force 5

the 5th force has been discovered she
is afraid
of light
as she decays she
shines

the 5th force has been found
in Hungary. they are coaxing her and fixing her up
under a microscope
now

she recedes into darkness
instinctively

soon she will be widespread and universally
loved. they dream. the latest force! in her prime! just
imagine!

she tends to avoid the spotlight. your
music is not my music how
can it be ours?

like a light in the dark she matters may
she
never go out.
hold her close now! how
she appears!

death by MVA

There must have been 4 tons of car coming at you with a green light letting us through. Me in my Volkswagen, an old man in a Chevy, and a lady sliding off the highway in a Subaru. The time was 2pm, the city drenched by waves of heat. I saw you riding your bicycle slowly into the intersection ahead, and wondered would you stop? You kept pedaling with an icy stare into us, 3 lanes of traffic against your perpendicular. I'm not sure if you wanted to die, but you sure knew what you were doing. The physics, the mathematics of the equation, did not at all look promising yet you kept a steady pace, a mane of black hair falling behind your tan face. You looked maybe Latin or Native American, and ready to die by MVA. Why? Did you lose someone close to you? Were you socioeconomically starved? We all pressed into our brake pads, and the old man in the middle lane lay on his horn.

We were long gone when I wondered; were you laughing in the aftermath of an adrenaline rush? Or were you disappointed? Or had you gone on to Broadway, indifferent to us all, searching for cool water, a smoke, friends, and some shade.

pressured by fronts and driven to tears

we are not so unlike clouds in the sky, are we, puffy and bleached turning gray, you can see through us and other times opaque we hide our secrets inside us, coming for us and striking through they do, yet still we remain intrinsically unscarred or untouched, reflecting it all sea to sea and the earth, where we travel we leave the residue our prints passing silently along, forensics loves a cloud, made of water and vapor we are and capable of many forms, evocative of endless feelingstates, containing our own electromagnetic storms we are carried by winds and made by trial and fire, under certain conditions we scatter and the streets become empty and clear like the sky, monotonous, monochromatic we are pressured by fronts and driven to tears

Journal # curiosity, torque and the WIP

The fireworks began just before the fourth of July, and continued on in my imagination, working off a basic outline with some central tensions, rounding out the love story, letting myself drift into the unknown, for what is compelling is not often on the map, but rather a billowed sail out to where you were told to believe the world would fall off. You had to have the courage to go there, yes, and even before the courage, the critical questions and the curiosity.

I must confess I cannot always break through the finite limits I have placed upon myself. Forty years of acculturation and shaping as an American in a society of human beings and animals of course has done some domesticating, as it always will. But I have had my years upon years of rebellion against the status quo, which ultimately left me alienated and alone. I was missing something essential. I had lost myself somewhere in the neurosis. That little tumbleweed had grown so large in traveling across my life, it was all i could see anymore.

The love for self and the spirit of exploration has slowly come back to me, but there will always be the root acculturation that is like hardware and very difficult to change or recreate. The foundation of my self in society. I am not trying to uproot all that, I can work off of my hardware because it's a great foundation actually, lots of Latin and a strong work ethic, and a loving nuclear family. I am one of the lucky ones.

So now I am creating from there. And just trying to get more and more involved in my own creative process, because I know the feeling: attractive, magnetic. But the feeling is hard to reach for me. It requires sustained force in one direction for a long time. Perhaps a month of daily ritual immmersed in the WIP, with a singular devotion, takes me into that particular effort zone where it is pulling and not pushing off. Because it is difficult is why it pushes off. Even now, maybe halfway through Book Two (the finished product), I am still finding more pushing away than pulling toward.

And it drives me crazy, to sit down and get involved, and an hour into it feel like I have to walk away! I only know from experience the tables will turn, the tectonic plates will come together just right, if  I keep at it, sustained force in one direction, physics, torque, and KABLAM! Suddenly fall into orbit around the central planet of tension! The atmosphere is so fine.