Posts

the key

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i’ve spent too many years
lost in the darkness of my mind
heart separated from soul

and then i met you
the key between the two
and the world opened up

like it must have done for
magellan stumbling through
the strait that now bears his name

Promise

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every now and then i fall
apart at the seams, it seems

only held together by
the promise of a new day

and the words i want to say
to you tucked underneath
the floorboards of my sanity

Come out

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let the clouds
bounce off
of my coffee

the black birds
blast chilling night
mares in the grass

the rotten wood
shudders in the garden

the yard can’t come
out to play

Light the world

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This morning came home my fine Camlett cloak, with gold buttons, and a silk suit, which cost me much money, and I pray God to make me able to pay for it. I went to the cook’s and got a good joint of meat, and my wife and I dined at home alone.

In the afternoon to the Abbey, where a good sermon by a stranger, but no Common Prayer yet.

After sermon called in at Mrs. Crisp’s, where I saw Mynheer Roder, that is to marry Sam Hartlib’s sister, a great fortune for her to light on, she is worth nothing in the world. Here I also saw Mrs. Greenlife, who is come again to live in Axe Yard with her new husband Mr. Adams. Then to my Lord’s, where I stayed a while. So to see for Mr. Creed to speak about getting a copy of Barlow’s patent. To my Lord’s, where late at night comes Mr. Morland, whom I left prating with my Lord, and so home.

with a silk suit,
money, and a good joint,
i pray

i saw fortune
light the world with
her creed at night

note: This erasure poem is derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sunday, 1 July 1660

The Sparrow

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I’m a sucker for the broken and the beautiful. I
met you on a random Tuesday. You said hi or
something like that, but all I could see were your lips.

Lips that spoke in code; lips of imagined lust
lips begging and pleading for me to linger longer
lips pouting and preening, a warning sign for me to go.

Seeing you, standing there, in the corner of the room
reminded me of the sparrow I found in my garden once.
It’s little wing broken. Honour demanded I rescue it

from a potentially grim fate, one grey, one tabby,
one black and white. I found an old shoebox, scooped
the bird up, squawking and panting, it cowered in the

corner of the box all feathers, fear, and desperation.
I secured the lid on the box, poked a few breathing holes
in the side. The bird would be safe to heal its wounds.

Your lips demanded I do the (dis) honorable thing
with you despite the ring around your finger.

Awe

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When was the
last time
you walked
around in a
sublime state
of awe?

Still working on the groove

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I didn’t blog as much as wanted to this week. My notebook is full of scribbles, but I haven’t digested them yet. Nor I have I edited all of the photos, but here a few from mu Batsford walk and my wanderings around the paths that lead out from my town.

Friday, 3 July 2020

Worked all morning. Went for a bike ride in the rain, I was desperate for motion and I haven’t been on my bike for several days now because of the rain. Cycling is definitely much more fun in the sun.

At lunch, I heard a loud crash downstairs, like something had fallen off a shelf. My immediate thought was, we must have left a window open and the wind knocked something off of the windowsill. I needed another coffee anyway so I went downstairs to investigate.

It turns out, Shika (our pet tortoise) has figured out how to climb out of her enclosure. Who knew tortoises could climb!

I’ve been dipping in and out of Paul Zweig’s biography of Walt Whitman: The Making of a Poet. I’m also bouncing back and forth from Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within, by Kim Addonizio (whom I have a huge crush on), and drinking from the river of light: the life of expression, by Mark Nepo. Collectively, these are entertaining my current mood.

Watched Hamiliton on the Disney Channel with the family. Watching the film of a play is odd. You definitely have to watch Hamiliton in the theatre if you haven’t seen it already. If fact, I would say, save the experience for live and only watch the recorded version if you’ve seen it performed on the stage in person.

 

I think that catches me up for now.

no glory

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so i lay there
playing with splinters
in the late afternoon

the angels of paradise,
hidden in the mystery
of my days leaning
on worn-out wings, sang to me

sticks lie broken,
dead leaves gather dust,
i am homesick here
in the ashes

all i wanted was
glory, found only
strange sadness instead

More self-reliance, please

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Watched Black Summer on Netflix. The only thing it has going for itself is the zombies. They have more character than the humans we are meant to care about. Black Summer is the prequel spinoff of Z Nation. If I had known that beforehand, I would never have started watching it. I didn’t enjoy Z-Nation and I’m struggling with this one, but feel compelled to watch ’till the end. I love a good zombie story, but these two shows leave me cold. Apologies if you’re a fan of either show.

So Walt Whitman laid down this challenge, One I am eager to accept:

“You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the specters in books; You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me; You shall listen to all sides, and filter them from yourself. 

It’s a challenge to see the world through your own eyes, filtered through the lens of your experiences and hard-won knowledge. There seems to be no lack of individuals who want to do this for you, to tell you what you should do, how you should live, and how you should think. And being herd animals, it’s easy to get caught up in the endless procession of life gurus telling you how to live your best life and have everything you want. 

On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with getting help from teachers, mentors, coaches, and gurus. Where it falls down for me is that many of these folks are as clueless as the rest of us in figuring life out. More than a fair few are just clever marketers who know how to tug on our heartstrings of pleasure and pain in order to separate the unsuspecting and those who lack self-awareness from their hard-earned money.

The self-help industry, in this way,  is a blessing and a curse. I believe many of the folks get into the game with good intentions, but they are driven by the same system of lack that fuels the anxiety of the folks that seek them out.

I like Walt Whitman’ s encouragement for us to do it for ourselves, to be self-reliant in the spirit of Emerson and Thoreau. The true path to liberation is an inward journey. One we must make on our own. 

Speaking of Emerson, he had this to say to about trusting in yourself:

Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought because it is his. In every work of genius, we recognize majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

Lean unto your own understanding is the goal.

Last thing, ponder this:

Which should you listen to, your soul or your will?

Re-inventing myself

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“Like the legend of the phoenix, all ends with beginnings” – Daft Punk

This is my first entry on the new soulcruzer site. I am not new to blogging. I’ve been in the game since 2004.

My most consistent trait as a blogger has been experimentation. If you’ve been a solid follower of this blog (or any of my others), then you’ll know every few years I blow the site up and completely redesign and re-invent what it is about and who I am in relationship to it. I’d like to say I am through with all of that and this is the last iteration of the blog, but knowing myself, as I do, I can hardly make that promise to you, nor to myself. All I can do is follow the flow and see where it takes me.

This iteration of the blog marks a return to my roots as a philosophical thinker and reflector in search of the good, the true, and the beautiful in life.

I feel compelled to emancipate my spirit and focus on the pure joy of living while maintaining, as Plato taught, a balance between my desires, my emotions, and my thoughts.

I am currently working my way back through Lin Yutang’s wonderful book, The Importance of living. He always reminds me of the joys of practicing philosophy with an Eastern mindset.

As he writes in The Importance of Living:

“…the Chinese philosopher’s view of life is essentially the poet’s view of life, and that in China, philosophy is married to poetry rather than to science as it is in the West.”

This philosophy is:

“characterised by: first, a gift for seeing life whole in art; secondly, a conscious return to simplicity in philosophy; and thirdly, an ideal of reasonable living. The end product is, strange to say, a worship of the poet, the peasant, and the vagabond.”

Something else I picked up from Lin Yutang is the idea of the “laughing philosopher” whose only function is “to teach us to take life more lightly and gayly than the average business person does. “We moderns take life far too seriously and as a consequence, the world is full of troubles.” My present direction of travel very much has me aligned with the laughing philosopher.

My intent with the re-invention of this site, and therefore myself, is to move away from the abstract outlines of wisdom and move towards the art of living in a more visible, palpable and understandable way.

“The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.” – John Ruskin

Stranglehold

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I cannot escape the stranglehold of words. To be able to use language like an alchemist mixing chemical concoctions that play with the mind, well now that just turns me on to no end. Words are sexy. I’ve been learning about the sentence and even though I have been writing sentences for more than forty years, there’s still loads to learn.

And then there are American Sentences – the Americanized form of the Haiku invented by the word wizard, Allen Ginsberg. Like the Haiku, American Sentences (example 1 and example 2 and here’s a whole book of them) are meant to be extremely vivid and detailed oriented with the image as the central focus rather than rhetoric or lyricism. I tend to float between image and lyricism.

I especially love what happens between sentences where the juxtaposition of images play with your own experiences to co-create a narrative between writer and reader. For example, when you read the verse below what images spring forth from the depths of your subconscious:

Where were you when the weird bearded beasts
burst from her womb rubbing their buddha bellies and
praying to the sleeping lamb, the flowering whore laughed
and blessed the night; your last words lost in the drowning city.

Those are the kind of words I hear in my head from time to time and often commit to paper (well electronic paper that is). I know I’m sloppy with punctuation, but playing with words is more meaningful to me than grammar. Though grammar is the glue that makes the spells work. Otherwise, you (mis)spell and the magic doesn’t work. And words are magic.

Bring me back the witch’s head. I’ve been obsessing over Courtney Love obsessing over doll parts and faking beyond fake with a crazy ache to have more cake than anybody else at the table.  But the truth is I’m more likely to be what might have been bearing the name of never was.  I don’t know what I’m selling but I’m not selling sheep. Demonology maybe?

Image by Waldkunst

Sometimes my mind gets so saturated with words that it feels like my head is going to explode. Like right now, my head is throbbing but it’s not like a headache. It’s more like all the thoughts in my head want to get out at once, and yet I’m still putting stuff in it right now as I  re-read T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland – probably his most famous poem, but hasn’t been, up until now, one of my favorites. The state my mind is in is making the Wasteland make sense like it’s never done for me before. 

When I’m here, there’s not much else to do but ride it out and wait for the calm to come.

It’s a good place this. 

I like it here
this place where
all of Time meets
inside my head
past, present, future
blending together into
now(here)

I hope you’re staying safe and sane in these crazy times.

Clay

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Bliss

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Yesterday, I was wondering what it would be like to return to a state of innocence like before I was aware of the wicked ways of the world.

Remember Supertramp’s Logical Song, kind of like that before they sent him away!

I was ruminating about this over a turkey sandwich in Starbucks and this poem poured out:

Before you became aware of your sexuality,
Before you became aware of sex,
Before you became aware of good and evil,
Before you became aware of violence,
Before you became aware of deceit,
Before you became aware of betrayal,
Before you became aware of hate,
Before you became aware of work,
Before you became aware of money,
Before you became aware of death,
Before you became aware of sin,
Before you became aware of ‘I’
Before you became aware of limits,
Before you became aware of heartbreak,

There was bliss.

Why stand on a silent platform

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1
Why stand on a silent platform? Zach de la Rocha yells out on Township Rebellion.

And I agree. This is the greatest time in history to get your voice heard around the world in whatever medium suits your fancy. Do you want to write? Start a blog. Do you want to make films or have your own TV show? Start a YouTube Channel. Do you like radio? Start a podcast! Do you want to be a photographer, a fitness model, artist, illustrator? Start an Instagram account. Do you Want to be a musician? Start a Soundcloud account. There is no limit on your means of self-expression.

I wrote my first blog post on the 8th of February 2004. There was a real sense of community then, in the blogging world, mainly because it was new and people were still trying to figure out blogging’s potential. It was more personal then too. But once someone figured out they could make money from blogging, the game started to change. And once people got more comfortable with e-commerce (giving they’re credit card detail over the internet) the game changed for good.

Then social media came along and like TV killed the radio, social media killed personal blogging.

Commercial blogging still managed to thrive. The likes of Huffington Post, Tech Crunch, The Dredge Report, Gawker (now defunct) and others like them, kept blogging alive, albeit with a different cultural flavour. The days of the solo blogger (alone in his or her room) bleeding their heart and soul out into the Internet were gone. The CopyBlogger crowd moved in with the promise that if you niched well and nailed your SEO, then you could quit your day job and be a full-time blogger. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

If you wanted to blog for the love of blogging, you took your game over to social media ‘cause that’s where the eyeballs are. And that’s fine too. But why not write from your own blog and syndicate out, which is what the IndieWeb Movement is partially about. There’s also the fight against having your data harvested and sold to any bidder and then fed back to you via algorithms designed to make you buy more goods and services that (in a Fight Club sort of way) you probably don’t need.

If you have a blog that is sat gathering dust because you fell for the rhetoric that blogging is dead or because you thought (in reference to social media) if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em and left for the promise-land of ‘likes’ and ‘hearts’ and ‘rewteets’, then dust it off, and join the IndieWeb Movement. Your blog deserves it!

Side note: Most blogs, these days, look the same -clean, neat, colour coordinated. Remember when they used to look like this?

2
Travel reminds me that people are pretty much all the same regardless of where you go or what country you’re in. Everywhere we’re trying to survive and that breaks down to 3 things – feeding, fucking, and fighting. Everything else is just a sideshow or a way to kill time between the 3 F’s.

These are the kinds of thoughts I have at 3:30 in the morning.

3
My journey to Madrid was not a direct one. For some reason, nothing was flying out of the UK and going directly to Madrid. My only options were to fly to Frankfurt or fly to Brussels and then onto Madrid. I have a soft spot in my heart for Germans. I lived in the country for 3 years. I grew fond of the people and the place and the culture. Plus I love pretzels like the Germans love pretzels. And since I had an hour layover in Frankfurt I thought I’d seize the opportunity to grab a couple of them:

4
So it’s day one of #blogpals19 and because I’m not one for always choosing the easy route, I didn’t hesitate to jump into this challenge knowing that my first 4 days of the challenge were going to be a challenge because I’m away from my home base on a business trip!

But that doesn’t matter. It’s a great opportunity to practice my mobile blogging chops. I’m using my iPhone 8+ to type this out as I taxi down the runway on LH 1112 to Madrid. I love having a small computer in my hand capable of being a one-stop media creation shop. I can write. I can record and edit audio. I can shoot and edit video. I can take pictures and edit them. I can broadcast live video and live radio. In short, I have the means of total media production in the palm of my hand. I know I’m not saying anything you haven’t heard already, but man this stuff excites the hell out of me. I get fired up every time I think about the power we carry around in our pockets!

5
We’ve done a pretty good job of domesticating humans. Law and order are prevalent in most of the civilised world. It doesn’t matter if I’m in Frankfurt or Madrid people, on the whole, behave the same – we greet each other, respect each other’s space and property. We stand up and sit down when we’re told. We stand in line. We pay for goods and services. We get up, go to work, watch a little TV, watch the news, complain about politics. We eat. We sleep. And we get up and do it all again the next day, until we eventually die.

We are well trained domesticated primates.

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The only thing that separates us from the beasts is our imagination and wild ass capacity for creativity. So don’t be a robot. Create stuff. Express yourself in you’re own unique way.

The world doesn’t need another automaton.

It needs YOU – in all your beauty and glory.

Go make something!

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Pursue more friendships. That’s going right on my vision board. I’d hate to be nearing the end and wishing I’d done so when I had the chance.

 

h/t theguardian.com

Panicked indifference

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My mother belongs to the fear I was needing, interlocking arms with white bags. Today has everything I need – wet clothes, pillowcases, liquor, eyelashes, and chemicals. Excuse the scars. Ducking, jumping, terrible things I was mid-air like a heavy meal. You save people too scared to fall from the sky. I need them to fall to feel better. I wept twice. My favourite emotion, a mix of happiness and sadness. No visible shame just a panicked indifference.

Lost in the woods

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Admiral McRaven has put into words what has been on mind and spirit for the past three and butt years. America has lost its way because the leaders of the country have lost their way and have lost sight of America’s values and what we stand for as a Nation. I spent 11 years in the service of something higher than myself. I was proud of the country I served.

When you serve something greater than yourself, you understand:

…the awesome responsibility that the nation had placed on their shoulders. They understood that they had an obligation to serve their soldiers and their soldiers’ families. They believed in the American values for which they had been fighting for the past three decades. They had faith that these values were worth sacrificing everything for — including, if necessary, their lives.

I believe Admiral McRaven is right:

It is easy to destroy an organization if you have no appreciation for what makes that organization great. We are not the most powerful nation in the world because of our aircraft carriers, our economy, or our seat at the United Nations Security Council. We are the most powerful nation in the world because we try to be the good guys. We are the most powerful nation in the world because our ideals of universal freedom and equality have been backed up by our belief that we were champions of justice, the protectors of the less fortunate.

And if our current government leaders can’t understand that, then as Admiral McRaven says, it’s time for them to step aside.

One of these seconds

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I often wonder
about nothing;
Sometimes I wonder
about something, but
mostly i just wonder
about Hell

and my place in it
or on it if Hell is Earth
and other people

Worlds within worlds
within worlds. Worlds
come and go.

Four births happen
each second of every
day and nearly two
people die each second.

One of these seconds has
my name on it, I know,
we all know, but we carry
on doing what we do until
the second that has our
name on it comes.

Not the kind of thoughts
you want to be having
driving down the road
at speed with

one hand on the steering
wheel and the other hand
flipping through Spotify to
find just the right track to
suit my mood.

For some reason
I like to dance around
the edges of the abyss
comfort i guess,
keeps me loitering on edge.

My postmodern sex goddess

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Giving Aphrodite a run for her rubies would have been easy for you, you are, after all, a postmodern sex goddess. I tried to penetrate the day, but the hours skipped ahead somehow removed from where we sat watching reruns of the Real World.

I thought about Puck. Where did he go after the show? Falling through the darkness, I am terrified of my own crucifixion, which had already begun the day I left my bike on your front porch.

Crushed by love and by war, I miss the stories we used to tell each other at night. I felt ashamed when you said yes. The old man died. You smiled.

“Bitter glory runs in our family,” you said.

There was something I wanted from you – a poor boy’s pale arm – or something like that, I can’t remember.

Do I smell ginger drifting down from the front line?

Internet porn makes life more reasonable when you realise it’s the sub context we think things through, at least for the upwardly mobile anyway, who think it’s erotic to see the source of our modern souls play acted on blackened screens.

“Who would you like to see naked?” I ask her, mildly amusing myself.

“I’d like to see Carl Jung naked while he’s explaining the concept of the collective unconscious and the connection between darkness and vampires and Internet porn that focuses on anuses and amateurs and overweight little freakish Italian men in high heels.”

Sometimes when she talks to me that way, I wish I was a werewolf slayer, like Buffy only buffer.

Why is she here lap dancing me to tears of delight and reverie? I recognise her whore’s eyes now – eyes that attract and dominate and devour time and the handful of people strolling through the garden in the early morning. I listen to her laughter. Boulders roll and chime beneath the current of music whispered to the dead. Like Bruce, I’m on fire. I pray to her in anger hoping she’ll cool my desire. Secretly, I know she will.

She’s a benevolent demon, my petulant little postmodern sex goddess.