Life cares little
for people without
stories.
No great love,
no grand calling,
no adventure, no
heroics.

Just people

knowing what they
aren't

Life never ceases
to disappoint me.
I can't even cry
anymore.

Adjusted baseline--
hell as the new normal.

I've believed in
comical things
like fate
and love
and truth.
Gibberish
to people I
would have given
my heart to.

I should have
hewed
to what I was taught--
misunderstanding,
abandonment,
rejection.

We dream
and are told
this is noble.
But dreaming
is just
one more thing
you do alone.


.

There was everything
and it was
good.

Then the door
shut
and everything
was gone.

It was only
something.

And something never seemed
so small.

I was no longer
me
and we weren't
us.

Just two people
with
something
too little,
and so all the reason
to walk away.

We walked
and
it was done.

A phone call now and then.

.

When you're not so
obviously beautiful,
winningly charming,
stunningly rich;
when all there is
to love about you
is a subtle idiosyncrasy,
how do you
ever
walk up to someone
in a bar
and get them
to care?
Why would you
even
try?

.

Feel the hole inside you.

Fill the hole
any way you can,
with whatever
you've got.

Plug the empty space.

But nothing can
arise
without a space
to rise in.

So what might you be losing?

Substitute pleasure
might erase the
possibility
of genuine pleasure.

--Maybe the hole
is where God enters.

Maybe the pain means
you're alive

and you still have
a chance.

.

All along
you were pulling
away.

That last night,

your hand
on my leg
as we rode home--

it was a kind
gesture.

A gentle goodbye.

It's what I remember most.


.

these hopes
unmet

these needs
unfed

this being

untouched

looking for a
body
to put it
all
in

Your hair's
mussed up
and there's a
run in
your stocking.

But I can't
tell you this,
or run my
hand through
your hair.

I don't get to
touch you anymore.
I just have to
watch you walk
away.

You've been walking away
all my life.

You're walking away forever.


.

We avoid each other
best we can.

You're afraid
I'll talk
to you,
and I'm afraid
I'll say something
stupid
if I do.

It's a perfect
relationship
in stasis.

We're great apart.

what's broken
will break again

again and again

because it's only
held together
by a kind of
pretend--

something stupid
like hope
or a notion of
fairness

this world is not fair

the broken keep
breaking

and all the faith
and all the glue
and all the want
can't make anything
more
out of a pile
of pieces

so pieces you stay

and who wants that?

.

So someone
wrote
poems,
painted on turtle
shells,
danced with abandon--

such small
things
become the
monuments
to our lives.

Things
true and
forgettable.

Window shopping holding
hands.
A matinee.
Sex in the afternoon
before
night school.

And the light,

summer sun through
the blinds.
Stars on the wall.
Touch and love
and
wonder.

All in you.

Touching you,
loving you,

the love,
the time,
the day,
and so much wonder.


All the golden light.


.

late,
Christmas lights
in rain
outside your house.
going home
alone.

all of you.
all of the yous.

facets.

you showing me
how much
there is in you
to see.

and me
just wanting to
get lost
exploring
this universe
here
smiling at me
tonight.

The best is to
jump,
with just a
hope
that you'll be
caught.

Being on the brink
of love.

I have to set aside the poetry for now so that I can blog about RSS feeds for the learning 2.2 program I'm taking part in (which is why I created this blog in the first place).
It goes without saying, I suppose, but, man, there's a lot out there on the web. I've been browsing through the top 1000 sites on bloglines to find some interesting things to subscribe to. It's a nice thing to be able to stay on top of so much information so easily, but I'm always assailed by this suffocating feeling of information overload--I need head space to have my own thoughts and to create my own works.
You can view my public subscriptions on bloglines with this: http://www.bloglines.com/public/brandon25@cox.net

Love found
too
late.

You can
only watch.

A reflection
on the
water
of a bird
flying
away.

The left ventricle
of the
human heart
stores our loves.
The right
stores our
pain.
The left atrium holds
our hope,
while the right
dreams up ways
to die.

Through it all
the blood courses

and we suffer
the tides.

Pieces put
together.

Pieces in their
place.

Pieces missing,
pieces gone,

for good,

for ever.

Outlines now.

Lives made up
of lives

and deaths.


Pieces of each other.

this is Cold Mountain

in me

desolate
wondrous

Cold Mountain

rock and snow
green
golden light

leaves fall
leaves grow

Cold Mountain

time turns to love

and back again
here

All those pretty children
who grow up wrong.
Become
the fucked-up.
People with problems.
People who:
never find love,
miss their dream,
go nowhere,
get lost,
feel awkward at parties,
hate themselves,
want to die,
die.
All pretty little children
who never did anything
wrong
and turned out wrong.
Bye-bye, kid.

lights in the
trees,

white
in a violet
sky.

see it
beautiful
and meaningless.

eyes can't feed
the heart.

it takes a
kind of
love
at least.

another heart

just things

things
not enough
for empty
people

things that won't
stay,
that can't be
held,
that won't
fill

things for the
things
they can't replace


things
falling
through
us

people
with
holes

The Animal in the Mirror

Would you rather be disliked for who you are, or liked for who you aren't?

What if your Eden had to be yours alone? Would an incomplete perfection be better than a complete imperfection? --Are you happy by yourself?

How much do we need each other? How much do we need to be understood? Aren't we only understood by an other? Plenty of people would have us believe that humans are really only animals, with only animal drives, animal needs. But animals don't seek meaning. Humans desire to be known, to be understood. Our hungers go far beyond food and sex--our sustenance comes from contact with each other; we reproduce ideas and dreams.

And yet some people are so hard to be around. We should try harder, for the sake of each other. Because, so far, we're really all we've got.


(but if we're a step beyond the animal, might there not be a step beyond the human? Why should it all stop with us? What is out there in the void, waiting to be born?)

Smells LIke Self Expression

I've been reading the book Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream by Jay Stevens, and at one point, trying to explain the social forces active in the 60's, he writes "Strip away the decade's thick impasto of sex, drugs, rebellion, politics, music, and art, and what you find is a restless imperative to change, a 'will to change,' if you will, and one that could be as explanatory for the latter half of this century as Nietzsche's 'will to power' was for the first." Change was the zeitgeist. This made me wonder what we might consider the imperative is for us now, ten years into a new millennium. Perhaps we might say that it is the "will to express."
The most vital trends I see in our culture, and perhaps the entire globe's culture, for we are quite intertwined, all seem to involve self expression. Facebook, blogs, podcasts--social media, in toto, is about self expression. It is about sharing your interests, your passions, your opinions and ideas with others. It is a way of trying to rise above the faceless fray, of asserting your individuality, of connecting with others in a meaningful way. One could perhaps say that the "will to connect" better describes our era, but what is connection without understanding? Without mutual recognition? We need meaning, and the meaning of "me" is found in how I express myself.
In my first post I made joke of what I considered the rampant strain of narcissism running through the American psyche. And indeed there are plenty of people who, already believing that they are oh-so precious, subject the rest of us to what surely is proof of this. Reality TV survives on these people and their self-drama. But this is just a slightly pathological version of what even the most humble of us feels (which I made joke of in my second post). We want to be understood. We want to be recognized. We want significance. We want a world that has meaning so that our lives will have meaning.
Maybe, then, that's what this all really comes down to--a need to understand the universe and our place in it. Since Mr. Stevens mentioned Nietzsche in his quote above, let's bring in something else that Friedrich said: "God is dead." What he meant by that was that the time of mythologies, taken on faith, had passed. That we were in a new age (led by the then relatively new thing called science, which would play such a significant part in that 20th century will to power) that demanded evidence. Sadly, it was only empirical evidence that was accepted, and God isn't going to be found with a telescope or a gas spectrograph. So God died and left us alone. Alone with our drive for power and its subsequent world wars and environmental degradation.
But if there is a bright side to all of this, it is that we learn and grow and just maybe this "will to expression" is a reflection of our disillusionment with power. Maybe we are reaching out to each other to rediscover what was lost in our vicious turn away from the good, the true, and the beautiful. Nietzsche never meant that God, or if you prefer, Spirit, had died, only our notion of God as a personified parent figure. And evidence can reveal Spirit, just not empirical evidence--meaning evidence that can be gathered by the five senses or their extension. Just as mind transcends the physical, spirit transcends mind. Mind is the physical plus something more, spirit is mind (including the physical--it is taken up as a component, embraced) plus a new something more. The evidence for spirit, then, needs to be established intersubjectively--between two subjects, like you and me, because it is only through us that this transcendent something (Spirit) can be known. It can't be known merely through the physical, because the physical is only a component of it. All of nature is in Spirit, but not all of Spirit is in nature. Because it is nature plus something more, something transcendent to the physical.
Which is all to say that reality TV may just be a manifestation of our hunger for meaning. In celebrating ourselves, in sharing ourselves with each other, we may be chasing the transcendent. We may all be blogging Spirit into our lives. We may be seing people's evolution from role identities, where the person defines himself by his place in his society, to an ego identity, where the person is first and foremost an individual with his own agency, free to define himself however he chooses. And from there further development beyond the ego, beyond the personal, even. Today's "look at me" culture may be a slight detour on the road toward the infinite. Toward our true identity. All little gods, coming home.

nails go in
each day

that's alright

it's only the
useless
parts
that get
crucified

Here's a picture I found on flickr of the Verde River. My friends and I canoe this sometimes (the picture under my profile is of me on the Verde several years ago), and I've gone by this spot before. Bald eagles nest in this area, and because of this it is protected. One time we forgot where we were and got out of our canoes around this spot, and sure enough a helicopter quickly showed up to keep us from pillaging bald eagle scalps.

Me All The Time

Disregard that last post about these things being for narcissists. I'm one post in and drunk with the glory of my own ideas and their (potentially) world wide dissemination. This is great, bring it on. There is no zeal like the zeal of the newly converted. Hello world, this is me.

My first useless post

So here I am, in the computer lab at work, creating a blog. I appreciate the need to keep up with innovation (and I basically need to know how to do this stuff for work), but I'm not really a blog kinda guy. I don't think that everyone has thoughts or ideas that are worthy of public consumption. It's a sign of the escalating narcissism of the age that everyone now thinks that everyone else needs to know their thoughts. Let's face it, most of us are morons. And we're all full of crack-pot ideas about how the world should be changed.