Generations

There are some things we can only learn for ourselves; mental things that can’t be written down, recorded, even passed from parent to child; things that we lose between generations.

Run

Running up a hill, nearing muscle failure, fight or flight makes sense: whether, based on your body, your energy expended before muscle failure will result in a won fight or an escaped flight, makes the choice. If both result in death, I suppose you choose the best odds.

With you

When I am here with you, especially one person, even more so my love, I am here with you fully. When I am not with you, even when I sit with you physically, I am in another world.

Hike

How many deaths have been caused by a surreal misunderstanding of reality? The mountains pinch away into one point as I hallucinate. 

These woods give me energy to write. I feel my mind overwhelmed, begin to worry, then redirect my thoughts to writing. As my friends capture the moments in photos, I capture them in words. 

The energy of nature fills me and I empty it back out. It fills me to the brim and I spill over. I give the energy back. After all, I am a vessel. 

Let myself teem with it. My body is weak for the strength of my soul. 

The mountains clearing up. Nah, just rolling in a new face. Like the mountains change cloud cover, I change my guise.

Spending time

I am not yet good enough at maximizing the time I do have in the present to start worrying about how I will spend my time in the future.

Fork

I try not to worry too much 
about choosing a road 
and instead focus 
on the fork itself, 
so that I find myself 
all of a sudden 
at another fork 
and so start 
to focus on this fork 
just the same as the last.

Feel

Sometimes when I am writing a message to a friend I can’t decide whether to say “I think” or “I feel.” Almost always I choose “I feel.” Just seems that my friends understand me better when I say it that way.

Memory

Meditating in yoga my memory cuts through the shallow recent into the deeper past. When I deny my mind its easy present bias, still it wants something to hold, and is not satisfied with just a simple focus on the breath.

So it reaches deeper and wider, dodging the defenses that protect my meditation and pulling memories from my childhood which I didn’t even know I still had, memories which are much more poignant and effective at breaking my concentration and occupying my thought.

Orthodoxy

You can create your own orthodoxy. Look and say these are the facts of the thing and from such one-time facts follow these all-time principles. Only a half-man is forced to follow the orthodoxy of tradition; he has not spent enough time paying attention himself. If he had, he would have realized that all the facts are contained in one moment of space and time, one consciousness—His own.

Old man

On the way home,
I walk on the sidewalk
behind an old man
and go at his pace
to see what it'll be like.

Sculptor

He said it was necessary that he became like them before he could sculpt the world. A sculptor can only create the object with a great amount of personal skill and time alone. But the object always has a subject. And he cannot possibly know what it looks like without subjecting himself to the subject which he must remember when creating the object alone.

He gets into it and soaks it up, then goes away to render it in his art form. Before he must come back again to get more. He must be alone and away from it all to create, but only after being deeply with and part of everything.

Natural drugs

It’s the trippiest thing, after a lethargic Saturday, I wake up on a Sunday, and fight to return, not artificially with coffee, but naturally by sitting up straight in the early morning and enduring to do my work, for two hours; my back hurts and I am not enjoying myself, then all of a sudden at 9:45am, the whole world returns to me, and the art flows through me, so that I can write again, and the edges of everything that were blurry are sharp again.

Solitude

Only in solitude can one encounter the clarity of oneself, and it is this richness which one has to offer the community.

Yogi

A yogi says: your inhale invites the fight-or-flight response, and your exhale is the calming mechanism. When you start to think, blow air out of your mouth.

Alone

Whenever I get away from it all and spend time alone and just be quiet and content, I feel like a little kid gotten into something I should not’ve. Even alone, I feel like they can see it in my eyes and smell it on my breath when I return.

Someone else

I wonder about what keeps me from waking up tomorrow and becoming someone completely different: moving to the other side of the world and changing my name.

Loner

The key to being alone is to be like a homebody; just as a homebody prefers their own abode to anywhere else in the world, so too does a loner prefer his own body and mind to most others most the time.

Leper

Any man alone, even a socialite, looks like a leper, without a partner, to invoke his social qualities.

Bad writing

I must take my hyper-self-awareness, and turn it on others; if I’m ever to write, anything other, than loves stories, to myself.

The Artist

Her artistic life, she can only live one day a week; and spends the other six days getting ready for it.

Safety

Ever since 11th street, I’m more conscious of the vulnerability of the back of my head, and always want to be looking around to make sure somebody doesn’t come up with a shovel or a wrench.

Swim

It all wells up and gets me so anxious, when I’ve not flown a kite or been with friends at the surface and resisted my conditioning long enough to swim deep mentally and grab at something new and original.

Glass door

I have a plant, that sets on my bookshelf, in my apartment. I believe, whether it is true or not, that it makes me healthier: to have some nature, inside my industrial apartment. Only that, some mornings, when I leave for work, I forget to open the blinds for my plant to get light. And some nights when I get home, I’m so tired, that I forget to water it. So that, the plant may be healthy for me, inside my apartment; but my apartment, is not healthy for the plant.

One day, I opened the glass door to my balcony, and set the plant outside, to get sun all day and water from the rain. I planned to bring it back inside the next morning, but have now left it outside on the balcony for several weeks. I can still see it through the glass door. And so receive any health benefits from “seeing” plant life, but cannot smell it, nor receive its oxygen from my carbon dioxide.

That glass door—between the inside of my industrial apartment and the outside of sun and rain—is a line in the sand, and the human species is drawing near to a point where we must decide which side we’re on.

So

I'm really starting to believe in it,
and have so much anxiety about losing it.

Cut

A couple of years ago I made an incision but couldn’t cut all the way through and so left just a perforated line; today, I cut all the way through.

Horizontal

Up and out of it all,
through a vertical,
to grab onto something original
and then endure a great anxiety
to pull it back down
and spread it out,
horizontally,
where it can be shared.

Tourist

I get up and out of it,
focus on something else,
live another life; 
then return
like a tourist 
and find it anew
—to read 
a different writer,
my past self.

Anxiety

I drink coffee in the morning and write poetry and get so worked up and anxious and have a panic attack and think of so much at once that I’m thinking of nothing at all just feeling a great worry and so think to myself about my artist friend who after a day of creating has real men in her real bed and so think to myself: I just need to fisticuff tonight and I’ll feel better.