New Year's Eve: a doorway

every mystic sees the door
that must be opened
every fool thinks god
is on the other side

a new year is an old one
the door is always open
you need only gaze
quietly
and calmy
into your own heart
to see god
to see yourself

a new year brings new yesterdays
and new tomorrows
but it is always today
in the heart of wisdom
always now
in the heart of god

A Christmas Tale

the snow is deep enough
for me to remember
the long ago
when a family of many
gathered on the hill
and sang Konlendy
drinking Gibbons
and maybe a little more
because of the day

for years
such thoughts would depress me
make me long for another time
another place
today
i jump from time to place
and smile at all the possibilities
as if they were the only one

wakeful unaware

to be awake
to be aware
not the same
and yet, I am not sleeping

read my mind
and you read my soul
sometimes covered with soot
or the dust of an old book
i've long forgotten i've read

rivers

rivers flow
only time will shape them
or the Army

it is not fair, nor is it favorable

wind
water roaring through the moat
wind
fire roaring at the door
wind

fable fabulous , fabricated, fancied, fanciful, fancy, fantasied, fantastic, fascinating, fictional, fictitious, fictive, figmental, forged, formidable

a fart in sleep
wind

photos through an evening filter

man
bread
alone
spirit
anima mea

sound
fury
plymouth
rock

words associated by time, by thematic reading, by traumatic experience
fail to raise the bar because the lawyers are sitting on it

why would I care about that?

it’s not always that the imagination is fully fueled, in a high gear, and cruising.  sometimes, it’s idling in the parking lot, waiting for Godot.

man and superman, good and evil, god and creation, all in a paper back, waiting for the sun to rise, then off to the dumpster.

cheeseburgers at midnight and what do you do with a drunken sailor.

someone's mind is somewhere, someone’s thoughts are sometimes a little behind it but it’s survivable

another poem about love’s demise

the woman came from somewhere north of reality
north because of the coldness of the way
she slit the throat of his his fantasy
and watched it bleed into reality

she did not like the blood
nor the reality of it
and so
she found another dream
one housed in a body that was not his

no further record is known of her activity

the life of the artist as a memory lost in the vacuum of the daily grind

sitting high
above the struggling mass of humanity
the artist sits on a throne carved from the bones of mundanity

memories swirl like the mist over a moor in the early morning of his life
he is awake
but unaware

let nothing stir his reverie
it is all that’s left
of his clever life

another rainy day

der Lebenkünstler lebt

ohne künst

weil es regnet

traurig regen

grauer tag

grauer geist

grau

grau

irrinerungen wachrufen

unvergesslich

october is the most interesting month

it is october
golden
warm
and swept by the gentle breeze
of memory

is is memory
golden
warm
and swept by the gentle breeze
of time
the breeze that sweeps
the pain
from the present
by creating the past

A Sad Song and a Refrain of Contentment

how many poets have written
of their shattered dreams
their battered hearts
their sad and painful
memories?

all of them, I think,
the ones who feel,
have shared this death,
this descent into shadow

it's not a happy sandboy's dream
it's not a day of sun and gentle breezes
it is a dark night of loathsome dreams
and songs of despair
sung to a guitar tuned lower than the mind can sink

yet, waking to a promise of deliverance
the soul repents its lack of faith
retrieves its face
from the mirror of her soul
and sits quietly
remembering love
and all of the reasons
it should not have been

not every mind recovers
from its fantasies
but most are stronger when they do

no longer dreaming of your loveliness
your lovelessness
the poet sings a song of contentment

you are gone
and he
alone
and stronger than before
re-tunes his guitar
re-tunes his heart

Много лет тому назад

That means, a long time ago.  There were many things, a long time ago, as many as there are today.  That’s a fact.

Thinking about…

I’m thinking about taking the train down to Warburg today.  I cleaned the apartment yesterday, so it would be best for me to avoid living here all day in order to preserve order for at least twenty-four hours……

Why the hell do I use ellipsis so often?

Maybe because this is how I see myself-

Poetry and its Ramifications

if you’re really honest in your poetry, you leave yourself wide open to criticism, you hurt other peoples’ feelings, you hurt your own.  I am that kind of a poet. A poem is a linguistic manifestation of emotions.  I don’t share the tranquility I feel when ironing a shirt or loading the dishwasher, but I do give you glimpses of both the mania and the depression associated with the beginning and the end of human relationships.  The middle is something we all know.  It’s usually the reason for the end.  Today, I’m going to give you two middles, which one would you choose?

 

I. Mountains, rivers, country roads
Barflies, bards, and bats in the living room

we never sail or fly together
but our canoe is well-used
as is our tent and our bank account…..

II. Conversations on a country path
Coffee, pastry, language lessons

we never went to Paris
but we know the Rheinland well

III.  M Street and a mountain lake

The rest of them are too short to describe, although numerous.  These three suffice to describe the way I’ve lived my life at the middle points of relationships.  You may have already read the beginnings and the ends, or may have experienced them.  Fire, ice, and other cataclysmic nouns, surrounded by adjectives rich enough to make you pray before a porcelain god….. 

I still haven't gotten a clue

Which is different from not having a clue.  Something about the Heforder Vision pageant is still unclear.  There is most likely an underlying Catholic reason for this.  With all of my time in Catholic schools and all of my reading of Catholic literature, I am a Catholic by birth only.  My friend, who was ordained a Catholic priest in the La Salette order and spent 11 years in the service of the church, but who is now a Mennonite and a counselor in a hospital, once told me my thinking was too intellectual for me to be a practicing Catholic.  I've been thinking about this, since I am really not a practicing anything.  The closest I come to religion is meditation, and that is not something disciplined, and results in short stories and character sketches and flights of fantasy, more so than any spirtiual enlightenment, unless love alone is enlightenment.

I took Thomas Merton's mantra to heart, some forty or more years ago.  God is Love.  God is Life.  God is Light.  For me, these are the three most important elements of existence.  We all think we understand the first (a notable exception shall remain unnamed). The second needs no explanation.  We experience it, and then it is gone, unless we believe otherwise.  The third is, for me, finding and sharing knowledge and experience.  And so is my religion.  Higher power.

Waiting for the clue...

I'm sitting around my intellect, drinking writing, while brewing a pot of my own fiction.  I've moved into Paolo Coelho's world for awhile, befriending his mystics and pilgrims and teachers and trying to find my own.  My old friend Marion has become a Zahir, in Coelho's sense of the word.  I see her in places we've been together and places where we've not.  It's not an obsession as in Coelho's book.  I don't seek her out, but by the same token, I'm not seeking to remove her from consciousness.  I wonder about my motives.  Possibilities include loneliness, love, lack of ambition, and lust.  I don't really feel lonely, except for conversation on something other than football, wurflen, or skat and put in half an hour to an hour at Giovanni's to satisfy the minimum requirements of human contact.  It may be lack of ambition, because of the amount of ambition I'm using in travelling, research, and writing.  Her memory keeps me company there. It may also be love, but something akin to the Platonic. And it could just be all of the reading, two to three books a week, most of which entail some form of man-woman relationship.

The thought of a new relationship has occured to me, and although I've met some attractive and intelligent women in the last few months, I haven't felt a real attraction to any of them.  The course ahead is to wait for the omens, follow the signs, let it fall into my lap.  If it doesn't, then life remains uncomplicated.  The perfect solution would be for her to just say let's go back to the way we were.  I could handle that quite nicely.  A good friend who likes to walk and travel and learn.

White Russians

Au Lecteur (thanks Baudelaire)
thanks to chance (not the gardener, but the phenomenon) i have encountered several russian, byelrussian, and polish women over the last few months.  this is for them.

dark eyes
bright eyes
smiles too which disarm
would they would as well disrobe
my russian is too shy to ask
perhaps i should speak to them in english

it is of interest to my readers
that the older i am the more interesting
to younger women
if you are young
(for now, that means over thirty and under fifty,
although both borders are acceptable)

i am not seeking love
but will accept it
if the wind is right
and the sea is calm

dark eyes
and accents that make my german
seem almost perfect
sit with me in the cafe, my reader,
sit and drink them in

The Muse is Still Awake

The Muse no longer lives in Bielefeld.  She moved out of another's body and returned to mine.  The Muse lives in Herford with the writer, the sculptor, the photographer, the nature lover.  The Muse lives in me and I am the Muse.


Which is just my way of saying, I don't need external inspiration, although it's nice to have.  Being completely alone with the exception of waiters and waitresses and cafes full of strangers, I've remembered where the fantasy lies.  

More about Sundays

aside from the obligatory walk

there is also coffee and cake

both are more enjoyable

when in the company of someone you care about

as it stands

as I stand

there is no one to walk with

and the coffee comes without cake

at the cafe

meaning and its opposite

man lost in mind's gelatinous bog

mind lost in man's diaphanous fog

field, forest, cafe

workshop, living room,kitchen

these are my world

as for friends,

i have my knives, my chisels,

my wood, and my words

a portrait

without a face

time heals all.....not always

there are certain types of wounds that can't be healed by time without a catalyst. I use writing, walking, and wood carving to pull me out of musings and mental meanderings that can lead me to that never never land of could have been....

After four months, she is still in memory when I am not at work.