Reprise

Here is where
a suffocating numbness of noise
collides into a
limitless vacuum of silence

again and again and again
Here is where
trending , Heade
yields to observation

Exotic painted
He returns
Hummingbird in Brazil
cacophony and orchids

Touching eternity
within brush strokes
Here is where
He returns.

Reprise

Here is where
limitless bewilderment
displays in lines
drawn - cross - poem
trend in fleeting noise
painted beauty
observed.

~~~

It is poetry month. I try to observe this with more listening, sharing and (with provocation) writing. Two things I often cherish, collections of responsive media and Found Poems, were referenced at a reading in a manner that created a distaste. Thus, a provocation. A poem.  

studioW Express Show Perform 2-25

The Virtual Gates of Heaven
by David Garlock
The Anthology
by Susan Cinoman

Directed by: Ann Finateri and Randy Laist

Doors open at 8:30 PM


Featuring: Rose Lamoureux, Rob Iulo, Kevin Long, Cassie Iulo, Quint Johnson, and Virginia Skinner In the one-act dream play “Virtual Gates of Heaven,” a Bible-thumping televangelist dies and arrives at the entrance to Heaven, only to discover that none of his expectations about the after-life are to be fulfilled. Technological advances, corporate mergers, downsizing and globalization persist beyond the grave. All of his preconceptions about eternal bliss are upended, as the purgatorial processing of his bedraggled soul is undertaken by Heaven’s gatekeeper, the Archangel Gabriella.

illusion

Three decades ago I said I want to go to Chicago to live and study and for three decades I owned this, the shallowest of illusions. But today my middle is there with the same mantra and 1000% more potential to claim the city and maybe even someday have it claim him.

I have had the pleasure of visiting twice. This is more than I truly expected I would do when I first claimed the illusion.

I have said of this path not taken, that it was an opportunity stolen. But the truth is that fear of large doors and the cracks made from a short memory are the true source of cement in my Buster Brown loafers. Today, I am year three in Finn Comfort and much less likely to travel afar. Vicarious is my only mode and even there I may be out of my depth.

in all cultures the people love the trickster until it is too late

What has been an almost unspeakable hope, may be crushed by pettiness, in the next few hours.

Community Service lacking community requires volunteers to have a larger vision and a tremendous aptitude for pain. How does one decide the tolerance of pain appropriate in the service of others? Is martyrdom a reasonable life choice?

I have a wise child. He reminds me that truth is not always easy to hear, or swallow and that there is an incredible role model serving our country as President.

Free Speech, community dialogue, and the consensus are challenging. When the facilitators of such things in a community fear the word democracy because it sounds too much like Democrat which sounds partisan -- what is the strategy?

My stomach hates my head today...no consensus on how much to tolerate within the body politic.

images, dandies, and tweets

Some images are come by accidentally. Some take on lives of their own. Most can fill-in the blanks of a story. Some images also need blanks filled in. I named this image: aftermath - wearing liberty. I took it at Ground Zero. Because I know it is Ground Zero - it speaks to me. Without knowing this, the picture is incomplete in its telling. Clarity takes many forms. Maybe this too is true of truth.

Sometimes information can saturate. Saturation can cloak memory. Lack of sleep can do the same. Together, too much input and too little sleep, form a haze of thought something like scrabble with an acute random connectedness. I often get to a point of saturation. Today it happened. I know I heard things of interest to me but my mind feeling intent upon this knowing - registered blank. Distractions fill in these blanks. Blogging with conviction becomes more difficult in the haze. (I am the generation of purple haze- Are You Experienced? not the generation of hazegame.)

Some distractions: Papa wants to know if I can Google backwards to find a word he can not spell. The word is bat poop. Last night I Googled radish-tops-eat and confirmed what he had wondered about for years: Yes radish tops can be eaten much the same way he eats dandelion greens or wild spinach. I did not take any real time from the day job to be with him, or to be good to me today. And last evening's sleep was again interrupted about 4 am with noises of raccoons in the kitchen. We have relocated 10 so this visit was not expected.

Another word that entered my sphere of distraction was tweet. A week ago I declared I had no awareness or knowledge of tweet as other than bird sounds. However, the Twitter social-networking message tweet is now in my purview: through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question you can be known between the lines. Tweet is the way I have overheard my children talk on the phone for years. I am not ready to go there. But I did discover If about the future... which from book to tbd; is a place for further exploration. It is the archival references to free spoken word ripe for my future visiting, that compel.

Do stories ever end and other deep thoughts

Before a personal story ends, Memoir writers decide that there is enough of a story to be told, to be penned, to commit to. Reflection and significance are ingredients. Compelling is important. And how to begin requires selection of an end for the unending. I am a derailed storyteller because I can never decide upon an ending.

When this entry was conceived, there was 100 days remaining; to elect a new president and to make ready my primary daily bread assignment for go live. These turning points are not ends. They may be middles or starts. What comes later – the benchmarking measures like the 1st 100 days of the presidency and questions about the completed project speak to the lack of true ends.

New tools allow us to manage or compile data and images and the elements of story. Sometimes pseudo stories emerge much like pseudo poems from folks exploring sentences and fragments instead of paragraphs and chapters. New tools can inevitably make endings ever more, less likely. Time capsules of experience accumulate. Folks like me get to avoid deciding on a larger scale than outside of the moment’s distraction – about endings. Volumes of reflection, commentary and noise emerge – and stories that could change, heal or inform salt and pepper the abundance.

Blogging, this hybrid commentary journal process was activated by me to reflect upon significance. Scribble. Distraction. Curiosity. Ponders. All in a format that allows me to avoid questions wrestled by true storytellers. Maybe coming of age with the TV drama view of story, most of which now tell multiple stories simultaneously and attempt to develop characters serially, neatly prescribed time, foreshadowing and tension until there is a fade to credits has contributed to my dilemma.

I began to read the World is my Home. I did not get to the end yet. It has been months since I set it down. I started it in the middle, as I recall. The 1992 biography of James A. Michener was published 5 years before his death, an end marked by his decision to remove life supports. A collection of selective reminiscences, his story for me did not end when I closed the cover of the book nor would it have if I were on the last page. It continues here. His story lives on because they were scribed. Each new reader restarts the story. And every new writer underwritten at UofTexas at Austin by Michener funds ensures his story never ends. This novelist did story his way. He followed his intellectual curiosity, informed his style from the experience of opera arias and ultimately his narration rewards the reader or listener with knowledge. His large novels are said to be absent psychological insight. I have purchased but have yet to read his sagas. A novelist that could have been a blogger is an indulgence that I can not yet invite in to my frame of reference. So I digest short stories. This week it is People I wanted to be.

Go Live is less than 100 business days away and the day job is carnivorous. Is eating my soul, flesh eating? Deep thoughts are set aside as core hours begin now.

Lifelong…then retirement or into retirement

Life-long: what are the benchmarks? Is it duration or duration in relationship to the length of one's life. When must a lifelong relationship, idea, pursuit, regret begin to qualify? Is meaningfulness implied? What are the shades of meaning: continuous until a person's death, continuing through all or much of one's life? This out-of-place meandering began while at a retirement event of a co-worker.

When something is more than 50% of your life and the majority of your daylight it probably qualifies. Family relations most often do. A person’s work can qualify and sometimes that work is at one place of business. This is a phenomenon that is changing. It is one I never expected to be part of but one for which I can now claim a duration maker of more than half of my life.

For my co-worker the years are 36. The retirement is about to start with a summer vacation at the camp of his making with his best friend who is intended to be the rest of lifelong. He practiced retirement for a week before deciding that he was ready. Ready and able are not mutually exclusive but the able part usually comes far later than readiness for most (maybe I am projecting here). If employment is more than making a livable wage then one may never be ready. There are very few positions on 60 Minutes, or tenured professorships in the perfect climate, or artists that can sell enough to sustain daily bread or piano men or living poets with solid indirect income sources.

As I tried to kindle connections I found rhyming words: The batches of rhymes seem to speak to me about passionless day jobs: along phrases are scrape, rush, shove, stretch, play, pull, tag, or come along.

Lifelong is now a learning buzzword. It is something we are all expected to make claim to. I invested in this claim six years ago when I processed through a second graduate program. Sometimes I think it was only proof that I could type ever more poorly with more sleep deprivation. The brain exercise was sometimes fun and challenging enough to make me feel that I was evolving. However, I am not sure that the benchmarks for lifelong learning sited herein.(p.2) were achieved in my personal journey. I am often reminded of the three word marketing rule, as it is often deployed, and the challenges of good tauts. Grad school is where I learned I too could make hyper Connections like one of my most favorite books and made 4 television adventures by James Burke. (And I too have a box and scribble that may become bones or blog entries or remain for future ruminations.)

And then I get totally distracted in the world of connectivity and find bliss.

Memorial..Community Remembrance

I mostly remember dad in his greens going to march instead of work, the Cuban Missile crisis and almost stories of the korean conflict. But then my generation's war took over and friends did not come home and poet friends brought the power of the Vietnam Memorial on the MALL in DC to life. I had to see it in person. Not many things get such a definitive must do in my heart and mind as I no longer have enough focus to create poems.

While in Boulder City we stopped at several artisan shops. I saw the miniature cast of this memorial and had to find it. It is a powerful reflection and symbol of remembrance for sacrifices. It is the image in this spot.

But in all of the near sobs the strongest gulp is why are we again at war? I focus on the artists responses to find some meaning. And I am please to share my findings with my community this day away from work. A video with permission will play on public access station and pictures.

Siloing by Design

A silo is a place where fodder is preserved and stored to provide nutritious feedstuff for livestock. A silo is also where guided missiles are stored. As such siloing appears to be an apt description of how some communities restrict valuable resources. For example having funding and functionality for Public Education and Government Access TV distinctly restricted versus treated as Community Access resources is siloing. Since some believe the content of community access is ‘food for thought’ and others consider it an ‘ever present danger’ it seemed to me to be a fit usage of the term.

Where should I be, where is my mind?

My spiritual mentor would always correspond to me on a transformed scrap of paper. A sample of such a transformation circa 1993 is shown here. I found it difficult to throw away even with its tea stains.

I am at my work table where I access work from home and do community tasks via computer. The presumption is that on occasion I collect my thoughts here via this blog which is concurrently a collection of past and future memories. This process is expressed via a Maxim which is keeping a diary supports personal development.

So I am here but I just drove some distance. Driving is now a rare occurrence given I have one eye tracking left. This makes the passenger more aware of my vulnerability than myself. Dad was my passenger today. We arrived late to the commitment to heaven ceremony (which requires either faith or imagination) held by the family of Rosalie Catherine Cook (his sister, my aunt and mentor). Gathered were unfamiliar faces that were connected through Rosalie. The gathering was small and polite. Charlie broke the ceremonial sounds with a how do you do to the person to his right. This fella married into the family via the youngest daughter of Bill, niece to Charlie and Rosalie. Yes there were cousins in the room. People who once participated in games of tag, kick-the-can, hide & seek all cousins from the occasional family picnic of decades ago.

Rosalie had been a beacon of family connected-ness in a older sister fashion while she lived in CT. That changed more than several years ago. Family distances were not bridged – hearing impairment and other aging issues taking the reigns of daily life when she retired to Florida. The rest of us entered lives after teen years. Her recent return home was brief. It allowed for one visit which included the expected squeeze of the hand…the ‘good to see you my dear' whisper in the ear, the 'what can I feed you discourse. Odd disconnected memories of Rice Pudding made me bring her some. She just smiled. Maybe it should have been Tapioca. (The absence of cigarettes was very pronounced. She had been the embodiment of the meaning of Virginia Slims for me even as the cancer sticks poured from the pack of Camels or Marlboro.)

But the mind has no focus as the heart tries to reflect: cousins, pieces of art and some craft pull me in several directions. I do not turn on the radio in near fear of more connections that I cannot trace.

My sister has Dad now. They were part of the procession to the burial site along with another aunt and cousins. I returned to my table with a promise to myself to visit here before attending to the external loci of control. Upon returning, I did walk myself and the dog first because it is at this too that I fail daily.

Back to the main event: Dad did not recognize his daughter. She resides on the other ocean’s side. Many years have passed. Today as most days she embodies confidence. She was simply and smartly dressed with color accents. I immediately considered how “Rosalie would have just loved how she looks”. I did the basic black attire. it fit and the random thought for what stylish colorful item in my closet would Rosalie like, passed into nothing she would like would fit today – so the 'do not go there’ voices in my head won and I wondered in thought too much more pressing tasks at hand feeling I would be lucky to be dressed and on time. Not lucky.

Rosalie. You grace every room in my home. There is no more to write.

Words that Pass

Would that there be but one symbolic, functional word that could unlock all the connective tissue of our techno-being? But there are limits, rules, characters; not less than, not more than, must have, cannot include ... special memory questions. I have failed to define my favorite things to remember. I have failed to have favorites, goals, or a disciplined existence ... failure to form habits stresses me. Brings me to the brink of panic. 

I prefer a world with serendipitous connections full of pleasant, valuable, or useful discoveries. Defiance enters into my thoughts. I wish to  challenge traditions and  customs in a restless pursuit of a greater truth ... then my alarm rings, and the day must continue, one password at a time.