Endangered species

The least you could be
is indifferent
to my gnashing, angry gold teeth
and allow me to bite through
your yielded flesh
like some privileged lowland gorilla
oblivious to the rising tide.

Slowly Lumbering

Elephant Shell

These elephants were installed many, many years ago.  The weather has been chaotic and killed the first two or three vine species.  They were replaced this year again and it looks like they’re actually thriving.  

Maybe we will eventually have more than elephant shells?

Reviewing old poetry

History

Re-reading my old journals is hard and not in an emotionally difficult way but in a “what the hell was I trying to say” sort of way. So much of it is flowery language without a specific point. Good poetry has a core concept, a point or two it is trying to make, or some comparison between two things that make a compelling image.

Which is to say that I’ve written a lot of bad poetry and I was too caught up in my own… something. Pompousness? Pretention? I was too caught up in something to see both the good things in each poem and how unnecessarily obtuse they were.

I would have called it abstract back then as a shield between my writing and your understanding. “It’s not my fault you don’t get it. I am an artiste.”

I don’t understand half of what I wrote in 2004.

I think that’s telling. But there is some stuff of value. I still like the idea in a poem I wrote about Dr. Manhattan from The Watchmen on 08/05/04:

Superhero Story

I only listen to Manhattan -
who can ignore a doctor that scars himself out of respect for
perfection.
The gravity of his creation
destroys the gridwork of a city.
No one expected this trouble,
that he finds in both sexes.
Do not change your exterior;
It can never fix the future inside of you.

– But.. like.. that doesn’t really mean anything… “It can never fix the future inside of you”?

Sounds good. Not much substance.

BUT! There is a useful image in there: scarring one’s self in deference to perfection. So maybe I can rework this one?

Active Ingredients

A new but familiar orange bottle.
The safety lid to protect children.
Little, white pills.

Active Ingredients:
    bupropion hydrochloride,
    entirety of your youth unprotected,

Inactive ingredients: 
    ethylcellulose, to keep it together
    glyceryl behenate, to keep it together 
    microcrystalline cellulose, to keep it together
    always finishing last in the mile run,
    povidone, to keep it together
    the regret you didn’t kiss her in the field by your junior high,
    polyvinyl alcohol, to keep it together
    hydroxypropyl cellulose (type H), to keep it together    
    the embarrassment when the teacher called on you with a mouth full of paper,
    laughter that you could ever date her,
    the light decaying behind your eyes,
    keep it together

Action:
    NDRIs reduce the re-uptake of dopamine and norepinephrine
    allowing more to linger in your brain
    with your childhood, still turbulent and swirling,
    so the memories may repose and be protected

Side effects:
    Vitality, 
    Joy,
    Rest for these ugly memories that are a part of you
    but never again the whole you 

The tablets are printed with edible black ink

Dyson Sphere

In the deep hollows of space
I can build a sphere around the sun
to apportion the radiant energy,
joule by joule.

It is buffered by cool
and tenebrous mechanisms that
regulate the transfer of any glimmer 
between us.

Structural containment is critical.
If I yield, it will flare and
irradiate everything,
warming you without restraint.

And, oh, how we may grow so reliant
on the touch of light
unregulated and unbuffered
by space.

The Next Great Adventure

Oliver No. 5 circa 1912.

Alyska and I are collectors. She collects Kodak folding cameras and projectors, I collect typewriters and Russian cameras. These items represent powerful forces in our lives — creativity, mechanism, self-actualization.

These are beautiful machines in themselves but the things they allow are what captivates us. These devices are an interface between a person, their creative spirit — call it muse or inspiration or that awful thing that only appears when I don’t have paper to write it down — and the outer world. Through them may c we build something that did not exist until eye met prism, until fingers met keys.

Discovering joy in a nowhere barn

The act of acquisition is an immensely powerful drive. Setting aside the American consumerist zeitgeist, when you’re a collector much of the joy springs from the journey to find your next piece. It is as close as many get to Indiana Jones’ style archaeology — you set a day, map your situations, dig through awkward corners of overstuffed rooms hoping that Thuggee bandits don’t jump out of that wicker basket.

When you find something, the feeling is intoxicating. It’s there, dusty, on a desk that no one has sat at for decades, wondering at its own purpose. You feel the capability it still has. For me, place hands on keys and hearing that clack of smooth hammer action is what will sell me. For Alyska, the faint difference in the shuck of 1/30 versus 1/100 a second spring-loaded shutter time. It’s finding life.

Stacks of paper to the ceiling

And life can get ahead of you. We try not to buy everything we find lest our house be so full of little mechanical interfaces that we cannot navigate our own rooms. We place limits on our collections, strict ones, to keep the stacks in check. We both will only collect things that work or could easily be made to work by our own hand. Typewriters can be restored, but I can only fix certain problems myself yet. She can unstick a shutter on occasion or remount a lens. But some pieces are yet out of reach.
It’s important to have a limit for it, though, part for controlling but part to help these interfaces work again. I’ve typed something — letters, poetry, on all my typewriters. She’s shot with most of her folding cameras. These working objects have purpose re-discovered and in us they instill it.

Where does the adventure end?

The dance of utility, joy of discovery, the finite space we occupy all must balance. Collections can grow large. There are many, many things even when you limit yourself to certain elements, that you can acquire and at some point you reach a limit. Where does my adventure end with any of these objects?

We, in fact, love that we requested the device from that barn (and narrowly escaping the Thuggees who protected it) but is it any better sitting on my shelf than in that barn? If we believe a machine can have purpose, at they are built to perform that purpose, it is unjust for us to let it sit and diminish again.

And I think that’s the point at which we must release these things back into the world. When the emotional resonance has dwindled to a faint ringing in the ears and this working machine is admired a little less, it must find a new home.

This moment is hard. You remember the dust, the digging, the serendipity. You cannot imagine letting go of this machine that was lost.

Just look here: you found it; you reveled in joy of it again. That will never change and in absence may that grow fonder while allowing for the space your next.

And in letting go, may you allow another to find their own adventure