Blank Pages

Marvelous things, blank pages.  It's hard to write without them.  So much potential, so much to offer.  So much reason not to notice blank pages.

Blank Pages

Blank pages.  

A sea run dry.  

Shorelines unzipped blaring at the sky, 

as if to cry out against it.  

What did the sky have to do with it?  

To be filled is not the only use for spaces.  

Blank: the word thinks for us.  

Unused, undone, un-learned-from.  

Pages left unwritten are no proof of not writing.  

The life-trails left in the sand of the sea aren’t a lack of ink.  

Stripped, torn, beaten, worn; the pages bind and grind and burn.  

Holding itself so high the sky cries “blank” at the frozen sand.  

Silent as the once sea stones, blank pages flash back and grin.  

There’s room for that on 

blank pages.

The Zipline

A story from my childhood.  Crazy story.  True story.  Enjoy.

“Let go Lee!  Drop!”

“I can’t; I’ll fall!”

Smack!  Lee face-planted into the tree.   

Take a trip with me to an easygoing little street in the neighborhoods of South Provo.  The houses have a dried-out shoe leather quality to them.  The people are much the same.  They would just as soon water their lawns by hand, and in the fall they rake each other’s leaves.  The air has secrets in it.  Schools out, there’s way too much energy available, and there’s nothing left to do.  I don’t remember who’s idea it was; we were all collaborators though.  Leave it to a gaggle of bored nine-year-olds to think a zip-line’s a good idea.  

Allen had a fantastic backyard.  The trees were like leafy parapets of an abandoned castle.  A rusted out van was the carriage under the archway of golden branches.  The peaks of the castle towers was the perfect place for our project.  Michael   was a “big kid” from across the street.  He always had some sort of junk cobbled together into contraptions too varied and useless to define.  This time it wasn’t so useless though.  Bicycle handlebars and a plastic pulley can do amazing things with the right application of imagination.  Jordan’s dog ran ruts in the ground around the stake he was tied to. I’m not sure where the dog was while we were using his cable.  My contribution was a set of obsolete snow chains that made a marvelous ladder.  The blueprints were more mental than print.  The planning consisted of, “We should build a zip-line!” followed by several resounding, “Yeahs!”  It wasn’t long before a board, resembling the solidity of a dead fish, was nailed to one of Allen’s trees about twenty feet off the ground.  We tied the cable to the tree just above our platform, stretched it almost to the ground, and tied it to another tree as far away as it would reach.  I cannot, for the life of me, remember how we stuck the pulley to the handlebars.  We may have used spit for all I know.  But there it was, in all it’s splendorous, horrifically questionable glory: The Zip-line.  Oh, what a beautiful invention!  A goosey little nine-year-old could feel truly free as he rocketed through the air, holding on until the very last second until he had to let go to avoid the tree at the end of the line.  We never thought to put down a pad of any kind down.  All we were thinking of was how much fun we were having.  My Mom didn’t believe we had actually made a zip-line; she had seen our inventions before.  Our flying machine made of cardboard, plastic wrap, and a fan; or our time machine made of Christmas lights and a bed frame.  She had this uncanny ability to make our equipment malfunction on it’s maiden voyage every time.  Anyway, it was all fun and games until Lee showed up.

Its astounding that nobody was hurt sooner.  Lee was a bit younger than us, and a bit slow to boot, but when the threat of, “I’ll tell my mom” pours out of another kid’s mouth you start cutting deals.  After no small measure of begging and threatening from Lee, we finally consented to let him ride The Zip-line.  Thinking back, his awkward midget-like steps up the ladder seem like the banging chimes of a clock-tower just before your carriage turns into a pumpkin.  “Hold on really, really tight,” we told him.  “One, two, three, go!”  Off he went.  But one important detail had been left out.  We didn’t tell him how to stop.  All at once everyone screamed at the top of their lungs, “Let go Lee!  Drop!”  Being small and stupid his only reply was, “I can’t, I’ll fall.”  

Lee didn’t let go.  Lee didn’t drop.  Lee’s face was all over that tree like ugly on a moose.  If ever you want to stop quickly, smacking into a tree is a good way to do it.  We told him to walk it off, but I doubt he could hear us past his own wailing.  Again, it’s uncanny; the ability mothers have to ruin fun.  Maybe it’s my fault for telling her about Lee’s near-death-like disaster.  When she finally saw it, she might as well have shot a disintegrator ray at it.  The Zip-line was no more.  All this hullabaloo only lasted about a week, but oh what a week.

In a town on a street where life is what happens while you’re busy doing other things, sometimes drastic measures are necessary to compete with boredom.  We didn’t just compete with boredom; we obliterated it.

My Candle is the Low One

The ramblings of a tired mind.  Formless blurts of non sequitur sentences.  There must be something in it.

My Candle is the Low One

Standing in the ashes falling,

Existence in your arms.

Light through grey is grey.

What color would the light have been?

What color should it be?

“Ivory and gold!” comes the cry.

Some hearts reflect the river, some the sky.

The softness of forgetting is lost

To the scrawl of the learned man.

How do you stop the pendulum swing

When hard earned blood runs dry?

As an arsonous flame to the school of thought,

Clouds of broken chaos breaking;

My candle is the low one--

I’ve been burning it.

Let the Ink Run

Some recurring themes are blatant in this poem. Writing it after sprouts of thought had already begun spreading leaves, I was left with reminders of the seeds that had sprouted; feet that didn't trust the ground, a welcome to the scraps of an unsettled mind, dissonant dreams hedging the dawns.  All like stones marking the gardens of words that I seem to have stumbled upon; and sometimes stumbled over.  But watching things begin to live is worth some dirt on your hands.

Let the Ink Run

God bless the colors of your mind;

The anthemic operas of dissonant dreams

Standing before you, a wall to the day.

Volumes said to the wind,

Screamed at the deep.

Are you as silent inside as out?

So let the ink run.

And golden light of day and dawn, 

Though mountain hardly purple shines, 

Burn in bolts of amber sun

More cold than aching time.

And let the ink run.

With a quiet huzzah, 

You walk through the dawn; 

Tearing its seams as you pass.

Tearing its seams at your dreams.

Walking alone with the rest of them.

Like walking next to a ghost;

Like dancing with no bones.

So let the ink run.

Welcome to the scraps of an unsettled mind.

Speak not your silencing solutions.  

Their breath is too shallow to still the deepened soul.

My feet don’t trust the ground anymore; 

Delicate sole.

And let the ink run.

Pelican Dreams

Sometimes dreams have a funny way of turning into stories.  Albeit very short, this story is one of the ones that makes me smile most. 

Pelican Dreams

A small, brownish pelican gently moved the other birds aside with his beak as he boarded his little raft.  They fussed some but this raft was his and they let it be.  As the tide went out, I watched the brave little pelican floating out to sea.  Some days he’d only float some yards from shore and later come back in with the tide to go about his little brave business.  Other times I watched him disappear over the horizon to brave the deep and the fishes from there that would visit him.  I feared once that he might not return but he finally floated in, head high and eyes sharp.  A tear came to my eye as saw him ashore again.  It was a somehow noble thing this little one did, braving the waves and the deep -- a sentinel of sky and sea on the little wood raft he rode.

Charlotte

I cannot, for the life of me, remember where this came from.  Being obviously incomplete, you may have to use your imagination a bit.  But more should follow.  Welcome to the first story post.

Charlotte loved her uncle Charley very much.  After all, he had been the first person to ever make her laugh.  From the time she was born onward, she couldn’t help but smile every time she saw him.  On top of everything, he was also her only uncle.  Every time he came to visit, which tended to be often, she would charge at him with open arms and a smile so large it was slightly silly, but in a beautifully endearing way.  She would ask, “How now uncle?” (as they both shared a love of reading and of writing,) and he would respond, “Alas poor Charlotte, I’m still chasing the dream.”  At this they would laugh and continue on to less poorly spun silliness.  What was left unmentioned was that the dream he chased was not the average, typical ‘dream’ that everyone else seemed to mean when they said this.  No, he had had a dream and was truly chasing it.  His dream, as most worthwhile dreams do, had come in bits and pieces of clarity.  When he first had it, he decided to find the place he dreamed about and do what he dreamed he had done.  He went from place to place, doing this thing and that, trying to live this markedly average, but remarkably particular dream.  You see, it’s perfectly respectable to chase a dream like freedom, or starting your own restaurant.  Even admirable.  But that’s a different sort of dream entirely.  No, he had dreamed events and, for years, had been trying to make them real.  Not surprisingly, this was not approved of by his family and he was asked not to mention it.  Especially around Charlotte: because she was too much like him already and it wouldn’t do to have her wasting her life chasing “actual” dreams.  

It is necessary, now, to mention a very unfortunate truth.  Charlotte’s parents weren’t really her parents.  They had never told her this and she, like very nearly everyone else, thought that they, in fact, were.  Another unfortunate truth is that dear Uncle Charley, contrary to popular opinion, had not always been single.  His dear wife had died inexplicably at a young age.  Poor Charley had been left, heart broken to say the least, and very alone to raise a very small child.  In short, he knew he couldn’t do it.  Not that he wasn’t willing to try; he was never a quitter.  But Charley was also not stupid and he realized his daughter deserved more than he could give.  Rather than give her up entirely, he gave her to his brother and his sister in law.  Being a very bright girl, if Charlotte had been told this story it wouldn’t take her more than few seconds to put it together, as you surely have.  Charley was not Charlottes uncle but her father.  This more than likely accounted for all the unique similarities they shared.  It is also worth noting that Charley’s dream had first come with the death of his dear wife, and this more than likely accounted for his chasing of it.

Hope rolls

I've decided to move back to poems today rather than adding another tab but that will come.  This poem seemed to be a physical dawning in form of thought and word as it came together.  What does it mean?  Work on it; it's more fun when you define it yourself.  I've come up with more than one of my own meanings.

Hope Rolls

Let moon console the morning

As pass the morning must

And come the gentle evening

To hide away the dusk

But swiftly as the hours roll

The moon must go to sleep

And come the mighty morning

To light the shadows deep

It's Me

I've added a poem as promised; you'll have to scroll a little to see it because I've also started an essay section.  Don't deem them worthy a verdict of disregard yet; these are not persuasive or analytical or five paragraph nonsense.  These will be just another form of the spilling ideas I'm too tired to hold back any longer.  It's only a short journey to bottom from top, and you might learn something about me on the way.

It’s Me

When I tell people that a color sounds funny they usually give me a look like, “Don’t ever ask me on a date,” or “Dude, go take a nap.”  I don’t hold strange looks against anyone.  I realize how crazy it may seem; colors don’t “sound” anything.  They’re just colors, right?  Well, for people with synesthesia, that’s not true.

Sometimes synesthesia is called cross-wiring.  It comes in various forms and intensities.  Researchers don’t really know what causes it, but people that have it (Synesthetes), don’t think the same way as other people do.  That’s not just an opinion either; their physical brain pathways are different.  I could write for days on the problems it’s caused me, and all the joy it’s brought too.  See, my brain wires for sight and sound are crossed.  Everything I hear has images, everything I see has a noise.  That’s my variety.

I first discovered I had it as a junior in high school.  I was driving with my family and the name of a friend’s mother, Ramona Styce, came up.  I said, “Her name looks like a gypsy dagger wrapped in a red and a blue piece of silk.”  Everyone gave me their own variation of those weird looks I mentioned earlier.  I didn’t know why they were so confused; it seemed perfectly reasonable to describe what I saw.  Why didn’t everyone else tell me what they saw?  When I asked that very question the reply confused me: “Names don’t ‘look’ like things,” they all told me.  As long as I can remember, sight and sound have always gone together.  It’s almost like two manifestations of the same sense.  When I said that to this car full of people, they all decided it was great fun to spout words and random noises and make me describe what I saw.  That got old real fast.  

I’ve had trouble making sense of the world the way people think I should my whole life long.  When I was five and asked my mom if I had to eat the toe of the bread she thought I had just gotten mixed up.  It wasn’t clear to her until this year that in my mind if the heel was at one end the toe surely must be at the other.  Part of the problem was that I thought everybody thought the same way I did until that experience in the car.  

Understanding why my teachers didn’t understand why I didn’t understand what they were saying took some real effort to get past.  I’m sure it took some effort for you to get through that sentence; now you know what I felt.  I had to bend my brain in directions it didn’t like to go.  It made me think I was stupid.  Turns out I was just different.

Synesthesia has done beautiful things for me too.  Music isn’t just something to listen to.  It’s something I can see and feel almost palpably.  The screaming bursts of golden fire as the mountains light with day are doing just that; it’s not just pretty imagery. That’s really how it is for me.  I remember people by their color or their texture; not just memorizing name plus face.  Everything I see or hear has another sense connected, building a bridge of association right into emotion.  The phrase, “Life is beautiful” means different things to me than to other people.  

Most people’s reactions when I tell them of my personal phenomenon follow the same pattern: a bit of, “You’re nuts,” followed by, “Are you making this up?” a dash of, “That’s so weird,” culminating in either a blank stare of dis-understanding or a string of positive adjectives connected by their wishes to experience the same.  It’s a double edged sword; it comes with unique struggles and unique blessings.  I don’t know that it’s better or worse than anything else. It’s just the way it is.  I’ve never known anything different.  At least not until recently.

This summer I was given the chance to go caving with a bunch of climber friends.  The cave we went to, Spanish Moss Cave, is about three hundred feet deep straight into the heart of a mountain.  It makes you realize how indomitable mountains are; there are no holes. There are no cracks or slits of light. There is no way for the outside to get in except through one small entrance, a tunnel hundreds of feet through winding corkscrews and caverns lined with silver and gold in minute spirals of crystal so delicate they seem to breathe.  In this absolute removal of the outside, someone suggested we all turn out our lights and be silent for a moment, just to see.  And see I did: an utter absence of sight or sound, so thorough it might have been tangible.  I had never felt that before.  All the sights of sound, all the sounds of sight, were gone.  It was like waking up for the first time.  It’s worth mentioning that I had been having a particularly rough time with life.  Nothing seemed to be going right.  All I had was stress.  With this experience, I finally found peace.  A kind of peace I had never felt before.  It felt like an ancient well, born of glaciers too deep to be touched, had poured, cool and clear, through the volcanic torrent that had been my mind and made it still.  It was as if time were a substance, like water--a darkened sea, and sight and sound were what marked it--the peaks and the crests of the waves and breakers and the winds and the rain the only evidence that the sea was there; turning them off turned off the conflict of time.  It was made smooth so you couldn’t even tell it was water anymore.  It was like standing on dry ground.  Then somebodies stomach growled and we laughed and the sea turned back on and everything went back to “normal.”  

This experience has given me somewhere to go when I get too lost in the conflict of life.  Having a cross wired brain in an uncrossed world will always have it’s challenges.  Having something to compare things to has made it easier.  It’s funny to me that I found a foundation in the middle of the earth.

Scraps

I never liked reading sonnets.  They just didn't feel good.  It was like watching a cheese grater do math.  This was an attempt to make one fun and I think it turned out that it's less cheese greater and more seaweed doing the math this time.  I'd forgotten I'd named it scraps.  Not sure it fits but what else should I call something like this?

Scraps

When battles crack, I halt to watch dreams pass

From incomplete to ideals worth my heart.

The stained cacophonies of shattered glass

That catch the screaming light and bar the dark;

The days that dance with hopes that live beyond

The ardent choreography of time;  

What balls of black loom dark in front of dawn’s 

Next coming day?  These battles are not mine,

But they are left to climb my yesterdays. 

What could be sent to wipe away the dark--

Step up, step round and ring a sound that stays

To undo what has split the dawns apart?

     I’ll scream out loud when I am called to be

     The one they send to break the iron sea.

(Parenthesis)

This may be more work than it's worth, but I'm going to try and organize my posts on pages.  Obviously there is only one other page and only one poem that could be on it.  That  will change.  There will also be other pages.  I just didn't want to make a chore out of reading my blog by overloading it all at once.  Thank you for your time.

A Lovely Nightmare

This could be considered the scrap that started it all.  Working in a print shop is noisy.  Working with people who like loud, terrible music is degenerating.  All you can do to save yourself is enter your own thoughts but do it too long and you start to run out of room.  This poem spilled out of my pen exactly as is. And spilled is just what it did.  I couldn't focus on anything else until this was done.  It's done now and it's really what kicked off the scrapping that's been going ever since.  Enjoy.

A Lovely Nightmare

What a lovely nightmare is this?  

Where the smiling man shines darkly up 

From the black light of the sea and, 

Upside down, frowns.

And what of dust bunnies 

Swept to the corners of society?

What will they do when the twilight police 

Catch the gleam of their hearts in the fire frenzy?

Live?

In a simple moment, not so simply found,

the Calamity collapses in around them.

Flame and dark.

No; 

The corridor of light shot through the weight of 

Dark trees

Frees.

What brought breath to fated disaster and un-fated it?

The mind, 

Waking.

Joining the ranks

So, I suppose now is as good a time as any to join the ranks of the blogging masses.  (That sounds violent for some reason...)  I've been meaning for some time to post the the scraps of thought that have made it out of my brain, but so far I guess I just haven't had the guts to do it.  Why do it?  I don't know.  I suppose I want somewhere to empty my mind.  Am I a writer?  I guess I'm a writer.  If by "writer" you mean "someone who puts words on pages" then yes, I qualify.  But that's about all I can say.  So here they come; the scraps of my mind.  I don't plan on changing the world, or even commenting on it really.  What follows will be things I've thought and written down; poems or stories - a dream here or there.  I don't really know where it will go from there.  We'll just have to see.