For Rivi - With My Heart Full of Hope

By one count, 22,000 are dead, by another, 23,700. Nature's fist slamming down on the earth, making a massive display of a point that will be lost in the shuffle of petty concerns, greedy enterprise, political wrangling and meanness.

We will memorialize September 11th, 2001 until we as a people, are so tired of the words, we will finally tune it out.

For this extraordinary display of power we have only tasted slightly through the hurricane season, we will have instant amnesia as long as our lives are not directly affected. What an infantile nation, full of self-indulgent children who don't want to learn any lessons from what life brings us.

When the towers fell, I had the thought that one slap from the planet could take entire countries out with a single event. And it has nearly done so.

Will we learn anything from this might, which in the eye of a rational beholder, reduces humanity to the importance of dust? Isn't it time to begin the long journey toward adulthood and perspective? Isn't it time for us to be a little bit kinder, a little less interfering with the happiness of others?

I have a friend whose family is in Sri Lanka, another whose family is in Malaysia. What can I say to these people? So much grief may await me in my mailbox one day in the near future. What consolation can be offered? This from only two friends, two individuals. Think of the hundred thousand lives that will have been so badly torn and damaged, and add a potent quantity of grief.

This is the world. America is not the world. It is merely a fortunate place.

We should be in mourning for the losses of others, but I doubt many of us will do that. It's far away, and we are safe...we think. We will turn to a TV station that amuses us, and we will still hate blacks, and gays, and whoever else has the nerve to disagree with our politics or religious views. Not one iota of open heartedness will result from watching a genuine tragedy of unthinkable immensity as it continues to unfold, hour by hour, day by day.

We will fight insane wars for the purpose of financial gain, we will call strangers enemies, and we will kill them. We will keep on keeping on.

Meanwhile, nature settles into a quiet phase, and builds up it's rage for the next time. Is it trying to teach us something? Ask yourself that question. I do.

Path - Dedicated to Ara

I do understand.

Click image to enlarge.

Blind Love - Tom Waits

Blind Love


Now you're gone, and it's hotels and whiskey and sad-luck dames
And I don't care if they miss me, I never remember their names
They say if you get far enough away, you'll be on your way back home
Well, I'm at the station, and I can't get on the train

Must be blind love, only kind of love is stone blind love
Blind love, the only kind of love is stone blind love
With your blind love, oh it's blind love, stone blind love
It's your stone blind love

Now the street's turning blue, the dogs are barking and the night has come
And there's tears that are falling from your blue eyes now
I wonder where you are and I whisper your name
The only way to find you is if I close my eyes

I'll find you with my blind love, the only kind of love is stone blind love
The only kind of love is stone blind love
The only kind of love is stone blind love
With your blind love, oh your blind love, your stone blind love

It's your blind love, the only kind of love is stone blind love
Stone blind love, the only kind of love is stone blind love
With your blind love, the only kind of love is stone blind love
Stone blind love, stone blind love
End

Were it not for blind love, some might never be loved at all. Is it because they are unlovable? Or because they are unseen, kept safely invisible to those who only see what they recognize as being proper to love? An eternal question in the game of life.

What?

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

The Razor

She has a black razor, a gift from a Prince who stands high in her estimation. The Prince arrived long ago, in the dead of night, bearing the gift. He laid it upon a small marble-topped table in her living room. He said little, since the gift was so laden with implications one might derive from past experience, or from dreams, or sometimes, from terrible realities.

Each morning she stands looking at it before starting the day. It is always close to her in thought, as though there were links of fine chain connecting them.

The black razor is mysterious. It speaks it's own language. It tells tales of nightmare landscapes, and of flying on wings that sprout from the shoulders of some who drink a secret potion, unafraid of the result. It speaks of escapes that are accomplished not by going outward, but going inward instead. Interior magic is heavy, dense and powerful. Its potency can not be diluted by exterior sound and fury.

She loves the black razor with a peculiar intellectual twist. The flame is not dampened by this, but fueled instead.

She is perverse.

At times, just after nightfall, she kisses the blade, imbuing it with her spirit, and breathes upon it, leaving a film resembling smoke. When it clears, the eyes of another look out at her.

Communion.

She loves the long sleek lines of it, and finds a deep, almost erotic pleasure in pressing the flat of the blade to her cheek, feeling it's cool surface warm to her own temperature. It becomes a part of her. Ever dangerous, ever mesmerizing, never sheathed.

It is the constant reminder of life as it might trickle away through a cut across a vein.

Or, of a close elegant shave, leaving a sensuous silken surface behind.

On certain nights, she is awakened by the presence of the moon. It sits squarely centered in the window.

There was a fine crescent moon in a dark sky. It was the colour of ivory. Small clouds moved slowly across it. It was the magic vehicle of witchery, which enables peculiar loves to fly toward each other soundlessly. Speaking in ancient tongues too arcane for others to know, thoughts are exchanged.

The palm of her hand promises either genius or madness. Is there a difference between them?

Hagfish straight up...

...no water, no ice, no twist. First person singular. No artifice.

Time to talk. My house. I do the talking.

Link Policy: Links from this site exist because I have found some merit in the places they lead to. The meritorious are things perceived as funny; profound; poetic; of intriguing content not necessarily understood by me, but recognized as good stuff; brilliant minds reflected; fine photography; great graphics-non photographic-as in fractals etc; or the deep and tortured-which I am qualified to recognize. This is the spice that gives me life without terminal ennui.

I do not like stupidity, self-congratulatory puffery, reliance on dumb sleaze and/or profanity to attract/keep an audience, or hearing about the new pink sweater someone just bought. I will not link to these sites. I cannot promise you the links I have will lead you to Wonderland, in fact, some of them might just lead you into hell. One man's Hell is another man's sweet spot.

I do not suffer fools well. It is my hope, that I don't send you to the house of a fool. All of life is subjective. So is taste.

If a site I've linked to starts to bore me, I will delete it. A piece of advice--if you use a link from this page, bookmark it for yourself. My level of tolerance may be different from yours. This advice is given as a courtesy.

Reciprocal links are appreciated, but not required.

Anonymous Comments: While your input is appreciated because it shows you've taken an interest in my work, there is something sorely lacking. It is personalization. A name would be the acceptably polite thing to attach. A first name would do nicely. (Not looking for the strawberry birthmark here.)

Content: Please bear in mind that I am a writer first and foremost. No writer worth his or her salt will deliberately bore the reader. Embroidery makes the cloth more interesting. I have the intention of doing that. If I fail you...what can I say? Nada. If you want meat and potatoes I suggest a cooking site. They can be loads of fun and full of horny innuendo too.

Here you get nepenthe, hemlock, sensuality, the occasional aphrodesiac, sarcasm, and sometimes, stiletto sharp nastiness..maybe like today. Plus, horny innuendo. In the mood for "lite"? A word I hate incidentally--trip on over to Hagfish Lite, a name chosen in sarcasm. Stupid (but not always stupid) humor is another facet.

It is appreciated that some of you would like to advise me. If I show distress and angst, it is part of the process of my life. Please understand, you do not know me. You don't know anything about me.

You only know of me, that which I choose to tell you. Take it with as many grains of salt as you need or wish. Above all, don't let me bring you down.

This is a book, slow in the crafting. It will never be published anywhere but here. You are in a gondola, lying back on the cushions. I am the gondolier and the storyteller.

Sometimes I weave, sometimes I spin. There is always a center of truth in what I tell you, but whether the truth is mine or not, is only for me to know. Your perception may be based on your own imagination, not mine.

Storytellers carry you away on their breath. If you open your eyes and look down to realize only a breath is holding you, you might fall on your head. You wouldn't want that, would you? Drift, I won't land you someplace unfriendly. Maybe.

New Places: It is with pleasure that I introduce you to some new places I've found. Starting at the top -
World Through My Eyes
This is some of the most beautiful photography I've seen . The photographer is sensitive, but also very much aware of line. A combination of inherent mathematical consciousness, and soul-beauty. Visit. You won't be disappointed.

In alphabetical order...new minds to explore.

blacktooth
Within the layers of this place, if you look carefully, you will see struggle, honesty, intelligence, striving, nobility, sorrow.... One human being making the best of some of the hardest days. A musician, a writer, a worker...a man self-described as, "a wormfood man applying unaccepted philosophy to this crapshoot called life - or something." Walk gently here with good intention. You may come away humbled. You won't be the same, as you leave, closing the door softly behind you. Remember...there are layers. You must seek.

The Vault of Buncheness
Oh my, how I love this guy. This is a man one would find described as killingly funny. The description would be true. And he's a food maven. Better yet. He's irreverent, so smart he makes my toes curl, because I'm an intelligence junkie, and he's living in my old home town, well...almost. Close enough for me to smell the "dirty hot-dog man" wagons. And I can hear the screech of the subway.... He would ask why I wanted to hear that. I would tell him, try this place for a while, friend.

To the invisible man, C. W.

You did not enter my life. I entered yours. You are twenty-five years old, and you are almost as cynical as I am. Almost as cynical as S. J. Almost, only because it takes time to perfect that patina which is a sign of longevity.

I sniff at you, and the scent is too familiar to walk away from. You remind me of someone I love. You are beautiful and frightening in your reality. You are terrible in your reality. You cause me to cringe in your reality. Your reality is a honed razor poised at the jugular.

I have maintained for many years that I do not fear death, only the means through which I achieve it. Am I lying to myself? I believe death is the surcease of all pain, and that it brings with it absolute termination of consciousness. The burning...heh...fizzling question that floats ectoplasm-like through my atmospheres is then...do I fear obliteration?

Answer: No.

Reason: Obliteration ends comprehension. Comprehension is required to allow fear to exist.

And you? You speak of dying. Do you fear it? I do not think you fear it. Not at the intellectual level. Perhaps at the cultural level you might. But you are intellectual first.

You hold life in a death grip. You continue to breathe in, breathe out, even on the worst days.

Through words, you are immensely powerful and provocative.

My greedy indulgent side says, stay, live, write more. I am already addicted to the recounting of your harsh life, and your contradictory self that speaks a million languages.

Live. Who am I to request that?

I said you remind me of someone I love. He is a tree filled with dark flowers. I hunger for the blossoms he sheds, that fall upon this strange virtual paper, and leave their indelible mark and scent on my life. And you are like him. You both tell true and naked horror stories.

Yellow Moon

Yellow moon like butter
Sitting on a dark plate.
Warm moon says love
Who ever pleases you,
And even some that don't
But love, because I am
Followed by cold skies
Distant and unattainable,
And you are a distressed
Bitch goddess who needs
A little softening up, like
Butter on a dark plate
Resting beside the sun.

Novemberata

High-tension-wire days and nights. Sleep is more fitful than ever and silence seems an odd course to take, but it is taken. Against whom or what, to protect whom or what?

Unanswerable.

If we are silent we do not inflict too many deep wounds, only the wound of silence itself. If we practice silence, we inflict the wound upon ourselves also, and so it goes, round and round.

The moon hangs in clear skies, and the same moon covers all the silent ones with the same light. Is this communion? Is this the kiss in the dark?

A breath is caught in the cold of night, hangs as visible mist, then is gone. An exhalation that says the word "sigh", but if there is no one to hear it, did it really happen?

When the eyes are closed, darkness covers all things except reality.

She kisses the arch of a certain distant foot. Not in humility, for she is never humble, unless it's part of the worst game in town.

She displays the palm of her hand.

Evening Descends Over Hanover, PA

Click photo to enlarge.

Dream Tigers

Dream Tigers

The Dream Tigers came again last night.
They breathed on my face, taking my air away.

Their feet are so huge, they never sink
into the featherbed.

Some nights I don't know they're there,
but on the nights when they feel hungry
they nibble at my fingers, swallowing
the tips like cherries. I can't ignore them then.

I smell them when the air is heavy with fog or mist,
and I try to lie so still they'll pass me by as they
prowl, searching for something new to eat.

My cherry fingertips grow back. The Dream Tigers
know this, timing their voracious night walks to
coincide with a fresh crop. I tried sleeping in a tree,
but they climbed better than I, and knocked me to the
ground to teach me a lesson. They reminded me then
of my evil stepmother, who beat me black and blue,
but never where it showed.

The Dream Tigers know the cherry tips of my fingers
are ignored by others, and laugh at me for caring
so much whether I can push a button to light the room;
or write a letter asking to be rescued from them.
They know they are supreme in the Land of Night,
where Anything can happen, and sometimes does.

I want to run away from the Dream Tigers, but
they're faster than I am, and I fear that if I annoy
them too much, they'll eat my legs instead, and I'll
be there, smelling them, and listening to them
rumbling as their appetites sharpen, finally eating
until I never grow back again.

A. Murray
Based on a dream told to me by Richard Sellers.

Autumn Sunday

Sunday. A day that has always carried with it enforced rest, in the back of her mind.

And what's worse, it's autumn, the least enjoyed season, and the most challenging when it comes to skirting deep winter induced depression.

Everything that could happen in the way of bad events seems to happen in the fall of the year. The word, fall, itself, conjures up grim memories of bygone days and hours. It was in the fall that she fell, never to walk properly again, and it was in the fall the forced separation from her mother when she was seven years old took place, leaving a bitter segment behind itself that never sweetened with time, and it was in the fall she'd made hard decisions concerning other lives that depended on wisdom she was unsure of, and on and on...

The sun shines with a defiant brilliance, while swarms of birds shriek and complain of the upcoming trip south. They are everywhere, cacophonous and repellent. Starlings, the accidental natives, with little to commend them as birds go, perch in the trees all around her home. They make it impossible to ignore the cold northern air that has settled over the region. They are the harbingers of discomfort.

They fall silent as suddenly as they had begun the discussion of flight plans. It is eerily quiet, save for the music coming from the living room. From the same window through which she watched the disappearance of the blue and white umbrella, she sees the flight resume. A mass exodus.

When the geese begin their journey to a more amenable clime, the vision of their chevron flight which invokes poetry so easily in many, strikes her with great deep sadness, while at the same time, thrilling her with it's perfection, and more so when they break ranks and engage in a chaos of design.

Their cries across evening skies that are often shot through with outrageous sunset colors lining charcoal clouds, say less of abandonment than invitation to come along.

Come…fly with us, we know the way to escape from this, and as you like us, we like you. Come be with us. You will be one of us; you will be a kindred soul among us. We will alight near friendly waters, and we will coast on the winds, and warm air will caress us into a sense of continuity, and safety.

But she has no wings.

The Plume

He was standing on the corner, just strumming his guitar….

That was the first time she saw him, but she was too involved in buying a feather to pay attention to a skinny raggedy man, playing for dimes and quarters, while the reality was nickels and pennies…and not too far you can get on that.

It was weeks later that they crossed again, she with a bruised face, maybe a broken nose and a fifty in her pocket. The air was damp from the night and the river, and she was beyond caring. She came toward him like a moth approaches flame, full of wondering what the hell it is, and unable to decipher any answer at all, and equally unable to break the hold of the light. It was the music.

The john had grudgingly given her the fifty after she'd gotten shrill and loud about the sum since she normally got a hundred…he had been unceremoniously brutal, slapping her repeatedly across the face while he stroked his cock. She figured it came to two dollars a slap. Deduct the cost of the torn jacket and the panty hose, and she was in the red, with no prospects until the bruises healed.

When she'd started the shrill complaint about the money, he grabbed her by the arm and swung her toward the stairs, letting her go flying so she rode down them on her back. The jacket just one more casualty, having caught on a protruding nail when she brushed against the wall as she slid.

And now she was standing in front of a loser without a hope or a dollar bill. The music was soft, as if it was being played for the musician only, and she was being allowed to eavesdrop on a private conversation. She reached into her pocket, and fished out the fifty. Blood money. She dropped it into the case at his feet. He finally looked up at her. He was smoking a joint, and offered her a hit. She took a drag, sucked it in, holding the smoke deep in her lungs, while staring out across the street…still disconnected.

He waved the joint away when she passed it back to him, bent over the case, laid the guitar in it, paying no attention to the fifty, clicked the locks on the lid and stood, all in one motion. He offered her his arm, and said, "where to?"

As they reached the second floor of the apartment building, he grew aware of the tapping of her stiletto heels on the small black and white tiles of the floor…the way she seemed to be a beaten drum in an echo chamber. Just before the third floor he stopped her on the stairs. Standing behind her, looking at the torn nylon encasing her legs streaked with blood, he reached down and took one of her shoes off, held her foot so she was standing there like a crane, and placed a kiss in the hollow of the arch.

On the fifth floor, she turned to a door, took the keys from her purse, and walked into the apartment, without looking back at him. She heard the click of the lock, and the security chain slide into place. He was a quiet walker, and she felt him behind her before he spoke, asking if he might take a shower.

He came into the kitchen naked and un self-conscious, seating himself in front of one of the plates full of eggs and potatoes. They ate in silence, and didn't look up at each other until he finally raised his eyes, assessing the damage. All he said was, 'better put some ice on that."

After a while she rose from the table, and took his hand, leading him to the bedroom. He lay down on his belly, stretched so long and thin, like a white stripe on the red sheet. He heard her in the bathroom running the water, and he thought he caught the sound of a muffled sob…a woman crying into her bath towel…classic scenario.

He was half-asleep when she came back, and stood beside the bed. She carried a long ostrich plume, soft as a cloud. She ran it slowly down the length of his body. Over and over she slid the plume down his back from neck to feet in one direction. He slept.

Somewhere around three in the morning he came out to the living room with a towel wrapped around his waist. He reached toward her and said, "you'd best come to bed now, it's late." She followed him, and folded herself down beside him.

In the morning, she wakened to the scent of his skin, and his long warm arm laid across her like a shield.

Years later, after his songs had begun to sell, he bought her a fur jacket, and a pair of silk stockings.

For S.J.

*fic*

Falling Away

She thought about the falling away process. She recognized it came in clusters. Several people close to her, all dying within a short time, several friends leaving her sphere at the same time, whether they were acquainted with each other or not. It left a strange veil of cold over her to think about it.

Things are presaged by dreams in her life. Some so distorted, she only recognizes them by a remote similarity of color or design in a waking incident, and often put this down as déjà vu, until memory forces itself upon the conscious mind.

The other dreams though, are starkly real, They play themselves out in the conscious and aware mind with a jolting adherence to fidelity. Those dreams give her a sense of having lived too long in the present time warp, and a desire to escape through a small opening, if she could find it. The truth of it all is that searching for the entry/exit of a particular time is futile. Time wraps itself around some, and force-feeds events into their lives no matter how valiant their attempts to escape might be.

She pulls her wrap closer around herself, staving off the chill of knowing too much at times. The affliction is coveted by the uninitiated, who imagine it as a magic carpet ride...this ability to understand.

There were times she tried to tell them what it was like, but it was a waste of breath to explain how it felt to recognize the horror of phantom pain in a limb severed in an accident, or to know the emptiness of the bed of the widow, or the hunger for a gentle touch the leper lives with, even as the flesh loses it's capacity to receive sensations.

Or how it is to feel the fear of the cancer victim, waiting, terrified of death, knowing his kiss will come. Or of how she sees the deadened eyes of the newly hopeless, recognizing the echo of the moment before the heart ceased looking for a solution.

The chill passes over her again. She knows it comes from within. The room is quite warm. She calls it by its name. It does not leave, but dogs her steps as she crosses the room, lifts the dark green watering can, and gives continued life to the hanging plant.

Later, as she leans back in a chair not designed for lounging, she sees a spider making it's way across the ceiling, and wonders, if it fell onto her tongue, what it would taste like.

Slip-Sliding Through a Mad Mind

Oh, how I wish you were close by, so that I could sit with you, talk with you, letting it all spill out like suspicious fruit from a dangerous cornucopia, telling you my strange not so strange ideas of grand conspiracies that will bring down the world.

I would talk on and on perhaps concurrently exhausting you and your patience with me.

I do know you love your silences, the absence of other humans in the same room, your ritual solitude. I love these things myself, but for me, too much of a good thing can be poison, and I may settle for the wrong companions in a moment of weak loneliness, or jump from a high place.

What if I was to allow the words to escape the chamber of my mind where they are safely locked away, and one of them heard me? You see? You see? How close I get to the breaking point….

And I fear you’d turn away from me in disgust because I talk too much. You would say, "listen to this, have you ever heard of this band?" as you put on a loud piece of music whose appeal escapes me, and I blurt out, "got any Satie?" and ruin it all.

Oh, and I think of our writing. Yours is careful and under control. You know just where to put the punctuation marks…oh, god, it does make me wish I’d been a scholar instead of a dreamer in school. All those little rules utterly escape me and you know all of them. I feel in awe of this.

I have a crazy indifference to sounding sane sometimes when it’s flying forth, and don’t care how it comes out. You, on the other hand, construct. I spew like a fountain, or a girl caught unawares by a friend telling a joke, when she has a mouthful of soda pop.

You build.

When you tell me about something you’ve read, you’ve understood every word on the page. You’ve given it deep thought. I pluck data haphazardly from inelegant sources, the Internet, tabloids and pulp fiction, often imagining I know the meaning of it all. Your comprehension puts mine to shame, I sadly confess to you here. You are the intellectual; I merely act the part.

"All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and entrances; each man in his time plays many parts."

Oh, I could sit at your feet staring up at you like an adoring hound, and learn so much, with an air of innocence disguising my abysmal ignorance. But if you uncovered the sham, if you found me out…. I can imagine the cold withdrawal coming down over your face like a curtain that may fail to rise again. Oh dear. Oh dear.

Perhaps I should eat this little orange colored pill. Maybe I should wait.

But then, I still my yammering voice, my dismayed heart, and I remind myself of two things: First - While you might enjoy being a learned king for a while, the crown would weigh on your head eventually, and the job would become onerous. You’d want to toss it off, and start to laugh. Second - We are friends. We love each other. And if you laughed it could be because I made you do it, and if you got too tired from it all, we’d just curl up on the floor and have a little siesta.

Like dogs.

There is nothing evil, or even strange afoot. The world is a wonderful place. Repeat one thousand times, and call me in the morning.