when I live correctly I can all of it from friends, strangers, lovers, enemies, dreams, reality, letters, words, places, and names.

So that is just a piece of everything I've thought in the last 15 minutes. Most of it was witty, at least in my mind. And, some of it had to do with Jackson Pollock.