Gracious Beast

Did she come out to smoke to make eyes with you?

Did she look at you from across dark bar rooms or open cafe courts for want and affection or because you had been looking her way yourself only for forgotten endless hours and with piercing persistence?

Did she touch you with roses and stare into your eyes the same as every other boy in the room?

When she sat 3 seats over you thought to offer an open palm and half out stretched arm, that she might do the same, then you’d be holding hands while the guitar screamed so loud.

We are a fraction of our ancestors – only a bit more than their division by way of starlight and dust.  This explains our weakness in all manners physical, emotional, spiritual – maybe not spiritual entirely.  Could it be like homeopathy?  Dilute the thing again and again and it becomes something more potent, in a way?  But the clutching at intellectual growth is an ego’s excusing – for magicians once changed forms by way of mirroring and sacrifice and now we clutch dearly to comforts and inmaterial material.  Glen Dawson is proof enough, and your grandmother or father.  Then there’s that young shit with motorcycle and tattoos: a fraud compared.  Even me, not in the mountains, not writing countless novels, not with the woman I love.  Infatuated instead with girls I’ll never speak to, at a loss for magic, drunk at a cowards – crowded bar speaking to no one.  It is as is.  Words of little consequence – less than more of curving q’s and twisting turns.  Make the thing dear beast.  Maybe with a jackal – some lord of death, I might face the dark thing that holds the last vestiges of fear over me – 30 years now counting.

I’m up as late as late and as early as early – after stars are crisp and before the dark blue is over took by gold and good.

Caffeine steeped in boiling water to start the thing; some firery brown to put me down; an ungodly plastic bull to keep me up and “right”, though I’d prefer a nap with a pretty girl – save that I’d go stir crazy, upset by my lack of progress in other things.

Today it is grey and spitting a bit.  The chain cafe is littered with those who typically wander the streets – their first watering hole.

She wrote me a good note.  I had a perfect moment with another in my sleep.

I am leaving tomorrow.

If woven toes were felted

meandering, raging, pooling, falling along easy paths or smoothing rough edges – a small channel in valleys feeding trees and birds and goats and mice

– for life and cold places. But algae and worms and cacophonous seracs falling like small mountains themselves or tremendous timbers.

and in winter, entire frosts cut away by  frozen falling

The indescribable absence. Reluctance, called “patience”. Inaction, called “watching”, “sitting”. Without, called “discipline” or “growth”.

Bottled up, becoming fodder. Thinking it might become strength, wondering if it is decaying and weakening.

Living as half myself on the hunch that I transcends “myself”.

Night blooming flowers, budding then blooming under starry and moonlit skies.

Long fragrant ghosty petals, translucent white wings with reaching tongues exhaling the most fragrant sighs.  This captivating perfume.

Night Blooming: saved, once per year; moonflower; hallucinagines

Woody Bushes: forsythia, ugly scrub scrap save it’s week of explosive sun gold

Desert Blossoms: after rain; the awakening desert; the dreamy lavender and the release of fresh air

Relentless Flowers: through frost and long winters; those that prefer a beating – you wisteria!

Bolting flowers: from sudden heat; leafy greens

Last night I was awoken by crippling fear. I had a nightmare of course, something I can’t quite remember; one of my reoccurring dreams, of places far away – not the furthest, but the gateway places that lay at the border of terrifically far and manageable. Our friend Lindsay lives there, and we visit her there. But that is not at all what made the dream a nightmare, that is what made it reoccurring, just the place, being on the edge of very far away, and visiting Lindsay.

What I do remember is waking up with this fear, physically seeing red, turning on all the lights in the room, making my way to the bathroom, being sure not to look in any mirrors, being sure not to move suddenly in one direction or another, or to look out the corner of my eye, making my way back to the bed, reluctantly turning out light and lying down in bed in the same exact position I had woken up in, realizing I was about to return to the same nightmare I had just left. I could stay awake and have the horrible things come, I could already sense them taking form, they’d manifest as a man or woman standing by my open window; or I could fall back asleep into the clutches of the terrible dream.

I then asked myself “why?” It has been so long since I have felt this horror. I almost returned to the aged routine of pleading with the dark haunting spirits that I am not ready to be plagued by them, or to ask the intermittent God I speak with to lift this curse from my room so that I might return to peaceful sleep. But that routine is tired, and it does not answer “why?” The details are blurred, but I had a notion that the terrors haunting me came from the busy run round that has defined my existence for the past year plus. A symptom of my hurried pace and the sickness that has stricken the neglected “artist” (that reflective, intentional, inspired, quietly listening, noticing the subtle and slow) within. A waking symptom, perhaps more obvious, is that I had set 3 day time alarms for myself, to take 10 minutes, to sit quietly and do nothing, and think of nothing. But I had simply turned off the alarm each time, intending to honor those moments of quiet, but had inadvertently, but almost unapologetically, continued to work at my maddening pace.

Now (in this moment of waking horror) I decided it was this neglect for self-care that brought my ghosts, and the only cure was to treat the cause, and so amidst the flurry of whirling nearly corporeal beasts I closed my eyes, took deep breathes and let the images go. I thought of nothing, but saw so much. Of course the spirits moving from my right brain through my left, the tall black boots and creeping hand of the man outside my window, the would be heroes that would protect me, let those go as well, ideas of how well I was doing or how poorly this would go, pride of my self-awareness and how this might be a good exercise for Quen to use for her night terrors. From useful to junk, the ideas entered and I let them go again, from right to left. At times I’d focus on breathing, and that was a nice distraction to focus on. But sometime I didn’t need that either, and could really focus on nothing, and that brought me closer to my peace. My power animal came for a short visit, and for a duration, the thoughts entering and exiting were no longer dictated by my conscious mind. A sort of waking vision played out. And I let that go as well. Soon enough I was asleep again. Waking this morning with words to write, and three new alarms to set on my phone.

Trust in the unknown.  First you have to believe.  Or take enough time to convince the matter surrounding.  Persistence can be a tool.  Sometimes ridiculous-persistence will bend space.  Simple parlor tricks – illusion can build the fodder for “real” magick.  Then the question comes: “what is real magick?” Or better (further) still is “what is real?” The truth’s subject to the moment and perspective.

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you are preaching the same words as if you think you’ve discovered something.

Needing more magick; the dark and the light.  The sinister feelings I’ve had of Aleister Crowley and the warm filling up hearing three (two old white men one young Asian man) magicians discuss sleight of hand and double-sided cards.  I see the enormous fox stop and look back on past-midnight full moon mountain turns.  And the cooler air rolling off the steep hills into the canyons below.

I need to reinvoke the artist and stir the crazed poet, the die hard romantic has been dying.  The musician should bang away on tuned percussion with rhythms as arrhythmic as his own tempo.

Plenty of caffeine, gold pressed leaves, late late nights, early earliest mornings, keep your mid days I am asleep with Italy and Spain!

I won’t make climbing sport or reason.  It is the intense “need” that compels the going and planning, thought and process only catches up by necessity.  Consideration shows up on occasion.  That is of course the balance that defines function or dis.  The boundary man or the mad.