Tag: creative non-fiction

To call a stone panther.

The braches on boughs broke.

Lying lifeless. Casualties of the white out.

Lost soldiers, abandoned by their unit.

Under the weight they could not withstand.

Only now revealed

Sheets melted.

Perfect circle encircling more circle.

Inside.

There is a blackstone panther, she re-enlivens each night

A path of sprawling

Stalking prowl.

The little girl awaiting her bus told me so.

She tugged my coat and pointed as I passed: I see her at night.

Does she have a name, I ask?

She just nods and waves.

Passing,

I smile and turnaway.

Exhausting Dreams

I’ve been consistently sweating in my sleep.
Dreams in the same neighborhood as the swaying structures
Only now we are not pedestrians.

Nor roof top runners.

The vans return.
Mass panic.
Drunk, drunk rednecks.
And, disenfranchised swarming points of public services.
No one seems rich.
Or perhaps the rich are unseen.
Alee and safe from our strife.
The previous night, the riots/disaster broke out.
Some truth revealed of which I discovered myself involved in
Through familial inheritance. clandestine.
Unaware until that moment.
Strange feeling of alienation.
Now that I know my involvement, my allegiance, must change.
My family has implicitly caused the suffering of many. With at least a bit of awareness.
<With too much intoxication?>
We leave a keg party in the woods.
A young man, Hunter

I went to high school with this blonde

Son of a politician [in the dream].
We were not friends.
He was in a higher clique, multiple levels.
That said. he was always kind.
I am by far the sober one.
But have the deepest of dread about driving the
Super drunken party.
As in, if we get pulled over by the cops (sic. American cops midst a crisis….DANGEROUS) it is more important for me to ditch the carload and make for this public center. That looks like the Tuscaloosa Library

(ed. note: before ‘tuscaloosa’, it was called Druid City. Point in case, the biggest hospital is known formally as DCH- Druid City Hospital. Quite magical considering the Magic City is only 45 min. NE.)

Hunter offers, kindly yet foolishly to drive us in his huge red truck.
Within two minutes we are clearly going to crash and hit a metal solid post. I think:
1. Hunter’s father has the sway and motive to save his son and the party to the crime. That is if we/they ever make it to trial. Which is questionable. The state of AL is in shoot first question later mode.
2. I will bail from the truck before impact IF impact is inevitable. I have great confidence in my ability to time and gauge this.
3. Amy is the only one in the truck I feel loyal obligation to. I fill with dread. We have not spoken in years, and she feels like dead weight that I am responsible for. And I intuit she may feel the same way about my own prescence.
People begin to reach up and try to snatch the wheel. This is ok by me.

Somehow we avoid crashing.

Amy bails.
I bail.
We freeze

And look at each other. We did not plan to bail together.

We apparently were just similar minded in how to handle the problem.
I indicate with eyes: I’m going my way. Do you want to come or go?
She crosses the road towards me.
Before she finishes, I’ve started running toward my destination.
She cannot keep up.
She arrives later and is pivotal in assisting me help the people my family

tacitly, indirectly, hurt.
(Ed. Note: she loves her family. They have never truly hurt her or even let her down in waking life).
We save the day after a protracted dance of:
She distracts and alludes the vanmen outside through camp.
I evade them inside while finding and sneaking people.
From this multiple story structure that winds horizontally.
It seems to grow ampersand sprawl.
The people often resent my help.
Some refuse it.
An armed faction of the people I’m trying to get outside decide me a hostile enemy.
Complicating my evasive action.
They change forms. An elite force.
At one point, í beat a crow to death, over and over it came at me, with a tennis racquet. When I looked on its lifeless body, felled upon the second step of a staircase, I fill with dread.
I killed it in fear it was a transformed enemy. In retrospect, I cannot be sure that I had not just beaten a confused, agitated bird to deæth. Maybe it was just a bird. Then the whole question stops making sense. I feel confused but on the run. Time, survival.
end: successful but incomplete.

Cut to last night.

Same place, same time.
Only, I embrace the role of driver.
My car.
Interstates flooded with water and cars.0
I dodge and weave impeccably.
But, I feel exhausted and stressed.
Then, I know when/that I should/ to

pull over and rest.

The panic inside me ceases.

The disarray outside continues.

I drive people in and out of the city all night
(I would not describe it as a nightmare. Not even as a bad dream.

Just a tiring, surprisingly self re-affirming dream)

*

I Tense My Neck

With back straight,

Í asked you, “do you try hard too?”

The snow reduced me to pencil,

#2

Bleeding out my pens proper.

Wondering about that table of six í auto-gratted

in the Tavern five years prior.

My lead cracks.

Mark darker.

And then í find,

one pen left in my fold.

Shortstop

Between run and go.

A dash of dalliance

Unconcerned with with prose that came before

Or wilt

Would be.

Her hands would shake?

Ledges are not only

but also for leaping.

They told me “no.” Which is always within rights, but í was left confused.

Í cannot remember asking anything

Lend a

Hand, right?

Play your vinyl

Remove the album sleeve.

Put your diamond down, glasscutter.

45 rpm.

I see none involving nengk.

I feel like a chemist when I boil water.

Astood upon three toes.

Oops

now four.

And the sky matches the ground.

He told me we ought to blow it up.

The snow.

Cuz of the moon.

An allotment of the ailment is being carried

By wagonmasters & confronters.

I pay attention to your punctuation.

Sometimes my teeth bend but don’t break in my bad dreams.

Of getting ready for Gertrude’s party

That never happens.

Disproportionate response.

Unreeving.

Receive the rowen.

We worked double overtime.

And looked into your mother’s eyes.

She could not smile then but she does now.

As assiduous as inexorable is

My final defenses are indeafsible.

A prerogative disinclined toward extravagance,

As much as the silver sliver of

The new moon is caustic

And the lurdan lurid.

The succubus and incubus work in tandem.

One pulls rope and the other gathering eggs.

No small surprise they work in sleep’s misty revue.

A dæmon to a dreamed of demon that never derived from the proper diabolical.

A small child born.

A mom and dad.

And suddenly you stroke your chin,

And I miss my train

Of thought again.

Scraps of yellow bits scatter my room

And I sit indian style.

Crossed.

Bow drawn. Arrows all a’quiver.

Quivered and quivering.

Set asleep amongst the Ingessana Hills.

Children recover souls they did not know

They missed.

We are the doctor-diviners with a sleepy second sight.

We dream the dreams the sleepers cannot fathom

Until awakening.

There is no need to fear.

I see none involving nengk.

A Concealment of Collective Nouns

Morbid effery from the monkeyed,

Landed gentry.

Luxurious as late night coffee with heavy cream.

Laden.

All the crawfish fixing to get boiled.

Cloves of garlic

Resting on claws

Coalescing correlations.

Corrections to iterations

Deshelled and /de/tailed

Consumption.

Silver eyes against armor-alled all red

Whiskers a’faced to

Terraced tails.

Rampant mud and bug

With a dropped bouquet.

The slow crawl of the limited engagement

Leaves above my head.

Shining.

Í will make you look up and remember the sky.

You forget your breath

(Ampersand)

You lose a life.

I forged injunctions

Duplicitous & with steely reinforcement.

Silversmithing.

The pleasure of the written word. Consummate.

The change in our handwriting over time.

Fingering out your new font

Of pen scratch.

Scrawled.

Sprawling.

And my rhythm dictates a tempo for our saraband.

Shorthand.

You should always carry a handkerchief.

Cotton is fine. Print or naught.

It is not you that will use it

Anyhow.

So remove from that top drawer.

Overly ajar.

《》

A black rectangle

Framed in an indigo field. Ræching.

《》

What do we know of destruction?

Or why the paper need be canary.

Elongation in enunciation is

A mispronunciation.

Two blankets for the two ankles outside

Tonight.

Headed stones of fuzzy beasts

Sette

Atop footed cherrywood.

Vascular knotted circuitry

(<subterranean>)

A slip of the hips,

a flick of fingers.

Full affront of the suites

Merely one of a sort of resorts available

To your privy.

The pluck of pages.

Should they dissuade?

Is it prey to the præter-?

They said some really mean things about some really mean people. What do you suppose that means?

Felled and befell.

Sometimes it is hard to tell an l from I from a 1.

But no one ever mentions this.

A notice noticed. Even if misunderstood.

I drank the coffee to stay

Sharp in my sleep.

I sleep with a steno

Padded

Petrified enfossil.

A sordid seizure of a hardened fruit pit.

Dishollowed.

Where countenance meets disposition.

Heavy like

Wet denim.

cassette à fleur

I shift shoulders,

Crackly, a’tængled.

Naught not knotted.

Capacity and current

Contained by my spine.

Contracting.

Runs amok until

Corrected to both

convex & concave

Context.

Back braced

And arching.

Bending

Bow

To arrow.

Column of my chord.

Given immobility put to good use

In postures

Not posturing.

Posing but no poser.

Calf cramps

Paces inside

In sides.

Sidling as slides.

Sliding the sphere of my cəntər

Recanter.

And əntərs.

My abdomen to

My solar plexus

through

To my head.

Red , Terracotta , orange

Yellow , Green, Indigo.

Amid

White

Black.

All then red.

When cultivating a rose, they account for size, form, color,

Substance

Stem & Foliage

Balance

&

Proportion

(but wə can turn anything into a competition, I’d wager)

An ugly rose?

Hum

Birds and bees do not notice.

Lao Tzu or The American Rose Association Rule Book.

Misnamed. Mislabeled.

!

Dont let the roses pick up on that vibe.

Or the glass embracing it might break.

The rose and the vase.

This translates to a title.

Watch “INXS – Never Tear Us Apart” on YouTube

A recent conversation left me reexamining my mental (re)collection of the 1980’s music scene. I came from an acoustic, Martin, early 1960’s to gritty 1970’s household, ya see.

Now, I was a young `un during the `80s, not even alive for the full decade. I write from sloppy memory & unresearched timelines.

To wit. viz. My first memories of favorite songs (years before-gasp-receiving my first cd/tape player boombox) include:

1. Phil Collins (solo, post Genesis); Groovy Kind of Love

2. The Beach Boys (see Surf’s Up not Pet Sounds. Giggle); Kokomo

3. Don Henley (solo, stag de La Eagles); All She Wants to do is Dance

My radio cassette player allowed me to record radio to cassette tape. I took great advantage of such a Tape OP.

The draped-on drum production kinda kills me.

Insta-musical carbon dating.

Not necessarily standing the test of time.

Remaining revolutionary.

But hindsight blahblahblah.

I know I’ll take Tears for Fears, INXS, and George Michael (see also The New Radicals 1990’s) most days.

But I thought real hard about what song with which to start a Pressed review.

The 1980’s have some spectacular introductory pieces (ala Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain).

Songs that mesmerize you before they truly begin.

Donnie Darko previously re-popularized Tears for Fears Head Over Heels. Same band, Sowing the Seeds of Love continued a pop sentiment that trickled down to Oasis, Space Hog. REM.

But, as far as knock out 1980’s intros that I can immediately recall, I had to land here with INXS. Vaguely Antish?

P.s. an exemplar par excellence of the use of a 1980’s sax. Too often wrecking a track.

.

Awhite awit. De-lis

Whirling padded fan blades

Belt around in circles.

Encircling.

Edifying eddies of easy breezes

Above me.

Pink & blue light

Nearly a wishing sky meandering on my wall.

Reflected

Then

Transposed.

Everyday reaching one more yard.

Poised.

Discomposed.

A’teeter

Totter.

Topple.

Someone fell down?

Afront.

In front ampersand behind.

(All a front for)

A’cold

Front

A’coming

Font.

Red rocks the remain

chilled & a’cold

/Des-/In spite constant sunshine.

To spite.

Spritely

Bell Rock

Pealing.

Bells.

Belle appealing.

Upturned. Un toward.

A forward.

A’front.

Word afore

A nameless, unspoken

Fleur

Pressto

The server dropped the tray of glasses

Right after saying, “Don’t worry I’m a professional.”

Rushy.

Could not out plates down fast enough

Before picking up new ones.

Meritoriously.

Feet bones cracklin

Pork ears

The following morning

IT sent an email.

Meanwhile, the coil leaked.

And my hair sits flat today.

And I smile.

At a memory.

You said noodles used to be tradeable.

(Funk & Wagner photo)

Phosphul

Alight.

A light

A’lit.

Alit.

A bit lit.

Branches bumble and shake snow on me.

Wet, excited dogs preparing to come in after a romp.

I slip about on tip toes.

Inside ampersand outside.

Hamhocks hog tie knots.

Due to recent disuse.

I disabuse them of their notion of stiffness.

To remind.

Renew.

A sun barely seen still strikes the sheets

Too brightly.

So much light.

Watch “Small Faces – Itchycoo Park (Lyrics)” on YouTube

https://youtu.be/QBZgu9riZyc

A sun pokes through

My appendenages blanch the blankets.

My duvet is a pacific northwestern grey sky.

I wore it in my flip flop dance of toss and turn all night.

Third pillow fastned tight between legs and arms.

A downy company warmed then warming.

Vigil in anticipation.

Of the bed not being an ocean, but perhaps a sea.

The release of tides of sheets leaves me drenched

In cold morning. I do not mind.

Flitting.

Humming.

The cat begs attention and food.

Stalking her way into my awareness.

The snow play of last night is a black and white still.

Outside my window.

I replay it in my mind’s eye.

Then a sun appears

And everything shimmers.

Shivers of strings

Of colors falling

On blanketed.

Hard to describe dream

Time was askew and this manifested in the way I viewed things.

Things moved too slowly. I moved faster than the flow of the world.

Intermittent whiteouts/color bursts of vision only to return and have missed a few scenes.

I was caring for a young boy of about ten. There were no words exchanged.

He looked sallow, yellowish skin from poor nutrition.

Deep set, big dark saucer eyes.

It was an informal, novel arrangement for the short term.

He asked me there for the night?

His mother. His mother was aweful and possibly maleficent.

He lived in a trailer home, that connected to others like an aluminum apartment complex.

One story.

My cat kept plying at doors, as always.

The door to the connecting abode. She kept opening it and running inside.

I kept sneaking inside to retrieve her. Worried I’d get the boy in trouble with his neighbors.

I finally met the daughter girl of the neighbors. She was about 20 years old. Beautiful.

Suddenly, I’m her age too.

We attend school. We are friends, but it is hard and dangerous to have friends in this place, so we are very quiet.

Her home is immaculate and in the Thai decorative style.

Her mother wears very traditional almost ceremonial garb.

The mother watches me and her daughter but says nothing to me.

Never formally acknowledging me, but I feel comforted by this. Welcomed nonetheless.

The mother talks in mutters to her husband in a language, presumeably Thai, that I do not understand.

Those are the only words.

Me and the daughter never speak.

We draw geometric figures on the hardwood floor with chalk.

I notice a discoloration that is dried urine on the floor.

I worry my cat did this.

She writes, “my brother.”

I never meet him.

It stays grey outside, but now it is darker.

I return to the boy.

He and I take off running into the night.

Frenetic, nervous. Running. Like animals nervous before a storm.

We run for hours through meadows in dim moonlight.

Sparse trees here and there.

Everything is an aqua teal green.

You can feel a building electricity.

Like the accumulation of major internal static charges.

The boy stops. Freezes.

I’m running so hard I almost do not notice.

I stop, turn heel, and tear ass to be at his side again.

I make it to his immediate proximity.

The earth tremors. Isolated to the area immediately in front of us.

The earth tears open like a ripple over water.

A slight scar forming.

It is his mother.

Aweful. Pure force and energy. Intuited.

The boy is now catatonic, stood upright behind me.

There is a surge of fear followed by the security of knowing exactly what you are supposed to do.

Even if you have no idea how to do it.

Just do not let the boy touch anything.

The mom comes up from the ground in colors and consistency the like of a nebula and the root structure of an old tree. Explosions in the air like fireworks.

I just watch. The task is easy, if you do not panic.

~

It may snow today.

Poly-sal’ went acourtin’: Orientation Day

The tradition of Courtly Love in literature comes in three types: allegories, lyricals, and romance (aka færy tales).

In prudence of full disclosure, be aware that Richard Wagner’s opera was tentatively titled Parzifal (just as WOLFRAM VON ESCHENBACH had titled the protagonist) until 1877, when he switched to the handle Parsifal. This change was informed by one theory about the origin and etymology of the name (Perceval > Parzifal > Parsifal).

Vidēre licet the name as of Persian order Fal (Pure) Parsi (Fool).

At this time, your historian has been unable to validate any other origin theories for the name.

Though we shall encounter, virtually, every story ever told within Parzifal, a breakdown of the tradition of Courtly Love and Chivalry during the High Middle Ages as Eschebach tells it is justly prudent.

We concern ourselves, as the reader, with (1) Provençal troubadours, (2) French trovères, and (3) minnesänger.

I’m Wolfram von Eschenbach. I’m a bit of a minnesänger.

Note that Eschenbach states that a Provençal called Kyot (my research suggest Pyot to be a correspondant name in other texts) sent ” the book” to him.

Of keen interest to your historian is the patron enabling Eschenbach to afford the luxury of his composition. Wolfram was under the patronage of Medieval German Mæcenas Herman Landgrave of Thuringia.

taube.jpg

The tradition of Courtly Love and Chivalry during the High Middle Ages as seen from the Critical perspective:

The overall gist, to be concisely reductive) of works concerned with courtly love seems to be the romance of self-perfection in knighthood, where both the chivalric and the spiritual receive their due as part of Love and Sensualism.

Parzifal had the knowledge of chivalry concealed from him until he was of an age able to think for himself.

In C.S. Lewis’ Allegory of Love, he presents the literary tradition of courtly love to include four basic characteristics: humility ; courtesy ; adultery ; Religion of Love.

A feudalization of love.

We will consider the meaning of the above shortly.

The genius of the above description will be revealed in history of words.

Textuality

Metatext (analogue ; tape ; printed to paper)

Light falls upon pages.

Back light shines from digital pages.

Watch “Neil Young Inducts Paul McCartney into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions 1999” on YouTube

“Well, maybe I could do this too.” Neil Young after hearing the Beatles.

Wittgenstein is proud. No doubt.

“Neil Young Inducts Paul McCartney into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions 1999” on YouTube

In this six minute clip, he shares early experiences as a musician, as a musician going solo and the impact of The Beatles, particularly (along with many other musicians) his appreciation for Paul McCartney’s bass playing (“He played it left hand,” says Young. Just like Ziggy!).

As a Southerener (Deep South, to be clear) for over thirty years, The Rolling Stones album, Exile on Mainstreet, Neil Young’s Harvest most closely express the energy of the Dirty South, US. Amusing given neither outfit is American. Whatever an American is. <We were founded on philosophy, not history.>

I still remember the silly outrage I felt, when my father explained Neil Young was from Canada.

Canada?! They already have Joni Mitchell, though! I was so jealous. And disappointed that Young was no longer like me in this sense. Typical adolescent stuff, right? Giggle.

Southern Man and Alabama were outsider views?! Impossible. These had been Songs of Lament I could share in. This owed to me imaging that Neil Young’s perspective arose from living in the gothic American South. Whatever that is.

Suddenly (and without warning. Giggle), they were Songs of Condemnation.

Akin to the this sentiment:

As an older sister, I relentlessly hassle my little sister, but if anyone else so much as looks at her with crossed eyes s/he will be destroyed. That’s my effing sister!

Now I’m older and see the error in my thinking

He still sang the Song of the South.

Genius transcends and understands without experience. He’s in my pantheon of geniuses.

ROLL THE TAPE!

Young understands Wittgenstein’s concept of “the duty of genius,” which, as I read it, boils down to two things:

1. To believe there is no true or real difference between you and the great minds we celebrate (e.g. Abraham Lincoln, M.C. Escher, Johann Sebastian Bach, Umberto Eco, St. Augustine, etc).

2. To try to do your best at persuing a more robust mastery of abilities. Should you find a great passion, engage it and enjoy, but do not be discouraged by the heights others achieved.

It is not that you’ll never be that good. It is that everyone has the potential to be that good.

You just gotta try.

Auto-Transitive

Calling out for collection.

Just a collect call or two through conductive cables.

Throw me a land line.

Far too tangled as between

the trident’s skewers under this sea.

I woke up here,

From a saga of the strife-filled dream of another.

Am í of this dream?

Nave, Knave, Navel, Novel

In this sphere, am í finally loųe unfolded?

I have already been so many things.

I feel weary from all this dreaming.

Again. Rising ignorant and beside myself.

Alone, in barbarous prudence.

Hand-made

Handmaid

Maiden

Maid

Mave

Maven

Litle blue polka dots over my ivory stretched canvas.

Pyramid built for a moth.

Knights vainly going to nowhere fast, keep passed.

You Pure Fools will do fine if you do not hide your eyes.

Troubadours, minnesängers, trovères, you already made a feudalization of loųe

Diabolical idiotēs, you are well-endeared.

Venus stays near as my ally.

I carry but a cordon as an ornament of beauty.

My other hand holds a lamp.

Needing enkindling.

Pyramid for moth.

Conducting that underground current into specific key sites.

Where lode-stones are meticulously fawned over through ritual, mysticism and magic. Pressing them firmly into earthen mound prepared.

I feel as though a hermit knight tonight.

I feel like Persephone waiting for the weather to change.

And now I am Kore: Made. Maiden. Mistress.

But Babylon awaits. So I shall abide.

In lovesome patience, heavy.

Moony Movements

I stand up.

I sit down.

I look for something.

I think of something else.

I forget what I seek.

I still look for the forgotten thing.

It is not what I wanted anyways.

Where did I last see my attention?

Oh. I have left on it on you.

Again.

Supranatural Feedback Fields Looping

Together. We magnetize electricity, 
The charges of our respective bodies.
Look at our electromagnetic field, our maven meadow to run wild.
 
Your masculine contains electric force. 
My feminine contains magnetic force.
See, we are different manifestations of the same phenomenon. 
 
Together we erect
Electro-magne-magickal fields that extend indefinitely throughout space.
Producing charges and changes with and within our bodies.
 
A tapestry interweaving the force of your electric field to my magnetic current.  
 
When our electromagnetic meadow is viewed with Classical eyes:
We seem smooth and continuous.
Issuing out and propagating in the manner of a wave.
Quantum field researchers will see our creation as quantifiable, a function of individual particles.
 
Your electric charges are stationary points making your field solid.
Fierce and indignant.
Much stronger than mine
My magnetic field arises from moving charges.
My capacity and resistance tempers the strength of your charge and can curb or accelerate you.
 
We are force and current.  Stationary yet ever flowing.
 
I am current and capacity.
You are charge and station.

 

When we combine our bodies,
We become one of the four fundamental natural forces existing in nature.

Shiny new Par/z/sifal Reasearch: dictionaried

The above is incorrect. Just my opinion, in light of the below.