This is the first Valentine’s Day since 1988 that I wasn’t part of a couple. Naturally I feel a little strange. The strangeness transliterates into the above page.
valentine-ku for the once-loved
the hole in the heart
is another heart. it makes
sense and yet doesn’t.
Better times are ahead, though, Friends. Happy Valentine’s Day to all!
Merry Christmas and Peace and Love to all who read these words, be you Christian or otherwise (I’m an Otherwise myself). May we all see a better year ahead.
Velvet Dreams
Vexacious times wear Trouble like a beard
Vicissitudes cause wars, most undeclared
Enchantments give a wish a wheel to steer
Events make crosses children borne must bear
Lieutenancies emerge in Fate’s fell spate
Love’s touch lends voice to scent we taste & see
Legalities help predators predate
Voracious carnivores still spare the pea
Victorious survivors sport the stoma
Ventricular caprice makes tragic trauma
Entranced botanicals enjoy the loam
Enhanced mechanicks find a shop & glom
The SATINED VISIONS steer us through the isthmus
Then make(s) The Presence present(s) here/now/Christmas
Note: “vexacious” and “mechanicks” are deliberate misspellings. They would drive my younger self crazy. I refer him, and you, to the “extended play” version of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous quotation about foolish consistency:
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
This post is inspired by Stephen Bishop’s song “On and On,” taking its title from one of its lyrics. Two other lyrical sections of the song are also quoted.
The song has stuck in my head for nearly forty years; I like it but it haunts me. I like the rarity of a man singing about a man crying who is not the man himself. I also like its singer/songwriter, Stephen Bishop, who was billed “Cool Guy With Guitar” in the landmark comedy ANIMAL HOUSE. He was the one whose guitar was smashed to pieces by John Belushi’s Bluto, who handed the severed neck back to him with a sincere but I-had-to “Sorry.”
Toss Up My Heart words:
Though they’ll have Tito Puente there’ll be an empty seat at Hialeah
Of the 600 outmunitioned almost all died in Crimea
Such odd haphazard history may have you ask What For
Seek ye serendipity becomes my soul’s retort
See Where It Lands words:
Swollen willows weep–it’s offal
Section Eights have FILLED Golgotha
Every time stuff hits the fan
Each soul tries to understand
Evanescence–drifting sands
This morning Denise told me something that inspired first the acrostic bookends and then the words within them. This page and this post, therefore, are dedicated to her, with my love.
Throwing guidebooks in the trash
Rids us of the “have-to” cache
Useful more to sense our aura
Eminent as one adorer
Safe within that two-souled breast
There will grow our Fearlessness
Yesterday I wrote a poem called “second understanding,” thus:
second understanding
he understood her ONCE
she was not available
but not coy
not hard to get
(paradoxically it was hard to get that she was not being hard to get)
subsequently they meshed
loved
fought
yearned
cried
and
(both feeling misunderstood and both feeling dissatisfied)
separated
now they circle, wary noncombatants
and he realizes
if he could understand her a second time
if he could get her motives and heart’s desire
and the key to her easy-smile lockbox
they would be safe to shore
second understanding
to get her to really get her
to get her again
to get her again
together again
It was posted in my Notes in Facebook. My talented painter friend Rachelle commented favorably, and there was this exchange in the thread:
Me: Thank you so much, dear Rachelle! Wondering if and how to illustrate it. What do you think?
Rachelle: Ooo! Seriously? I’m honored you’d ask me. Give me a couple hours-I’m at work now, but I’ll give it my full attention this evening. Cool beans
True to her word, Rachelle later instant-messaged me. Our exchange is reprinted here with her kindly permission.
Rachelle: Here are my thoughts…
An image of a rubiks cube-
You figured out how to solve it once, but now.. you can only get one side solved. You could take it apart- but it will never work right after that. The joints will be loose and the colored stickers askew.
To solve it again takes an uncomfortable amount of effort but ultimately satisfying result-IF you can ever do it.
I dont know. Prob not helpful but thats the image I got. And burnt orange houndstooth check pattern/feel.
Other than that-I got nuthin
Me: That’s GOOD! I’ll try a sketch. Thanks!!
Rachelle: Really? I was cringing after i hit send lol
This shows two things about Rachelle. She is generous with time and help, and she doesn’t know her own strength. She and I belong to a Facebook arts group where we all create and share what we’re working on. She is unfailingly encouraging and kind in her comments. She’s also great about describing her own works in progress and what she goes through stage by stage from conception to completion.
I liked the idea of a Rubik’s Cube of Love, so close to perfect but impossibly far at the same time. Here’s what I ended up doing, with the thanks to Rachelle built in.
Less than an hour ago “In a relationship” became “In a domestic partnership” in my Facebook settings. Some hours earlier my partner, Denise, made a lovely blog post, about our trip to the Pinetop-Lakeside area, in which she referred to “My partner, Gary.” (Here’s a link to that post: http://aintnoninny.wordpress.com/2014/10/25/autumn-in-the-white-mountains-apache-country/ ) So we have made our partnership semi-online-official.
I liked the idea of slicing Relationship into Relation Ship. Sometimes there is a ship to steer, and for sure there will be chopwater, sandbars and squalls to navigate. Much depends on choices of battles or compromises, the rheostat setting of respect, and the prioritization. Denise and I have a long way to go. But we have come a long way together as well, and love is there.
Here are the words to the double acrostic:
Retro-fitting tastes & likes
Efforts, ventures, dips & spikes
Leaves a couple mixed to match
Applesauce with kaffeeklatsch
Tenderness & tetrazzini
Intimacy conjures djinni
Offline lovers loop the loop
Nestled in the Primal Soup
Right now, September 10, 2014, I am in the moment of having a Sweetheart about whom I am head over heels. In the wee hours of this morning, thinking of nothing in particular, I did most of this sketch by the seat of my pants. It is full of drawing errors and clumsiness, but it also has life and love.
usku
undoing lifelack
salvaging hope in the dark
striving i and thou
Here is something I started over a month ago and invited collaboration (see the post “Seven, Eight–Collaborate”). One brave soul told me there would be a try; that I have not heard from the brave soul since casts no aspersion on said soul. Collaboration is tricky.
Indeed, collaboration ended up being the theme of this, now finished, page:
And here are the words of the triple-acrostic sonnet:
Desire may ebb when disillusion flows
Endangering stability, which flees
Each time de-Liberation strikes a pose
Some issues turn to Beasts none may appease
Proceed OUTSIDE the box, and P.D.Q.
Example: cure your Beef with B.B.Q.
Rescind your doubt! Do what WILL do for you
And with each therapeutic molecule
Add TLC that’s stubborn as a Mule
The optioned limitation with accrual
Ensures the Trust that leads to Love’s renewal
“Desperate But Sequel” hearkens back to the bad old days of “Separate But Equal.” Alas, Racism is still alive and “well” more than a half-century later. Not much more we can do about that but get our own houses in order (see Avenue Q’s “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist”).
The image is a four-shot sequence wherein two people are irritating each other’s stiff backs, then find a synergistic solution when they loosen up a little and rub together. I am ridiculously proud of this metaphor for relational friction. Honest to Goodness, I have no memory of ever seeing this bit of storytelling before–but I suspect I’m not the first…
I just love Index Cards, so much so that I think of them as friends, as benevolent messengers, as the Type O Blood of information conveyance. They go in pockets, on refrigerators, in those nifty little metal boxes with the cute dividers. They are big enough to contain the hugest ideas. Write small enough and you can put a decent-sized short story on one. They’re great for five-minute portraiture, ten-minute dream capture, fifteen-minute landscapes, sixty-minute meeting minutes. For reminders, Valentines, plot outlines, and affirmations they are hard to beat. So here’s to ’em:
It’s RED WHITE & BLUE on one side–the other blanc
N is for NOTES or NOTIONS or NOSTALGIA
Dreams need not fade if this & a pencil serve as recorder
Edifying, talking points, & love may be conveyed
Xylophone music written & drawn with gravitic graphitic pyrotechnics
Special thanks and manifold gratitude to my Sweetheart, Denise, for not only introducing me to the Index Card Project but also for giving me a pack of 100 cards, one of which I used for this post. Sweetheart, special as they are, the entire pack of cards could not thoroughly describe your wonderfulness!
tableau vivant
taxes levied leveled Levi
blimey barney’s stoned but viva
eager beamers roar & win
ukuleles sound like mint
TAB LOW/WE WANT
The candidate survived the peer review
And then her father died, as if on cue
Bulimia & travel left her raw
LOVE set her world aright & flipt her shwa
Obsessing over Style & cred & thin
Will make us OVERLOOK a crucial hint
I don’t want to clutter up the post with annotation, but I will say that Bulimia and Depression seem highly correlative. Also: I think the image has good potential for snap/crackle/poppery that has not yet been realized. I did two other scan/edits that were even less successful:
One with Clay, Image and Text 