see how small the world
This poem keeps coming back to me. It’s in my 2007 book the waywith sun, though I believe I wrote see how small the world in 2004. It’s in my stack of hard drives I am not sure who to burden with. 2004 is when I went freelance from my 8am-10pm job and got to spend some time with the poetry circuit in Chicago. Even then with some freer time, it took a mighty push to be able to stop output long enough to put a book together. I can’t even look at the stacks I’ve amassed.
Last year I started shredding my morning stream papers. Was feeling buried. I did get Schrivner and got close to putting out a collection in 2021. But ultimately what is the point? Trying to market kinda killed my desire to apply the trimmings on songs to release to the void. And there are so many warnings about fame for sensitives in the books I’ve read. It’s the same with poems. Taking a lifetime of crucial therapy and turning that into a brand gives me dissonance. I can’t tell you how heavy it feels to live in the error card where the fallen rule over crowds of gossipers and anecdotal spinners who neither listen nor can say for themselves what has value without group consensus. Popularity is a fawning curse. It takes you from your journey and traps you in a phase that cancels out your voice while the crowd wears the t-shirt of the thought, within shoddy seems of customized threads. There is so much opportunity in beauty that I am hit by lightening at every evidence–Goethe’s hero looking for signs only in the air, above the billboards, outside of the marketplace where a redeemer chases out the sellers of his tortuous mortal fate. Stuck stuck in phases that do harmonize with our species and stumble to encode the tonic from space. Such little time in these bodies and in these chances to map our path and energy to an immortal escape.
Instead they transfer longing to the next inhabitants who might break through the dark shadows of our waiting, the next bound brood.
So back to this old poem of eternal language that smacks as archaic as thee and thine. But the archetypes wrote it, and I listen to mine. Thema Wayne, I believe, after she was Emma Nation, who lives in the waves of all densities and does not take in constraints. Of infighting or emulating while she survives on crumbs, leavings of the benighted, and has no time for your pop theories. Give her history, give her future, give her something you’ve built upon an original thought or even upon a ruin. Break your circling and break your loans in your short time with old tomes. Reincarnate yourself in safety and lay that on your seeds, if you will. But she is the seen shining for what cannot be unfelt from the atmosphere.
Hope I didn’t spook you there. I’m going to revise all of that into a booty song. Another writer mentioned a clearing and now I wonder if that is a thing. A known theme. That place you go in the middle of the wildness to rest and see things clearly. What I do know is that we are not visiting for stagnant daily violence. And personally don’t feel it’s for leisure, self-promotion, or to add to our home’s sickness. But I could be wrong. Because this chance is not worth arguing.
see how small the world
who falls apart & who remains.
how much still stands. & what’s the change?
What stands has always been.
((innocence) in (experience))
The deity, the magic, the energy
(that gives what lives in mystery)
tunes emotion to reason
the shocks, the spins, the seasons.
Spirit,
my twisting hermit,
spinning on the rack of despair;
the wheel, that spire,
is magic:
inspire in wonder
full strength.
A hanging man needs trading;
he walks in a dead wonderland
w/ thickets to harvest–
a clearing
The sort to pardon a way.
In a forest, in a tower, in judgery,
the stars, a twirling starer
the error still holds discovery
error, err, how fair.
cost will still stand. collect the change
keep in part. heart will remain.
See the need for shelter
feel the strength of care
tender the garden to prosper
err, how fair, how fair
We walk in imagination
in hand, a held temptation
the part–that holds frustration
keeps the heart in patience
& the whirlwind is sublime
its beauty we honor divine
humanity in keep in kind
my friend in the end is Eden
how fair, how fair, how fair.
